Professionalism

Once during a particularly lonely night in NIFM Faridabad, angry over an exam I didn’t particularly want to pass, frustrated over choices I made that were incredibly stupid, and above all, unable to sleep because of all the anxiety, I decided to play a movie as white noise while I tried to study.

I played Mean Girls.

I figured it was a nice movie, there were no surprises there, the dialogue is sparkling and witty, the delivery is sharp and on point. Just nice. A feel good movie. So I stared into my material and had the movie playing in the background on my laptop.

I have watched and re-watched Mean Girls many times but I remember this re-watch particularly well because it was that night that made me appreciate how professional some people were in the art of film-making. I could tell exactly which scenes were playing from the audio alone. The little dramatic changes were magnified. I didn’t need to watch it to know when the acts shifted from the little music and sounds. I stopped studying and made it a game of my own to not watch it at all but just absorb the movie aurally.

Ever since that night, I have been sensitized to this aspect of film-making: how some films deserve to win all the accolades and positive criticisms because they are just so good. People think it is the camera quality, the high definition visuals, the budget, the premise, the pretty people and everything else. But while these bits are important and eye-catching, they are actually a very superficial part of what makes a film good.

I remember watching Psycho one time. That movie was made in 1960. I didn’t like the movie at all because I’m not a fan of horror/thriller as a genre but I loved the movie at the same time because dear lawd, that was quality filmmaking! The angles made sense, the characters played their parts, the whole thing was designed to titillate your senses the way the director wanted to. It was captivating. 

See, in the end, your senses require more than pretty clothes and pretty faces. The direction that actors get make so much difference. I notice this with Britney Spears and Taylor Swift a ton; they’re awkward and weird when they face the camera on their own but under proper direction, they are simply magic. Or Robert Pattinson in Twillight versus everything else he is in!

I don’t really know film-making so I don’t know what goes on and what needs to go down. But of the little I have managed to learn to notice on my own, the end visuals really is honestly the least of it all. Authenticity of script in terms of both story-line and dialogue, easter eggs, costumes, expressions of actors, audio and (my gawd) the background audio of it all, the soundtrack – I mean, think My Heart Will Go On and Titanic! – the minor characters, location scouting, angles of camera… 

Everything is quite interesting if it is done right. I’m not even interested in film-making but when even I can figure out how impressive these things are, I wonder what else gets done and what needs to get done. It should be very interesting. Maybe I should talk to Tenzin one of these days and get her opinion on it all. Now there’s a mental note for me.

In any case, I passed the exam, so all’s well that ends well, I guess.

NB: I am watching Squid Game 2 at the moment so it's too soon to comment and Spoilers still apply I guess but they used Con Te Partiro in ep 1! 'What's Operatic Pop doing in Squid Game?' I thought. But as it turned out, it made sense. It worked! How?! Ugh. Brilliant filmmaking.

Dumb

At 9 PM, Cartoon Network exploded and TNT began. It was also the signal to us kids that we were up past our bedtime, which was 8PM. If we stayed up till 9PM, it was scandalous.

As was TNT. To this day, I don’t know what kind of TV Channel TNT was. But I firmly believe it was a grown-up channel. Mostly because it came after the children channel Cartoon Network, but also because it was on only at nighttime. I could Google or Wiki it, but why, tho? It’s not like I’d go back and watch TNT now as an adult. I have my smartphone.

I do remember one time we watched the old-timey Titanic movie (the one before the Leo-Kate one) on TNT. So I also associate TNT with ancient beige movies. Maybe they showed technicolor but it probably was all beige. Not Black & White, you understand. Just not a lot of pop. I mean, Titanic was set in the ocean. Which should ideally be blue or white or black. But I remember the movie as beige. I don’t think I stayed up to the end of it. Or maybe it was also because I was up way past my bedtime.

There’s nothing that really sets children and grown-up channels apart anymore these days. Parents often tell me they put up parental blocks on their phones so their kids can stick to only those irritating, high-pitched, loudly-coloured sing-alongs on YouTube. But I also know from Twitter that there’s a lot of hentai and cartoon porn that parental blocks don’t often get. A lot of pervs out there. So supervision of online content is incredibly difficult.

My friend Goldie’s kid used to like PBK-a on YouTube who was this man dressed like a pastor and dancing clumsily along to his really traditional Mizo gospel beats. Very tame. Very safe. If only more kids liked that, it might be easier on parents. As it stands, content is extremely hard to control. Even Aubrey has moved on to shinier videos and artists like Young Fella and Mary Dawngi. As all of us do. Sawisel Bo, us.

So much of online content is sus anyway. Even cartoons need to be realistic these days. People even get angry over races of half-fishes. During the CN/TNT days, cartoons were just a whole lot of mindfuck. Or at least something someone extraordinarily high dreamed up and then coloured in and then delivered in primary colours. Cartoon logic defied physics and it was awesome. And so much adult jokes inserted in innocent cartoons. Why? Because the people who made them were sus. But innuendo flies past kids’ heads so we were more or less OK as far as preventing naivete was concerned. Today? Everything in the media? Very woke. Very in the lines. Lowkey boring. And somehow the end result is even the littlest of kids knows what coitus is. Very disturbing. What did I know aged 9? Nothing! And I seem to regress every day recently.

Or maybe my generation was (is?) just dumb.

The Titanic

First of all, what a news! It was so unexpected to hear about a Titanic related death in 2023. Who would have ever conceived that a hundred plus years after the Titanic sank (so famously they made a movie out of it!), the same Titanic, sitting in the bottom of the ocean, would still lure and cause the death of humans? Not me, for sure.

But here we are. The allure of the Titanic has clearly not abated. Possibly enhanced, to be honest. Perhaps precisely because of how unattainable it still is. To this day. The romance is not dead.

In June 2023, twenty-six years after the second movie on the Titanic, and a hundred and eleven years after the actual Titanic sank, the Titanic claimed five more lives. Rich lives. Again. Well, wealthy, at any rate.

The saddest part about this tragedy was that this time round, people just aren’t mourning the deaths as much as they are shaking their heads even as they do mourn the loss of life. How very unfortunate. How extremely suffocating and frightening their last moments would have been. How incredibly disastrous this voyage. But also... how very avoidable!

I think a lot of people are feeling a sense of schadenfreude about the immensely wealthy folks and the daring they have with the money they possess. It’s coming off like them trying to feel alive because they just have so much money. I mean none of us know which way and how life is going to fuck us up, but this just seems like one of those situations which people can only get into because they have so much money and it just comes off as sad but... well, there is a but.

I think many times, the very moneyed folks are so used to buying what they want that it becomes second nature to them, that they start to reason that things can’t be that bad or can’t hurt them that much because money will bail them out. It’s like how Trevor Noah’s mum said she never gets sick so she pulled out her insurance and then she got shot and he’s like: well, mum, guess what you didn’t think of? Bullets.

I saw memes about how immigrants lives are lost at sea and people only think, well we need to tighten security, but when five millionaires’ lives are at stake, the world watches it. George Orwell continues to be right: some animals are more equal than others. There are the macabre humorous reflections like: those that refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

For my part, I think The Titanic is cursed. WBU?