Thursday 5/9/24
Spent the evening with various Radiohead shows from 2003 and 2006.
About to write two new horror film pieces.
Bruins got mashed in Florida, 6-1. Mustered only 15 shots on goal. Swayman was pulled at the start of the third, Ullmark didn't fare any better. Who plays in net on Friday? I really have no clue who they'll go with. Certain guys give up a bunch of goals, and then they come out with boosted determination and fight--they get angry and extra-accountable--and shut the door the next game. Patrick Roy was that way. I don't think Jeremey Swayman is, but I could be wrong. Which isn't to say that the goaltending was the reason for the lopsided score last night. Then I read the quotes from the Bruins' players and their coach, and there's just so much of the huggy-wuggy. You'd think they won and became even better friends with each in the process. Very sappy YA novel type of quotes.
Unsurprisingly, Chris Sale got the win against the Red Sox last night. You just kind of figured it'd go that way.
Dumb people trying to sound smart like to use the word "binary." "It's not a binary." "When you look at things just as a binary..." You can tell that they use the word like fifty times a week. "Time to sound smart...'binary.'"
Unfortunately, the more you know someone the less you like them, as a rule with exceptions. You'd really prefer it to be the other way around.
Hoping to get out to the Brattle a bunch over the next few days, which will depend on how much work I get done. I saw The Dark Crystal there recently. I've never cared for this film. Feels more like an excuse to have made a movie with that puppetry--which is unappealing puppetry to me--than a good faith storytelling effort. The film is more about the elderly than anything else. It's like Cocoon for the Muppets crowd.
Also saw Malick's Days of Heaven at the Brattle a little while back. Doesn't work. There's no attempt to pull a viewer in, create a point of contact. The beginning is an assembly of images that doesn't tell a story or convey part of the narrative in how those images play off of each other. Eisenstein would be like, "Okay, see this? Now see this? Now this?" And there'd be narrative coagulation. Griffith did something similar. You can tell that Malick didn't know what to do, how to go, how to start. So then he was like, "I'll art house it up!"
It's just a trick of someone who isn't working with enough or enough of an idea. It looks fine. Sometimes the plot is called out as being too simple, but that's not really the problem. Plots look full when the story is rich, believable, and have many points of emotional contact with a viewer/reader/listener. That's more what a plot is than a bunch of shit that happened that you can make a list of after. It's one reason why Star Wars, for example, is a much better movie than The Empire Strikes Back, with its integration of story rather than, "Then this happened, then that happened, then, oh yeah, that happened."