nemof.org blog

Time to get excited about The Fountain. Really my first reaction to it’s trailer was ‘Meh’ but after having read this Wired article I have begun to catch the ‘oski bug. To quote:

To give you an idea of what that means, check the Film poster.

2006 has been an amazing year for Film.

NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month

Elsewhere, exciting news - It’s NanoWriMo. Time to bang out that 175 page novel by the end of November. I’ve never tried this before but I’m going to give it a shot with a ‘Why the Fuck not’ attitude. Why don’t you? You might discover unplumbed depths of Stygian rot deep in your heart, the kind of stuff that makes good print in other words!

GTDMonkey

I just discovered GTDMonkey, an excellent task manager that you can download and use. It’s not actually a program, rather it’s a webpage that you download to your Computer, filled with HTML, JS and various other voodoo. What that spells though is is a great web interface to plan projects and your daily doings. What does GTD stand for? Getting Things Done. GTD is actually a type of time management strategy to help you be more productive, and I know that things like that sounds like rubbish but a lot of people who enjoy being productive have found GTD a great way to help in their daily business. Heavens knows I need to GTD, so this is a good start!

Bonus Power Up

Holy Folktronica Tunng Power Batman.

OK, was having a little disagreement with a friend earlier over Cinema and it’s importance. I know that most people aren’t as passionate as I am about Film, and that’s fine, we dig what we dig. However my friend is a passionate reader, and I think any reader who considers them avid should consider Cinema as a medium that is conducive to complementing their reading experience, and sometimes contributing towards an experience that reading just can’t give.

Let’s break it down. There are a great many differences between Cinema and Books. This is so obvious is hardly needs illustrating. However I find there to be one striking similarity, and an important one at that - books and film are just different mediums to convey a narrative. Their relative strengths lie in how they convey that narrative. I think the significant thing here is that Film can convey things that a book can never hope to illustrate clearly, and of course vice versa.

I will keep this brief as it will get to the point where I blather so much I will just confuse myself. I would simply say that any reader who looks down their nose at Film is doing themselves a disservice. I’ll finish the post with some trailers from remarkable films that have come out or will be released this year.

A Scanner Darkly

Brick

Renaissance

Pan’s Labyrinth

The Fountain

I think they speak for their selves, these are remarkable films - and there are many more like them around. Do not just settle for the word as writ, seek to compliment and enrich it through other mediums such as Film, Theatre & Music.

Bonus video:

Portishead - Only you

OK, I went and watched ‘A Scanner Darkly’ yesterday. I don’t think I am ready to give a review yet, as I am not actually sure how I feel about it. I can say that my friends who came to see it with me, enjoyed it a whole lot more, and I suspect that is because they had not read the book. I spent a great deal of the Movie making subconscious comparisons between it and Dick’s novel. I guess there is a problem on my part, where I can’t actually turn off and just enjoy something.

Scanner without a doubt is a Masterpiece. Linklater has tightened up some ideas introduced in his earlier films, and the visual and auditory result is a sometimes disturbing but always compelling feast. At the end of the film, as in the book there is a list of Dick’s friends. I heard people querying this list and what it meant, to my amusement. This film is about addiction as much as anything else, and so the list represents Dick’s friends who were lost to various drugs. As Dick says, their only mistake was to play the game. Having discussed with my mum the 60’s-70’s era and what it was like, pharmaceutically speaking I can say I feel quite pleased that I wasn’t there. I will quite happily give ‘permanent psychosis’ (as some of Dick’s buddies are listed as having) a miss.

It seems this is turning into a Scanner review, even if it wasn’t meant to be. Perhaps it’s actually just a few thoughts. I’ll just let them meander (like snakes on a scanner) and see where they go. This may well mean I write spoilers (give away parts of the movies plot or ideas) so if you read on and find something spoiled as a result, that’s tough.

One thing that was kind of pleasing was seeing some quotes from the trailer expanded into more reasonable dialogue that didn’t seem like some forced dramatic cliche. When I first saw the trailer it left me twitching with anticipation like a chronic junkie, but hearing the same dialogue unfold like origami in the film the sense of satisfaction was beyond parallel.

The thing that gets me about the dialogue is the thought that has gone into capturing the stoner style madness and idiocy. It was cause for more than a few laughs from the audience, there was more than one scene in the movie that had us laughing. None more so though than the I believe soon to be infamous "9 gear bike" sketch. By itself this scene would be worthy of a short film, sitting around watching a bunch of stoners talk about why an 18 gear bike is actually a 9 gear bike, and anyhow who went and stole those extra gears?

I think the laughing might be explained in part due to people being uncomfortable as they watch Arctor slowly begin to lose it, the film decinding to strike a tone similar to ‘Requiem for a Dream’ without resorting to being as brutally visual or visceral. Films about addiction often make people uncomfortable, for obvious reasons; Thus, we laugh. It’s our tonic.

I guess I need to discuss one of the most significant aspects of the film, at least visually. If you are a fan of Linklater’s work then you will have seen ‘A Waking Life’ and know about Rotoscoping. Simply put it is a technique of tracing over live action footage to produce a pronounced, distinctive style of animation. The colours are sharp and allow for an extremely expressive palette when it comes to characterisation. Together with individual animators initiative the combination of human input and computer editing allows for some mesmerizing work.

However…

The studio really did a job on Scanner. I heard that they stuck their noses into Linklater’s production when he had his head elsewhere (being in the process of directing other films too) and laid down the law on Scanner, stylistically speaking. What does this mean? If you compare Scanner to Waking life then you’ll find a much less expressive film that shows no individual animators marks or creativity. Each character was supposed to be worked on by an individual animator but you wouldn’t know that. It almost removes the need for rotoscoping at all. It could have been 1) completely CGI or 2) live action.

It frustrated me greatly in some scenes when some elements of scenery were just too photo-realistic, moving the movie away from art and into design. Those two elements are from two different thought and expression sets and should be applied with thought dependent on what they are being applied to. When a film becomes "designed" rather than artistically grown, to me, at least, it loses its message. It becomes product rather than message, and weakens its potential to appeal to peoples conscience rather than their ego.

I guess this doesn’t meet some of the pre-reqs of a decent review, such as a reasonable amount of objectivity but I have to say on my part that I have been waiting for this film for a dreadfully long time, and if my expectations had been any higher, I would have needed an oxygen tank just to breath.

Scanner is far from disappointing. It keeps very much to the letter of the book, and compresses a lot of complex character dynamics into a filmic scenery. Gone however are the ideosyncrasies of Dick’s novel, noticeably so his misogynistic fear of women that pervades throughout the book. The film also would have benefitted from Arctor’s internal monologue, which added a great deal of depth to the book as it allowed you a window into his state as he begins to dissociate from himself. It had a sense of potency as you watched this sad character crumble, his internal image falling away till it only answered to the outside world as an automaton.

If I could recommend anything, it would be that you pick up Dick’s book and read it. Whether you choose to read the book before or after is up to you, people place such great emphasise on literature over other mediums, but I would have preferred to have read the book after. The book is so much more than the film could ever hope to be, and this is not a fault of the film but of the medium. Translating text into silvers is a task of attrition and Scanner is without a doubt not a casualty of this battle, but a victor; However the book is still shoulders above, and if the film touches you then reading the book is a necessity.

I thought it a good way to end this review, with the Dick’s notes from the novel.

This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed — run over, maimed, destroyed — but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. For example, while I was writing this I learned that the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie Luckman died before I began the novel. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each.

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. "Take the cash and let the credit go," as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime.

There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because anyone of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. I myself, I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time. This novel is about more people than I knew personally. Some we all read about in the newspapers. It was, this sitting around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful.

If there was any "sin," it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all. Here is the list, to whom I dedicate my love:

To Gaylene     deceased
To Ray     deceased
To Francy     permanent psychosis
To Kathy     permanent brain damage
To Jim     deceased
To Val     massive permanent brain damage
To Nancy     permanent psychosis
To Joanne     permanent brain damage
To Maren     deceased
To Nick     deceased
To Terry     deceased
To Dennis     deceased
To Phil     permanent pancreatic damage
To Sue     permanent vascular damage
To Jerri     permanent psychosis and vascular damage

…and so forth.

In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The "enemy" was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.

Even though the trailer isn’t great, I am filled with joyful expectation.