What In...?

This blog is supposedly about film school, so maybe I should talk a little more about movie stuff, instead of just shooting the shit about what went down at the Smog Cutter the other night.

The school of Cinema-Television runs these events that entail watching a movie and then having a Q and A with the person who made the movie. I've gone to a grand total of two of these events, simply because I haven't had the time. Or I've been shooting. I made Jordan miss Werner Herzog a couple months back cause we were shooting, but I made it up to him by scheduling around the Superbowl.

Anyway, point is: saw Tarnation last night. I hadn't seen it before (again, I don't watch movies because I'm too busy making movies--see anything drastically wrong with this picture? (and I mean that in all possible senses)). Hot damn that's a fine piece of work. First up, the footage is incredible, not because it captures pivotal moments, but because there is such an everyday-ness about it. And second, the editing is great, because it still manages to tell this story that's all about pivotal moments and what direction a life takes because of them.

I'd like to see it again when I'm not sitting in the front row, but that's the only way to watch a movie in Lucas 108 and not get bruises on your kneecaps. And there was even a handy chair in front of me that I could pull up and rest my legs on. Did I feel like a jackass when, after the screening, I realized the chair was for the filmmaker to sit on during the Q and A? Yes, yes I did.

Luckily, Jonathon Caouette seems like the kind of guy who wouldn't care that much if you put your feet on his chair. He was very sweet and shy, and kept looking at the floor, and possibly at my shoe? Tarnation is the kind of movie that, after the credits roll, you wish you could talk to the people that made it, so it was surreal that he was there to talk to. Hearing him talk brought a whole new dimension to the meaning of the film. It also made filmmaking feel as personal and as easily accessible and as weird and specific as, i dunno, making a zine or being in a band. Like filmmaking is something you can do randomly in your spare time and it can be as crazy as you are, as long as you put love into it.

At what point is extremely personal specificity no longer interesting to a good percentage of the populace?

Confidential to JB: at least 93 Avid stations and 99 16mm Arriflexs, can't find mention of 35mm cameras, but USC does have its own telecine, which I should have mentioned to the Air Canada agent this January who said, huffily, that there is a perfectly good film school in Vancouver.