On long, involved movie rants.
Feb. 4th, 2009 04:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
demiurgentSo, I finally got around to listening to the Christian Bale rantfest that's... um... 'news.' For those who haven't, essentially Bale and his costar were playing an intensely emotional scene, and the director of production -- who'd been warned to not cross onto the set and make light adjustments while rolling before -- walked into Bale's field of vision and broke his concentration. Bale went apeshit on the guy. Many examples of 'fuck' and 'amateur' were thrown around.
This is now... apparently... some kind of controversy.
I dunno, man. I've been in a lot of theater. In the middle of rehearsals -- much less when it goes up -- what you're doing becomes disproportionately important to you. I've heard probably forty explosive rants of that kind over the last twenty five years. There is, to use the theater aphorism, a reason they call it drama.
People are coming down on Bale for 'taking it out on a coworker.' Only this isn't the office. This is a creative endeavor. Actors are napalm at the best of times -- get them worked up for a highly emotional scene and you're lucky no one gets knifed. This is just how it goes. This is how it goes in penny-ante community theater productions that less than a hundred people will ever see -- are you telling me it's going to be way more mellow when you're shooting a movie that's expected to make hundreds of millions of dollars?
It's just theater. Everyone's embarrassed for about two hours and there's whispering for a day and then you move on. Being a prima donna is walking off the set and not coming back. Blowing up at a DP is news?
Oh, wait. He's a big star. That makes it news, because we can 'tsk' at his potty mouth. Fucking cultural puritanism.
This is now... apparently... some kind of controversy.
I dunno, man. I've been in a lot of theater. In the middle of rehearsals -- much less when it goes up -- what you're doing becomes disproportionately important to you. I've heard probably forty explosive rants of that kind over the last twenty five years. There is, to use the theater aphorism, a reason they call it drama.
People are coming down on Bale for 'taking it out on a coworker.' Only this isn't the office. This is a creative endeavor. Actors are napalm at the best of times -- get them worked up for a highly emotional scene and you're lucky no one gets knifed. This is just how it goes. This is how it goes in penny-ante community theater productions that less than a hundred people will ever see -- are you telling me it's going to be way more mellow when you're shooting a movie that's expected to make hundreds of millions of dollars?
It's just theater. Everyone's embarrassed for about two hours and there's whispering for a day and then you move on. Being a prima donna is walking off the set and not coming back. Blowing up at a DP is news?
Oh, wait. He's a big star. That makes it news, because we can 'tsk' at his potty mouth. Fucking cultural puritanism.
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Date: 2009-02-05 01:05 pm (UTC)I work at an ISP that also does web hosting. There's one fellow who seriously overestimates his level of skill.
The systems are designed so that if any random server fails, generally a quick reboot will fix it. Everything is redundantly-clustered to a fare-thee-well.
This fellow managed to get it into his head that because the servers are running Solaris, they should never be rebooted. Because, you know, Solaris isn't Windows.
So he spent two hours wrestling with this one server over how, because of a bug in NFS, one filesystem doesn't mount correctly. He unmounted, remounted, unmounted, remounted, and unmounted one filesystem on this box over and over. Because, you know, Solaris never needs to be rebooted.
Eventually he gave up and rebooted the system. And by golly, everything worked fine after that. Because the system was designed so that rebooting a server (which was, y'know, Server 3 of 5) would generally work out right.
So because this guy tried to be a hero instead of applying the quick'n'easy fix, a whole bunch of people got bizarre broken results for a couple of hours. Fortunately, those bizarre broken results happened during the dead of night, and would've been easily fixed by the user hitting reload. But still--he just Didn't Get It. Because of his strange attraction to Not Rebooting Servers, he caused problems for a couple of hours, where taking the easy route out would have fixed everything.
The next morning, he talked about the problems he'd had, and how rebooting the server fixed it. The knowledgeable people he worked with all said, "Yup, you should've rebooted it first."
All of us were models of calmness next to how Christian Bale reacted. But we all would've been within our rights to tear him a new asshole on that account.