TWO HUNDRED THIRTY-TWO

SONG OF THE DAY #232
Wednesday, January 5th, 2011
Between Two Lungs
by Florence + The Machine

Got up at 10:30, took Mawms her lunchbox, then took the long way to work: Coral Way, 27th, US1, I95, Exit 2B.
Got there at exactly 12:00 noon. Stayed until 7 Programming it up. Today was interesting... a couple things happened. I left a message in French and now everyone thinks I'm fluent, I went to Nino's pizza and bought a Sicilian, I worked on Roberto and Vivian's films, the former was sick and didn't make it to work this morning. Tomorrow is our next slotting meeting, and we don't have all the films' formats. I'm freaking out. I feel like we're about to suffer the wrath of Jaie. O, Canada.
Getting up early tomorrow to try to make it to work at 8, when the building opens. Hopefully I'll get some formats in or get some checklists in, finally. I still have our list to finish, and there are about 13 titles with absolutely no information. If things continue this way I'm going to start killing filmmakers. The movie's FINISHED! What else do you have to do besides promote it?

My family is angry when I get home from work? What a surprise. I went to T-Mobile with my mom and hung out for a few hours unnecessarily. It was an experience as bland as bland can be.

Later at night, I saw a certain unnamed film in our Ibero competition, which ended up being a terrible disappointment. I'm struggling to describe it. It was like a Jim Jarmusch film without the black comic relief or any of the somewhat rich and cultivated secondary characters. It was basically a collection of very long establishing shots, and medium shots that were just as drudging and uneventful. These were very artfully set to the sounds of closing doors and the ocean. The characters utter two words every ten minutes, with the exception of a taxi driver fifteen minutes shy of the end of the film. The audience very quickly tires of his nonsense, and it is engrossingly clear at the end of the film that the main character had as well. After painting a picture of the lifeless existence of its protagonist, the film reveals several details that the audience doesn't know what to make of. Said climax occurs in the five or six minutes prior to the film's abrupt ending. Perhaps the film was so painstakingly slow because it mirrored the internal turmoil of its central character (which the audience never seems to understand). Perhaps the film is crafted to reflect the meaninglessness of Spanish life in the commercial age, where there is nothing but suffering, unemployment, empty sex, and crime. That, and far too much time. What the film accomplishes is giving the audience a glint into a single spanish life, and this becomes very clear into the final third of the film. It is about one man and his frustrated existence. The film makes its audience feel just as frustrated as its sad antihero. In order to stand as a reputable piece, it's my assessment and plea that the director give us a few more pieces. I'd be alright with the film if it was part of a series, whereby the audience has several works to draw a given theme from, such as in the collection of french shorts in Paris, Je T'Aime (2006). Otherwise, the film alone scrambles to discern an identity that in the end it simply does not find.