James Vicari.com

The Double Random: 2 Thoughts, 1 Price

Jul 14

JamesRespect/Admire, observation No Comments

Thought 1:

It really bothers me when movies step away from their central premise for no real reason. I was watching Urban Legend earlier while cleaning. The entire modus operandi of the killer in the movie is to kill people based on urban legends (someone in the backseat, pop rocks and coke, etc). But in the midst of the movie (and I guess spoiler warning) Tara Reid gets killed in a very generic non-concept specific way. She’s just stalked, attacked and killed. Unless I’m missing something it’s incredibly glaring in the middle of the movie.

The strength of any film (whatever strength that movie may be said to have) is how well it uses its unique premise. Slasher films by and large aren’t that unique so to just stray from the film’s main premise in the middle of the movie seems so arbitrary and unnecessary and just.. poor.

Thought 2:

George Steinbrenner passed away yesterday. The owner of the Yankees was pure Force in human form and he changed the game in many, many ways and of course, depending on who you ask, it wasn’t always positive.

He was dramatic and he was big and he understood something very important: owning a sports team is owning a business that makes only one product: the Brand. And in sports, you define that Brand by winning.

You can scream about how he threw money at everything, and used his financial means to crush other teams, but that ignores the real picture: He wasn’t the richest owner in the sport, for every dollar he spent, he made more than enough back, and he continued to reinvest that into the Brand, into his product. It’s the mentality that any sports fan would want behind the wheel of the franchise they love, but aren’t all luckily enough to have.

Mr. Kurosawa Would Be 100 Today

Mar 23

JamesReflections, Respect/Admire No Comments

Akira Kurosawa would have been 100 years old today had he not passed away in 1998. He created an incredibly legacy of film. Not only did he leave behind some of the most magnificent movies to have ever been made, but he influenced generations of film makers around the world.

In an essay on the criterion collection’s website, Donald Richie says that Kurosawa “was interested only in practice — how to make films more convincing, more real, more right.” If the theories of other realities are true, then we can hope that maybe Kurosawa achieved his goal in at least one of them. Some of us, though, would say he achieved that goal here. In this one.

Throne of Blood and Rashomon are among some of the greatest movies I’ve ever seen. Brilliant is thrown around too casually today, but those were and are brilliant. They are just as vibrant and engaging now as when they were first put to the screen.

For me, though, the saddest part about celebrating a genius in any artistic medium, is what we are missing out on. If we stop and think would he was able to create with comparatively just the barest essentials, how big of a masterpiece could he have made with a world of technology at his hand?