Some Writing Ideas

I'm on vacation, as I've been saying. This takes a lot of time out of your day, counterintuitively. So, I figured I'd just do something that is essentially my own bookkeeping. This is a list of some writing projects I've either undertaken or am planning on undertaking. If you're at all interested, comment and tell me which of these you'd be most interested in seeing.


Hit the break to see.

Oscars vs. Grammys

The Oscars were last night.

I, like most of America (if Nielson ratings are still to be believed), prefer the Oscars to the Grammys. There are a few relatively obvious reasons for this. The spectacle itself is a bigger event, in terms of scope and spectacle; movie stars are on average more charismatic than musicians; people aren’t afraid to poke fun at the Academy, or each other, or themselves, which makes for more engaging television; and people are more aware of the number of people watching, making them more likely to use their platform in an intriguing way.

But all of that, in my opinion, is ancillary. The biggest reason the Oscars are bigger than the Grammys for people of all demographics is because the Oscars seem to nominate and award the art they’re evaluating based on merit in a more significant manner than the Grammys.

That is to say, Oscar winning movies are typically more respected– by critics, by viewers, by art buffs– than winning Grammy winning songs or albums.

More after the jump.

Subtlety of Meaning vs. Extended Metaphors

I saw Black Swan recently, which is a supernatural pseudo-thriller set in the world of ballet with lesbians overtones. Which, yeah, is a mouthful as far as genres go. Darren Aronofsky, the director of Swan, previously knocked out movies like The Fountain, Requiem for a Dream, and Pi. So the man's pretty familiar with every subsection of that aforementioned genre, except maybe ballet.

I loved Black Swan. Natalie Portman's performance was out-of-her-mind good. If you ever watch sports, they like to use the term "in the zone" to describe a fantastic sports performer playing at a near-perfect level. I'm a Packers fan, and the perfect descriptor of "in the zone" for a sports performer was Aaron Rodgers in the Atlanta Falcons game. Natalie Portman in Black Swan was the cinematic equivalent. She's always been an excellent actress, but Black Swan was so far beyond anything she's done previously that it was like seeing her for the first time.

Hit the break for more.

Sorkin as an Adjective: A View of The Social Network

I watched The Social Network for the third time recently.

Firstly and most pertinently, that movie is beautiful. I feel as though I understand its purpose more with each subsequent viewing. The first time I saw the movie, I enjoyed it, thought it was funny and poignant and scathing and engaging, but I was ultimately unsure why it was written. To paint Mark Zuckerberg as a douche? To expose the kind of seedy aspects of Facebook's creation?

The latter seems more likely. Aaron Sorkin's writing history has been one of exposure. A Few Good Men exposed dark military secrets. Sportsnight and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip were startling views behind the scenes of struggling television programs. The West Wing was the closed doors inner workings of politics. Considered in that vein, The Social Network becomes a movie about the man-behind-the-curtain of Facebook.

Still, despite that, I don't know if that's the purpose of The Social Network.

Hit the break for more.

Arts, Ants and Sonic the Hedgehog

The line in High Fidelity (the book) goes like this: "I've been letting the weather and my stomach muscles and a great chord change in a Pretenders single make up my mind for me, and I want do it for myself." It comes near the end of the book. For those with only knowledge of the movie, it would be in the bar scene, where Rob asks Laura to marry him.



For those of us who love music - for those of us who love any kind of art form purely and with great fervor - we understand what Rob is talking about in that passage. It's a bit inexplicable how a moment of music, or a scene in a movie, a brush stroke in a painting can change your mind, but it can.

The Video Game as an Art Form

I'm sure by now most of you have seen one of YouTube's most defining clips, the shot of a young boy absolutely losing his shit when he realizes that he got a Nintendo 64 for Christmas. If you haven't, you can check it below.

Sonny Tzu's The Art of Television

Television is the basest form of entertainment. At its most crude, it satisfies our most instinctual urges - for sex and violence - in increasingly banal ways. The most perfectly distilled form of this sort of television is easily The Real World. Every subsequent season, the producers at MTV come up with more and more ways to convince people, in situations that are almost bizarrely mundane, to hate, love, fight, fuck and betray each other. Usually between the same two people.

Minimalism and Movie Previews

Minimalism is an interesting artistic concept. Essentially, the idea of minimalism is to take the medium you're working in and strip it down to its most basic elements, removing an extraneous data to get to the core of what you're working with and what you're trying to say. Its principles stretch from painting to sculpture, from music to architecture and, lately, when I've been thinking of the term minimalism, I've been thinking about it in terms of movie previews.

Let me explain after the jump.