Crystals in the Rough

The colors and shapes are all blending together. The symbols beginning to merge into meaninglessness. You sink deeper into the cushiony chasm, feeling hugged down to the cellular level. Intoxicated by the embrace, all the tension drains from your muscles. Neck tension slowly releases, the jaw unclenches, you feel the warmth gently passing into you. Building and building while you ride further into the rainbow road of your shrinking window. The further you go, the smaller it gets, but the more of your field of vision it takes up. The heat is now building to an uncomfortable level. Your muscles start to radiate soreness, they need to be moved but the chasm’s embrace keeps them still. The lights dance in front of you, they lure you out of your body. You gradually lose awareness of the increasing discomfort. You gradually lose awareness entirely. What day is it? Where are you? Where is your spouse? Your kids? Are they even real? You aren’t there anymore, you never were there. Or anywhere else. The further you delve into the dancing lights, leaving your body being folded into the chasm, you see that they have neither endpoint nor beginning, which means they aren’t really there either.

This is how it goes 99% of the time you start idly scrolling through your streaming accounts. You are shot out of the space time continuum, your friends and family eventually forget about you, civilizations rise and fall, stars supernova, universe implosions, Big Bang pt. 2, then you snap back into yourself. Now you’re stuck in a whole new existence watching some cookie cutter nonsense you’ve seen a million of already. You could’ve avoided this but you just could NOT stop scrolling. Passed a lot of things you’d probably love, but what if they end up sucking? And how do you know the next thing won’t be even better? Just keep swimming. For sure, the algorithm knows you inside and out and sometimes nails it for you. But scrolling is such a time suck, and an unhealthy pattern for your mind. It’ll even make your final destination less satisfying, since you’re seeing so much other stuff you’re passing up. And the human mind wants to pursue more than find. Scrolling is such an immediate form of pursuit that it’s hard to stop. I get it, not everyone has the time to put in the effort in advance to figure out what’s next. But once you come up with your own system, it’ll definitely save you some time overall while providing better results. And it isn’t that complicated, it’s simply figuring out what’s important to you with movies and defining your range for those aspects.

Personally, I’m one of those who could watch almost anything and get some kind of enjoyment out of it. Genre-wise, style-wise, length-wise, and all other -wises. When I get sucked into the scroll I can go beyond infinity in all directions. What narrows it down for me most is time. Lower middle class full-time workers with student loans to pay off really have to optimize time if financial stability is to ever be possible. Most of my time is work, travel, research, life organization, family stuff, and whatever other nonsense life throws at me. So I gotta pick my next watch carefully based on time and mood to avoid wasting the little bit of free time I have on a disappointment. This makes the first couple of decisions pretty easy: movie or series, long or short, simple or complex. My mood and energy level are the main genre and style guides for me. Once they’re established, I can go several different ways. I’ll illustrate my process with an example of a great find I would’ve never come across otherwise. This is based on starting with Vince Gilligan’s 2008-2013 series Breaking Bad to get to the Boaz Yakin 1994 movie Fresh.

SOURCES:

I often get recommendations from friends, check out lists online, look up other projects by creators of stuff I previously watched and dug, and check out reviews of stuff I find. Friend recs, lists, and reviews are subjective so your opinions might not match up with your source, but if you check out the same or similar sources consistently you’ll start to get an idea of how your taste compares to theirs. Like, you’ll always love all of what they trash, or vice versa, or some other usable taste comparison. Similarly, working through a creator’s IMDb page isn’t 100% reliable. Most often a creator will have something in their catalog that you don’t vibe with. But using this, my spouse and I were searching through actor Giancarlo Esposito’s credits because we had recently finished Breaking Bad. He owned his role in that show as Gus Fring. So brilliant with his quiet but wrathful portrayal of a drug kingpin working for a Mexican cartel in New Mexico. And we also saw him in several other, very different roles such as Buggin Out in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Frank Dawson in Bong Joon Ho's Okja. The former role is a high strung, very in-your-face young guy trying to assert his civil rights but with questionable communication skills and methods. The latter is a sneaky assistant to the owners of an international food corporation. These show a skill range that is pretty rare in the typecasting world of movies and shows. And his credit list is formidable, you could get lost scrolling in there just as easily as in your Netflix queue. Many different types of roles, but our search was narrowed by our mood at the time. This is where I get into the characteristics that helped us decide on our next watch.

ASPECTS:

Genre - This is the biggest, most obvious one. The pitfall many fall into with this one is going too general with it. For example the overarching genre sci-fi includes way too many different kinds of movies to be used alone. If you’re expecting Terminator and end up watching Star Wars Episode VI, it ain’t gonna sit right. So you gotta go into the sub genres to really use this properly. For our decision, spouse and I were in the mood for a gritty crime movie. We had recently finished Breaking Bad. This was our starting point, we were jonesing for some more Giancarlo-as-ruthless-drug-lord energy. When we came to Esposito’s role as Esteban in Boaz Yakin’s movie Fresh we knew there was potential. So we started looking into reviews of the movie to see if we found something that would hit our sweet spot.

Tone/Mood - Reviews universally pegged this movie as a well-executed gritty realistic depiction of life in a low-income African American neighborhood in the 90’s. This is the exact vibe we were looking for to ease our Breaking Bad withdrawal symptoms. It was said to be dark, brutal, and personal. So while the setting might be significantly different, the slow burn realism feel is preserved.

Mechanisms - This is what I would label for the aspects of the content that maintain the viewer’s attention and drive it forward. For both Fresh and Breaking Bad, this viewing momentum is built through a particular balance of character and plot development. The plots can be broken down into the common denominator of genius protagonist wrapped up in the drug trade trying to find a way to safety for themselves and their families. These unexpected geniuses use strategy to navigate through their worlds. The main impact of both of these is delivered through the characters’ interactions with each other and their moments alone of processing their emotions.

Pacing - Both pieces of content have plots in which extreme events happen, but everything is presented in a slow building suspense, and action is sparse but very intense. The show and movie are not shoot em ups with Hollywood blockbuster style explosions and car chases. But the restraint in showing action and then presenting it in short bursts is a very jarring experience that you can connect to on a much deeper level because of the foundation built by the investment you have in the characters.

These are just some of the aspects we panned through to find this gold. Everyone has different priorities for their entertainment. But these have been the most important for us to ensure our enjoyment. The method is to find sources, establish what you’re looking for in the spectrums of these aspects, and then look for the match ups. It was a great success in our journey from Breaking Bad to Fresh. They were similar enough stylistically to make their differences fresh and appealing. Where Walter White would use schemes mainly based on his high IQ and scientific knowledge, 12-year-old Fresh would use his strategic mind developed through his mastery of chess along with his current experience of crime to manipulate the people in his life, putting him in an advantageous position. Where Giancarlo was a steady, thorough, proper business-minded villain in Breaking Bad who maintains power using wealth and violence, he was contrasted in Fresh as a more standard hotheaded and outwardly emotional local gangster whose methods of control also included the drugs themselves. The protagonists in both movie and show went through rough transitions and communicated that getting through life involved in the drug trade will require some moral sacrifices and big risks. And they both are set in real life drug epidemics of their time, namely heroin in NY in the 90’s (Fresh), and crystal meth in New Mexico in the earlier 00’s (Breaking Bad). The movie was just similar enough to the show to satisfy that craving, and different enough to hold our interest.

We would’ve never found this movie with idle scrolling. It isn’t a super well known film and it isn’t available for streaming in any subscription website aside from Amazon, and even then you have to pay for it. This is the other benefit of using your own system, it will enable you to find great stuff that isn’t put forth by the algorithm. We would’ve never seen Samuel L. Jackson as a deadbeat dad champion of expert in speed chess mentoring his 12-year-old heroin dealer son on the mind development he would end up using. To free him and his sister from being under the thumb of local gangsters. So for the love of all, please don’t do it to yourself anymore. Your life will improve by vast immeasurable degrees. Watch your back Bezos, you won’t be at the top for too much longer. STOP THE SCROLL!!!! And Breaking Bad fans, you cannot not watch Fresh. You need this in your life badly, and not having seen this will break you.