. . .and write good songs.
There's always been something slightly affected about the Smashing Pumpkins, especially their lead singer, but they had a delicious energy "back in the day" that they seem to have lost. A kind of "mug in the mike" attitude that characterizes young musicians, but looks silly as they age. It's like they're just feigning youthful energy now, refusing to mature their sound.
I. Am. Exhausted.
This past weekend, I traveled "abroad" for the first time, going to the UK to attend a film animation conference. Good times, but I don't think I'm a person cut out for trans-ocean travel. Me and airplanes just don't get along.
Planes aren't necessarily more cramped than planes or cars, but somehow they feel more claustrophobic. Is it the change in altitude? The lack of grounding? The ridiculous travel speed? All I know is I got incredibly nauseas during the flights over the Atlantic. I have never gotten airsick before. Ever. So why should an international flight cause me such pain? Uck.
The only good thing about flying is seeing the clouds from above. It always reminds me of James and the Giant Peach. At any moment, cloud men will pop up and begin hurling snowballs at the plane.
I also discovered I'm a real homebody at heart. It's cool to see new places and all, but I really like being home. Maybe I'm just getting old.
"I shall write by fits and starts, sorting out my memories and not hesitating to speak about myself, but this myself is the person I have known better than any other, and often it was only my behavior that posed the questions that became important for me."
- Georges Bataille
Kontroll (Nimród Antal, 2003)
A surrealism-inspired thriller meets character study of a subway inspector in Budapest, this Hungarian film uses its milieu symbolically to explore the mind of its protagonist, Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi). It's really easy for a film like this to take the symbolism to that cliched place we're all so sick of going, but I thought Antal did a nice job. I mean, it's not as cryptic as Lynch's best films, but Antal's not banging you over the head with the neo-surrealist sledgehammer either (like Lynch's worst films).
Innocence (Lucile Hadzihalilovic, 2004)
A friend of mine who writes for Scene 360 recently did an interview with Hadzihalilovic and highly recommended this film about an eccentric girl's boarding school. The world of these girls is completely self-contained. Nobody ever visits them (presumably they're all orphans or abandoned), and they aren't allowed to leave until they graduate (which happens about the time they hit puberty). Both instructors and all housekeepers are female, ostensibly isolating them from experiences that might undermine their innocence. It's an unsettling innocence for the viewer, though, because we watch through the eyes of people aware of how the world works. The film itself seems to be aware of the superficiality of this charming isolation, an isolation we, the viewers, violate with our gaze.
Nayakan (Mani Ratnam, 1987)
This film is my advisor's favorite film and is billed as "India's answer to The Godfather." Indeed. I groaned through most of the first act. It was just so obviously trying to be epic and archetypal and yawn. But then. . . I don't know. . . somewhere around the first time the cops beat up the protagonist, it really picked up. Maybe the dynamism of the the lead actor, Kamal Hassan, finally got to me. Maybe all that class struggle filled me with the revolutionary spirit. Who knows? But I really started enjoying it and midway through the second act, I was loving it. The filmmakers smashed about everything they could into Nayakan, including musical numbers, explosions, juicy plot-twists and winks to Coppola. What great fun it turned out to be.
I remember really digging this song when I was a teenager, but hated every subsequent single she released. Maybe it's just the cowboy myth that hooked me. (Interestingly, I've never found actual cowboys particularly attractive, so I guess it's just the movie cowboy I like.)
"That is to say: instead of relying on texts that are regarded as definitive and as sacred we must first of all put an end to the subjugation of the theater to the text, and rediscover the notion of a kind of unique language halfway between gesture and thought." - from Antonin Artaud's "The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto)"
There's this phenomenon in academia known as "the creative black hole." Or rather, there's this phenomenon I call the creative black hole that's quite widespread in academia. What happens is some creative youth with dreams of literary, cinematic or artistic fame finds him/herself in graduate school. Why? She can't quite say, though it seemed like a good idea at the time.
When she applied she wasn't aware of the black hole in academia that slowly sucks all creative energy away from the young scholar. Energy previously spent writing vampire stories gets redirected toward psychoanalytic readings of vampyric folklore. In the evening when she used to read Jane Austen, now she reads Judith Butler. Silly Luchadore videos become fluxus films, and German theory is eating into all her good painting time.
Suddenly, she wakes up, an advanced PhD student who hasn't written a word of fiction in 3 years (if you don't count emails to committee members about deadlines and comments on student papers). By the time she's on tenure track, her brain is so mushed from research, undergrads and academic bureaucracy she's lucky if she can trudge through a few sentences of Confessions of a Shopaholic in her "downtime" (re: bathroom).
le sigh.
I've tried really hard not to let this happen to me, but it's hard. I've met many a prof. that had long since abandoned artistic endeavors. Whether they decided they lacked talent or just didn't have the drive to carve out "writing time," so many just let that aspect of themselves slip away. Still, I've also met a few that somehow balanced creative and research projects, giving me hope.
The original point of the post was that I have an idea for a novel (remains to be seen whether it's a novel idea) I'm excited about. Since I learned to write I've loved writing fiction, but have stalled out majorly in the past couple years. Don't get me wrong. I <3 writing about film, but to have some fun fiction itching at my pen is a nice change.
My 10 favorite horror films - the ones I could watch over and over and still jump when he bursts out of the closet. It was a tough list to make. Most of it will be obvious, but perhaps you'll find a surprise or two on the list. Sadly, many worthy films will be left on the porch for the slasher, so let's start with those.
Honorable Mentions: Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981), Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992), The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), Killer Klowns from Outer Space (Stephen Chiodo, 1988), Hostel: Part II (Eli Roth, 2007), Children of the Corn (Fritz Kiersch, 1984), Dead Alive (Peter Jackson, 1992), and The Fearless Vampire Killers or: Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck (Roman Polanski, 1967)
So many good ones... So little space... Now, on with the list!
10. Village of the Damned (Wolf Rilla, 1960) - "He's thinking of a brick wall. . ." This has been a favorite since I was a kid. Blonde kids are just creepy!
9. The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005) - It's like Deliverance remade with a female cast. Juno is the Burt Reynolds character. Sarah is Jon Voigt. And the woman-eating spermy guys are the scary locals. You have a kickass group of women who don't flash their tits and run up stairs! Perhaps that's a negative for the male horror fans who try to dominate the market, but for those of us of the other sex who enjoy a good dose of gore and suspense now and then, this film rocked. Everything we like in a horror flick without the elements that make us roll our eyes at our dates.
8. The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) - "Mother, make it stop!" Father Merrin's character is so dark. Regan's face so gnarled. The green vomit so. . .projected.
7. Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968) - Is it just me, or does this one almost have an avant-garde quality to it? Poor Barbra just wanted to put some flowers on her papa's grave and practically ends up a zombie herself.
6. The Devil's Rejects (Rob Zombie, 2005) - I love what Zombie does with the slasher myth in this and the preceding House of 1000 Corpses. He fucks with our identifications, subverting the Final Girl formula and creating protagonists out of slashers.
5. Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987) - The guy being rejuvinated is truly gross out. So icky and gooey, and then his brother's wifey makes out with him! Add onto that a guy with a pin cushion for a head and we've got some horror.
4. Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) - This is a no-brainer. Classic Final Girl. Classic mindlessly evil slasher. Classic creepy music. Classic open-ended ending.
3. Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922) - Iconic vampire movie. Bram Stoker's wife sued the studio for adapting Dracula without permission, causing it to go bankrupt. Was it worth it? Prana studios may not think so, but the rest of us are happy that the prints survived Mrs. Stoker's purge.
2. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) - This list just gets more and more obvious. Of course Norman Bates and Mother are on the list. Hitchcock pulled one of the best flip-switches in cinematic history, introducing us to the unenuncitive camera and shower murders.
1. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) - The roadkill armadillo says it all. It's these unsettling asides that make this film. They speak to careful attention paid to atmosphere beyond the standard spooky flick, leaving us with lingering, skin-crawling images. The freakiest moments are not the ones where people die. This is one of my favorite films of all time.
Well, there they are. My fave horror flicks.
Oh dear. What have I done?
