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Twitter [2]
Mar. 16th, 2009 09:33 amI was watching The Bourne Supremacy the other night when something struck me. It’s a cracking film; an intelligent, fast moving script and some first-rate actors make it a standout in the crop of action thrillers. If it has a weakness, it’s the choreographing of action sequences.
Every fight scene is jumpcut into incoherence. You get cuts of no more than 0.02 seconds long of fists and people struggling and pained faces and maybe someone going “Ooyah!”, and it just gets tiresome after a while, especially when compared with the phenomenal skills of people like Tony Jaa or Jackie Chan. On the extras documentaries of the Lord of the Rings films, fight choreographer Bob Andrews (who also did the fight scenes for the Star Wars films and taught Errol Flynn to fence) says that every fight scene should tell a story and I think that is what the sequences in Bourne lack – any sense of narrative, development or meaning.
“My God”, I said to myself as I watched another meaningless, jumbled mishmash of fists, feet and blood spatters* whizz by on the screen. “This is the cinematic equivalent of Twitter.”
One of the major uses of LJ for me is to get rid of ideas. I often find the same idea rattling around my head like a pinball on a particularly forgiving table for days on end, and I’ve found a good way of getting rid of it and making space for other stuff is to write it down. This is particularly useful for things like work, as some days I might be writing a song on the train in to the office only for the tax auditors to appear on the doorstep like baleful wraiths and I don’t much want to be still trying to find the perfect rhyming couplet whilst being asked probing questions about my expenses claims.
Someone noted in the comments to my past last week that ideas gain increased value through consideration. Isaac Newton was once asked how he worked out the principles of gravitation, and he replied “By thinking on it constantly”. Similarly, Einstein spent the better part of the decade puzzling over general relativity before finally putting pen to paper.
I have to wonder how much creativity is lost as a result of the untold numbers of people blogging and twittering away their every thought and not taking time to develop a narrative or structured statement or idea. I suspect that if oysters could twitter, we’d get lots of messages like this:
Oyster01: Just swallowed a bit of grit. No use, so I spat it out again#
and not many actual pearls.
But am I right? Thankfully, using the miracle of David’s Making-it-up-o-vision, I can see through time and space and find out what the great minds of history would have done with their ideas if they’d had twenty seconds and a mobile phone to hand.
AlEinstein: Any1 any idea what riding on a beam of light looks like? Probly not important#
Oppenheimer: Am bcum deth, destroyer of wordlz lol#
Newtoni:Apple fell on head. Bummer lol.#
wamozart: Spent all day playing tunes with the keys on my handset!#
Dickensc: Quicker to let u know: little nell dies.#
Charliedarwin: All these birds look diffrent! Go figure.#
Aynrand: Atlas *hugged*#
Davy: That’s enough twitters. Get back to work#
*Some will say that this incoherence is more realistic and that real violence has no inner narrative and real fights don’t have any sort of structure. I suspect that the people who say things like that have never actually been in a real fight.
Every fight scene is jumpcut into incoherence. You get cuts of no more than 0.02 seconds long of fists and people struggling and pained faces and maybe someone going “Ooyah!”, and it just gets tiresome after a while, especially when compared with the phenomenal skills of people like Tony Jaa or Jackie Chan. On the extras documentaries of the Lord of the Rings films, fight choreographer Bob Andrews (who also did the fight scenes for the Star Wars films and taught Errol Flynn to fence) says that every fight scene should tell a story and I think that is what the sequences in Bourne lack – any sense of narrative, development or meaning.
“My God”, I said to myself as I watched another meaningless, jumbled mishmash of fists, feet and blood spatters* whizz by on the screen. “This is the cinematic equivalent of Twitter.”
One of the major uses of LJ for me is to get rid of ideas. I often find the same idea rattling around my head like a pinball on a particularly forgiving table for days on end, and I’ve found a good way of getting rid of it and making space for other stuff is to write it down. This is particularly useful for things like work, as some days I might be writing a song on the train in to the office only for the tax auditors to appear on the doorstep like baleful wraiths and I don’t much want to be still trying to find the perfect rhyming couplet whilst being asked probing questions about my expenses claims.
Someone noted in the comments to my past last week that ideas gain increased value through consideration. Isaac Newton was once asked how he worked out the principles of gravitation, and he replied “By thinking on it constantly”. Similarly, Einstein spent the better part of the decade puzzling over general relativity before finally putting pen to paper.
I have to wonder how much creativity is lost as a result of the untold numbers of people blogging and twittering away their every thought and not taking time to develop a narrative or structured statement or idea. I suspect that if oysters could twitter, we’d get lots of messages like this:
Oyster01: Just swallowed a bit of grit. No use, so I spat it out again#
and not many actual pearls.
But am I right? Thankfully, using the miracle of David’s Making-it-up-o-vision, I can see through time and space and find out what the great minds of history would have done with their ideas if they’d had twenty seconds and a mobile phone to hand.
AlEinstein: Any1 any idea what riding on a beam of light looks like? Probly not important#
Oppenheimer: Am bcum deth, destroyer of wordlz lol#
Newtoni:Apple fell on head. Bummer lol.#
wamozart: Spent all day playing tunes with the keys on my handset!#
Dickensc: Quicker to let u know: little nell dies.#
Charliedarwin: All these birds look diffrent! Go figure.#
Aynrand: Atlas *hugged*#
Davy: That’s enough twitters. Get back to work#
*Some will say that this incoherence is more realistic and that real violence has no inner narrative and real fights don’t have any sort of structure. I suspect that the people who say things like that have never actually been in a real fight.
