So there was Chinese food and
Kai Doh Maru. Which I really liked, and I think
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cholten99 liked as well. Well, he was really impressed by the artwork, anyway. It was actually really good -- facial features from
Ghost in the Shell, background CGI stuff from
Blood: The Last Vampire with that washed-out light colour scheme that you tend to get in medieval Japanese art. According to
cholten99, it had something else in common with
B:TLV; "it's very pretty and made fuck all sense". Which launched yet another conversation on the subject of good art v. enjoyable art. Apparently there's a lot out there that's good -- meritorious, anyway -- but isn't, in his opinion, particularly enjoyable.
Which led us on to
American Beauty. He said that a lot of people said that it was uplifting but that he found it singularly depressing, so (being me) I tried to explain why I didn't find it depressing in the slightest. What I liked about it on the whole was that they didn't vilify death, and that they showed the true nature of the tragedy of death. It's not the victim that we should feel bad for, the film tells us -- not if he's lived well and ends well with no regrets to speak of. It's the survivors who suffer, not the dead. The dead are beyond that. It's an interesting outlook for a culture that, for the most part, believes in eternal bliss after death (if you were good) and divine forgiveness and then wails, "Oh, poor [so-n-so] is dead! Woe! Wooooooooe unto him!" If we were honest, and secure in our faith (should we have one), we would stop bloody well projecting our own suffering and loss on someone who's beyond caring what happens on this plane, whether there's a next one or not.
So maybe not uplifting, but definitely food for thought.
Which is where "good" art vs "enjoyable" art comes into play. It's just a variation on the meaning of the word "entertainment", I suppose -- some people just don't really enjoy thinking all that much. They'd prefer something that can let them coast along, taking in the pretty pictures or the funny one-liners and not tax them overmuch, intellectually speaking. I don't get that. As I've often said, I think too much; in fact, it's my natural state. I would suck at meditation, frankly, because the "no-mind" state just could not happen with me. Which means that for me, entertainment is something that stretches my natural tendency to think too much in new and interesting directions. So I listen to music and mull over meanings of lyrics, chord structure, harmonies and melodies that make the piece feel a certain way and so forth. I read and think of language, sentence structure, reasoning behind the use of specific words, how paragraphs are arranged, metre and tone. I look at art and think about use of colour, brush strokes, canvas size and how it all affects the mood of the piece -- well, that and how it fits into the two main categories of art, as discussed with
ninja_arzt so long ago: Sex or Death? Theatre -- well, that's just Theatre Studies in voluntary application -- director's view of the piece v actor's view of character v writer's view of the whole thing, set and costume, blocking, lighting, SFX, line delivery, etc. And then there's the cinematic and televisual side of things, where you take all of that and add camera angles, mise en scene, target audience and so forth. I think too much but I
enjoy it, most of the time. Of course, that's something to do with the fact that, while all that's going on in one level of my head, the rest of it can go, "Ha! He's funny!" or "Oooooooh. Pretty" or "This track rocks!" or what have you. Just, if I like it or hate it, I'd like to know why. Partly that's so that I know so I can use it as a benchmark for what to avoid next time, and the other reason is that it makes for good conversational topics later on.
Unfortunately, while you can do it with
American Beauty or
Kai Doh Maru or
Amadeus (with the added bonus of the theatrical version versus the cinematic version), you can't really do it with, for example,
Van Helsing. Of course, not even something like that is a conversational dead end because you can discuss, for example, the fact that the hideous overacting is a dead giveaway that the thing's a freakin' parody of the genre anyway and why on earth they settled for such hideously cheap-looking special effects in this day and age.
In short, to end this rambling diatribe, thinking too much means never having to say "I have nothing of interest to say". Of course, it also tends to mean annoying people who would rather just watch embryonic vampires explode into green goo without any of the commentary about how cheap, fake and senseless it all is, complete with logical reasons why.
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