Bascially Revolutionizing Art, thank me later

4/9/09: The no fun highlight of today is going 1-2 drop in a PE and not being an active 2000 anymore. Probably should have retired it in an attempt to convince people that I am good at the thing I want to be good at.

I am losing my zeal. I am itching for fun. Today I felt so stuffed up, it made me want to try the white lady. For real, I have been thinking about it so much. I don't get it because I have no connection, literally none, with the stuff in my life. Luckily, KimmyB is in Ohio, ohio, ohio so I got to hang out with Rob. Trouble with that is that Rob is currently watching Sat. Night Lights the television show as his pastime and he was inflexible about it. It wouldn't have been as bad except he is on season one. Yeah, from 7 years ago. So he kept accusing me of lying about having seen it when I didn't remember something forgetting that we were watching a television show made in the early 00's, following the success of a movie made in the 90's, which was an adaptation of a book written in the '80s about a football team that played in the 70's. Man, does the entertainment business sure know how to take its time.

The best part about hanging out with Rob, besides the fact that we can talk seriously about technical magical issues without it being weird, is he knows the dumbest parts of the Internet (perhaps related to his job?, hard to tell sometimes). Inspired by the drama on screen, I learned about slam pages tonight, which I think is the funniest thing ever. Me and Rob have big plans to start a new hit website slampagerampage.com and post a new slam page every day with awesome animated gifs and arrows that point at a picture of someone with sweet burns. The only problem is that we don't really have anyone to slam (Rob was adamant that you aren't supposed to slam your friend for fun, it has to be real. I think pre-irony days were stupid) which is probably related to why I think the whole idea is so funny. If you hate someone so much, why do you want to spend any time on them, making what is essentially a hate scrapbook. Making stuff is hard work. Rob also taught me that slam pages used to be actual slam books that got passed around and drawn in and stuff. Man. I missed out of so much awesome high school being a stupid born again. What a big mistake. What we both agreed is that the only person in our scene that anyone would want to slam is me. No fun.

Without trying and in different contexts, I fell into watching both Godfathers this week. (Don't get me started on the unspeakable and how no fun it that W. Ryder got sick and got replaced with stupid big nose daughter). I don't think the movies are the best things ever, but watching them got me thinking about how easy it is to make a good movie despite how rare such good movies are. No one in these movies is doing anything spectacular with their acting. The story is just a drama about a family. The cinematography is professional, even inspired at times, but still attainable for the average trained person. Sue always talks about how she likes/misses/wants more slice of life movies. I think it might be more simple than that. I think that regular people doing regular things, even things that bore them, is way more interesting than the no-miss premise that most movies seem to be based around. Despite what you might say about the Godfather being a mobster movie, its really a movie about a family that has regular family problems. A scene that passed me by before but I think is really awesome is when Vito gets fired and brings a pear home for the misses. She gets all excited about a single pear and then they eat. (btw: even dirt poor, they eat better than any of us because they wear suits and dresses. Apparently my dad's dad refused to eat dinner until he changed into a shirt with a tie and coat. I should be so classy) If you think about this theory for one second it holds true across the board. People liked Rocky because it was a movie about a guy that did regular things. Sure, something happens to him that fits into a story arc. But most of the movie he is doing things like buying a girl a dog because he can't think of anything better (she works at a pet store, if you remember). There are long scenes of him running, training, punching meat, walking around the neighborhood doing squat. He does silly things like bounce a racket ball for no reason. Rocky 2-5 are awful movies because they start being all flash and glamour and drama or whatever. Drama is boring. Its boring in life when people try to make it and it falls flat on a screen. This applies to lots of things I think. Personally, I really wish someone would make a skateboarding movie with shots more than 2.4 seconds. Why can't the movie just be in real time? Why can't the first scene of the movie just be a bunch of friends on the El with their skateboards or crammed into a car talking about regular things? If those regular things are skateboarding related, about this site that they are going to explore, than so be it. If those things are the friends making fun of a kid because his girlfriend dumped him last night, than that is interesting too. Most of the time when people skateboard, no one is actually skating, they are bullshitting or going to the corner store to get a snack or they are fixing their board, etc. I realize that the audience for skate videos is people that appreciate the technical aspect of the sport and that is why they have become style guides more than movies but I find the fact that a bunch of dudes spend their time on pieces of wood trying to control them in cool ways way more interesting than the minutia of the sport itself. There is a story there, just in the "here are these people, this is what they do with their time, they care about it" Maybe if people made watchable movies, people would watch them.