Ryan Jenq | Skewed perspectives and opinions on film and more
Photo used without permission by David Stewart
Robert Culp is dead.
Before attending a Bill Cosby book signing for Come On People, I viewed the film Hickey and Boggs, starring Bill Cosby and Robert Culp (who also directed), written by Walter Hill of The Warriors fame and bought a poster to get autographed. Most people know the acting duo from the television series I Spy, which unfortunately, I have never seen. But, I liked the film. It was a bit hard to watch due to the terrible transfer; looked like it was copied straight off a VHS with bunch of grain added tossed on it. I haven’t seen it in a while so I can’t write up a comprehensive review or anything.
Cosby didn’t sign it. Still a nice guy though.
Two years later, Robert Culp was on the New York Comic-Con guest list. I wouldn’t consider myself a fan of him or spending $20 for a signature either. Even though I don’t like video games, I liked his work in Half Life 2, plus I spent $25 for this vintage poster anyway. I said, what the hell, what can I lose?
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I recently viewed the Michael Haneke film La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher). I will make this brief, I don’t know how to explain how much it intrigued me.
Caché is the only other Haneke film I had seen. Though I enjoyed it immensely, I was a bit skeptical about highly stylistic lack of energy, which is relevant considering it’s subject matter. Still, I was afraid his body of work would rely heavily on this distinguished approach: an over-reliance on translucency and minimalism. Kind of like how M. Night’s body of work seems solid after viewing one or two films, but you immediately realize that they lack contrasting core structures. Twists and all. Sure, they work the first few times, but come on. Shyamalan’s cannot efficiently build on any narrative foundations than the one he started with.
Thankfully, La Pianiste failed to confirm my fears.
I don’t know what to say. What a fascinating piece of art. Haneke has an uncanny ability to delve into the human persona through film language. He knows exactly what knobs he is turning and why.
Through Erika (Isabelle Huppert), Haneke takes us deep inside her mind. He shows us the cross and lack thereof between sexuality and art. The fantasies and the frustrations. The fantasy and the reality.
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There is nothing wrong with him or his work.
I just don’t like Alfred Hitchcock.
Every time I have alluded to my distaste, I have been barraged with comments questioning my status as a filmmaker and my appreciation of cinema, simply due to Hitchcock’s prominence in film history. I understand that he is one of the greats and that his revolutionary use of technique (camera movement, sound, etc) have created masterfully created suspense (hence “The Master of Suspense”) and contributed to cinema as a whole.
Those techniques are precisely why I dislike Alfred Hitchcock. Most film scholars would admit that he emphasized fancy spectacles to win audiences everywhere, and that his ability to work with actors is less than stellar. This is not in any way, shape or form bad – considering the narrative contexts, camera techniques, visuals, and suspense employed in his work. That is exactly what I dislike about popular cinema.
Hitchcock’s films accentuate technique over content in it’s purest form.
They live on gimmicks.
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I just finished spending the last two days taking and editing photographs.
First off, I shot a few pieces of artwork for a friend’s portfolio. This was my first time shooting something like this, but the final result was exactly as I expected. Set up was a piece of black foamcore and poster board, along with a basic desklamp and a $10 clamp light with 120 watt daylight balanced CFL. Lots of heavy Photoshop work to eliminate non black space.
A few hours later, I shot a party by request of my friend Michael, celebrating the birthday of his girlfriend. This was my second time using my Vivitar 285HV, I had much less issues with underexposure than last time. I opted for a different tone during post processing. I’m pretty satisfied overall. Of course, there was little to no light so auto-focus was completely out the question. There was barely enough light to focus manually; most of what I captured ended up blurry.
You can check them out on my Flickr account.
I shouldn’t have switched to photojournalism. Of course, I’m glad to be out of the computer science program but I am a filmmaker.
I am a fucking filmmaker, I can’t take any more of this shit.
No way am I going to do that at RIT, the students are all passionless, clueless and garbage. There is much more to cinema than rehashed student zombie shorts. Not to mention when I actually applied for a program change, those motherfuckers made things difficult. Even then they didn’t accept me when I was doing my college apps in high school anyway so what’s the point.
I really tried to get into something else, photography, but it’s not the same. It doesn’t fill that same area of satisfaction and I’m just not feeling it. None of the creative energy I have stored is getting released, not to mention I haven’t taken the kinds of photographs I want to take. I care very much about this expression of beauty through the combination of visual motion and sound elements, even beyond what is real. Documentary photography is great, but to me it has nothing on the physical labor, poetry and sewing required of a documentary film.
Plus I am at the point where I’m 90% sure the short I’m in prepro now for the summer is not going to get shot.
Watching Pierrot le Fou, and writing these posts has put me in a really bad mood.
In better news, I redid my desktop and like it a lot.
Am I the only one who thinks Shutter Island contains the most notable use of sound in a contemporary American film?
Granted, it is a psychological thriller; there is a degree of surrealism surrounding the sanity of the protagonist: which lends the film opportunities take advantage of vivid imagery, violent flashes, the subtle drop of papers in the air and the sun light glaring through windows. It’s a miracle, a film blessed with a wide release in the United States -full of symbolism and motifs associated with key illustrations. Shutter Island doesn’t intersect meaning and image to attempt to reach a transcendent level of artistic excellent for the sake of being “art.” It is used with the pure and innocent task of progressing the content. Plain and simple.
None of the images, nor the content would have been effective without the wonderful sound effects, mixing, and the most beautiful compilation of contemporary classical music in the last decade; an area I feel has been understated. Certain audio cues, such as lightning and low bass, work their way into the audience’s consciousness and overtime, along with the attached images, develop a certain denotation. Certain sounds create specific moods as well as clues towards the answer of the question. Without a doubt, the musical selection contributes to this more than as a vehicle to set tone.
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