All Consuming : Sumit

A review of "Babel"

nobody@allconsuming.net (Sumit) — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 10:31:19 GMT

by Alejandro González Iñárritu

“There are some films that arrive here from the international festival circuit almost incandescent with self-importance. They hover into the cinema in a kind of floating trance at how challenging and moving they are. ... One such is Babel, the exasperatingly conceited new film from Alejandro González Iñárritu. It is well acted and handsomely photographed, but still extraordinarily overpraised and overblown, a middlebrow piece of near-nonsense: the kind of self-conscious arthouse cinema that is custom-tailored and machine-tooled for the dinner-party demographic. The script is contrived, shallow, unconvincing and rendered absurd and almost meaningless by a plot naivety that is impossible to ignore once its full magnitude dawns on you.”

Intimate, but directionless

nobody@allconsuming.net (Sumit) — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 10:27:09 GMT

Iraq in Fragments

by James Longley

The intimacy with which Iraq in Fragments portrays its subjects is undoubtedly remarkable, given that it was shot in a warzone. There are some striking images, too, particularly in the final “fragment”, Kurdish Spring. But for the most part the result is dissatisfyingly impressionistic.

Too hard to separate from its maker

nobody@allconsuming.net (Sumit) — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 10:32:51 GMT

Apocalypto

by Mel Gibson

(Contains spoilers.)

This is the second film I’ve seen in recent months whose climax touches on the Christianization of “primitive” peoples whose traditional social frameworks are being destroyed by environmental change – but beyond their basic premise the two movies couldn’t be more different. The Journals of Knud Rasmussen depicted its protagonists’ journey from shamanism to Christianity with sensitivity and tact; Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto tackles similar themes with all the blunt force of the axes his pseudo-Mayans wield on each other with increasingly monotonous regularity.

Pseudo-Mayans because, as with The Passion of the Christ (which I haven’t seen), Gibson’s deployment of authentic language and locations obscures the liberties taken with historical accuracy. As has been hashed out elsewhere, Apocalypto compresses several hundred years of Mayan civilization into the same milieu and throws in some Aztec motifs to boot, while failing to pay even lip service to the cultural, scientific or social achievements of either the rural or urban Amerindians.

Much of this inaccuracy can be forgiven in the name of artistic license, but Apocalypto seems in part to be an exculpation of Europeans in Central America, starting with its opening quote: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” Certainly Mayan civilization had tumbled far from its peak by the time the conquistadors arrived, but some of the motifs in Gibson’s film suggest a questionable reframing of the Europeans’ arrival as a doomed attempt at salvation, rather than a largely remorseless process of colonisation.

For example, we see a young girl suffering from smallpox – a disease that Amerindians first contracted from Europeans. It is hard to see how such an obvious anachronism could have accidentally survived the editing process; but if it is deliberate, it would seem to be blatantly revisionist. The hero’s journey, too, is suggestive: having survived a gruelling ordeal (seemingly another Gibson motif) his skin is saved – quite literally! – by a succession of miracles: an eclipse (yawn), a jaguar, a snake, a waterfall.

Are these sent from God, or the spirits of the jungle? That question goes unanswered, since it is Jaguar Paw’s decision to become predator, rather than prey, which turns around his fortunes. (Mind you, God does help those who help themselves.) Ultimately, he turns his back on the landing missionaries to return to the animist forest: even the noblest of the savages is ultimately doomed. It’s not an unsympathetic decision: after all Jagar Paw has been through, it’s hardly surprising that he doesn’t trust his fate to another group of outsiders.

The consequences of Godlessness are drawn more explicitly in the broader milieu. The good guys are live in something akin to a state of grace (albeit one in which bawdy humour is much appreciated); the baddies are the urbanites whose implausibly cruel society appears to comprise little more than a vast machine for enslaving and sacrificing legions of innocents. It’s hard to escape the message that heathens just can’t assemble a half-decent civilisation without it turning into a death cult. Given that the film is partly an allegory for our own times, the moral – and the presumed remedy for our social ills – is clear.

Does any of this really matter? After all, nobody really expects historical accuracy from Hollywood, do they? Well, no – although I’d argue that this lack of expectation itself suggests worrying complacency. But Apocalypto is not, in any case, a Hollywood movie in many respects. Mel Gibson bankrolled and co-wrote as well as directing it, making it an uniquely personal creation – and one that has more in common with the works of Werner Herzog than Tom Cruise.

Gibson has his strengths as an auteur: as Peter Bradshaw observes, it’s hard to see how such a “mad and virile” film could have been made through the usual channels. Apocalypto might be light on plot and characterisation, but it’s muscular, energetic and visually stunning. (It’s refreshing to think that other squillionaire and hopefully non-Scientologist stars might choose analogously risky vehicles in the future.)

But Bradshaw also comments on the difficulty of assessing Apocalypto without being swayed by Gibson’s personal, but well-publicized, beliefs and public (mis)behaviour. He’s a professional, so he manages. I’m not: and I can’t be well satisfied by any film whose context and content both make me so consciously second-guess its creator’s motives.

Why I recommend "Hibiscus Flowers"

nobody@allconsuming.net (Sumit) — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 07:52:50 GMT

Hibiscus Flowers

I bought these in – of all places – Lakeland in Bluewater Shopping Centre, whose stock in trade is kitchen gadgetry along the line of grapefruit spoons and bagel slicers. The idea is that you pop them in the bottom of a champagne glass, where they open up and bubbles stream off them. Rather to my surprise, they actually worked exactly as promised (and turned the champagne a lovely purple colour). You can also eat the flowers, which the jar claimed tasted “of rhubarb and raspberry”, although a cynic might argue that they taste mostly of the preserving syrup. Still, “a delightful surprise for your guests”, as Good Housekeeping might have said circa 1965.

Why it's taking me forever to finish consuming "Jane Eyre (2006 mini series)"

nobody@allconsuming.net (Sumit) — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 06:15:56 GMT

Jane Eyre (2006 mini series)

by BBC

Saw the first two episodes of this on the big screen at the NFT in September. Which makes the small-screen version seem … cramped. And I had to borrow episode three on video from a friend. And then my video recorder broke …

(Oh yes: So far I’m with the consensus that says Ruth Wilson is superb as Jane, Toby Stephens a bit too jovial as Rochester.)

A story about "Puffball"

nobody@allconsuming.net (Sumit) — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 06:10:32 GMT

Puffball

Specifically, a giant puffball fried in breadcrumbs and served with Parma ham, soft-boiled eggs and new potatoes. Interesting texture – the closest thing would probably be one of the stickier variants of tofu – and a fairly strong mushroom flavour. Apparently a single giant puffball can contain seven trillion spores, which makes me feel a little guilty, as though eating it was an act of mycological genocide. But not that guilty.

Scary

nobody@allconsuming.net (Sumit) — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 16:50:07 GMT

Children of Men

by Alfonso Cuarón

I tend to find dystopian science fiction disappointing. All too often, it transpires that a single catastrophic failure – political, environmental or military – has resulted in Doom and, I dunno, I think I’m just too bullish on human ingenuity and resilience to find that convincing. People seem to have always thought that the world was going to hell in a handbasket, even as many objective measures of human wellbeing – infant mortality and literacy, for example – have steadily improved. I don’t believe progress can be derailed that easily.

The few dystopian fictions that I really admire – the usual suspects, basically – are less attempts at prediction, more allegorical warnings of present-day ills. But that approach is fraught with difficulty, too: I find ham-fisted, half-baked morality tales even more tedious than pointlessly pessimistic apocalypses. Even when allegories are done well, a dystopian approach can be overkill: it’s a cinematic analogue of Godwin’s Law. I already understand that prejudice/fascism/pollution/cyborg killing machines are bad, m’kay?

And since I’m not the kind of guy who likes to sit in his bomb shelter fondling small arms and counting cans of sweetcorn, I’m not particularly interested in watching civilization disintegrate for the sake of it. A post-apocalyptic landscape can make a decent backdrop for a story, but rarely captures my interest in its own right. It’s not enough that the world should end: it has to end in an interesting way. The first example that leaps to mind is Brian Vaughn’s Y: The Last Man, in which the world doesn’t actually end, but civilization certainly stumbles a bit.

Like Vaughan’s comic, Children of Men postulates a future in which a single social element has been mysteriously removed: in Y it’s men; in Children, it’s, well, children. This, of course, sets up an obvious plot in which the first pregnancy in eighteen years becomes the target of warring factions, and the expectant mother has to be shepherded to safety by a conflicted everyman. But since Alfonso Cuarón’s adaptation of PD James’ novel is neither didactic nor simplistic, there’s both more and less going on than that.

More, because the infertility pandemic is only one of the ills that have beset humanity: totalitarianism, armed conflict and environmental collapse are all suggested as contributors to the film’s version of the Grim Meathook Future. And it’s a startling believable vision, thanks to richly textured set design and convincing performances – as well as distinctly British locales that helped me out a lot in suspending my disbelief. I’m still not wholly convinced by the world it depicts, but it’s close enough to be scary. And it is very scary.

Less, because – like much of my favoured fiction these days – Children of Men offers few clues or answers. There’s no explanation for the childlessness, or for the miraculous pregnancy – this isn’t the kind of apocalyptic thriller in which the race is on to identify a magically curative antibody. The plot twists and turns a little, but the narrative’s force really comes from the cinematography and insistent pace. Even the ending is inconclusive: all the viewer is left with is hope. And that, more than all the careful world-building, is what makes Children of Men enduringly memorable.

Romps don't come much rompier

nobody@allconsuming.net (Sumit) — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 10:19:20 GMT

The Eyre Affair

by Jasper Fforde

It’s somewhat ironic that a book which celebrates literature should itself be so unliterary. There are any number of holes you could pick in Fforde’s writing style, but that would rather miss the point: this book’s appeal lies in its frenzied innovation, not in its wordsmithing, character development or even its episodic and somewhat incoherent plot.

I’m curious as to whether Fforde keeps the ideas coming later in the series, or whether having established his world he simply runs his stories through it. Not curious enough to read the next one particularly soon, though.

You'll never leave!

nobody@allconsuming.net (Sumit) — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 22:45:43 GMT

League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse

I wouldn’t normally be much interested in seeing the movie version of a TV show – I find they’re usually too much of a good thing – but I was attracted by the premise of Apocalypse: Royston Vasey’s cast of freaks, creeps and weirdos break the fourth wall, crossing over from their fictional universe to “ours”. Their mission: to persuade the League of Gentlemen, their creators, to continue to write about them, thus averting the apocalypse of the title. As a sucker for all things metafictional, that was enough to draw me in, but the film turned out to be a bit of a curate’s egg.

The plot requires the Roystonites to be more than one-dimensional caricatures – but in making them more sympathetic, it also makes them less sinister. Where the TV series frequently curdled the blood, the movie rarely does more than slightly turn the stomach. There’s nothing particularly novel about the handling of the metafictional element, either: a film-within-a-film that doesn’t really add much, the portrayal of the comedians as self-obsessed (seemingly obligatory these days) and a mildly amusing riff about free will. Apocalyptic it may be; definitive, it’s not.

Why I recommend "Office Space - Special Edition with Flair (Widescreen Edition)"

nobody@allconsuming.net (Sumit) — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 16:33:49 GMT

Office Space - Special Edition with Flair (Widescreen Edition)

Peter: I don’t like my job, and, uh, I don’t think I’m gonna go anymore.

Joanna: You’re just not gonna go?

Peter: Yeah.

Joanna: Won’t you get fired?

Peter: I don’t know, but I really don’t like it, and, uh, I’m not gonna go.

Joanna: So you’re gonna quit?

Peter: Nuh-uh. Not really. Uh… I’m just gonna stop going.

wtf

nobody@allconsuming.net (Sumit) — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 00:21:50 GMT

Snakes on a Plane

by David R. Ellis

Hollywood has processed airborne paranoia into some fairly odd forms over the past few years, but none more closely resembles a fever dream than Snakes On A Plane. How to describe it?

A $33m viral clip with an A-list leading man? Had the blogosphere not gone nuts for this movie, it might well have shed its astonishingly literal title, lost a chunk of its funding, been fronted by a has-been or a nobody and gone straight to video. Instead, well, it became what Wiredreferred to as “the best worst movie of the year” months before it was even released.

A throwback to the Seventies heyday of ludicrous aviation-disaster flicks? The insanely implausible threat, the cast of neurotics, stoics and unfortunates, the histrionics and heroics – all hearken to the kind of film that Airplane was supposed to have finished off for good. Even the interior of South Pacific Airlines 121 looks like it was last refurbished in 1974.

A particularly eccentric take on the “postmodern slasher” subgenre pioneered by Scream? The unpleasantly sadistic nature of the deaths in this film speak more to murderous gross-out than tongue-in-cheek disaster, and it obeys the rules: the first to die are a young couple busy toking and joining the Mile High Club … drug use and casual sex is apparently still punishable by death in the movies.

An instant camp classic in the vein of Showgirls, complete with rubber snakes, shout-along quotes, call-and-response and the rest? (In this respect, going to see it weeks after release in a virtually empty hall might not have been the smartest idea.) A movie whose makers know that you know that they know that nobody is taking this remotely seriously – except the unfortunate critics, who have no choice but to offer up their utterly redundant verdicts.

Or all of the above, plus a few other tropes and tricks borrowed from randomly from all over the place? There’s an air stewardess who has “just one flight left” before she graduates (does this imply that “flight attendant” is now as risky an occupation as “cop”?). There’s a (probably unintentional) Cronenberg-lite moment when two characters become aroused by an impromptu medical procedure. There’s state-of-the-art herpetological special effects, culminating in a chihuahua-eating anaconda, for pete’s sake.

I don’t know what the hell Snakes On A Plane is. The secret of its unlikely success may be that it doesn’t either.

A story about "Jane Eyre (Penguin Classics)"

nobody@allconsuming.net (Sumit) — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 23:18:16 GMT

Jane Eyre (Penguin Classics)

by Charlotte Brontë

Much too, you will think, reader, to engender jealousy: if a woman, in my position, could presume to be jealous of a woman in Miss Ingram’s. But I was not jealous: or very rarely; — the nature of the pain I suffered could not be explained by that word. Miss Ingram was a mark beneath jealousy: she was too inferior to excite the feeling. Pardon the seeming paradox; I mean what I say. She was very showy, but she was not genuine: she had a fine person, many brilliant attainments; but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature: nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil; no unforced natural fruit delighted by its freshness. She was not good; she was not original: she used to repeat sounding phrases from books: she never offered, nor had, an opinion of her own. She advocated a high tone of sentiment; but she did not know the sensations of sympathy and pity; tenderness and truth were not in her.

You go, girl.

The first really good time-travel movie (rated 5 stars)

nobody@allconsuming.net (Sumit) — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 10:52:09 GMT

Primer

by Shane Carruth

Contains spoilers, but definitely not explanations. Also: The reviewer once wrote a term paper on time travel under general relativity. This means he cares a lot about it but not that he knows what he’s talking about.

I’ve been boring my friends for a long time now with my contention that there hasn’t been a really good science fiction movie made about the experience of time travel – something that suggests how it might feel to be a time traveller in the same way that 2001: A Space Odyssey suggested how it might feel to journey through space. Might Primer be that film?

It seems to me that time travel would be an extraordinarily disorienting experience, something that’s largely been ignored in most pop-cultural treatments of the subject. These tend overwhelmingly either to use time travel as a way to add novelty to a caper (Back to the Future), quest (The Terminator) or farce (Groundhog Day). Sometimes it’s a handy “reset button” (see Quantum Leap) and occasionally a way of adding a particularly bittersweet twist to an otherwise linear story – the modern equivalent of a soothsayers’ prophecy fulfilled (Twelve Monkeys).

But what they generally don’t do is address the problems of trying to negotiate an eerily familiar environment using only unreliable memories – in fact, you could argue (and I have) that the best treatments of that subject so far are actually to be found in Memento, or perhaps Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – both of which actually use amnesia as their central plot device. I haven’t seen a movie which uses time travel to create the same effect – Donnie Darko comes close, but its “time travel” is virtually indistinguishable from magic. So: no good time travel movies.

Until Primer, that is. Shane Carruth’s microbudget ($7,000!) debut feature hits the ground running. It scores points immediately by dumping us into the garage workshop of a bunch of fast-talking, evidently brilliant boffins whose patter is almost entirely convincing; there’s plenty of technobabble here, but it’s plausible technobabble. (Primer’s style has been described as “analog egghead”, which I would dearly love to see become sci-fi’s next wave.) They could be building anything from Google to a cold-fusion plant, but in fact they’re developing a superconducting rig that can partially levitate objects – which turns out, unexpectedly, to also be a time machine.

It’s a plausible time machine, too: it seems to generate closed timelike curves and its physics are reasonable, if necessarily speculative. There’s none of that “meet yourself and you’ll explode!” bollocks here: mass-energy is conserved, time changes direction but not speed; and there’s even a nod to entropy with the notion that repeated or interrupted travel is harmful (leading to lousy handwriting, spontaneous bleeding and worse). Okay, you need to suspend your disbelief when it comes to the machine’s economy and portability, but that’s not too difficult. It’s certainly no harder than it is to believe in a fusion-powered DeLorean …

Of course, this versimilitude would count for little if all Carruth did with it was to show us Eloi and Morlocks, but that’s not the case. During the film’s brief running time, the central characters – the elementally-named Abe and Aaron – take an unspecified number of trips through the box, creating at least nine time-lines along the way. The first few trips are confusing enough – and made slyly more so by the rapid-fire dialogue, anonymous locales and use of flashbacks – but the story rapidly grows much more tangled when it transpires that there are additional boxes and that Aaron, a control freak if ever there was one, has been making covert solo trips to arrange various matters to his liking and impersonating himself at critical junctures.

In fact, the use of the word “tangled” is misleading here: it suggests solving the puzzle is just a matter of patiently following the threads to their ends, whereas that approach would actually only end up with a handful of loose ends. Carruth’s boldest move is to revisit his time travelers’ bewilderment on Primer’s viewers – even when that means abandoning linearity and narrative resolution. Just as those caught up in a temporal paradox may never be able to gather the information needed to make sense of their experiences, so Primer’s viewers aren’t given enough information to fully decipher the movie’s narrative.

The best example is that of Granger, a potential investor who disrupts Abe and Aaron’s plans after discovering one of their boxes and taking an ill-advised trip – or rather, that’s what they (and we) assume, since we never see the chain of events that lead him there. And just as they struggle to deal with his sudden manifestation, so do we. As Carruth says in an interview: “The universe is not going to explode or break down if you create a paradox. Whatever’s going to break is probably going to be you.” The film isn’t going to explode or break down if you introduce an unexplained narrative element …

So Primer is playing an intertextual game with the viewer that reminds me a bit of Blade Runner, with its multiple edits and corresponding interpretations. There’s another layer, too, in the characters of Abe and Aaron: almost instinguishable at the outset, their divergent paths also suggest bifurcating timelines, in this case splitting as a function of free will, rather than causality. But Primer is no Blade Runner: it has only a feeble emotional core. It seems rather begrudging to complain that a film (and director) which gets so much right, working with so little, fails to deliver in the acting department: but there it is.

Whereas Blade Runner’s replicants make us question what it is to be human, Primer’s humans never seem like much more than automatons. Of course, science fiction frequently skimps on character development, but in Primer’s case the problem’s not so much that characterisation is absent as underdone. Aaron’s actions are perplexing because they’re clumsily introduced, not because they fit into Primer’s puzzle-box, and that undermines the force of the consequent developments. So while Primer is a great time-travel movie, it’s not quite a great movie overall. But that’s good enough for me.

A review of "A Scanner Darkly"

nobody@allconsuming.net (Sumit) — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 22:43:28 GMT

A Scanner Darkly

by Richard Linklater

I had high hopes for Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly, talked up as the most (first?) faithful adaption of a Philip Dick novel to date and promisingly cast with Reeves, Ryder, Downey Jr, et al – not to mention the now celebrated rotoscoping effect used to give the picture an other-worldly edge.

In the event, most of those expectations were satisfied. Scanner certainly is the most faithful Dick adaptation so far – adhering fairly closely to the plot as well as the themes of the original novel – and the effects and acting were both impressive in a low-key way. In fact, there was a gratifying solidity in the movie’s juxtaposition of 70s-fried dope shenanigans and 21st-century surveillance state – a combination I’d found it a little hard to visualize when reading the novel.

That said, I was mildly disappointed that Linklater didn’t quite go the distance – although perhaps that really would have been too alienating for viewers who hadn’t read the book. The comedy was played a little too broadly, foregoing its potential to unsettle the viewer; Arctor’s mental disintegration was a bit abrupt and a bit too clinical; and the ending was so thoroughly foreshadowed as to have lost much of its power.

Still, it’s the best Dick adaptation we’re likely to see for a while …

Little to offer besides curiosity value

nobody@allconsuming.net (Sumit) — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 23:36:08 GMT

The Exploits of Professor Shonku

by Satyajit Ray

Picked this up in Calcutta because I was curious as to what homegrown Indian science fiction might be like – particularly as written by film maestro Satyajit Ray. The answer, alas, was pretty disappointing.

Ray’s many talents apparently don’t extend to science fiction: this is derivative, thin stuff. Shonku is clearly modelled after earlier scientist-heroes like Professor Challenger, but lacks their charm, while his adventures are a bit on the dull and linear side.

Granted, it is a children’s book, but the stories in this volume would have seemed creakily old-fashioned even when they were first published in the 1960s or so.

Phenomenal (rated 5 stars)

nobody@allconsuming.net (Sumit) — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 23:19:59 GMT

A Scanner Darkly (Gollancz SF)

by Philip K. Dick

Wanted to re-read this before seeing the film; was amazed how much better it was than I had remembered. Astonishing book.

Unconventional next-gen anime (rated 4 stars)

nobody@allconsuming.net (Sumit) — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 23:12:21 GMT

The Place Promised In Our Early Days

by Makoto Shinkai

Makota Shinkai is apparently poster boy for a new generation of anime film-makers, having produced his debut, Voices Of A Distant Star, almost single-handedly in his home studio. (A bit like Kerry Conran). So I lucked out when I randomly bought a ticket for The Place Promised In Our Early Days, his debut feature at the National Film Theatre.

The Place Promised In Our Early Days doesn’t conform to any of the lazy stereotypes of anime: it’s anything but knockabout and there’s very little action of either the sexual or violent kinds. Rather, it’s an elegiac character study: the tale of three friends’ struggle to make good on a childhood pact to fly a home-made ornithopter to a mysterious tower in enemy territory.

There’s not much more to the plot than that, really: this movie’s much more about mood than anything else. It’s drenched in nostalgia; many scenes are saturated with sepia tones and the editing does a good job of conjuring up a sense of half-forgotten memories. The film’s McGuffin – the mysterious Tower – also toys with might-have-beens and should-have-beens.

Ultimately, The Place Promised In Our Early Days is fairly slight – its pace relaxed despite its relatively brief running time. But Shinkai’s control of character and tone is impressive. Be interesting to see what he does next.

A review of "The Transporter"

nobody@allconsuming.net (Sumit) — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 21:00:52 GMT

The Transporter

by Louis Leterrier

Let’s face it, the only reason to watch this is the fight sequences, which are okay. Although the sequence in which Statham loses his shirt, rolls around in some oil and then snogs a bloke^{1^ underwater might cater to those with, uh, specific interests.}

1^ _{Okay, so the bloke’s dead. Still and all …}

A story about "Miami Vice"

nobody@allconsuming.net (Sumit) — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 11:37:01 GMT

Miami Vice

by Michael Mann

Apparently CSI: Miami is the world’s most popular TV show. Moral: detectives in Miami = laughing all the way to the bank.

A story about "Schnapps"

nobody@allconsuming.net (Sumit) — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 17:55:58 GMT

Schnapps

by Teichenné

Very clean-tasting schnapps that you can combine to make up any number of cocktails. I had an apple pie (apple and vanilla), black forest gateau (blackcurrant, chocolate and um, something else) and a peaches-and-cream (peach, duh, and vanilla). Um, and a pint of bitter. And two shots of tequila, sambucca and tabasco. And yet today my head is clear as a bell (and not ringing like one). I must do this more often.

A story about "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"

nobody@allconsuming.net (Sumit) — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 10:25:57 GMT

Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Interesting, watching this as an adult, to realise that most of Ferris’ adventures (the notable exception being the carnival float) really aren’t particularly extraordinary. They’re just grown-up ways to pass the time: fine dining, visiting an art gallery and a baseball game, borrowing a fancy car for the day. But they seemed impossibly sophisticated when I was a kid. As did Ferris, but he still does. Sorta.

Also interesting how dated many of the film’s props and gags seem, even though it was only made twenty years ago. Computers, trainers/sneakers, women with short hair, call forwarding, audio sampling, French cuisine, flashing cash – they’re not embarrassingly clumsy plot devices as they are in other films from that time, but they do add subliminally to the air of “cool”. What do teens today think of this movie, I wonder?

Oh, and I now that I’m an adult, I no longer envy Ferris very much. Except that I wish I could get my hair to form a Mohican in the shower.