"I could do that!" media

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"I could do that!" media 2011-06-15 18:18:04 Reply

I know a lot of folks here aren't so keen on journalists and critics of films, games, theatre, whatever. I know that some would go so far to shit all over the profession... or "profession" to some. But either way, I so often find myself totally engrossed by books chronicling pieces of art history and so on. It's not a must in every case, but I tend to like stuff where the original authors are talked to and interviewed.

In the case of filmmaking, I've read a lot of working directors and writers talking about their "I could do that!" movie, the thing that set them going on the path to try something out for themselves. i.e. Kevin Smith said it about Richard Linklater's Slacker, a film cited by about 2435586848 others similar to him. That film inspired him to make Clerks with its low budget, non-actors, accidental necrophilia, etc.

Maybe it's because we have YouTube and so on pampering us, but I got to thinking and discovered that I actually had to think about what mine could be, if I was working that is. I mean, most of my favourite films (La Dolce Vita, Double Indemnity, Network, etc., off the top of my head) don't make me leap up and yell, "That's it! I'm going to go and make my version of that, right now!". Part of the thing is, I don't know any romantic production stories about any of those. Something small-scale, low-brow with dashes of something else, like Lars von Trier's The Idiots would probably be my "ICDT" movie. I can say, "You know, they had porno actors on the set and they felt uncomfortable!". I would like something dishy like that to tell my grandkids, certainly.

I know we have filmmakers and lots of creative people here, movin' around, doin' their thing, locking the stable doors, all that. What would your film/play/comic/story/game/drawing/Flash animation/song, whatever. Like I sort of considered, it's not necessarily your favourite stuff. Heckles and rhubarb, you might even like the stuff you start thinking about. I've certainly gone a bit sour on the trangressive stuff that first got me into creating literature.