CHARGE POST FOR JAN - ROGER DEAKINS EVENT WRITEUP

Photo above taken by me!

I emailed Patreon support asking how to switch to monthly billing and they informed me that is not currently possible. I will include the full text of their email response at the end of this post. I'm really frustrated with that and am just going to have to manually charge once a month. In doing so I'll try to offer even more extras than I have been offering, so when I manually charge for a post it at least has some additional new information/novelty exclusive to patrons and so that I am charging FOR something as per Patreon expectations.

As before, if you need to lower/cancel your pledge that is totally fine. If you have requests/suggestions for what kind of updates I make, feel free to comment with them, assuming they aren't weird/parasocial or so intensive that they take away time from me making the essays you're all paying to support in the first place. I would still like to do script reads of abandoned scripts and may do a monthly Q&A or something (not live).

For this post I wanted to do a writeup of two Roger Deakins events I went to along with two mini-reviews of the films screened- The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Prisoners. Some spoilers for both movies in the reviews. I hadn't seen either movie prior to their screenings, though I did know how the climax of Jesse James played out because thirteen years ago I saw a fan-made CGI animated version of it (SPOILERS!) using strangely high-res models of Yogi Bear and Boo Boo. If they aren't the models from the then-contemporary Yogi Bear movie, they're very close.

Roger Deakins has a photography book out and he and his wife James (who is a very important/active collaborator of his) are I guess touring to promote it. The two pre-film Q&As I went to were partially about his book, partially about their podcast, and partially random fan questions. (I'll refer to both Deakins spouses by their first names below not to be informal but rather to differentiate them.)

Throughout both Q&As I enjoyed how James and Roger put so much emphasis on collaboration and mutual respect in the film industry and on uplifting under-appreciated crew who don't typically get any kind of spotlight or appreciation. I also enjoyed all of the really specific questions Roger answered about his process on certain iconic shots in his films. He almost always had an extremely detailed, specific, and thoughtful answer when asked about a given film, shot, or director, regardless of how long ago the film was made. It was very informative and impressive. I hope both end up online (it seemed like his Q&A at The Plaza was filmed?).

I have basically no cringe tolerance for real-world events though so a couple of the questions were extremely awkward and difficult to sit through, with Roger taking the awkward questions and giving maybe too-blunt answers and James trying to soften them. The Q&A at The Tara also had a lot of audio problems and I wished they would have halted the Q&A to take a moment to fix them (assuming fixing was even possible). This was my first time attending an event at The Tara and that plus them leaving stage lights shining at the screen for the first minute or so of the movie were both awkward/distracting.

As for the movies, I'm glad Jesse James was prefaced during the Q&A with the idea of it being very strange and melancholy since apart from having seen a reimagining of the ending, I had very little to go on going into it. Roger went into detail about developing a particular lens configuration (combining two lenses?) meant to (if I recall correctly) mimic the pinhole camera look of real photos of Jesse James' corpse. So, especially knowing that going in, the whole film lays out like some kind of death dream and is extremely, extremely heavy and cold and stifling. Like watching a man sink slowly over a period of hours into quicksand until he suffocates. As the "parasocial person" it was pointed out to me before I ever saw it that the film is an examination of an all-consuming parasocial obsession. My friend Ethan even turned to me during it and quietly made a parasocial joke at one point. I get why the movie has queer readings (again, spoilers as to how the title plays out) but I was struck more by Ford's vicious desperation and grasping at relevance, spending his own life on an uphill battle toward being something other than himself, rather than any queer reading. Interpreting his obsession as lust is to me a little simplistic, though not mutually exclusive with my own interpretation and interpretations that focus on his lifetime parasocial fixation, and (minor spoilers here) him laying in James' bed is pretty weird/gay lol. Maybe I would feel differently if I rewatched the film. This go around I was too engrossed by the gorgeous pinhole cinematography with sharp jarred edges and chromatic aberration, the at times very funny dialogue, and the crushing sense of preemptive grief.

The story and genre couldn't be more different, but it reminded me of Lake Mungo- "I feel like something bad is going to happen to me. I feel like something bad has happened. It hasn't reached me yet, but it's on its way."

The movie is a big downer and I'd definitely recommend it. I also had no idea it was a flop at the time but slowly grew a dedicated following? Maybe double feature it with Ingrid Goes West or No Country for Old Men. It's a great meditation on mythos, masochism, and searching desperately for meaning and valor at the cost of any real trust and dignity.

I also enjoyed Prisoners, which Roger pre-emptively joked/apologized for how much of a downer it was before the screening. I would recommend it with the caveat that some of it is contrived and dumb as hell. A big "aha" moment for the lead investigator (Jake Gyllenhaal) is so stupid it took me out of the movie. He connects two very important clues way, way after they were set up. The script seems to assume both he and the audience are incapable of extremely basic pattern recognition. Like a ten-year-old who understands how to solve a video game puzzle would have swooped him on this.

During one of the intros Roger described a shot in Prisoners (the camera moving in towards a tree) as unsettling and unnerving in a way he couldn't articulate intellectually, like it was planned intuitively and unconsciously. Despite the script being at times very goofy, Prisoners is still tense and upsetting, and his cinematography certainly ramps up all of that tension. It was also filmed in Georgia and it certainly looks like Georgia. The old houses and highways were very familiar to me.

The story runs like a cross between an SVU episode and a Fincher movie. Your tolerance for it may depend on how much vigilantism and moral ambiguity around torture you can take. I'd recommend Jesse James over it as that film is massively more thoughtful and interesting but I did enjoy Prisoners and found it disturbing (as intended) despite some silliness (the bottles of purple liquid, Jackman's goatee, etc). One scene has some disturbingly realistic makeup effects as well.

Thanks as always for the support. I plan to write more of my Lutsko essay tonight and tomorrow and hopefully get back to contract work on Monday.

Also here's the Patreon email response I got (no way am I making a new account lol)-

Tom (Patreon)

Dec 5, 2023, 9:39 PM PST

Hi there!

This is Tom with Creator Support, thanks for writing in, I would be happy to assist!

Regarding your request, I wish I had another answer but currently, subscription billing or another monthly billing is only available to creators who already bill patrons monthly or new accounts that did not launch their pages yet, but I know our engineers are working hard to make this option available for creators on the "Per-creation" billing in the coming months. Once it is available, we’ll send out an update so that you can begin the process of switching over.

At this moment, the only alternative if you'd like to charge your patrons with monthly billing, is to create a new account and a new creator page, that way you will have the possibility of subscription billing or another legacy monthly billing since is available to use when you set up a new page.

Thank you for understanding and if you have any other questions, please don’t hesitate to let me know - I’m here to help.

Stay safe and healthy,

Tom.