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?
Wednesday 31 October 2012
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.
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.
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