Troll 2 is widely considered one of the worst movies of all time. Also, one of the awesomest. That’s how these things work sometimes. And this is it. In its entirety. I’d click through to watch it fullscreen, if I were you.
Is it just me, or were they REALLY pushing Archuleta for the win? I pretty much picked Cook over Archuleta every round, and then Simon did the opposite. Not that the judges and I usually agree, it just seemed like both Simon and Randy were giving Archuleta more praise than he deserved. His first song was not flawless, and the songwriters’ song he chose was not better.
So here’s the question. Are they pushing Archuleta for the win because they really think he’s better? Because he’s more marketable? Because they secretly want Cook to come in second because he’ll have more creative freedom without Idol’s contract? Because they secretly want Cook to win and they’re using reverse psychology hoping to motivate Cook’s voters? I’m totally overthinking this aren’t I?
And then the question for me, and how/whether I vote. I want Cook to win because I think he’s ten times better than Archuleta. On the other hand, I don’t want him to win because I don’t want him to make Idol’s record, I want him to make HIS record. Maybe I’ll just let it alone and save my cell phone bill. :)
In unrelated life news, I’m all moved out of Waco and am back in St. Louis for a couple of weeks before I drive out to LA and find an apartment. And a job. Hopefully will have leads on that before I go out there. So that’s what’s going on, for those of you wondering.
Who can write 20 pages of academic prose in one day when she really sets her mind on it? That would be me. That moment when procrastination turns into focused concentration? Good moment. Although it apparently hit too early this time, because I had two hours to spare. ;)
So that’s my last assignment ever for my last class ever. Of this Master’s degree. I have very little faith in my ability to stay away from school for ever. But for now. Yay.
The paper was on Godard, and I’ll probably post it on The Frame once I get it back and, you know, have confirmation that it didn’t totally suck. I feel good about it, which is usually a bad sign, so we’ll see.
Wow, you know what this means? I can read ANYTHING I WANT before going to bed now. I haven’t done that since…well, Christmas, but even then I was trying to read ahead for classes. So, then, since 2006. Really. I’m not sure I remember how to make reading decisions on my own. I’m a little overwhelmed by the possibilities.
Here’s an example of something I’ve been seeing a lot lately. A book or a blog post or whatever will refer to a perhaps lesser-known author/filmmaker/musician/book/film, etc., with the construction: “a Japanese film of 1966 called Godzilla vs. Monster Zero.” That happens to be the one I’m looking at right now, but I’ve also seen ones like “a 19th century British novelist named Elizabeth Gaskell.” Typically, the assumption when writers use this seems to me to be that the thing they’re about to mention won’t be known to most of their audience. For example, in the book with the Godzilla example, four lines later, the writer mentions “Beethoven sonatas” but doesn’t feel the need to say “sonatas by a German composer named Ludwig van Beethoven.” Apparently because everyone should know who Beethoven is. And I agree that Beethoven is, and should be, better known than the Godzilla movie. But I would still say “the 1966 Japanese film Godzilla vs. Monster Zero” instead. To me, that contains all the same information with less condescension. It gives the object a more concrete existence by virtue of a definite rather than an indefinite one as well as by firmly connecting it to its name (it isGodzilla vs. Monster Zero rather than just being called that).
Do those two ways of phrasing the same thing have connotatively different meanings to anyone but me? Or am I just being overly bothered by something meaningless?
David Bordwell has a whole chapter on Jean-Luc Godard in Narration in the Fiction Film; I almost returned the book to the library without reading it, but I’m so glad I didn’t. It’s great. And this quote is so right:
Those who dislike Godard’s films may well find the works’ resistance to large-scale coherence incredibly frustrating; those who admire the films have probably learned to savor a movie as a string of vivid, somewhat isolated effects.
I find myself more and more savoring films that are a string of vivid, somewhat isolated effects rather than devoted to large-scale coherence. Perhaps something to keep in mind when you decide whether to take or leave my recommendations. ;)
