Analyzing Titles

Assignment

It’s incredible just how insanely talented Kyle Cooper and Patrick Clair are. K-PAX 1. It starts with light against darkness, warm hues of golden reds. The start of something forming from that ethereal substance that transcends man. 2. Upon Kevin Spacey’s name, a distinct flash akin to that made by a photocopier and the colour palette turns distinctly to that of burnt printer paper, to that of the developing negative. A mote of dust flies across the screen with other artefacts, implying travel. 3. Eventually the burned, green-grey-brown tones give way to the softness of the initial golden red lights and, like a newborn, vague moving shapes begin to come into focus. Slowly. 4. The music evokes newfound wonder, joy, pleasantness, contentment. 5. The beam from the human perspective is seen pouring through the window into a train station where the masses of people move about. A place of departure… and arrival. 6. In the beam we end off after a slight flash, to insinuate the origins or believed origins of PROT, and how so much of consciousness, being, and contentment has to do with where we focus our attention. A small debris, dust or something, floats through the light in the train station, evoking “Pale Blue Dot,” the photograph of planet Earth taken on 14 February 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe, and you can almost hear Carl Sagan’s voice: ““Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives… The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena…” I am one of the busy ones, but here are two extra I have time for at the moment: LOST HIGHWAY 1. I wouldn’t pull as much from this title if I hadn’t read McKee’s seminal Story. Lost Highway is a story constructed by intentionally inverting or turning story structure inside-out. The road, like Campbell’s hero’s journey, can be seen as a road—structure—from beginning to end, etc. 2. But there are ways to stay on the road and shake the fuck out of you. Perspective careens to and fro along the highway juxtaposing the safety and structure of the road with the carefree sense of swerving, along with the opium-laced tongue of David Bowie in the background. By following the road but doing everything in your power to upend the viewer, can one ever truly escape it? 3. The dramatic, functional font, as if to render this an intentionally pragmatic affair, dramatized for effect but. HALT AND CATCH FIRE 1. I am in awe of this piece. We are all but brushes by which the gods paint the world. This spark, emerging from the glitch, from chaos. 2. It passes in front of Joe MacMillan, the observant one. Then via Gordon Clark, the engineer, as he ponders lost in thought, trying to capture it. It eventually hits the centre of the head and a feminine figure—both Cameron Howe and Donna Clark. 3. The correlation to the sperm entering the egg, splitting, and evolving, using the CPU, then quad core, insinuating the advancement of technology and time. Eventually giving way to the circuitboard and such. 4. The idea continues, through that tacit, un-manifest space, through the crowd of unimportant, uninspired figures among the masses, before breaking through barriers of resistance to explode into existence—a bright light of illumination. 5. The dim LED of the front of your PC. The immense power of creativity, the fleeting power of the muse and the novelty of creation, finds its way to even the most mundane of everyday trinkets and tech. 6. The music by Trentemøller is a perfect match, just pops and glitchy enough to be on theme, but ever-pushing, seeking, exploring—giving the spark a life of its own as it seeks to find a host to give it manifest form in the world we take for granted. 7. The font is Bembo, I presume because of its resemblance to Apple Garamond harking back to 1984 and the insinuations and layers of meaning you could take from there. Just a guess.