After class, the day unfolded deliberately. Otis and I did work (she's still wading through a ton of papers herself), had lunch, did work, took a walk, and so on. I was pretty sleepy all day; I think the cat disturbed my sleep more than usual this week.
We kikcked it off the evening when Stella arrived so we could carpool up to Capitol Hill for moovie nite. We met Dingo and walked over to Pho Cyclo, where we joined Sachet and Johnbai (and were joined by Soapy). After topping off with tofu, we walked back down Broadway to the Harvard Exit to watch Fast Food Nation.
I think Bummerman is going vent his spleen about this movie at length, so I will only say that it was disappointing on almost every level: pacing, narrative arc, character development, and even music. It's a shame, really - the movie, like the book, could have delivered an important message, but aside from one terribly affecting sequence towards the end, the entire film is pretty much a waste of time. Even in a town like Seattle, where viewers are likely to be predisposed to liking the film, the audience was restless, unengaged, and unhappy.
Nonetheless, the cinema experience was not a complete loss. There was a stack of free baseball caps on the lobby table, promoting some car, so we each snagged one. Viz:
(My picture and Soapy's got lost in the ether when Sachet tried to send them from her phone to the email, I guess.)
After the film, we retired to Dingo's pad for tea and sweet cookies and conversation; it was nice to end up in such a warm and welcoming pace, and it made a nice change from a late-night IHOP.
4 comments:
Ok, so what if they had put the last scene first?.......
Besides lots of people walking out and being permanantly scarred, do you think it could have given some much needed emotional intensity to the rest of it?
Because I had read in a review that the slaughter scene was coming, and in general it was present in much of what characters were discussing in the film, I felt like it was a lurking character in the film.
In classes I ask students to try and "front load" their papers, meaning grab your audience with something powerful in the first paragraph. This movie felt like a student paper that chose instead to build up to that part in the conclusion, thereby losing the audience in the meantime.
Yeah, in an academic paper you want the thesis up front, as well as some compelling statement or image... personal essays, on the other hand, sometimes meander a lot and build up a head of steam before the big reveal. Which was this? Maybe one of the problems was that it didn't know -- I mean, "there's shit in the meat" is a pretty compelling open, innit?-- or maybe it should have done more to make the references to "the killing floor" more deliberate foreshadowing or something - a true "lurking character," like the shark in Jaws, or Boo Radley
I think if they showed the killing floor first, then when they discussed the shit in the meat the audience would have a much more intense picture of what that meant and why.
Or they could have saved however many millions of dollars they spent on this to just re-release Frederick Wiseman's documentary "Meat" (1976) to theaters. He had total access to a slaughterhouse, and photographed the whole cold-blooded process (in the standard black and white he was using at the time).
The whole thing sounds like preaching to the choir to me. The folks who give a damn will probably see the film...unless it's bad...and the rest are going to ignore it...completely.
Whose bright idea was it to make it "Traffic" with gristle?
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