Shameless Plug: Urban Tranquility by Mark “Mungkey” Vicente

I love working in digital media, particularly working with video and photography. I’m passionate about it, and I make some sort of money with the work that I do around it. But it doesn’t really matter to me if I do get paid or not, in fact, I’ve done a lot of projects for free almost for free. I just love working in digital media, I love the creativity and the freedom (somewhat) that is allowed working in this industry, and I love most quite a few of the people that I work with. It’s just a great bunch of guys doing great things and creating great stuff.

I thought I had it pretty good until I found out what my good friend Mark “Mungkey” Vicente has been doing during his free time while working in Abu Dhabi. He sought out to buy a Canon EOS 7D and while waiting for it to get delivered he self-studied and researched his way into this masterpiece of a first project called Urban Tranquility. Watch and be amazed –

Video Montage: Urban Tranquility – Abu Dhabi, UAE (Canon EOS 7D) from mungkey on Vimeo.

To put into perspective why this is a topnotch project, this is Mungkey’s first ever video project. On a new camera. On a different system (Canon, he was a Nikonhead before.) The video quality and is amazing (saying something about Canon EOS 7D’s HD video techonology and Mungkey’s directorial and cinematographic eye), The editing is smooth and seamless, and the photographic skill and selection is perfect. We’re talking genius here. I hope someone in the industry sees this and gives him a deserving job. He is creative, passionate, and really good at what he does. I’m rooting for you, Mungkey.

After watching the video over and over again, I feel ashamed with how I’ve been so lax in nurturing my passion in visual production, at the same time I’m inspired and motivated to keep learning and improving in my craft. What worked for this type of output was passion and perseverance above all else. I am looking forward to Mungkey’s future projects. He has set a the perfect first impression.

Movie Review: AVATAR – Thank you, James Cameron

If ever you keep a list of things to do before you die, I must insist that you add one more entry –

Watch AVATAR on IMAX 3D.

And do it as specifically as the statement says. Forget the movie theater you usually frequent, ignore the hefty 400-peso price for an IMAX ticket, persist through the long lines and sold out screenings, and be ready to give up 2 hours and 42 minutes of your life.

You really cannot must not miss this movie.

Must-see in 3-D. Go. NOW.

Let me rephrase that. This is not a movie, this is an experience. And that is precisely why you are required to watch it, because you will not just be sitting back in your chair staring at moving pictures on a 50-foot screen – you will be immersing yourself in the most visually stunning movie and the most technologically-advanced filmmaking to ever grace any type of screen. It is revolutionary in that aspect; and in that aspect alone, viewing the film is mandatory.

But like all that is ordinary and mediocre in the world, take this review with a grain of salt.

The premise is ordinary, the soundtrack so-so, and the running time (162 minutes) seems draining. But these are nuances you might be willing to forgive once you come to understand what this movie has achieved in terms of pushing the envelope, and the level of patience, focus, imagination, and hard work James Cameron and his crew put into this film. Thus you might understand why I say that it must be view ONLY in 3D.

It takes that extra obligation to be able to appreciate what has been done here. The emotional stimulation one looks for in a movie (there is plenty you can choose from – environmentalism, capitalism, war, culture, love.) can only begin the moment you see the thousand-foot Hometree crashing down in extra-dimensional detail, or when you see the pain and anguish in the Navi’s expressions at that moment. These blue cat-like creatures seem less alien than we are – it is embarrassing that they can show more emotion than we can! – and we have James Cameron to thank for that. He INVENTED technology precisely for this movie (I literally cannot wait for the next video game or movie that makes use and does the same kind of justice to this technology!) to be filmed this way.

But it is not the perfect movie. How many people can hold their bladders for 162 minutes at a time? There are scenes I felt the movie could have done without (most especially the ones with people in it), and I think the antagonist could have been made more compelling and attached instead of slipping in and out of scenes and just be the prerequisite final boss standing at the movie’s climax. And I really think James Cameron needs to lighten up a bit. I am beginning to think the man does not have a sense of humor. But with his movies breaking records left and right, maybe he doesn’t need one.

As of this writing, Avatar is only $7 million away from breaking Titanic’s (another Cameron classic) all-time box-office records, and rightfully so. The world has been waiting for this kind of movie for the last decade, and who else but Cameron would go out and surpass his self-set standards. If you went out and endured the sappiest movie of all time in Titanic, take a flyer on Avatar on IMAX 3-D. It’s definitely better than a movie about a sinking boat.

And let me just add, I can’t believe I wrote this in less than a thousand words.

Daybreakers: Where The Movie Suddenly Falls Off A Cliff.

I saw the trailer for Daybreakers late last year, and along with the smattering of other interesting teasers for 2010 movies, this was a movie that I was willing to take a chance with. Solid casting (Ethan Hawke, Sam Neill, and a redneck-y Willem Dafoe) and a not-so-new plot of a world where vampires are the global population (Humans are hunted so they can spike their vampiric coffee with blood.) should make for an interesting movie.

The first few scenes actually make one sympathize with the bloodsucking, lifeless mother-effers. The movie is visually well thought out, as it drags you in and prevents you from seeing it from a fishbowl. It convinces you that this is still a familiar world, and yet you’ll notice that you’ll be so out of place – it bombards you with detail of a society that has moved on from being once human, and likes it better this way (Would you like some extra blood in your coffee, sir?). Life (or the lack of it – no one has a pulse, or a reflection) goes on.

Except, apparently, for one man. (This is, with all other movies with heroic plots, the golden standard. Somebody always doesn’t get with the program.) Edward (Ethan Hawke’s character) is simpatico to the humans, goes on a blood diet, and works to finding a substitute to human blood before humans are extinct and they are all left sucking on chicken’s necks (which they somehow left out of the story. Somebody needs to explain to me how this vampirism thing works. I might drink cow’s blood or something. Are vampires limited to human blood? I’d be a really lousy vampire. I need more information to make it in that world.)

At some point the movie starts to drag, and I realized that what kept me interested the whole time was the beautiful semi-dystopian world created in the movie.There are surprisingly few action sequences in the movie, and the ones that move the plot along are underwhelming (we’ll get to the final action sequence in another paragraph – undeservingly so.)

The movie had some characters that I felt were misused or understated. A couple of them threw me off – the vampire senator, and the girl who played Sam Neill’s daughter.I felt they could have had more significant roles (after a couple of scenes, the senator was never scene again, contributing nothing.) As for Sam’s daughter, he and Ethan had dialogue about her, setting me up with the expectation that she was going to be an important part of the plot. But when she did appear in her scenes, it was already too late into the movie that she almost felt like a prop. I felt more could have been done with her role. Plus she was the only pretty face in the movie. She did help the movie make an important transition towards the film’s climax, so she did her job.

If Willem Dafoe had just crossbowed Ethan Hawke's character right then, I wouldn't have had to suffer through the movie's ending.

The female protagonist was almost unimportant that she had to be kidnapped towards the end just to make sure that she was still in the movie until it finished. All in all a forgettable female lead. Talk about a damsel in distress – I was distressed every time she was on screen.

The film winds down into a gory mess of vampire cops biting and killing and falling on top of each other, and then just stops. You could almost here the lead character’s thoughts – “Alright, we’ve killed all the bad guys. What the f— do we do now?” It was an unsatisfying and confusing ending, almost as if they literally ran out of bad guys to kill. It was one of the most disappointing movie climaxes I had ever seen. (At least Avatar had a potential iconic line in “I see you.”)

It’s easy for me to say that I was disappointed by the movie. I felt more could have been done with such a unique and intriguing premise. The beautiful depiction of this alternate reality by the talented Spierig brothers plus a few different choices here and there could have really realize the film’s potential. Anything would have been better than Ethan Hawke and company driving off into the sunset… or falling off a cliff.

Why We Make New Year Resolutions and Fail: A Half-Assed Attempt at Psychology to Understand What’s Really Behind This Dumb-Ass Ritual.

Alright, resolutions. First off, I have to complain. I will go on a short tirade before I pump out all the data. I am not fond of resolutions, yet I make them or think about doing them every single year. I guess it’s all well and necessary to set goals for myself at the start of every year, and then reflect at the end if I got stuff done, or if I’m any different or if I’m a better person. Why do we wait till a new year comes around to make self-promises? Why can’t we make them during some boring day in August (nothing ever happens in August), or on really ordinary days while we’re wasting time sitting on the crapper? Why romanticize and attach the idea of a fresh start to a fresh set of desk calendars? Why commit when the general average of resolutions getting done is 17%?

Are we really that fond of shooting ourselves in the foot that we’d do it annually?

I just find the whole idea weirdly fascinating.

Let’s try to get to the bottom of this… if there is a bottom to this.

—

Harris Interactive (www.harrisinteractive.com) conducted a survey commissioned by Dorthy.com (www.dorthy.com) that came up with some interesting and (ho-hum) expected numbers:

• Women (74%) are more likely to make New Year’s Resolutions than men (54%) among adults who have ever made resolutions;
• Men (22%) are more likely to keep their resolutions than women (14%)
• Out of 2,256 respondents, only 1,495 (66%) have ever made a New Year’s resolution.
• Out of the 1,495 resolution-makers, only 17% always or often keep them. That’s more or less 256 changed lives. (Remains to be seen if those were changed for the better. Let’s talk again in 2011.)

Seems bleak, no? Have I talked you out of losing all that extra weight yet? Hang on, we’re not done yet. FranklinCovey Products (www.franklinplanner.com) also came up with their own survey that yielded these wonderful statistics:

Top 10 resolutions from last year (2009):

1. Get out of debt or save money
2. Lose weight
3. Develop a healthy lifestyle or healthy habit (eat better, exercise)
4. Get organized
5. Spend more time with family and friends
6. Develop a new skill or talent
7. Work less, play more
8. Other
9. Break an unhealthy habit (smoking, drinking, overeating)
10. Change employment

FranklinCovey Products’ survey further dashes your hopes – 75% of the respondents broke their resolutions in 3 months, and around one-third break them by the end of January.

Sad stuff, really.

But wait; let’s put all these ball-busting stats in perspective. The success behind pulling off these self-commitments lies not in the numbers – there is only you. Yes, you get to be a hero.

Wait – I’m only getting to the perspective part. You being responsible to your success depend on a few things: Self-control or Self-Efficacy, awareness of Comfort and Control, and understanding Choice and Commitment.

Self-Control/Self-Efficacy

I shouldn’t even be talking about this, nor am I qualified, because I have so little of it. Yet with whatever little ounce of it I have, I can still proudly say that I’ve had some sort of success with most of the resolutions I made in the last three years. I’ve basically reinvented myself in the last three years. (Yet I cannot for the life of me figure out why I still write the same way.)

The point is this – It’s how you see yourself and how much you hold yourself capable. Resolutions are goals. You can treat your resolution of cutting back on the midnight ice cream binges the same way you commit to paying off your credit card bill on the 5^th of every month. These are all just data in the brain, but the way you deal with these things is what matters – they call it cognition or some other weird word, and let’s not get into that.

But what I’d do like to get into is this – our effectiveness in accomplishing any sort of goal is determined by our commitment to a choice. It’s a choice to keep paying our credit card bill on time so that we can keep a good credit rating, or so that we can maintain our nasty buying impulses. It is also a choice to double down on an ice cream pint when you promised yourself 20 scoops ago that you’d only have one. You made the choice to stuff your face rather than lose the pounds. So that’s basically how self-efficacy contributes to your success (or in the examples above, loser-level failure.)

Dr. John M. Grohol on his blog mentions it like this –

…individuals with high self-efficacy attribute failure to insufficient effort, while individuals with low self-efficacy attribute failure to deficient ability. Higher self-efficacy generally is correlated with a greater likelihood of achieving one’s goals.

So where does all this self-efficacy bullshit show up in life, anyway? I thought you’d never ask.

Comfort and Control

We are crazy creatures of habit. Why crazy? Because we are beings who hate being bored, hate the idea of sitting 2 hours in traffic, and just hate to sit still. And yet we go to the same coffee place, eat the same bad food, and walk the same routes to work. We continue to do the same boring shit day after day after day. I’m getting bored already just talking about it.

We are all about comfort and control. (Alright, maybe not ALL about comfort and control. We’re mostly about it? 70%? 80? I don’t know. Somebody needs to come up with a survey.) We repeat our daily experiences because we want to be in control of the outcome, and we pre-empt acceptance of the outcome, good or bad. We visit our usual coffee place and drink the worst-tasting coffee there is and complain about it all day, but we go anyway because it’s the only coffee place you pass by on the way to work. At these moments, we’ve already made a choice and accepted our fate.

Yet in between these moments there are opportunities for change. They come in the form of life-altering events, or the New Year. They come in the form of epiphanies. They come in the form of odd-shaped coffee-latte swirls and potato chips. Don’t even get me started on cloud formations. You get to come up with the things that you want to do differently. They may be life-altering things, or they maybe something as simple as putting your pants on before your socks when you’ve always been a socks-before-pants kind of guy.

Choice and Commitment

How do we get things done, really? Most anything that we do is preempted by a choice. And we get them done when we commit to those choices. How do we commit? We find value in whatever it is that we are choosing to do. So lose weight because you want to get healthy, not because you’re getting too fat. Save money not because you want to pay off your debts, but because you want to be financially secure and responsible. Get more organized so you can be more efficient, not so that you can spend more hours drinking with friends. All these things will become available to you anyway as long you keep within the process.

And resolutions are a process. That is the most important part of this whole thing. I guess that’s why 75% fail at it is because they do not understand that. It is lather, rinse, repeat. You have to decide to commit to that change, and you have to form a plan around it, just like all the other routines we do in life. If you decide to quite smoking, you have to quit every day. Lather, rinse, repeat. This is then where all that self-efficacy weirdness comes into play. Let’s see how effective you are about it.

The moment you step out of that routine, the moment you let go of a little bit of that control, you are presented with an opportunity to do things differently. You make the choice. Add all this with a commitment to change and finding value in whatever it is you are doing, and I guarantee a way higher probability of success than 17%. If not, then I was wrong. I’m no psychologist, after all.

Resources:

Google.

Links to this article:

The Psychology of New Year’s Resolutions:

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2008/12/28/the-psychology-of-new-years-resolutions/

Business Wire: Dorthy.com New Year’s Resolutions Survey Findings:

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20081229005180&newsLang=en

http://eon.businesswire.com/news/eon/20081218005288/en/7-Habits/FranklinCovey/FranklinCovey-Products