I forget who it was, but someone was telling me about how the opening voiceover of Lord of the Rings was just so important in setting the tone and getting you into the world of the film:



At the time I was a little bit "well yes, it's a nice enough voice-over" and mostly "LORD OF THE RINGS LORD OF THE RINGS LORD OF THE RINGS." I think at the time I hadn't quite fully embraced the idea of the epic. I sort of thought everything epic should be smart-epic, kind of unfeasible given that there's only one Joss Whedon and right now he has enough on his mind.

BUT those words came back to me today when I saw The Spirit, which begins (this is not a spoiler, it's literally the first two seconds of the movie) with Jamie King in shadows, beaming blue light and saying "I am Death." It's an awesome effects shot--accounting for all that blue silhouetting in the trailer:



Her hair is all antigravity and blue light is streaming through it and you're sitting there like

"IT'S TOO SOON I'M NOT READY. I haven't turned my PHONE off for crissakes. I am still reeling from the trailer for My Bloody Valentine 3D. I'm not in the epic mindset, and it's way, way to early for a pretty blue lady to be saying 'I am death.' That's just silly."

So, for the record: You can start a movie with a woman translating Elvish and saying "the world has changed, i feel it in the water," over a black screen. You can't start a movie with Jamie King saying "I am Death." It's a big difference. Even if Jamie had just a little black slug and a little lead-up... "I will always be near you, watching, waiting--" that's like the second thing she says, it should have been the first. You really can't just hit us with this "I am Death" business.

It's really the whole first quarter of the film that makes you think Frank Miller has never seen a movie before, and doesn't know what they're supposed to be like. By the end it sort of gathers enough momentum to be considered an actual motion picture, but until about minute 45 you really have no idea what you're watching. It's crazy, it's weird, I'm glad it was made, and EVERYONE IN IT IS SO INSANELY LIKEABLE that I really enjoyed it a lot.

Not "good moviemaking" per se, though. Just not.

I need a way to remind myself of all the things I need to add to my portfolio--I'm going to use this blog for now. This was for a water fight organized by David Mahfouda. Even though it's my profile picture on Facebook I don't really think about it that often, I just happened upon one of the original postcards while cleaning:

1. Final Cut can't tell when you've altered a document. You can open a project and simply try to close it again and FCP will ask you if you want to save your work. This is totally not a big deal--many programs actually are so keyed in to whether your file has been altered that they actually WILL NOT LET YOU SAVE IT twice in a row without changing it--FCP is the other end of the spectrum, it can't even tell, and that's fine.

What I like is this:



Now why does this plucky little program, which has no ability to detect when your project has been altered, go so far as to spontaneously offer this information? A simple "would you like to save your work" would have been fine.

I think it's cute. I've maybe spent a little too much time at the computer lately.

Every time I see these I think.... "Save more than space..."
What would have been so wrong with "save more than space"???

I think there's some weird insurmountable curse when it comes to influencing teen behavior with advertising. No matter what you do, you're always an adult telling teenagers what to do, which always makes you seem hopeless and square. The kids you cast are the kids you cast hoping teenagers would be impressed by them. Even the Truth campaign, with it's--okay this was going to be a sentence about how even with actual teen involvement, the Truth ads feel contrived. But this theme with the unicorns and shit is fucking awesome.

So it's never surprised me that anti-smoking ads don't work, (though I guess it wouldn't surprise me to hear that anti-smoking ads work, either.

However, I THINK THIS AD IS BRILLIANT. Maybe because its back-seat protagonist is neither displaying cool internal fortitude in resistance to peer pressure nor being made a fall-guy by negative example. She's just doing a nice dry straight-man act against the scary black comedy in the front seat. Her position is so unfailingly reasonable.



Ad Council Launches New Campaign To Prevent Youth Reckless Driving -

So after the New York Times Magazine covered bipolar kids in the last issue, Barbara Probst of Croton, NY had this to say:

"We need to be cautious about giving psychiatric labels to children who are intense, erratic, provocative and extreme but are not necessarily disordered... "Diagnostic creep" has spread alarmingly in recent decades, with psychiatric categories consuming turf that used to be part of the variety of human life."

Well, first a note about everyday accusations of "diagnostic creep." It seems to be a generally accepted truth that

"Americans turn to pills when good old fresh air and conversation would do the trick just fine!"

"nowadays, if a kid is rambunctious they just slap a label on him and dose him to the gills!"

It's obvious that as a new disorder is diagnosed and knowledge of it becomes widespread, the number of reported cases should rise. But the term "diagnostic creep" describes something else, an insidious process whereby not only are more cases reported, but the diagnosis itself is broadened to blanket more and more cases.

And that's a difficult assessment to make, for most diagnosed disorders. There's the rise in reported cases of cancer, which no one suggests is diagnostically creepy. There's the Victorian concept of "female hysteria," a gynophobic cultural construction used to cover everything from hot flashes and anxiety to legitimate grievances with an unfair political system. But almost everything else falls in between, and I would certainly look at lots and lots of charts, and chart the evolving diagnostic criteria for lots of disorders, before deciding that "diagnostic creep has spread alarmingly in recent decades."

It just sounds folksy to me. Like saying the English language has become impoverished "in recent decades," because people sometimes shorten words in text messages.

But the really telling comment is here:

"psychiatric categories consuming turf that used to be part of the variety of human life."

Any barely competent mental health professional knows that her patients are all varied, all human, and all alive, no matter what "psychiatric category" they fall in. She may have mildly bipolar patients who decline pharmaceutical intervention and severely bipolar patients whose conditions resist medication. And every single one of them will need a different plan of treatment, even if they share a diagnosis.

We should of course "be cautious about giving psychiatric labels to children." "We" should be cautious about giving psychiatric labels to anyone, especially if "we" are not psychiatrists. It takes care and acumen to provide a diagnosis that will help lead the way to an effective treatment. Done well, there's nothing dehumanizing about it.

Hello! This is a very new blog with very few entries. But coming soon are