Roger Ebert, RIP

In 1999, I had a website. I realize now that the format I was struggling for was what would become the "blog".

I wrote a piece that I was very proud of at that time about the influence of Gene Siskel and Stanley Kubrick on who I had become.  I wish I could find it to post.  I suspect it says much of what I want to say now, although perhaps my memories are being kind.

Watching Sneak Previews was one of the joys of my childhood. It's where I learned that grown-ups could also love movies. The enthusiasm that both of them brought to discussing movies was inspiring. Not only that, they discussed movies that I would not necessarily have heard about or considered as interesting in the way to be enthusiastic about.


Starting from the beginning, I always felt a kinship to Ebert. Perhaps it was him being the "fat one" and me being a chubby kid or just that he more often seemed like the "fun one" who was more likely to enjoy a mainstream movie or most especially an exploitation movie.

Since then I've learned a great deal from watching his further adventures, reading his books, listening to the commentaries he recorded and following his blog. This should have been expected, but somehow it wasn't for me, so I'm strangely at a loss for words.

I'll leave it to I do not fear death by the man himself, A statement from Chaz Ebert and, oddly enough, Roger Ebert Hails Human Existence As 'A Triumph' from The Onion.

I can't think of anything to add today.

Writing and introversion

I read Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain this week, as I said I would, in The loud introvert.

It's a very interesting read. I went through a number of stages of emotions reading it. It certainly has made some enormous changes in how I want to approach my life and my relationships. It's raised a number of questions as well, that I might discuss publicly on another day.

I've certainly been examining every aspect of my life through this prism, and boring poor Kimberly Rae with it, but also coming to some interesting points about each of our needs and how we can best get them from our lives and our marriage.

But it really has me thinking about my creativity.

When I was a kid, I used to love to things...  Oh, I was a kid, I loved all kinds of things at one point or another, but two of the things I thought about while reading was writing, of course, and puzzles.  It's been so long since I've done puzzles for my own benefit or enjoyed doing them at all.

But I got a sense where it went wrong.  People noticed and got impressed and then I stopped.  It became a thing I had to live up to some level of expectation as well as often having to do it as a performance, both of which made it harder and less enjoyable.

I doubt my love of puzzles will return any time soon.  Even briefly considering going back to it made me anxious to think about.

But I do still love creating.  It's what I think about when I take walks alone or get any time to think on my own.

But through conversation, through Facebook, through this blog and wherever, I've created that kind of situation.  On purpose, I'm well aware.  The idea of people rooting for you and thinking well of your efforts on even a small level is kind of intoxicating.

I need to some time away, though.  It's also very, very distracting.

I'm going off to my cave, a metaphorical cave for now, and just pounding some words out. Writing, as Stephen King admonishes, with the door closed.

If that turns out to be a novel, a screenplay, some short stories or merely a lot nonsense that I let go of, I have no idea.

And yet the freedom of spending some time with that as the goal itself makes writing sound a lot more exciting to me than I've let it be in a long, long time.

Iron fists

I finally saw The Man with the Iron Fist. It fell just short of being something Kimberly Rae and I were able to make an exception to go out to last fall.

A kung fu movie by The RZA of The Wu-Tang Clan. Cool.

Of course, the word was not good, at least where my ear sat near the ground.

So, I sat down, unsure if I should watch the theatrical version and not spend longer than necessary on a movie that didn't work or take the chance that the extended version fixed the perceived problems. Well, just fuck it! I'm a guy who's more likely to like a longer movie and just jump in anyway, and despite it all, I was still reasonably optimistic.

And for me it paid off. I liked it. I'm kind of interested to see what opinions are from people who saw both versions and if that's having much effect or it's just that my opinion is significantly different. I'm not sure yet how much effort I'll put into finding out.

I found it engaging throughout. The action was solid and well-shot. The characters were iconic.

And the really cool thing, I thought, was that the lines and the line-readings all successfully evoked the sound and feel of an English-dubbed Kung Fu movie without ever being distracting or sounding like a joke. It reminds me of the way some serious Woody Allen movies evoke the feel of reading English subtitles for an Ingmar Bergman movie. In both, I suspect there's at least as many detractors as fans, but I'll count myself among the fans... and quite an extra impressed fan, because I find the sound and feel of English-dubbed Kung Fu movies to be frustrating most of the time, as opposed to the feel of reading Bergman movies, which is something I quite enjoy.

As the son of a blacksmith, though, I have to say, its understanding of the physics of metal is extremely lacking.

Usually I'd let something like that go.

This was frustrating to me personally for a number of reasons.

First of all, generally, evoking blacksmithing is a way to draw me into a movie. I grew up in and around blacksmith shops and blacksmithing. It was outside my natural skill set, which made it almost mystic. It was something my father was good at it... I would later discover genuinely brilliant at, and I couldn't make grasp in a most rudimentary way. I was always a story geek, reading books and watching movies. I was never good with my hands or manipulating the physical world or myself physically.

I spent several years, in fact, trying to work in blacksmithing, which seemed to work moderately, for a while, but that was certainly all about the revelation of The loud introvert and nothing at all to do with any innate skill at it. In fact, the constant need to work against my innate ineptitude was source of enormous and heartbreaking frustration for me. I love and hate blacksmithing more most people have even considered its existence as a profession.

Because of all of those things, blacksmithing immediately evokes a lot for me.  The Blade by Tsui Hark one of my undisputed favorite movies, and of course there are many reasons aside from the metalworking that the movie is so amazing to me, but that's something that immediately draws me in and gives me a connection to that world.

So, for The RZA to make a movie that included him as writer/director/star playing a blacksmith, he had an enormous opportunity to draw me personally into this movie and make it something very special.

Well, obviously he had no reason to need to do that.

And I'm sure that if you went to him and said that the physics of metal were off, I'd guess he'd say it was a movie thing and he was creating some effects that looked cool.

And here's where I'm not sure he traded up. I kind of think the things different metals would do in the weird extreme situations presented could be made to look cooler than the generic shattering effects the movie leaned on.

It reminds me of '80s action movies, which I watched a lot at the time, and still do. In fact, I'm still slowly but surely making up for various periods of pretention I went through during that time and wrote off a lot of the action movies at the time.

But at some point, after watching dozens and dozens of movies in which Molotov Cocktails just exploded, I saw documentary footage of a riot and saw what a Molotov Cocktail actually does and couldn't get over how much more visually striking it is. It's ridiculous that people in a visual medium missed this obvious fact. And, by and large, that has been fixed in more recent movies, so apparently I wasn't the only one who noticed.

Not only that, but like the Kung Fu movies he was so influenced by, the RZA was clearly trying to make a larger point about human behavior in how he labeled the different clans by animal types and modeled the way the looked and acted, their posture and their strategies, off the animals. Perhaps if I had grown up with a zoologist, I'd have similar issues with that.

Here, I really think RZA could have made use of the real physical qualities of iron and gold to really cool effect both visually and symbolically, both of which, for me, were essentially thrown out the window for me by effects that were ultimately used.

All of this criticism, I'm sure sounds like I'm joining the detractors, but I'm not. I liked it enough that I think it could have been something all the more wonderful if it weren't for that issue, which makes me unable to stop thinking about it.