A few nights ago, I watched (and enjoyed) the 70s cult classic Carrie online. When the movie was finished, Netflix recommended similar offerings I might possibly enjoy, and I sadly discovered that Carrie was remade for TV in 2002. Out of sheer curiosity, and with extremely low expectations, I watched the trailer. Not surprisingly, the TV version looked even worse than I imagined. It was a joke, a perversion of the original; a stale, vapid remake like so many other stale, vapid remakes…
The Art of Editing Comedy
Since the films that have inspired me the most are overwhelmingly dramas, usually darker ones, editing comedy is something I never imagined I’d be doing. But perhaps my forays into comedy not have been without reason. As it turns out, I really enjoy editing comedy and discovered I have a natural instinct for it. Maybe this isn’t so surprising since comedy and drama are really flip sides of the same coin. After all, it’s no accident that the theater masks of ancient Greece represent both comedy and tragedy—comedic moments are frequently precipitated by tragedy (however minor) and tragedies are often incited by absurd, even laughable acts. That said, good comedy is as hard to pull off as drama; in fact, it’s sometimes easier to make people cry than laugh…
The Hurt Locker
A high-pitch fever dream that explodes in your brain like an IED, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker leaves your head spinning, ears buzzing and veins pumping with adrenaline. “War is a drug,” the film cautions from the outset, but in the hands of Bigelow so is cinema. Though watching a film is hardly a substitute for reality, this one is so realistically shot, so well acted, so tightly edited and precisely sound designed that you come close to feeling the visceral horror, fear, uncertainty, exhaustion, and strange euphoria of war, of living at a level of pure survival where the smallest decision can make the difference between life and death…
Into Great Silence
The thick of summer is undoubtedly the province of the blockbuster. Fast-paced editing, amped-up music, explosive pyrotechnics, death-defying stunts, excessive CGI and throwaway plots beckon the masses. I, myself, am not immune to its siren call. Last weekend, my weakness for comic book heroes and desire for escapist entertainment lured me to the theater where I watched The Incredible Hulk and Wanted back to back. Both were entertaining, fun, and action-packed—but, let’s face it, the pleasures of the summer blockbuster are like eating a Big Mac and fries. Flavor is high, obviously enhanced, but as food usually lacks nutrition and the subtle complexities in taste. Wanting to balance my filmic diet, I decided to seek out the very antithesis of the summer blockbuster: something slow-moving, lengthy, with no music, minimal dialogue, and a subject matter completely devoid of drama. What I found was a documentary about the preternaturally silent lives of Carthusian monks…
The Fountainhead
Since high school people have recommended that I read Ayn Rand. In eleventh grade, and later in college, I remember friends reading The Fountainhead— actually, I remember friends carrying around a copy of the book because now that I think about it I can’t actually recall anyone sitting and reading that hefty tome. Mind you, I’m not averse to reading long books; one of my favorites is Haruki Murakami’s amazing novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. But The Fountainhead never seemed inviting; the cheap paperback version reminded me more of a brick than a book, and Rand’s dry, repetitively dull writing didn’t even make me want to turn the first page. Writing, for me, is as much about the way a writer uses language as it is about what he or she says. A good writer has a strong sense of rhythm, pacing, word choice; a great writer shows wit and lyricism, writes in a way that’s emotionally honest, and couples intelligence with imagination. With Rand, language seems secondary, a mere tool used didactically to get across a point. Since I couldn’t make it through her book, I figured why not a movie. After all, two hours trumps 752 boring pages anytime…
Nixon
Nixon is a long, lumbering ox of a film that, though tedious and muddled at times, is ambitious in its exploration of the life and undoing of the infamous president. Far from being the character assassination one might expect, Oliver Stone’s film is a surprisingly fair portrayal of Nixon (played brilliantly by Anthony Hopkins) and a complex examination of his rise and, ultimately, tragic political demise…
