Blue Valentine

SPOILERS AHOY.

I loved this movie. Even though the ending is in the pitch ("It's about a couple breaking up,") I was still clinging to the possibility that they might stay together. That's how in love with it I was - usually if I know the plot I just watch the movie to say I've watched it, but this one I was actually emotionally invested in.

As a piece of storytelling, it's an interesting experiment in flashbacks. If it's been in vogue the last few years to tell a love story by juxtaposing the beginning and end of the relationship, then Blue Valentine is the most triumphant example of it that I've seen. We've seen this gimmick before - it was in 500 Days of Summer, which I honestly hated - but here it feels more honest. It's a difference in tone. 500 Days was too metatheatrical, too willing to utilize film cliches and irony. Blue Valentine doesn't use title cards or fancy effects. There's something about the soft focus and color saturation that feels old-fashioned. The awkward angles feel intimate, not avant-garde.

It's like watching someone's home movies. How it began, how it ended, piecing it together. The main action of the film is set over the course of the fourth of July weekend, and there's something just so quintessentially American about the story. Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Boy and girl get married, have a kid, buy a house, get a dog - the American dream. And then it falls apart. The dog gets hit by a car. You try to have a romantic getaway but you're both just too pre-occupied. The American dream crumbles around you, and then your wife demands a divorce on Independence day.

They could be anyone's parents. And I think that's why I got so emotionally invested - because it feels true. Most of Blue Valentine's press comes from its original NC-17 rating (successfully overturned), and I think I agree with the interviews that the MPAA wasn't offended by the oral sex so much as they were by the honesty. Like I mentioned in my American Idiot rant, Americans like their sex and violence covered in a sheen of unreality. When you wipe that sheen off, we recoil.

There's a lot that isn't said in this movie. For every inch we learn about Cindy and Dean's backstories, there's a lot more we don't learn. Little clues to their personalities that might explain why these people are the way they are, that aren't explained - not that the movie needs to. We get enough. We don't need to know it all. Our minds fill it in. Whether it makes them more or less sympathetic is left up to the viewer.

Anyway I loved it. It's such a charming and honest little movie and the characters are likeable without feeling cutesy. If you get a chance, you should definitely check it out. I hate to use words like "adorable" for movies with sex and violence, but it really is. It's adorable, but it's also raw and emotional and painful.

:)

Orphaned Paragraphs

I didn't take my computer to Boston because it was going to be a thirty-hour trip and my plan was to spend all of it with Max (my brother) and Roma (a friend from an online collaborative writing project we both worked on starting when we were about fourteen, who before you freak out mom I had met before). So I read on the bus. On the way down I read John Lindqvist's novel Let the Right One In (Basis for two recent movies, one Swedish and one American) and all I can say is that I think Swedish reads funny in English translation. I've read a couple of novels translated from Swedish now, and they all have a sort of strange rhythm in the language, like there's an accent programmed right into the sentence structure.

Before my ride back to New York, I wandered around downtown Boston with Roma, who had her heart set on going to Fire and Ice before putting me back on the bus, and we stopped into Barnes and Noble while we were wandering. I picked up two Dystopian/Post Apocalyptic novels (a guilty pleasure) - Cormac McCarthy's The Road (interesting, but not anything that wasn't in the movie) and Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games. Don't ask me why I'd been avoiding reading the series, because it's brilliant. It reminds me of Uglies, but in the best way possible.

So, the best place to read a post-apocalyptic novel is in an automobile on the highway in the middle of the night, when it's really easy to pretend that there's just you in your little bubble of light and the whole rest of the world has gone away.

I don't know if anyone else gets like this, but when I'm reading a really good book, it makes my thoughts feel more creative when I put it down. Like the way words fall together is energized. So let's mess around some and I'm going to post some orphaned paragraphs for a strange idea that will probably never go anywhere.

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He's the kidnapped son of a sixteenth-century playwright. She's a girl carved out of living marble. Between them, they've got a time machine, the shoes on their feet, and the only copy of Love's Labor's Won left in the universe. (THEY FIGHT CRIME!)

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He woke up to find both the man's daughters staring at him. One about twelve, the other about eight, but otherwise identical. Pool-blue eyes, flaxen hair piled on their heads like haystacks.

"I guess he's not dead," said the younger one.

"Nope," said the older one, and continued to stare.

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Only Kara stayed behind, and it was because she was too young to go, not because she pitied him. If she were seventeen instead of sixteen, there was no doubt she'd have gone into town with the others. Certainly she wouldn't have remained in the boondocks with a crippled houseguest; that wasn't how anyone wanted to spend their last weekend on Earth.

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He never let the girl have long hair, and she never asked for it. What good was long hair? It was just one more hand-hold for an enemy to grab you by in a fight. There was no such thing as vanity after the end of the world. Who was there to judge you as pretty? Zombies didn't have aesthetics. And here was a girl who had never read a copy of Vogue. So he cut his hair short, and then he cut hers, and that was just the way things went.

BOSTONNNNNN

I THINK I'LL GO TO BOSTON.

BOSTON.

WHERE NO ONE KNOWS MY NAME.

No, actually, I'm going to go see the Decemberists play, visit Max / Megan / PEOPLE, and have a good time.

SONG TOTALLY UNRELATED EXCEPT IT'S THE ONLY ONE I KNOW ABOUT BOSTON.

ALSO I LIKE IT. Also it is relevant to a play I wrote over break.

Do you like free stuff?

I know you do. I also know that at least some of you are THEATER PEOPLE (we are a special breed, we theater people). Kim, who is my boss at my fantastic internship that I am sure I will talk about some more at a later date, has a blog where she talks about THEATER, especially theater of the MUSICAL persuasion. (Musical theater people are an even special-er breed!)

And she is running a contest.

In her contest, she is giving away free stuff.

Specifically, she is giving away a songbook (aka sheet music) by up-and-coming musical theater composer Ryan Scott Oliver. The rules on how to enter are over on her blog which you will go to by clicking this handy dandy link. It's really easy and harmless and won't take more than a few minutes out of your day. So I advise you DO IT. DO IT NOW.

Also, the dude wrote a dark re-imagining of Peter Pan. What's not to love?

SNOW DAY

I was sort of dreading today on account of having a lot of work to get done before I can go to Boston and have funtimes with Max (and now apparently Megan because we have an extra Decemberists ticket? Long story.) But now it's a snow day and all my classes are cancelled. (Pretty sure I still have work at 1, though. Better email my boss.)

So how am I going to spend my day?

Editing Like a Dog in Space. FOREVER. Gotta make Milena and Gennady sound less like high schoolers, I think.

Also, MUSIC SPAM.

Setting Fire to the Universe

This is the text of the monologue I embedded in the previous post. I WROTE THIS. Caleb needs me to toss it up here as a proof-of-authorship thing for a competition, no big deal. If you're competing in forensics and want to use it, feel free to comment or email me and we'll work something out.

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COOPER

(Cooper enters. He is fighting mad.)

WHAT THE HELL IS THIS? Talk to a tape recorder? A freaking tape recorder? What year is this, 1994? My parents are paying for me to talk to a shrink, not a machine that no one’s used since Clinton was president.

(He huffs around. Someone offstage shouts something at him. He sits down, defeated but still mad.)

Talk about anything, huh? Anything in the world? Well,obviously not anything. I could tell you about the time my hamster died but mom told me it ran away, but that wouldn’t do us any good and you’d tell me to start over. You want something relevant. Something relevant to my problem. Your word, not mine. Their word, not mine. It’s not a problem. It’s a hobby.

I am a connoisseur of fine… fires. My tools of the trade are zippo lighters, dry leaves, paper towels, sticks, pinecones… anything that’ll burn, really. Sometimes I use plastic bics. Sometimes I use matches. But I like Zippos best. There’s something classic and timeless about a Zippo that bics and matches haven’t got. When you flip a Zippo, you feel like you’re in a detective movie. There’s a- a sort of permanence about the metal casing. Bics dry up and you throw them away, but a good Zippo you can keep for years and years and years.

Before you think I’m some kind of psychopath, I never hurt anyone. Not even animals. I’m not one of those sick kids who lights bugs on fire.

That wasn’t the point of what I wanted to say.

Um.

I meant to tell you about the first fire I ever lit. When I was about eight or nine, we lived next door to this kid, Joey Crusoe. He was… twelve, thirteen? I idolized him. He was tall and athletic and cool. Oh man, he was so cool, or at least I thought so when I was eight. Anyway, that’s not the point. Sort of. I mean, Joey Crusoe’s got everything to do with the story, but, I mean-

Um.

So, I was on my way home from school one day – eight or nine, I thought I was cool that mom let me walk the half mile from our house to the school – and Joey Crusoe was out in his driveway. It was October, so there were dry leaves everywhere, and he had a little pile of them in front of him, and he was sitting on the ground. “Hey, Cooper,” he says. “Want to see something cool?”

Who was I to say no. So I went over and he had this magnifying glass and he was catching the sun and focusing it just so that the leaves would start to smolder.

“Want to try?” he asked me. And, you know, I couldn’t say no, ‘cause it was Joey freaking Crusoe actually acknowledging my existence. So he gives me the magnifying glass and shows me how to hold it and after a little bit I’ve got a flame going and he tells me I’m pretty cool, which was exactly what I wanted to hear, and he let me keep the magnifying glass, and-

Um. I kind of forgot where I was going with that.

Um.

Can I start over? Talk about how treatment’s affecting me and all that? Well, here’s a start: I threw away my whole collection of Zippos – I didn’t want to, but mom stood over me and wouldn’t leave until I gave her all of them, and all the bics under my bed, and my matchbooks I collected from fancy restaurants when we were in Europe last summer, and even the magnifying glass that Joey Crusoe gave me.

(Beat.)

Man, it’s weird to talk about this. I think – I’m glad I got caught, because I don’t know how kids come clean about this stuff. I mean, I did it once before, not about this- about something else. But it went as well as you’d expect. You think “Mom, Dad, I can’t stop setting fires” is bad? Oh, sure, it’s a problem right now, but they shell out for a few appointments with an after-school psychologist and you’re all better. Parents want their kids to be perfect. It’s what they do. You’ve got jacked up teeth, they put you in braces and call it an investment in your future. You give them something they can’t fix, though? And what about this, do you think they can fix this? What is this, a bad habit? Do they think they can paint bitter liquid on my nails and I’ll stop chewing?

(Beat.)

The fire setting’s a compulsion. I’ve been jittery all week.

But I’m here to get better. I’m going to get better. I’m going to get better. We’re all. Going to get. Better.

(He sneers.)

It’s a nice thought, isn’t it? Getting better? I don’t think getting rid of all the lighters was a ‘step in the right direction’, though. Those had sentimental value. I mean, the bics? I don’t care about the bics, but the Zippos and the matches and the magnifying glass had sentimental value. I don’t think she really had to take those. They were mine. I bought them with my own money.

(Another pause. Then, sardonic.)

Talk about anything? Like what? You want to hear about my grandfather who died when I was eleven? You want to hear about the kid who shoved me in a dumpster every day after school in seventh grade? You want to hear about my hamster? Because I can tell you that one if you really want to hear it.

I went to summer camp and Mom was supposed to feed him. But she forgot. She forgot to feed my hamster – she passed its cage one-two-three-four-five-SIX times a day and forgot to feed him. She didn’t notice it was dead until it started to smell. But you know what? You didn’t really want to hear that story, and you know why? Because it doesn’t matter. It’s got absolutely nothing to do with what we’re talking about.

(He listens. Then:)

Okay. Okay. Okay. You’re looking for cause and effect and that’s why it’s not working. This is … Idiopathic mental disease. I looked it up. It means a disease that arises spontaneously with no apparent cause. No cause and effect, just a random case of the crazies. Okay. Okay. There. I admitted it. It’s mental disease. It’s compulsive. Happy now? I’m screwed up. I’m crazy. We’re making great progress today, aren’t we? Isn’t the first step of treatment admitting you have a problem?

Trying to say that what I do, I do for any particular reason… It’s, um, it’s a fallacy. How’s that for a ten dollar word? You can’t try to pin me lighting fires on some kind of horrible childhood trauma I won’t fess up to because I haven’t got any. I just have me and Joey Crusoe lighting fires in his driveway, and it was the best two weeks of my life.

I’m having an- an epiphany here, okay? You’re all a bunch of quacks. You leave us alone so we can have epiphanies and you leave us alone with our thoughts. We’re a bunch of screwed up kids and you leave us alone with our screwed up heads. And it’s – it’s a hobby, but if it’s a hobby that you can’t stop–

-You teach us to be afraid of ourselves. You teach us to be ashamed of ourselves.

But there’s no cause and there’s no effect. No reason to keep doing it. Every screwed up part is screwed up separately.

There’s no cause and effect. I don’t want to get better, because there’s nothing to fix. You want to cut out the cancer but it’s wrapped around my spinal column, my brain, my nerves, down into my fingertips where the urge to ignite begins, the itching feeling as it crawls up my arm to the places that only I know, the twinge in my chest, the anticipation of a flame, the zippo in my pocket, and I need to burn something but there’s nothing to ignite! You’ve taken it away, locked me in a little room with my thoughts and my fears, until I realize that the fire is the only thing that was ever real!

So I take the match, and I strike it on whatever’s handy. One, two, three, snap-hiss. And the way that it glows, the way that it dances – I don’t need anyone to tell me that beauty is dead in the world because I can find it in the tiniest ember. And I kindle the flame.

And I whisper to it – Hello, hello, please burn for me, hello – And I find kindling wherever I can, a burnt offering to my fiery god-

And it feels so good to burn things. It feels so good to burn.

Cause and Effect

So a little over a year ago I wrote a little 20-minute play called Cause and Effect, which was about two kids sitting in a psychologist's waiting room and was really an experiment in dramatic arcs and which I never expected to go anywhere. And it didn't, but my friend Caleb who is so often my co-conspirator on everything fell in love with one of the characters and begged that he get to play him, one way or another.

Fast forward to last Friday night.

"ALIZA, I NEED A MONOLOGUE FOR FORENSICS COMPETITION."

"OKAY, WHEN?"

"Well, competition's tomorrow... so tonight. I was wondering if I could cut together something from that play about the pyromaniac kid?"

"Okay!"

I was out at the time and he had a copy of the play saved on his computer, so I let him go ahead and get started (note: this is terrible form and as a playwright who expects to be treated professionally, I should never have let him do this, but Caleb is one of my best friends and I knew I'd be getting final say on how the piece worked when I got home, so there was no harm in letting him do the basic assembly.) Later, when I got home, he showed me what he had so far and I realized I was going to need to do a bit of footwork - Cooper's arc in the original one act is the less intense of the two characters, but his intermediate monologues are better. So I did some adjusting, wrote him a new ending, and sent him on his way.

So how did Caleb do with his competition monologue that we tossed together in, oh, half an hour, tops?

"I'm reading instead of memorized, which I think I'll get knocked down two places for... So I'm aiming for third."

So what does this brilliant, overmodest child do? HE TAKES FIRST. What the hell, Caleb. So of course my reaction is to demand he send me a video of his award winning performance, or barring that, a re-creation. What's he do?

"Okay so I was going kind of fast because acting for my parents makes me nervous and I'm in my pajamas but HERE."

Oh Caleb....

Anyways, that's how this dastardly duo stole first at forensics competition.

Awkward turtle?

The guy who lives next door to me can never remember my name right, which is awkward because he really does try and usually winds up calling me some variant of "Allie." This is only made worse by the fact that I actually do always remember his name.

The biggest thing I miss about freshmen dorms is actually knowing the names of 80% of the people who lived on my hall, and actually hanging out with them.

Last night's dreams

The extremely weird and vivid dreams continue!

I had three faces. I also might have had two heads, but the dream was inconsistent. One of the faces didn't really do anything, but the other had a jaw that grew from somewhere behind my ear (I know because in my dream I kept reaching back to feel the bone). It was extremely painful to open that mouth, but that face kept trying to open its mouth and I couldn't stop it.

Also the other two faces may have been conspiring to take over my head.

Also no one mentioned these extra faces I'd sprouted, so either everyone else had three faces and I couldn't see them, or else only I could see my three faces.

Anyway there was an earthquake at one point and the building I was in did a barrel roll or four and then I went back in time and prevented it by going into a different room, which I don't really understand but whatever.

I think I'm going to keep writing these down on account of them being so strange and vivid lately.

Dreams from Last Night

I have a tendency to have very vivid dreams about my teeth falling out. These are really unsettling because they're generally accompanied by realistic sensations of my mouth sans tooth (or teeth). Usually it's molars or incisors - for whatever reason, I don't usually lose my canines in my dreams. According to the internet, dreams about teeth are usually concerned with your appearance. But last night I dreamt about knocking out a canine tooth which, just based on anthropology last semester I sort of think that canine falling out dreams might be more about a sense of powerlessness. But enough about that.

So in my dream I knocked out a canine tooth and obsessed about that for a while, until my obsessing about my tooth was interrupted by the fact that I apparently worked on a bar at a space station, and I was expected to serve 4loko to weary space travelers. Or, actually, Jack Harkness and the Ninth Doctor.

Um, what?

Yeah, these guys.

Apparently I was out of 4Loko, so I mixed blue power-aide and vodka. According to my subconscious, this is the exact same thing. (In my subconscious's defense, I've never actually drank 4Loko.)

And then the Doctor waved his sonic screwdriver at me and told me I had a piece of the void between universes stuck in my head, and asked "How long has this been going on for, huh?"

So now my subconscious writes self-insert fanfic. This proclamation was about as far as the adventure (which would have probably been awesome) got before I woke up to the sound of rain and the realization that it was ten AM. I was kind of bummed, I was really looking forward to galavanting around the universe with two handsome rogues! Never mind that, though. Oh well.

Maybe I should watch weird british sci-fi before bed every night, because it seems to do good things to my dreams

Contemplation of a toilet seat.

I'm kind of obsessive about wiping off public toilets before I use them. It's because when I forget, the seat is usually wet. Don't you hate that feeling? I mean, I'm pretty sure this is why most people squat, but you can't get HIV from a toilet seat. (And if you do manage to get HIV from a toilet seat, contact me: I'd be very interested to know what you were doing with that toilet seat.)

So you do your business and dry yourself off, and then you experience a profound sense of relief when you realize that the toilet is a very wet flusher, or else that the nearby sink splashes a lot.

That was probably too much information.

Sanitized Anarchy, and what I've been doing this week.

So I went to go see American Idiot, which to be honest was sort of disappointing. For all the avant-garde anger of the concept album, the musical was alarmingly mainstream. While from a technical and performance aspect it was pretty phenomenal, I couldn't help but feel let down. First of all, any play that you have to read the wikipedia summary just to understand... is not actually a good play. Second of all, everyone got off scott-free at the end. It would be really, really nice if, for once when writing a musical about sex, drugs, and rock and roll, not everyone got a happy ending. Like, why did I just watch Jesus of Suburbia run away to the big city to do hard drugs if at the end he goes back to Bumfuck, New Jersy to hang out at the 7-11 with absolutely no consequences? Everyone got a happy ending, more or less, except for the ambiguously-skinhead ambiguously-gay ambiguously-real drug dealing St. Jimmy.

Seriously I would have watched a whole play about the drug-dealing leader of an Anarchist Cult of Personality, but I digress. The point is, American Idiot is no Spring Awakening, despite its shared leading man (Oh John Gallagher Jr, I sure do love you). In fact, it's not even Rent or even Hair, if we want to go really far back. It's Anarchy Lite, so you can pretend you're being edgy but it's still fun for the whole family. Your ten year old already knows the word "fuck" and has probably puzzled out how sex works, so what's the harm, right? Sure there's some drugs, some beer, some masturbation, but really... there's nothing in here that won't offend your grandmother.

(Well, maybe... Is your grandmother as liberal as mine, who loved Avenue Q? Because Avenue Q might just be edgier than this.)

Anyway, so what's Leez been up to this week? (I promise, this discussion's going to loop back around to my complaints about American Idiot in a moment.) Leez has been hanging out at the Young Playwrights Inc. conference where she's making new friends, doing a lot of revising, and attending master classes. Well, she was, because it's over now and the whirlwind has stopped and she's taking some time to sit down and write a proper blog post about it. (Actually, gonna cut the whole third person thing.)

Anyways, so one of the great master classes was with a playwright named Thomas Bradshaw, whose work tends to be a bit... controversial. One of the things we talked about was how Americans tend to be very puritanical towards sex, drugs, etc in our theater, as opposed to Europeans who are a bit more loosey-goosey free love. The flip side of this is, of course, that Americans are morbidly fascinated by the stuff that repulses them. So we want to see violence, but not too much violence. We want to see sex, but we want people to get under the covers or turn off the lights first.

Which is exactly what American Idiot does. The sex is covered up, the drug use is stylized, guns shoot flags that say bang. For a play that is ostensibly about the Bush years, it doesn't really say anything about the Bush years at all. There's grandiose language, but it doesn't deliver. St. Jimmy preaches anarchy, but there's no anarchy to be seen. Everyone goes back to Bumfuck and gets off scott free. They all grow up.

Everybody lives.

Everybody lives, and I didn't give a fuck, because not one of these characters was worth giving a fuck about. I was intrigued by St. Jimmy, but I have to compare him to Graverobber from Repo: The Genetic Opera, because I think they're part of an emerging class of character... the Squandered Badass. He's that dude who despite not doing a whole lot of anything is just sort of the most memorable part of the show. A character who, due to being more interesting or better played than anyone else, just seems wasted because of their small role. I don't really care about Jesus of Suburbia. He's a whiny angsty white boy. But St. Jimmy - who is he? What's his story? I know one interpretation is that he's just a figment of JoS's imagination, or else an alter ego he invents, but I kind of like the Anarchist Cult story better. (Although if he is JoS then it explains why he's so ineffectual.)

Basically, I watched this musical and just started thinking of ways that, given the album, I could have done it better. Maybe I'm just getting too jaded and cerebral for Broadway musicals. Or maybe I missed the point. I didn't hate the show - from a tech and performance standpoint it was excellent - I was just underwhelmed by the story. It didn't live up to its themes and my expectations.

Maybe when you write a musical about the Bush years, it's helpful to actually mention any significant events from the Bush years, yeah?

I'll write more about YPI at a later date, hope you enjoyed my rant.

Let's kick off the New Year with a belated post about Doctor Who!

I somehow forgot to mention in one of my previous posts that some friends and I had a pow-wow on Christmas to watch the Doctor Who 2010 Christmas Special, which was pretty great. I enjoyed the flying sharks and references to marrying Marilyn Monroe, as it's fun to see the Doctor portrayed as anything other than an asexual autistic savant. I just got into Doctor Who in the last year or so, but you could say it's a series I really like. SO HEY, let's watch the trailer for next season and do a quick reaction post!

So what we have here is the trailer for season six, at least the first story arc, possibly more. So right off the bat we've got what are either aristocrats from the French Regency or Pirates, and also Nazis, and they're both looking for our favorite time traveling alien. (Those wacky Nazis.) It looks like the Doctor is chilling with Amy and River. I don't see Rory in any of these early scenes which makes me wonder where everyone's favorite Roman Centurion/Male Nurse has gotten off to. Amy in a fancy dress with a petticoat... cut to scary black man with a gun and the Doctor... in the oval office, requesting a SWAT team and some cookies.

If these are all scenes from the same episode, I am very curious what Steven Moffat and his team are up to. But, moving on...

Flyover of Monument Valley, Doctor in a stetson, OH HI RORY I SEE YOU MADE IT TO OUR LITTLE SHINDIG AFTER ALL. 8) Flashback to last season with the fez, oh hi River you are looking as Mary Sue as ever. Is the writing team sure this little expedition wasn't just an excuse to make the whole gang wear flannel? At any rate, it seems they've been recruited to work on something at Area 51 (this is the only reason the Doctor would ever be caught dead on American soil - to deal with an alien threat.

So it is implied that the Doctor, in bedraggled unshaven scientist mode, has summoned himself because he can't deal with this shit on his own. Okay then! And then shit gets real! Aliens! Amy running! Rory running! River naked!

Wait. Why is River naked?

If this is a hint that we are actually going to find out anything useful about River this season, that would be awesome, k thx Mr. Moffat.

So Amy's screaming, the Doctor is monologuing ominously, everyone looks pretty freaked out, and we see... a member of the Mos Eisley Cantina band?

ALRIGHT THEN. Bring on season six.