The Last, Best Escape Room

I spent the day helping a friend move into a new apartment, so I'm pretty exhausted. I wouldn't say too exhausted to actually write something down, but I guess it's close enough that at this point it might as well be an off day. As with the other times this has happened, though, I don't want to leave you with just this paragraph of excuses, so here's a semi-story I haven't shared on this blog yet.

Escape rooms are still popular, right?

Champion Of The New

I don’t really think of myself as a film critic. I watch a lot of movies, yes, which I think inevitably means that opinions are going to change and develop as I express them, and there was that one time I tried to have a weekly review blog that we don’t really talk about anymore, but, I don’t know, I guess the label just never really stuck.

But one thing I have realized I enjoy doing from that whole process is telling people about movies they otherwise wouldn’t have heard of. Not in an “If you haven’t watched this movie you haven’t lived” sort of way (see below), it’s more of an “I don’t think this movie gets the respect it deserves” idea.

I think that’s why critics like to do Top X pieces. There are other reasons, sure (lists are both easy to make and easy to consume, search engine optimization and clicks are the driving moneymakers in the gig economy, etcetera), but at least ideally, there’s also the drive to promote. To take from Anton Ego at the end of Ratatouille, “The new needs friends.”

So with all that said, let’s talk about something new.

The Proposal (2018) is a documentary about an art installation, the installation itself about an artist and their relationship with their own artwork after their death. That’s its primary question, one that features prominently in its trailer: “What happens after the death of the author?” But that message has two meanings. The first is the obvious: An artist’s work is their legacy, but art can be a commodity. So what happens to that legacy when someone just… buys all of the art? And doesn’t let anyone see it?

The second, question, though, is a bit more physical: Does their body reach similar sacred heights? Filmmaker and visual artist Jill Magid has an answer to both questions already in mind. Her goal is, by taking you through the same steps she did, by showing you the same pieces of architecture that she has seen, she wants to guide you to that same conclusion. Or, at the very least, think harder about why your answer might differ.

But presenting a perspective and defending it is an obvious selling point for documentaries. What makes The Proposal stand out is just how pretty everything looks. Luis Barragán’s work is treated with the reverence it deserves, with special lingering looks at his Satelite Towers and his El Bebedero fountain, and they emphasize certain voiceover moments as perfect moving images.

One thing I want to point out specifically is how Jill Magid seems to take special pains to try and always film herself from behind. By doing so she becomes an observer, just like her audience, even if she herself admits that by even presenting this story she is forever changing its history and future. She also makes an aside towards the more controversial aspects of her project (“I know my offer is unorthodox” she says in the opening narration). I mention these because, again, depending on how you view the questions the movie poses, you might find yourself hesitant to view further after a little research.

I don’t know how easy or hard this movie will be to find after its limited theatrical run. The way I figure, you’ll probably forget this post by the time this movie re-enters your consciousness. But if you haven’t forgotten it, I hope that this sways you to watch it.

Really, that’s all I can do.

-F

Things To Do Instead Of Writing A Blog Post

It’s an odd situation to find oneself in, only remembering a deadline you’ve set pretty hard for yourself only after the fact. But let’s not dwell too hard on the past and instead focus on things that could be done instead of focusing on deadlines -- the things I was doing instead.

1) Sleeping in! I do this especially after having to close at work, where I just sort of plow through the next morning and straight into the afternoon. There are a lot of other factors, especially in the summer when it’s less likely that I’ll have scheduled obligations in the morning, but it certainly happens.

2) Grocery Shopping! This kind of happens on a by-need basis. I guess that’s just what happens when there are two stores just down the street. This also means I tend to shop a little light. After all, I can always go back and buy more.

3) Seeing a Movie! I saw Meeting Gorbachev, a film by Werner Hertzog and Andre Singer exploring its titular subject over the course of three interviews. It’s an interesting watch, I think. Hertzog at this point is known for his narration and affect which translates well, and the subject matter is something I’ve been tangentially interested in (or interested in because people I know are interested in it). What the film doesn’t do, really, is display too much content from the interviews themselves, so if that’s what you’re looking for, I’d suggest steering away. If you’re looking for an (admittedly biased) overview of Cold War Russian history, though, this is a good one.

4) Cooking! People around me say I’m good at it but I’m not so sure. Like, I can, and it (mostly) tastes good, so I suppose if you call “anyone who cooks,” then yes, I’m a cook. But in terms of personal identity, I don’t know. I’ve never thought of myself as “a cook” even if I do the things a cook does on occasion.

5) Writing Other Things! I have other things! I can’t show you them yet (or, for some of them, ever (sorry!)), but I have talked about some of them in the past. For example, just last week I talked about a sort-of memetic lighthouse and that, well, that still hasn’t gone away. That’s kind of the point of it, really.

One does have to eventually buckle down and get back on schedule, though. That’s what this is for: a list of excuses and a promise to do better. And hey, if you go by the timezones on Blogspot -- a Pacific Time Zone company -- I technically wasn’t late just yet.

 I’ll see you next Tuesday, for real next time.

 -F

Terraforming (Part Four): The Lighthouse

I’ve recorded in the past how I tend not to remember my dreams and how that’s lead to them becoming something of a minor fascination of mine. Most of that is still true, though I do occasionally catch glimpses now. I remember having them, at the very least. This post is still about a fictional dream, but it’s one that pervades my thoughts and demands a setting to be placed in.

It’s been a while since I’ve written here about Naviim, that fictional kingdom I throw so many ideas into, throwing worldbuilding elements into it like they’re all magnets on a fridge, rearranging them as I see fit. That’s what happens when you’re working with two or three periods in the kingdom’s history. In this case, I imagine this particular element as a sort of bridge between the two.

What I imagine is this ethereal lighthouse haunting people’s dreams, a sort of eldritch location that just shows up. It doesn’t do anything malicious (at least, not yet), but it does seem to cause people to obsess about it, desperate to find its physical manifestation even though one might not exist.

Now, astute readers might notice how in the first paragraph I introduced the lighthouse as something that “pervades my thoughts,” while later introducing the same elements into the fictional world as well. One might presume that it’s sort of memetic trap similar to, say, The Game (the one you just lost) or Roko’s Basilisk (don’t look that one up). But I don’t think so. It’s probably just me. Though that’s probably what they always say right before it starts.

In any case, because of its probable lack of, you know, corporeal-ness, it could easily withstand the apocalypse. As long as there is somebody to look for it, it exists. What happens after that? Well, I haven’t quite figured that part out yet. I just wanted to get something about it written down. I’m sure I’ll let you all know, though.

-F

Change For The Better(?)

Work has been going through something of a restructuring recently. Now, to be fair to them, it’s a new business quarter, so it’s probably the right time to, but the fact that they’re all seemingly happening at once means that they border on overwhelming. Some of these I’ve mentioned to people already, but just for the sake of completeness, let’s go through each of them:

Staff changes aplenty have happened. In addition to losing six workers due to various reasons and having to hire en masse for those, we’ve also got a new shift manager who’s been acclimating themselves to the new environment. Everyone seems good so far, though it’s still pretty easy to tell who has been around for longer than who.

We’ve also switched up our menu. We’ve swapped out three or four dishes for new ones, and though I would have liked to have seen us maintain the split between geographical regions we had before, I do have to admit that the new dishes do taste pretty good. One of them, though, has the awful corporate portmanteau of zucchini and spaghetti, and “zuccheti” is not ever going to be a thing, I guarantee it. I’ve spent more time explaining what it is and how to pronounce it than taking orders for it.

With the menu change comes an aesthetic change as well. The old menu was confusing, yes, and this one may or may not be better (I get too used to these things too quickly to tell for sure), but it does certainly clash with the rest of our labelling. Now, I’m not saying I would have done better, but I would have thought about all the smaller, yet noticeable details in the redesign. For example, a lot of our wall decor now references dishes we no longer serve. But maybe we’re saving that particular change until we run out of cups and bags and chopsticks with the wrong restaurant name on them.

On a more “sausage is made” level, we’ve gotten new equipment! Well, some new equipment, and by “equipment,” I mean, “stuff that doesn’t work/fit/something else.” I won’t go into too much detail on that, but suffice to say, we’ve had a couple things that just don’t work and it’d be nice if they did, thanks.

We’ve also tried moving extra supplies around. I’ve been told that this will be a “one weird day where we can’t find anything but will be better in the long run” sort of deals, but I’m not entirely sure about that. So far, it mostly just seems like people have been moving things around just to move things, just to change things up. It’s all the same stuff and it’s all the same nooks and crannies, so I don’t know.

I don’t mean to be complaining all the time. A lot of these, in reality, are just minor gripes stretched out into paragraph-long problems. I mean, the store still runs like it used to, so things haven’t really gotten worse. But things are happening, even if I don’t write about them right away.

-F

Trailers (Not The Park Kind)

If you want you can think of this as a follow-up/rehash of that spoilers post I did a few weeks back. Not that it covers the same material per se, but it covers similar internet reactions to similar portions of media. Instead of talking about the merits of not giving away the final moments of certain stories, let’s talk about the opposite: the parts they show before the movie or game or show is even out.

In fact, spoilers and trailers are more related than one might realize. There are numerous people on the internet that swear by not watching trailers, believing that they’re either deceptive marketing out to trick you or give away way too much of any given movie. There are people say that theaters play too many and people that say they have to see all of them.

There’s definitely an art to a good trailer. The one for Suspiria (2018), for example, seems like one you’d get tired of seeing after a certain point, but I never seemed to. Madeline’s Madeline (2018)’s trailer, too. What makes both of these work, I think, is how instead of describing the plot, they’re big on conveying the emotion of the film. For Suspiria, that was dread. For Madeline’s Madeline, that was its dream logic.

We’ve certainly moved on since “In a world…” (not the 2013 movie (obligatory trailer link)).

There are other, similar promotional materials as well. Blade Runner 2049 (2017) had a few prequel (interquel?) short films before its release, as did Alien: Covenant (2017). These tend to be the more nostalgia-driven films, I’ve noticed, but it’s something I’ve noticed as far back as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), which had an additional scene with a character who otherwise starts the movie very much dead. There’s not much to say about these because they’re exactly what they are: superfluous to the main story, which is why they aren’t in the film.

But that brings up an interesting idea. Trailers don’t have to show what’s in the movie. Like I mentioned, this can cause some consternation among audiences who feel lied to. It seems like every horror movie A24 produces falls victim to this, including It Comes At Night (2017), which I’ve talked about before. To elaborate, it seems like they prefer slower-burn horror, but they always want to market it as more standard fare to attract an audience. The most recent example of this was High Life (2019), which has a trailer promising space-horror, but it’s written and directed by Claire Denis, a French arthouse filmmaker. Now, I understand being frustrated, but one does have to remember that they’re being sold something.

I’ve been trying to talk about the better side of trailers because I’m firmly in the “I enjoy them,” camp. Really, the only trend I’ve found annoying about trailers is how they tend to announce themselves online. As advertisements, I mean, there’s been a huge push to have the first five seconds be an ad in itself so that people don’t skip past them on Youtube (for an example, see that Blade Runner 2049 trailer). It’s like how jpeg compression can slowly ruin images, combining bits together saves data but it means it ends up as a flash of incomprehensible images and sound. I imagine some poor editor, having made what they think is a pretty good trailer, being forced to hack away at it until only the explosions and thrills remain.

But there are also the bad ones. The ones people can only wonder how bad the movie’s going to be if it’s going to sell itself like this. Sonic the Hedgehog (which I’m not going to link here) had a trailer so bad it’s causing artists to probably go into a crunch period to fix some of its more out-there aspects, and even without those its best selling point is probably hoping that people see it to laugh at it (or Jim Carrey, I guess). Because again, it’s an artform. It’s meant to be judged.

Again, these things are trying to sell something. I don’t want to downplay that. When I say I like watching trailers, I’m still participating as a consumer, not so much as a critic. So that’s at least one reason to be wholly against them. But at the same time, I wouldn’t have seen some of the smaller movies I’ve seen without some of these trailers, so the idea of completely ignoring them just seems completely foreign to me.

-F

Raindrops on Roses (Part Eighteen): The Hypothetical Screen-Novel

To reiterate what I said in my introduction post (see Raindrops on Roses part Fifteen-and-a-Half), I wanted to talk about adaptations of computer screens, but I couldn’t think of a good book that did something similar to match the film/game/book sets I had been doing. So instead I plan to describe how the aspects that make Searching and Secret Little Haven work might translate over to a less visual medium.

Some books aren’t entirely without visuals, of course. The graphic novel medium could potentially use the computer screen quite well. It presents a similar limitation to Richard McGuire’s Here, where instead of a single place presented over multiple time periods, the novel could depict a single screen, following the cursor around just like a film might. Individual windows could be treated like different panels and such, for example.

This does run into the problem of separating itself wholly from its filmic inspirations. At best, what I’ve just done is describe a storyboard for something like Searching. And, I mean, it works. I could see something done like this, but that’s not what I was going into this piece trying to explore.

We learned from Searching that introducing characters before reducing them to IRC messages helps the audience, largely by letting them get to know that character in a different context first. And we learned from Secret Little Haven that a sort of melodramatic earnestness goes a long way. If all your characters have their emotions written on their sleeve, interpreting their messages as anything other than the obvious becomes difficult, if not impossible.

Both of these lessons operate under the assumption that the aesthetic problem gets solved, i.e., how do you make a book look like a computer screen? The closest I can think of is the “documentary novel” Nothing But The Truth by Avi. It’s written in a semi-script format, which serves to hide both critical details about the truth behind certain events but also many of its characters’ motivations. So even that example is not perfect. It runs counter to the emotional honesty that the previous two examples provided, obfuscating rather than illuminating.

What we’re looking for, therefore, is a novel that eschews traditional formatting in favor of (probably) text messages, IRC chat, or some other format that reduces description. It preferably needs to have earnest characters, each of whom get little introduction scenes before being pulled into the larger narrative.

I don’t know if that book exists yet. If it does, I haven’t read it yet. It might be a bit of a mess, to be honest, though I also think a lot of books sound like a bit of a mess when you boil them down to a paragraph of description. But it would be neat to see if it matches the same mood that those other examples do.

-F