Wednesday, July 22, 2009

cinema

its a language. thats what i've decided. it has its grammar, obviously. it also has its dialects. every sentence has an alternate phrasing. well, a million alternate phrasings. some people think they're hot stuff because they use big words, but its almost always far less interesting than people who do big interesting things with the smaller more common words. 

theres common phrases. phrases like "is it hot in here or is it just me?" or "so it goes" or "... right up your alley" and etc. etc. etc. 

it can be poetry, it can be dry prose. but even the dryest of dry prose has a slight resemblance to poetry, and a few poetic elements. its damn near impossible to strip it down to zero percent poetry, but thats arguable i suppose. 

its the only language everyone can read. think about that. 
most people take it for granted. the majority doesn't read to well. some of its heavy reading- you need a mega attention span, a high reading level, and dedication to achiechieving an understandment. others is light- yaknow. 


but its very different. you'd have to stretch the meaning of the word "communicate" to apply it to film, but i'm sure there are those that would say so. its basically impossible to have a conversation in that language (but i would love to watch one happen). 



some people don't see it as a language. some movies you oughtta say "hey, why isn't it a novel? why not a play?"
 if a story's crafting is magnificient- the script was a work of beautiful genius literature, yet in the execution it had no sense of cinematicals, besides a room-stage with cameras. would that be a "good movie?"
 if an averagely literary but still no less concise and well-crafted script was made into a movie by a guy who was fluent in the language and played into its every nuance and was an honest work of cinema in every sense of the word, which would be "better"? 


hollywood's history is full of writers who wanted to be directors but never got that far.. maybe the ones who didn't make it were the ones who could craft a story better than they could tell it. or could tell it in the written word just not the screen. maybe its for the best they never directed. thats why John Milius, Paul Schrader, Quentin Tarantino pulled it off and did well for themselves. 


well, to be continued, i guess. . . ... . .. . . . .

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