Film Geek Smile

I’m a film geek. As a kid, two of the movies I enjoyed the most were The Blues Brothers (1980) and Conan the Barbarian (1982)... you know, typical kid movies. Remembering back, I know that the massive car chases of The Blues Brothers just thrilled me, and as for Conan, who doesn’t love a barbarian-takes-revenge-on-the-snake-cult-leader-who-killed-his-parents story? 

Given that these were the movies of my childhood, it comes as no great shock to me that while I love all film genres, action films are what I love the most. Have I seen the latest and greatest award winning drama? Probably not. Have I seen all the Fast and Furious movies? Damn straight. 

Almost nothing makes me smile like going into a movie theater with a screen the size of Montana and a bleed from the ears sound system to experience the newest cinematic action extravanganza involving an ex-Special Forces cyborg who is forced to drive a rocket propelled tank in an illegal race through the streets of Manhattan against a gang of drug dealers who tried to blow up the orphanage of the cyborg’s youth.  And for those of you who would question how a cyborg has a youth, get out of my theater.

That being said, I’m actually very opinionated about what makes for a great action film. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll go see any action film. But only a very few do I hold in high regard as great.

One of these great action films, and one of my personal favorites, is The Rock (1996). It has all the elements of a great action film: Reluctant hero. Sweet cars. Helicopters. VX-poison gas. This movie was directed by Michael Bay, who, in a career spanning only 10 movies so far, has directed 3 of the greatest (by my standards) action films of all time; The Rock, Armageddon (1998), and Bad Boys II (2003). (And his other films weren’t exactly action slouches.)

Unlike most directors, Michael Bay has an official website and an official fan forum, and I’ve been a member of this forum since around 1997-1998 (close to the beginning). In 2004, the webmaster, Nelson, asked me if I would be interested in writing an essay for the official website about why I was such of fan of The Rock, and write it incorporating ideas of visual perception. I was thrilled at the opportunity to use my knowledge of visual perception and apply it to one of my favorite films. And then to have it posted on the offical website? That is a level of awesome that still makes me smile... almost as much as seeing a Michael Bay film.

You can read my essay here.

Michael Bay’s next film, Pain and Gain, will be in theaters on April 4, 2013. That is also where I will be.

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Writing

I spend much of my day writing. In this email-centric world, we all do. Typically I’m responding to questions, usually as quickly and succinctly as possible, in order to move on to the next question and answer it as quickly and succinctly as possible. Sometimes I have to write an email that is lengthy, providing in-depth explanation (and opinion), but those times are few and far between and very limited in topic. 

Outside of work, I also spend time writing. Writing text messages, Facebook status updates, etc. Again, very short, succinct messages. (Although because my 8th grade English teacher Mrs. Neiman ingrained correct grammar into my head, I have a tendency to write in complete, grammatically correct sentences when texting people. And yes, people have made fun of me for that.)

This is not to say I haven’t written very long manuscripts. Quite the opposite. My Master’s thesis was around 40 pages, my Doctoral dissertation about 50. I’ve worked on projects that were closer to 100 pages in total. The difference for those items is that they were the very definition of technical writing. Every statement had to be written, deconstructed, and written again to ensure the correct point was being made clearly. Plus, as with the emails, these manuscripts were fairly limited in topic. I appreciate the effort required for such writing, and I’m sure that I will continue to work on longer manuscripts in the future.

However, even with all that writing, I’ve felt recently that I wanted to write more, although certainly not more emails and not really more dissertation-like manuscripts.  I wanted to write somewhere between a text message and a dissertation, and outside the narrow topics of work or technical writing. I have discussions with friends and family constantly, and I find those discussions incredibly rewarding. Often, after those discussions, I would think to myself, “Would I like to have my thoughts on that topic written down?” 

So I’m starting this website to see if I can answer that question. And while I could just write them down in a journal or something, I like the idea of sharing my thoughts with others.  I’ve got a few topics already in mind, such as “Why sports analysts don’t know anything about psychology” and “The frustration of ‘Norman doors’”. I expect that I’ll write some reviews of products that I use regularly, movies I’ve watched and books I’ve read. I have some amazing friends who do amazing things and I’m hoping to be able to help them share those amazing things with others. At some point I may resurrect my “Random Thoughts from Ed” that I would occasionally email to people in graduate school when my mind had temporarily melted down from the pressure. And in between writing, I’m planning to post other things, like Music I’m listening to, Photos I’ve taken, and Bacon. 

I don’t expect to be great at this from the beginning, and perhaps not great it at ever. Even writing my first post was more difficult that I thought it would be. However, I think that it will be an interesting challenge. I hope you find it interesting, too.