The Town

I've been finding that I can only really be truly contemplative while watching feature movies. I have two hours to focus my attention on a narrative. The web destroys my attention span. I know that it will be destroyed in about 20 minutes, as my impulses have a ready enabler.

I used to live in Fishtown, a working class Irish town, rapidly gentrifying, an old favorite of Edgar Allen Poe. I chose it because it was cheap and relatively safe. To this day, I probably find ethnic enclaves like Fishtown more interesting, more akin to part of my self-image, how I self-construct myself.

The Town is about these places. Charles Town in Boston is basically an ethnic enclave like Fishtown. Very clean, by the way, because it is rapidly gentrifying. I would have counted as a gentrifier.

It's an excellent movie, by the way. Authentic, to the Irish Boston that produced Staind and Godsmack. Tightly woven, excellent action. Every movie, every narrative, has to start with a bang, then some character development, a quiet moment, then the big finale. This movie hews to the formula and it works.

What I end up thinking about while watching this movie is something that I keep on coming back to. It is how the faces I see in the movie could be Chinese. That is, the different village types: the fat guy, the handsome guy, the guy with the big nose, the young guy with the undeveloped features, the girl with the hoop earrings whose emotions are worn on her sleeve. I saw those types when I visited the village back in Taiwan a few summers ago. In America not quite so much, for reasons I won't get into.

Another thing I thought about was how movie directors probably think alot about camera angles. I don't really notice camera angles, or even camera work so much anymore, focusing more on the story and arrangement of sequences. I often don't bother watching the video, preferring to listen to the story, and when I do watch the video I often just notice the technical aspects of the blu-ray disc. The attention thing, again.