MISCELLANEOUS MISCELLANY: THOUGHTS, LINKS AND OTHER CRAP

Posted byAaronOOFPosted inUncategorized

Well, I finally have a job … sort of. I mean, it is a job, but it’s technically part-time and it only lasts until September 16, which means that even as I’m doing this job, I will continue job-hunting. Not to mention now, apartment hunting. And maybe one of these days soon, I’ll actually get all personal and shit and write the big long post that is a combined expression of frustration and big screeching cry of, “HELP!”

But not right now. Still, some work is better than no work, and hopefully one of the other, more-permanent things I’ve got on the lukewarm hot plate (I wouldn’t want to call it a back-, side- or front-burner) will come through and get me going come mid-September. For now, I must refrain from taking stupid 8-10 hour Fred & Ginger breaks and really focus on organizing my shit and actually being productive with all the things I’m trying to juggle. To get all Franklin-Covey on your ass: managing the “important and urgent,” the “important but not urgent,” the “unimportant but necessary and urgent” and even the “unimportant but necessary but not urgent.”

To show how magnificently I manage my time per the above categories, I now present you with some examples of my stupidly paying the most attention to the last of those:

  • The New York Film Festival has announced the full line-up for the 43rd edition running from Sept. 23 through Oct. 9, and happy frigging birthday to me! (OK, my birthday is actually a couple days before the fest, but … oh wait … Happy birthday to Lily!) What an amazing looking lineup, even if there are, surprisingly, no Latin American entries. I’m not sure how the hell I’ll figure out how to get to everything I’m going to want to, but I’ll have to try. I won’t bother highlighting the highlights — there are so many. As usual, indieWIRE has a great overview. And if you’re Asian-cinema-dumb like me (meaning you love it but still don’t really know enough about it) you will want to check-out resident expert Filmbrain’s take on the lineup. He seems relatively giddy.

  • I was super-excited to read that FX has re-upped Morgan Spurlock’s show 30 Days for another season. I had my doubts about the show before seeing it because while I enjoyed Super Size Me, I didn’t think it was actually that great a film, and the thought of seeing Spurlock repeatedly do similar experiments sounded tiring. But the fact is, 30 Days is absolutely perfect television fodder in the “serious” reality show mode, and Spurlock, while involved in every episode on a narrative level, was only the actual participant in the first episode. I saw five of the six episodes, and with one exception (the very last one where a mother decides to become a “binge drinker” to help teach her daughter why that’s bad — it kind of didn’t work, it in the episode or for me), each episode was very good-to-excellent. The show’s potential flaw, however, is in the casting, most exemplified in another episode where two city-dweller/club-goers went to live for a month in a self-sustaining “green” community — meaning they sustain themselves with all natural, biodegradable products and even manufacture their own power; no outside electricity, gas or water is utilized. The two subjects really weren’t open enough to the experience, and that made this episode another experiment that almost didn’t work.

    Still, the premise of the show is fantastic and really not tired at all as long as the subject matter and people involved are interesting. I was sad to see there had only been six episodes produced because I looked forward to it each week, and it’s good to know it’s coming back. Now if only MTV would also get to making more episodes of MADE — but that’s for another post.

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