My Five Year Plan

You know, sometimes life just prevents you from doing the important things (like updating your blog), and then even after life stops happening, you’re too embarrassed to face up to how long it’s been since you’ve updated, and then you put off updating even more.

So I’ve got a few things to air out from the last few weeks. Let’s start with the important stuff first:

1) Miami Vice is the best film I’ve seen thus far this year. As some have pointed out, it offers a great counterpoint to Malick’s The New World by being major American films that trade on constructing entirely self contained formal and narrative languages - Mann plays with the basic foundations of film here, eschewing traditional continuity editing, using boldly evocative musical selections that offer tonal counterpoint to image, and managing to wrestle out an exhilarating, moving narrative. Miami Vice’s primary element of construction is not the shot, nor the cut, nor the scene - it it simply the moment. I’ve said this half-jokingly before, but a second viewing reveals its truth: it’s one of the best American love stories of our time, the love narrative thoroughly integrated into the action narrative in a way that highlights the overarching themes of the work - the way the private and public intersect in an age where identity is a premium. I’m in love with this movie right now.

2) Snakes on a Plane - saw it opening night. There was this annoying blonde girl who insisted on hissing loudly during every scene. I don’t mind shouting and laughing and even saying lines with the actors, but at least be amusing if you’re going to make noise during the feature. That said, the film is a tremendous amount of fun, delivering everything I could have hoped out of a film titled Snakes on a Plane. It harkens back to an earlier, simpler era in American genre filmmaking where all you needed was a catchy premise to get your film produced. That said, SoaP more than surpasses its genre limitations by being a ceaselessly entertaining bit of nonsense, with fantastic dialogue (”Snakes on crack?“), great, graphic kill-scenes, a William Castle-worthy Snake-Vision gimmick, and Samuel L. Jackson embracing his star persona to such a degree that when he makes a cameo in the music video shown during the closing credits, it’s almost a moment of grace - you realize there’s nothing out there quite like him. He’s a valuable part of our collective conscious, and it’s kinda moving to know that a public figure can still engender a traditional sense of heroism. I’ll have another post later probably addressing the obvious political implications of the text, but frankly, enough people have already done it that my points will be limited to a few that immediately cropped up during the screening.

3) Searching for a job.

Ahaha. 38 applications sent out. No responses yet. I knew we were in a wintry economic climate, but who knew that a talented Ivy Leaguer couldn’t find a job in film in New York? I’m gonna make a bunch of calls to various employers on Monday to check on my applications, but here’s hoping something turns up before my expected move-in to NYC in mid-September.

4) Proud Flesh

Ugh. I’ll admit it - I haven’t made any updates on the status of this screenplay because frankly, I have nothing to update about. I’ve been enormously unproductive as far as this screenplay goes and definitely falling behind in my five year plan this summer. Perhaps it’s a combination of things - finding out that some upcoming terrible-looking Hilary Swank vehicle has a similar plot to Proud Flesh, my own realization that my interests as a filmmaker, despite my love of genre films, lies in character studies, and my busyness this summer with work, animation, and job-hunting - that have prevented me from working on this idea that’s been bugging me for a while, but I simply haven’t time to work on this script right now. Maybe later. In coming weeks, I’ll write about a new project I’ve been doing some preliminary planning on.