Gather in the Drawing Room
My current practice of saving certain articles until I have time to concentrate on them has meant that I found out about the Fake Teenagers Festivus Blogathon a couple days late. Looking at my collection of oft-revisited physical media, I’m not sure what I would have immediately leapt to cover — perhaps Edward Scissorhands, which featured a 20 year-old Winona Ryder and a 22 year-old Anthony Michael Hall — but my secret goal of becoming relevant as a figure on Film Twitter will certainly be harder to achieve if I’m not pursuing clout and chasing trends before Twitter inevitably wheezes its final death rattle. Which means I will need to read movie commentary and articles, not at some distant leisure and certainly not after waiting a week for new cinema releases to lose lustre so I can see the film with a minimal audience on a Tuesday night. No, I might need to cultivate the anxious, wide-eyed panic of someone consumed with worry about no longer being streets ahead.
The recent film I did get a bit of a jump on was Glass Onion, which ended its limited theatrical release yesterday night before pausing to return as a cozy staple on Netflix in a month’s time. It was important to me to see Glass Onion in cinemas, as I have seen all of Rian Johnson’s film output in theatrical release so far, and I didn’t want to break the streak.
I believe I heard about Brick back when I was haunting the corridors of the TwitchFilm website (which I probably discovered chasing breadcrumbs about the theatrical release of Serenity, for my sins). I drove from grad school in Western Mass to the Coolidge in Boston to see a screening of Brick, and while I was disappointed with the fidelity of the digital projection, I was at least glad to have seen it in as large format as possible. The essential flashy conceits — the noir trappings, the arcane Young Person Code, and the curious mechanism where the plot of the film is being acted out by the high school theatre company while it’s still happening to the protagonists — were all attractive and clever, but I really responded to its essential technical filmmaking: the photography and the sound mix. I found myself won over by the choices of putting the strong, distinctive images together with the borderline absurdist touches that occurred throughout the script and production (Lukas Haas’ character’s accumulated quirks — the floor lamp in the back of his van, his mom’s chicken-shaped juice jug, and his attempt at making a human connection with JGL over the Tolkien books — all had me convulsing with laughter). It felt like a visual voice I wanted to continue to know, and it got me to follow Johnson’s career ever since.
RSS feed
smartovercoat.com 