Don't worry, it's not just LJ. Currently, I can't seem to write anything.
It seems I haven't posted since... July. So, who wants soup?
No, seriously, I have an awesome, awesome recipe for Thai chicken soup that I just had to share because it is a TRIUMPH. You will need:
- 1 large, heaped tablespoon of red curry paste. Possibly more. YMMV.
- 3 cups chicken stock, plus 2 cups plain hot water. So, quite watered-down chicken stock.
- 1 onion, finely chopped.
- 1 carrot, cut into chopstick-friendly slices.
- about 3 cups chopped bok choi, also in chopstick-friendly pieces.
- about 400g chicken, also in... well, yeah.
- 2 cups bean sprouts.
- Udon noodles. How many depends on how souplike you want your soup.
Heat about a tablespoon of oil in your soup pot, and spoon in the curry paste. Stir it around until it's sizzling and making your eyes water. Add the onions, and stir until starting to soften. Open a window. Then add the chicken, and cook through.
Add the carrots, then the chicken stock. Wait until that is bubbling, and the carrots are a little tender, then add your udon noodles. When they are just about cooked, add the bean sprouts, stir, and finally, add the bok choi. Turn off the heat, stir until the bok choi is just wilted, then serve.
Please note that I wasn't joking about the goggles. A common side-affect of noodle soup is flailing and blindness. Enjoy!
~
Honestly, you probably didn't notice, but I am sorry I haven't posted in so long. This is actually the longest I've been able to make my fingers type out complete sentences with the end goal of completing something. Here's something I've noticed: I have a belief that I could do anything, absolutely anything, if I could just make myself not suck so much. Having realised this, I am endeavoring not to suck. It's a bit hard. Especially when a deadline's looming, and all I want to do is read Cable & Deadpool until 3 a.m.
FILM 222, the practical course that I have been desperate to get into for two years, is hard. We have 5 projects, each mandatory, each worth 20% of our mark, and we've had two already. And they're not little projects, they're stuff like: do a 7-shot sequence telling a coherent narrative without dialogue or commentary. Write a 12-page, character-driven script that tells 3 distinct arcs. Do a short autobiographical film - and get it perfect on the first take, because you're not allowed to edit it. Stuff like that. It's nerve-wracking. More nerve-wracking: I got a C on the first assignment. My first ever C in Film. Sure, live-action composition isn't my strong point, but by God, my script better get a much better mark or I'm sunk. Also, the lecturer called the sequence 'cliched and incoherent.' Meanie. It was totally coherent.
The good side is that I am genuinely learning cool stuff necessary to making films (who knew scripts were so strictly formatted?), so even if I flunk this course, I'll know what to do. Plus, the five projects actually make a great starter-portfolio, which is a leg-up. The trick, I guess, is to just do my own thing whenever possible, and keep plugging away. And not get distracted. D:
So, that existential whine over: what else is going on? Oh, I have a giant and visible bruise! This is a big deal, I never bruise visibly. Very thick skin. But no, Sas and I went to see The Dark Knight for the second time on Tuesday, and I tripped over some mug's coat and crashed into the arm of a chair, bruising the fuck out of my thigh. There's a purple thing the size of my fist. It still hurts to walk a little. (Speaking of The Dark Knight, does anyone still care what I thought, or have we moved on by now?) ETA: Okay, apparently people care! Yay!
Okay, my thoughts are large and complicated, and also partly stolen from other people's thoughts, because there have been so many good reviews. I loved so many things about it, I'm not even quite sure where to start. No, wait, here: I didn't like Batman Begins. *ducks rotten fruit* I mean, I didn't hate it! But I was kind of heinously indifferent. Your main character dresses up as a giant bat to fight crazy people - and what, you're not going to do anything with that? Point out that he's every bit as crazy as the people he's fighting, but just managing to delude himself that it's perfectly reasonable? Batman Begins felt far too reasonable, to me. Too bland and logical. Possibly Katie Holmes was sucking even more of the life out of it than I realised, but it just wasn't demented enough for a Batman movie, and that made it boring.
This movie corrected any gripe I had with the previous film. (Well, except maybe the use of Rachel Dawes, but even then it was an improvement - I'll come back to that.) It had crazy to spare, and studied very intently the line a sane and reasonable man might trip over in becoming a super-anything. It also did something very wonderful at the end that made me sit up and go, "Thank you! You got your hope and faith in my dark cynicism and it tastes GREAT!" (I'll also come back to that.)
I loved the interactions between Bruce and Alfred - it seemed real and added a lovely touch of personality that was needed. I loved that this film was full of little throwaway lines that were just there to remind you that these people were more than masks or jobs to be done. I loved the idea of lying for the greater good - Harvey saying he was Batman to draw out the Joker; Batman telling Gordon to pin Harvey's murders on him; Alfred burning Rachel's letter - because it tied in beautifully with the theme of hope and justice as powerful yet fragile abstract concepts that need a lot of effort to maintain, but would be devastating to lose. I loved that none of this was hammered home, yet was so clear throughout.
jen_in_japan pointed out in her review that when Harvey says that you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain, you could easily say the former refers to Rachel. She dies with all her love and integrity intact; she knows, when Batman gets there, that it's too late, but uses her last seconds to comfort Harvey anyway. Thinking of that, it puts a different spin on Harvey's last scene, when he's holding Gordon's son hostage; he wants Gordon to know what it's like to tell a loved one that everything's going to be okay when it's not. I didn't realise it until the second viewing, but Rachel was the one doing the comforting, while Harvey freaked out about the danger she was in. It makes me feel a little better about how underused she was otherwise - though, man, yay for Maggie Gyllenhaal. She did a lot with the little she was given.
The performances were uniformally awesome, of course. I really loved Aaron Eckhart in this, and I hope I see him in more stuff. Two-Face always had the potential to be too silly to take seriously, but between the flawless (and seriously icky) CGI job and his performance, it felt too genuinely horrible and sad to ever break the suspension of disbelief. It was just monstrous, in the way that you were never sure if you pitied or feared him more. Perfect.
Heath Ledger, of course, went in the other direction, and are you impressed that I've held out this long before mentioning him? I'm impressed. Also, really sad, because Jesus, what I high note to go out on. Anyway, silliness and the avoidence thereof: the Joker was never not going to be silly. The whole point of the Joker is that he's silly gone wrong, the literal embodiment of "it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye" so you're constantly torn between hysterical giggling and the knowledge that you are never again going to be able to look at a HB pencil without shuddering. Or a naughty nurse's outfit. Or a cellphone. That you never truly knew what made him tick was also a wise move. I love The Killing Joke - hell, I own it - but, while it is a fascinating and brilliant story, that Joker is not the one that was needed for this film. The Joker is far more terrifying as a cipher, and a psycho without a cause is a far more convincing agent of chaos.
Performance-wise, I think this made me realise what Ledger's greatest strength is as an actor: his voice. I mean, yeah, he nailed body-language too - I'll come back to the tongue thing - but the voice is where, looking back on it, he really seemed to nail down who his characters were. With the Joker, I noticed how often his voice rises above an ordinary speaking tone, and that was maybe three times in the whole movie. So, he didn't make the Joker scary by shouting, or even by having an evil laugh - though, on the occasions he employs it, like with the horrible little home-video, it's hair-raising. Instead, he keeps this quite reasonable tone while using a distinctive accent that sounds like it's been scraped throat-first over gravel, hoarse and gutteral except when it cracks into a high giggle. Clever: half the lines, he seems to mutter to himself, not particularly caring who's listening, and that, perversely, makes you listen more, trying to catch every word. I've never seen Jack Nicholson's performance, but I don't think I'd find it half so nuanced.
But the physical performance is a factor as well. Every mean grin, every look of bright-eyed attention or lip-licking concentration shows through the makeup. The Glasgow smile was a clever take, as it hints at start-of-darkness type traumas but never explains them, and in the meantime is a memorable disfigurement. I was struck on my first viewing by how clever the lip-licking was, because not only does it add that nastiness to his voice, it also seems credibly like a habit someone would develop while not sure of the corners of their mouth, once again bringing the attention to his scars and his smile. I also love how he handles objects - not like his movements have been rehearsed and choreographed, but like he's figuring out how to use stuff there and then - the rocket-launcher comes to mind, as does the detonator outside the hospital (an awesome and surreal bit of comedy). He's competant and deceptively strong, but not graceful - he's too lanky and twitchy for that, but not to the point of it looking affected.
I should probably stop at three paragraphs and go onto other things I loved about the film, like Squirrelly Random Lawyer. I couldn't help but like him, because he was quite stupid in trying to be clever and couldn't see the big picture if you showed it to him from a mile up, but the last scene with him made me weirdly happy. That would be the part where people are trying to kill him because the Joker has threatened to blow up a hospital otherwise, and someone almost rams a truck into the police car escorting him - except Bruce sticks his Lambourghini between the two cars and saves his life. Of course, he gives Gordon the impression that he barely knows what day it is, let alone that someone's out to get the guy, but Squirrelly Random Lawyer, who's figured out his secret identity, exchanges one clear glance with him and realises what he's done, and you can see it finally click in his head, why Batman's so important to everyone. It's a "what if a self-centred asshole found out?" subplot that ties in perfectly and deals with a relevent question.
Just the moral and philosophical complexity of the film blew my mind, in a really good way. It showed a mature and nuanced take on comic-book morality that few films, comic or not, ever reach. The Bat-copycats at the beginning were mockable and dangerous, but they had genuinely good intentions, and you felt sorry for the poor bastard who got strung up by the Joker. The lying thing, as I pointed out above, was damned interesting, and tied into the themes of hope and despair and kindness. But what really impressed me was the scene with the ferries. So far in the film, everything that could have gone wrong has - the white knight has turned into a disfigured tragic villain, the gal Friday has been horribly murdered, citizens and police are turning on their own in a desperate bid to save their loved ones, and Gotham itself is being evacuated. There's a ship full of nice ordinary people, and a ship full of convicts, and each are given the detonator to the others' ship (though whether the Joker was lying is up for debate - it's hard to say what he'd find the crueler joke). Ship full of ordinary people turns nasty and decides, by vote (about a 2-to-1 split there, I thought), to go all capital punishment on the convict ferry's collective ass. So far, so gloomy and Nietschian. Then the big, scary black convict leader with the tattoos and the husky voice cajoles the detonator out of the warden's hands, saying he's going to do what the warden "shoulda done ten minutes ago."
Then he throws the detonator out the window. And then I go \o/
Because at this point in the history of cinema, that kind of hope in ordinary people doing the right thing is so unexpected and refreshing that it seems like the far braver step than a massacre. It was also a huge relief after so much darkness, but that goes without saying. It's the climax - everything afterwards, with the Joker and Harvey, is just tying up the last threads. The story, after all, was about the fight for Gotham's soul, not any particular man's - Batman, Two-Face and Joker are just representative symbols of choice, chance and chaos.
One thing and one thing only bugs me: Gordon's son as the hostage, because he's the one Gordon loves most. My knowledge of Batman canon is limited, but I know Gordon's daughter, Barbara, ends up as Batgirl and later, Oracle. I also know Nolan didn't want the extended bat-family in his trilogy, but I think it would have been a nice touch for the comic fans if she were the one Two-Face picked out. Also, it would have meant at least one more female character who wasn't just a voiceless bystander.
~
For the rest, I've spent the last three days listening to "Werewolves of London" on repeat, handing out my CV to shoe shops and bookstores like... some kind of prostitution metaphor, I don't know... and stressing about airline costs, because I just want to see my family for Christmas and I'm already looking at $3000. Oh, and trying to find a birthday present for my mum.
So, there. That's the last two weeks' worth of my brain. Currently, it seems to be going AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH.
No, seriously, I have an awesome, awesome recipe for Thai chicken soup that I just had to share because it is a TRIUMPH. You will need:
- 1 large, heaped tablespoon of red curry paste. Possibly more. YMMV.
- 3 cups chicken stock, plus 2 cups plain hot water. So, quite watered-down chicken stock.
- 1 onion, finely chopped.
- 1 carrot, cut into chopstick-friendly slices.
- about 3 cups chopped bok choi, also in chopstick-friendly pieces.
- about 400g chicken, also in... well, yeah.
- 2 cups bean sprouts.
- Udon noodles. How many depends on how souplike you want your soup.
Heat about a tablespoon of oil in your soup pot, and spoon in the curry paste. Stir it around until it's sizzling and making your eyes water. Add the onions, and stir until starting to soften. Open a window. Then add the chicken, and cook through.
Add the carrots, then the chicken stock. Wait until that is bubbling, and the carrots are a little tender, then add your udon noodles. When they are just about cooked, add the bean sprouts, stir, and finally, add the bok choi. Turn off the heat, stir until the bok choi is just wilted, then serve.
Please note that I wasn't joking about the goggles. A common side-affect of noodle soup is flailing and blindness. Enjoy!
~
Honestly, you probably didn't notice, but I am sorry I haven't posted in so long. This is actually the longest I've been able to make my fingers type out complete sentences with the end goal of completing something. Here's something I've noticed: I have a belief that I could do anything, absolutely anything, if I could just make myself not suck so much. Having realised this, I am endeavoring not to suck. It's a bit hard. Especially when a deadline's looming, and all I want to do is read Cable & Deadpool until 3 a.m.
FILM 222, the practical course that I have been desperate to get into for two years, is hard. We have 5 projects, each mandatory, each worth 20% of our mark, and we've had two already. And they're not little projects, they're stuff like: do a 7-shot sequence telling a coherent narrative without dialogue or commentary. Write a 12-page, character-driven script that tells 3 distinct arcs. Do a short autobiographical film - and get it perfect on the first take, because you're not allowed to edit it. Stuff like that. It's nerve-wracking. More nerve-wracking: I got a C on the first assignment. My first ever C in Film. Sure, live-action composition isn't my strong point, but by God, my script better get a much better mark or I'm sunk. Also, the lecturer called the sequence 'cliched and incoherent.' Meanie. It was totally coherent.
The good side is that I am genuinely learning cool stuff necessary to making films (who knew scripts were so strictly formatted?), so even if I flunk this course, I'll know what to do. Plus, the five projects actually make a great starter-portfolio, which is a leg-up. The trick, I guess, is to just do my own thing whenever possible, and keep plugging away. And not get distracted. D:
So, that existential whine over: what else is going on? Oh, I have a giant and visible bruise! This is a big deal, I never bruise visibly. Very thick skin. But no, Sas and I went to see The Dark Knight for the second time on Tuesday, and I tripped over some mug's coat and crashed into the arm of a chair, bruising the fuck out of my thigh. There's a purple thing the size of my fist. It still hurts to walk a little. (Speaking of The Dark Knight, does anyone still care what I thought, or have we moved on by now?) ETA: Okay, apparently people care! Yay!
Okay, my thoughts are large and complicated, and also partly stolen from other people's thoughts, because there have been so many good reviews. I loved so many things about it, I'm not even quite sure where to start. No, wait, here: I didn't like Batman Begins. *ducks rotten fruit* I mean, I didn't hate it! But I was kind of heinously indifferent. Your main character dresses up as a giant bat to fight crazy people - and what, you're not going to do anything with that? Point out that he's every bit as crazy as the people he's fighting, but just managing to delude himself that it's perfectly reasonable? Batman Begins felt far too reasonable, to me. Too bland and logical. Possibly Katie Holmes was sucking even more of the life out of it than I realised, but it just wasn't demented enough for a Batman movie, and that made it boring.
This movie corrected any gripe I had with the previous film. (Well, except maybe the use of Rachel Dawes, but even then it was an improvement - I'll come back to that.) It had crazy to spare, and studied very intently the line a sane and reasonable man might trip over in becoming a super-anything. It also did something very wonderful at the end that made me sit up and go, "Thank you! You got your hope and faith in my dark cynicism and it tastes GREAT!" (I'll also come back to that.)
I loved the interactions between Bruce and Alfred - it seemed real and added a lovely touch of personality that was needed. I loved that this film was full of little throwaway lines that were just there to remind you that these people were more than masks or jobs to be done. I loved the idea of lying for the greater good - Harvey saying he was Batman to draw out the Joker; Batman telling Gordon to pin Harvey's murders on him; Alfred burning Rachel's letter - because it tied in beautifully with the theme of hope and justice as powerful yet fragile abstract concepts that need a lot of effort to maintain, but would be devastating to lose. I loved that none of this was hammered home, yet was so clear throughout.
jen_in_japan pointed out in her review that when Harvey says that you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain, you could easily say the former refers to Rachel. She dies with all her love and integrity intact; she knows, when Batman gets there, that it's too late, but uses her last seconds to comfort Harvey anyway. Thinking of that, it puts a different spin on Harvey's last scene, when he's holding Gordon's son hostage; he wants Gordon to know what it's like to tell a loved one that everything's going to be okay when it's not. I didn't realise it until the second viewing, but Rachel was the one doing the comforting, while Harvey freaked out about the danger she was in. It makes me feel a little better about how underused she was otherwise - though, man, yay for Maggie Gyllenhaal. She did a lot with the little she was given.
The performances were uniformally awesome, of course. I really loved Aaron Eckhart in this, and I hope I see him in more stuff. Two-Face always had the potential to be too silly to take seriously, but between the flawless (and seriously icky) CGI job and his performance, it felt too genuinely horrible and sad to ever break the suspension of disbelief. It was just monstrous, in the way that you were never sure if you pitied or feared him more. Perfect.
Heath Ledger, of course, went in the other direction, and are you impressed that I've held out this long before mentioning him? I'm impressed. Also, really sad, because Jesus, what I high note to go out on. Anyway, silliness and the avoidence thereof: the Joker was never not going to be silly. The whole point of the Joker is that he's silly gone wrong, the literal embodiment of "it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye" so you're constantly torn between hysterical giggling and the knowledge that you are never again going to be able to look at a HB pencil without shuddering. Or a naughty nurse's outfit. Or a cellphone. That you never truly knew what made him tick was also a wise move. I love The Killing Joke - hell, I own it - but, while it is a fascinating and brilliant story, that Joker is not the one that was needed for this film. The Joker is far more terrifying as a cipher, and a psycho without a cause is a far more convincing agent of chaos.
Performance-wise, I think this made me realise what Ledger's greatest strength is as an actor: his voice. I mean, yeah, he nailed body-language too - I'll come back to the tongue thing - but the voice is where, looking back on it, he really seemed to nail down who his characters were. With the Joker, I noticed how often his voice rises above an ordinary speaking tone, and that was maybe three times in the whole movie. So, he didn't make the Joker scary by shouting, or even by having an evil laugh - though, on the occasions he employs it, like with the horrible little home-video, it's hair-raising. Instead, he keeps this quite reasonable tone while using a distinctive accent that sounds like it's been scraped throat-first over gravel, hoarse and gutteral except when it cracks into a high giggle. Clever: half the lines, he seems to mutter to himself, not particularly caring who's listening, and that, perversely, makes you listen more, trying to catch every word. I've never seen Jack Nicholson's performance, but I don't think I'd find it half so nuanced.
But the physical performance is a factor as well. Every mean grin, every look of bright-eyed attention or lip-licking concentration shows through the makeup. The Glasgow smile was a clever take, as it hints at start-of-darkness type traumas but never explains them, and in the meantime is a memorable disfigurement. I was struck on my first viewing by how clever the lip-licking was, because not only does it add that nastiness to his voice, it also seems credibly like a habit someone would develop while not sure of the corners of their mouth, once again bringing the attention to his scars and his smile. I also love how he handles objects - not like his movements have been rehearsed and choreographed, but like he's figuring out how to use stuff there and then - the rocket-launcher comes to mind, as does the detonator outside the hospital (an awesome and surreal bit of comedy). He's competant and deceptively strong, but not graceful - he's too lanky and twitchy for that, but not to the point of it looking affected.
I should probably stop at three paragraphs and go onto other things I loved about the film, like Squirrelly Random Lawyer. I couldn't help but like him, because he was quite stupid in trying to be clever and couldn't see the big picture if you showed it to him from a mile up, but the last scene with him made me weirdly happy. That would be the part where people are trying to kill him because the Joker has threatened to blow up a hospital otherwise, and someone almost rams a truck into the police car escorting him - except Bruce sticks his Lambourghini between the two cars and saves his life. Of course, he gives Gordon the impression that he barely knows what day it is, let alone that someone's out to get the guy, but Squirrelly Random Lawyer, who's figured out his secret identity, exchanges one clear glance with him and realises what he's done, and you can see it finally click in his head, why Batman's so important to everyone. It's a "what if a self-centred asshole found out?" subplot that ties in perfectly and deals with a relevent question.
Just the moral and philosophical complexity of the film blew my mind, in a really good way. It showed a mature and nuanced take on comic-book morality that few films, comic or not, ever reach. The Bat-copycats at the beginning were mockable and dangerous, but they had genuinely good intentions, and you felt sorry for the poor bastard who got strung up by the Joker. The lying thing, as I pointed out above, was damned interesting, and tied into the themes of hope and despair and kindness. But what really impressed me was the scene with the ferries. So far in the film, everything that could have gone wrong has - the white knight has turned into a disfigured tragic villain, the gal Friday has been horribly murdered, citizens and police are turning on their own in a desperate bid to save their loved ones, and Gotham itself is being evacuated. There's a ship full of nice ordinary people, and a ship full of convicts, and each are given the detonator to the others' ship (though whether the Joker was lying is up for debate - it's hard to say what he'd find the crueler joke). Ship full of ordinary people turns nasty and decides, by vote (about a 2-to-1 split there, I thought), to go all capital punishment on the convict ferry's collective ass. So far, so gloomy and Nietschian. Then the big, scary black convict leader with the tattoos and the husky voice cajoles the detonator out of the warden's hands, saying he's going to do what the warden "shoulda done ten minutes ago."
Then he throws the detonator out the window. And then I go \o/
Because at this point in the history of cinema, that kind of hope in ordinary people doing the right thing is so unexpected and refreshing that it seems like the far braver step than a massacre. It was also a huge relief after so much darkness, but that goes without saying. It's the climax - everything afterwards, with the Joker and Harvey, is just tying up the last threads. The story, after all, was about the fight for Gotham's soul, not any particular man's - Batman, Two-Face and Joker are just representative symbols of choice, chance and chaos.
One thing and one thing only bugs me: Gordon's son as the hostage, because he's the one Gordon loves most. My knowledge of Batman canon is limited, but I know Gordon's daughter, Barbara, ends up as Batgirl and later, Oracle. I also know Nolan didn't want the extended bat-family in his trilogy, but I think it would have been a nice touch for the comic fans if she were the one Two-Face picked out. Also, it would have meant at least one more female character who wasn't just a voiceless bystander.
~
For the rest, I've spent the last three days listening to "Werewolves of London" on repeat, handing out my CV to shoe shops and bookstores like... some kind of prostitution metaphor, I don't know... and stressing about airline costs, because I just want to see my family for Christmas and I'm already looking at $3000. Oh, and trying to find a birthday present for my mum.
So, there. That's the last two weeks' worth of my brain. Currently, it seems to be going AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH.