A nonsensical post
I am sitting in the editing room of my college. My boyfriend is transferring over a couple of family videos as I finish my absurd mockumentary which makes no sense whatsoever. I am working on a Mac right now which confuses the hell out of me. The keyboards are indeed nice but how anyone spends their life working on one is beyond me. I forgot to bring my stuff with me so one and only resource is this computer. So I am blogging. What am I blogging about? I have no idea.
I am done with classes on Wednesday at 3:30. I am done with the most stressful part of the semester but I still have a decent amount of work ahead of me. Thankfully I only have two finals. I just finished my documentary so I am finished for that particular class. The one class that is destroying me is the art class. All it has done is remind me why I do not draw. It may relax some people but few activities get me into such a stressful and rage filled funk than the act of drawing. For my final project I am recreating 5 specific shots from L'Avventura with charcoal and it is so much harder that I thought. Nothing looks real; it all looks representational. I basically lost my mind last night and literally smeared shit loads of black over the left side of the drawing. You know what? I am going with it. I'll do a bit more work on it but basically I am going to explain that I lost it and felt like keeping the result as it showed the unpredictability of the art making process or some bullshit like that. None of my drawings look good. I spent as much time on them as my homework assignments throughout the semester but I know she will only see a drop in quality and thus a drop in time spent on them. I have one more to go and I'm a bit nervous about the turnout.
Other than that I have to do a presentation tomorrow for my Terror of the Gothic class. Our group will be comparing Dracula and Twilight and Let the Right One In. Basically it will be about how the vampire genre has evolved and how it is used for many different things. It is a pointless assignment; worth only 5% of our grade and put in place simply to give us yet another fucking pointless thing to do. And I'm not sure we are making any points with this presentation. At first I was excited because I thought that our presentation was essentially going to be a shit fest on Twilight and how it has taken any interesting aspects of the genre and castrated it for Mormon infused morals. But the more i think about it the more I think our presentation is going to be a simple comparison which means that there is a possibility that I could come off as a Twilight fan. How do I convey in my minute of speaking that I am not a Twilight fan and am simply a fascinated observer from the cultural perspective? I don't want to just be a prick and put a disclaimer out there for the class before I speak. I have, after probably a half an hour of thinking about this, some up with a solution....Here it is; my section is going to be on the settings of each and basically what they signify. I plan on mentioning Edward's trip to Italy to seek out the Volturi in the second book; and I am planning on mispronouncing Volturi. There you have it; my master plan. I am hoping for it to play out something like this. "And in the second novel, New Moon, Edward goes to Italy to seek out the..Vol-turi? Volturi? Is that how you pronounce it? Okay good..." Genius no? I think so. I figure this will at least indicate that I am not all that familiar with the stories and am thus a passive member of the group in that I did not come up with the subject directly.
I am putting together some really fun end of the decade lists for this blog and for myself for I would be making these with or without said outlet. Right now I am doing my performances list. It will consist of Top 30 Performances of the Decade, Top 30 Underrated Performances of the Decade and Top 30 Worst Performances of the Decade. The Worst one is done. I am pretty happy with it I guess. It was the hardest of the 3 because these are mostly shitty films that I have only seen once and to remember a performance years afterward with no intention of seeing them again is hard. I am sure there are performances I am forgetting. I just picked the ones that stuck out to me. Underrated and Top 30 were slightly easier and actually extremely satisfying. I tried to only have 1 performance from each person. It was not a rule but simply a preference and luckily I really only ran into 2 problems with that. I also decided not to put any performances on the Underrated list that made my Top 30. My only issue with Underrated is that it was difficult once again to recognize any foreign performances since they are well recieved in their own country. For example nobody talks about Mathieu Amalric in A Christmas Tale but reviewers did acknowledge the performance and it was massive in France. So what do I do? I leave it out. The girl from Thirst would have made it but the film was huge in South Korea. So I leave it out. It is so difficult to gauge which performances are underrated in the foreign category. Basically they have to be underrated in this country to an insane degree. Because of this I believe I only have 1 performance from another country and I feel like an asshole. The same thing happened with my Top 30 list. I have not seen a ton of foreign films this decade and I had to cut 70 performances off of my brainstorm list to get down to 30; the chances for a performance from another country to make the cut is so much slimmer. I think I have maybe 3 that made it. Its very depressing and American heavy. Ugh. Oh well. I stand by my choices. Hopefully they will be posted within the next week.
The Lovely Bones is getting a ton of flack for not depicting the character is Susie's murder/rape and furthermore by not even acknowledging the rape as a part of the story. I figured I would give my stance on this before I see the film and then figure out where I stand after I see it. I do hope to reread the novel before I see the film. I laugh at my pathetic ambitions. Anyways though, this was something I had spoken about with someone (who that someone was I cannot remember) a few days before Entertainment Weekly had a short article which was labeled something to the effect of "Peter Jackson being attacked for not showing us a girl's rape and murder". Way to be objective. For the record I do not have a problem with Jackson and Fran Walsh deciding not to depict the rape or murder. I'm actually pretty happy about it. They understand that film is a visual medium, that this film is being made for mass consumption and that there are ways to convey events and have them be effective without showing them. Having said that (sorry Larry David but the phrase is necessary here) I take major issue with the film omitting the fact that she is raped. From my understanding it is never mentioned or acknowledged that Susie was raped by Mr. Harvey. Essentially the film conveys that she is murdered and nothing else. Perfectly okay with it not being shown; happy in fact. Really really not okay with the event not being acknowledged. It is such an important factor to take out and to me it does change things a bit. The entire tone is set with this knowledge. It is not even how it changes things; it is simply a much too important fact to cut out. If we add this with the fact that Jackson went back in later and filmed additional scenes of Mr. Harvey's fate because the audience wanted to see him suffer more than we have an interesting dilemma. Basically everything has been switched to make the audience more comfortable. The person that audience members do not want to see suffer do not have to and furthermore the characters final moments are changed dramatically and then we have the character that everyone wants to see suffer is allowed that extra pain. So basically none of it is challenging and this has been made into a very comfortable and cathartic film about a girl's murder. And apparently the rest of the film fails pretty badly as well. Do not get me wrong; I am still excited about this film. Extremely excited. I have been waiting for it for years. I just hope that if changes of this size were going to be made that they hopefully have a film that still retains the emotional exploration of the book.
What else to talk about? Nothing really. I think that it all for now!
