Monday, 1-31-11

Monday, 1-31-11

Today in class we spent a good deal of time talking about movies we’d seen over the weekend. Matt made the point that since our brains are in their last developmental growth spurt, we should be taking advantage of it by doing things like learning foreign languages, watching at least one foreign film every week, and reading a play every day. That sounds awesome. I should try and do a little bit of calculus every few weeks before I turn twenty so that I don’t lose my math-y brain either. And as for all those other things, maybe I’ll make a serious attempt at that after run crew ends in a couple weeks. I have been doing a pretty good job of watching a movie I haven’t seen before every weekend, which I definitely was not doing last semester. It’s definitely important to keep up on the industry considering I intend to be entering that industry in three and a half years (that soon?).

After we finished talking, we worked in our animals for about forty minutes. I got black tights over the weekend and those work really well to make my legs look more spindly and flamingo-esque. Flamingos are very skeletal creatures—they’re defined more by the curvature of their spine and the linear quality of their legs than by anything else. Matt wants me to work more with a slower tempo on Wednesday, because the precision and determination of each step is very effective.

Wednesday is Watering Hole, where all our animals will come together for a long improv session to finalize this portion of the assignment. Then we’ll begin transitioning our animals into human characters based on the animal, which I’m excited for. I think I’ll name him Florence.

I’m exhausted again, so this may be another short entry. I’ll include my thoughts on The Town, though, which I saw on Sunday. The Town had a lot of problems in pacing, and failed to fully explore the most interesting relationships in the movie. There were a lot of shots of people walking places when there could have been things actually happening. The writing was mediocre, but more importantly, The Town seems to have missed its own point, or perhaps it never knew what its point was to begin with. The most interesting characters (played by very good actresses as well) were given entirely too little attention (and thus the very talented actresses were completely underused). It was their relationships to the main character that I wanted to be explored, and in that the movie failed me. The conclusion was, in particular, a drawn-out mess, which is another pacing problem. If the movie was about escape, the final line didn’t make sense. In general, most of the problems were with the screenplay, but it just shows how even very good actors tend to make stupid decisions and thus do dumb acting when given so little to work with.

That’s it for tonight. I’m sure I’ll have lots to say about Watering Hole on Wednesday.