6 posts tagged “movies”
Everyone seemed to like it a lot. Considering that the premise is, on the surface, two dimensional, I was really surprised at how well it was carried throughout the movie. It didn't feel old or stale at any moment. It's just a good light hearted romantic comedy. About a sex doll.
If you get a chance to see it, I'd definitely recommend it.
It's weird to see subversive genre homage marketed to the mainstream frat boy crowd. Yes, look at how smart and cool we are, going to a refab genre pickup that I'd have scoffed my ass at thirty years ago.
Afterward, on the way to my regular diner, walking along east 9th street... The sidewalk was littered with playing cards. By the looks, seems like someone was setting up 52-pick up out a car window. Someone had found them first and most had already been picked up or blown away. However, there were quite a few left. Adrian and I, the scavenger pack rats of our group picked up what we could find. There were a dozen cards that we picked up, each taking six.
A semi-rare 1985 deck of Virginia Slims promotional point deck. Great find, all in all. I've missed scavenging. I used to be so much better.
I'm now officially working three jobs and going to school full time. The prospect of this seems a little...overwhelming? Yes. But, two of my jobs involve movies, so that's a bit more interesting then my current a/v tech job. Granted, one of them is doing promotion. Yeah, I know, I never in a million years thought I'd be handing out fliers and movie passes on the street corners of Manhattan either, but we all have bills to pay.
On the upside, I guess this does add to the list as to why you should be friends with me; I can maybe get you into free screenings of really awesome or really not awesome movies! Sweet.
And while I feel awesome (and therefore must actually be awesome), someone who is not awesome is Mr. Bush. Way to listen to everyone else, idiot. At least I can follow simple instructions when told by the people I work for as to what not to do. Granted, it must be pretty hard work following all those commands from the puppet master.
I'm supposed to be writing my screenplay right now. I just finished my term paper comparing Kierkegaard to Mary Shelley. Probably one of the stupidest papers I've had to write in my life. But now it's supposed to be screenplay time, but I just can't sit down and do it. I'm something like 10 pages behind everyone else, and I need about 30 more pages in two weeks. I can probably get away with 25, but still.
I just feel so burnt out. Here I am at nineteen and in the fifth or sixth year of intense creative writing instruction. I'm so tired all the time, and I never want to write anymore. Which is strange, since all my life I've been working towards the point where that's all I have to. Beyond my anthropology courses next semester, writing is all I'm doing, and theater related things.
I'm studying abroad in Ghana in a year. That's my little semester long writing break. I thought I could hold out to year seven, but it seems so hard right now. I keep sleeping past two, and stay up all night watching movies and playing video games. Last night it was Super Size Me, the night before: Batman and The Mask of the Phantasm. I'm such a bum.
This is what I want to do. Forever. Why can't I just do it? I'm sick of being in school. College is still a hoax; I'm not learning anything new. It's all fine tuning, which is annoying when everyone else is still learning the foundation.
At 11:00 last night, I decided it would be a good idea to watch Promises. It pretty much broke my heart, and due to the war in Lebanon now, it makes it retrospectively even worse.
Especially since two of the children, Daniel and Yarko, are probably killing Lebanese children right now and being totally okay with it. After all, they are defending their country from terrorism, and 3-year-old children are terrorists.
There was a boy in my Craft class my freshman year who was a hardcore Zionist. He was of the oppinion everyone who was no Jewish was conspiring to kill all the Jews. He honestly believed the holocaust was still happening and that every country in the world except Israel was helping perpetuate. America's Holocaust? Hollywood. You heard me. He thought Hollywood was conspiring against and killing Jews.
All year I sat next to this boy and watched as he wrote more and more propganda instilling hate and fear. Everytime he wrote about Jews kept in Palestinian prisons (prisons which, I might add, do not exsist), I sat by. I was shocked at his complete disregard for fact and reason. I made my oppinions to him clear on several occasions though, and every time I brought facts to the table, he would respond with dogma and call me a racist. He started telling people I wanted to kill all the Jews, including my best friend.
This was the same boy who wore a Lacoste kipah everyday and personnally attacked a very excellent professor and when the professor halted the performance, he defended it with "well it gets better."
I think now is the time for the obligatory stated of "I am not a racist, I do not hate Jews, many of my very close friends are Jewish." I hate having to say that, but if you dont, and even if you do, any criticism of the political structure of Israel or radical Jews gets you labelled a racist and dismissed.
How can we go on every day and tout "not all Muslims are fanatical radicals" without saying "all religions have fanatic, fundamentalist, radicals, but this is not usually the majority"? Christianity has fanatics, so does Islam, and Judaism, and even Buddhism. Though I think the safest fanatacism comes from the Buddhists.
There's a problem in the Middle East. There's a big problem. And Promises looked at that problem through the eyes of children. It was made by an Israeli, it was clear from the editing that nothing regarding the topic was edited in or out. Conversations with the children were uncut. Do you know where the intolerance came from?
Israelis. The Palestinian children were more willing to talk to the Israelis and more willing to say "all we want is freedom. I could live with you, but right now I cannot because you have the checkpoints that keep us segregated." Only 2 of the 4 Israelis were even willing to talk to the Palestinians. Only 1 of the Palestinions was hesitant, but he still participated and through his participation, he found answers and discovered he could cooperate.
Israel has gone too far. Too far with Palestine, too far with Lebanon. It's time for the United States to accept Israel for what it is: a racist and terrorist state.
So the day Miss Lexi came home, my first batch of Netflix DVDs arrived in the post. I feel so far behind the times since I'm only just subscribing. In my field, that's inexcusable. I can play off the whole poor college student thing, but that's still pretty lame.
I was very happy to find that Born Into Brothels was among the three. I've been frantically searching for this documentary since it was released in 2004. As a documentarist, I'm always on the look out for new and supurb documentaries, just the bad thing is they are sometimes hard to track down. But Netflix seems to have a whole slew of hard to find docs and to me, that makes it worth it.
My mother (oh how she's always meddling with my life!) was not so happy when she found out I was spending my money on something else 'I don't need' but she doesn't fully understand the whole film/dramatic writing thing. She does, but I can tell she and my father wish I were studying something more 'worthwhile' in college. Something more than just art.
But as T.S. Elliot argues in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," I cannot be a true artist without knowing my tradition. Watching movies is a necessity in my growth as whatever it is I am. It's important.
Anyway, she ended up watching Born Into Brothels with me and changed her mind. She really liked it; as did I. It broke my heart, but at the same time left be with a sense of hope. It was definately worth two years of searching to find.
