How will I ever be able to look my film school friends in the eye and say that I didn't love Federico Fellini's 8 1/2?
I did however love the idea behind it. The concept of a semi-autobiographical film about a film that interweaves plot with the inner workings of the main character's mind is an appealing one. Fellini & co. exteriorize protagonist Guido Anselmi's (Marcello Mastroianni) private thoughts, hopes, and dreams in a seamless and oftentimes beautiful way.
Oddly enough, this is also something video games can do very well. One of the best example in recent memory are the myriad flashback/hallucination sequences in Batman: Arkham Knight.
After I finished the film I found myself wondering if this kind of thing has been done in comics before. I'm sure there are more than a few ways to inject memory/thoughts/dreams directly into the visual fabric of an individual comic panel or a series of them. It's something I'll chew on going forward.
(You can see what else I've been watching lately over at my Letterboxd page.)
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New York City is crumbling. In many different ways. When I was young and would visit Manhattan with my parents, I thought I had arrived in Metropolis: City of Tomorrow. Now that I'm older and have sampled a variety of its locales and living situations I can say with confidence that New York City is a great big rotting organism shot through with shiny luxury condos. People run around the shell on its back, attempting to fix its disintegrating infrastructure and build skyward, but the skeleton that supports it all will one day turn to dust.
"....an examination by The New York Times has found that Mr. Lhota’s reach as a power broker has grown with new board appointments in Manhattan and on Long Island, giving him extraordinary sway over some of the most important aspects of New York life. But while Mr. Lhota remains a respected official, his growing web of jobs has led to potential conflicts of interest and competition for his time, complicating the still-flailing effort to resuscitate a transit system used by millions of people every day." -- NYT
"These apartments — seen as the scourge of landlords and the salvation of struggling New Yorkers — are at the center of a housing crisis that has swelled the ranks of the homeless and threatens to squeeze all but the affluent from ever-wider swaths of the city. But even as Mayor Bill de Blasio has made adding more affordable housing a signature pledge of his administration, the system that protects the city’s roughly one million regulated apartments is profoundly broken, a New York Times investigation has found." -- NYT
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That's all for now, folks. Stay sharp--that is definitely not me standing outside your window.