neorants

Today I got into a discussion on a message board with a friend who posted a flash animation to Ernest Cline’s Dance Monkeys Dance (the link is to an animation I find arguably better for the spoken word piece). I went off on a bit of a rant about it, because I find it to be typical of the type of stuff that passes as “insightful” today. Click the link below for my thoughts.

So the monkeys are us? I get it. Clever.

Mostly in the sense that so many indie film writers and directors are clever. That is to say, in the false sense.

Caught in the pubescent limbo between knowing nothing and knowing something, exalting in masturbatory pleasure of a distinct nature: a glib presumption that one possesses skill, insight, or wisdom beyond one’s peers, and therefore an imperative to mete out one’s blessings upon a hapless world.

In the end, the only ones gratified by these works are their creator and a unique group of supplicants: those whose self-loathing can only be tempered by the constant reassurance that they are one of the illuminati, able to grasp brilliance and truth in the work of these talented souls who go unappreciated by the great unwashed. In so placating themselves, they damn themselves to grasping neither, confusing exclusivity with profundity.

I am not blind to the irony of this text, by the way. I felt like being wordy; sue me.

(after a brief response in which she explained what she thought the author was trying to say)

Oh, I got it. I’m just not buying it.

I’ve just about had it with pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-artistic tripe. That’s all. It comes off as pompous, pretentious, and otherwise just useless.

But perhaps I’m just bitter because I actually watched Conversations with Other Women in its entirety yesterday.

Have you seen it? Some indie films are great, like Thank You For Smoking (also starring Aaron Eckhart, whom this waste of film stock co-starred), some are passable, and some are just so caught up in trying to be original that they end up as this sort of artistic circle-jerk where everyone is so caught up in trying to win some award for something from people who don’t actually watch movies that they forget to address an audience that actually exists in a useful way.

For instance: during the first 5 minutes of this film, the screen (widescreen) was split into two halves, vertically, yielding two approximately square viewports, as can be seen at the beginning of the trailer, here. I assumed this was just a gimmick to pull you in, initially, BUT I WAS WRONG.

For the entire 84 minutes, these two viewports remained.

The director (Hans Canosa) was so caught up with being clever that he neglected to use the camera to help tell the story.

Now, it could be argued that the split-screen helped to show the sense of distance that existed between what was and what is, or even the dichotomy between the two people when they’re together, but apart from a few instances, it detracted, placing the cinematography above the story. I watched this film for free on Video On Demand with my cable box, and I still felt cheated, after it was all done.

Contrast this with something like the heavy use of split-screen in the television series 24, where the technique is used to advance multiple plotlines within the real-time constraints imposed by the chosen presentation, and you see the difference between someone using technique to tell a story and something pompous and overwrought, intended only to stroke the artist’s own . . . ego.