A Day Without A Tanaka Did Not Go So Well

Rooting around a box of old college stuff the other day, I came across some film essays I did during my time at CalArts for the numerous cinema history/critical theory classes that I had taken. I nearly forgot my old, semi-coherent, train of thought writing style that I had implemented during that time, and laughed at my (what must have been) seriously prodigious pair of balls to turn in something like that on a regular basis to my professors.

The first essay was supposed to have been a critical analysis of the very popular German movie "Run Lola Run." I had titled it "A Treatise On the Theory Of Vertiginous Movement: Run Lola Run and the Wehrmachtian Superwoman."

In the body of the paper itself, I found the following passage: "...what we are made to do is forcibly identify with our flame-haired protagonist, as a theory of momentum rather than flesh incarnate. The theory of vertiginous movement is one that states that a film is propelled by its forward action rather than plot or sequence, wherein the linear progression of her physical movement defines the previously undefined metaphysical law of cinematic structure itself."

A sphincter says what?

And then, at the end of the second page of this incomprehensible rhetoric, I found a comment left by an intrepid TA, who may have possibly been the most brilliant critical mind I have ever, never, met.

"You ate Ayn Rand and Kierkegaard, and vomited them up on this paper. Stop taking them drugs, buddy."

Daha!

Preview RUN LOLA RUN at www.videodetective.com