Jodie Mack: A Review

Jodie Mack was as vibrant as the short films she showed, and I was loving it. Not only did she draw in the biggest crowd out of all the lecturers but she did nothing but make good on her promise of wowing us with her art work. On a more serious note I'll start out with saying that the fine arts has always been a soft spot for me being that a vast majority of the people in my family are involved with the field in someway or another. Out of the two films that she showed us I have to say that I fell in love with "The Saddest Song" at first sight, I mean even though I don't believe that people can fall in love at first sight doesn't mean that a person can't fall in love with something at first sight right? I guess she caught me off guard by making her films kind of a one woman show, sure we went into it expecting nice art work and good creative vision but on top of that she did her own vocal performance and had fantastic themes throughout her works. The vocal performance (one of my favorite parts) was adorably well tuned, it fit the overall quirky, half-baked theme of things that came across in both pieces and kind of made me feel like I was at an open mic night at some off beat yet popular in the unpopular way independent coffee shop. While Ms.Mack's work spoke on the greater themes of love I felt more touched by her initial disclosure that her films speak of her inner desire to be loved in that silly sweet way. If only there were more disclosures like that in this world, after all it gave great insight to why she would pick the silly happy feel good themes that she did, and for that I am ever grateful. We haven't had many opportunities in this class to see the ultra positive side of love with just a touch of that saccharine sweetness that we all crave so this was much needed to say the least. Ms. Mack was able to convey some more serious themes about modern relationships such as confronting strain of money issues and being single but ultimately what I thought was going to be a more depressing film turned about to be adorably sweet. Going back to the artist herself during the Q&A session after the films Ms. Mack was asked about her film making process to which she responded that the division of work was hard to outline because her pieces are constantly existing in all states of pre-production, post-production, and production. I found this to be quite profound because her pieces exist in those states and revolve around some romantic themes while love itself always exists in those forms all at once. We are either looking for the next person, being caught up on the current one, and reminiscing about the past ones making love less of a cycle and more of conglomeration of parallel states none of which are tangible but all of which exist.