The hardest part about critiquing poetry is understanding its purpose. More than any other art form, poetry is born out of a need to bend, break, or ignore the rules altogether, so whether a poem is poorly written or very well written in a way you can't identify is objective. I know what I think of Joe Hall's fourth poetry anthology, but I'll present it to you both ways.
Sunday 6/16: Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004)
You know how I spent Saturday dumping all my DVDs on the floor to sort them by year? Well I decided to do that with my CDs too. In the depths of my Firefox windows, Ginger Snaps Back had been waiting for too long, so I finally pulled the trigger and watched it in the middle of my organizing mania.
I rarely watch sequels of movies I like because of the likely chance they'll be bad. Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed (2004) is an anomaly. It may be less of a movie, but its self-confidence and lack of exposition makes it a lot more fun. Ginger Snaps Back decided that actually, the first movie didn't have enough exposition, and pull an Evil Dead 2 if Raimi hadn't learned anything in his six year reprieve. The action is boring because it's interspersed with so much filler. The charm of the first two is that you feel for everyone on screen, even if they objectively kind of suck; here, you don't even feel for the sisters. I'd say the writers need to go back to the drawing board, but that's what gave us this lukewarm straight-to-DVD shitfest to begin with. Let dead dogs (ha) lie. / ★★½
It's been a while! Well, maybe it doesn't look like it, if I finally get off my ass and backdate a couple Referencedale in Review posts, but for me I haven't touched this thing since maybe March. Where were we?
Sunday 6/9: Drylongso (1998)
When I got home from my week long vacation with friends, I was wiped. Shit needed to be unpacked, laundry needed to be folded, and I needed to lie on the floor for an undetermined amount of time. It felt natural to grab a DVD from the stack I picked up at the library and hit play. Now, as someone writing about film, I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but I have a bad habit of not paying attention. I'll throw something on for background noise and not retain any of it! Drylongso may have been one of these cases, but it was enjoyable nonetheless.
Movies about the creative process are always a slam dunk. Drylongso tells the story of Pica's creative process—she loves photography, but struggles to fit in with her mentor and peers and their belief that "good" art must be made a certain way. She wants to capture the humanity she sees around her every day. It highlights all the good parts of the 90s independent movement, from the bright colors to the stilted, yet painfully earnest line deliveries. That's what kept me watching despite missing (pretty vital) parts of the plot: every actor had that look in their eyes. It was more than fiction, and that's what good cheap casting needs. My laundry got folded, and my mind got something to chew on, so I'd say it was a successful day. / ★★★★
