Dammit 40...I think you just ruined my weekend again! -superboyac
What can I say? I'm just trying to keep you out of bars unless you're gigging in them.
Am I going to have to create for myself a Twilight Zone marathon weekend, followed by the Hitchcock marathon??!
Well...I've been told "chicks" dig that sort of thing. Why not invite a few
brainy geek-goddess types over and make a long weekend of it? Sure beats making smalltalk with strangers in a room full of horn-dogs and loudmouths. Besides, like
Irene Adler said in the new
Sherlock series (
A Scandal in Belgravia): "Smart is the 'new' sexy." (Oh yeah!)
I remember a couple of years ago making an effort to go back and watch the older shows and movies. My first thought was "Boy, they talk a lot in these things." Lots of talking, lots of explaining.
Yup. There was. We've since become more sophisticated in our viewing. We've learned a visual lexicon and grammar so things don't need to be spelled out quite so much any more. Time was, you needed to have pages falling off a calendar or see a moving line with an airplane on a map to understand the story was shifting to a new time or location. That trick gave way to "establishing shots," then to "quick cuts," and now to "jumps". (Hypertext and the web helped us get comfortable with discontinuous leaps and linking.) Our consciousness has evolved. We've learned to interpret cues and signals the old directors wouldn't have dared use for fear of losing the audience. Even the once
avant-garde voice over technique is now seen as being old hat. No surprise. A voice-over is just a variation on the ancient Greek Chorus trick. Nothing new at all really.
Same goes for explanations of: technical, medical, economic, scientific, political, psychological, and legal terminology and scenarios. We don't need as many of them as we used to. TV and print news with international coverage; widespread literacy; mandatory schooling to age 16; public libraries; the web; special interest groups; inexpensive telecommunications;
yadda-yadda-yadda...the average person's "infoprint" is miles
wide even if most of it is only inches
deep.
We're all much more "up" on things than many in the previous generations were. Not so much because we're any "smarter." It's more because we're
exposed to more information than any preceding generation. Small wonder so many are of us are breaking under the constant stimuli.
Maybe we don't understand everthing that gets put in front of us on a screen. But it isn't too often we haven't at least
heard something about what we're looking at.
That little bit of exposure goes a long way in a movie. Especially when it comes to "laying pipe" as the industry refers to it when informational or background footage is scripted into a movie purely to get the audience up to speed enough to follow whats going to happen next.
