With The Movie
I've mentioned the photographs are getting larger. I like them larger. Take a look at this one. Not great, but it doesn't work at all unless it's at least this size, preferably bigger. If you were in the photograph (and you weren't looking cross eyed into the camera or scratching your babushka) you'd like it just fine, although you'd never admit this to the photographer. Photographers eventually learn to pay no attention whatsoever to their subjects unless they're married to them, in which case they find other subjects.
I was thinking about Signs after writing my impressions on seeing it yesterday. The Chronicle review talked about the movie being "bland", telling a story similar to that told in War of the Worlds, the classic alien invasion movie, yet here the family, the widowed father, his brother, young son and younger daughter are barricading themselves into their farmhouse, the brother hunkered down over the television set that he's moved into a closet, the pacing, slow, cumbersome when the entire world, for gosh sakes, IS BEING INVADED!
And that's true, I guess. Still, with movies like Fight Club, where the two characters turn out to be two halves of the protagonist's personality, and Being John Malkovich, where, well, the characters crawl around inside John Malkovich's brain, hunkered down in the basement while the world outside is ending seems reasonable. (I personally would be hiding under the covers. Or shooting pictures.)
I'm not sure what Signs is about. I think it's trying to say things about faith and fate and the Monte Carlo method of generating random numbers, but who knows? It's a little murky. I'm not sure the people who made it necessarily know what it's about either, but it did plug right into the old subnoggin, somehow, and got me to writing this disjointed rejoinder. Not the best movie ever made, not by a long shot, and maybe it was seeing the trailers and thinking, well, this looks chancy, and then reading the review in the Chronicle, average, mediocre, but there was obviously a connection made in the theater. Enough about Signs. I'm thinking I'd like to try something like it, so maybe that's what I'm writing about, nothing whatsoever to do with the movie.
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