Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Happy Halloween, Tempest, Night to Remember

Happy Halloween!
I have missed a week or so and need to do a quick catch up.
I really loved the Buck 65 show in SLC 2 weeks ago.  He did a lot of the classics and even did Pants on Fire as an encore.  There was something really melancholy about the show in general, a lot of sad songs.  Luckily those are generally my favorites.  Also into the stranger stuff to, and he mixed that in there. Here is a bunch of demos from the making of Situation that just got released from 5 years ago:
http://www.skratchbastid.com/buck-65-situation-5-years-ago-today-the-demos/
I think I like the sampled versions muuuuuchhhh better.
School is going really well.  Passing tests and stuff, spent hours last week making a cast and mounting it to an articulator.  Everything is really interesting and time usually passes quickly.
I played Risk on Sunday, match two with friends, and was again the first out.  This time it was all a fluke.  I don't even want to talk about it, I want a rematch.
Natalie and I went to the school Halloween party on Friday and could not come up with costumes.  We eventually put on knit sweaters and went as College English Professors.
Last week I watched "A Night to Remember" which is a 1958 film about the Titanic directed by Roy Ward Baker.  Funny, I had just finished listening to Bob Dylan's new album, "Tempest".  The title track is about a 10 minute ballad about the sinking of the Titanic, and Dylan even references Leonardo DiCaprio in the song as if he was someone actually on the Titanic.  It's really long and totally worth listening to maybe before or after watching this movie.
Back to the film.  It wasn't the most enjoyable to watch, mostly because the director seems fixated on the facts and doesn't extract a lot of story other than the monolithic historic event at it's center, but maybe that is the point.  It just makes it a bit harder to hang in there the entire time.  That being said, focusing only on the event and the facts surrounding it maybe makes it seem all the more horrible.  You are not following any specific character really, just checking in on all sorts of different people in terror and how they dealt with the awful prospect of death.  A few things I really liked:
-Even in black and white and a low budget, the actual sinking of the ship really stirs up some stuff inside of you.  It kind of made me realize that the idea is always more terrifying than the image itself.  I never once thought that it looked fake, all I could think about was something that big disappearing.
-I guess the movie did what it intended, because I immediately opened up Wikipedia and looked up all sorts of statistics and facts about Titanic.  I really wanted to know how many children had gone down with the ship because the movie has a really sad scene with one of the kids being left on the ship accidentally.
-The playing with the ice on deck, although re-created in James Cameron's movie, seemed to have more screen time here.  It made me think about people playing with the object of their demise just an hour or two earlier.  
-A lot of these old movies end with some grand statement from one of the characters.  In this one, the "main" character says, "I'll never be sure of anything again."  And scene.  I think film makers felt like they not only had to sum up the movie, but sum up the entire effect the subject had or will have on it's watchers.
You can watch the whole thing on the right there.
Next week I will write about "The Killer" and "Hardboiled" at the same time.

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