Magic

I think there's two kinds of people in the world, one kind who wants to know how magic tricks work and another who does not. Of course, people change types depending on the kind of trick they're seeing. A couple goes to see a magic show, one is happy seeing David Copperfield's car disappear, the other looks for the strings and mirrors behind the scenes. Yet put those two people in a restaurant and they'll be the opposite, one having no interest in how the food is made, the other sneaking glances into the kitchen. They go home, rent a movie, one captivated in rapt attention while the other is looking at the camera angles, set design, sound, and auteur imprints.

I was thinking about this today, trying to figure out at what point exposing the trickery behind the scenes ruins and when it improves the product. I don't really want to know how Criss Angel does his illusions but I'd love to know how he does his street magic. The last thing I want to see is how the greasy 17 year-olds at Wendy's put together my burgers but when I worked at the Chinese food restaurant, I loved watching the cooks work their sweet and sour skills. Love knowing stories from movie sets about what lines were improvised and who hated whom, but there's nothing more boring to me than watching some white-haired engineer talking about how they had to built a whole city, with a working sewer system and everything, just because they couldn't find a city that, you know, looked right. I don't know how one can unify all those contradictions into a cohesive explanation, except that most couples I know, or am involved with, will contradict each other as often as possible.

What must be universal certainty, however, is how people hate finding out that great art was actually created out of economics. I was listening to a film critic on the radio once talking about how the increasing DVD player and disc sales were affecting film photography. The idea was that DVD sales are so high, and for many the preferred viewing method over the theatre experience, that directors are using more close-up shots in their movies to cater to the smaller size TV screens at home. That kind of takes the artistic pleasure out of movies, doesn't it? I like the idea of directors stomping their foot in their producer's office, refusing to allow his artistic vision to be contradicted. Finding out that they've capitulated to market factors really de-values the viewing experience.

That's kind of annoying, but not annoying enough to warrant a blog post. A better, more aggravating example is with the Transformers movie. No, not the new one, that was awesome, but the 1986 animated movie, which was also awesome. This is a great movie, relatively speaking. Lots of new characters, a truly epic plot, the death of Optimus Prime and Starscream, the evolution and promotion of secondary characters into headliners, and a massive villain worthy of the movie's grand scale. I remember watching this for the first time and being incredibly emotionally involved, far moreso than a 19 year-old should be. But come on! Killing off Optimus Prime and Starscream? That's ballsy. It's the equivalent of killing Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader halfway through Empire Strikes Back, or doing away with Peter Parker and Harry Osbourn. I mean, you're talking about the most important Autobot and second most important Decepticon. That's epic stuff! Congradulations to the filmakers for taking chances and working with the audience's expectations!

Ah, but the backstory cuts out the artistic heart of the movie. The reason they killed off Optimus Prime and the all the rest was because Hasbro was launching a new Transformers toy line featuring a bunch of new characters. The new TV show would feature only the new toy characters, so the writers had to "tie off" a number of the old characters. Pretty weak eh? And Orson Welles voicing Unicron? In declining health during his last film role, Welles really didn't have much idea what he was doing, and was completely oblivious to the cultural phenomenon of which he was excitingly a part.

I guess neither of those are surprises, that companies like to make money or that old people don't care about transforming robots. The appeal of watching a magic trick is that your senses are convinced of something you rationally know to be impossible. Like a computer being presented with statements like "this sentence is a lie," the human brain gets locked in this nexus point between imagination and reality. You can go one of two ways: remain in your state of confused bliss, or attempt to regain your hold on reality and try to make sense out of the incongruity of the experience. It's much the same, I suppose, with old cartoons. You know there's strings and mirrors and marketing ploys that you should be aware of, it's up to you to avoid rooting around backstage after the show's over.

The Unconscious Subconscious nonsense...

I don't put much credence into what dreams are about. I don't believe in any secret meanings or hidden clues that reveal supressed memories, hatred towards parents, or super-charged homosexuality. Sure, you might have dreams that remind you of some fear you have (I'm constantly having ones where I've lost my glasses and somebody needs help), but those aren't repressed or hidden feelings your subconscious suddenly released. You knew that stuff already. People are extremely gifted at finding patterns, and meaning as a result, from random piles of verbal or numeric nonsense. Dreams are just a gumbo of whatever thoughts you had rattling around in your brain during the day. Nothing more.

Last night, I dreamed that I was receiving job counselling in a deep underground mountain fortress. The setting looked exactly like Superman's Fortress of Solitude, except deeper, much bigger, and made of natural rock formations instead of ice. I was led into the deepest chasm by a nice chap wearing black pants, a white collared button-up t-shirt and a black tie. He was cleanshaven and shorter than his colleague, who I met only briefly. He had a nametag but I don't remember what it said. He sat me down at a picnic table and told me to "help myself" to whatever food I wanted while he checked out my application. He walked off towards a trailer, like the kind you see at construction sites, that was about fifty yards away. The only "food" was a glass jar of water, a tub of whey protein, glutamine, creatine, and a shaker cup. I started mixing up the ingredients when I noticed two other people sitting at the table. A tall skinny girl and a short fat girl. They stared at me while I mixed, saying nothing. I asked them "what they were in for." The skinny girl said she was recovering from an eating disorder and had a heroin addiction. The fat girl said she was depressed and had tried to commit suicide. They asked me why I was here. I told them it was because I couldn't find I job that fit with my degree and relative lack of experience. They nodded understandingly. I asked how long they'd been here. They both looked at me, confused.

"We don't remember."
"Well, how long did they say it would take."
"They didn't. Did they tell you?"
"No, actually, I guess not. I'll ask when he comes back."
"When who comes back?"
"That guy who led me over here? The one with the tie?"

They didn't say anything, just stared. I went back to my shaker cup, put the lid on, and shook up the drink. I took off the lid, let it sit for a while and watched the foam dissipate. When I looked up, the girls had gone and the fellow with the tie was back. He was holding a clipboard and was smiling pleasantly.

"I think we can help you. Are you ready to begin?"
"No. Let me finish my shake."
"Take your time. I'll be waiting."

He kept standing there, smiling. I felt angry, hostile all of a sudden. I looked down at my shake. The foam was gone. I looked at the shake, then looked back at him. He saw my hostility but it did not affect his mood.

"No rush."

The Sarah Connocles

Boy I was excited for this. Boy oh boy. Two episodes of "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" have fallen short of the expectations that this show would inevitably create. Considering the evolution of multi-season story arc TV shows in the last few years, emerging from HBO classics "Sex and the City" and "The Sopranos," gaining strength with "24" and "Lost" and peaking, of course, with "Veronica Mars," there was every reason to think that "Terminator" would greatly benefit from its rich sci-fi background and well-developed mythology. Time-travel, apocalypse, mother-son relationships, hot robots, these are all topics perfectly suited to a TV series rather than a movie franchise, especially considering how DVD sales of TV shows have made it possible for multi-layered character and story depth, previously impossible under the Slaves-to-Syndication mentality of the past.

The first two shows have fallen short of this promise, I think, because of their inability to focus on the strengths of the films. Arnold deadpanned lots of great lines before or just after blowing something up or beating someone up and while Summer Glau did much of the same on "Serenity," she hasn't yet been as violent or destructive as Arnold's T-800 was so there isn't the same kind of innocence/violent justapositioning. The pacing has been kind of slow, feeling more like a video game in that the characters may have an ultimate goal, but are just hitting checkpoints along the way. Run away from Terminator, meet Helpful Terminator, break into bank, transport into future, find new ID's, deal with complications. Very linear plotting, the opposite from what you'd expect from a show featuring time-travel as prominently as this one does.

The characters themselves are producing mixed results. Thomas Dekker as John Connor has given a solid performance with a well-written character. It would be pretty easy to portray him as young, whiny, feels-sorry-for-himself teenager but fortunately the writers spared us that cliche. Sarah Connor's voiceovers feel like knockoffs of Mohinder's existential intros on "Heroes." They aren't furthering the plot, they don't develope her character and they don't re-frame the story or the scene in any meaningful way. Voiceovers are used to provide the audience with a voice from outside the world they're watching. The point is to grant perspective on the scene and story in a different way than what the viewer can otherwise draw out from within the storyworld. By limiting Sarah Connor's voiceovers to little more than introspective nattering, no new perspective is gained and the opportunity to enhance the viewer's perspective is lost. Summer Glau's Terminator hasn't been asked to do much other than shove larger men through walls (No plasma arm cannon? No liquid metal? Just "Shoving," that's her power?), but so far is the only character through which the plot can evolve. This will need to change as the series goes on. Right now there's a real claustrophobic feel to the story, which if intentional can work (that the characters are isolated from the rest of the world in their mission) but the relationships between these three characters has to evolve beyond "I didn't know you could do that."

Another gap between the films and the series is the genre gap. The movies were action-science fiction, so far the show has featured little action (the most exciting happening in a dream sequence at the beginning of the pilot episode) and even less sci-fi (that gun they built in the vault was pretty cool, but that's it). Chase scenes in this show won't carry any suspense because we know John won't die, presumably Sarah, the titular character, will make it and the attractive robot will pull through. Miles Dyson was a very sympathetic character in T2, if the show can build in more charaters that the audience connects with, they'll be a lot more emotionally invested into the suspense scenes. I just worry that the show will be the same every week: Sarah and the Termihottie will go out to learn a little more about SkyNet, John will tag along but mostly be relegated to "trying to fit in" plots in his new school/chess team/group sports blog effort, periodically being interrupted by Evil Terminator for a lengthy chase scene featuring, of course, the great and mystical Robots Through Walls fighting technique. I'll stick with it, but I need a little more.

It's a New Year!

Well kind of. Like the Canadian dollar reaching par with its American big brother or $1.00/litre gas, January 1st is a pretty significant psychological barrier. I achieved none of the things I wanted to in 2007 (though it's possible that mail-order bride was merely lost at sea) but with the start of 2008 hope springs eternal. Well no, not really. It springs up once in while and hopefully just long enough to give me the energy to get a job. Edmonton is a nice city but I do not have a nice job, a nice place or a nice car, and as a result I'm getting pretty tired of this place rubbing its nice things in my face. The only thing I can do to fight back is move somewhere that has things Edmonton does not. Like a summer that lasts more than four months. That is this year's goal, to finish 2008 with a real home base, somewhere I'm happy to invite people to visit. Not just in terms of my physical housing space, but have a life worth being proud about. I've never been good at feeling proud of myself or anything I've done, so that's the goal this year. Have a nice pad, have a job I enjoy going to and feel good telling people about, and maybe a cool hobby. The goal for 2009 is to travel like a mad fool. It's probably telling that I'm further along on those plans than 2008's. Good luck to all of you who made New Year's resolutions, hopefully you were able to remember the ones from last year to see if you achieved them. Or hopefully not.