New things are happening. But first, some housekeeping.
Film Month went too fast
These past four weeks, I actually felt like I was back in my old film courses in college. The textbook I assigned myself turned out to be a legit study of history and theory that would cure insomnia for the casual film viewer. If paired with the even more eye-wateringly esoteric Film Theory and Criticism (Braudy and Cohen) I kept from my original class, How to Read A Film could easily convince most people that film students are THE WORST. I ate it up. Manna from heaven.
Meanwhile, Alicia Malone’s Backwards and In Heels was a lighter, quicker read, but no less informative on the more specified subject of women in film. I appreciated and enjoyed rounding out my education on the unsung heroines in film art and industry.
I also took advantage of the one and only film studies lecture series offered on Great Courses and was pleasantly surprised at how much I learned from it. The prof is a bit camp, but totally impassioned and deeply knowledgeable. He leaned toward presenting concepts on the narrative front rather than the theoretical front, so he balanced out the more technical and philosophical info I was absorbing every day.
Factoids I picked up that stick out the most:
1) Zodiac has way more CG effects than I would have ever guessed. I fuckin’ love that movie and have seen it multiple times and watching it once again just to admire the flawless CG was fun.
2) A film’s GD IQ (Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient) tells us how much gender bias it has. Like a more sophisticated computerized Bechdel Test. One may run a film through this software, which takes about 15 minutes to analyze a 90-minute movie, and it automatically calculates how much screentime/dialogue female characters have, revealing dark truths about just how fucking entrenched misogyny is in Hollywood.
3) IMAX films are enormous and feed through a projector sideways instead of top to bottom, maximizing the space on film stock. CRAZY.
4) Ingmar Bergman reportedly had a dark night of the soul when he realized that 50% of film is a blank screen. He felt it was an artistic atrocity. Viewers don’t notice due to the speed of the frame rate, but yes, there is an infinitesimal pause while the machine advances each frame into place for playback. I think we can forgive that, Ingmar.
5) 24 isn’t the only standard frame rate, BTW. It’s just what makes something feel cinematic. TV tends to go 25 or 30 due to the technology of signal transference and scanning (I will not go down that rabbit hole). One may go to 48 like the The Hobbit films, which eliminates motion blur altogether, but this makes it appear too real to even feel like a movie anymore. I honestly hate TVs that use high refresh rates for the sake of resolution because it ruins the timbre—the texture—of the entire experience. When it’s too clear, and essentially, extra frames are added to “smooth” out the motion, everything feels like a soap opera. I can’t fucking stand it. Luckily, I figured out how to reduce the frame rate on my TV long ago so I am seeing movies has the film gods intended. If I go to someone’s house and see their TV I can immediately tell if their settings are off and I want to die.
6) Wes Anderson truly is a basic bitch, and thank you James Monaco for summing up my feelings in the most politely dismissive way possible: “You’ll find a lot of auteurist conceits and tricks, but in the end Wes Anderson’s world is all self-reflexive Upper West Side New York middle class.” *slow clap*
7) This isn’t new info, but Citizen Kane is brilliant and it’s always been brilliant and I still stand by it as a test of whether someone really gets cinema because they won’t lie about seeing it and can actually tell me what makes it great other than Orson Welles who was not the only genius working on the project—not by a long shot. Thank you and good day, sir.
Podcast Addiction
Over Spring Break, during a mini road trip down to St. Pete for a day at the new Pier and the Dali Museum, I played a few episodes of a new podcast in the car with my parents. The next day, my dad was like “OMG have you listened to the dingo-got-my-baby episode? It’s insane.” Within a week, my mom binged all the episodes about Princess Di and my dad actually subjected himself to the episode about the 2000 Election.
My parents are not podcast people, but now I have inadvertently given them exactly the perfect thing to play in the background while they do their COVID lockdown puzzles.
Luckily, this wonderfully fascinating podcast has been around since 2018 and has a decent back catalog full of juicy subjects. The non-intuitively compelling premise of this show is picking out big news stories from the 80s and 90s that we think we remember correctly, and then spending an hour disabusing ourselves of our false memories. I am speaking of course, about You’re Wrong About, and I am fully aware that I’m a total Johnny-come-lately because everyone in the podcast world has already been on this bandwagon for the podcasting equivalent of forever.
The secret sauce of this thing is their friendly conversational reportage that is highly entertaining and humorous without being insolent or disrespectful. Also, they don’t have ads. Also, both hosts, Sarah Marshall and Mike Hobbes, are experienced journalists who can research shit better than your Facebook-loving drunk uncle. So there’s that as well.
This is one of those few podcasts that you initially think “Oh I’ll only listen to the few episodes that sound most interesting to me,” but you soon realize that EVERY episode is interesting. I had exactly a vacuum worth of thoughts about Anna Nicole Smith but now I have OPINIONS and I will defend her to the death if you argue with me.
The only thing wrong with them is that they sometimes say a few words entirely wrong, “denouement” being the most egregious (Mike regularly says “de-now-mint”). I also picked up on issues with “oeuvre” and “double entendre” so now I’m just convinced they cannot do French loan words. That said, apparently, they are well aware of this character quirk, and even have a t-shirt you may purchase on their support page that says “DE NOW MINT” on it. *eye roll* OK, you guys are so funny and I still love you OMG LEARN FRENCH.
Manflesh of the Month
Now I’m just going to gush about Steve Zahn for a bit. I developed a huge soft spot for him the moment he appeared on Conan in 2005 so I have to check in on him every so often. I did a mini binge of some of his latest work this week and my heart plotzed as usual. I’m revisiting Treme because for some reason I only watched half of the first season on HBO when it came out and I really need to rectify that situation, if only to get in the mood for my upcoming fifth trip to New Orleans in July (W00T). Steve is obviously great in that.
Now imagine my squishy soul when I got to watch not one but two LGBTQ-themed films he did in the last few years. Uncle Frank (Amazon Prime video) is a contentious but positive coming-out story starring another old boyfriend Paul Bettany, so that was fun and Steve was a warm blob of reliable cuteness in that. But then there’s Cowboys (rented for $3.99), for which Steve won Best Actor in a U.S. Narrative Film at Tribeca last year. He plays a father with some form of manic mental disorder whose young child comes out as trans, and they ride off on a horse into the Montana wilderness together to bond and escape the cruel world for a while. It turns into a modern manhunt western when the mother, who is not so accepting of the whole trans idea, believes her husband kidnapped her kid. It has its tragic and bittersweet moments, but it’s heartwarming in the end. TWO positive endings for LGBTQ characters in a week! So rare and lovely. Steve, for his part, delivers (not surprisingly) a nuanced and empathetic performance, and all I want to do is hug him until the end of time.
*record scratch*
Now, on to the big announcement that I’m making to my own soul for the sake of my sanity: I am writing a goddamn screenplay, starting as soon as possible. That goddamn screenplay I literally started and wrote the first eight pages of eight years ago about Richard Feynman’s life. It has always galled me that no one has made a movie about this endlessly fascinating individual, an all-American bigger-than-life Nobel-Prize-winning physicist so full of humble character, powerful quotations, and absolute genius. It’s an atrocity that regular people don’t really know his deal. I don’t even care if my work ever sees the light of day, but I feel compelled to write this sucker just to make myself happy. It is a whole project and a challenge. I have a handful of books I cannot wait to re-read about him. I get giddy just thinking about highlighting all the interesting parts and imagining a whole movie in my head.
I had a rough syllabus for the year, and I even had April’s two fashion-related books already come in the mail, but damnit, I’ve been struck with a higher calling now. I need to do this thing. I am burdened with a not-so-terrible purpose.
