Posted
Saturday, March 18, 2006
10:57pm
Nip
it in the bud
Hmmm.
It's been a busy few weeks for me.
A few months ago I mentioned that something
big was coming up. Well, it has. As
of January 1st, I've been freelance.
I took most of January off, but have
been slammed since then.
I'll
try to post as much as I can, but in
an effort to keep the posts coming,
I will doing more sketch posts. These
will doodles and sketches I draw during
the course of the day.
FYI,
the illustration above was done on
the Sunday that Don Knotts died and
posted that night to my illustration
site. I think I'll be combining this
blog and the illustration side more
and more. It will help the lack of
posts here.
And here's my top
ten movies of 2005... like it matters
at this point.
10. (Tie) Munich/War
of the Worlds
Directed by Steven Spielberg
9. Batman Begins
Directed by Christopher Nolan
8. Cinderella Man
Directed by Ron Howard
7. Sin City
Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank
Miller
6. The Constant Gardner
Directed by Fernando Meirelles
5. Wedding Crashers
Directed by David Dobkin
4. The 40-Year-Old
Virgin
directed by Judd Apatow
3. The Squid & the Whale
Directed by Noah Baumbach
2. Syriana
Directed by Stephen Gaghan
1. Good Night, and
Good Luck
Directed by George Clooney
I am one of the Crash-bashers
and guess what... it had nothing to
do with Brokeback Mountain. For the
record, I was rooting for Good Night,
and Good Luck (though I knew it stood
no chance).
To tell you the truth,
aside from the gay thing, I found Brokeback
to be
standard story of forbidden love; a
modern day update of Romeo &
Juliet. Of course, this probably comes
from my upbringing in San Francisco.
Gays and lesbians are accepted here
and it's not unusual to see advertisng
and marketing targeted to that community.
Nothing taboo or strange about that
lifestyle to us.
I bash Crash because
it has the subtlety of a ten-ton truck
smashing into a nursery school. It's
over the top, cliched script left me
groaning. The connections between the
characters went beyond mere coincidence;
it smacked of lazy convenience for
the writer. It was almost as if Paul
Haggis took the racial epithat montage
from Do the Right Thing and expanded
it into a two-hour movie.
Honestly, I found
it to be the worst among this year's
best picture nominees. It lacked grace,
realism and plausibility. I find it
puzzling that so many critics have
embraced it. To me it's not so much
as a mirror, but a funhouse mirror,
distorting reality and exaggerating
the truth.
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