probabilityfields

Check it out, I got a Rode VideoMic from my mom for my birthday. It’s pretty much the standard mic for videographers so it edges me one step closer to being legit. I did a quick test and was very pleased with the clarity and very noticeable boost in volume. Maybe I’ll shoot something substantial in the near future and post it here. (how many times have i said that?)

Lately, I’ve been getting together with a few old friends and writing some short comedy scripts. A few weeks back, in the span of a few hours, we got an idea, wrote a 3-page script, and shot 40 minutes worth of footage. The finished product was pretty funny, but the time limits made it a little too rough around the edges to show anyone yet. But now, armed with a new mic, lighting from Lowe’s, a pile of scripts, and some lessons learned, we’ll have something worth showing soon enough.

…

In the meantime, I’m dealing with one hell of a sore throat, white patches and all. I was tired and achy the first two days, but last night I found a home remedy that actually works: gargling warm water and cayenne pepper! It sounded crazy enough, and by last night I couldn’t swallow and had knots of lymph nodes in my neck.

Sure enough, with the first gargle my throat loosened up and the pain started to go away…well, not entirely, but almost. I’ve continued the treatment and I haven’t had any fever or aches today nor am I tired. Hopefully the cayenne will keep me from having to go to the doctor.

P.S. Can’t wait to go see Knocked Up tomorrow!

Tonight’s episode was just incredibly depressing. I don’t even feel inspired to make any great insights or interesting interpretations. It’s just terrible. I remember the first few seasons when Tony was depressed, but the writers and producers weren’t. There was humor and great action sequences. Now the humor is sad because it only highlights the hopeless stupidity of the characters, and the action is morbid rather than spectacular.

I think the voice of the writers comes out in AJ when he talks about how the world is so horrible and you’d have to be crazy to not be depressed. The complaints of the viewer are anticipated by Carmella telling Tony to stop playing the “depression card.” Of course her demand is rude and insensitive, but damnit is it too much to ask for one of the greatest shows in TV history to end its run with some entertaining episodes?

*SPOILER*
When AJ jumped into that pool I felt relieved that we wouldn’t have to focus on his stupid story any more. Unfortunately he didn’t die so we get to look at his horrible facial hair for at least one more episode. Jeez, somebody kill these people already.

They played V for Vendetta on HBO tonight and I got back from a night of drinking just in time to catch it. I’d seen it twice before. Both times at the Alamo Draft House in Austin and both times I was probably more intoxicated than I am now. So three viewings combined with slightly lower BAC can comprise a ’sober’ analysis, I say.

So I’ll start off by saying that I enjoyed my first two viewings. Mostly because Natalie Portman is so pretty, the beer was so good, my friends were so fun, and V paraphrased Emma Goldman’s “If I can’t dance it’s not a revolution” (I love that line)…and the movie had some good parts. Specifically, the exploding buildings were wonderful. V conducts a recording of a well-known piece of music whose name I can’t remember (get used to it) as the Bailey, in a perfect phallic image, explodes.

The Wachowski brothers are known for quoting fashionable philosophers (The Matrix: “Welcome to the desert of the real” [Baudrillard said it before Morpheus]). The orgasmic-orchestral explosion of the Bailey recalls the quote by an art-intellectual-whose-name-escapes-me that said something about the 9/11 attacks being a wonderful performance.

And I’d have to agree. I saw it on TV. It was amazing. A giant plane hit the first tower like only Hollywood’s biggest budget could wet-dream-of. Then the cameras were there, wishing they’d been able to capture such a spectacle. But sure enough, we’ve got another tower, and another plane: perfect! An instant replay! The media should have thanked them for their foresight. Osama should have taken over Paramount.

Back to the film: the Bailey blows up. Then we get the suggestion that blowing up a building can change the world.

“Oooooooh.”

But this is different from 9/11: V is a good guy. And after seeing some policemen try to rape poor Natalie, we want to blow the goddamn building up with him. And the innocent lives lost? Well, we can assume that no one was inside the Bailey. Kind of like the even-better-music-video-explosion-ending of the pre-9/11 Fight Club.

CUE: Pixies “Where is my Mind”

So yeah, I cheered when the buildings exploded, assured that no lives were lost, that this battle was fought between symbols: a mask and an edifice. Wow, if that were what life was like. Unfortunately, it’s not. People die, or get maimed, survive guilty and alone, walk around with ounces of ash in their lungs and die slower. (And yet the destruction of symbols is still the primary goal.)

So yeah, back to Tarantino: remember the scene in Pulp Fiction where QT does a terrible job of acting and he complains to Samuel L. Jackson that his house doesn’t have a sign out front that says ‘Dead Nigger Storage.’ Holy crap, how powerful is that scene? It’s amazing. A suburban middle class white male who’s afraid of his wife’s wrath gets to say the dreaded N-word in front of a black man with a ‘fro and a gun! Awesome!

The ultimate white man fantasy: to be cool enough to say nigger in front of a tough black guy.

And V for Vendetta is the post-9/11 white man fantasy where we get to blow up buildings like radical Islamists, only no one dies that doesn’t truly deserve it.

Wouldn’t it be great if there weren’t any poor or brown or black people and us white guys could just have another bourgeois revolution?

Then again, perhaps there’s some universal element here that can show us how we’re deep down all the same and that we should learn to love and accept each other. Sure, but I believe that anyway.

My biggest problem with V for Vendetta’s plot is that the mask becomes a man, falls in love, dies, but still succeeds. I think that once the mask became a man he should have died and failed. And that the masses with masks should have run amok and raped and pillaged the country. That would have certainly been truer to history. The whole film pivots on the relations between individual/ideology, individual/society, and ideology/society. But it failed tragically because it glossed over the bad parts with clean and spectacular destructions of people and things a la The Count of Monte Cristo. In these ways, it was maybe the worst embodiment of film: projection of the fantasies of white middle class men.

Despite all this, the Wachowski brothers have proved that they can make amazing films. And even by painting morality in broad strokes you can do some good. Obviously The Matrix made people think about the moral consequences of the media, and V has some great anti-Bush comedy and a pro-gay rights mini love story. But for the Wachowskis the phrase ‘grand scale’ only means ’special effects.’

I’ll end it with a quote from the great Roger Ebert, “To attempt a parable about terrorism and totalitarianism that would be relevant and readable might be impossible, could be dangerous and would probably not be box office.” I think V falls somewhere in the middle of all of these.

P.S. My more astute readers might question my use of the n-word in the title, obviously placed there to be edgy. My answer would be that only my friends read this blog, and that anyway it’s just a cry for help for anyone to tell me why I shouldn’t ever use that word.