theory

Why The 1970s Are Inspiring Films Today (Cross Talk Ep. 30)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

There are definite echoes and recurrences of the 1970s cropping up in film.

It was a time of very serious filmmaking, when grit and resourcefulness were championed, emotions were raw and characters had very simple motivations. You killed my partner? I’m coming after you. We can’t make our marriage work? Let’s get divorced. Our crew needs to get home from the edge of the universe? There’s time to investigate an alien spacecraft.

Tensions were high, politics was laden with so many revolutions – sexuality, gender equality, television, nationalism, race relations. But at the core of it all were stories about characters, and the depth of field pushed backdrops to the edge of our attention.

For the sake of argument, I’m just going to quickly list off a bunch of famous films from that timeframe to demonstrate my point. Ready? Here we go. Star Wars, Jaws, The Exorcist, Alien, The French Connection, The Godfather, Taxi Driver, All The President’s Men, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, MASH, Apocalypse Now, Annie Hall, Rocky, A Clockwork Orange, Halloween, The Deer Hunter, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Carrie, Serpico, Chinatown, the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Sure I didn’t select comedies like The Muppet Movie and Bedknobs and Broomsticks, but even those movies featured Nazis and a frog legs merchant. And were weird as shit. I’ll let you figure out which villain was for which film. Yes, there were complex films like Airport, but on that note, disaster films, exploitation and “B movies” were prominent in a decade of civil unrest. Any of this sounding familiar yet?

As we start to look back on the 2010s, I can see that there is a definite correlation in critical filmmaking and so we have some spiritual successors to 1970s classics. Movies like A Ghost Story mimic the epistemological 2001: A Space Odyssey, while Logan channels Badlands, The Man with No Name trilogy and so many other flicks like Five Easy Pieces. But maybe Baby Driver was more your speed, creative cuties? What about The Driver, The Italian Job (technically the 1960s, but just barely), and Smokey and the Bandit?

You know what, just watch the latest episode and decide for yourself if we are entering into a second renaissance of 1970s minimalism in film. AKA the return of the 1970s.

Cool right? Yeah, its a great idea to explore how themes repeat themselves over time, and yes there still plenty of examples of films inspired by the 1980s, but I have to wonder if anybody else is noticing this connection?

I hope you enjoyed watching this episode as much as Chris and I enjoyed recording it. But you know what we love more? Comments! Shares! And new subscribers! Check back in a day for an album review and a theory on why metal music gets better as you age.

Tim!

Home Improvement (My New House and Other House Keeping Thoughts)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

Where I came from, holding a door open for a stranger was absolutely necessary (especially the elderly), and minding your parents wishes at all times expected, but I also had the great privilege of choosing my career path, focusing on creative acts and experimenting with belief systems as I grew up.

A strange combination of conservative Christian roots and post-modern ideals indeed, dear readers.

Now, in case you are wondering what my interpretation of that lifestyle could possibly look like, I’ll start by telling you some of my thoughts on living life. I have strong tendencies towards moral relativism and pluralistic truth-finding, while my creative energy is highly self-referential and irreverent – this is likely why I gravitate towards satire. And satire is best represented in popular culture (in my humble opinion of course). Also, my humour is starkly dry, and I hate injustice of any kind, so satire lends itself well to those values. But on the other side of that coin, I am fiercely loyal to maintaining family traditions, believe in the importance of a cultivated education that never ends, and I will happily defend that etiquette, discipline, and spirituality have their place in properly developing a human being. Even more-so as I step off the singles ledge and into the deep-end of parenthood.

It might seem contradictory to have those combination of beliefs, but I think of it this way, we should carve out what doesn’t work, always holding onto the core pieces that give us structure.

Also, there is an old adage about sweeping your own front door before you sweep the entryways of others, which make perfect sense to me. It’s a universal truth about minding your own business, that we shouldn’t assume to know the first thing about someone. We live in a world today that is very quick to judge or pass judgment on others without looking at ourselves first. We are quick to judge people based on gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, how they make an income, what their income level is, based on where they live and even based on their past life experiences.

But life is way too involving to waste time and energy on what other people are working through. I really can’t see how you would ever run out of things to do to improve yourself, which is likely why I happen to think of houses as marvellous objects and excellent metaphors for change.

Tool Time

As you may know, I’ve been making lots of changes to this brand ever since I started this timotheories business back in November 2014, and for many, it seems like a natural progression to buy property after a certain period of time renting a space. Many people rent for a few years and then pick up a mortgage when they’ve tucked enough savings away.

I decided to to buy a property too. But I did it because I want to have more freedom over my daily life

Buying a house meant finding a mortgage broker who would approve a loan, searching through hundreds of listings, and then viewing more then twenty of them, before finally making an offer. After I put my offer on the table, I was approved. Which meant I could move forward with the next step – I had an inspection of the property done, I put down a deposit,  worked with my insurance company to set up the house insurance, got the lawyer to draw up some paperwork on the sale of the house, and finally closed on the deal.

As I mentioned already, I bought this particular house for a few reasons, one of which was to convert the bi-level bungalow property into two rental units. And I’ve already started that process by replacing the old furnaces and hot water tank with brand new energy efficient models. You see creative cuties, I want to rent both properties and luckily the house came with two furnaces; furnaces that were 20 years old mind you. So rather then continue a string of repairs and having to coordinate with handymen, I signed up for a lifetime warranty plan and replaced those machines. That way I can just give any heating and plumbing concerns over to Always Heating and Plumbing whenever a tenant has an issue. For free. No surprise bills, and the annual maintenance schedule should help keep them alive for many years.

theories Summarized

I also want to pay off the house faster, and turn the house into a source of passive income. That way, if either Mysticque and I lose our jobs, we still have money coming in which could be used to buy another property, build a studio over the garage of our primary residence, or any number of big expenses. It’s a lot of work, but as I’ve said before, home improvement is essential if you want to make a difference in this world. You work with what you’ve been given, but each of us has an opportunity to improve on what came before, by mixing the old and the new.

And if you can keep up that habit, you’ll find you don’t even have time look at your neighbours house, let alone try to sweep up their front step. Leave that mess to the Jones’ and start planning to put in your hot tub instead. Just a theory to consider.

Tim!

 

Truth, Records, and Goodwill (Brendon Greene, musician and record label owner interview)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

We already know that vinyl records have seen a resurgence in recent years. Likely because collecting music is still an incredible enjoyable hobby, and even though music is even more readily accessible then it ever has been in the history of humankind, people are going to focus on specific sources of musical talent and just absorb what is within their radar. After all, it takes a lot of work to go diving for new music.

Believe me I would know. I Source the internet every week to find a new album to review, one that’s interesting, accessible and just plain entertaining to listen to. But the reality is that music taste is even more subjective then film or fine art.

So imagine being someone who manage a record label. You have to be fairly relaxed, forward thinking, and dedicated to the art in order to keep up with all of the demands. Plus if you’re a grass roots organization like Conscious Collective Entertainment you’ll also want to promote local up and comers, and hopefully maintain a community based imaged.

A musician himself, Brendon Greene has a lot say about why he has decided to have a record label – He started playing guitar 17 years ago, and began teaching guitar 14 years ago. In 2015 he also ran in the provincial and federal election for the Green Party. Immediately deciding upon the end of the campaign that he wanted to learn more about the management of artists, and production. So he incorporated Conscious Collective Entertainment. And he works for Goodwill Industries. AND has slowly been adding artists to his label. Don Bartlett (Modern Fingerstyle, Harp Guitar), Christiana Munch (Classical Fingerstyle), and a punk band called For The County.

If it’s not apparent yet, Brendon loves to teach music and he’ll do you one better. He also wants to help you get a record mixed and distributed for a realistic price too. He believes in stewardship and the value of a good mentor. I personally think he is a pillar for the community but I’ll leave that up to your discretion.

Plus, the interview has even more detail on how to get out there as a musician.

It was a a lot of fun talking with this guy about his business, he has so much passion, and a lot of great insights. I learnt a lot from him too!

I’d love it if you left a comment, and if you liked this artist interview leave one and then share it with a friend or two. Better yet, go visit Conscious Collective and Brendon on Facebook and Instagram, respectively – he’ll appreciate the visit.

 

And special thanks to Brendon for being bold, brave and brilliant. When it comes to passionate mentorship for burgeoning musicians, this Greene knows how to party with the best of them. It’s a new theory for 2018.

Tim!

Das Ist Gut (Dunkirk review)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

Not every story told follows the same narrative path as what preceded it. I mention this because Christopher Nolan has been directing movies since 1989 but it wasn’t until 2008’s The Dark Knight that we began to expect a certain tone from his films.

 

Dunkirk (2017)

Cast: Fionn Whitehead, Barry Keoghan, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Kenneth Branagh
Director: Christopher Nolan
released on blu-ray December 19, 2017
********* 9/10

IMDB: 8.1
Rotten Tomatoes: 92%, Audience Score 81%
The Guardian: *****/*****

Christopher Nolan is an English film director, screenwriter and producer extraordinaire. He also has dual citizenship in the United States. If you are unfamiliar with his work, he has also helmed the recent The Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception, Interstellar, Memento, Insomnia, The Prestige, and Following, his directorial feature length debut. There were three films he made before Following, but those were all short films.

An advocate for film preservation, Nolan’s films often explore themes of morality, the passage of time, and identity. He prefers to use practical effects where possible, incorporates wide angle shots to reduce the scale of his characters, and adjusts the narrative landscape through the use of gripping soundtracks (looking at you long-time friend Hans Zimmer) and by messing up the typical sequencing of scenes.

Dunkirk follows that tradition of Nolan’s films, but does so in such a way that the lead character becomes the evacuation itself, with Allied soldiers, Axis planes, and British civilians all helping to fill in for settings and props. I should be clear when I state that this is a war film, but the explosions, cries of pain, and bloodshed are not the focal points – it’s the magnitude of war and how it effects our personal decisions for right or for wrong.

Courtesy of Wikipedia…

In 1940, during the fall of France, hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers have retreated to Dunkirk. Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), a young British private, is the sole survivor of a German ambush. At the beach, he finds thousands of troops awaiting evacuation and meets Gibson (Aneurin Barnard), who is burying a body. After a German dive-bomber attack, they find a wounded man. They rush his stretcher onto a hospital ship hoping to get onboard and escape, but are denied passage themselves. The ship is sunk by dive-bombers; Tommy saves Alex (Harry Styles), another soldier. They leave at night on a destroyer, which is sunk by a torpedo from a U-boat. Gibson saves Tommy and Alex, and they are brought ashore by a rowing boat.

The Royal Navy requisitions civilian vessels that can get close to the beach. In Weymouth, Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance) and his son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) set out on his boat Moonstone rather than let the navy take her. Impulsively, their teenage friend George (Barry Keoghan) joins them. At sea, they rescue a shell-shocked officer (Cillian Murphy) from a wrecked ship. When he realises that Dawson is sailing for Dunkirk, the officer demands that they turn back, and tries to wrest control of the boat; in the struggle, George falls and suffers a head injury that renders him blind.

Three Spitfires head towards France. After their leader is shot down, pilot Farrier (Tom Hardy) assumes command with a shattered fuel gauge. They save a minesweeper from a German bomber, but the other Spitfire is hit and ditches. Its pilot, Collins (Jack Lowden), is rescued by Moonstone.

Tommy, Alex and Gibson join a group of Scottish soldiers and hide inside a trawler until the tide rises. Her owner, a Dutch mariner, returns. German troops shoot at the boat for target practice; when the tide rises, water enters through the bullet holes. Alex, hoping to lighten the boat’s load, accuses Gibson, who has been silent, of being a spy and demands that he leave. Gibson reveals he is French; he had stolen the identity of the soldier he buried, hoping to evacuate with the British. Alex, Tommy and the Scottish soldiers abandon the fishing boat when it begins to sink. Gibson is entangled in a chain and drowns. Alex and Tommy swim towards a nearby destroyer, but it is sunk by a bomber. Moonstone manoeuvres to take on troops, including Alex and Tommy. Peter realises that George is dead; when asked by the shell-shocked officer, he lies that George will be fine. Farrier shoots down the bomber, which crashes and ignites the oil slick from the sinking destroyer. Peter reveals to Collins that his elder brother was a Hurricane pilot, killed early in the war.

Farrier reaches Dunkirk, his fuel exhausted. Gliding over the beach, he shoots down a dive-bomber to cheers from the troops below. He cranks his landing gear down and lands beyond the Allied perimeter. He sets fire to his plane and is taken prisoner by German soldiers.

At the beach, Commander Bolton (Kenneth Branagh) watches the last British soldiers leave. He confirms that 300,000 have been evacuated, ten times more than UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill had hoped for. He remains to oversee the evacuation of the French rearguard. Alex and Tommy cross the English Channel and board a train in Weymouth. Dawson is congratulated for having saved so many men. The shell-shocked officer sees George’s body being carried away. Peter visits the local newspaper with a photograph of George; a front-page article later commends George as a hero. Alex expects public scorn as the train approaches Woking, but they receive a hero’s welcome. Tommy reads out Churchill’s address to the nation from a newspaper.

This is nightmare fuel. Beaches filled with men with nowhere to go watch in terror as German aircraft decimate them from above – the analogy of the boot stomping ants is sickeningly accurate in this case. The movie showcases the blender full of emotions in such a thoughtful way, allowing us to give pause and see faces filled with anger, others with pride, despite not connecting with anyone long enough to root for them. It’s an odd thing, given that Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance, and Kenneth Branagh are all excellent character actors – Nolan only gives us a taste into each man’s personality knowing full well that war dwarfs our self-importance.

Pros: The action moves up and down, like a wave crashing on a beach. The sparse storytelling and tone of failure barely concealed by dumb luck work damn strong to force a response. It’s technically brilliant.

Cons: A lack of an emotional core, might be difficult to swallow. Tom Hardy’s Farrier could have been given a slightly larger role – showing his end at the hands of Nazi soldiers even. A lot of unanswered questions.

Runtime: 1 hour 46 minutes

Points of Interest: Thirty or so Dunkirk veterans attended the Long premiere – they appreciated the accuracy of the story, but felt the soundtrack was louder then the actual bombardment. Nolan cast young and unknown actors based on accounts of how inexperienced the real soldiers of Dunkirk were.

As far as a military effort, the Battle of Dunkirk was an epic disaster on a global scale. But the evacuation of almost 300,000 soldiers and the moral victory of the British is considered by many historians as the lynchpin in the Allied story of fighting against tyranny. By giving the soldiers and citizens an equal footing, Winston Churchill was able to foster a spirit of resistance within this nation, and turn a tragedy into a triumph, which is echoed in the final moments of the film by Alex as he is welcomed home in Woking.

theories Summarized

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this film as a I watched it, if I am being completely honest. Mysticque and I watched it together, and she was not a fan of it by any means. I try not to let other opinions effect my own interpretation of a film, but rather to enhance it. In this case it was invaluable, because Dunkirk is a film of competing emotions, many personal narratives drowned out by a larger message. I think you should see this film, especially given that stories like Saving Private Ryan and Pearl Harbour exist. A film like Dunkirk will help to expand your worldview and introduce a greater perspective on World War II, a time that that provided such cognitive dissonance for humanity, theories and all.

Tim!

Am I The Only One Around Here Who Gives A Shit About The Rules? (Anger Management)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

Almost two years ago, I wrote a post entitled The Secret Genius (Attitude is Everything).

It was a Wisdom Wednesday topic I wanted to broach about the importance of both vision AND application in becoming the “you” that you want to be in life. And yes, factors of genetics, ambition, effort, personality and environment are all to be considered when you decide to change your attitude and become the master of your destiny.

Without regurgitating the entire article, I’ll simply state that genius can be cultivated, and geniuses cultivate their curiosity by learning new things, visiting unfamiliar territory, and asking a lot of questions. Or to put it in Dean Keith Simonton’s words – geniuses tend to be open to experience, introverted, hostile, driven and ambitious. Also, geniuses can find patterns where others won’t (Erika Andersen on Malcolm Cowley).

It’s a compelling argument, and something about taking ownership of your life and putting together the pieces, is very appealing to me on a personal level. But there is some required reading in-between the lines too here. In order to be a successful “genius” a positive attitude is essential in relation to your personal motivation and when communicating your ideas. But what I didn’t discuss in that article I wrote two years ago, is that controlling your emotions is just as important of a component when you finally decide to commit to the house rules.

Don’t Look Back In Anger

It can be difficult to admit when you are lacking in a quality. I myself struggle with my emotions, daily. I’m not an emotive person by nature, but I am an emotional person. I feel things deeply and though I operate from a place of analysis, knowledge, and conceptualization, my second-most dominant motivator in life is meaning, significance and compassion.

What this has meant for me is that as I grew into adulthood, I learned to communicate through the lens of my own experience, but often accomplished it by either denying my feelings or holding them at arms length.

In reality I still had the emotions, and when they did surface, they would often come out as anger. I cannot begin to describe all of the reasons why I believe anger is the emotion I gravitate towards in expressing myself, but even more frustrating is the impact it can have on my loved ones. While I may not truly feel angry at the time I am addressing my emotions, it doesn’t mean those people don’t feel the heat from my internal process, and more often then not, those feelings come from a place of victimization.

As I wrestle with my feelings, I go through the entire emotional gamut, often landing at a place of compassion and understanding. But the emotional violence that I and my audience endure is difficult to wrestle with.

Last night Mysticque and I had a good long chat about the way I process new information, my emotional reactions, and how it effects her, and I came to the realization (with her help), that I do this so often, that I am not even aware of it’s impact on my life – I want to be clear that I while I start off this way, it never finishes with the same feelings, because I do process the feelings.

However, I have decided to make a conscious effort to become better in touch with my emotions and express them in a more balanced and moderate manner.

Which is why I am going to take responsibility for my anger going forward.

Anger Is As Anger Does

In a world where anger is often seen as a negative characteristic, it can be difficult to see it for what it is – potential unfulfilled.

We can channel anger into productivity, and we can use it as a source of personal power. But that means recognizing you have anger, and that you are not a master of it. Yet.

If you move through your feelings, you can prevent emotional toxic buildup, but anger needs an output to be constructive, just like any other dangerous tool. Proceed with caution! Exercise, meditation, creative writing, art making, and even driving can become major contributors to releasing anger; because they give the anger purpose and focus it.

Additionally, your mental head space needs to be receptive to change. If you can identify the source of the anger and why you were triggered, you can begin to separate yourself from your emotions and choose when to engage them. By looking at your past history with key events, people, and topics, as an outsider looking in (by literally viewing it as a story) you can learn how to let go and focus on the present.

And one other thought – it is completely up to you to make this change. No one can do it for you, because this is a paradigm shift. Yes, YOU can learn to access and express your anger in a healthy way. Yes, YOU can choose to see that anger doesn’t have to be a destructive force, but a warning signal that something is wrong when you feel it, and also a tool for appropriate self-defence when expressed.

theories Summarized

I still have a long way to go in my mastery over anger. But even the smallest act of saying out loud to someone I trust that this is a challenge in my life, means that I can move forward and look at the situation differently. Anger is a tool to be used in both recognition and implementation, just like any other dangerous object.

A theory to consider, at the very least.

Tim!