I am lucky enough to have friends who force me to watch special features on DVDs. For example, Cloverfield, which had me thinking weird paranoid thoughts I as I drove the treacherous, drunkard-infested streets of Madison on my way to my Capital City crash space. What if University Square fell on me! What if that lightpole was covered in spiders! What if that freshman's head exploded onto the wall behind her for no obvious reason except maybe that the Army had shot her/spiders were bursting from her brain sac!
Anyway, the guys who invented the Cloverfield monster were so excited about how much it changed everything for them that they could imagine it as this big bumbling baby animal that doesn't understand anything and is very confused about land and is rather blameless but even more frightening because it can't be reasoned with. That this, in some ways, made the whole movie happen, even though we the viewers couldn't necessarily see the difference between what they, the film monster makers, imagined, and a malicious intelligence that just couldn't get off the damn island.
Conversations like that get me very excited. The creator of anything has such power over those who view it, if they do their job well in not telling you everything. Confessions get boring - I'd rather read a grocery list full of seemingly unrelated items. Backtrack - sometimes confessions are very interesting. But the best part about Cloverfield was also kind of the most infuriating: at pretty much every turn you're left still not knowing what the hell is going on. Just like the protagonists! Isn't that awful? Aren't you glad you didn't die not knowing anything useful? Because a lot of people sure did!
On another note, this botched execution in Ohio made me very angry and I'm going to say some things when I'm less sleepy and don't have to wake up for 231221 catch-up coffees with friends.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
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2 comments:
I'd be interested to hear why the attempted execution upset you. I personally am surprised it doesn't happen more often. Threading an IV is practically an art form (way harder than just drawing blood). I have drawn several drug users, and their veins are rarely ever fun, so I couldn't imagine what it would take to start an IV on them.
Every time my diabetic aunt goes into the hospital, it regularly takes 2 or more hours to try and get an IV on her, and sometimes they just have to give up and try again later.
It's more that I disagree very strongly with capital punishment, and even if they don't always have to try again later, extreme examples like this should be drawing attention to the fact that injection is not always be "humane." It's may be a step up from hanging and the gas chamber, but it's still an act of brutality, in my opinion, and neither necessary in our society nor, perhaps, very good for it. More later.
Also, there's a lot of pathos in those descriptions of Broom trying to help the execution staff find a vein, which isn't as much about logic as me having emotions.
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