This blog is +5 awesomeness, -5 productive:
Also, the rough draft for Dissed in 90 Seconds is up for your perusal! Feedback always appreciated.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED4q1cj_xkg]
Look! Another video of Julie acting a fool!
For my new media capstone class, we have to develop a series of video shorts that can hypothetically be broadcasted to cell phones — Mobi-sodes if you will. The journalism school recently purchased a TV station and has commissioned us new media students to tinker away at developing Mobile TV. I volunteered to cover the concept of a reviews show and came up with the idea of a Soup-esque short that lampoons bad movie releases. I dummied up a mock episode of what that show would look like — a mock-sode if you will.
It went over well with my classmates, but I want to post it on my blog because a.) I’m pretty proud of it, considering I slapped it together over the course of 3 hours. b.) I want some feedback, would you watch something like this? does the format work? what other movies do you want to see critiqued in this manner?
Oh, and please ignore my bad acting, oily face and lame humor.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_lb9GgUJHU]
In other news, can’t wait to go to China this Christmas! I will have Randy in tow. He’ll probably be the first white person ever to step in my dad’s village.
“Some things belong on paper, others in life. It’s a blessed fool who can’t tell the difference.”
Made my roommates watch “Quills” tonight. Easily one of my favorite films, possibly even in my top three.
A raunchy period piece on the infamous Marquis du Sade, the film stars Geoffrey Rush as the fiery madman, Kate Winslet as his laundry maid ally, Michael Caine as the brutal doctor antagonist, and the oh-so-sexy Joaquin Phoenix as an idealistic abbe who must repress his coursing lust for Winslet’s character, Madeleine. [Never has a man of the cloth looked so delicious as Phoenix in that long black robe.]
Considering that the historical Sade lent his namesake to the term “sadism,” there are so many ways this movie could have plummeted to a graphic soft porn with gratuitous genitalia waving about like windmills, but no. Instead, the movie tangoes with the evergreen issues of censorship and religion.
And it tackles these trigger words like no other movie I’ve seen before, openly slashing apart Christianity as if it were wrapping paper. One of my favorite lines has to be when the Marquis sneers at the abbe, “Virgin birth! An entire religion built on an oxymoron!”
The dialogue is razor sharp and delightfully blasphemous (as any film on a crazy fiend should be). And despite its seedy subject matter, it’s one of the most intelligently and imaginatively scripted films I can name. I mean sure, sexual references is heaped on this film like fried chicken is heaped on a redneck’s plate at Golden Corral. But that’s the point, just because Sade’s work is craven, it doesn’t mean the film has to be.
And I’m always baffled at how the film manages to portray Sade almost as a hero, a representative of artistic expression. To call him an author would be like calling Ron Jeremy an award-winning actor. But he is also a man whose “writing is as involuntary as the beating of his own heart.” I can identify with that. It’s strange to think of this selfish, self-aggrandizing monster as the poster boy for passion-driven writing. But in the context of his rebellion against censorship, his flippancy is admirable. When Rush galavants atop the cretins’ dining table and uproariously shouts, “My writing lives!,” I get chills down my spine.
I end this post with the “Quills” trailer [one of my favorites because it includes all the best scenes and music] and another of my many favorite quotes from the film:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u--PYnIYewE]
Abbe: But we also fall in love, we build cities, we compose symphonies, and we endure. Why not put that in your books as well.
Marquis: It’s a fiction, not a moral treatise.