The Road

I am a depraved lunatic when it comes to movies. I love watching them. I love talking about them. I even love hating them sometimes. So, I try to keep my eyes open to what is looming on the horizon, and this is a dire, foul year as far as I can see. All the little fanboys and girls, of course, are getting all goo-goo eyed over Wolverine, Star Trek, Terminator, etc, blah, blah, blah. I can't deny looking forward to Star Trek, and I will probably watch the others, but who really cares. Event movies like that are a dime a dozen these days. The movie studios don't want to release a movie any more unless they can guarantee something like $70 Million dollars on opening weekend, and good movies don't usually attract that kind of buzz, which brings us to my actual topic.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, is currently holding the number one spot on my favorite books of all time list. If you haven't read any of McCarthy's books (No Country For Old Men, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness In the West, All the Pretty Horses, etc.) then there isn't much point in me trying to describe them to you. My description would only make it sound bad. I could tell you, for instance, that The Road is about a father and son fighting to survive as they make their way across the ruins of a post-apocalyptic America inhabited by few remaining survivors, most of which have turned to cannibalism. That description would evoke all sorts of horror and despair in your minds, but would fail to do justice to exactly how beautiful, and even heartwarming the book actually is. Somehow, in spite of it's bleekness, it managed to uplift my soul in all the right ways. I read it twice. Then again, some people find it incredibly depressing, so maybe I have it all wrong. It wouldn't be the first time.



Anyway, there has been a long-awaited movie adaptation in the works. Normally that would make me cringe in terror at the prospect of another fine novel being slaughtered for mass consumption. It wouldn't be hard for Hollywood to capture the awfulness of the story, but it would take a rare type of filmmaker to capture the strange beauty among the bleekness. But that is why I took hope when John Hillcoat was designated to direct the film. He made his debut with The Proposition, which is an Australian spaghetti western of sorts, and one of the very best westerns I have ever seen. It's quite disgusting and beautiful at the same time. It makes my skin crawl just thinking about that movie, and yet it makes my eyes more than a little bit moist in it's finer, more tender moments.



If anyone can make this movie it would be John Hillcoat. So I have faith in that man to do reasonable justice to the book. I also have faith in Viggo Mortensen. The film was supposed to come out last November, but alas, it was pushed back for unspecified reasons. Now it is being slated for an October 2009 release, but I don't know whether I dare hope for it to ever actually come out. Maybe it will just be the first straight-to-video to get an edition of the book with the special movie cover saying, "Now a major motion picture release" (now available wherever books are sold). Supposedly the Weinsteins walked out of a screening of it, although the chosen few who saw adavanced screenings have mostly cited it as a masterpiece. I don't believe internet hype anyway, one way or the other. Now they are saying that the Weinsteins have put it in October to open in the heat of award season, and they have been slowly leaking out various, small parcels of information, publicity stills, etc.

I have taken the liberty of collecting some of the best visual drippings here:


Viggo and Kodi Smit-McPhee in The Road.


Here is an oddly humorous photo of the actors who play the "men and women in the cellar". If you have read the book you know what I'm talking about. It was posted along with several other great pictures by Jeremy Ambler who plays one of the men in the cellar. You can see those photos on www.Jeremyambler.com/theroad


Jeremy Ambler himself, in make-up of course.


Some lovely concept art made for the film can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/14146112@N08/sets/72157604169280010/

Including some before & after location shots:








This one has been out for a while. Now I suspect that maybe the real reason for the delay is because they realized that they could still make the movie uglier, as seen in the next, newer version:



And that's all we have to tide us over.

Bitter Thoughts For Earth Day

"..as sincere as a dog...when it's the food on your lips with which it's in love." - - - Fiona Apple

Today I have been trying to remember why the Earth preview pisses me off so much. My memory is often flawed, because it tends to make up a lot of stuff to fill in the blanks. So I went onto Youtube and watched it again to make sure I was remembering what I thought I was.

It starts out with James Earl Jones narrating about how our planet is the only known planet that can support life. Okay. Fine. Then it shows a lot of gorgeous shots of stuff, which is very nice. I like a good, epic nature film every now and then. Nature is not only inspiring, but often comforting after dealing with too many human beings. But then it starts to turn sour when they cue the Sigur Ros song. But I can't fault the film for using good music. But I can sense that things are about to get warm and fuzzy. Whenever you hear that particular Sigur Ros song on a preview you know something warm and fuzzy will happen imminently. (The song incidentally is about jumping in puddles and getting your feet wet, or something like that). Sure enough, after a moment, subtitles begin appearing on the screen because film trailers are made under the assumption that they have to bombard all levels of ones brain with information in case the audience is brain damaged and can't understand what's going on without subtitles.

My bitterness from this preview, it turns out, stems from their usage of one single word on the subtitle that says something about "joining three families for an amazing journey". The word 'family' here pisses me off because it eludes to all the cuteness that has ruined nature films in recent years. There are no families in nature. At least not in the sense that we use the word family. Animals can be related through their genes, and they may stick together for pure survival reasons, but animals do not love, or feel emotion in the ways that we do. Their functioning is guided not by thoughts or feelings, but by pure instinct. When I watch a nature film, I want to see real nature, not some disney cartoon about the tender love between the noble beasts of the savannah.

When humans deteriorate to behaving like animals we usually lock them up in prison, or hospitals for the criminally insane. That is because nature is a brutal thing. Animals are not like us, and so why do we want them to behave like us. Brutal as it may be, the reasons animals are special are the ways that they are not like us. For example, when an animal kills it is not for greed, or envy, or betrayal, or corruption. It is just survival. Their existence is simple. There is no such thing as evil in nature. The primal tendencies of wild, dirty animals also reveal to us what is so special about being human: love, compassion, the ability to reason and seek meaning in life, etc.

I have not seen Earth yet, and so I withhold my judgement of the film itself. But I have noted that since the release of several, widely popular films about penguins, the trend has been to reduce nature to a series of cheap human cliches, which does a disservice not only to nature, but to humanity as well. It would take me too long to explain why, so I'll let you think about it. However, I will leave with this final thought:

Cougars are dangerous creatures, and when they find themselves wandering into your neighborhood, where they might be apt to eat your small children, it is best for everyone that they be removed to a safer place. Safer for them anyway. But the real truth is that if you can not co-exist with the nature around you than it is you who is in a place where you don't belong.

P.S. If you want to see a great documentary, I recommend Encounters At the End of the World, by Werner Herzog. There are even penguins in it.

The Gnarly Old Singletrack of Wicked Truth

"I have seen a part of myself no man should ever see." - - - James T. Kirk





Back in the time when we had nothing better to do, my good friend Walt and I began a journey of biblical dimensions. We crept through the shadows of weird landscapes, and we carried with us some highly technical equipment that allowed us to try to understand things that were forgotten. We developed some bizarre fashion statements and crude alter-egos. Walt became The Witchdoktor: an enigmatic ecclesiast of the universal truths that can free your soul, or bind it, depending on your own free will. And I morphed into a sinister creature bent on the development of pure, transcendental, sensory perception. This dark being came to be known as Steven H. Falcon. We trudged barefoot on roads of broken glass, identifying ourselves as The Dukes of Despair, and perplexing the minds of the innocent who crossed our paths. It was good times.


The Witchdoktor may still be around. I’m not really sure. As for S.H.F, I lost contact with him. His eccentricity grew so completely wild and uncontrollable that even I could no longer grasp his mysterious essence. For a time we both tried to destroy each other, but slowly he fell away, back into the shadows from whence he came.


Now that time has rolled on forward, I find it nearly impossible to describe that era in a way that makes sense even to me. All that is left now are thousands of photos which offer little insight into the state of mind that gripped us in that madness, but they do tell a story of some sort, and perhaps they can stand as a warning to those who wish to veer off from the straight and narrow path of normal behavior.


The following selection of photos were all taken by Walt Sorensen. Most of them were too weird for the public, so these are a milder version of the truth, mostly a vague travelogue of the places where things happened.



Somewhere in Idaho



Somewhere in Southern Utah.



Somewhere in Taiwan



Somewhere near Parley's Canyon



Rozelle Pointe



Where the Buffalo roam.



Adventurous Roaming takes it's toll.



The Spiral Jetty



an undisclosed location



Steven H. Falcon comes close to enlightenment, just this one time.

Blog Stalking

I just thought I would ramble on a bit about the weirdness of blogging. After all, these days blogging has become the it thing to do, and I think we are still coming to terms with it, and the ways it is changing the world. Never before could so many people follow the goings on of so many other people who they have never met.

I myself am not a very prestigious blogger. I only post these random things every now and then for the sake of...well, quite frankly I'm not sure why. I also maintain a photo blog for the sake of showing my friends what sort of hijinks I have been getting myself into. That one gets a lot more views, understandably, than my random thoughts. In fact it is that photo blog that has gotten me thinking about the weirdness of blogging.

Last week I posted some photos from the festival of colors in Spanish Fork, and since then the number of views has gone up trememdously. I assume this is because I posted pictures of something that people were interested in, and they are randomly finding it through google or something. I'm not really sure. The fact is, that several new countries appeared on my map, and my counter went a little crazy for a few days. But I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that my photos are now being viewed in 14 different countries in a geographical span from Seattle, Washington to Saudi Arabia. That's right, someone in Saudi Arabia clicked on my photo blog last week. Weird. Right?

In the old days you would have to be a pretty awesome photographer to be seen in 14 different countries. Now I'm not sure it means anything at all. I am definitely not on a list with David Bailey, or William Albert Allard, or anyone like that. I'm just a guy who works a day job at UPS while continually trying to become a photographer who can actually get paid by someone outside of his own immediate family. And yet, somewhere out there, in France, or Germany, or Iceland, or even Saudi Arabia, there are people huddled in dark rooms, staring at the white light of their computer and they are seeing things like this: