The Wise Kids

So basically I developed this new passion for movies. I spend more time on IMDb now than I do playing video games. I like to see where movies take me, I like to see what actors have done what, and try and understand critics better by reading their reviews. So because of this I've been able to identify my favorite type of movie. I like dialog based movies. I like a movie where scenes can stand out by themselves apart from the movie and are very dialog based. My favorite type of scene is literally just two people talking without anything important happening in the background because there is so much room for interesting conversation. That's why I love Pulp Fiction so much. Most of the movie is just these cools dialogs between the characters surrounded by blood and action.

This blog post is about a movie I saw yesterday. It's called The Wise Kids. It was originally released in these two film festivals in New York and Los Angeles in 2011, but was then released to theaters in March of 2012 and on DVD in December. I found out about this because I had seen another movie about called Nate & Margret, which is again, a really cool movie, and the actor who plays Nate also plays Tim in The Wise Kids. The movie is just a series of conversations with really amazing dialog. The movie is about these three kids who are finding their way in life while they all are surrounded by their extremely Christian upbringing. One character is gay, the other is becoming an atheist and the the third is a devout Christian. 

The Wise Kids Clip

Workshop

I was raised in an environment where elders where seen as superiors in every way. The sad thing is that I would actually believe that for most of my life because for so long I could never argue with them. Even though now I have these heated debates with my sister and am constantly disproving my parents I still have that odd feeling that elders have this superiority over me, and judging them, like we were to do in the workshop, is something that is taboo. I guess I'm in a position where I can only honestly judge people I know well. Whenever my sister preforms something I always give my opinion, probably more harshly than I should, because she is my sister and she does the same thing to me, but when I'm forced to judge something to a new person, when they are right in front of me, is something I'm not comfortable with, especially when that person had studied for years in college and I've only been writing for a couple of years.
I really didn't like what I wrote for the workshop. I actually restarted twice, already two pages in both times, before I realized that I needed to get something done for the next day. I settled on the idea of my sister coming home and a conversation we had. I normally don't like to write about myself. I find that talking about myself can get really boring and I really don't think that my life has all that much to offer. I would normally prefer to make characters that are like me and put them in situations that I would never be in. Because of this, I'm not used to writing this "creative nonfiction". I am starting to like the idea of it more as I've been learning more about it and reading the book I got, but I still hate writing about true stories.
I think I'll enjoy this workshop but I need to learn to open up more around people. I'm very shy with people I don't trust but I realize that I can go all out with people I do trust. Ever since I "came out" I've been less shy because I'm not afraid of people thinking I'm gay, but I still have this inherent shyness around new people. If Alex weren't there that day I would have participated much more than because everyone in the group is a friend and most of the group I consider my close friends. I've only just started to trust everyone in STAC and I've been here for over a year now.

Chasing

So me, Danielle and Kat worked on a thirty second chase scene today. Basically the whole thing is just chasing. I had the idea to use Misirlou from Pulp Fiction as the music in our movie and have a scene like the one in the Graduate where Ben is just running down the street but doesn't look like he's going anywhere.

Misirlou
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fRRnrevc8M
Running
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRBNA27N0ts 

Manu Chao

Manu Chao is a musician, born in France to Spanish parents. Writing music in English, Spanish and French he became a leader in the new Spanish alternative music. I've been listening to his music since I was born. Right now I just searched him on Spotify and all these memories are coming back. I haven't heard some of these songs in years. My father used to play his albums on summer days while I would lay on the hammock with my sister and really that is the only memory of a perfect moment I have. His album "Proxima Estacion- Esperanza" plays as a single piece, where the next song has started before the last ended and listening from start to finish is something, to me, so perfect. I really don't know what to say other than to listen to it. It's not the type of music that people in STAC really listen to, it has this laid back regge feel but it is different than Bob Marley because Chao feels more experimental. His biography said that he spent years traveling around South America and that his music is a reflection of everything he saw.
These are the links to the two albums I listened to when I was little.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh6vM1CwpXg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rEeuqJlmE8

Pulp Fiction, The Blogging Conundrum and Suicidal Singers

Pulp Fiction is one of my favorite movies of all time. It was only in the past three months that I had actually watched it, but in those three months I've probably seen the movie six times, and I have been watching all of Quentin Tarantino's movies. I'm writing about this because two nights ago I watched it again with my mom, sister and dad. Both my mother and father had seen it, but it was my sister's first time. My mother told me she had seen it and liked it, but couldn't remember it at all. Pulp Fiction is my father's favorite movie. After we finished watching I asked my sister what she thought and she said she liked it, then my mother informed me that she no longer liked the movie. Honestly I was expecting that. My mother isn't one who enjoys cursing and can't see any humor in killing, and her face during the scene where Zed raped Marcellus was more than hysterical. But what really makes me think is that there was once a time when she actually enjoyed the movie. I was never a believer in the idea that people actually could change, but it seems like she has. I guess after all these years of being a mother her instincts tell her that she can't like those type of things. Tonight I'm going to see Django Unchained, I have high hopes and I hope that my mother can forget her instincts and just enjoy the movie for the beauty and art that it is. 
I know that I haven't been blogging that often, but I have actually been meaning to change. The issue is that my grandfather has an obsession with online spider solitaire and spends all his time on the computer. Today I got a Mac, so I can blog more often. I actually started a journal two months ago and I have been writing in it daily, but because I don't get to use the computer I couldn't type up any of my ideas.
Three days ago i went to a theater in Manhattan called El Repretorio Espanol. It is a theater where they preform and write plays in Spanish. I went and saw a concert about Latin American female singers, where they preformed a bunch of old songs that I grew up listening to. Before each song the pianist gives a little story about the artist, where she came from, what her struggle was, and other information. During the last song, Gracias a la Vida by Violeta Parra, the pianist informed us that Ms. Parra killed herself recently after writing this song. Gracias a la Vida means thank you for life. It is a song that I've heard countless times and it is part of my childhood, but I never knew the connotation behind the song. She killed herself because of love, and wrote that song as her last influence on the earth. She thanked god for everything but really she was thanking him for giving her life, but that she couldn't handle it, so she had to give it back. 

I realized something today as I was working on a script with Jessica. We have had an extremely odd relationship with each other. Our piece is about two spies that are trapped and must confront an evil doctor. It's a completely silly script but it reflects so much about our lives and the relationship we have with each other. I don't know if Jess would be comfortable with me getting into the details but this much information could have been gathered from facebook. We dated, twice, and now I'm a homosexual, and we are now really good friends, but there we're also times when we didn't speak to each other at all. Our relationship has been everywhere it could go and that is what is our script really is about, our lives, our story, told in a five minute script consisting of cliche spies and a transvestite doctor. It's not done yet, but the idea is one so perfect to me, and I really want to get it on it's feet because this idea is just too good to just be another script saved on flash drive.

Kontrollings

These are the things I've noticed...
1) The subway is hell. Bulcsú is being punished by some reason and he can't leave the subway because it is his hell. This reminded of the Greek Myth, the name I cannot remember and I can't find it on the Internet because I don't know what to search, but in the myth the hero's wife dies and she is sent to hell and he must save her from hell. I think that the girl in the bear suit is the hero in that Greek myth. She is trying to save him from his hell.
2) Bulcsú's face gets progressively more bloody as the movie goes on. I don't know what this mean, maybe something about his punishment, but I thought that it was a really cool thing.
3) Because it is filmed in an active subway system, it has all the real dirt and other gross stuff that lives in the underground. This makes for a really cool effect of the setting of the movie. So many movie aren't this way, and no movie that I've seen felt this real.
4) My favorite scene is the dream scene. The girl in the bear suit with the red flare thing is incredible. In the dirty subway, it makes it look majestic and surreal and I love that.
5) I like how they showed Bulcsú had another life before his Kontroll job, but they don't give too much detail because they don't have to. This also helps me understand that maybe Bulcsú is being punished for his life before.
The one thing that sticks to me is the idea of coming out of hell. Being trapped and then saved, or rather, being trapped and then killing the thing that keeps you there (the person who is pushing people into the trains). There was this weird feeling as I was watching it, it felt uncomfortable, and it made the movie better for some reason. I felt enclosed and that helped with the idea that Bulcsú was being punished.