Here’s some fun stuff vaguely related to the worlds of movies and video.

First, I just have to comment on the reaction to this particular movie trailer :

People are oohing and aahing over the thing, saying “it’s a movie trailer that’s like an entire movie about life” and saying how wonderful it is, and how they can’t wait to see the movie, and so on.

I mean, the New York Times reviewer quoted said “it reinvents the very act of perception”.

Well pardon my cynicism, but what the fuck have you people been smoking, and are you sure you are lighting the right end?

To me, admittedly judging purely from this miracle trailer, it seems like a rather thin and pretentious meal. Perhaps I am less impressed by philosophical poetry than the average critic, or I lack their deep and weary cynicism borne from watching so many bad movies that makes them vulnerable to sprouting into verdant bloom at the first movie that comes along that treats them like a grownup, but I cannot help but wonder how much of their impression is the material and how much of it is the admittedly very cool old Italian man doing the voiceover. (Presumably the auteur, but you can never be too careful about that. )

Maybe if I saw the whole movie, I too would be blown away. I am certainly open to beautiful poetry and a fresh, new, warmer approach to film. I am a big fan of movies like Shortbus and Hamlet II that embrace a new warmth, gentleness, and sincerity.

But come on, movie critics. Could you be a little less obvious in your train response to anything that seems impressive and European? Wipe the drool off your chin and try to seem objective.

Moving right along, here’s another form of film criticism : the damning clip compilation.

“You Just Don’t Get It, Do You?” – A Montage of Cinema’s Worst Writing Cliche from Jeff Smith on Vimeo.

Some lines do get used too much, Jeff Smith on Vimeo, and I consider it a perfectly valid point to put together clips of over used lines as a way to draw attention to the crime and hopefully put a little pressure on the system to avoid it.

But come on, Jeff Smith from Vimeo…. “You just don’t get it, do you?” as “the worst movie cliche of all time”? The worst? Seriously? You honestly think that is the worst one?

It doesn’t even make the top ten!

And some things are cliches in movies because they are cliches in the real life, and they are cliches in the real wold because they are phrases that work. They express a genuine sentiment in a fluid and succinct way, and hence they enter the language and stay.

In fact, honestly, the whole paranoia about cliches has lead to a lot of stilted, unnatural, and just plain ugly writing as diligent followers of the rule constantly try to reinvent the wheel, or as they might say, “once more conceive of a rolling vertical solid circle as a means of locomotion. ”

Admittedly, this particular phrase, “you just don’t get it, do you?” has been quite rightly identified as one of the most hostile and alienating things you can say to a person. There is good reason to regard it as being like “shut up” : a phrase you do not use casually because its potential rudeness and insensitivity makes it rather like dynamite, and hence, only to be us in exremis.

In fact, “you just don’t get it, do you?” is a lot worse than “shut up”.

But still, people do say it, and sometimes it’s even entirely justified, and so to label it as one of the worst movie cliches of all time, let alone the very worst?

Please. Give me a break, Jeff Smith of Vimeo.

And finally, completing today’s tryptic, we have this bit of film par excellence, a dramatic reading of a highly important passage ripped straight from the headlines of today and sure to take its place amongst the most august and respect works of history as it happens.

It’s also NSFW as all hell. or at least the audio is, so listen with caution!

Plus it has Jane Lynch, who has the magical powers of awesomeness, and Bill Maher, who I think was famous back in the 90’s for something maybe.

I kid, I kid, I still like Bill Maher and him losing his job over daring to suggest that maybe the USA had done something to provoke the events of 9/11 was a tragedy and a farce and a crime.

I was a huge fan of Politically Correct back when it was on. It was the only show I can recall of in recent history where you could get actual intelligent debate on issues, you know, back when the sides actually engaged one another.

And I am glad Maher is still out there doing his best to provoke.

But seriously, who watches that show?

You know that well worn old saying “some days are diamonds, and some days are worm-eaten explosive musk ox turds with AIDS”?

Today ain’t been a diamond.

Mostly, it has been the usual business when, for whatever reason, the universe dumps a whole twelve gallon bucket of the Sandman’s magic dust into my brain all at once, and I spend the whole day either asleep or blearily stumbling about, barely able to feed myself and empty my bladder before Morpheus reclaims me.

Today was so bad, it melted my fragile reality circuit entirely. At various moments of “consciousness” today, I have forgotten what day of the week it was, what season it was, whether or not I had done various tasks, what meal it was I was having, and even how to do a crossword puzzle properly.

I don’t think I forgot my own name, but then again, nobody asked.

It really highlights something I have been musing about lately, which is just how chaotic my life is, in a subjective sense. I never know what sort of bizarre mind altering chemical chaos this strange organic stewpot of a brain of mine will cook up next. My feeling of connectedness to reality, my ability to concentrate and focus, my state of wakefulness, my emotional polarity (positive or negative, expanding or contracting, outward or inward), my feeling of physical comfort and ease…. all of these vary wildly and unpredictably from moment to moment. Outwardly, very little happens in my life.

But on the inside, it’s a tornado ripping through a line of very full port-a-potties in here.

And I think these two things might be related. I suspect that the radical unbalance between my outer and inner lives might be either a major or THE major cause of this internal chaos. I get so little input from the outside world, and do so much to isolate myself from it and hence leave myself almost entirely at the mercy of my inner life, that I think my mind and my body generate a great deal of internal chaos just as a way to balance the equation.

It’s like a minor subset of the much larger phenomenon of sensory deprivation. In sensory deprivation, the subject’s senses are completely blocked in what is known as an isolation tank. The person in the tank can’t hear, see, smell, taste, feel, or otherwise sense anything.

Deprived of all input, the person rapidly begins to hallucinate quite vividly as their brains generate false input in order to try to compensate for the sudden deficit. They enter a total “waking dream” state, and unsurprisingly, lose all contact with reality.

As a result, isolation tanks and the experiments using them are considered ethically extremely dodgy to put it mildly. The risk to the person’s sanity is extremely high. Living beings are simply not designed to handle such catastrophically low input levels.

In my case, of course, my senses are functioning just fine. They do not literally get low levels of input. My eyes stay open, I can hear, I can smell, I can touch, I can taste.

But the longer one is exposed to the same stimuli, the more one’s senses screen out said stimuli, so in effect, it is as though, from a perceptual basis, said stimuli is not really there any more.

Now apply that to someone who spends most of their life in the same few rooms, in which very little changes from moment to moment, day after day.

This describes both the lives of a person in a high security prison…. and a person like me, with crippling depression that keeps them home most of the time.

It is not the kind of radical brain scrambling psychedelic experience as sensory deprivation, but it is, I think, a milder but chronic version of the larger and more acute phenomenon.

And the unpleasant equation, the deadly Catch-22 of it all, is that it is the depression which drives an introverted person like myself to isolate myself, and then said isolation makes the polluted inner life all the more brutal and chaotic, and hence makes the depression worse, leading to further isolation.

Thus, the disease reinforces itself, potentially infinitely, with the victim living in a ever tinier box of their own creating. And all because of a faulty survival instinct that says, basically, “hide and be still until the big bad monster goes away”.

And that just plain does not work when the monster is a pain deep down inside you.