Cultural Backlog

Although I said this was going to be about me trying to get published, that's only a half lie. Consider that the main plot of my life currently, and I'll invariably introduce a bunch of side plots of what I do day to day. It's still a bit of writing, and thus experience. Any experience is experience.

Most twenty one year old males watch a shitload of movies. I was never one of them because I never really watched anything I couldn't watch for free. I didn't like buying movies because due to my bloody awesome memory, I pretty much remember everything right off, thus have no need to watch it again. And in the rare cases I don't, I can scan over a summary of Wikipedia and it's quite a good refresher. $20 for one showing is more of a rip off at theater for me, and everyone complains about how ludicrously expensive those are.

But thanks to the greatness of Netflix, I can now start to wade through all the movies I had missed. I mainly signed up so I could go through the season sets of Penn & Teller's Bullshit to save money. And that I did, given that each season set would run me $30 and there are 4 seasons, and that I got through the entire set of seasons in a single month, I saved myself about $103.

On the offhand note, I strongly recommend the series. Very entertaining in my opinion, but I would say you don't take their opinions as gospel. They're horribly one sided, and rarely acknowledge the points of the other side of the debate. While that's perfectly fine and dandy when it's something ridiculous like conspiracy theorists and ESP, you should look to other sources and get both sides of the story when it's issues like the death penalty(which Penn & Teller are really downright sensationalist on in that episode) or recycling(which they make a solid point on recycling paper, but don't acknowledge that plastic isn't renewable like paper is.)

But back on topic, once I finished with the Bullshit season sets, I decided to stay on with Netflix and get some inspiration going. The subject of my fantasy novel is people escaping from a criminal organization that has risen to city controlling power. So I decided to start with crime based movies, hoping to pick up some inspiration(fancy word for stolen idea) for the book. Even though the book is already done, I'll probably be revising it a good deal, so getting new ideas in my head is never a bad thing.

Following this and periodically as such through the blog, I'll be dropping my thoughts on various movies. I'm not going to call them reviews, because I'm not going to be dropping grades on them. I'll likely be doing the same with any books I happen to pick up and read through, which may be tomorrow.

First up, is Pulp Fiction. I went into it completely unknowing of Quentin Tarentino's story telling style. I thought it was kind of odd at first, but I view it as entertaining for what it was. For an overall story, it doesn't really do much. It's more of a series of entertaining skits with not much of an overlying story, which in itself is told in a all over the place order, such as one of the main(using the term loosely given it jumps around all over the place) characters gets killed midway through the film timewise(an hour into a two hour movie) then the next scene has him alive and well for quite awhile, not even really hinting that he's about to go get killed within the next couple days. It was a worthy waste of two hours, but I would never worship it the way that some people do.

Second, I watched Reservoir Dogs, another Tarentino film. Ironically, I get two DVDs at a time from Netflix, and the first two were accidentally Tarentino films, and the second set were Scorsese films. I enjoyed this more than Pulp Fiction, even though it had a similar style of sorts, where you get the Part 7/10 of the story first(Well outside the opening credits and the Anti-tipping tirade), and the rest as time goes on. It was easier to follow and the overall story was more enjoyable as a result. Not a bad way to tell a story honestly, as if it were dropped on the viewer in true chronology it wouldn't have been as good. Was done better there than in Pulp Fiction, which may be solely because there IS a major story in RD and not in PF.

Third, The Departed, the first Scorsese film. For a brief time as the movie started, I thought it was one of those our of order movies, as with the previous too. Why? Because I can't tell Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio apart. I thought it was the same character at different times for about 20 minutes. Then they had different names. Then I felt stupid. After making this realization the movie made a lot more sense and was pretty good, watching two people get themselves into deep on both ends of the law. I actually loved the way the ending was handled, where you ask yourself "What happened to that guy then?" and out of nowhere he shows up and answers that question on top of delivering the last of the comeuppance for the antagonists.

Finally, I viewed Goodfellas. I dug it, the semi-autobiographical approach to the guy's history. It stuck to the one crime-movie cliche that I like- the protagonist is a bastard, yes, but everyone around him is a bigger bastard. I also liked the touch of letting Liotta's character's wife's thoughts be heard occasionally, given you outside view on the bastardom occurring. One question that was raised in my concern is that Pesci's character is a murderous psychopath who killed a man twice for being sarcastic or standing up to him. And further more, Liotta and DeNiro's characters didn't even give a shit when it was a busboy. I know they're suppose to be hardened criminals and all, but being mildly annoyed when someone just kills a busboy(for having a legitimate complaint about being shot in the foot) is just a plain cartoonish response. And it's suppose to be based on a true story, which means something resembling this must have happened in real life, which is even more head scratching. Speaking of it's real life base, it kind of hurt the movie overall. The ending was... just an ending. No big climax, just Liotta's character saying fuck it, I'm becoming a rat. Entertaining movie, but the ending is just so blah.

Next on the agenda: I'm going to write some character profiles for the Fall of Allbridge's editing phase. Most people do it before hand, but I think it's best left for the end. This is long enough already so I'll hit it up tomorrow to keep the content flowing.