fine whine

In the book Coercion by Doug Rushkoff the idea is presented that spatial relationships matter in the movie-watching experience. In a nutshell (by which I mean I can't remember it correctly) the angle from which you view a movie screen affects how your brain (and you with it) experiences the movie. According to him, according to a source I've forgotten, sitting right of center of the screen forces the eyes upward and to the left, which is something of a primordial cue to the brain to start up the analytical left side. Sitting to the left, looking right, accesses the more creative right side. So Rushkoff recommends to those seeking to love a movie to sit on the left side.

Well, tonight, in order to see the movie (we were watching The Forgotten) but still give Jessica a foot rub (and for her to not move on the sectional) I ended up sitting on the right side of the couch. She had already taken my preferred center seat, and from the beginning I knew my experience would be 'off' as the surround speakers are placed for that seat, not the one I was now in. So it goes. I think that I had the analytic stuff going full tilt, as the film started to roll, off center or otherwise.

Almost immediately I began to notice things about the movie: not things about its story or plot but the actual crafting of the images and sequences. I got distracted playing amateur film geek, as it were.

Speaking of being distracted, today I happened across a puzzling vanity plate: BABE HMR. I was unable to come up with too many words other than "Hammer" or "Hummer" for those latter three letters. Neither seemed quite appropriate for the mid-fifties woman driving the minivan.

Back to the movie, though. As I mentioned, I constantly found myself distracted by what I was watching. One thing that I noticed was that significant plot points happened at very specific timecodes. An important revelation appears just at the fifteenth minute. Julianne's on the run at 00:30. Something really, really big happens at the big 01:00, and the last thirty minutes is clearly Act 3. Everything plugs into the formula.

The cinematographer had a formula, too, though I think I caught a few missteps wherein the camera was shaky when the characters were secure but I'm not positive. I was hyper-aware of the cinematography, though, and the shaking camera and skewed (almost 60s-Batman-esque) angles really took me out of the whole audience experience (apparently this was often a side effect of the long lenses with which they tightened up so many of the shots, as the commentary revealed). So did the editing, with short cuts and quick takes anytime something really distressing's happening. So-called MTV-style editing can work, if done right. This wasn't.

Moreover, the director wanted the shots set in the present (darker, colder times) to be more blue, and shots set in the past (lighter, warmer) to be more golden. That much I noticed, and that much the director explained, but my mind took it a step further. In almost every shot of the 'cold' world few seconds go by without some flash of a warm or hot color somewhere in the frame, be it a red stoplight or taillight, or a fruit stand, or a sign or something else bright. Sometimes the warm color is solely from Julianne's hair.

I may be outthinking them, however. I'm about halfway through reading Learn design with Flash MX which is presented as a story of a class about design and (surprise) Flash MX. I've only gotten about a third of the way through it, enough for the class to have discussed the color wheel and color value schemes. I was taken back to high school art class (the highlight of which was probably my 12 pack box of "Crapple -- made from the worst stuff on earth" being sent to an exhibition of sorts in the local library) but then we hadn't delved to the heart of the matter as this Flash book does: red contrasts very much to blue, in that a tiny bit of red attracts attention even on the biggest expanse of blue (or other colors, since we wouldn't probably need to spot blood smurf-colored-flesh but instead flesh-colored-flesh). I was thinking that the filmmakers were using this effect, but either they didn't reveal it in the commentary or they just happened across it as a happy accident.

It could also be due to the pervasiveness of warm colors and the limited capabilities of post-production to cool them off convincingly. Any way around it I think I was outthinking the movie. That part of it I enjoyed, I think, though I'm sure it annoyed Jessica for me to be pointing out camera angles and colors and whatnot. I'm not sure I really enjoyed the film itself nearly as much as I did the experience of watching it. Generally I rewatch movies for commentary tracks when I enjoyed the film, but in this case I just wanted to hear my ideas voiced by the people I'd thought came up with them first.

I also re-watched it to confirm my theory that Dominic West's (McNulty from The Wire, and he does a great job playing something of the same character) stubble 'grows' in reverse, actually diminishing over the three days of the second two acts, and I think I'm right, though my little DVD player's screen isn't quite up to snuff to really get that detail clear enough and I wasn't going to zoom. It didn't matter quite that much.

Back to the commentary, though, which mentioned something I found interesting: the intensity of an character who never blinks. The director mentions Christopher Plummer not blinking in Dreamscape and Gary Sinise who deliberately did not blink in this film.

It's odd that it took the director explaining that for me to notice, as I am often the first to chime in with the chant of "BLINK!" when a character, well, hasn't for a while. Some of this, I am sure, goes back to Michael Moore's skewering of the unblinking Steve Forbes in The Big One. From now on, I suppose I'll pay even more attention to this, or at least Gary.

Another thing I've noticed about this film is that Julianne's character's name is "Telly". That's a bit obvious, isn't it? She's telling people things the whole time. Telling them! Telly! Get it? Gosh.

Thinking about it now, I suppose that license plate might've been "babe humor" but that doesn't make much sense either.

Spartan certainly is.

It has come to my attention that there are a lot of people using the phrase "No worries" these days, and this, I must admit, slightly troubles me.

After all, I am one of them. I began using it as a replacement for "No problem" or "Don't worry about it" or "That's okay, I really didn't want fries with that anyway" about two or three years ago, having finished reading Terry Pratchett's The Last Continent, the only Discworld book (so far) set almost entirely on the continent of FourEcks, which seems suspiciously similar to a land Down Under.

As such, the natives say funny things (to our American and British English-accustomed sensibilities) including the pervasive "No worries" which rolls off the tongue so much more cleanly than does, say, "Hakuna Matata".

Anyway, it is for that reason that I use the phrase. I really, really doubt that I started everybody else using it Up Over but still sometimes I wonder...

Another April Fools' Day, and I didn't really even notice it. I'll catch up on the internet pranks tomorrow, probably, and didn't encounter any at work or elsewhere today.

So I guess the Post-it note that has long since fallen off my monitor, meant nothing.

One of these years I'm going to do something on 4/1 and it will be cool. This time, though, I was on a plane to New York and back and it just took a lot out of me.

I suppose, in retrospect, I was the victim of a prank. The shuttle bus that was supposed to take us from the office in Manhattan to the private airport in New Jersey never came, so we found ourselves flagging down taxis at the beginning of a NYC friday rush hour.

But this might've been a simple oversight, not some malicious attempt to strand me in the big apple. We may never know. So it goes. Happy April Fools' Day indeed.