Monday, 1-24-11

Monday, 1-24-11

Today in Acting we warmed up with Slava work but for some reason I didn’t feel as engaged as I did during the work on Friday. I had to keep reminding myself to stop retreating inward and refocus my attention on the people around me. It could be just a result of having an extremely busy weekend and thus being preoccupied with other things. I’m not sure. But it’s something interesting to notice and be aware of. As long as I was able to notice it and keep re-engaging myself I think I was able to participate fully anyway.

After the warm-up we talked about what we’d seen over the weekend. I brought up Scott Pilgrim because I’ve noticed that every time I watch it I become more critical of it. To be clear, I really love the movie. I think it’s highly enjoyable and altogether a solid story. However part of what I love about it is that it has real flaws and things that could be improved upon. Though these don’t necessarily detract from my enjoyment of the movie, I do noticed them and I think they do detract from the movie’s quality independent of my personal opinion.

Matt Gray described Scott Pilgrim as one of the movies that will define our generation, and I think that’s true. But for a movie with such a unique world they do very little to properly set up the fantastical elements of that world in the early part of the movie. To my mind it’s a fairly simple fix: In the comics, several characters repeatedly mention the fact that Scott Pilgrim just happens to be “the best fighter in the province” as if it were some off-hand and perfectly normal fact. That tells us two things. A) Fighting can be expected to occur frequently, and B) Scott is going to be above average at it. Just those two things, in combination with what we already know about Scott and the environment of the film, would go a long way to bringing the audience up to speed faster than the movie currently does. It is hard for me to be completely objective about this since I read the comics before I saw the movie, but I do think that overall the movie does a very good job of adapting the story into something simple and cinematic, but could go farther to bring the audience along for the ride assuming that they may not be familiar with the comics.

Another problem with the movie is the ending. They basically trade a dramatic finisher for a gimmicky bastardization of one of the elements that’s explored further in the comics, and I think that’s one of the movie’s biggest blunders. They try and tie in Nega-Scott with the Nega-Ninja from the video game earlier on, but I found that to be unnecessary and weak. It was good for an easy laugh, but I think I would’ve rather had more focus placed on the defeat of Gideon, both symbolic and literal. Why not make Gideon the Nega-Ninja? Or do something more original without throwing in a reference to the comics that isn’t fully supported. Sam French suggested that Scott could have defied expectations by refusing to fight Gideon at the end and ending the cycle in a different way, which would have been a much stronger arc. I’m not saying that’s what they should’ve done, but it’s a possibility.

But back to Acting class. After we talked we went straight into the presentations of our Animal Research Projects. The presentations had to be creative, that is, a performance or interactive game rather than a book report. I went first. I chose to go the minimalist route, and simply sat myself down in a chair and performed a monologue I’d written up over the weekend. I had spent about an hour altogether writing and rehearsing it, and it wasn’t hard to be natural with it since a lot of it just relied on knowing the facts. The idea behind the monologue was that I was a sort of caricature of myself saying “I wish I was a flamingo… here’s why.” I tried to make it funny and delivered it dead-pan and serious, and I think it was well-received. It felt successful. In retrospect I think I could’ve gone a little farther with it—found ways to include more of my research and so on—but it got the important information across and it was enjoyable. I liked what I did.

The other projects were, on the whole, also excellent. Interestingly, the least successful ones were the ones where the person was so obviously and blatantly going for the comedy that it distracted wholly from the information they were trying to get across. As I was discussing with Chris Douglass later in the day, most comedy works best when it’s subtle, where the normalcy is there so that the ludicrous stands out all the more. If everything is ridiculous then it becomes flat, predictable, and awkward to watch.

We’ll be finishing up research presentations on Wednesday and our assignment for Friday is to prepare a circus trick as our animal and perform it for the class to music. The circus trick doesn’t have to be wild or crazy, or anything our animal just wouldn’t or couldn’t do—it could be as simple as kicking a ball. That’ll be fun.

On the costuming front, I procured a bunch of pink clothing at Goodwill yesterday and dowels for the wings today. I’m still worried about the beak, but then again it’s not unexpected that it will be the most complex piece to manufacture. Funny story: Kyle Wilson went to Goodwill with me yesterday and we waited for about an hour and a half for the 500 bus to come by to take us back to campus. We took shelter inside a Laundromat where it was warm. What was humorous though was that when we first got to the stop we asked this woman with an iPhone when the bus was coming, and she said “10 minutes.” After about 40 minutes, I went out to ask iPhone lady if she would like to go into the Laundromat for a while and I would stand outside and watch for the bus. She declined, and said “I think it’ll be coming in a minute.” Another 40 minutes passed and she left. Then after a while the bus came. iPhone lady was nowhere to be seen. It’s just funny how far people will go to defend the claims they make, even if they aren’t originally their claims. I mean, how much clearer could it have been that the bus simply could not be expected to just show up within a few minutes? Anyway. I hope she got home okay. I’m attaching the script I wrote for the monologue I performed today. There was some variation due to improv, but it’s mostly pretty accurate.

"I am not a flamingo. I envy the flamingo.

I know a lot about flamingos. And when you know as much as I do about flamingos you can’t help but envy them. I wish I was a flamingo. For starters, the flamingo’s neck is so flexible that they can reach their back-feathers with their beak for preening. That would be useful. I hate it when I’m at the beach, and I’m contorting my arms this way and that trying to spread the sunscreen-… anyway. I can never find anyone to spread the sunscreen on my back for me.

That’s another nice thing about flamingos. They live in flocks. Their whole lives. The bigger the flock, the happier the flamingo. All day, every day, their walking around together. Eating together. Enjoying each other’s company. Fighting. Squawking. Marching. Flapping their wings. Making themselves pretty. I can barely find four people who tolerate me, let alone hundreds.

The American Flamingo doesn’t have any natural predators. There’s the occasional wild dog or egg-poaching eagle, but generally flamingos don’t have anything to fear. That sounds nice. The flock isolates itself away from other animals, in warm, moist, wetlands. I think that’s the most comforting phrase in the world. “Warm, moist, wetlands.” I’d love to live in a warm, moist, wetland. If I got hungry, I’d just stick my head in the water and gurgle for a bit, and my specially designed beak and tongue would filter microscopic organisms into my esophagus. And then all the carotene would make me pink and pretty.

I tried to turn my skin orange eating carrots after seeing an episode of Magic School Bus.

Flamingos aren’t that different from humans though. They’re very devoted animals. They mate for life and then they raise their chicks together, as a team. Heck, lots of humans don’t even manage that anymore. Flamingos court each other by flapping their wings at each other, touching beaks, and synchronized marching and head bobbing. Sounds like my parents. They lay their eggs on mud piles, and after a month it hatches and they feed it for a few months until it can feed itself. And then it only takes the chick six years to reach sexual maturity…

…That would be awesome.

But the best thing about being a flamingo… besides having a bunch of friends around all the time, besides being mostly isolated and safe from predators your entire life, besides being naturally graceful and beautiful, besides skipping adolescence and jumping right into having sex… the BEST thing about being a flamingo is that if you want, you can spread your wings and fly… you weigh less than ten pounds… you’re only about four feet tall, and hell, you live in paradise already. But if you want, baby you can fly. 30 miles an hour… 35, sometimes. They’re completely free. Graceful. Beautiful.

…I wish I was a flamingo.”