Wiseguy
Having recently returned from what I considered to be a well-deserved and much-needed vacation, I find myself questioning the nature of the vacation, and the actual motivation behind such undertakings.
Mostly, I find myself asking this because I am currently sitting on my ass watching the Computer Lab here at work because the main computer-dude is away... on vacation.
I guess my biggest question is this: Why the hell do you need a vacation from this? All I have to do is sit here and explore the internet. The machiens are all top-of-the-line, so there are rarely-if-ever any problems, and when there are they are, by and large, someone needing me to enter the password so they can log on. I've sat here for four hours so far just looking at different websites that I enjoy and, frightening consideration, I've run out of internet. I've goddamned run OUT of INTERNET. I even looked at a few of the less appropriate ones, O Risk-Taker me.
And I know this guy. It's not as if he's jet-setting off to Kuai for the week that he's off. He's going to sit at home and relax. Most likely, he'll do so ON THE INTERNET. Apart from being around all these people and, I suppose, the stress and pressure of reponsibility (but, again, I know the guy...) there really isn't any large categorical difference between what he'll be doing with his time off and what he would have been doing had he stuck around the office, except at home he isn't getting paid to slack off.
At any rate, like I say, it's a nice little set up. I have unchecked authority in here, and am allowed to impose my will on any and all visitors of the Lab. I can involve myself as little or as much in their lives as I please, and I have a high-speed internet connection as well (that none of the other computers have, as we became a little tired of the whole, "Don't look at porn sites, little Johnny," routine). And now it seems, as the time to close the Lab edges nearer, that, without having said a word, these people sense that their time is soon to be over, and they are slowly, one by one, filing out the door. Soon the place will be empty, I will be alone, and perhaps then I'll give the more-than-inappropriate sites a flying go.
Mostly, I think the concept of the vacation is the scheduling manifestation of the Greater Overlying Theory of American Laziness. GOTAL, as I've come to call it, affects every aspect of our life to a degree, but in the form of the "vacation," as it is made manifest in today's society, is some kind of hyper-distillation of that laziness. People who work 4 hours a day, twice a week, will come to work and drag-ass around, saying the entire time, "I don't want to be here, I don't want to be working," take their measly check at the end of the pay period and, in a couple of months, they'll ask for a weekend off. "I just need to unwind, man. I've been going full tilt, firing on all pistons. I need a break bad."
If you did anything, then I might agree with you, but every single day for you is a vacation, it's just a vacation that you happen to spend here while getting paid.
Now, as the forerunner of research into the theories and rationale of GOTAL, and as a self-confessed and diagnosed American Lazy Bastard myself, I feel I can say with a degree of safety that it is strange that I myself am slightly intolerant of laziness. Even today I find it hard to believe that the concept of slight lack-of-ethic is anathema to me, though it may be simply here, and now, or whenever it is that I happen to be doing something that I geniunely enjoy. Yes, then the laziness bothers me to a grand degree. We are, as a race and as a nation, not the industrious, career-oriented, goal-achieving cross-section that we were prophesied to be. Instead, we are a people who largely hope to get by with as much as we can get on as little work as possible. There are exceptions, but they are, in fact, exceptions, and the fact that they are exceptions proves the rule. We are all lazy shits, and we desperately need this time off, less we become irrevocably irritable lazy shits.
Aaaaaaand I hate you all.
...
I watched Goodfellas again last night (which I actually feel a little guilty about, considering I have three Netflix films backed up, I've had Tokyo Story for a week and I still haven't watched that, and I don't like watching films I've already seen that I don't really need to see again when there are so many films I haven't seen... if you follow me) and I just wanted to give it what brief immortality I could afforded by the Internet, as it deserves all I can give it, by saying that it truly is a remarkable film, and a lucid example of Scorcese's artistry at it's most soft-handed. What Scorcese put of himself into that film he did within folds of celluloid and turns of scenery like flour folded into dough, like flowers pressed between book pages.
The jarring freeze-frames, meant to jar, meant to displace, do so in a manner that falls into place like a child's peg-toy. After it happens, we can't imagine the freeze-frame being anywhere else and, indeed, can't imagine that part of the film without a freeze-frame, no matter how completely disorienting it succeeds in being. We begin to think that perhaps we even expected one to pop up, to give us a moment to consider, to take us out of ourselves if only for that instant.
The film is full of canonical wiseguy dialogue (two conversations in particular that pigeonholed Deniro and Pesci, the "Little Bit" and "How am I Funny" discourses respectively) and filmic pantheon scenes that are bread and butter to any cinematography/directing 101 professors, even those that haven' the slightest clue what the fuck they're doing (I'm looking at you, Evanow, you mushroom-shaped marketer). The long takes of the entrance to the club and the introduction of all the gangster friends (I'm gonna get the papers, get the papers... like you weren't thinking that right then) are so legendary in themselves that anyone who had seen the film almost certainly thought of those scenes the moment I mentioned the film, rather than was reminded of them once I'd listed their existence.
Tommy's execution, Henry's failed score and subsequent bust, Jimmy attempting to kill both Henry and his wife in such a roundabout manner, these are the things that have helped to carve the film heritage that is the modern American filmmaker's inheritance, and these are the things that make American film the most influential in modern and historical cinema.
Anyway, whetever it may mean coming from me, the film is fantastic. If you haven't seen it (and I honestly hate to say this, because I hate it when people say it to me unless asked) you should. There aren't a lot of films I would say this about. In fact, some of my favorite films I would not say this about, but this film is not only an important film for film's integrity, but it's a truly enjoyable film, and it's enjoyable for the right reasons. It's enjoyable for the reasons that all films shoudl be enjoyable, and you should see it so that, as a society, we can learn what a good film should be, what we should be enjoying about film, and how film can be something more than what most of the shit we watch today is.
How film can be so much more than Maid in motherfucking Manhattan.
I want to make films like this. I want films to be made like this. I want more films LIKE. THIS. If there are more movies like this that are widely enjoyable by a large audience, but still enjoyable because, at the end of the day, they're just plain good movies, perhaps we can retrain ourselves to like good films. Perhaps we can return to some kind of culture, some basic form of civilization. Not sophistication in the form of snobbery, but in the form of intelligence. In the form of distinction. In the form of self-respect. I would ask anyone out there to attempt such a transformation. I would ask us all to.
More and more, day after day, this is becoming my true life's work.
Mostly, I find myself asking this because I am currently sitting on my ass watching the Computer Lab here at work because the main computer-dude is away... on vacation.
I guess my biggest question is this: Why the hell do you need a vacation from this? All I have to do is sit here and explore the internet. The machiens are all top-of-the-line, so there are rarely-if-ever any problems, and when there are they are, by and large, someone needing me to enter the password so they can log on. I've sat here for four hours so far just looking at different websites that I enjoy and, frightening consideration, I've run out of internet. I've goddamned run OUT of INTERNET. I even looked at a few of the less appropriate ones, O Risk-Taker me.
And I know this guy. It's not as if he's jet-setting off to Kuai for the week that he's off. He's going to sit at home and relax. Most likely, he'll do so ON THE INTERNET. Apart from being around all these people and, I suppose, the stress and pressure of reponsibility (but, again, I know the guy...) there really isn't any large categorical difference between what he'll be doing with his time off and what he would have been doing had he stuck around the office, except at home he isn't getting paid to slack off.
At any rate, like I say, it's a nice little set up. I have unchecked authority in here, and am allowed to impose my will on any and all visitors of the Lab. I can involve myself as little or as much in their lives as I please, and I have a high-speed internet connection as well (that none of the other computers have, as we became a little tired of the whole, "Don't look at porn sites, little Johnny," routine). And now it seems, as the time to close the Lab edges nearer, that, without having said a word, these people sense that their time is soon to be over, and they are slowly, one by one, filing out the door. Soon the place will be empty, I will be alone, and perhaps then I'll give the more-than-inappropriate sites a flying go.
Mostly, I think the concept of the vacation is the scheduling manifestation of the Greater Overlying Theory of American Laziness. GOTAL, as I've come to call it, affects every aspect of our life to a degree, but in the form of the "vacation," as it is made manifest in today's society, is some kind of hyper-distillation of that laziness. People who work 4 hours a day, twice a week, will come to work and drag-ass around, saying the entire time, "I don't want to be here, I don't want to be working," take their measly check at the end of the pay period and, in a couple of months, they'll ask for a weekend off. "I just need to unwind, man. I've been going full tilt, firing on all pistons. I need a break bad."
If you did anything, then I might agree with you, but every single day for you is a vacation, it's just a vacation that you happen to spend here while getting paid.
Now, as the forerunner of research into the theories and rationale of GOTAL, and as a self-confessed and diagnosed American Lazy Bastard myself, I feel I can say with a degree of safety that it is strange that I myself am slightly intolerant of laziness. Even today I find it hard to believe that the concept of slight lack-of-ethic is anathema to me, though it may be simply here, and now, or whenever it is that I happen to be doing something that I geniunely enjoy. Yes, then the laziness bothers me to a grand degree. We are, as a race and as a nation, not the industrious, career-oriented, goal-achieving cross-section that we were prophesied to be. Instead, we are a people who largely hope to get by with as much as we can get on as little work as possible. There are exceptions, but they are, in fact, exceptions, and the fact that they are exceptions proves the rule. We are all lazy shits, and we desperately need this time off, less we become irrevocably irritable lazy shits.
Aaaaaaand I hate you all.
...
I watched Goodfellas again last night (which I actually feel a little guilty about, considering I have three Netflix films backed up, I've had Tokyo Story for a week and I still haven't watched that, and I don't like watching films I've already seen that I don't really need to see again when there are so many films I haven't seen... if you follow me) and I just wanted to give it what brief immortality I could afforded by the Internet, as it deserves all I can give it, by saying that it truly is a remarkable film, and a lucid example of Scorcese's artistry at it's most soft-handed. What Scorcese put of himself into that film he did within folds of celluloid and turns of scenery like flour folded into dough, like flowers pressed between book pages.
The jarring freeze-frames, meant to jar, meant to displace, do so in a manner that falls into place like a child's peg-toy. After it happens, we can't imagine the freeze-frame being anywhere else and, indeed, can't imagine that part of the film without a freeze-frame, no matter how completely disorienting it succeeds in being. We begin to think that perhaps we even expected one to pop up, to give us a moment to consider, to take us out of ourselves if only for that instant.
The film is full of canonical wiseguy dialogue (two conversations in particular that pigeonholed Deniro and Pesci, the "Little Bit" and "How am I Funny" discourses respectively) and filmic pantheon scenes that are bread and butter to any cinematography/directing 101 professors, even those that haven' the slightest clue what the fuck they're doing (I'm looking at you, Evanow, you mushroom-shaped marketer). The long takes of the entrance to the club and the introduction of all the gangster friends (I'm gonna get the papers, get the papers... like you weren't thinking that right then) are so legendary in themselves that anyone who had seen the film almost certainly thought of those scenes the moment I mentioned the film, rather than was reminded of them once I'd listed their existence.
Tommy's execution, Henry's failed score and subsequent bust, Jimmy attempting to kill both Henry and his wife in such a roundabout manner, these are the things that have helped to carve the film heritage that is the modern American filmmaker's inheritance, and these are the things that make American film the most influential in modern and historical cinema.
Anyway, whetever it may mean coming from me, the film is fantastic. If you haven't seen it (and I honestly hate to say this, because I hate it when people say it to me unless asked) you should. There aren't a lot of films I would say this about. In fact, some of my favorite films I would not say this about, but this film is not only an important film for film's integrity, but it's a truly enjoyable film, and it's enjoyable for the right reasons. It's enjoyable for the reasons that all films shoudl be enjoyable, and you should see it so that, as a society, we can learn what a good film should be, what we should be enjoying about film, and how film can be something more than what most of the shit we watch today is.
How film can be so much more than Maid in motherfucking Manhattan.
I want to make films like this. I want films to be made like this. I want more films LIKE. THIS. If there are more movies like this that are widely enjoyable by a large audience, but still enjoyable because, at the end of the day, they're just plain good movies, perhaps we can retrain ourselves to like good films. Perhaps we can return to some kind of culture, some basic form of civilization. Not sophistication in the form of snobbery, but in the form of intelligence. In the form of distinction. In the form of self-respect. I would ask anyone out there to attempt such a transformation. I would ask us all to.
More and more, day after day, this is becoming my true life's work.
posted by DeadLanguage at 3:27 PM
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