My NCAA bracket is ranked only in the 22nd percentile overall. This is poor. I was correct with only 11 of the final 16, and I have only one of the four elite 8 representatives correct so far. I take solace in the fact that any baboon could have successfully picked many correct teams so far since there have been so few upsets. This year, the pools will all be won on the last two rounds, when the little number next to each team becomes irrelevant. I'm quite fine getting trounced by 78% of the United States this year. I'm fine losing to 78% of the field several years. Playing in NCAA tournament pools is not like taking a test in high school. If you get an 85 on a test that score will carry over and affect the average. NCAA pools don't carry over. You either get a 100 or you don't. A series of 85s or 90s is impressive, to be sure, but they're all failures. You might was well have all 0s. I think too many people playing in pools, even the very smart ones, lose sight of this fact. It's hard to turn off the natural human instinct to try to do the best you can. Probabilities work amazingly well over the long run, but they're basically worthless in a small sample size. People who habitually pick the higher seeds in NCAA pools will consistently do well, and that helps to prevent these people from changing their strategy.
I don't have statistically proof to back this up right now, but the best way to win an NCAA pool is to make one or two big guesses that very few other people will make. The reason for this is that if you stick with the seeds like everyone else, then your margin for error slips to virtually zero; you'll have to be right with basically all of your late-tournament picks, something ridiculously hard to do. If instead you single out one unpopular team, then all you need is for that one team to hit for you and you will have close to an even shot at winning. Basically, the odds of your one team coming through for you--even though it must necessarily be an underdog and somewhat of a longer shot--is much better than to hope that a whole sequence of final four and title picks falls in line. Remember that if you play it conservative and do well heading into the last few games, you will still be competing against a large chunk of the pool. and late in the tournament is when you have to start guessing more anyway.
The beauty of my theory is that you have much more freedom outside of your one big guess to go with your gut. And if your gut proves right, then you've just hedged against the possibility that your big guess only ends up half-right. You're narrowing the playing field immensely.
I won a 65-person pool in 2005, and should have won again last year, using this philosophy. 2005 is maybe a bad example because everything hit just perfectly that year, but even still i don't think I had more than 12 Sweet 16 picks right. Last year I picked Memphis to win it all. They were a 1-seed but they were a very unpopular title pick. I may have only gotten 10 Sweet 16 picks and 4-5 Elight 8 picks right, but still if any number of things had happened in the closing minutes of the title game, I'd have won the pool again. In between these efforts, you have years like this one and a couple others where I've finished in the bottom third. It happens. I guess the great unsaid secret in all this is that you have to have a good eye for who these unpopular picks will be that will surpass expectations. This is where I've done well, and the reason I've finished so high in so few years. Memphis was a really good, well-rounded team that was disrespected because of its conference last year. They were easily talented enough to win it all. In 2005, 5-seed Michigan State helped win me the pool by making the Final Four. They were another very talented underrated team that did lots of things well and had my all-time tournament hero coach, Tom Izzo.
Wrapping this up, and perhaps explaining why I'm thinking about all of this right now, I'll remind you of my 22nd percentile standing. I can still win, because I have two potential aces up my sleeve: 4-seed Gonzaga making the Final Four, and 2-seed Michigan State making the title game. If both of these things happen, I will have a better than 50% chance of winning. If only one happens but my other picks are good, I still might have a chance. More than likely, they both won't succeed, and I'll finish 58th out of 75 or something, but maybe they will. And they're both playing tonight.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Chicago Errata
I never took the time to mention anything about my Chicago trip from a couple weeks ago, so now here are some bits of impression:
1. Chicago is a very segregated city. I mean, very segregated. I was looking at a website while there that had demographic info on each of the many neighborhoods (Chicago prides itself on being a "city of neighborhoods," if you didn't know. Presumably that's to make it seem more friendly). I can't remember which, but one had a Hispanic concentration of 97%. That's 97, not 9.7. I made the joke to a couple people that NYC doesn't even have single apartment buildings with that high a concentration of any one race or ethnicity. It's pretty ridiculous, but evidently that's how it works. I guess there are some benefits to having an relatively exclusive community to yourself if you belong to a minority, but that can't be good in the larger sense.
2. The is a punk club located in an oddly barren spot along North Ave that's called Exit Chicago. On its marquee it offers two proclamations: "Chicago's first punk club," and "since 1983." That's cute, Chicago. Really, 1983?
3. Another bit of date oddness: I went to a basement bar/seafood restaurant (that was pretty cool and good food actually) that claimed on its outside sign to have been open "since 1969," while the sign inside claimed its founding at 1968. This wouldn't be as odd, but the two signs are literally not more than 5 three-dimensional feet away from each other.
4. Location isn't terribly important when it comes to the cost of renting apartments. You would pay close to the same cost for a decent 2-bedroom in a far northern neighborhood as you would for an identical place in the more conveniently located and hipper Lincoln Park. Obviously this is a gross simplification of things a realtor told me, but taken in context to my six-year residence of NYC, it's pretty jarring information.
5. Chicago is on a grid system too. Now, truly--forgive me for even suggesting this, but--their grid is probably even smarter than ours. It's not simply based on numbered blocks, but actual measured blocks. As opposed to having a bar located at 86th St and 2nd Ave, you'd have a bar located at 2400 North Clark and 800 West Diversey (that address is not necessarily perfect, I'm just making it up from memory, though it's probably not off by a huge amount). All you need to know is that the N/S/E/W quadrants zero downtown, and that it's a half-mile for every 400. So really all you need is the address and you're there. It's just a full mathematical graph, whereas NYC's is more of a single-quadrant graph. I don't know, maybe I'm overreacting to something new. It's increibly intuitive though, and that's right up my alley.
6. The El is a horrible idea, and it's the great stubborn fault of the city itself that they've never put it underground. It's dirty, it's loud, it's exposed to their horrible winter, and it's slow. How the El ever came to be some romantic image of Chicago is beyond me. Wake the fuck up, people.
7. This says more about me living in NYC than anything else, but there is a lot of light in Chicago. You don't get the constantly-shaded canyon effect there. At 3:00PM on a sunny day, you can walk down the sidewalk and be bathed in sun. There are definite benefits to not having many buildings taller than 4 stories, and not as densely packed.
8. If anyone ever wanted to know where Chicago sits on the continuum of American cities, there were far far more areas there that reminded me of Columbus than New York. This is slightly unfair, as NY is unique, but it's also true. While Chicago is certainly large and definitely has the feel of a city some magnitude larger than Columbus, it feels to me even more than that smaller than NY. Maybe "smaller" is not the best descriptor. It's residential. It's downtown stacks up nicely with anyplace, but it goes almost immediately from there to endless blocks of houses and townhomes and small apartment buildings.
1. Chicago is a very segregated city. I mean, very segregated. I was looking at a website while there that had demographic info on each of the many neighborhoods (Chicago prides itself on being a "city of neighborhoods," if you didn't know. Presumably that's to make it seem more friendly). I can't remember which, but one had a Hispanic concentration of 97%. That's 97, not 9.7. I made the joke to a couple people that NYC doesn't even have single apartment buildings with that high a concentration of any one race or ethnicity. It's pretty ridiculous, but evidently that's how it works. I guess there are some benefits to having an relatively exclusive community to yourself if you belong to a minority, but that can't be good in the larger sense.
2. The is a punk club located in an oddly barren spot along North Ave that's called Exit Chicago. On its marquee it offers two proclamations: "Chicago's first punk club," and "since 1983." That's cute, Chicago. Really, 1983?
3. Another bit of date oddness: I went to a basement bar/seafood restaurant (that was pretty cool and good food actually) that claimed on its outside sign to have been open "since 1969," while the sign inside claimed its founding at 1968. This wouldn't be as odd, but the two signs are literally not more than 5 three-dimensional feet away from each other.
4. Location isn't terribly important when it comes to the cost of renting apartments. You would pay close to the same cost for a decent 2-bedroom in a far northern neighborhood as you would for an identical place in the more conveniently located and hipper Lincoln Park. Obviously this is a gross simplification of things a realtor told me, but taken in context to my six-year residence of NYC, it's pretty jarring information.
5. Chicago is on a grid system too. Now, truly--forgive me for even suggesting this, but--their grid is probably even smarter than ours. It's not simply based on numbered blocks, but actual measured blocks. As opposed to having a bar located at 86th St and 2nd Ave, you'd have a bar located at 2400 North Clark and 800 West Diversey (that address is not necessarily perfect, I'm just making it up from memory, though it's probably not off by a huge amount). All you need to know is that the N/S/E/W quadrants zero downtown, and that it's a half-mile for every 400. So really all you need is the address and you're there. It's just a full mathematical graph, whereas NYC's is more of a single-quadrant graph. I don't know, maybe I'm overreacting to something new. It's increibly intuitive though, and that's right up my alley.
6. The El is a horrible idea, and it's the great stubborn fault of the city itself that they've never put it underground. It's dirty, it's loud, it's exposed to their horrible winter, and it's slow. How the El ever came to be some romantic image of Chicago is beyond me. Wake the fuck up, people.
7. This says more about me living in NYC than anything else, but there is a lot of light in Chicago. You don't get the constantly-shaded canyon effect there. At 3:00PM on a sunny day, you can walk down the sidewalk and be bathed in sun. There are definite benefits to not having many buildings taller than 4 stories, and not as densely packed.
8. If anyone ever wanted to know where Chicago sits on the continuum of American cities, there were far far more areas there that reminded me of Columbus than New York. This is slightly unfair, as NY is unique, but it's also true. While Chicago is certainly large and definitely has the feel of a city some magnitude larger than Columbus, it feels to me even more than that smaller than NY. Maybe "smaller" is not the best descriptor. It's residential. It's downtown stacks up nicely with anyplace, but it goes almost immediately from there to endless blocks of houses and townhomes and small apartment buildings.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
The Brink
Boy, I'm going to miss Sara the next couple days. Sure, I'm going to miss her in the normal sense cause I like her being around and all, but I'm also going to miss her laptop. Last night was the first of seven consecutive nights I'm going to spend without her (she's staying an extra week in Chicago), and maybe it's just the pre-NCAA Tournament unquenchable desire for more and more bracket-related knowledge and numbers, but I was seriously wishing I had a constant internet connection. It's one of those things you take for granted once you get used to it.
But even more than that, I wish I had a laptop now because I'm about to leave work in the next few minutes and I think I'd like to be able to do some semi-live blogging tonight and tomorrow while watching games and being drunk. Maybe I'll do it with pen and paper like the old days but probably not.
Good news is I'm feeling the good vibes right now. Although I really am (and already have in just the first night apart) going to miss Sara, it's also nice to have a little time to not have to be considerate at all. And what better time for that than the first weekend of the tournament.
Just let it go.
But even more than that, I wish I had a laptop now because I'm about to leave work in the next few minutes and I think I'd like to be able to do some semi-live blogging tonight and tomorrow while watching games and being drunk. Maybe I'll do it with pen and paper like the old days but probably not.
Good news is I'm feeling the good vibes right now. Although I really am (and already have in just the first night apart) going to miss Sara, it's also nice to have a little time to not have to be considerate at all. And what better time for that than the first weekend of the tournament.
Just let it go.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Another for the "Well, No Shit" File
Today is a cover-the-reception-desk-at-work day. It's also a leave-early day, as I'm out at 4:15 to catch a flight to Chicago for a long weekend. Because of this, I knew I knew I'd have some time to maybe do a post, and almost jokingly I asked Sara what I should write about. She said "getting married." Ok.
1. For reasons that will become clear, I believe that the one thing a man should keep secret from his woman (above your ATM pin or any other important financial passwords) is the password to his Netflix account.
2. Over the last two nights, I spent a total of 134 minutes watching the Sex and the City movie.
3. Ommitted for effect.
4. If you've watched a movie and are having a hard time deciding if it was any good, let me offer this tip: start it up somewhere randomly in the middle and make your judgement soon after; you don't need to watch more than the first 4-5 minutes. Make sure you start it up cold, meaning without any memory or residual emotion leftover from your first viewing. When you do this, you are getting only the quality of the film and you're most likely not getting a big climactic scene (that would have been closely edited by the filmmakers). You're also totally divorced from the emotional build-up, so the natural tendency of even the worst movies to suck you into the story is gone. (A feature film is like a book in that the simple time investment to complete it implants an automatic austerity to it. A thiry minute TV show that's of equal production value to a two-hour movie will never feel as good as a movie. Even two hours worth of TV shows would not be the same. After you've read even a mediocre book, there is always a period of time immediately afterward where you are smitten with the book and would be inclined to inordinately praise it. So too with movies, and that's why you need to strip away that bond.)
5. You noticed before I said I saw Sex and the City spaced over two nights. Sara gets sleepy early and so we only got through just under an hour on night one. She was angry with me for the first 20 minutes because I couldn't stop picking on the movie's shortcomings, but I started following the story and quieted down eventually.
6. Sex and the City is a horrible, horrible movie.
7. On night two, we started it back up where we left off and yowzer once again I couldn't stop make comments about how bad it was.
8. There wasn't anything different about the first five minutes we watched on night two (maybe minutes 55-59 of the movie) and the last five minutes from night one (minutes 50-54), but it was painfully easy to find fault with the former while glossing over the shortcomings of the latter. The emotional flow of the movie had been interrupted and the movie was left open for me to see it for what it was.
9. This effect might be in some ways similar to why it's often difficult for an actor to do live theater work, compared to films. In a theater, the actor has to do his own work in sustaining that emotional bond, while in film, any number of editing or directorial choices will cover an actor's deficiencies.
10. It almost feels frivilous to comment specifically, but Sex and the City is really bad. I will admit that I've watched several episodes of the TV show, sometimes enjoying them, sometimes even respecting their relative quality. The movie, however, is terrble. Almost every actor just phoned it in, though not so much as the writers. You would think that a writer constrained to 30 minute storylines would love the opportunity to add real depth to his characters when given two-plus hours to play with. Not so here. If anything, the characters are flatter and less interesting. Again, it's probably a waste of time to criticize this stuff as the movie was clearly made with its only purpose being to lure women into the theater. As with lots of our contemporary culture, mission accomplished commercially, mission big fat fail substantively. I guess it just offends me when someone who has the option to make something at least passably competent with what wouldn't even be any additional effort, but chooses instead to fill the cracks with shit. I don't really like the term "sell-out" as a slander because usually it's used hypocritically, but pretty much everyone involved in this movie sold out. Good for them, as long as they knew that's what they were doing.
11. Someone does indeed get married in the movie, in case you couldn't stand the garbage and turned it off before getting to the end.
12. On a brighter and barely relevant note, I read somewhere recently that Chris Noth's character on Law & Order is being replaced and the character is to be played by Jeff Goldblum.
1. For reasons that will become clear, I believe that the one thing a man should keep secret from his woman (above your ATM pin or any other important financial passwords) is the password to his Netflix account.
2. Over the last two nights, I spent a total of 134 minutes watching the Sex and the City movie.
3. Ommitted for effect.
4. If you've watched a movie and are having a hard time deciding if it was any good, let me offer this tip: start it up somewhere randomly in the middle and make your judgement soon after; you don't need to watch more than the first 4-5 minutes. Make sure you start it up cold, meaning without any memory or residual emotion leftover from your first viewing. When you do this, you are getting only the quality of the film and you're most likely not getting a big climactic scene (that would have been closely edited by the filmmakers). You're also totally divorced from the emotional build-up, so the natural tendency of even the worst movies to suck you into the story is gone. (A feature film is like a book in that the simple time investment to complete it implants an automatic austerity to it. A thiry minute TV show that's of equal production value to a two-hour movie will never feel as good as a movie. Even two hours worth of TV shows would not be the same. After you've read even a mediocre book, there is always a period of time immediately afterward where you are smitten with the book and would be inclined to inordinately praise it. So too with movies, and that's why you need to strip away that bond.)
5. You noticed before I said I saw Sex and the City spaced over two nights. Sara gets sleepy early and so we only got through just under an hour on night one. She was angry with me for the first 20 minutes because I couldn't stop picking on the movie's shortcomings, but I started following the story and quieted down eventually.
6. Sex and the City is a horrible, horrible movie.
7. On night two, we started it back up where we left off and yowzer once again I couldn't stop make comments about how bad it was.
8. There wasn't anything different about the first five minutes we watched on night two (maybe minutes 55-59 of the movie) and the last five minutes from night one (minutes 50-54), but it was painfully easy to find fault with the former while glossing over the shortcomings of the latter. The emotional flow of the movie had been interrupted and the movie was left open for me to see it for what it was.
9. This effect might be in some ways similar to why it's often difficult for an actor to do live theater work, compared to films. In a theater, the actor has to do his own work in sustaining that emotional bond, while in film, any number of editing or directorial choices will cover an actor's deficiencies.
10. It almost feels frivilous to comment specifically, but Sex and the City is really bad. I will admit that I've watched several episodes of the TV show, sometimes enjoying them, sometimes even respecting their relative quality. The movie, however, is terrble. Almost every actor just phoned it in, though not so much as the writers. You would think that a writer constrained to 30 minute storylines would love the opportunity to add real depth to his characters when given two-plus hours to play with. Not so here. If anything, the characters are flatter and less interesting. Again, it's probably a waste of time to criticize this stuff as the movie was clearly made with its only purpose being to lure women into the theater. As with lots of our contemporary culture, mission accomplished commercially, mission big fat fail substantively. I guess it just offends me when someone who has the option to make something at least passably competent with what wouldn't even be any additional effort, but chooses instead to fill the cracks with shit. I don't really like the term "sell-out" as a slander because usually it's used hypocritically, but pretty much everyone involved in this movie sold out. Good for them, as long as they knew that's what they were doing.
11. Someone does indeed get married in the movie, in case you couldn't stand the garbage and turned it off before getting to the end.
12. On a brighter and barely relevant note, I read somewhere recently that Chris Noth's character on Law & Order is being replaced and the character is to be played by Jeff Goldblum.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Two Good Movie Ideas
Fact: I have good ideas. Fact: I am poor at acting on these ideas. Fact: I don't really mind that my ideas don't always come to fruition.
One of my key approaches to life is that I don't feel the need to prove myself to others as long as I know I'm sure of myself. You could call this cowardice and you might have a point, but i don't see the need to actually go about proving to you that I can run a marathon if I am fully certain that I could, for instance.
While I was walking to Whole Foods' beer store on Houston last night (let me pause for a second and both trumpet this resource and shame myself for underutilization of it. You buy an empty half-gallon growler for like $3, then you pay from $7-20+ to have it filled with draft beer whenever you want. And they stock delicious beer as well, often locally produced for people who are into that sort of thing. And it's just a 20minute round-trip excursion from my apt.), something mundane got me thinking, as happens frequently. A guy dressed like a cook with longish hair tied back in a ponytail stepped across the sidewalk in front of me outside of a small restaurant, then lit a cigarette and started smoking it alone as he surveyed the street. He looked like how Robert DeNiro might have looked it 1982 if he were preparing for a role as some kind of a cook.
1. So I'm not sure why but that cook's aloneness there on the sidewalk so near to other people gave me a good idea for a movie plot. I should say, not just the cook's aloneness but the complete disengaged sense of being in a place but not of it, is what gave me the good idea. Most movies are of course about people on a basic level, sometimes about people reacting to events but more often the interesting or quality ones are just about people. Further, they are about people interacting with other people. What I mean is that a movie's plot is virtually always advanced through dialogue or some interaction with people, sometimes also with objects (the Raging Bull jail cell scene) or events (Forrest Gump, duh) or environments (Cast Away, aka the greatest movie ever made), but whatever it is specifically it's still basically just the active engagement with outside forces that drives plot.
What I'd propose is that you take an individual--a comedian would be a good subject to help show my point--and follow him not as he deals with people but just before and just after and especially those moments--like with the cook on the sidewalk--when he's amidst people but still alone. I'd go to great lengths to ensure that it wouldn't simply be a case study on loneliness or a biography of a hermit, but instead simply an examination of those times in a life when a person is only himself at his innermost. It's a variation on something I find very interesting: that a person will behave differently when alone than when in company. (Even if the person is completely self-aware and well-adjusted and unaffected by conventions or expectations, he will act differently. An example of this that I've mentioned before is that when I wake to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, I will almost never wash my hands afterward, but if at work and someone else is relieving himself at the same time as me I will always do at least a cursory rinse in the sink. How a man reacts to the former tells more about him on a basic level but it's also boring because it's something mostly involuntary for the man. How a man reacts to the latter isn't interesting because it's a social constant, but the thoughtful man's response to his bending in the latter situation is extremely interesting. At least to me.)
2. The other great movie idea I'll share now is one I've had for at least five or six years now, but since I'm now 28 and unlikely ever to follow-up on it (see also Monsieur, Monsieur), I'll share it with the world. This idea is not so much a plot idea as it is a thematic visual idea that would essentially make whatever plot you put behind it simple dressing.
Just a warning now,
(There, I've left an extra space for emphasis.)
but I feel that this is one of the finest artistic-related ideas I've ever had. I always become excited when thinking about the possibilities and the utter originality* of it any time I consider it.
You position the camera lens as though it is an eyeball looking out at the world and just follow your character around. I'm not talking about a simple first-person POV here either. You'd have to semi-blur most of the screen, maybe even blacking out nebulous amounts of the edges, and focus only on the center focal area. Not only that but this central focal area would have to drift and move (and the rest of the screen in kind) as the character's eyes drift from one object to another. I'm no lens expert but I'm not sure the technology was advanced enough to do this right when I first conceived this idea. In 2009 it might be possible.
Vision, and seeing things differently under different levels of focus and sharpness, has always been fascinating to me. This is most likely because unlike most people, I haven't really ever been able to take my vision for granted. (Obviously there are blind people who would scoff at this statement. Sorry to them.) My eyes required correction, but then the correction didn't take so I to go back to glasses, which never felt natural to me. I couldn't get over the fact that I was looking through something to allow me to see, and even then the glasses would slide around or I'd be trying to see with my periphery and of course fail because the frames never seemed to wrap enough quite enough. Finally a year and a half ago I went under the knife and I'm now something close to a normal contactless seer. The only problem is that, depending on the humidity and the wind, my vision can fluctuate slightly. Not enough to ever cause a problem, but enough to recognize it.
That history out of the way, think of the effects this filming technique would produce:
1. You'd get a real point of view. Something that bugs me with traditional POV camera shots is that no human can actually see with clarity the breadth of a movie screen. So while I'm watching a movie shot that way, I'm noticing many details that the character himself can't be processing beyond the simple impressionistic level.
2. You would change the way we think of "realism." (Again, done correctly) I think this is the true elimination of the fourth way in film. It's not virtual reality as we've been exposed to it thus far, because it would still be a film and thus it's goals would still be fictive and artistic.
3. You could add a layer of thought to every second of the film. You're forcing the viewer to consider himself as he watches the film. And you could do it without any subtlety whatsoever, but in such a way that it's effect after watching for a few minutes would dissolve so effortlessly that it would fuzz over the distinction between subtle and nonexistent influences. The possibilities this could open up with storylines and themes and symbols and everything a good writer is good at would be amazing.
Ok I'm getting the feeling that I might be drifting into the realm where I'm not able to make sufficient sense of what I'm trying to say, so perhaps I should cut this short. Know that I love this idea. I love it so much that if it were presented by someone else, I'd still love it and want to write about it.
*The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a recent film that I admired quite a bit, did do something that could be considered similar to what I'm proposing. They used the camera lens to double for a human eye, and narrowed the perspective of that eye to mimic the condition of the main character. However, in that film, they use the technique as a simple way of connecting the audience to the experience of the character, rather than as narrative filmic tool in and of itself. They also didn't go the whole way of constraining the lens' focus to replicate that of an actual eye's. None of this is meant to discredit the technique in the film though. I loved it. I thought it was extremely well done.
One of my key approaches to life is that I don't feel the need to prove myself to others as long as I know I'm sure of myself. You could call this cowardice and you might have a point, but i don't see the need to actually go about proving to you that I can run a marathon if I am fully certain that I could, for instance.
While I was walking to Whole Foods' beer store on Houston last night (let me pause for a second and both trumpet this resource and shame myself for underutilization of it. You buy an empty half-gallon growler for like $3, then you pay from $7-20+ to have it filled with draft beer whenever you want. And they stock delicious beer as well, often locally produced for people who are into that sort of thing. And it's just a 20minute round-trip excursion from my apt.), something mundane got me thinking, as happens frequently. A guy dressed like a cook with longish hair tied back in a ponytail stepped across the sidewalk in front of me outside of a small restaurant, then lit a cigarette and started smoking it alone as he surveyed the street. He looked like how Robert DeNiro might have looked it 1982 if he were preparing for a role as some kind of a cook.
1. So I'm not sure why but that cook's aloneness there on the sidewalk so near to other people gave me a good idea for a movie plot. I should say, not just the cook's aloneness but the complete disengaged sense of being in a place but not of it, is what gave me the good idea. Most movies are of course about people on a basic level, sometimes about people reacting to events but more often the interesting or quality ones are just about people. Further, they are about people interacting with other people. What I mean is that a movie's plot is virtually always advanced through dialogue or some interaction with people, sometimes also with objects (the Raging Bull jail cell scene) or events (Forrest Gump, duh) or environments (Cast Away, aka the greatest movie ever made), but whatever it is specifically it's still basically just the active engagement with outside forces that drives plot.
What I'd propose is that you take an individual--a comedian would be a good subject to help show my point--and follow him not as he deals with people but just before and just after and especially those moments--like with the cook on the sidewalk--when he's amidst people but still alone. I'd go to great lengths to ensure that it wouldn't simply be a case study on loneliness or a biography of a hermit, but instead simply an examination of those times in a life when a person is only himself at his innermost. It's a variation on something I find very interesting: that a person will behave differently when alone than when in company. (Even if the person is completely self-aware and well-adjusted and unaffected by conventions or expectations, he will act differently. An example of this that I've mentioned before is that when I wake to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, I will almost never wash my hands afterward, but if at work and someone else is relieving himself at the same time as me I will always do at least a cursory rinse in the sink. How a man reacts to the former tells more about him on a basic level but it's also boring because it's something mostly involuntary for the man. How a man reacts to the latter isn't interesting because it's a social constant, but the thoughtful man's response to his bending in the latter situation is extremely interesting. At least to me.)
2. The other great movie idea I'll share now is one I've had for at least five or six years now, but since I'm now 28 and unlikely ever to follow-up on it (see also Monsieur, Monsieur), I'll share it with the world. This idea is not so much a plot idea as it is a thematic visual idea that would essentially make whatever plot you put behind it simple dressing.
Just a warning now,
(There, I've left an extra space for emphasis.)
but I feel that this is one of the finest artistic-related ideas I've ever had. I always become excited when thinking about the possibilities and the utter originality* of it any time I consider it.
You position the camera lens as though it is an eyeball looking out at the world and just follow your character around. I'm not talking about a simple first-person POV here either. You'd have to semi-blur most of the screen, maybe even blacking out nebulous amounts of the edges, and focus only on the center focal area. Not only that but this central focal area would have to drift and move (and the rest of the screen in kind) as the character's eyes drift from one object to another. I'm no lens expert but I'm not sure the technology was advanced enough to do this right when I first conceived this idea. In 2009 it might be possible.
Vision, and seeing things differently under different levels of focus and sharpness, has always been fascinating to me. This is most likely because unlike most people, I haven't really ever been able to take my vision for granted. (Obviously there are blind people who would scoff at this statement. Sorry to them.) My eyes required correction, but then the correction didn't take so I to go back to glasses, which never felt natural to me. I couldn't get over the fact that I was looking through something to allow me to see, and even then the glasses would slide around or I'd be trying to see with my periphery and of course fail because the frames never seemed to wrap enough quite enough. Finally a year and a half ago I went under the knife and I'm now something close to a normal contactless seer. The only problem is that, depending on the humidity and the wind, my vision can fluctuate slightly. Not enough to ever cause a problem, but enough to recognize it.
That history out of the way, think of the effects this filming technique would produce:
1. You'd get a real point of view. Something that bugs me with traditional POV camera shots is that no human can actually see with clarity the breadth of a movie screen. So while I'm watching a movie shot that way, I'm noticing many details that the character himself can't be processing beyond the simple impressionistic level.
2. You would change the way we think of "realism." (Again, done correctly) I think this is the true elimination of the fourth way in film. It's not virtual reality as we've been exposed to it thus far, because it would still be a film and thus it's goals would still be fictive and artistic.
3. You could add a layer of thought to every second of the film. You're forcing the viewer to consider himself as he watches the film. And you could do it without any subtlety whatsoever, but in such a way that it's effect after watching for a few minutes would dissolve so effortlessly that it would fuzz over the distinction between subtle and nonexistent influences. The possibilities this could open up with storylines and themes and symbols and everything a good writer is good at would be amazing.
Ok I'm getting the feeling that I might be drifting into the realm where I'm not able to make sufficient sense of what I'm trying to say, so perhaps I should cut this short. Know that I love this idea. I love it so much that if it were presented by someone else, I'd still love it and want to write about it.
*The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a recent film that I admired quite a bit, did do something that could be considered similar to what I'm proposing. They used the camera lens to double for a human eye, and narrowed the perspective of that eye to mimic the condition of the main character. However, in that film, they use the technique as a simple way of connecting the audience to the experience of the character, rather than as narrative filmic tool in and of itself. They also didn't go the whole way of constraining the lens' focus to replicate that of an actual eye's. None of this is meant to discredit the technique in the film though. I loved it. I thought it was extremely well done.
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