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I've been doing some thinking. I don't particularly enjoy writing, but it feels necessary. That said, I don't mind writing for people I know -- myself or my friends. This "weblog" -- I feel like it's neither here nor there. It was fun in the beginning -- say, February through June, maybe. Then it stopped being fun. Since then, by turns, it's been morose or ambiguous or erratic or vituperative. And now it just feels like a hanger for my limited design ideas. So I'm knifing it. Time to sleep the big sleep. I don't enjoy declaiming into the ether. I've been contributing to a couple other sites managed with or by various friends, and I enjoy that more. And I've got other non-line projects which are currently more deserving of whatever obsessiveness or monomania I'm capable of. I'll keep this message up for a week, and then I'm deleting this directory. It's been interesting. And it's no big deal. I just felt an explanation was in order. So I finally saw The Perfect Storm. Various people had already warned me of its awfulness; and indeed, it's a laughable contraption. The dialog is pulp-core, the characters are straight out of proletarian central casting, and Diane Lane in particular is saddled with clunky direction that often leaves her staring off into some bathetic middle distance, struggling with what can only be described as a Cape accent by way of the mayor from The Simpsons. To say nothing of her hammy lines, which she shoots out like Nerf Darts. These tender vittles are wrapped up in a narrative where scenes lurch rhythmlessly from tedious exposition to gratuitous mayhem, inviting incredulity. One moment, a shark is chomping down on Marky Mark's shank. A few minutes later, it's George Clooney who's chomping down on Mr. Wahlberg -- chewing him out, and much scenery besides. Badly. James Horner's score doesn't help matters. In typical form, he plagiarizes not only his own prior art (Legends of the Fall, in this case), but Aaron Copland's as well. The dividend is a series of musical cues best left to the producers of life insurance commercials -- oozing over the screenplay's sundry emotional abscesses like the blackest tar. My main beef is with the film's much vaunted visual effects. While I don't doubt the technology behind them is indeed groundbreaking, they remind me of the similarly groundbreaking work in Jumanji: too fuzzy, too evident, not ready for prime time. And that's when they're at their best. At their worst, they're digital cheese. The master shots often resemble Playstation 2 cut-scenes, and the water tank sequences are horrendous: the lighting is flat, the horizon is clearly not deep enough, and the angle of the "sky" is rather obviously the sheer plane of a painted wall. Either the filmmakers were trying to be impressionistic or, more likely, the production hit snags and postproduction was rushed. Upshot: you get to see characters you barely care about die, die -- and did I mention die? Oops, spoiler. Not really. When I was younger, I used to have a habit, almost a compulsion: I would constantly replay events -- exchanges, accidents, triumphs, assorted minutiae -- in my mind, often with a subtle, self-serving editorial prejudice. It was a sort of retroactive optimism, a glossy hindsight. A way of viewing the world always in the best light, putting the best spin on things, moving forward through time looking backwards. Looking backwards isn't necessarily the most efficacious way to get ahead in life -- it leads to disappointment -- but a vector is a vector; inertia is infinite in the vacuum of the mind. These days, I find my outlook is more ambivalent. The need to revise has given way to a more basic impulse -- to always arrive at the core of a matter, to understand things fundamentally. Fundamentals, in their own way, are also infinite. It stops me dead in my tracks sometimes, this desire to bear down on things, pass upon pass, with increasing resolution, traversing skeins of consequence both morbid and beautiful, colorful mosaics that unravel in binary cascades and spill into pools of light and shadow. Permanent and ever-changing. How it compares with corrective hindsight, I'm not sure ... yet. Some places, you arrive at by moving forward. Other places, you have to find by stopping to look down, deep, inside -- past the meat and the marrow. And sometimes, the mind is like the center of a donut -- defined entirely by what's around it. It's been a low-light-levels, too-much-sugar, loud-music sorta day, and my track of time has gotten lost somewhere in the mix. The snow returned a few days ago, a perfunctory smattering, and hasn't been back since. But the little that fell has remained, owing to the cold. Initially, it looked like confectioner's sugar, a fine dusting of white over everything; but the wind has moved it around, so that there are now wide expanses of earth lined with discreet margins of powder, and I'm reminded of the salt on a margarita glass. That's enough of that. So about this design.... |
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