Alas...
For those who caught this earlier, I ordered a very unique medium-format Soviet-era camera - the Iskra. Unfortunately, after receiving it and testing it out, I found a mechanical problem with the shutter release mechanism (ie. it won't take pictures). So, I've sent it back to the eBay seller for him to repair. Quite frustrating, but I'll be patient and wait...
Back from Kirkland Lake (unless you thought I posted the Solzhenitsyn remembrance from afar). It was a great trip, though next time my wife and I have pledged either to do it with more days to spend/travel, or take another mode of transport. Sixteen inclusive hours of door-to-destination driving do not wear well on you when you've only got one day off in-between to enjoy. The reason for our trip was to pay respects at a memorial service for my wife's uncle who passed away earlier in the year, in case you were wondering why we attempted such a feat within such a short period of stay. We aren't masochists.
It was great to meet more of my extended family, see more of the province, and get a better sense of the geography. No wildlife to note, unfortunately, save for crows, mosquitoes, and the odd call of a loon in the night. Photos were taken and I hope to post them when the slides are developed. I still have photos from July that I need to sort through so, pending quality, you may or may not be in for a bonanza of visuals. I wish that "bonanza" didn't imply a lack of aesthetics.
Some facts about the trip:
More writerly concerns to post about in the near future. Hope all is well with everyone.
"A great writer is, so to speak, a secret government in his country."
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)
Apologies for the lack of postings this week (I know, just a lame Twain quote is all you got). Work is finally catching up to me and, until the day this blog pays, then you, dear reader, will have to suffer the odd "outage" from time to time.
This weekend, my wife and I are driving up to meet her relatives in Kirkland Lake [there should be much more fiction written about this town, btw - ed]. To the average person, one who doesn't live near Ontario, this doesn't sound like much. So, let me put it into perspective for you:
It's about a 7.5 hour drive from Toronto. That's a long trek in my books, especially considering that it's just for the weekend (thankfully a long weekend up here). However, I've always wanted to see Northern Ontario - I mean the real Northern Ontario, not driving 3 hours to a cottage in Haliburton, but waaay the hell up north. I'm sure it will be a beautiful drive (after the first hour of anonymous suburban/industrial wasteland). I look forward to fresh air, clear skies (particularly at night), rocky terrain, and - my favourite - wildlife.
Going to northerly parts of Canada (in particular the real real North: Yukon, Nuvavut) is truly the only way to get a strong sense of how characteristic (and, plainly, how rough) our environment is. In cities like Toronto it's hard to get a perspective on the greater (arguably better) parts of this country. It is for this reason, driven by childhood memories of sitting in the back of my parents' car while we drove from Alberta to Vancouver BC, or from Brantford through New Brunswick, that I feel it's worth turning into a car-zombie for a short while (long drives will do that) if only to experience what Canada is truly, nakedly, like.
And yes, I will have my camera. And I promise to post more photos in general.
Have a splendid weekend.
Yes...the improv-rock band, of which I am a member, returns. We play the mighty Press Club this Monday (July 28th). If you are in Toronto or plan to visit, check us out.
One thing the Internet has helped birth is the ability of anyone to sound (or sound like they are writing, rather) like a professional film critic, regardless of whether they know what they they are talking about, whether they have seen more than three films in their lives, etc. . I've glanced at "user-contributed" reviews on Facebook's Flixter application which make even the trashiest pieces of celluloid sound like fair-game for a first-year Media Arts screening.
There's nothing wrong with this. I'm not going to editorially trample on anyone's feelings, yet.
However, while the same could be said for online book reviews, it's much harder to get away with it (it being sounding like a professional...or a professional who writes as they sound. Something like that).
A film is inherently visual. It also has sound (most of them, at least). It also usually uses actors who speak lines. For the armchair (or E-Z Boy) critic, this audio/video-based performance makes the casual accusation of, say, "bad acting" somewhat verifiable (again, somewhat verifiable - there are always disagreements and prejudices, but these tend to be questions of degrees rather than disagreements of monolithic good or badness. To this end, it's always harder for the viewer to infer a good performance from a bad film; it's like a supermodel who cleaned her hands with an old dish cloth - sure she's pretty, but she smells bad for some reason.).
Outside of the necessity of reading words printed on a page, books by comparison are not visual, nor do they have sound (assuming we forget for the moment about audiobooks). When a character speaks in a book, we don't see Sally Field (mind you, perhaps some of us do...), but rather some variously fuzzy or non-fuzzy imaginary abstraction - an avatar if you will - that we attach to the words in order to help us visualize the character(s). For one person, they may be fluffy, indeterminate cloud-like beings, for others the animated cast of Battle of the Planets. Whatever floats your boat.
In other words, as regards books, whether it be War & Peace or The DaVinci somethingsomething, chances are pretty slim that someone's going to criticize the performance of their personalized imaginary helper-beings, who mouth the pretty words in their head whilst they read. For the book reader, they don't need to be convinced primarily through performance, but rather through conviction; the conviction of the author's choice in story crafting, character actions, etc... This is not to say that the topic of conviction in books cannot be just as debatable as an actor's performance in a film, however, due to being a medium which is more abstract, the arguments are invariably deeper than those shared about films.
Let me cut to the chase, this being the Internet and most of you having probably left to check out porn or martini recipes by now: books are abstractions whereas films are pantomimes of abstractions. Here, let me pull my chair closer [chrrrr]: films are easier to criticize. Period. They are small books, painted big. Once you have a rudimentary sense of what works and what doesn't in film (acting, dialogue, story, and, peripherally, visual effects, sound design, directing) it's pretty easy to sound like A.O. Scott, even when reviewing, say, Tank Girl:
In this wild, cheeky romp, the audience benefits from wonderfully imaginative environments, spunky performances, and a ceaseless plot driven by pure adrenaline. Tank Girl issues a decree to the viewer: the graphic novel-turned movie is a serious threat to original screenplays.
Is this valid? Again, if you've only seen three movies in your life, perhaps it is. Perhaps Tank Girl is for you. I only saw the first half of Tank Girl. I suggest you see none of it. In fact, I suggest all remaining prints be stored on the moon - but that's me.
The problem (or advantage) with a book review (vs. film) is that there is much less wiggle-room when declaring your opinion. Unlike film, where there is more latitude for interpretation (particularly as regards camera work and editing), with books we are dealing with what is literally written on the page. Room for interpretation? Of course - there will always be room for interpretation, otherwise MFA professors would have nothing to structure their courses with. But certainly - whether we are talking about so-called professional book critics, or their translucent-skinned basement-dwelling non-professional Internet cousins - the opinions don't nearly or consistently bounce from one end of the "good/bad" spectrum to another as is common with film.
I think it comes down to the fact that readers generally respect authors more than viewers respect filmmakers [and on this note, I suppose that really means "directors" - filmmakers, in my book, are people who go out with a camera, an idea, and come back from the edit room having done 80% of the process with their own hands - I'll write more about this later]. This isn't to say that readers respect authors as people; rather, I submit there's a begrudging respect to anyone who has the perseverance to lay down 40,000 words which construct coherent sentences and paragraphs.
It's a layman's respect, whereas with filmmakers, if we don't like what they do, then... well, they suck.
[For sake of disclosure, I've only done one film review on this blog - albeit in collaboration with my friend, Simon - and it was an artsy documentary about a soccer player.]
So, the listing (previously done here) continued, this time my friend thought it best to do movies: one for every year you've been alive, as per last time. There was a particular emphasis this round on re-watchability, so instead of simply picking the best of a particular year, we needed to pick the films that we would involuntarily pay attention to if they happened to come on TV one night (as an example).
My picks:
1970 Five Easy Pieces, dir. Bob Rafelson
1971 A Clockwork Orange, dir. Stanley Kubrick
1972 Solaris, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
1973 The Exorcist, dir. William Friedkin
1974 Chinatown, dir. Roman Polanski
1975 tie: Love and Death, dir. Woody Allen
tie: Three Days of the Condor, dir. Sydney Pollack
1976 The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, dir. John Cassavetes
1977 Annie Hall, dir. Woody Allen
1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, dir. Philip Kaufman
1979 The Ninth Configuration, dir. William Peter Blatty
1980 The Shining, dir. Stanley Kubrick
1981 Cutter's Way, dir. Ivan Passer
1982 The Thing, dir. John Carpenter
1983 tie: Rock & Rule, dir. Clive Smith
tie: The Fourth Man (De Vierde man), dir. Paul Verhoeven
tie: Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, dir. Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones
1984 Paris, Texas, dir. Wim Wenders
1985 Brazil, dir. Terry Gilliam
1986 Aliens, dir. James Cameron
1987 Wings of Desire (Der Himmel uber Berlin), dir. Wim Wenders
1988 The Vanishing (Spoorloos), dir. George Sluizer
1989 Crimes and Misdemeanors, dir. Woody Allen
1990 La Femme Nikita, dir. Luc Besson
1991 Zentropa (Europa - original title), dir. Lars von Trier
1992 Glengarry Glen Ross, dir. James Foley
1993 Naked, dir. Mike Leigh
1994 White, dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski
1995 tie: Underground, dir. Emir Kusturica
tie: 12 Monkeys, dir. Terry Gilliam
1996 tie: Ghost in the Shell, dir. Mamoru Oshii
tie: Breaking the Waves, dir. Lars von Trier
1997 Perfect Blue, dir. Satoshi Kon, Hisao Shirai
1998 Dark City, dir. Alex Proyas
1999 tie: Top of The Food Chain, dir. John Paizs
tie: The Iron Giant, dir. Brad Bird
2000 tie: Maelstrom, dir. Denis Villeneuve
tie: Possible Worlds, dir. Robert Lepage
2001 In the Bedroom, dir. Todd Field
2002 Read My Lips (Sur mes levres), dir. Jacques Audiard
2003 Mystic River, dir. Clint Eastwood
2004 2046, dir. Wong Kar-Wai
2005 Grizzly Man, dir. Werner Herzog
2006 Children of Men, dir. Alfonso Cuaron
2007 No Country For Old Men, dir. Joel & Ethan Coen
Now, I took some flack from Simon for picking the likes of Solaris and Paris, Texas. This turned into an interesting discussion about how one person's "You picked what??" is another person's "Damn straight - and yes I consider that film extremely watchable.". Sure, a film like Naked is probably something most people will only wish to watch once...and yet, despite the fact that I love a good suspence/thriller/comedy/sci-fi/anime film, I honestly do like certain films which are slooow and gloomy. I consider them re-watchable even if they aren't, by nature, exciting.
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