goin' goin' back back to Cali Cali

Well, folks, that's the end of it. I've been in Chicago for the fastest 5 weeks of my life, and now here I am at the airport waiting for a delayed flight. I have so much to say about the last five weeks that I don't know where to begin... except to say that hey, I really like teaching, and that this could potentially be something I'm interested in doing. Whether or not to pursue it is a debate that's been raging in my head for weeks now.

To change tracks completely, let's talk about how Northwestern always smells the same. You'd think that things might change slightly over time, depending on who lives in what dorm, what the weather is, how old the building is, etc, but no. No, every Northwestern building I set foot in this summer smelled exactly like I remembered it. Walked into the library and immediately felt like I was going to Opera and Betrayal class in the Media Center... walked into the dorm and immediately missed Martha, my freshman and sophomore year roommate in CRC. Louis still smells like stainless steal and watery sunshine, and Fisk still smells like radiator heat and rain. What is that? Why is smell such a strange sense? It's the only sense you can't readily conjure up to remember... or at least I can't. I usually can't remember a smell until I smell it again. Even the SIDEWALK at Northwestern smelled like it used to. It was comforting and strange and sad all at once.

Along the comforting/strange/sad lines, the best thing about this summer has really been being with my friends. They weren't all my best friends or anything, but it was awfully nice to be in that effortless environment of a college dorm with people you genuinely enjoy- Kevin and Jim and Kevin Welch, and all the others I either met or got to know better over the course of the summer. I think that was really the best thing about college, being so close to all your friends. It's a lovely little alternate reality where you don't have to pay for things, your friends are nearby, and everything is within walking distance. Where everybody knows your name, and they're always glad you came, etc. I'm really going to miss these people and the brief yet divine falling-in-love-with-new-friends period.

Anyway. Enough with the waxing nostalgic. You'd think it would be hard to be nostalgic about something you just finished today, but I (like many of the kids who were bawling as they checked out of the dorm today) am doing a bang-up job of it, thank you very much.

NHSI is a summer program where rising high school seniors come to basically take a one-semester college class over the course of 5 weeks... except that it's more than just taking a class, because the program occupies them just about 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We had Film Producting kids and Acting For the Camera kids, and despite their annoying habits (like staying up late and shrieking), I was very attached to them by the time they left this morning. I was the Production teacher, which basically meant that I taught them how to compose and light shots, use the camera and lights, and to record sound. Well, I did the best I could, at least, and I hope I taught them a few more things along the way. It sounds pretty obvious, but to teach something you have to remember what it's like to not know anything about it, and that's really hard to do. If I do this next year (and I really hope I do), there are a lot of things I'm going to change about how to approach teaching. It's hard to teach them things when you're not there looking over their shoulder all the time, but you also don't want to be hovering and doing things for them. I wrestled with how to treat them a lot, whether they needed me to babysit them or not-- and I realized that sometimes they do better when I'm not around to tell them exactly what to do. Granted, they also sometimes come up with the worst possible way to shoot whatever it is, but you take what you can get.

Jim and Kevin Welch are the directors of the Film program; Kevin Cannon teaches animation; Glen teaches screenwriting; Caleb Johnson (who briefly went to NU as a grad student) teaches editing; and then we have 5 Faculty Associates, or FAs- Marci, Adam, Dusty, Joe, and Melissa. Marci and Adam were students of Jim's at Montana State, Joe and Dusty were cherubs themselves three years ago, and Melissa just randomely applied for the job. We were a strange bunch, to be sure, but it seems like sometimes the strangest groups of people are the ones that end up getting along the best. Not that we were without strife, but for the most part the summer went pretty smoothly among the faculty.

I also got to do some random fun things with my friends from college this summer, although not nearly as much as I would have liked- NHSI sucked up a lot more time than I was expecting. Tim and Pat and I made screwdrivers and watched Mamma Mia! just to be masochistic; The three of us plus Jack, Kat, Mike Depilla, Kat's sister and a friend of Pat's went to a White Sox game (my 2nd of the summer- we took the kids to a Sox game in a rainstorm, too); Kevin and Tim and I met Jack and Kat at Jack's last ever Public Observing session at Dearborn Observatory (which he's run on Fridays ever since I've known him); Jennifer Welch and their baby Avelyn came up to visit Kevin, and we got to hang out a bit; I went to the Kane County Fair with Jill, Natalie and Alec; Kevin and Jim and I went mini golfing with Jamie Madison, Matt Repchak, John McGlothlin, Dan Peringer, and another guy, and Jim and I BOTH won free games on the final hole; I went to trivia night in Lincoln Square with Tim, Kreutzer, Andrew Linnehan and John Tsarouchas, Kevin Cannon and Amanda and I went to Harry Potter at midnight in Skokie, as you already know (first time I ever took the Skokie Swift!); and David, Jessica and Willa Marie came up to watch fireworks on the Lakefill with us for the 4th of July. Oh, I have so much to say about it all. I can't say it now. It's too late. I'm too tired. There's too much to do.

More when I'm back from Camp!!

HERE I AM NOTICE ME

I'm sitting in Studio 105 in Louis Hall at Northwestern, waiting to tape one of the acting classes for the Acting For The Camera students we have in the NSHI Film program. I offered to help out with stuff for the end of the camp, because I had the afternoon free, and this is what I got stuck with... but I suppose it's vaguely interesting. Our acting kids are so much less annoying than the Theater Cherubs. Bane of my life, the Theater Cherubs! They sing in the dining hall and walk around in loud attention-getting clothing, hug each other and climb on each other and just generally make sure that EVERYONE NOTICES THEM AT ALL TIMES.

I HATE people like that.

Theater kids have always bothered me, even in college when I was friends with a lot of them. Hell, even at Lively Arts Summer Camp in 5th grade when I had to be in a play- even THEN I secretly knew it was all bullshit. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate a good actor more than you know- it's murder being on a film set with only bad actors, or even just one bad actor who throws things out of whack. But when theater people are grouped together, there's just this loud, impenetrable wall of PERFORMING that surrounds them and dwarfs all the normal people. Gag.

Random! Yes I know! I shall be coherent again someday!

elementary

After a) reading my first Agatha Christie novel and b) seeing the trailer for the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes film (with Robert Downey Jr!), I have been thinking a lot about how I used to want to be a detective. Observe:



This is me in my oft-present Detective Hat. I had The Young Detective's Handbook, which taught me how to find clues and dust for fingerprints, then save them with Scotch tape, and I had this hat, and a magnifying glass. Heather and I used to set out to "solve a mystery" oh, probably about once a week. It was either that or looking for secret passages. Random, yes, but man, those were the days. Maybe I'll quit film and become a marine biologist who studies narwhals... and when there are no narwhals I will solve all the mysteries in Greenland.

cherubs gems, volume 5

KID DIRECTING: "Oh wait, she's supposed to cry in this scene. (To actor) How fast can you cry?"


KID DIRECTING: "So, when she leaves, it's like a slow pan, and then you guys are like, da bomb wiggity."

SAME KID, STILL DIRECTING: "Can we up the LOLing?"

FRIEND OR FOE

I've mentioned before that I am sort of addicted to the Stuff You Missed In History Class podcast and blog... and obviously you are all painfully aware of my deep obsession with narwhals and burgeoning desire to ditch the film industry and go be a marine biologist in Greenland. So you can only imagine my surprise when Stuff You Missed In History Class got a new co-host who is also obsessed with narwhals. Is she meant to be my bestest friend whom I can stealthily stalk via the internet? Or is she an enemy out to thwart my narwhal-related job search? HOW CAN I TELL?

cherubs gems, volume 4

KID: "Can you do a British accent?"
ACTING KID: "Um... I can do a pirate accent."

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

My thoughts on this movie and the franchise in general are many and scattered, so please forgive me if this is a less than coherent review. The Harry Potter series is a little too dear to my heart for me to think rationally about anything connected to it.

So!

I find that I differ from a lot of people in which of the five previous movies I think to be the best- I think it's #5, Order of the Phoenix, while most snobby film folk will go with #3, Prisoner of Azkaban and anyone who is looking for a not-shitty-yet-surprisingly-true-to-the-book adaptation will say #4,Goblet of Fire. Sure, Prisoner is probably the most concise, and Goblet is a whole lot of fun, but the latter I definitely found to drag at points, and the former I thought cut out things it didn't need to cut. Order I thought was the first film to strike that delicate balance between maintaining the magical world created in the books and creating a decent movie, while also injecting a much-needed sense of lurking danger into the franchise. The books are dark- there is death and tragedy left and right, and yet until the 5th movie you didn't SEE or feel that darkness. Prisoner got close, I suppose, but holy crap, has there ever been a movie more brightly lit than the first two films? Harry is facing off with Voldemort! Clearly we must light it like a sitcom!

I'm talking more than lighting, though- the 5th film is the first to really delve into Harry's character, too, and as anyone who has read the books can tell you, it's a hell of a book for character development. So that's where I stand on the movies- if I could order them, until now, it would go (best to worst): 5, 3, 4, 2, 1.

And so because I like #5 the best, I was ecstatic when David Yates, the director behind that film, signed on to do not just #6, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but the entire rest of the series, namely #6, plus #7 Part 1 and #7 Part 2 (which is another discussion entirely). Huzzah! Interesting that Yates chose to switch up DPs- he got better results with Slawomir Idziak on #5 than anyone else had in the franchise- but who knows, perhaps Idziak wasn't available. In any case, hurray for a decent director finishing out the series, and one who seems to have a rather accurate perception of the series- dark yet comic, sweet and fun but sinister and tragic all at once.

ANYWAY.

Half Blood Prince is right up there with Order, I think. I just saw it, and it's 4am, so perhaps my impressions are a bit tweaked, but it was pretty frickin' awesome. The effects are finally (for the most part) starting to integrate seamlessly into the film, which was a huge downfall for some of the earlier movies, especially the first two, and also sadly the second two. The kids, who started out so shaky and painfully dull in their performances, are now solid actors who actually bring a lot to the film- especially Daniel Radcliffe (Harry) and Rupert Grint (Ron), who have quite the comedic timing together. Emma Watson (Hermione) still leaves a little to be desired, for me, mainly because she always seems to make the same "I'm angry/sad/smart/snobby" face, but she too has come very far and almost completely embodies her character.

Bonnie Wright (Ginny) is a bit of a different case. She started out as the worst of the horrid child actors, and while she has definitely improved over the years, she's still no shining star. Sure, her performance is no longer the visual equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard, but it also always seems that she is deliberately given very few lines so as to avoid having to recast her. But I suppose by now I should have resigned myself to this awful actress playing one of my favorite characters, and should probably shut up about it, at least until #7-1 comes out.

On the subject of acting- Jim Broadbent, who plays Horace Slughorn, was fantastic. He's very different than how I pictured the character when reading the books, but I am 100% ok with it, because his interpretation is much more nuanced and interesting than the cartoonish figure I had in my mind. As Amanda said, you saw both his jovial professor side and his more manipulative, two-faced side. Hell of a casting choice, and with him under their belt I think the only British actor who HASN'T been in a Harry Potter film is Judy Dench (and thank goodness they didn't cast her as Dolores Umbridge, even if she was the obvious choice! Imelda Staunton was a much more unexpected and inspired decision).

I know a lot of people who are upset with the amount of things that were either cut or changed from the book- nearly all of Harry's journeys with Dumbledore into the Pensieve, for example. There are a few things that bothered me too, or that I would have really liked to have seen, but for the most part I recognized that things were cut for the sake of making this a better MOVIE- that is, more than just a verbatim recreation of the books. In general, what was cut was cut to make things more streamlined, and what was changed was changed largely to expedite some things that would happen in the next two films. I am as much a die-hard Harry Potter book fan as anyone, but I know that if the books were stuck to, we'd just have 8 long sludgey movies like the first two were- and I don't know of anyone on the face of the Earth who thought the first two movies were good.

They added a couple scenes, and I thought one of them was rather interesting, although they didn't revisit it as I felt they should have. Harry is at The Burrow, Ron's home, for Christmas, and a bunch of Death Eaters show up and chase Harry and Ginny into the surrounding wheat (or something) fields. There is an exciting, tense sort of battle sequence, culminating in everyone being safe, but The Burrow being burned. This scene accomplished two things that I thought were good: a) it added some action to the middle of a story that drags a bit in the middle (most of the middle of the book is spent going into the Pensieve, and obsessing about girls and Quidditch), and b) it reaffirms Harry and Ginny's relationship a bit, so that it's less weird when they finally hook up. So hurray, extra scene. That hasn't been done much in these movies, and while I don't want anyone to get carried away with it, here it was done well. Besides, the image of people running through miles of wheat fields in the dead of night was pretty sexy.

Sexy! There's something to bring up about this movie: there were a lot of sexual innuendos, most of which I felt were a bit out of place. Sure, the kids are 16 now and starting to grope each other or whatever, and that's all fine and good, but the sexual references were a bit over the top. Obviously they'll go over the heads of most kids, but it just seemed to be stooping to a level to which Harry Potter should not stoop.

ALSO in relation to "sexy," THIS MOVIE WAS SHOT SO FRICKIN' SEXY. Bruno Delbonnel, be still my heart. I knew you were awesome, but man. Idziak also did an amazing job, and I legitimately can't decide which I prefer, but there were a LOT of frames and camera movements in this one that were just... perfect. There were lovely rich colors and subtle color changes and oh, did i mention the shot of the staircase looking up that uses so many planes of focus I can hardly stand the brilliance? The image was perhaps a little overly DI'd (digital intermediate, a color correction device- I blame Letters From Iwo Jima for starting the "DI IT INTO OBLIVION" trend) in some scenes, especially the flashbacks in the Pensieve, but on the whole it was totally badass. Kudos, Monsieur Delbonnel.

Have I talked about the visual effects yet? They have gotten ever so much better than in the first 4 movies... even #5 had some composites that I questioned. This one I bought nearly everything, even the (previously always awful) Quidditch scenes. The best effects scene was when Harry and Dumbledore are in the cave with the Horcrux, and the Inferi start to climb out of the lake... holy crap! Way creepier than any other reanimated dead bodies I've seen in movies. That whole scene was pretty solid, in fact... I wish they'd made it a little tenser, with Dumbledore drinking the potion and yelling at Harry, but it did its job.

If the movie had one downfall, it was perhaps the same one as all the other Harry Potter films: a lot of time is spent in the beginning on minimally plotty things, and then they sort of have to rush through the ending. The one thing I was truly sad that they cut out was the battle between the Death Eaters and the Order of the Phoenix at the end of the book, when Harry gives his 3 friends the remainder of his Lucky potion and they and the teachers fight the invading Death Eaters. A battle like that, with the ramped-up tension it would provide, would have made

SPOILER

Dumbledore's death that much more shocking and heartbreaking. As it was, it was almost like the filmmakers figured "hey, everyone KNOWS Dumbledore dies, they know what's coming, why bother building up to it?" So I was a little bummed about that, but hey, you can't have everything.

In conclusion: YAY HARRY POTTER 6!! Go see it. AND GO SEE ICE AGE 3 while you're on a kid's movie kick.

8/10

I'm sure I'll be adding a few things as they come to me, so check back again if you're really intensely keen on my Harry Potter musings.