ticky tacky

today i saw ticky tacky (2014), which is this 14-minute short film starring oscar isaac as an eccentric rich guy who finds out his girlfriend has been cheating on him with his cousin and kills his cousin. the two other characters are marguerite, his assistant (which, by the way, is still one of my favorite names ever. a lot of the names i like are french girl names that start with m: marguerite, margaux, maude, maïa, mathilde. they're so elegant.), and this boy who is a young child but also, i think, a private investigator who has killed multiple times. it's all set in one room, his office/study.

It was a quite cute and nice film, a dark comedy type. It was absurdist in the way that everyone acted so matter-of-factly, and the young boy character, gabriel (which is also a boy name i really like! it's also elegant and i like that it alludes to an angel. i've personally associated a lot with spanish. i feel like a latino guy named gabriel is automatically cooler than a white guy named gabriel. and it's a biblical/common name that isn't lame like michael or david), was just a great concept. It reminds me in a way of my own novel, Monday / Stop Praying, Kanye Is Not Going To Help You (i like the second title more but kanye's really fallen these days and it's not as cool as it would have been in 2014-5. dammit kanye, ruining my cool book title), the final draft of which I will probably never finish (it has to be utterly contemporary. That's part of the point. but it takes me so long that i have to keep changing stuff. Like how drake isn't cool anymore, post-human trafficking connection and post-hotline bling. and I probably have to go back and remove dilma rousseff bc her scandal is already so passé.). Anyway, my book is absurdist in the way that crazy shit happens and everyone just accepts it like it's totally normal. And everything is very posed. It's unrealistic because real life would never be like that, and that's why I like it, because it's this specific, archi-fictionnel microverse that's used to examine the real world in a not-so-subtle way. It's self aware. And that's another reason why I write absurdist fiction, because I'm self-aware, I know it's bad, it's meant to be bad –– so you can't criticise me for it being badly written or whatever, because that's the point. It's a kind of shield I've set up for myself because my writing style used to be more Anthony Doerr - style and I don't want people to be like, "Oh, look at her, so pretentious, so melodramatic, blah blah blah."

Anyway, the film had a bit of a Wes Anderson style. And of course i used to looooove wes anderson, and everyone loooooves wes anderson, and now i'm sick of wes anderson (which also goes into what i was talking about with chelsea. Wong kar-wai is really great but he's so loved and lauded that it's offputting.) God, I am so sick of Wes Anderson. his style is reallygreat and original and cool. (i think something bad about having a very distinctive style is, once you're famous, you start to plagiarise yourself to replicate your success. and it becomes bad because you're not trying anymore. but the grand budapest hotel was one of the best ones. but if you look at the tenembaums or whatever, that style was a lot more subdued.) People really hype wes anderson too much. He's.... to mainstream. Gah! I hate saying that. It makes me sound like a stereotypical groucho hipster. But it's true! Everyone and their mother loves Anderson. And Ticky Tacky kind of has that vibe, with the very wide shots, the fast cuts, the self-aware-ness of the characters, the cool fashion, that vague chronological setting where there are aspects of the earlier twentieth century but also aspects of modern day à la A Series of Unfortunate Events (oh god. doesn't the first episode of the netflix show come out today?? it better be so good.) (I LOVE THOSE BOOKS SO MUCH! and they're another of those absurdist thigns i was talkingabout). I understand that a lot of filmmakers like Anderson for his creative style, i personally also made a film that specifically tried to replicate his vibe, but i'm tired of seeing it because it feels unoriginal, its just like "i wanna be cool and artsy (but simultaneously extremely successful) like anderson! so im gonna do blah blah". i'm sick of seeing him everywhere.

I also watched this video by the youtube video essayist Nerdwriter about how BBC's Sherlock is really visually interesting. and that's true! That's always what drew me the most to that show. Nowadays the relationships are SO exhausting and annoying, and the cases are also annoying because they're not fun anymore, they're too personal. But the show has always been visually cool. Stuff that they pioneered like showing text messages on screen has become a little cliché now. But the Nerdwriter's analysis of that scene was very nice. It was a very confusing scene but really developed the subjective perspective well.

So those were some incoherent ramblings about cinema, about someone who has never studied cinema. I'm going to watch Paterson tonight! I'm so excited! i read a review about it that's one of those reviews by a critic who has absolutely adored the film. It sounds like a very tender film. I saw Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive around the time it came out, and it was quite nice. I came out of it feeling slow and steady, like i had all the time in the world. It affected my mood for a week afterwards. It starred Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston, who have since fallen from "cool highbrow actors" to "really uncool and annoying goodbye" in such a short time. Poor them. Then again, they are millionaires who will continue to get roles and continue to be annoying in public. Tom Hiddleston, especially, will have a life forever split into pre-Taylor Swift and post-Taylor Swift.