Dystopias are usually not so poignant with me as they are for others, because I usually do not participate in that which is being portrayed as the beginning of a steep and dangerous slope; they lack poignancy with me because I cannot relate to that which is being exaggerated, and so I am just a frustrated outsider, and it often makes me sick looking inside, not because I see myself, but because sometimes people make me sick, or perhaps, fictional exaggerations of human beings sometimes make me sick.

Thus Black Mirror is a frustrating experience, at least in my first small tastes. It's gross, and doesn't carry along as much poignancy or insight for me as is necessary to combat the feelings.

Badlands (Terrence Malick)

So is this just an absurd little tale of a criminal romance in the '50s?

I enjoyed this film. I liked the characters a lot, and they kept me interested. Artistry in this film was subdued, so it, for me, was a nice character study, and not much more. I can't connect much with the supreme apathy of this film, but it held my interest well.

Malick's first film is spare, basic, forwardly-told, and is dominated underneath by a uniform apathy. Its age shows, but one can appreciate the shock value it must have held for its first audiences. Now, it's a token of a prior time -- and gives a simplicity we may be missing and craving once in a while.

Thoughts during The Thin Red Line

Tonight I decided to dive into Terrence Malick's 1998 WWII film. After a while of watching (this is a three-hour movie) it is clear that this is an excellent war film. The storyline pulls from a novel, but nonetheless it stays fairly pure and cinematic. A couple of things struck me. Firstly, I put this movie on not to solely experience the movie, nor to learn anything about life or reality from the movie, but to learn something about film. Exploring Malick's body of work is a project in deepening my understanding of this artistic medium, a project in learning about human art using a medium that I love. This becomes complicated though when, more than many other art media, film usually tries to craft an experience of reality for the viewer, thereby concealing its artistry. In experiencing most poetry one can hardly escape the art -- it is front-and-center. In film often it's the reality that is central. I realized, tangential to this, that my experience as a filmgoer and recreational critic in the past has largely been focused on not the very technical components of a film but the experience for the viewer, and the writing and characters. I have interpreted films from a very human perspective, focusing on sensory and emotional experience, the reality constructed. I know very little about artistic technique in film -- editing, camera, etc. So when The Thin Red Line doesn't give me very much in the way of new, innovative film experience, I'm left searching for artistic techniques I don't have the eye to identify. Indeed, unlike recent Malick films, The Thin Red Line does not give a novel, singular experience. It's just a good war film -- a very good war film, with ensemble acting and good direction. If one has seen Apocalypse Now from the '70s and Full Metal Jacket from the '80s one knows about philosophy and vulnerability in war cinema -- masculine films with feminine reflection and pathos. What does The Thin Red Line contribute? Well, maybe it's just very good.
I don't have much reason to continue watching -- I need to be learning about the art of film, and since that which I normally focus on (experience, writing, human realities) isn't novel, and I don't have the knowledge to draw much from technique in this film, all I'm doing is watching the reality and not the art, which I think is nothing but mildly destructive to my own experience of reality. I like this film, and I respect it. I respectfully withdraw.

22, A Million (Bon Iver)

3/5

Inconsistent artistic vision prevents 22, A Million from being a good piece of music. I like some of the sounds and I like a few of the melodies, but these are only pieces of the picture. The music seems to indicate that Justin Vernon is in a state of being pulled between different parts of himself, different creative visions. But not only is he in a songwriting limbo, he has lost the skill that put together his earliest songs into well-formed, rich and high-quality pieces of music. The airs of folk present in this album are mostly low-cost and empty, while the soundscape EDM alternative just doesn't pay off. This album is cool and nice to have around, but it doesn't hold much weight.

22, A Million

First quick thoughts:

It just seems to me that Justin Vernon is not as good a songwriter as he was once, or was at one intense moment in his life. Bon Iver had a couple of good songs, but things were already falling into collections of musical ideas rather than songs. Holocene and Beth/Rest were good songs to me -- but 22, A Million may have missed the mark entirely, being miles away from the subtlety and unity of things like Re: Stacks, etc.

These aren't songs -- they're just collections of things that Vernon heard and thought sounded cool. And there is a lot of cool sound on this album. But it's oh so unsatisfying.

In fact, it's quite Kanye. The correlation between what's going on here and The Life of Pablo is strong to me, and I noticed it whilst listening.

I notice how the more I know an artist, it seems, the less I respect their work.... because I am able to see the thought process behind it. I noted in my Standard Model thinking that the goal is to remove the artist from the art. When I read the writing of a particular friend of mine, when I hear new Radiohead music, when I hear Justin Vernon try new ideas, I just get it. It makes so much sense, and is thus unimpressive to me.

There are cool sounds here, and maybe a decent song or two, and maybe a couple songs I'll listen to out of context sometime in my life. But I just get what he's doing, and it's not consistent, and it's not cohesive, and it's not like the startling beauty of earlier work.



Actually, to be clear, my issue is not with the diverse brigade of glitch noises and electro-ambience --- it's really that he tries to settle his weak folk-rock melodies and chords within. For Emma featured good folk melodies and chords -- since then, not only have these features worsened, he is trying to meld them with ideas that come from an entirely different place of inspiration. One cool folk melody and one cool glitch sample may not work together, though both are cool separately. His vision is fractured, and even inconsistent in its fracturing. His classic, traditional musical talent from the early years isn't present or is lost, and the weaker form of that is placed amongst just weird, disagreeable parts. Two bad things happening here.