What I Took Away

Holy shit. Go see “The Raid: Redemption” now. I went in to this movie just hoping to see a decent action movie and I was blown away. This is exactly what an action movie should be in my opinion. The premise is simple, the table is set for all sorts of ass-kickery and then it all just happens.

I was warned that the violence in this movie was a little over the top, but I actually didn’t find that to be true. It was definitely violent, don’t get me wrong, but most of the action happens quickly and it’s not particularly glorified. The director, Gareth Evans is great at building tension and relieving it.

:::Minor Spoiler Ahead:::

He doesn’t make the audience watch a guy get his head bashed in with a hammer, but he makes damn sure the audience is following along with the guy about to get his head bashed in as he sees the “bad guy” grab the hammer and approach him. I don’t need to see the guy get his head bashed in, because I already saw the guy process the fact that he was going to get his head bashed in. That’s far worse.

:::Minor Spoiler Overwith:::

As far as action movies go, “The Raid: Redemption” has it all. It literally starts off with guns a’blazing. It’s a SWAT team vs. an apartment building filled with gangsters and they’ve both got a ton of weapons. About halfway through the movie, they run out of ammo and it’s all hand-to-hand combat. I think this is where the movie really shines. The choreography both between the fighters and the camera crew is unbelievable. I dare say flawless. The fights are real, gritty and relentless. You think they’re over and they’re not, and you’re glad that they’re not. It’s like a really great song.

Between this movie and “The Artist”, I’ve come to really appreciate visual storytelling this year. There’s something fascinating to me about making something that can be enjoyed by almost anybody on the planet simply through visuals. Language be damned. Sure, some of the devices used in the movie could be considered pretty cliche, but I didn’t give one fuck about that. This movie is just flat out fun to watch.

I’ve never read Hemingway. I haven’t read a lot of things to be perfectly honest. It wasn’t until my senior year of college that I started really reading on my own time, catching up with classics or even just topics that interested me. I had 6 months left in my education when I finally decided to take it in my own hands. Wah wah.

Anyways, I read A Farewell to Arms. I hadn’t even really read much on Hemingway before diving into this book. I knew his style was somewhat simple. He doesn’t use colons, semi-colons and the like. He’s clear and concise. 

The one thing I really love about Hemingway’s style, is that he puts you directly into the head of his characters. He writes what they’re thinking and he structures his sentences like thoughts. His characters repeat mantras to themselves, they question themselves, you get inside their heads and you understand how they think. That seems like a fairly simple choice to make, but it was somehow extraordinary. I think there’s something to this approach. It’s interesting to think how you could pull this off in a visual medium. 

I recently had an improv coach who told me to form an opinion on everything in a scene and react accordingly. You don’t have to necessarily say anything, but your body language will give the audience an in to your character’s psyche. It’s something to play with.

Aside from the style, the story was pretty straightforward. It’s a love story set in World War I. The protaganist Frederic Henry is an American lieutenant, driving for the Italian army. He hates the war. He hates fighting it, he hates being close to it, he only wants it to be over. He goes back and forth between being with his unit, and being at the hospital recovering with his lady, Nurse Barkley. They fall madly in love and she gets pregnant.

I foolishly thought towards the end of this book, that it might have a happy ending. Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong. It falls apart. Not the ending, but the whole story. At the end, Frederic Henry is left walking to his hotel in the rain by himself. Starting from absolute scratch with nowhere to go. It kind of reminded me of the Coen brothers movie “A Serious Man.” This dude fights for his life and he’s knocked on his ass. Sometimes that’s just how it goes. War is a real thing in this book, something that just exists around Henry without him having a say in it. Catharine Barkley is great for Frederic, but that gets taken away too. 

The story didn’t work out, but that’s what makes the book stand out. Sometimes life just doesn’t make sense, but you roll with it and you try to survive.

What else are you going to do?

Merchants of Doubt focuses on the struggle between protecting the free market and the environment. Some folks put the free market ahead of everything. Some assume that the technology of tomorrow will fix the problems we create today, others just think that regulation of any markets will ultimately lead to a larger sacrifice of freedoms. Whatever their intentions, their job/mission is to create doubt for largely accepted scientific truths.

The book examines the opponents to issues like acid rain, tobacco smoke, the depletion of the ozone layer, Carl Sagan’s warning of a nuclear war creating a nuclear winter, pesticides (namely DDT) and global warming.

The tactics for this bullshit are pretty well known. Corporations create front groups and lobbying firms that then fund “research committees” that often have very patriotic and trustworthy sounding names (ie. The American Enterprise Institute funded by conservative think tanks and the fossil fuels industry). These groups donate money to “scientists” to participate in their “research” and put their names on faulty science. These lobbying firms and front groups put these “scientific” arguments into press releases and they send them out to the media. I hate using quotes like that, but it’s actually appropriate.

The big problem here is that the scientific process, which requires peer review before being published, is thrown out the window. A scientific paper outlining the reality of global warming largely accepted by climate scientists is put on a level playing field as a press release written for a specific purpose by a scientist hired by a lobbying firm.

One argument that stuck with me, and that I’ve been pondering for awhile is the idea of “fair and balanced” media. The fact is, especially in the case of science, not all arguments deserve the same amount of credibility or time. The public relations industry manipulates and neuters our media outlets into reporting absolute fucking nonsense in the name of objectivity. A political party can choose their position on something, tell everybody what to say to the media, and their views are entertained because if they were written off as absolute fucking nonsense by the anchors, the network would be deemed biased. They muddle fact, and they create the necessary doubt to halt progress.

This wouldn’t be that hard to avoid if members of the media considered or even cared about their sources. This doesn’t just go for climate change, this applies to every issue facing Americans today, the war, the financial crisis, health care, agriculture, etc., etc. When a news outlet contacts a source or invites them on their program, they should be damn sure where that person is coming from and whether or not he has been paid by the people/institutions with financial interest in the matter at hand. If he does, his argument is invalid. That is objectivity. Having some discretion about who you talk to and their motivations isn’t being biased, it’s being careful.

This book didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already understand or believe to be true, but it showed how it actually works in practice. The spin that infects our media comes from somewhere. It’s not a mistake, it’s not even misinformed people (all the time). It’s an institutional effort to stymie progress and maintain the status quo. 

Not surprisingly, almost every character in this book is an idiot. The biggest of all the idiots being Ignatius Reilly, the fat gentleman pictured above. This dude really is what almost any creative type fears they might become… a fat idiot, jotting down random thoughts on notebooks, living with his mother who doesn’t believe in him, talking indignantly about politics while eating hot dogs.

Ignatius thinks everyone around him is an idiot, but in reality he’s the biggest idiot of them all. He’s constantly thinking he knows better than everyone and he’s constantly having to make up excuses/lies for his own failures. Idiots don’t think that they’re idiots. Toole gives you a peak at how that kind of mindset works and lets you laugh at it while nervously relating to it.

I’m not an idiot. WHAT IF I’M AN IDIOT!?!?!? I sure fucking hope not. Well, no problem because I’m not one. You’re an idiot. Fuck you, idiot. HOT DOG FART.

This book did a great job of filling out characters with minor comic details. At the beginning of one scene in the Night of Joy bar, the owner fills the half empty alcohol bottles with water. Officer Bataglia would be in an entire scene and at the end you’d find out he was wearing a santa suit and a baseball hat. Toole describes little actions and details so well, that I couldn’t help but picture them as scenes in a movie. By the way, I guess there have been multiple attempts to make this a movie led by Harold Ramis, John Belushi, John Candy and more recently Will Ferrell, but they haven’t happen. Why, I’ll never understand. It’s all right there.

I found it ironic that John Kennedy Toole committed suicide at the age of 31, over a decade before this book was ever published. I think there i a strong, sad possibility that Toole died thinking he was little more than an Ignatius. Ironically, it was his mother’s persistent efforts to get the manuscript out there that finally got this book published. 

What I Took Away: This book is funny. If you’re going to write an idiot, he can’t think he’s an idiot. This should obviously be made into a movie. Don’t kill yourself. 

Tonight I watched Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times” originally released in 1936. This was my first real attempt at watching a Chaplin film all the way through. Before this, I only knew that he starred in silent movies, he was a master of physical comedy and he sported the skinny mustache before Hitler ruined it forever. 

A few things really struck me about this movie. The first was that “Modern Times” is basically a sketch comedy movie. There is a loose plot, but it’s mostly a series of vignettes revolving around the theme of poverty/The Great Depression. Chaplin gets caught in the cogs of a factory, tests out a feeding machine, tries to get arrested, lives in a department store and even sings a song all in an effort to make a better life for himself and his gamine (Paulette Goddard). 

It was very obvious to me watching this movie, that this movie started with the script. What I mean is, Charlie obviously knew what he wanted to do on camera and he knew how he wanted it to look and he figured out practical ways to make that work. There’s one scene where he actually enters into a machine and rolls around in the cogs. He rolls down a couple of gears, reaches the bottom and then starts moving up the gears. There’s a pretty obvious cut right where he stops going down and starts moving up. Obviously Charlie went down on the one side and then slid down on the other and cut the two together to make a fairly seemless motion. I like practical filmmaking like this. It’s inspiring.

The last thing I really loved about this movie was the sense of fun that permeated the whole thing. There were plenty of prat falls, there was a fart joke and there was a lot of heart throughout. The whole thing ends with Little Tramp and the gamine back out on the street with nothing but the clothes on their back. The gamine is bummed out, wanting to give up. Little Tramp tells her to smile, she does and they walk off into the sunset. It’s kind of corny, but considering this movie was made during the Great Depression, it’s kind of nice too. 

What I Took Away: Start with a theme, find a practical way to make your idea happen and a little heart never hurt anybody.