"Philosophy of Two American Johns"
A dissenting opinion from a buddy of mine (may be of interest to Johnny Appleseed fans as well).

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Having worked at Pfizer and American Express, I've taken full advantage of the free admission to various museums around the city that those employee identification cards grant me. One thing I haven't taken advantage of are the film screenings at MoMA. The selection of films they show is great and I get tickets to those for free as well but I just haven't ever gotten around to it. What finally got me off my ass and up to 53rd street was the chance to see Citizen Kane projected on the big screen.

Wow.

It's such an obvious reaction but, WOW. I knew the cinematography in the film was pretty badass but seeing it on the big screen on actual film and not a small TV really made me appreciate it. The film is also a lot funnier than I remember it being and it's not at all boring. Although I was skeptical when I saw it in highschool for the first time, I can definitely now see why it's considered one of the best films ever, if not the best. There's just not much wrong with it.

After having been through one of the best film going experiences of my life at MoMA (the two others that stand out are Apocalypse Now and 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Cinerama) I just had to watch another movie before going to bed.

Through the miracle of DVR, I had The Parallax View, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and The Magnificant Ambersons on my TV. Lee chose The Parallax View and off we went on a real strange film going experience. The film is a political thriller released in 1974 in the wake of Watergate and the assassinations of JFK and RFK. The film is one of the most ambiguous and pessimistic films that I've ever seen. Great cinematography by Gordon Willis and some brilliant sequences, including an assassination in the Space Needle, an incredible montage in the middle, and a devastating ending.

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So I've started my final semester of college and my schedule is pretty sweet. I have class on Monday and Tuesday and I work full days Wednesday through Friday.

The classes I'm taking are Film Genres: Horror and Its Critics, History of Photography, and Adapting the Screenplay. Although it's going to be the most work, I'm most looking forward to the History of Photography class, the professor is brilliant and incredibly entertaining.

In the horror class we recently watched Night of the Living Dead the film that, along with Rosemary's Baby launched the modern horror genre in 1968. Although Romero's film is good for some laughs (whether they're intentional or not is open to debate... I think it mostly is), it still packs a punch, especially the photo montage at the end that plays under the credits. Rent this film to see from whence the horror movies that now plague our cinemas were born! If you regret it, you're dumb and deserve to be fed to zombies.

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The New World

Written on Sunday but never not finished. It's still incomplete but I figured I might as well post what I have.

Although I went to bed around 2am I ended up waking up a mere six and a half hours later. As a result, I figured I'd make the most of it and see an early showing of Terrence Malick's latest film, The New World.

Usually, I think thoughts like that but don't act on them because the walk + subway ride feels like a pain in the ass that early in the morning. This time around, I forced myself to quickly buy a ticket online before I could talk myself out of it. The plan worked beautifully and by 10:45am I was in Union Square at the gigantic theater in a crowd full of really really old people.

You can click below to read what I started to write about the film. Unfortunately, I wrote a lot but don't feel like I said much. Especially considering that I barely got past talking about the first fifteen minutes of it. It's probably in your best interest not to bother and instead just know that I liked it a lot and that you should see it.

Anybody who knows me knows that a Terrence Malick film is a very big event both in the film world and in my world (hopefully my world will be the film world someday... but for now I'm just a spectator). Unfortunately, the initial announcement that Malick was releasing a new film was dampened by the fact that it was about Pocahontas. Wtf right? Yes, wtf. I suppose...

How Malick would treat the subject matter was a pretty big concern, especially since I couldn't get a live action version of the Disney movie out of my head. Whether there was even a romantic relationship between John Smith and Pocahontas is a subject of much debate and from the research I did online, the consensus seems to be that they were at the very least very good friends (you know how rumors spread when boys and girls start hanging out together too much...). Fair enough, the film was being marketed as a romance along the lines of Titanic. I figured this was more a marketing ploy and less actually what the film was like. Another point of concern, brought up by a friend, was that Malick might romanticize the Native Americans, something he seems entirely capable of in the wake of The Thin Red Line. A valid concern but once again I gave Malick the benefit of the doubt and went into the film hoping to love it.

The film opens with a gorgeous shot of some trees and clouds reflected on the surface of some water. That's when it hit me that this was a Terrence Malick film I was watching and it had been eight years since I had last been able to view one for the first time.

After the opening series of shots, there's a really bad title sequence that bugged me for a bunch of reasons, none of which are worth going into, you have to see it. As soon as the unfortunate titles are gone we see ships finally reaching shores of the new world as Native Americans watch from afar. At this point I was a bit overcome with awe by the idea of landing in a world you know absolutely nothing about.

The extent of the differences in the two worlds that collided at that moment never had really registered with me until the breathtaking opening of this film. All those years of U.S. history never really conveyed just how amazing, scary, and ultimately sad that this even was. In the Thin Red Line, Malick explored the various things in the world that oppose eachother philosophically, spiritually, and in the material world. With the New World he once again pits two opposing sides against eachother and you just know it's going to be ugly. But, as ugly as it is, it's also incredibly fascinating.

The portrayal of Native Americans in the film is something that made me nervous even while watching the film because I have no idea what that culture was like and as a result have no idea how accurate the portrayal is. The only thing I had to go on was a National Georgraphic article I had read about the extensive research that went into recreating the time period. What I can say is that the world of the film is entirely convincing and the cinematography used to capture this world is really great (aside from a bit too much handheld work when it really wasn't necessary).

Um, I've written a lot and it's not very focused nor well written. I also am getting tired of writing since I feel like very very few people are going to read this... I'll wrap up with a series of comments:

Posted by Ben at 11:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

[00:45] Kumudha: on dr. 90210
[00:45] Kumudha: one of the plastic surgeons
[00:45] Kumudha: has britney spears' dad as their chef
[00:45] Kumudha: in house
[00:48] Kumudha: and there's this asian plastic surgeon and she's pregnant and she's talking about how their kid has to play an instrument cause he's asian
[00:48] blim8183: lol
[00:48] blim8183: not just any instrument
[00:48] blim8183: violin or piano
[00:48] blim8183: because guitar doesn't count
[00:48] Kumudha: whaaat
[00:48] Kumudha: are you watching too
[00:49] blim8183: no
[00:49] blim8183: why
[00:49] blim8183: did they say that?
[00:49] Kumudha: you're lying!
[00:49] Kumudha: you are watching
[00:49] blim8183: dead serious
[00:49] blim8183: i'm not i'm playing poker
[00:49] Kumudha: she said "violin and piano are the only choices"
[00:49] blim8183: i can't see the tv from my computer
[00:49] blim8183: hahahaha
[00:49] Kumudha: and then the husband was like "what about guitar?"
[00:49] blim8183: lolllllllllllllllllllllllllllll
[00:49] Kumudha: and she was like "no violin or piano"
[00:49] blim8183: i'm psychic

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I got tickets to the Belle & Sebastian show and I also got tickets to see a solo show that Colin Meloy (The Decemberists) is doing next week. That should hold me over, in terms of concerts, until this summer when Radiohead goes on tour!

On February 11th I'm taking an exam as part of the application process into the Directors Guild Assistant Director Training Program. It's supposed to be like the SATs so I'm not too worried. If I do well on that I have to go through a series of interviews from which the DGA chooses five people. Please keep your fingers crossed for me. Thanks.

Lately, I've been watching Errol Morris' short lived TV show, First Person. Morris is, in my opinion, one of the greatest filmmakers ever. His Academy Awards short film is brilliant. You can see it HERE. If you love film at all, this short will make you feel really giddy. In fact, seeing any of his work should make you giddy with excitement. He's a brilliant filmmaker. I plan on watching more of his work in the upcoming weeks and maybe I'll write about them here.

Posted by Ben at 8:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 2nd and 3rd
N.Y.C., Nokia Theater
Tickets cost $30 ( plus booking fee) and go onsale at 12noon on Saturday January 14th at http://www.ticketmaster.com/venue/300

Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

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*Bonus points to anyone who knows where that title is from!

A couple days ago I returned two items to Blockbuster that were over a month late. The late fine turned out to be a little under three dollars but the two movies I was renting at the time were about ten bucks. I'm not sure if I got a deal or got ripped off...

<3 Netflix.

The two films I rented were The Machinist and Crash. I haven't had a chance to watch Crash yet but I did watch The Machinist. Christian Bale is so skinny it made me nervous, the technical quality of the filmmaking is great (especially one grisly and particularly well edited scene in the factory), and the film in general is pretty good but not as good as it feels upon first experiencing it. What I mean is that it feels like a great film that one could really sink their teeth into and mull over but in the end I was a bit underwhelmed. "Oh" is a bad reaction to have to a film or any other work of art.

Oh.

Posted by Ben at 12:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Happy 2006 to anybody that happens to be reading this. My New Year hasn't started off with much of a bang but it did include a nice Korean BBQ induced post-dinner nap. Not much seems to be different from the last year and that was best exemplified by my strange inability to see the film Munich. This time my dinner being what thwarted my plan. Maybe it's for the better? I doubt it... I enjoyed War of the Worlds so much that I became a born again Spielberg fan. He's quite the craftsman when it comes to filmmaking, the only reservation I have about Munich is its politics. Hopefully I'll get to see it sometime this week.

Last Friday was spent playing Magic the Gathering for about seven hours. The game is every bit as enjoyable as it was when I was in fifth grade and that marathon Magic session left me wishing I hadn't sold all my cards in junior high. If anybody is wondering, I constructed a white and green deck geared toward protecting myself and slowly chipping away at my opponents. It proved to be somewhat succesful.

I recently finished reading American Sucker by David Denby. He's the film critic for the New Yorker and he's generally a very intelligent guy but this book was just freaky. It chronicled a period in his life that started when his wife left him. Suddenly thrown into a crises and faced with the prospect of selling the apartment they shared so that he and his ex could split it, he decided instead to buy out her half of the apartment using money he'd make off the stock market. His home was the last thing he had left and he was determined to hold onto it. This was right around that time that tech stocks were really taking off and Denby tried to take full advantage of it. Unfortunately, he and many others were bit in the ass by unfulfilled promises and shady characters in the financial world (Imagine that). Eventually, he ended up losing nearly a million dollars on paper and left me wondering how such smart people can be so dumb sometimes...

I'm currently reading a biography about Houdini that's really entertaining.

Yesterday, I was first introduced to Halo 2. Ugh. I'd played the original Halo about four years ago and that was the last time that I had played a first persion shooter on a console. Playing a first person shooter using a controller just doesn't feel right to me (I'm bad enough with a keyboard and mouse) and because the character doesn't move how I expect it to I end up feeling like I'm going to puke all over the place. In fact, just thinking about that feeling is making me feel queasy so I'll leave it at that. Halo 2 = thumbs down.

I've mailed off an application to the Director's Guild to get into the Assistant Director's Training Program. If I get past the first stage then I will go into what the program entails but for now I'm just going to keep my fingers crossed and try not to get my hopes up.

Does keeping ones fingers crossed imply a level of effort and hopefullness that one could equate with "getting ones hopes up?"

Also, does anyone know how to play the card game Mao?

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