The immediacy of desire

Thursday, I was sitting in Madelaine Hron's "Human Rights in an Interdisciplinary Perspective" - one of two fourth-year seminars I'm currently taking to prove to Laurier that I am indeed fit to graduate and be a representative of their Honours English program - and it really irked me that I hadn't done any of the readings for the course, especially given how tremendously cool the discussions seemed to be. For that moment, I was thinking to myself, "Yeah, I'm going to leave here and just become an academic recluse. I'm going to really passionately throw myself into the myriad texts and expand my mind and challenge my pre-existing assumptions about the nature of things. Yeah, that'll be great."

And then I left class and went to the Cord office, checked my email and immediately wanted to help all my writers ensure they wrote their best articles this week - that Tones and I put out a damn fine News section.

And then someone makes mention of Oktoberfest and I already regret not getting a ticket to the authentic Concordia Club experience like many of my co-editors, simply because I wanted to be academically responsible, when I clearly haven't been doing readings anyway.

And then I go to work at The Record and some of the younger writers/photographers invite me out to Jane Bond and Huether and seem to forget that I'm "just a student" (a self-imposed view of my role in the Record machine), just genuinely wanting to chill with me as an equal.

And as I lie in bed in those semi-conscious moments before sleep, my mind races through all the people I wish I saw more of, the amazing friends I have that I hardly ever see and wonder if they understand why I spend so much time on classes, Cord, and The Record. If they even should understand?

The thing is - and my brother sent me a poem to this effect not long ago, so at the very worst I know this is merely an affliction that torments the Brown family - there's never enough time. The phrase "killing time" is actually a very legitimate pet peeve of mine because the notion that anyone should want to get rid of time is utterly abhorrent to me. I have a stack of books that I desperately want to throw myself into precariously balanced by my bed - and it is but a shadow of the novels I actually desire to read. Movies, music - the same. And they keep making more, the crazy punks! Besides, that doesn't even begin to open the can of worms that is travel. How I could easily spend my life travelling and not even cover one continent to my liking.

For me, it seems the immediacy of desire rules me, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. What's in front of me now is so absolutely crucial, even when I know on a conscious level that there are many other things that I care about at least equally. I mean, I like that I can be so passionately concerned about so many things, but I also wonder about my ability to discern between what truly is important to me. It can't all be, can it?

I guess the most peculiar part of this all is that I ultimately conclude not that the lack of time is a depressing thought, since I will inevitably fail to accomplish all my goals, forever outstripped by my own ambition. Rather, I look in awe at a world that is so limitless as to leave me forever with a plethora of pleasing options - perpetually spellbound by the world around me, if you will.

Oh, world. You so crazy.

"I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane"

This is just one of many pictures from the California adventure, this one taken at the famous Grauman's Chinese Theatre. This is the place where most big Hollywood movies premiere and Snakes On A Plane was playing while we were there, which I deemed pretty neat. Anyway, the California pictures are coming, but it's going to take me a good long while. Your patience is appreciated. And now, the real post ...

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Last week, I had the pleasure of taking in Samuel L. Jackson's latest cinematic gem, Snakes On A Plane, in the company of some good friends at a delightfully empty theatre that allowed the ever-delightful Phil Froklage and I to vocally commend the filmmakers for their revolutionary vision at every turn. My expectations were high and I can say without word of a lie that they were met in full by what I dare say qualifies as the definitive movie of our time.

All fecetiousness aside, this has been a movie I've been excited to see for a while, particularly after seeing Sam Jackson on The Daily Show, where he confirmed the rumours I'd heard about the ridiculous backstory to the making of this film. Some highlights:

- Jackson did not read a word of the script before signing on for the project
- When they tried to change the title of the film, which was originally intended as only a working title, Jackson threatened to quit
- This movie became such an Internet-cult phenomenon while it was still in production that, upon reading some people's postings on blogs, the filmmakers went back and re-shot certain scenes to include dialogue such as this entry's title.

And that, I guess is where I want to go with this post. As much as I thoroughly enjoyed this film experience - and I key in on the word experience here, since all I wanted was to be laughing at the movie and not with it - I'd be utterly horrified if this type of thing became commonplace. I actually wrote an editorial for the racially-ambiguous Joe Turcotte (anyone who can provide insights to this man's past or present identity, please call me on the ASAP) in The Cord Weekly just last week, lamenting the lack of intelligent cinema. And yes, Snakes was precisely the type of film I was railing against - but with one key difference. This film knew it was a joke. It was okay with that. It embraced that.

So, I guess what intrigues, and in some ways, terrifies me most about the fact that random Internet bloggers effected the final product of a well-known film is the interactivity of the medium this could come to represent. Snakes On A Plane, I think, could be a trendsetter. I'm betting there are other instances of fan input on films to which I'm ignorant, but does anyone know of anything this random? Should we expect this to become commonplace? Should we even be concerned if it does, given that the vast majority of good cinema being made will always be working independent of the Hollywood mainstream and, as such, will be untarnished by this type of pandering to a lowest common denominator of sorts? What does everyone think? I have a lot of friends that know a lot more about the film industry than I do and I'm legitimately curious to know what you have to say.

PS - I hereby nominate the moment, about an hour and a half into the movie, when something goes wrong and one of the passengers exclaims as though it were a revelation, "It's the snakes!", as one of the single funniest moments in film history.