Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Quick Thought About Slate's Email Exchanges

Do they ask these guys to write like this?

"A digital meditation on the end of the analogue era, a procedural about process itself, Zodiac has less in common with Se7en or All the President's Men than with new-media masterworks like Inland Empire, Russian Ark, and Southland Tales, or the system-based storytelling of The Wire (aka the best narrative film of the decade)."

Now back to my paragraph-based meditation on presidential primary coverage accompanied by mug-based warm liquids consumption for the sake of warmth itself (aka the best food of the decade). PS. something about new-media and how blogging is like diary-keeping with benefits.

3 comments:

yoggoth said...

"... I see where you're coming from about how underwhelmed you were. David Fincher has made a movie about the very underwhelmingness of procedural work. On the other side of the screen, it's so often anti-climactic. The movie is all the more daring for taking that on, for wrestling with tedium, for making it look and feel like something nightmarish and dreamy in its way. Its fright is both visceral and existential."

"... the optical lexicon that Janusz Kaminski and Julian Schnabel devised for their ballad of the human spirit (yes, another one of those) isn't nearly as discreetly ingenious as the terrifying perspectives Harry Savides comes up with for Zodiac, with is both deeply cinematic and slyly post so."

A movie about "about the very underwhelmingness of procedural work"? That is daring for taking on that tedium? Why? How is that daring at all?

"Deeply cinematic and slyly post so"? In other words, it's pretty much the same with slight differences? Well, that's new-media for ya!

Little Earl said...

Yeah, well, I actually wasn't even going to read Slate's Movie Club this year...until you started making fun of it.

First of all, they're basing the whole enterprise on the assumption that other people will be really interested in reading what movie critics are talking about when they talk with each other, when in fact, this probably confirms the public's worst fears about movie critics! Second, as I've mentioned several times by now, I'm tired or reading about movies I haven't even had the chance/time to see yet.

In short, this whole exercise strikes one as an impressively insular activity.

Anonymous said...

"Optical Lexicon?" "Digital meditation?"

These guys need to depart for their rendevous at their calcified-pachydermia-tusk lateral-based structure with alacrity!

I can use big words too!