Cowtown Diner
July 28th, 2010
Sitting in the Cowtown Diner in Fort Worth.  Used to be a La Madeleine.
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Rain Clouds
July 25th, 2010
On my way to Kilgore this weekend, I left Dallas just as the pouring rain began to let up.  But when I came down a hill on I-20, rain clouds literally split the sky and earth online two.  Off the side of the road, I could see the rain coming down through the trees, creating a wall of water that visibly bisected the ground.  It was incredible to see, as the fishing water poured its way towards me.
No Comments »Inception
July 25th, 2010
At one point in Inception, an expert chemist named Yusuf (Dileep Rao) takes the main character Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) into a room full of people hooked up to a machine that allows them to experience a shared dream. So adjusted to the effects of the sleep extraction machines that they can no longer dream independently, they seek out the chemist Yusuf during the day so that they may use the machine to experience the dreams they no longer have at night. The old man guarding the dreamers explains they go there no to sleep, but to wake up. To the dreamers, the experiences they have while asleep are now more real and more meaningful than their daily lives. He addresses this to Cobb, who also goes under the machine at night to experience his own dreams. There are dreams that Cobb doesn’t want to leave, and they are haunted by memories he can’t bear to forget.
Christopher Nolan’s Inception sidesteps the tropes and clichés of dream movies, ignoring useless symbolism and illogical, twisting plot threads.  His plot follows a logical narrative and never ducking or swerving to pull cheap tricks out for the sake of confusion.  This is no David Lynch nightmare, where characters and scenes loop in on each other in surreal, strange ways.  That’s not to say there isn’t complexity, and a film about the nature of reality and perception will always carry doubt about what we see before us.  But Nolan is more interested in Cobb, who can’t stand the guilt he faces in the waking world, but also fears the torments of his dreams as well.  For a man who spends his time breaking the mental defenses of the rich and powerful, he seems unable to bury his own secrets just out of reach.  It might be telling too much that as he invades the dreams of others, he brings along a woman named Ariadne (Ellen Page) to help him navigate the labyrinths of the reality.
The basic premise comes from thrillers and heist films.  A powerful businessman named Saito (Ken Watanabe) hires Cobb to perform a difficult job of inception, that of placing an idea into someone’s mind, rather than just extracting the secrets already there.  Cobb reluctantly accepts, but only after Saito promises to wash away Cobb’s sins so that he can return to the states and see his family again.  Cobb’s exile is central to film, and the guilt surrounding it explains why Cobb believes inception can be performed when everyone else declares the act impossible.  Once accepted, Cobb begins hiring team members for the difficult job of breaking into a man’s mind.  It follows the usual beat of heist films, even if the vault they plan to invade is more cerebral and challenging.
If there is a great flaw to the film, it’s that every character serves as set-dressing for Cobb. Â Most of their conversations, dialogue and actions are in service of Cobb, discussing his history and why inception and extraction means stuff to him. Â Of course, Nolan provides an excuse for this, and may go a long way towards helping people interpret the film. Â But that’s not to say the film couldn’t have benefited from going into the mind of the other characters, such as Ellen Page’s Ariadne, who remain just as sealed off to us and they are to Cobb.
It’s no understatement to place Inception as the best film of the year. Â Nolan’s gripping plot, twisting visuals and snappy pace add up to a tight, well conceived thriller. Â After the credits start rolling, the mind races to puzzle together what’s been seen, and to add up all the threads until they make sense.
No Comments »Sunflowers
July 22nd, 2010
Yesterday was one of those dreamy summer evenings. I rode my bicycle up to Panzinni’s Pizza, then went to the park to watch people play cricket. On my way home, I saw the sunflowers were in bloom.
No Comments »Lights
July 22nd, 2010
Been experimenting with my new phone. I love the resolution and clarity, far excedes my old iphone. Also gives me more to edit with. This shot was taken while on my daily lunch walk.
No Comments »Let the Right One In
July 18th, 2010
Let the Right One In is eerie, engaging and morally ambiguous. The story’s premise is about an 11-year-old boy, Oskar, who meets a 12-year-old vampire, Eli, who has just moved into his apartment complex. On the surface it’s an inversion of vampire films, portraying the typical villains as innocent children and following their entanglement, while the victims are kept in the background, even as Eli slowly destroys their lives.
But it’s in this way that director Tomas Alfredson explores the darkness of coming of age, the crossing over from childhood to brutal adulthood. Out the outset of the film Oskar fantasies about using a knife to frighten, torture and kill the bullies who torment him at school. When Eli shows up, it’s almost as if the two have the rapport of sociopaths, and they find camaraderie in the alienation and anger they both have bubbling beneath the surface. Even though she doesn’t express the blunt evil of most movie vampires, Eli suffers no qualms or doubts about having to kill to feed, which is ironic considering the almost innocent way she conducts her relationship with Eli. She barely even seems to be aware of the impact she has the lives of the loved ones of the victims, who grow to hate her even as she just considers them detritus in their need to feed.
The film works overall, mostly because of the sound design that leaves thing sparse and empty, as though great chasms exist between conversations and any noise could break the stability of the lives portrayed. There is one scene around the middle, though, involving CGI cats that hits a kind of false note and was just too goofy for me to take seriously. It was an attempt at something more action-oriented that just felt out of place with the slow, methodical nature of the film. It also reminded me more than a little bit of Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive.
It’s a tight, well made horror film that definitely has moments, and while not especially challenging does delight and thrill.
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Things
July 12th, 2010
Daisy Lowe for UK esquire HD from Greg Williams on Vimeo.
Daisy Lowe as shot by Greg Williams, song “Tiger” by Maximum Balloon
Glenn Greenwald discusses the use of the word “disgraced” when referring to former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, and why it doesn’t seem to be applied to Republicans who’ve had scandals.
So common is this appellation that a NEXIS media search reveals that the word “disgraced” appears extremely close to the phrase ”Eliot Spitzer” (within two words) a total of 394 times
California is a Place is a sort of documentary website by Drea Cooper & Zachary Canepari, and it’s what I’d love to do with Texas someday. Â They produce their own documentaries on subjects in California and take video and photographs that are amazing. Â Follow their blog to keep in touch with the amazing things they produce.
High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace by Joshua Davis
No Comments »He lunges for a towel and staggers into the hallway as the ship’s windmill-sized propeller spins out of the water. Throughout the ship, the other 22 crew members begin to lose their footing as the decks rear up. There are shouts and screams. Kyin escapes through a door into the damp night air. He’s barefoot and dripping wet, and the deck is now a slick metal ramp. In an instant, he’s skidding down the slope toward the Pacific. He slams into the railings and his left leg snaps, bone puncturing skin. He’s now draped naked and bleeding on the railing, which has dipped to within feet of the frigid ocean. The deck towers 105 feet above him like a giant wave about to break. Kyin starts to pray.
Insomnia
June 20th, 2010
As I type this, I am lying in my bed gazing at the slightly out of focus light of the moon outside my window. I have often thought of moving my bed into the other room with an overhead fan, but would regret losing the view of the silvery glow that the moon effuses over the night sky.
Presently I am afflicted by a slight headache and an overactive mind that is constantly jumping from one idle thought to the next. The overall effect feels like a computer that is overheating because it attempts to run more operations than it can handle. It cools the system down to plaster this internal logorrhea on to something, like a Pollock painting in prose.
Over the weekend I had the pleasure of seeing the Peter Sellers film “Being There”, and while I feel my typing on an iphone too insufficient to fully express how I felt about the film, I can express a few thoughts on it now.
Produced in 1979, directed by Hal Ashby and adapted from the novel by Jerzy KosiÅ„ski, “Being There” tells the story of a gardener named chance who has spent his entire life raised by television under the care of a man reffered to in the film only under the name of “the Old Man”. After the Old Man dies at the outset of the film, Chance is forced out of the home and into the real world for the first time in his life. He soon falls into the company of rich, powerful socialites who mistake his simple-minded obsession with television and gardening as apt, folksy wisdom about the state of American affairs.
The film is unique as a satire in that it doesn’t rely on ridiculous, over the top gags to make its point, but instead employs a subtle, malevolent subtext to make a striking commentary about politics and culture. It truly is a brilliant film driven by the wonderful performance of Peter Sellers, backed by Shirley MacClaine as Eve Rand, a wealthy socialite who becomes smitten with Chance.
After writing all of this I can find myself closer to sleep, so I’m glad this opportunity to speak my fevered mind.
1 Comment »â€˜â€¦And Justice For All’ tee under grey flannel…
June 19th, 2010
‘…And Justice For All’ tee under grey flannel shirt. Instant ’90s, just add hipster.
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