Little did I realize that I had filed my last...month of columns as drafts rather than published pieces to the site. I proof them thoroughly and post them, and don't usually check the site itself to see how they look.
I have added a couple images into one of them that I recently acquired, but they all are untouched from the way they were originally written. You can find all the following topics covered (in chronological order):
Godzilla screens in Tallahassee
Broken Flowers
movie marketing terms, and what they really mean
2046
Junebug and American Kinship
Additionally, there are some overheard Talking at the Movies bits in there too. I only noticed all this late last week, so I held my little piece from then until now (you can find it below as the next header), so that it did not also get lost in the mix of old posts.
The technological middleman makes things so much easier in some ways, but it makes formerly simple steps terribly likely to miss entirely. I wonder if I had to physically type the column out on a typewriter and hand it to a copy editor, and then retype it with changes...would it be more reliable?
If it were then an easier task, would it be worth the laborious process?
I ask myself these questions just before snapping back from the daydreaming haze that has been my undergraduate life. Without fail, I proceed to apply my musing to the cinema, which of course cycles back into the way cinema comments on the modern day.
In a number of older movies I've re-watched recently, technology (specifically the gas-powered auto) has brought about the death of one frontier or another without fail.
In The Wild Bunch, we find the evil General Mapache (traslation: raccoon) riding around on a motorcar, dragging poor Angel (the 'innocent' member of the gang) behind. In our current state as a nation, we find ourselves in an eerily similar predicament.
The American dependence on fossil fuels has twisted our necks for years, but with these hurricanes rolling through, I've seen stations out of gas all over town for the first time in my life. It was really bad after Katrina, and now after Rita (a hurricane that shares a first name with my mother, oddly), there are again stations with the 'white box' syndrome.
As if gas hasn't been expensive for a while, I overhear people suddenly outraged that gas has broken the $3 bubble almost all over town.
The general public likes round numbers, and in the case of gas they prefer those to be in fifty cent and dollar increments. I heard a lady remark that she found some cheap gas for $2.94 and almost chuckled.
Did shitty movies like The Day After Tomorrow not teach anyone anything? It's been all over HBO, and it sold a blasted ton of DVDs. the general public saw a rather improbable global warming phenomena on their TVs or on the big screen, and it didn't change the way they lived their lives.
Then we have a big fuckoff hurricane that's still in the early stages of cleanup, and all I see are a few more than usual SUV's for sale in parking lots. Has global warming become the new evolution?
This turned into a political rant awhile ago, but not without due purpose or relation to film. Before I jump into Student Life Cinema's screening of Lawrence of Arabia last night (in glorious 35mm), I'll use last week's heldover story as an unintentionally brilliant segue.
The Yes Men
We brought one of the titular Yes Men from last year's documentary to Tallahassee this week.
For those who don't know, the doc followed a big con pulled by a couple guys (part of a larger group) who assume the identities of people from a variety of companies and groups, from Dow Chemical to fringe groups of the Republican Party.
(from left) Tallahassee Democrat Movie Critic/Senior Writer Mark Hinson, SLC Marketing/Promotions Director Samir Mathur, and Mike Bonanno of The Yes Men
Mike Bonanno, minus his partner Andy (more on that in a minute), joined a few of us for dinner at a terribly trendy new asian restaurant in town for a state-reimbursed dinner before he went in front of the crowd.
Lucy Ho's Masa, home of the best asian lunch special in town
Among the things discussed were the utter ridiculousness of Live 8 and the idea of Bob Geldof & Bono leading a charge to Gleneagles. Bonanno pointed out that even though Geldof & Bono cited their purpose as going to meet with these people, and came out saying they'd negotiated a deal, "there was nothing to negotiate, and $32 billion of that $50 billion had already been promised."
It's quite remarkable how much one person can learn just by paying attention and doing a little bit of research. It makes you wonder how focused our activist youth are on the things that matter as opposed to the amount of time deciding what to laser engrave on their new iPod.
Mike Bonanno plays to a house of over 200 undergrads, an outstanding turnout for a documentary on our campus
Mike Q&A'd for around an hour, and the best thing I could recommend after hearing him talk is Netflix or rent the movie. I hadn't seen it and now I have. I wanted him to prove it was worth the two hours of my time I wouldn't see some other documentary, from the man himself.
The great thing about a live Q&A was the exclusive nuggets that came out. Bonanno revealed a choice bit that was cut from from the movie, where he and his partner are falsely promoting a product called the Reburger.
The cut moment occurs when they tell a room full of high school students that the burger they have been eating has in fact been recycled from human waste.
He also shared that Andy couldn't come that night (or to the U.S.) because he's a fugitive in France. who is stuck in Paris.
Even though here we have freedom of speech and protection against charges of slander and libel, things are not so in jolly old 'liberal France'. After creating a website critical of a government minister, Andy was charged. He has been on television in France consistently for the last year, yet the authorities simply can't catch up to him.
At the end of the night, he started selling merchandise. The customary DVDs and videotapes were a given, but he surprised us by pulling out Yes Men t-shirts. Battling corporate greed by appropriating a corporation-like identity. If you can't beat them at first, make it look like you joined them and beat them from the inside.
The Yes Men shirts are made from second-hand t-shirts, which, when sold to 3rd world countries, help to undermine their native textile industries. A friend got one made from a Jaegermeister shirt.
The State of Arabia
The latest in our series of classic cinema at FSU moonlights as one of my very favorite movies. Lawrence of Arabia carries on being significant more than forty years later, both technically and thematically.
Middle aged men (with their young sons), old women, and students at intermission.
I overheard a great number of people saying "huh" and snickering occasionally. A friend who had never seen the film sat next to me, and most of my enjoyment seeing it on the big screen was derived from so closely observing a first experience with the film.
Two undergrads talking fervently about the rise to glory and fall into madness of T.E. Lawrence.
Auda abu Tayi's late-in-the-movie faceoff with Ali in particular drew a wonderful reaction, where Auda insists learning the European way of governance is a waste of time for him. Ali insists he will learn to be an Arabian, even though Arabia as Europe saw it existed only in the Europeans' heads and on paper. Ali concedes to the effective colonization of the Middle East, despite his own assertion that it will never work. To me, the greatest tragedy is that Lawrence unwittingly dragged his greatest ally into the depths of insanity with him after a time.
An audience that saw very little attrition from one act to the next.
All the modernization for modernity's sake sank in for those with moderately-sized I.Q.'s, whether they understood the WWI politics going on throughout or not. Lawrence sums it all up, from the military-industrial complex to the cultural divide between the European/Western idea of freedom and the Middle Eastern state of freedom.
The girl on the left had never seen Lawrence before, and her friends are told-you-so-ing, especially the man with the magenta hair.
Telling a man that a syringe is filled with a vaccine does no good if you don't speak his language and he's allergic to the vaccine in the first place. We'd get along better if we weren't trying to ethnocentrically colonize the world, and by "we" I mean the human race.
Texting: The Other White Talent
There is one thing worse than a cell phone ringing in the middle of a movie:
The guy next to you/in front of you/just to the side text messaging while watching a movie.
Now, it wasn't just white people doing it, but a sea of LCD lights blinked and blipped throughout the movie. I've experienced this phenomena at other movies, movies people pay for, and I'll never like it.
I get that some people were there for extra credit, but Instant Messaging (IMing) has spread so much that it's created another trendy-but-frustrating noun-turned-verb plague-on-humanity.
I can dig people text messaging in general, that's fine, but text messaging while participating in an activity that integrally involves a dark, quiet place, the frequent flip-clacking of clamshell phones and bright-bright screens destroys the experience throughout rather than instantaneously.
I don't often feel moved to violence, but so help me I might break a few phones if this keeps up.
One asshole in the back row had his laptop out. During Lawrence of Arabia. He's on my "naughty" list for life.