Indiana Jones (the Fourth)

WARNING: MASSIVE, GUN-TOTING SPOILERS LIE IN WAIT.

Okay, here goes. Read more, if you want, after the jump.

Often I Dream

Often I dream. Less often than normal humans, but when I do, it’s always surreal and entertaining. For instance: I take movies I haven’t seen or things I haven’t done and dream about them. One time I dreamed all four movies in a quadrogy, and during the dream I thought that the plot was real. It was a suspense movie and my dream had lots of stealth and ninja-stuff in it. I woke up and realized that that’s almost certainly not how the actual movies go.The spinny-things in playgrounds should be outlawed. They make people dizzy. Like concussion-dizzy.

They Might Be Giants

My favorite band. Recently I saw them live in NYC, but even more recently – so recently it hasn’t happened yet – I will have been seeing Gigantic. It is a movie about They Might Be Giants. I use Wiretap Pro – courtesy of MacHeist – to listen to/download TMBG songs off YouTube. It’s really easy. Lots of work this weekend. 

High Concept

Dystopias are awesome. No, not the special effects or the insignificant plots within them, but the idea that people have to create dystopias when there are already so many around them. Most novels or movie adaptations thereof end with the main cch submitting to the government’s will. The character gets out of line, and is towed back in.Movies are a bit easier to make dystopias in. 

The Worthless Blither of a Sickened Chelonite

Americans – and in this case, a sick turtle – spend 8-10 hours a day watching television. That’s probably not true. I lied.Or did I? It’s not a lie if I don’t know that it isn’t true.This is the kind of cerebellum-amputating logic that comes from an hourlong mixture of Michel Gondry videos and slight real-world nausea.Michel Gondry – Sure as hell hope I’m spelling that right – is awesome. Have you ever seen the videos he does for Beck? Or the White Stripes, for that matter.All in all, it makes about as much sense as that scene from Pirates 3 where Up is Down and they capsize the only thing stopping them from drowning but due the that damned inevitability clause, they all survive by bursting through to the surface.Great effects, great plot point, awful storytelling. Which reminds me… why is Lost popular again?(Duck and cover) 

Editing

I have been editing movies recently for one reason or another, and I find it makes me snobby. Whenever I watch a movie that has bad transitions or bad camera angles, I can’t help but notice. It only makes me want to go back and film more, just to see what I can do correctly.

Been a while

Good lord, it’s been so long. I finally got my desk set up properly, an electric piano, shiny new iMac, Leopard, and it’s great. I’ve been trying to write something – a duet of sorts – between the piano and my . I recently saw I, Robot, with Will Smith, and contrary to popular beleif, it was actually good. My only problem with it is as to why it was named I, Robot. The title I, Robot, implies that the movie will be in some way related to the book it was named after. The movie’s only similarity was the three laws of robotics, and many movies have used that without having been associated with Isaac Asimov.I also recently saw Close Encounters , and I cannot, for the life of me, imagine why its become so dang famous. Yes, the effects were incredible for the time, but it had no plot line, and around 50 of the 135 minutes were spent with the entire screen filled by bright lights, shaking objects, or some other unexplained incident. The oddest part was as to why the main character left his wife and children and was voluntarily kidnapped by E.T. looking aliens whose spaceship played the Jaws Theme.Sophie’s World is a wholly unsatisfying yet interesting book. 

Movie Trailer

And I don’t mean movie preview. Movie Trailers – such as the one to the right – that are used to house stars and  makeup – are sometimes betteroutfitted than hotels. Today I saw one with a biker-style person in a trailer, getting makeup put  on. It’s a bit odd to see a biker being touched up,  seeing as the whole point is to look grungy. Most often, people don’t need makeup to look real.  I am learning to play many chords and songs in the Ukelele. Using http://www.chordie.com/ and selecting the Uke tuning, I can play many songs. Any suggestions?

Horror

Horror Movies disgust me. And not just in the slimy guts and chainsaws way.

The fact that a good third of the American movie culture is centered around seeing a movie that scares you stupid is horrifying in itself. High Concept Thrillers aren’t so bad, just very tense. For instance, I recently saw War Games with Matthew Broderick. Nobody, ever, not even I, who is so scared that movie trailers scare me, nobody could ever say that WarGames was scary. But it was extremely tense. Quoting Douglas Adams:

It wasn’t impersonal, like a randomly flung fist in a crowd is impersonal, but like a computer-issued parking summons is impersonal. It wasn’t deadly like a kinfe is deadly, but like a brick wall across an expressway is deadly. And it wasn’t cold like ice is cold, but like a wall is cold.

Now most of the culture thrives on being scared. And that’s scary.