But my eyes, dear, they see only you

In an odd kind of a way, it's probably time to actually do that BEST OF 2012 post.

Well, MOST READ OF 2012, anyway. 

See, I know y'all out there are reading. I have, like, pageview statistics to show that that's actually, don'tcha know, happening. Because most of the time when I'm writing for this blog I feel like this: 

I know I'm not actually writing this for any one particular person in the world, and it's not groundbreaking stuff that opens up the doors of people's perceptions, nor is it current or topical or useful, but hey, after this comes the 150th Entry, which means - yes, folks, that's right - that I've been writing this for a bloody long time. 

We've been through several transitions, here, from it starting out as a quasi-film company blog for the actual Eton Crow thing - and yeah, not much came of that because I suck at setting up an actual website even though I own the domain name, I think. After that came a lot of the Diary of a Mature Student section, which had some entertaining moments but devolved into complaining - a lot like being a mature student, in fact, so the parallel is strangely relevant. 

Then there was the ill-advised Each Day, A Film section, which I managed to keep up for a couple of months before the rising waters of deadlines overwhelmed it - and me - and it sunk. 

Since then, it's just been my ill-advised but grammatically correct - for the most part - columns. 

Lucky you. 

But let's have that best of, shall we? 

PLEASE NOTE: PAGEVIEW STATISTICS ARE ACCURATE AT TIME OF WRITING. 

Of course, if you click the links, they won't be any more. Deal with it. 

With Thirty-Five (35) views, we have: The Scott Pilgrim Column! 

My Weapon Jammed And I Got Stuck

AKA Don't Send Your Single Men To The Cinema, Mrs Worthington. I wish I'd had more to say about the film, and I also wish I knew why using Stan Ridgeway lyrics in article titles means more pageviews.

With Forty-Seven (47) views, we have: The End Of The Degree Post!
It won't be very long - you will look for me, and I'll be gone

This dream must end this world must know Your guess is as good as mine, frankly. That was written at the end of a long and difficult course, and it was, really, venting. Perhaps venting works. Perhaps Moby lyrics as post titles work. Perhaps venting accompanied by Moby works. Perhaps, as Martinson (1974) stated, Nothing Works.

With Sixty-Seven (67) views, we have: Idle TV Speculation!
This dream must end this world must know

If you want to get pageviews, Quote Dr Who in the title. Seriously. Go try it. I'll wait. Especially entertaining considering the column was about a different show entirely.

But the all-time winner, with One Hundred and Six (106) views is this:
When I wake it's kaleidoscopic lime

Which kind of confirms the Moby hypothesis. Maybe if I start using Moby song lyrics for every post from now on we'll reliably hit double digits and maybe even triple digits. 

Here's the fun thing, though; that's actually a halfway decent, interesting, thoughtful, well-researched column. So hey, quality - and Moby lyrics - apparently sell! 

It's been an odd year, folks. No doubt about it. That gets written up in the Last Column Of The Year, though, so for now let's just celebrate the fact that one of my columns actually hit TRIPLE DIGITS this year. 

Let's focus on that because the idea that I have a silent group of readers who simply read, and judge, is slightly disconcerting. 

Look at my hopes, look at my dreams, the currency we spend

I'm having one of those weird moments where I've just spent money on something I shouldn't have, except that I feel a complete lack of buyers remorse. 

Not to harp on about it, but right now I'm broke as fuck, so it's lucky for me and my three readers that words are, technically, free. But this thing I decided to buy was

(A) Unique
(B) Part of a set I have one of already
(C) Not exactly expensive by normal standards
(D) Cool. 

The problem, really, is that I'm in a kind of weird situation at the moment with regard to money. Where I'm nominally 'employed' doesn't pay me, and no matter how much I try asking nicely, sweetly and politely, they keep dodging the question and throwing me back. 

At the same time, to find paid work that chimes with what I'm doing at the moment - and I should really talk about that more later, and would but for the fear that they might actually have the nous to read this blog, connected as it is with my youtube channel, and connected as that is with what I'm doing now, so, hi!, I guess - seems to be almost completely impossible. 

It needs to be part time, and pay okay, and be relatively understanding about the odd demands of my time that pop up here and there at the moment. 

And there simply seems to be sweet fuckall out there at the moment. 

Which means I'm eating into dwindling savings that will soon be gone, and I should really not be buying things online. 

And so we're back to the beginning of this article. 

Honestly? 

I give up. 

Can't get work means can't earn money, which means not being able to do... anything. At the same time it means mooching off of my family, which basically takes any kind of self-respect and throws it far, far out the window. 

And yet... There's this nagging voice at the back of my head that says stop complaining and the test of your character is what you do with what you have, and, well, it's right. 

I just get frustrated when people say "Oh, you need to get some bar work / administration work / clerical work" as if it's the easiest thing in the motherfucking world. Let's not forget, too, that because I'm doing what I'm doing I'm apparently not entitled to any benefits of any sort (other than the most tangential ones which, to be fair, I really appreciate like you wouldn't believe). 

This is all just idle, itinerant complaining, complements, frankly, of the season. There's a hell of a lot I need to be getting on with that doesn't cost money in particular other than the coin of the soul and, so, I guess... 

... Time to get on with things. 

I should have said it when I had credit

When I was looking for something in the loft earlier, I was confronted with something like sixty glasses of varying shapes and sizes - 'hi-ball', pint, tumbler - along with a lot of other receptacles that could, conceivably, be used as holders for candles.

A while ago, I became interested in a character called Jenny Everywhere for no real reason other than I found the idea interesting. As Inception tells us - repeatedly - an idea is the world's most resilient parasite, and I couldn't shake this one off, so I decided to make a film about the character.

I know I've featured this film on the blog before, and it's been touted around a few places as proof that I'm not just an idle dilettante - well, not completely an idle dilettante - when it comes to filmmaking, 'cause this was my show from script to nuts. Assuredly with the help of people who should have known better than necessarily to get organised in the weirdness that I brought to films - this one features quarter-second cuts of Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef along with an extended excerpt of Il Triello that I'm dearly dearly hoping is covered under fair use.

It was what I'd call a qualified success - there's some really student-y stuff in there, but that's to be expected, given that I was, well, a student. I'm not a hundred percent happy with the credits, or the makeup job that would have Bergman reach for the cavalry sabre, but as films go, it's... Not too shabby. 

And that's the problem. 

I've come to accept that not too shabby is about the best I'm ever going to reach for when it comes to films, because I don't have the requisite strength of will to drive a film from beginning to completion. It'd be nice to think that maybe I might develop that, but given my experiences, I know now that I'm a student-film level producer - a procurer of actors, locations, costumes and creator of spreadsheets and call sheets, not that nebulous person called a Director, who powers on on the assumption that all that stuff's been taken care of, baby, and we'll see you at the wrap party, yeah? 

That's where we come back to my loft full of candle receptacles; while the bloom was still on the rose and the scales still over my eyes, I wrote a script for a short sequel to the above. Actually, in point of fact, it was a prequel, designed to explain how Jenny Everywhere's teleporting powers functioned - moving from location to location via The Corridor. Jenny, you see, tends to travel between universes as well as just between locations in the same world, so every Jenny uses and experiences their own version of The Corridor, a subspace area (and granted, Scott Pilgrim kind of got there first on that one, but... well... damn) filled with - you may have guessed it - candles. 

The candles were set up to mourn the passing of other Jennys from other worlds, and 'our' Jenny, being new to the whole teleporting thing - was going to be taught by another Jenny the 'lore' and the way in which it all, well, worked. 

The reason I'm writing about this now is that I'm beginning to think the number of failed, incomplete or otherwise FUBAR-ed projects I have in my bag of wishes is actually probably more in number than the number of completed projects, and that worries me, really. 

There was the film about the jewel thief and the standover man, which ended up being filmed on a dopey little SD handicam and which was impossible to cut together, and the music video for the star of that film that I never managed to get together. There was the superhero western-style stand-off, and... Actually, come to think of it, those are the only ones I've really fucked up (and no black bars on this one, because it's true as the day is long). 

I guess it's as true for any creative person as another that there are as many failed projects as successes, if not more so, but I'm just... feeling it now for some reason I can't put my finger on. 

Plus, I'd love to make a Jenny Everywhere feature film, but can you imagine the copyright problems? 

Four Years In Arcade Games

Before we leave the 1999 - 2003 period, though, I'd like to step back and talk about the problems of addiction. Addition, in this case to fruit machines arcade games, because it was a real issue when I was a student.

I wish I was joking.

Before university, I was a gamer in the sense that I had a dodgy old PC and no money for games, but played a lot of C&C and Simcity and, god, Diablo. Diablo.

These days, if you go to my alma mater, in student union terms it's just a cafe near a gym. (At least, it was a few years ago, but I really haven't been back since.)

Back in the day - and how I simultaneously love and loathe that phrase - it was the crappiest kind of boozer, the kind where you go to drink and sit on the chairs and booths that hadn't been changed for fifteen years, or out in the conservatory area where you were bloody lucky to get a seat. And you drank, and you drank, until the place started to feel pleasant enough or you passed out, whichever came first.

Around the corner, though, past the fruit machines and the cigarette machine (and god knows you could smoke there those days, before passive smoking was invented) there was a bank of arcade machines. I'm going to tax my memory here and try to fully remember them, but in my first year for certain there was a Crazy Taxi machine (with steering wheel and pedals!), a Virtua Tennis machine, and... I think... I a football machine next to them, then the stairs up to three pool tables that had seen better days before glasnost.

I'm getting ahead of myself here, though, because that was the main student union, on-campus, where you could booze before going upstairs to a nightclub that, really, wasn't; just a stage and a floor and some steps designed to kill the drunken, with a coat-check operated by an uninterested student.

If you were in your first year, though, you could spend the cost of a train ticket on glorious, glorious beer and not have to leave the halls of residence because - fact fans - it had its own bad / nightclub, i.e. a bar with a few seats and a massive dancehall area with, yes, another bloody stage.

It also had a few arcade machines, and thus was my addiction rekindled.

Sadly, it was rekindled to Windjammers.

Now, let's not beat around the bush. 

In a triumph of style over substance, Windjammers is, basically, Pong. Why lie? But it did have a certain kind of style about it, and it was kind of fun, and it was on this huge, clunky Neo-Geo arcade machine that had the distinction of offering not one but four games for your perusal. 

Next to it was a Bust-a-Move cabinet, too, but again we're kind of getting into the hazy - sadly hazy - realms of memory here. 

So when I was on-campus but out of lectures, I could play Crazy Taxi, and when I was back at 'home' I could play Windjammers, and that was, in its own kind of way, a style of happiness. 

This is basically where the story ends - the machines were replaced, over time, as they either wore out or the rental costs were too high or, in one memorable case, the entire bar closed down because the manager had been fired due to an unwavering love of vodka - but there are a couple of changes that are worth mentioning. 

Firstly, the off-campus bar got a machine called Carnevil, which was... Crap. But fun, in a crap way, if standing in a bar with a plastic day-glo shotgun was your idea of a good time. And it has the distinction of being where I met one of my oldest, best friends, too, so Carnevil will always have a bit of a place in my heart. 

Secondly, the on-campus bar - and it's kind of sad and kind of not that it's not there anymore, because let's not mince words; it was a shithole, no doubt about it, but it was our shithole, and that just sounds wrong, so let's move on - had the first two House Of The Dead cabinets, and that was all kinds of a revelation, back then. 

Looking at it now - and here you go:

It was just all kinds of crap. The graphics by modern standards - hell, by any standards - are blocky and crap, the cut-scenes are cringey, and it's just not altogether a pleasant experience. But at the time, hell, it was just cool. 

Even then we probably secretly realised it was, at its' heart, a by-rote, timings experience, learning when and where things would pop up and then trigger-pulling like a maniac, but in two-player mode, it was just the coolest, really. 

The sequel was better - especially graphically - but still retained a couple of features including the trigger-clicking (i.e. shooting as fast as possible by holding the gun a certain way) gameplay but included better boss-fights. The one thing both of them had in common was a certain financiocratic approach to completion, because the final bosses were impossible to defeat without paying to continue so, in effect, you were paying for a chance to get your name on the scoreboard. 

(Oh, sure, perhaps it was a skill thing, but that never seemed to work for anyone in our group, so... Perhaps we all sucked.) 

Over time, the drinking would get harder, and fruit machines would replace arcade games - and that was a change for the worst. But like I said in the previous post, winter is coming, and these memories are keeping me warm at the moment. So there you go, I guess! 

You're tired and edgy. You're in the perfect mood for journalism.

Strange memories on a Sunday night.

This is just a memory of mine, but you can do with it as you like.

A long time ago, in a different world, it was the summer of 2000. And let's not beat around the bush; it was a different world back then. Not halcyon days viewed through 20-20 rose-tinted hindsight spectacles, by any manner, way, or fashion, but a different world, nonetheless.

My first year on the previous run around the merry-go-round that is the higher education system ended that summer. It was not a success. I was about to type that you couldn't even call it a qualified success, but I suppose you could, in that a 75% success ratio is technically a qualified success, i.e. that a pass rate of 3/4 ain't bad, I guess.

I'd made a lot of acquaintances, and a few friends, and learned a lot about a lot.

And so, on a seemingly warm summers' night in my memory, I ended up joining two of these acquaintances - two rich kids who either mistakenly thought I was one of them or mistakenly thought I fitted in around them, but they were amiable enough, so why worry - in one of their brothers' cars, a white open-top four-by-four mini-style jeep. It was, by his own admission - and take what you will from the class signifiers here - a hairdressers' car.

We lived out in East London, then, on the borders of Epping Forest in three tower blocks, and cars were few and far between because of, I guess, a combination of a lack of parking spaces, a lack of money, and the fact that driving in London is basically assisted suicide. (All right, that's a bit strong. But I didn't drive back then, so being a passenger was basically the coolest thing ever.)

It was warm enough to drive around with the top down, so we did, stopping at an Asda - if memory serves, which it rarely does these days, but still - for stuff along the way.

I had a disposable camera, and I still have the scanned photos knocking around, and it's fun to look back and see the Canary Wharf area still being built, and East London back in the day.

But looking back it reminds me of just how much of a townie I was. Not as a bad thing, but I went to university in London because of the attraction of the city, not necessarily because of the attraction of the university. Guy Ritchie also probably had something to do with it, but let's skip over that, because it's embarrassing.

Se we were driving - or, more accurately, being driven, in my case - around London on a warm summer evening, and, because the driver was a show-off, he took us right through the centre of London, by Westminster and the Houses of Parliament, then down to Piccadilly Circus. At the time, I thought the video wall there was the ne plus ultra of cool, because shiny lights and video have always had that effect on me.

My love affair with London lasted about a year, really, if we're being honest. Then the scales were slowly lifted from my eyes, via a process of slowly but surely walking downwards into my own kind of hell, then walking back upwards and out, a different (and, to be honest, fatter) person at the end of it.

But those summer nights at the halls bar, topped off by this aimless derive through the city I was coming to call home at the time, do have that halcyon ring to them at the moment. If I went back and analysed them thoroughly, it would come down to struggling with money, struggling with anxiety, struggling with coursework, and struggling with relationships.

Those warm nights were nice, though.

It's coming up on winter, here, and the forecast is if not for snow then for sheer bastard cold over the next few days. At the moment, though, I seem to be w-a-y too easily ensnared in what Gillen calls a Memory Kingdom, which, as he rightfully says, is a very dangerous place.

The thing is...

It's difficult to say and easy to say all in one, at the moment. The thing is that life is different and the same, at the moment, because thanks to a tanfastic combination of things, I'm basically going through exactly the same combination of elements now as I was then.

Like, literally. It's really odd. I know things supposedly go around and around in cycles, but this is just freaking me out that little bit.

You'd think that if this was the case that I'm going into it with a heightened degree of personal evolution and experience that give me the advantage, and I'm hear to tell you that they don't mean dick, son. Because all the experience and evolution in the world apparently don't help with the combination of money, anxiety, coursework and relationship problems.

Shovelhandle Me, , we're suffering from a lack of levity here, aren't we? Let's have a picture of Kisuke Urahara. 

 

Doesn't that make most things better? 

Here's the best way to look at it; in the grand scheme of things, my problems are trivial. Hell, in the grand scheme of things, my problems probably don't even count as problems. They are, instead, Things To Experience, Grow And Benefit From. 

And if my memory keeps tagging me back to the 1999-2003 period, well, maybe it just needs a slap. But living in the moment is hard... 

I got another fifty seconds and I'm ready to play

I'll be honest. There's been kind of a creative drought recently. 

This wasn't helped by watching Die Hard 4.0 (I really prefer Live Free or Die Hard, but apparently that title wouldn't play over here in Free Europe, so what can you do?) because, well, it's kind of difficult to put into words. 

See? Creative drought. 

I always thought being a writer would be easy, somehow. An inside job away from heavy lifting, that sort of thing. 

But I have trouble even considering myself as a writer, even though - as you can see, because you're reading it - I'm writing right now. 

Let's start over. 

I really want to talk about Skyfall, but to talk about Skyfall would mean talking about tuning out. So instead, let's wait until I've had the chance to see Skyfall again and, instead, talk about tuning out. Without, hopefully, turning out either on my part or yours. 

I have this weird relationship with time, sometimes, and I suspect it doesn't make me unique in any way. 

Normally, it manifests as - to borrow a phrase from William Gibson, describing a character called Laney - "pathological hyperfocus". 

It means that if I'm doing something that triggers the right switch in my brain, I toggle over to this mode whereby I can go for hours at a time without even acknowledging the existence of the outside world. 

Primary examples of this are video games (normal) and video editing (less normal). For example, when Spore came out I - much to the entertained bemusement of someone else - ended up playing it from evolutionary soup to galactic nuts in the space of seven straight hours, only stopping for biological necessities. 

In terms of video editing, though, it's a mixture of hyperfocus and stubbornness, because video editing is all about solving problems until they give up and beg for mercy. 

Given examples include 12 to 14 hour stints right at the fag-end of my Last Big Project, i.e. the 29 minute film that took seven months to make. 

By the end of that I was basically - once my suite-mate had finished and handed his in - working the aforementioned twelve hour days just trying to finish and submit. But to phrase it like that makes it sound like I didn't enjoy it, and that's one of the conditions of the hyperfocus; firstly, it has to be about problem-solving, and secondly, it has to involve enjoying something, if only the smallest bit. 

In gaming parlance, it's called grinding - i.e. doing the necessary actions to achieve your goals over and over again. 

Then again, one of the definitions of insanity is repeating the same task but expecting different results, so film editing = insanity; modus tollens. 

I miss it, though. 

I don't have anything film-like to work on at the moment, nor do I have the equipment to do so, and I really don't have the time. 

But I do miss it. 

This is not a sane and rational confession. I'm confessing to missing frustrating, angry days spent sitting on shitty chairs in a windowless bunker shared with other people giving off that special mix of stress hormone that students have as the end of term approaches. 

You can't even claim it's a kind of adrenaline junkie thing, because there's no adrenaline until the week before the deadline. It's just frustration then solution, followed by the next problem, repeat ad nauseam. 

I appreciate that that's two latinate terms in italics in one article, but I only found out about modus tollens earlier this week, so... Deal with it. 

That's the weird, sickness kind of addiction that filmmaking is, for me, at least. You make deals with devils and work for months to put less than half an hours' student film up on the screen, then you walk away, unsatisfied. 

And then you want to do it all again. 

Can someone else explain that to me? Because I sure as donkey don't understand it. 

#Losing faith, chukkah? No way.#

So this has been a column about nothing, in its own way. But to justify that, at least I'm trying to actually keep writing. 

Bah! Next week will be here soon, and with it, many things and worlds of promises. 

Well. 

You can dream, can't you? 

Let us not stand on ceremony, Mr. Wayne.

There's something that's  been bugging me for a while, now.

How have films swung the pendulum back from not having enough material to pad out ninety minutes to having too much for two-plus hours? 

Seriously; over the last five or six years there's been an absolute landslide of films that have struggled to make it to the theatrical release mandated (at least I think it's mandated, it's been a while since I checked) run time of ninety minutes; a lot were, in fact, closer to eighty plus credits, and some barely cleared seventy-plus. 

It was the same rationale, I would assume, as why American TV series (or, at least, the ones I watch) have switched season lengths from 22 to 12 (either that or it's a subconscious affiliation with Firefly's brevity of time). 

But recently the swing back to longer films - at least, in blockbuster terms, and it's quite revealing how many films I own that are in the >90 minute category and aren't very good - and, with that, there have been one or two examples of films that feel like they could actually benefit from being split apart or expanded upon. 

A counter-example of this would be The Avengers, because such a good job was done of fleshing out the world in the films prior to that (and why there's such a lack of love for Captain America, I do not know, but anyway) that the film could just start at a breakneck pace and continue that way from thereon in (although, as they Honest Trailers does say, you do get to watch Iron Man fix an engine for twenty minutes). 

I know there's a lot of brackets and sidebarring here. It's semi-stream-of-consciousness at the moment. All part of the fun. 

But The Avengers did have one or two odd elements; Hawkeye had been barely introduced in Thor before he got hit with the AHA YOU ARE NOW EVIL stick in The Avengers and spent the first hour or so being an antagonist before the power of Scarlett Johannsen's cranial trauma re-aligned him. 

And how Thor was able to cross to Midgard - sorry, Earth - when that crossing had been decisively all kinds of fishheaded up at the end of, well, Thor, which was explained away in one throwaway line. 

And the enemies could have used some more explanation, as well, because as it stands they were Just Another Nameless Alien Race trying to take over Earth because they... Well, just because it was something to do, as far as I could tell. And decidedly organic-looking soldiers all fall over when their connection to the home dimension is cut, as if they're radio-controlled. 

Oh, yeah, I should probably have posted the mandatory spoiler warning by now, really, but hey, if it's too late, it's worth pointing out; Robert Downey Jnr. Is Actually Iron Man In Real Life. 

Seriously. 

Expanding on the theory above, though, there's two films I'd like to talk about that represent opposite ends of the should-they-shouldn't-they theory of expansion in film terms. 

At one end, there's Looper, which I saw only a few days ago. 

I loved it; there's no denying that. 

And having seen previous films by Rian Johnson, I kind of went in expecting the pace to be a little... odd. Not bad, not better than anything else, just different - because, for instance, The Brothers Bloom had very odd pacing, and Brick before that had a pacing of it's very own and thank you very much but you can't touch it. If you were being unkind - and I remember a few people being so - the word glacial was bandied about, because there is a certain slowness to these films that you don't find anywhere else. 

There's a word I'm particularly fond of that I learnt ten years ago and never truly forgot; entelechy. I had it mentally filed as "a slow movement towards an eventual completion", or like the unfolding of a flower; slow, precise, ends in something beautiful unless you're a hay fever sufferer. 

I like to think that Rian Johnson's films are basically entelechy on celluloid (that is, virtual celluloid, these days) in that they can't be rushed, and wouldn't benefit from it if they were. 

Don't misunderstand me; I came here to write tonight fully expecting to say how Looper should have been much faster and the pacing different and and and... Then I stopped, and thought about it, and, well, if the pacing were faster and it was just balls-to-the-wall action, what would make it any different from any other action film out there? 

So maybe it's time to celebrate that sort of difference. The only film I can think of with a comparable kind of pacing and structure is Way of the Gun, which just kind of unfolds with a slow creeping terror about exactly how things are going to end, including sudden broken glass. 

The Dark Knight Rises, though - which I saw not quite so soon ago - had a completely different feel to it viz pacing. 

In that it was a wonderful film, with a deep, decent emotional payoff at the end (although, as Cracked point out, a slightly unbelievable one in practical terms). 

But - to me, and only to me - it felt like it should have been two films. 

This is just my opinion, and bear in mind opinions are like elbows - everyone has at least two - but bear with me as I put this together for all y'all. 

How about this: 

The Dark Knight Falls

(Because it's a pun on Knightfall, i.e. night fall, geddit? etc etc oh god help me please)

Ignoring the shittiness of the pun - but acknowledging it nonetheless - you could have a good ninety-to-one-twenty minute movie setting up an epic confrontation between Batman and a more fleshed-out, more understandable Bane. You wouldn't need contrivances like Bruce Wayne's money being fraudulently stolen in its entirety in eight minutes through a glorified iPad; you could actually have Wayne/Batman being slowly and completely stripped of his assets, his allies, his equipment and, at the conclusion of the movie, his ability to fight. 

This would allow for much more exploration of the motivation of, well, everyone, and more character setup time. Hell, there'd even be more time to explain how Bane managed to get the Gotham construction companies to create the absurdly spacious sewers (thanks, TV Tropes!) necessary to hide his equipment and his army, and more time to introduce Selina Kyle rather than just her getting a pearl necklace from - no, let's stop that amazingly vile joke right there and then. But more setup time for Selina would also have been nice, because in the film although we know her motivations are questionable there's the whole thing of whether she does feel genuine, total angst about selling out Batman to Bane. 

And equally there would have been more time to spend on John Blake and Miranda Tate, with equally more time to spend on myriad little plot things and such here and there and everywhere. 

And at the end of it, Bane still breaks the living shit out of Batman. 

The Dark Knight Rises

One of my main issues - and don't get me wrong, I raise it from no platform of experience of my own, but it's just something that bugged me - was Wayne / Batman's recovery time. Although it's been a while since I saw the film, it did seem to boil down to 

10 Back Broken
20 GOTO Turkish (?) Prison
30 Receive rope-based chiropracty
40 Do press-ups
50 All better! Go fight now.

Again, if the first film had been spent comprehensively breaking Wayne, the second would have had more time to devote to how he raised himself back up to fighting condition and found the inner strength necessary to make the jump without the rope. To do so so quickly kind of trivialises the matter, although in a way it's productive in terms of stating just how kick-ass Wayne really is when everything's up against the wall, and such. 

An extended run-time would have allowed for more time to show just how the GCPD were coping with their enforced prison time underground, too (and heaven knows there's a raft of characters from Gotham Central that could have been brought in in big or little ways). 

Plus... The close-to-final scene in Florence was genuinely effective (I... Well, I got a lump in my throat, I'm not really ashamed to say). But it was telegraphed earlier in the movie; if things had been split into two, then it might have had even more emotional heft when it made the viewer recall Alfred's speech from not just an hour and a half ago, but from the previous film entirely. It might have been more rewarding, that way. 

Then again, it might not. Because how would it have worked, this way? Release one film in May and another in September? There would have been pros and cons to this approach, i.e. extra box-office versus extra pr spending and the need to maintain the attraction between two films for the entirely mainstream audience as opposed to just the specialist sector, all sorts of things like that. Plus it would have made keeping schtum about all the plot twists and secrets just as hard. 

And god knows there probably would have been a Previously On The Dark Knight recap at the start of the film. Nobody wants that. 

I can't actually think of a way this has been done before except for, maybe, the Matrix sequels, which were - if memory serves - exactly a year apart. 

But I'm not a studio executive, a marketing mojo, a film director, a screenwriter or an economist. I'm just a fan with an opinion that's probably wrong and an overactive imagination. 

At the heart of it, a film plot is just a series of events in one long progression. The best films make this look effortless or make it look like that's not what's happening at all. 

At times, The Dark Knight Rises felt to me and probably only to me like event -> event -> event -> end. 

But it was still a beautiful piece of filmmaking filled with amazing actors evidently giving everything to the final piece in a trilogy (pre inevitable reboot, of course) and it should be celebrated as such. 

But maybe... 

Other Dancers May Be On The Floor

I forgot to post the one thing I came here to post, last time, actually. Here it is: 

We are none of us alone.

Even as we exhale it is inhaled by others.


The light that shines upon me shines upon my neighbor as well; in this way everything is connected.

Everything is connected to everything else.

In this way I am connected to my friend even as I am connected to my enemy.
In this way there is no difference between me and my friend.
In this way there is no difference between me and my enemy.


We are none of us alone.

I wish I could go ahead and say that's from some deep and meaningful Zen philosophy, but it's not. It's from Life. While this doesn't make it any less deep or meaningful, obviously, it's Televisual Zen.  

But I love it. 

Things to do, places to be and, most importantly, words to type, documents to fill and emails to reply to. 

I just figured you'd like to know that the blog is up and running again after that prolonged, embarrassing absence and the failed attempt at a daily writing exercise. 

A glorious failure, though. Although why in your-deity-of-choice's-name-here the entry on The Beach got so many hits, I have no idea whatsoever. 

In fact, that's something for a future entry; a Greatest Hits compilation. 

Yes, really! 

Creaky Crawley Monster Bawley

Today's a celebration of getting out of old habits.

Like putting off work. 

Like putting off exercising. 

Like putting off Nanowrimo. 

Oh, sure, even with today's work I still have to write 1,950 words a day for the next three weeks in order to meet the deadline, but hey, if I write more than that for the next week, the average goes down. 

And that's maths. 

Life's... Well, firstly, life's been good to me so far. It's important to recognise that, even though I have no idea absolutely where the hell that song came from - some weird shared musical inheritance, no doubt. 

But life's been weird, too. In a good way, no doubt whatsoever, but I feel like some time ten years ago someone proposed a trade to me then wiped my memory; 

"Tell you what. You can study, and you can keep studying until you're satisfied. But you'll neglect your body, and you'll avoid relationships, maturity and all manner of adult things in order to do so. 

Trade me your dignity and I'll give you your motivation."

It always sounds a bit odd when I try to articulate the trade me your dignity part, because it sounds so histrionic. But by all societal markers, that's what I've done; unlike many of my contemporaries, there's no wife, no house, no mortgage to show that I've grown up and matured. Instead, there's - depending on your classification - between six, twenty-two and thirty letters after my name to prove that, by some definitions, I'm a smart bastard. 

Here's the difficult thing, because this is text, and text, by definition, strips out any emotiveness other than the extremes; 

I'm happy. 

Oh, sure, I've been in a state of arrested development for ten years, in some respects. I got a massive inferiority complex from my first degree - didn't try hard enough and, when I did put the effort in, it was too late - that lasted a decade and two more degrees. I'm not even sure if I'm over it now, but results would tend to support the theory that maybe just maybe I am. 

But the thing is... When I look back over a lot of the Diary of a Mature Student entries, and a lot of the other entries on top of that, I see progress. 

Kind of. 

Well, progress, in that catharsis-mandated way that means we have to talk about our feelings, in that way that British people like me are only just coming to understand is actually useful. 

The other thing is that this blog is now, I think, directly linked to my youtube channel, so not only can you see what I've been chattering about as a film student, people who watch the films can also, I think, come here. 

Which might explain the eight hits the last entry got, although that doesn't explain the weird pageview stats - like how twice as many people in America have read this blog over time (Hi, American People!) than British people, or who the twenty pageviews from Turkey and South Korea are. 

It's weird to have reach to people you don't even know. 

But I'm babbling, again, as per usual. 

Because there's one more thing I haven't mastered yet. 

And that's putting off letting go. 

I have a lot of bitterness in my heart about the way certain things worked out over the past few years, and that's... Well, it's really stupid to be the kind of person who hangs on to the bitter only to let it cloud the good. 

It's what people in my family do - which is not a criticism in any way, just an observation - so it's what I've learnt to do, because holding on to a grudge gives you something to nurse and look after. 

But life's been good, and continues to be good, and to concentrate on the bad is just a way of... I don't know, really. It's just something that we, as humans, are good at - storing up ammunition as proof that we're not perfect, because to be perfect would invite other people to tear down that ideal of perfection. 

Look at it this way. It's Saturday night, and I'm writing this having finished a 3,000 word writing binge on my NaNoWriMo 'novel', most of which I'm just making up as I go along in order to fill out wordcount (although it's fun doing that, if I'm honest). 

So it's time to admit it. 

- If we are what we do; 
- If Gladwell's 10,000 hours theory is right; 
- And if it's time to finally admit it; 

I guess I'm a writer. 

But I know my narrative is changing. 

It's time to run it's time to run

 So it's probably also time to address the Kevin Smith issue. 

It's complicated, though - and not in the sexual sense, which is probably for the best. And, as usual, it all comes down to access, that perennial problem. 

Here, in Britain, the first time I was ever aware of Kevin Smith was when I got round to seeing Dogma. This must have been some time in 2000, and my brain pegs it as late 2000 because I'm convinced (and perhaps mistakenly) that I saw it on a screener videotape sent to the university newspaper at which I was working. More likely is that it had come in and been left around after being reviewed and I had snaffled it, as I was wont to do. 

Equally likely is that I rented it or bought the screener as a used tape from Blockbuster, because that was just how I rolled back then. (Actually joining Blockbuster? Pssh. Spending more than it would cost to join buying used tapes? Sure! Why not.) 

Dogma is a clever, sarcastic, and above all amazing film; so much comedy wrapped around the possibility of the end of existence in its' entirety. 

And to be honest, I didn't actually pay much attention to who the director was, because it wasn't really just 'A Kevin Smith Film' to me at that point. That's the thing; all the identifying features (type of humour, Jay and Silent Bob - who them? - featuring prominently, Affleck and Damon - who we'll come back to later - among other things) were alien to me. It was just a cool, funny movie with a lot of heart and a willingness to include a lot of random biblical concepts not because the plot needed them, but because the plot functioned well because of them instead of in spite of them. 

See Legion if you want to see the opposite of how that works. 

Now here's where it gets problematic; I distinctly recall seeing Chasing Amy on that fun staple of early filmmaking developmental love, late night BBC2 programming. (See also Strange Days, among others; the programmers at BBC2 in the late 1990s / early 2000s were great at bringing in films like that. Hell, they may still be, for all I know). 

Chasing Amy is problematic not because I can't exactly remember when I saw it (although I have it filed as After Dogma, so let's run with that) but because of the sexual politics of the piece; you could make an argument that it was, in theory, one of the first post-gender, post-sexuality pieces of the time, but I don't think you'd get altogether too far. Not that I cared, at the time, because it was Pretty People Doing Pretty Things, which included, of course, The Sex. Which was pretty much all I needed to look for in films at the time. 

And again, it didn't really impact upon me that it was a Kevin Smith film, because, to be honest, I wasn't paying that much attention. 

After this, we can basically fast-forward to 2003, when a friend - of the time, no longer, but let's not get into that whole bridges thing again, although I'm now really impressed at how easy it is to find old posts, but I'm getting distracted - brought over Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and alcohol. 

We've now moved on from the Video and BBC 2 days, folks, and into the wondrous land of DVD, albeit played on a Playstation 2. (Which, in a funny way, I kind of miss every now and then, having sold off most of the physical stuff from that time and just kept the memories.) 

I really, really liked Jay [...]. It appealed to my sense of humour at the time, as I was also on the path to getting into Family Guy, etc. I still think it's a pretty bravura piece of filmmaking, and would happily sit down and watch it again. 

But here's the somewhat fucked-up part; I only discovered Kevin Smith after seeing Jay and Silent Bob, in the sense that I'd been watching his films for that long and not actually caring who made them. I know; shallow, right? 

So after a while, I bought the Clerks X edition of... Well... Clerks, in, of all places, Dagenham. And watched it, and loved it, and, for no real reason, ignored all of the special features in the package. 

Now, Clerks has a wonderful story attached, which many other sources - Jon Pierson, Peter Biskind et al - tell much better than me, of the young, driven filmmaker who risked it all by putting $22,000 on credit cards to make the film, risking financial ruin if it didn't come off. And it is, like I said, a wonderful story (although it's not wonderfully inspiring for as many people as try this and end up, well, bankrupt) and it forms a key part of the issue I have with Kevin Smith; he's a master mythmaker. 

This is not a bad thing. Nor is it a criticism. 

So let's set out my stall. I love most of Kevin Smith's films. I've listened to a good many - although nowhere near all - of the SModcasts, and I've grown to love Jay and Silent Bob Get Old. I think he's an inspiration to several generations of filmmakers, that his films are well-made and his sense of humour is something I really admire. 

I also think that the mythmaking is out of control. 

The past few years have not been kind to Kevin Smith, really. There's the whole "too fat to fly" thing - and, speaking as a fat man, I dread the day that could ever happen to me - along with the problems surrounding Cop Out and the controversy - well, kind of controversy - about how Red State's distribution rights were sold. 

I will admit, because of these and other things, my love for Kevin Smith waned a little. Then I thought; you're being a jackass. You're judging him without knowing the facts, just basing it on what you've heard on the internet. You should look into things more. 

And I did. 

And, like I said, it felt like the mythmaking has overtaken the filmmaking. 

And all this stems from a comment from a friend of mine to the effect that "Yeah, Kevin Smith's really good at blaming it on other people." 

I thought - even with the bloom coming off the rose, the scales falling from my eyes, etc - that's a bit harsh, surely? 

Then I read Tough Sh*t, and, well, it really did feel like the friend in question was right. 

There's a chance that Southwest Airlines really were complete asses who treated him unfairly and caused him and his family a lot of woe. 

There's a chance that Bruce Willis was a complete and total bastard on the set of Cop Out, which caused the whole film to melt into the puddle that it became, in the end. I've seen Cop Out and it's... Well, I have this thing. I don't like to judge other people's work until I've done something similar, because you can't know how difficult something is until you've done it yourself, right? 

But Cop Out feels soulless in the worst sense of the word. And in Tough Sh*t - and in Q&A sessions, and on the Podcasts (if memory serves) - Smith eloquently but persistently lays all of this at Willis' door. 

And maybe it's true. 

(And maybe I'm starting too many sentences with And. My A Level English teachers would be so proud.) 

But how is it even remotely in Willis' interest for the film to be bad? Sure, many stars turn up for the paycheck and the free craft services. Many films are not good for many reasons. But if I'm Bruce Willis - and, more importantly, if I'm Bruce Willis and I don't want that whole Ocean's 12 fiasco again - I'd make sure to actually, I don't know, engage with the director and the film, rather than be the unconsciable, unworkable prick that Smith portrays him as. 

Yes, there are all sorts of power games like refusing to read dialogue, or refusing to do certain things, or such. If I had to guess, you do them because you want something - more money, more craft services, something - rather than to just torpedo a film that you're involved in because you can. 

If everything Smith says about Willis' behaviour in Cop Out is true, we're looking at the most self-destructive actor around. And it doesn't look like Looper had the same problems, now, did it? Although that's an unfair comparison, maybe. But to lay all the blame squarely at an actors' door belies a terminal lack of flexibility on his part, and maybe if I'm ever in the same situation, I'll be able to do things differently. 

Ha. Like that'd ever happen - but still, Tough Sh*t - for all its' merits - acts as somewhere between apologia and polemic about other people's problems. 

Red State is equally problematic. On the one hand, you have to - and I mean, have to - celebrate an attempt by a director to branch out from their previous, deeply established style in order to try something new and different and evolutionary. And, as a script, Red State really is something interesting, and anyone who's willing to take a stab at people like the Westboro Baptist Church has to be applauded. 

And there's some bravura filmmaking in there - Mark Kermode in particular singled out Michael Parks' sermon as a particularly interesting element - but the result felt, on watching, curiously flat, somehow. It's the weirdest thing; it felt - to this viewer, if to nobody else - that all the elements that made Kevin Smith films Kevin Smith films had been surgically excised when they could have been retained and tweaked. 

It's as if Eli Roth made a comedy and removed all the horror elements just in case someone made a comment about how it was so much like his previous films; it might not work. It'd be interesting, but it might not work. 

So here's how it works, because this is too long to keep going much longer; Kevin Smith was - and is, in some ways - a hero for me. But he's also a myth, and a self-made myth at that, which threatens to become PR of the worst sort. And, sadly, PR never ends well, because, at the end of the day, it's all spin.

Wow. That's kind of a downbeat, waffley ending for something I wanted to use to express both praise and concern (and, maybe, disappointment) in someone I'll never meet, speak to, or interact with, but who's had a giant impact on my life. 

That's because, as was said, It's Complicated. 

But overall I'm glad of the influence Smith has had on my life. 

You know what? I don't care about your blame.

Even with what I was talking about in the previous post - which was, yes, about forty-five seconds ago in real time, but still - I have managed to actually sit the finagle  down and watch the occasional film.

And, because... Well, because it appeals to me, I like to get my DVDs from CEX because, frankly, their pricing policy is even stranger than HMV's used to be. (And I know that I've talked about that at some vague point in the past, but I'm doohickeyed if I can find it to link it. And linking previous entries twice in the same entry seems... Less recursive, and more idiotic.) 

So today let's have entry one (in, most likely, a series of one) of Things You Can Get For £7. 

Today brings us: 

- Die Hard
- Die Hard 2 
- Die Hard With A Vengeance
- Die Hard 4.0
- Disturbia
- Mallrats 
- and O. 

Now, there's not a Die Hard fetish going on so much as having recently read this article,  and watching this video: 




And, yes, you can buy the quadrilogy for - Ctrl-T - £12 new or £5 used on Amazon. Or buy the quadrilogy -

No, wait. Let's take a pedantic moment. Quadrilogy isn't even a word. Seriously; spellcheck hates it almost as much as I do, and spellcheck hates spellcheck as a single word, so it must be consumed with self-loathing. 

If you wanted to be right - and to have people mock you for being right, most likely, what with your book-learning and stuff - it's Tetralogy. But no-one wants to use tetralogy because it sounds like a mixture of flying dinosaurs and Russian block-games, so instead marketing brings us Quadrilogy. Because Quad = square = four corners = FOUR, you see? 

And breath. 

Anyway. So I managed to score all four films for - and this is me checking again even though I added it up a minute ago, because my concentrations pan is shot to pieces at the moment - £3.50. Used, yes, but when you can get the Die Hard TETRALOGY - ahem - for 87.5p per film, what's not to love? 

This is the world we live in, kids, where films can be made for millions of dollars and end up sold for 75p. Long tail, my ass. 

Wait, I'll rephrase that. 

So the Die Hard series-of-four-films is there because it's been stuck at the back of my mind to see them for a long time. I saw Die Hard on TV once, about... Ten years ago? And I'm sure I've seen With a Vengeance, but I've not seen all four films, well, ever. Which is kind of a shameful gap in my film knowledge, recently, considering that they're the epitome of high concept. 

Also, I find it entertaining that Bruce Willis is always looking to the right on every DVD cover other than 4.0 (which should, really, have stuck to Live Free Or Die Hard, even though us English folks with our genteel sensibilities might not have got it). 

Now, Disturbia is only really there because one of the starts of Nothing Strange Happens in Colbourn recommended it to me, and I have no idea why he did, because he's the biggest cineaste I know (even more than Michael Bolton) so when you get it for £1, well, why not, I guess. Plus, well, actual cannibal Shia Labeouf. 

O was also £1, and, weirdly, I've been going through an odd Mekhi Phifer phase recently, what with watching the final eight seasons (7 through 15 - don't ask) of ER, and then ended up watching Clockers, which has a really... Strange feel to it, especially in a post The Wire world. Plus, it's a part of the whole Miramax history (and speaking as someone who's read Down and Dirty Pictures somewhat obsessively over the last few years, I'm prone to interest in Miramax history.) 

Which brings us to potentially the most difficult of the purchases; Mallrats. 

I have kind of a complicated relationship with Kevin Smith. Not in the sexual sense - that's an image no-one needs - but that... You know, that's probably best tackled in a different post. Because that's a whole mess of weird, really.  

But hey. Not bad for £7, no? 

I could yawn and be withdrawn and watch the world go by

Um... Wow. 

So I haven't been here since... Wait, let me check again. 

Ctrl-T

The end of June. 

That's kind of saddening, in a way. But also not, because hey, time, distance, perspective, talking like Buffy again, these things, you have to reclaim. 

In theory, this marks the end of something, too. Because the whole Diary of a Mature Student thing technically ended a week before the most recent posting, and your insert-deity-of-choice here above only knows that the whole Each Day, A Film format was, if not totally unsustainable, then overly difficult to keep running. 

Sorry 'bout that. 

The thing is; something's changed. And not in the fun sense. 

Work this out, because I certainly can't; studying film has destroyed my ability to watch films. 

In one sense it's to be expected; once you're taught how to view something in a different way, it's difficult - if not impossible - to turn those eyes off. So now, whenever I'm watching - and that's the wrong word, but we'll come back to that shortly - anything, from television to film to whatever, I'm watching it with - at minimum - two sets of eyes. 

It's like designer schizophrenia in cinematic terms - if the Barefoot Doctor wasn't quite as sleazy after the whole 'sexing your patients' thing, I'd borrow his quite lovely term, 'Polyphrenia'. Electively having multiple selves that you can dip into and access rather than a singular ego, effectively - Grant Morrison hints at the concept in the final volume of The Invisibles with the whole MeMeplex thing (playing off Dawkins' The Selfish Gene). 

Um. Hold on. My background reading is showing. 

But let's take an example; I've been watching Hunted recently on BBC 1, and a better example of all the overlays I've been taught coming into play is difficult to find at the moment. 

At any given time watching Hunted, I'm trying - desperately - to just watch it as a viewer, but at the same time I am - in theory, and sometimes in practice - 'engaging' with the 'text' as someone who's been trained - to a certain level, and certainly not to mastery, but trained nonetheless - to 'engage' on the level of the script, the production, the technical aspects, and a few other sundry bits and bobs (colour grading, I'm looking at you). 

And let me tell you, Hunted is not a great experience if you can't turn the overlays off. 

In the week before last's episode, I actually stopped, rewinded and counted the setups in one scene. A simple conversation between two people stood at a window - bread and butter, really, in filmmaking terms - ended up having eight different setups. 

For anyone thinking 'oh, well, la-di-da, he studies films and suddenly he's using all the slang and whatnot', a setup is - to my mind, at least - a single camera position. Inside that position, you can pan, track, zoom, change heights, whatever. It's fairly versatile, especially with the new cameras and such. 

So to have eight setups in one two-person conversation isn't simply over-the-top, or flashy, or different - it's bizarre. 

And it's not the only time it happens, either. There's a thing - and it's not my favourite thing ever, but it works - called the 180 Degree rule. 

 Like so.

And it's boring, and staid, and simple, but it works. It's part of the visual grammar of how people are brought up to understand television and film. And because if this, if you violate this rule, it should be for a good reason - disorientation, jumps, etc - to shock the audience, or to get them to pay attention. 

Hunted doesn't so much break the rule as violate it in every single possible way. It's not even funny; in a conversation between the Boss and his Second-In-Command, the line may as well not exist, which is bizarre in a normal conversation, let alone in a tense situation. So it's like starting a nuclear exchange with your neighbour country because they forgot to send a Christmas card; unnecessary, messy, and everyone's going to be looking at you funny at the UN from now on and not sending baskets of regional cheeses. 

The strange thing is that Hunted is actually getting tense. The perennial problem is that you have first-season-hump - you have one episode to set up the world, one episode to dive into the season-long arc, then you just have... stuff happening right up until the final episodes of the season. If the show is well-written, the stuff advances the plot without it being obvious that it's doing so. 

Otherwise, you just have A-plot and B-plot for an hour a week, with Season Arc going on in the background. 

This is not a bad thing, because it's how we like our TV shows, and, again, it's part of the grammar of how things work; event follows event follows event because there's always a reason for narrative causality, and then suddenly the season is ending and you end with the following programming loop: 

10:  QUERY: IS SHOW CONTINUING TO NEXT SEASON
20:  IF YES, INSERT CLIFFHANGER THEN GOTO 10 AT END OF SEASON
30:  IF NO, INSERT WRAP-UP SEGMENT THEN GOTO NEXT TV SHOW

So Hunted is finally tense, but as far as I can tell, no-one actually knows if it's being renewed for another season or not. 

If it is, perhaps they could decide if they want to give the viewer motion sickness or not? Because it'd be nice to know in advance.