It was 3AM and my brain was buzzing. By far the worst aspect to any sort of creative work is how engaging it is. Once I feel that certain “click,” my brain lights up and surges all around. In this instance, unfortunately, that “click” came around 10:30PM, after 2+ hours of drudgery trying to find a crack in a glaring design problem, and the electricity didn’t subside until many hours later.
I’d probably made it worse due to the fact that I had to leave it as it was around 11PM – I am a human being, after all, and do require sleep, or something resembling it. I got in bed just after 1AM, fully energized, then took [#] [sleep aid] and woke up bleary-eyed and foggy-headed. And to top it off, the work is moving slowly due to my insistence on doing it by hand, but it’s going to be done today, and it looks quite good, thanks in no small part to Casey at High Council. I’m looking forward to posting it on this very site in the near future.
This Blah is one of my New Years initiatives. While it’s probably too late for me to change myself – it’s always too late; that’s why hindsight is 20:20 – it’s not too late for me to commit to new distractions and possible modes of expression.
And so I’m going to use it as a sort of place to gather some thoughts and maybe cool things about what I’ve been up to over the past week, so that the curious few might read it over cereal, or on the toilet, or both at the same time.
This leads me to mention that I saw a remarkable double feature this week of Vice followed by First Reformed – two films, I thought, about empathy. First Reformed asks the audience to empathize with each character, shows their best and their worst traits (purposeful/suicidal; conscientious/oppressive; loving/apathetic; civic/proud; charitable/greedy; etc, and lets the viewer decide how they might align their sympathies. While Schrader’s overall agenda (no spoilers here) is highly specific, I think the more generalized conflict within the main character is sincere. Though Ethan Hawke, while doing a good job, often underserves the character’s internal struggle, it painfully shone through and resonated. This film moved me.
Vice was the perfect version of the film I’d been expecting. I’d been a fan of The Other Guys and The Big Short, if not for any other reason than political alignment. I like that McKay has become an angry voice, with films that are more entertaining and less hysterical than any by Michael Moore. And so I was looking forward to seeing a good performance from Christian Bale, some acerbic humor well executed, and that was pretty much it.
Well, that’s all there. What I wasn’t prepared for, however, was how empathetic this film was: notable for its absence, devoid of humanity. Vice is scathing, grade-A satire – a pitch-black spoof of the “complicated” historical figure biopic. Sure, the camera, the editing, the music, the script – they all direct one toward feeling sympathy for they Cheney family. But there was none for me to give, and I’m sure that was McKay’s intention: the audience should feel nothing. Or maybe nothing but contempt. These people are monsters. The only ones who will empathize with them are simply other monsters in disguise.
I’m all writed out for today. See you next week maybe.
WATCHED
Vice (d. Adam McKay)
First Reformed (d. Paul Schraeder)
Hereditary (d. Ari Aster)
A Dark Song (d. Liam Gavin)
The King of Comedy (d. Martin Scorsese)
New Year’s Evil (d. Emmett Alston)
Killing Eve Season 1 Episodes 1-4
LISTENED
Alice in Chains / Dirt
Alice in Chains / Jar of Flies
Beaten to Death / Agronomicon
Beaten to Death / Dødsfest!
Iskandr / Euprosopon
Krallice / Dimensional Bleedthrough
Krallice / Years Past Matter
Mastodon / Leviathan
Pallbearer / Fear & Fury
Rage Against the Machine / Renegades
Rival Schools / United by Fate
Weezer / Weezer (1994)
PLAYED
Chrono Trigger
Kingdom: Two Crowns
856.48 GB AVAILABLE