Two Degrees of Adam Sandler

Mr. Carty considered Will Ferrel's role in Stranger Than Fiction as the "straight man". This blog post has nothing to do with Will Ferrel.

The straight man is, by association, the most normal character in his inner circle, if not the plot entirely. Think about the people Harold works with. Think about Dave. Think about Harold's reaction to Dave and his surroundings. That's kind of the way I prefer Ferrel and his ilk. To compare and contrast, I reccomend you watch Jack and Jill.

While not the pinnacle of Sandler's resume, this movie is an excellent case study in two types of comedy. Jill represents everything I hate about Sandler comedy; she's childish, obnoxious, and about as subtle as a neon-green elephant with cymbals on its feet. Jack is everything I enjoy about Sandler comedy; he's just kinda walking down the street, sees a hobo with a banana, and he's just like, "Huh. That sure is a hobo." Then he moves onto the next scene. He's so good at straight-man comedy that you wonder why he spends so much screen-time flapping his arms and making inane faces at the camera. 

Grammar? What am you talking about?

     Earlier this week we got a handout about the liberties an author is allowed to take with grammar to make their works better. This is largely because normal people don't talk using the grammatical conventions we learn in school. This is especially true for people who write in colloquialisms form way back when, or who use modern informal speech. Further room for experimentation comes into play when a writer experiments with funny accents.
     And then there's sentence fragments, a major grammatical faux-pas. For example, when you are asked, "Why aren't you eating?", grammar dictates that the proper response is "I am not eating because I am not hungry."

HOWEVER!

     Who actually says things like that? Most people would say something like, "Eh, not really hungry." or, like me, "No reason." That's like sacrilege or something. And while we're on that, like, subject; there's stuttering and catching. This isn't particularly common in the written word unless they have a lithp or other s-s-s-speech impediment. In normal speech, people aren't practiced orators, so they can repeat themselves or other... stuff.

Point of View in Crime and Punishment

Crime and Punishment is most obviously told from the 3rd Person Limited. We follow the sociopathic protagonist Raskolnikov around London, and stay firmly rooted in his life, right. Wrong! The esteemed Mr. Dostoevsky actually creates an ingenious hybrid of Third Person views. We actually follow Raskolnikov around in a sort of narrative bubble of Omniscience. So while we focus on Rodyon for the majority, we can follow the people that he just interacted with for a block or so. We can also peer into the minds of the other characters, though this is used very sparingly by the author. We see the latter technique when Rodya meets Marmeladov in the bar. Dostoevsky gives us some juxtaposition between Ol' Marm's outgoing personality and inner turmoil. The former we see when Pulcheria and Dunya leave Rodyon's house. Rodya would have no means of hearing this conversation, but we do, and will likely need to remember it for later.

Out West

This is the blog post for the week of January 28. The blog post for last week precedes this one, and is dated thus.

This weekend, as I pondered through a second viewing of Industrial Light and Magic's Rango, I realized just how much this outwardly so-so picture manages to lovingly homage its western roots.

A Western takes place between the end of the Civil War and the 1890's, when the frontier closed. Westerns actually originated in literature well before the War, when the "frontier" was east of the Missouri River. One of the earliest films in the genre (or of any genre for that matter), was The Great Train Robbery of 1903. Train Robberies are a staple of the Western Genre (and one of the only elements Rango doesn't homage or parody). During the 50's and 60's Western TV Shows and Comics exploded, and from Bonanza to Gunsmoke to Jonah Hex they still remain in semi-public conscience. It was a time of bank robbers and wanted posters, cattle drives and posses. Gunslingers faced off at high noon, and unsavory characters walked bow-legged into saloons.

But when you think of a Western (even though few do anymore) you probably think of the genre's little amigo, the Spaghetti Western. Called so because of their Italian studio origin, Spaghetti Westerns were often filmed on location in Spain (Where the cacti were more stereotypical). They were often distillations and deconstructions (breakdowns) of regular Westerns, but managed to outshine their inspirations. Sergio Leone directed the Dollars Trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly), source of some of Wild West cinema's most seminal scenes (like that song that always plays when a gunfight happens), and helped make Clint Eastwood (The Man With No Name) the household name he is today.

Noir

This is the blog for the week of January 21.

So, before we started reading Crime and Punishment, I mistook it for a member of the Film Noir genre. Popularized in the 40's, noir is the typical "crime drama" style, before crime dramas inundated the prime-time TV scene. Noir typically featured your private gumshoe, your street hustler with a heart of gold, and other hard-boiled smooth-talker types. The words "dame" and "doll" are thrown around a lot.

In visual media, Noir is striking based on its light and dark contrasts. Shadows are long and often partially obtrusive to faces (known as chiaroscuro), and light will be used sparingly, often for dramatic effect (horizontal blinds are a staple). Dutch angles and other atmospheric positions are fair game. Authentic noir is shot in black and white of course, given the era.

Cynical, fast-talking, and never far from his cigarette, the protagonist will often be less then wholesome, but never genuinely evil. His outlook on the city he lives in (and it's always a city) is, as a rule, bleak and defeatist, often disillusioned by an event from his past.

Venerated printed examples include The Maltese Falcon and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Those two books were adapted into movies, the latter of which starred Humphrey Bogart, famous for Casablanca, another Noir Film.

You Read a Post About the Second Person...

Before I begin, let me follow up on last week by breifly discussing Huck Finn. Twain writes in a pseudo-present tense, as while it's clear that Huck is speaking about previous events, he uses phrasing like "He says," or "I am." It's supposed to be like listening to someone tell a story, or like one of those "A guy walks into a bar" jokes. I hadn't considered this kind of implement of present tense last week; it gets my approval.

Now, today we discuss an even more narrowly implemented style: second person. To put it concretely, The second person is a story in which you are a participant, and which is told from your perspective by a limited narrator. This technique is almost exclusively relegated to the text based or "Chose your own" media. Interactivity is almost a necessity, as dictating a reader's actions to them is essentially a less efficient form of third person limited.

Brian writes about writing in the present tense

This month I am writing about some of the less commonly utilized narrative mode. This week; my least favorite method: Present Tense. I am trying to remember one book I once read that was written entirely in this tense. Basically, the writer plans his narrative, then writes the characters as though they were currently acting them. One tends to get odd, unnatural feeling sentences like "John plans the surprise party," or '"Hey, stop that!" Jane cries.' This is a rarely used tactic, as it doesn't offer as much flexibility in story telling.

**Editor's Note: An adendum to this post has been written into next weeks post.