Spletz-O-Rama

WORK Got me a steady gig

2007-09-16T17:53:00.000-07:00

I think I may have mentioned a possible job with a PBS TV show called Biz Kid$ a year ago (or less), but it didn't go anywhere. Since then, well, it has gone somewhere.

I am now, and have been for over a month, the Production Manager for Biz Kid$. In talking with Line-Producer (and friend-of-a-friend who is now more simply a friend) Norma Straw and Executive Producer Jamie Hammond, it sounded like a job I could acclimate to pretty quickly. Which turned out to be the case.

The sad part was that I had to turn down working as Script Supervisor on an indie feature called True Adolescents by Craig Johnson, and starring Mark Duplass (who I enjoyed watching in The Puffy Chair and Hannah Takes the Stairs). And it was a good script, too!

Oh well. I've got steady work, it's production work, and it'll be going on for quite some time (which is such a relief after six years of spotty freelance work). I like the people and I think the show's going to be good, too. Like I said, it's for kids and the aim is to teach them money management skills. Most of the people behind it helped create Bill Nye, the Science Guy.

Oh! And I have a new freelance job working for The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. I need to start posting links to those articles, but there's a couple of other things I'm working on that is taking my focus. I'll do that soon.

FILM Superbad is Super…boring

2007-08-20T11:39:00.000-07:00

God bless everyone who loves the high school "quest to lose your virginity" movies. It's never really been my genre, despite the fact that I should identify with the nerd heroes of these films based on my own high school experience. But I don't. My gang didn't care about the parties where the jocks and the "popular kids" congregated because we were too busy making our own fun, while the nerds and geeks in the movies need to be recognized in the scope of the larger school environment.

That's all beside the point.

I came into Superbad hearing that it was both over-the-top and endearing, that it showed a lot of love to its nerd protagonists, and that it was maybe a little too long in the middle. I did really enjoy Judd Apatow's The 40 Year-Old Virgin (a high school movie played out with adults), and haven't yet seen Knocked Up but heard good things. Apatow's been doing a lot of press for this film, which he produced but didn't direct, and everybody says it has his stamp on it. Sounded good.

The thing I didn't expect out of Superbad was that it would be so boring.

Here's the plot: three high school nerds need to bring booze to a party where they hope to sleep with the drunken objects of their desires.

Here's the running time: Two hours!

Here's why it's boring: The characters. Namely, the main character of Seth, whose single-minded sex obsession is simply impossible to identify with. Then there's his friend Evan, who is sweet and nice and often fades into the background.

If Seth and Evan live in a world that skews close to the one we live in, their friend Fogell falls through the looking glass into a world that's as unrealistic as a Saturday Night Live skit. It's a pretty funny skit, and that's where most of the laughs come into play, but like on SNL the skit lasts way too long. The two cops who adopt Fogell and for some reason strive to gain his acceptance and have him look up to them, in the world of the other two main characters would be the worst, most corrupt cops in Los Angeles. And that's saying something. But their corruption is nothing but harmless fun.

When it comes right down to it the sweet reality of the boring best friends is diminished by the comedic cop story, while Fogell's funny storyline is diminished by the dull groundedness of the other plot which calls its corruption into question.

Whatever. It's a lowbrow movie of low ambition, and I think that because it exceeds that low ambition by becoming a harmless movie that pretends to offend it succeeds. The movie did really well on its opening weekend, and it'll play even better on video. I recommend that you wait and watch it there.

FILM The Shaky Ultimatum

2007-08-20T11:27:00.000-07:00

David Bordwell takes on The Bourne Ultimatum and its overdependence on handheld camerawork in the movie.

Dang, it's a really nice article. If you've seen the movie you know that it's chock full of shaky camera moves and "smash cuts" and propels its story along with energetic filmmaking. I enjoyed the movie, but thought the camerawork was a little much. I thought that it'll work better on the small screen of home television, and that it probably looked fine on the small screens in the editing bay where he was cutting it.

But Bordwell notes how the handheld camera and crazy cutting can cover up a lot in terms of plot and even acting. And, come to think of it, there are some plot holes that just whizzed by (like being able to waltz into the HQ of our government's super-secret black-ops security beaurocracy).

That said, I did like the movie more than Mr. Bordwell, despite all the great points he makes in his article. And thanks to Anne Thompson for pointing me in his direction from her blog.

FILM The return of Harvey Scissorhands

2007-08-20T10:55:00.000-07:00

When the Weinstein brothers announced that they were heading to Asia to pick up a new slate of movies, not to mention starting up production out east, I wrote this piece for Film.com praising the move.

Harvey Weinstein got the nickname "Harvey Scissorhands" because he would recut foreign films to make them play better in American markets. I think the nickname is a complement, though there are some people out there who think it isn't.

Ultimately, I think it's great that Harvey and Bob are getting back into the acquisitions game after years of floundering with film production (which they'll still attempt) over at Disney-owned Miramax.

FILM Meeting Marsha Hunt

2007-08-09T09:11:00.000-07:00

Here's the third in my San Francisco trilogy. This one is all about meeting the sprightly 89-year-old Marsha Hunt, who started as an actress during the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1930s. She was the actress in Eddie Muller's short film, and she's still got it!

For Film.com, I wrote this piece about her.

FILM "The Grand Inquisitor"

2007-08-04T21:35:00.000-07:00

I was down in San Francisco (actually Alameda, just outside of Oakland) working as Script Supervisor, and then as the Assistant Director, on Eddie Muller's short film. Follow the link and see what I wrote about it for Film.com.

You should know that Eddie Muller is known as the "Czar of Noir" and that the movie takes, as its starting point, some evidence about a different suspect in the Zodiac murder case and extrapolates from there. Very interesting.

FILM Abbas Kiarostami and the PFA

2007-08-04T21:26:00.000-07:00

I was just down in San Francisco, and my friend Jonathan Marlow brought me to the Pacific Film Archives to see part of the Abbas Kiarostami retrospective. I sort of forgot how much I liked his early films, back when he shot on film and before he discovered video. I think there's something about the limitations of film, particularly the temporal limitations, that made his films both philosophical and accessible instead of the more purely philosophical movies he's been making on video since he discovered that medium. Plus, he started out making movies for and about kids, and there's something completely charming about that. His early features are reminiscent of Truffaut's The 400 Blows. Really.

I wrote about my trip HERE for the website Film.com.

FILM Regional Filmmaking

2007-07-27T16:52:00.000-07:00

Once again I did not post a link in a timely fashion, but here's a link to an article I wrote about regional filmmaking and the Mumblecore movement. In it, I mention Brady Hall's June and July, Lynn Shelton's We Go Way Back, Andy MacAllister's Urban Scarecrow, and Matt Wilkins' Buffalo Bill's Defunct.

Enjoy.

Or not.

TV Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law

2007-07-16T11:08:00.000-07:00

I used to watch and love the Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" show HARVEY BIRDMAN: ATTORNEY AT LAW. He would ineptly try cases for other characters in the Hanna Barbera universe, like Shaggy and Scooby getting busted for possession of marijuana or Fred Flinstone up on charges as a Tony Soprano-like crime boss.

The new season just started... and it's a huge disappointment.

The following is from an email I just sent to my friends and fellow fans about the show.

------------------

"Speaking of things that have lost their step, I watched the first three new episodes of HARVEY BIRDMAN: ATTORNEY AT LAW and they sucked. Haven't watched last night's episode yet, but I'm not rushing to.

"In one sense they're reeling from the fact that Stephen Colbert left to do his TV show. It shouldn't have sent them reeling, because his boss was a fairly minor character in the scheme of things, but they devoted the first couple of episodes to the death of his character and who would take over the law firm. As though we cared about the law firm. Or the people who worked there.

"It used to be that the shows were all about the cases that Birdman would take, and the other characters in the Hanna Barbera universe. He didn't take one case in those first three episodes. Instead the writers think we care about the bad and poorly plotted soap opera that they're trying to craft. We don't.

"The new episodes of HARVEY BIRDMAN remind me of when SEALAB 2021 went into the toilet, and it's happening just as quickly and dramatically."

FILM Steve Buscemi's Interview

2007-07-16T08:56:00.000-07:00

At this year's SIFF, I introduced Steve Buscemi when he presented his new film Interview, which he directed and stars in, and ran the Q&A afterward. It's about a news journalist assigned to interview a starlet (Sienna Miller), and because he thinks it's beneath him he comes in completely unprepared and contemptuous. Buscemi shot it in script order, in just nine days, using three cameras, and it works. To me it didn't feel like a stage play, but because it takes place almost entirely in just one location, those who don't take to it can level that criticism.

Another reason I like the movie is that it reminds me of the worst interview I ever did when I worked at The Stranger. I won't tell you who it was. To find out, you have to go to the above link.

FILM Michael Moore's Battle Royale

2007-07-13T13:40:00.000-07:00

Michael Moore is a magnet for controversy, and that tends to be good for his movies. It keeps his name and the name of his movies in the news, and free publicity is almost always good publicity.

His latest flap was an argument with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, which I wrote about HERE. As I say in the piece, the topic of health care is important, and it's good that he's pushing it forward in an election year. No wait, next year is the true election year. Anyway, it's got all the politicians abuzz. You see, Moore is great at finding the problems in a system. Unfortunately, unlike Al Gore, he's not good at suggesting solutions. That's up to other people. Oh well. Hopefully there's somebody out there who believes our health care system can be fixed. Me? After seeing Sicko, I'm not so sure it's possible.

FILM Oliver Stone's Lost Iranian Movie

2007-07-12T18:24:00.000-07:00

When Oliver Stone made the news by trying to make a documentary about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, I wrote this piece for Film.com about his travails. You see, Iran turned down his request for access to Ahmadinejad, saying that even though Stone was critical of the Bush administration, he was still part of the Great White Satan. Instead of taking the rejection in stride, Stone fired back with an insult. It was all pretty funny. Go to the link for more of a play-by-play.

FILM Transformers

2007-07-12T17:58:00.000-07:00

As you can tell from all the links I've been posting, I've been writing for Film.com. More specifically, I was brought in to write for their "indie" section. Last week, after having seen Transformers, I wrote an entry that suggested five indie/art films that you could go see instead of the giant robot movie. What I didn't realize was that the powers that be over at Film.com were going to post my article on the main page (for a while) and in the mainstream movies link, along with being posted on the indie page. That was unexpected and cool, because it threw my writing to audiences that don't usually click the "indie" link.

As you can see from this link, many of the people who wrote in were critical of my being critical of Transformers. I tried not to be too negative about the movie, either, because the special effects truly are amazing to behold. You take for granted that the robots are giant and heavy and can cause massive destruction, and you forget that they are creations of a computer.

My criticism was that the story was unfocused. Sure, it was energetic and enthusiastic, but the military stuff seemed like it was added for no reason other than to have a couple more action set-pieces, and the romance was charming (thanks to the performances) but had little to do with the robot battle that ends the film. The commentors pointed out to me that I was looking too hard for a story, when this is really just supposed to be a big and fun action film. That's fine and dandy, but I was still often confused.

Most if not all of the people who commented on my article grew up watching Transformers. I remember them, but I was a little too old to get into the show. The story was made for the fans, with tons of references to the cartoon and the original animated film. Because I wasn't familiar, most of the in-jokes went over my head, which only added to my confusion.

But it was a relatively pleasant confusion. Like I said before, the performances were pleasant. I'm looking forward to Shia LaBouef in the new Indiana Jones movie because I'm sure he'll have more of a character to play off of, but he was charming in this film, especially when his performance (and, to an extent, the film) settled into a groove. John Turturro was also cinematically engaging with his over-the-top performance, even though it didn't really fit the tone of the rest of the movie. That didn't matter because it was fun. And the robots themselves were often goofy and charming.

So I liked the movie, but there's no way I could like it as much as the fanboys. My biggest criticism is that I wish it was about 20 or 30 minutes shorter, because I did start getting bored. But if it was shorter? I may have loved it.

TV On and Off the Lot

2007-07-12T11:41:00.000-07:00

I've been watching the Steven Spielberg/Mark Burnett reality show On the Lot, though it's been harder and harder to get myself to watched the taped episodes that I have on my TiVo. What started out as a really fascinating show (marred by too many contestants in its early stages) has become a boring show that does on television what the Internet does better: show short films and have audiences vote on them.

I wrote about the show at Film.com.

SCRIPTS Washington Screenplay Competition

2007-06-29T13:56:00.000-07:00

I was recently a judge for the Washington State Screenplay Competition. I used that experience to write a little piece for Film.com about the common mistakes that inexperienced screenwriters make. I didn't name any names or quote from any of the scripts specifically, but all of the mistakes that I mention are ones that I ran across.

SIFF Wrap-up and "Reject Fest" responses

2007-06-28T09:59:00.000-07:00

I wrote on Film.com.

I wrote a wrap-up piece about SIFF for Film.com which gives mini-reviews of a lot of the movies from the second half of the festival.

Also, my Festivals for Rejects piece stirred some controversy when Clint Berquist, founder of the Seattle True Independent Film Festival (STIFF) posted a response, which prompted me to post a response to his response and then Adam Sekular from the Northwest Film Forum to post a response to his response.

The funny thing is, I don't know if or when I would have found out about his comment if Clint himself didn't call me to make sure I didn't take it personally. That was cool of him. I didn't take it personally. The more voices the merrier, I say.

SIFF Awards and Comments

2007-06-19T12:22:00.000-07:00

I went to the awards brunch, and not just for the bacon (which was crispy and delicious). I brought my little digital tape recorder and grabbed some comments from the winning filmmakers, which I thought was a nice touch. Follow the link for a list of winners and some color commentary.

SIFF Closing Weekend

2007-06-19T12:21:00.000-07:00

I wrote this one just before the end of the festival, just before the final weekend.

SIFF Festivals by and for Rejects

2007-06-19T12:12:00.001-07:00

I've been bad about posting the links to my articles at Film.com. I'll try to make it up to you (and by you I mean me) by posting a few right now. First was the article I wrote about those little festivals that pop up around more established festivals . Slamdance started the trend, being a festival started by people rejected by Sundance, and it's a formula that has been repeated around the world, though never as successfully. Seattle has had a few of them, and now we have another, the Seattle True Independent Film Festival (STIFF), which just finished its third year.

SIFF Halfway Through

2007-06-07T16:35:00.000-07:00

The Seattle International Film Festival has hit its halfway point, and I wrote about the festival so far at Film.com. Find out the good, the bad and the ugly by clicking HERE.

SIFF Meeting Anthony Hopkins

2007-06-04T16:20:00.000-07:00

I went to see Anthony Hopkins' movie Slipstream last week because I thought I might be able to interview him. Early reviews sort of dismissed it as an experimental film wannabe, but fellow SIFF programmer Peter Lucas liked it and I suspected I would like it too. So Heidi and I went over to the SIFF Cinema to catch it.

Turns out we both liked it. Hopkins made the movie with an unbridled enthusiasm that's infectious. It's in the David Lynch postmodern mode but doesn't delve as deeply into the psyche, not that it matters, really, because it's a heckuva lot of fun... as long as you don't mind indulgent (in a good way), playful, wacky editing and a film within a film within a dream story. It also helped to have him come out before the movie and warn us that it's a strange film and that he wouldn't even try to explain what it meant.

I did end up sitting down and talking with him for nearly 45 minutes. What a nice guy. Seems like he'd be fun to hang around with.

Anyway, I wrote a piece for Film.com and you can find it HERE. Oh, and a nice addition to my piece is the fact that the Film.com people interviewed Hopkins, his lovely wife Stella Arroyave (who produced and acted in the film), as well as actors Christian Slater and Lisa Pepper when they were all at Sundance, and there's a link to that at the end of the piece.

CELEB The Meaning of Life

2007-06-04T08:46:00.000-07:00

Got this little tidbit from the World Entertainment News Network, which I believe is the gossip site that the IMDb links to. It got me thinking about how sometimes I wonder when I'll discover my own purpose in life, and maybe, just maybe, as it is with Paula Abdul, it won't be by creating new work but by cheering on other people who are creating new work.

Here's the story:

"Pop star Paula Abdul is so grateful for her seat on the American Idol judging panel - because she has finally found her purpose in life. The singer experienced huge chart success in the late 1980s and earlier 1990s, but believes her current stint as a judge on the hit talent show is what she was destined for.

"She tells U.S. magazine OK!, 'I knew since I was a little girl that I had this profound way of touching people. My purpose is bringing out everybody's best and being that cheerleader to other people's success. Being a judge on American Idol overshadows being a Grammy Award winner and selling millions of records.'"

CELEB The Big House

2007-06-04T08:19:00.000-07:00

I don't know why I like this sentence so much...

"She was booked into the jail at 11:38 p.m., according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's Web site, after days of partying and just hours after attending the MTV Movie Awards."

And yes, I do feel a little guilty following this celeb story, but just a little. My favorite bits of her press release are:

"'During the past few weeks I have had a lot of time to think and have come to realize I made some mistakes,' she said in a statement released by her lawyer. 'This is an important point in my life and I need to take responsibility for my actions. In the future, I plan on taking more of an active role in the decisions I make.'"

I can't tell if it's youth or money or "celebrity" that has allowed her to take such a passive role in the decisions she has made so far.

SIFF Opening Weekend

2007-05-30T14:49:00.000-07:00

I'm covering the Seattle International Film Festival for Film.com, and you can find my write-up of OPENING WEEKEND here.

Film.com is also showing some of SIFF's short films, which is really cool, and you can find them HERE.

FILM Lars von Trier is depressed

2007-05-24T14:58:00.000-07:00

Last week we learned that Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, co-creator of the whole Dogme movement, has been hospitalized for depression. He's now saying that he may not go back to directing movies, not in the near future. Because he's been such a master at using the publicity machine for his own benefit, some people are wondering if this is yet another stunt.

When I first learned about it, I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. Upon further reflection, I started to wonder...

Read THIS POST I wrote for the website Film.com and draw your own conclusions, why don't you?

FILMMAKING Improving Indie Scripts

2007-05-22T14:44:00.000-07:00

Another one of my rantings has posted to film.com. This one is about how screenplay readings are good for the whole film community. The more feedback that occurs before the script goes into production the better! That's pretty much what I say HERE.

FILM Waitress

2007-05-16T09:29:00.000-07:00

Rating: ***
Recommended Viewing: Cinema or DVD

So many American indies fall back on the clichés of romantic obsession and love being the means and sole goal of any lead character. As an actress and as a director, Adrienne Shelly has indulged in that, often to good but not always to great effect. I came into Waitress with the expectations of that kind of film, and boy, was I pleasantly surprised that it wasn't.

I think what surprised me most was that the naïve and fun-loving filmmaking style was balanced by a mature, even brokenhearted storyline. In Waitress, love is not something that will save the day. Instead, love is a flash in the pan that will at best dissolve quickly and at worst lead to a drawn-out life of purgatory or pain.

Keri Russell, in a revelatory performance, plays Jenna, the lead waitress at a semi-rural Southern pie shop. She has a gift when it comes to baking pies, with an ability to come up with recipes based on her mood or on the pie’s desired effect, such as the cinnamon spice custard “Kick in the Pants Pie.” She’s also trapped in a marriage with a needy and abusive husband, inspiring the “I Hate My Husband Pie.” As the movie opens, she’s inspired to make “I Don’t Want Earl’s Baby Pie,” but her desire to keep the baby effectively kills her motivation to run away, which of course leads to the “Pregnant Miserable Self-Pitying Loser Pie.”

Yes, the pie names are cutesy, but the emotions running under them are not. And she is not the only one trapped in an unhappy relationship. In fact, everyone in this town is unlucky in love. Her fellow waitress Becky (Cheryl Hines) has an invalid husband and an eye for an adulterous relationship with a married man. Her other coworker Dawn (Adrienne Shelly) is unhappily single who is then stalked by a man she rejected from a personals date, but because of his persistence she settles for him. Jenna herself looks for happiness and affection through the attention of her doctor, who is also married. In this town, no relationship is a good relationship.

Against this backdrop, Shelly has crafted a story of growing self-awareness and hope. Without this dark background, the movie would have been saccharine enough to send you into diabetic shock. Without the levity and some of the indie film quirkiness, it would have been too depressing to be deemed “entertainment.”

As it stands, Waitress strikes a wonderful balance of bitter and sweet, of darkness and light. It earns its tears by the end, even without the knowledge of the unsavory murder of the director, Ms. Shelly, late last year.

FILM Archiving the Future

2007-05-15T11:40:00.000-07:00

Film.com just posted another one of my rantings. This time it's about how old industrial and educational films are rarely archived, about found footage films, but mostly it's about going to see 35 year old, 16mm prints of Future Shock and In Search of Ancient Astronauts over at the Northwest Film Forum last week as part of their "Search and Rescue" series.

FILM The Tribeca Price Hike

2007-05-11T17:11:00.000-07:00

The good thing about writing for Film.com is that it forces me to post a couple of times per week, and usually it's something I can link back to here. My latest is about the price hike at the Tibeca Film Festival, which everyone was talking about before the festival started as some sort of thing that will chip at the sanctity of film festivals.

Afterwards? Not a peep. Not on that subject. Not really. So I wrote this article about that phenomenon.

It could very well be that they haven't crunched the numbers for the festival yet. Somehow I doubt that, but it's possible. There's also a chance that maybe they lost a little more than $1 million this year and don't want to admit it yet, but I have nothing to base that on.

As the festival wrapped up, all anyone could do was write about their favorite movies. That's a good thing, of course. I'm just wondering when we'll hear the resolution to "The Case of the Jacked Up Ticket Prices."

FILM The new Zoo review

2007-05-04T14:07:00.000-07:00

If, somehow, you didn't hear about the movie Zoo after it polarized audiences and critics at the Sundance Film Festival, then check out my look at the movie HERE at Film.com.

FILMMAKING Support Your Local Filmmaker

2007-05-02T08:05:00.000-07:00

Another article I wrote got posted on Film.com. This one is inspired by the upcoming auction for the Northwest Film Forum, and because I'm writing for a national publication, er, website, I focused on auction items of a national interest rather than the local ones. All of them are of interest to filmmakers (though a couple can be transmorgrified into being for and about writers).

Anyway, check out Support Your Local Filmmaker.

FILM Some Thoughts on Film Festivals

2007-04-26T09:54:00.000-07:00

I've never been to the Tribeca Film Festival, but that may happen one day. It's new and ambitious and has a lot of star power and money behind it. Especially money. According to the Hollywood Reporter, this year's budget should top off at around $13 million. And that includes an estimated budget deficit of $1 million. Of course, they need to spend that much if they want to catapult themselves into the realm of important international film festivals. And it may just be working, too.

My latest article for Film.com talks a little about this, but even more about the battle for premieres that is raging in the festival world. It's called Too Many Festivals and you should take a look at it.

Oh, and last week I wrote a preview of the Cannes Film Festival which you can get to if you follow that link.

I think I would blog more if I didn't end up thinking too hard about each post. I gotta try and find a way to do that. This post seems like a good start, no?

FILM Being a SIFF Programmer

2007-04-18T15:27:00.000-07:00

Another one of my articles for Film.com went live today. It's sort of a behind-the-scenes look at being a programmer for the Seattle International Film Festival. You can link to is here.

FILM The Grindhouse Split!

2007-04-18T15:17:00.000-07:00

This is old news by now, but I had to weigh in anyway. Harvey Weinstein is raising a big stink saying that he’s thinking about splitting Grindhouse into two movies and releasing them both, but without the “missing reels” gag. Mr. Weinstein is blaming audiences for not understanding the concept of the double feature. Allegedly some people left after Rodriguez’s feature, and Mr. Weinstein believes they didn’t know about the second feature, though I think walking out may have been a more conscious decision and the “intermission” was the least disruptive place to go.

Well, The Weinstein Company was planning on releasing the two movies as separate entities in Europe, so they probably already have the prints ready. The real question is, Do they want to spend the money on a new ad campaign to re-release the movies, appealing to the same audience with the promise of new footage and the need to buy two tickets instead of one. It’s a choice that is doomed to failure. It’s doubtful that they’d attract many new viewers to the mini-franchise, and it’s doubtful they’d make the new ad budget back in ticket sales.

WHAT WOULD ROGER CORMAN DO?

Because the two features are more drive-in movies than sleazy grindhouse fare, I’m left wondering what indie film legend Roger Corman would do. How would he have protected the investment and sold the movie and the split better? The simple answer is: He wouldn’t have gotten into this mess in the first place!

This is pure speculation, of course, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. Roger Corman would have looked at the projected returns of the movie(s) and adjusted the budget accordingly. With opening weekend grosses predicted to be $22 million or so (it came in at half that), Corman would have kept the budget for both films to be between $20-$25 million (probably much, much less). He would have been able to keep the double feature running time to the initial estimate of 2 ½ hours, despite diva directors, and even if he had to jump into the editing room himself.

Finally, in regards to the split, the drive-in circuit had a long tradition of renaming movies to trick people into either seeing them again, or to bring in new audiences. In the old days they would add shots of helicopters exploding to trailers of films that weren't working (footage which they would then feel obligated to cut into the movies).

In this regard, splitting the movie into two and re-releasing them under separate titles is right up the Roger Corman alley. But this is a different time where nobody would be surprised or tricked. Because of the Internet hype machine, everybody would know what they're in for. Consequently, it won’t work.

The Weinstein Company would be better off releasing the two movies on video instead of theatrically, which it sounds like they’re going to do anyway.

FILM Article the Second

2007-04-16T11:03:00.000-07:00

I should have posted the link to my second article at Film.com. You can find it here.

The article grew out of a couple of reports on the indie film scene. It’s kind of a behind-the-scenes piece, as you will read if you click on the article link.

I think my next one will be about being a programmer at SIFF. I’m back to work on that one right now.

WRITING Film vs. Video Games

2007-04-16T10:39:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday, Brian McDonald and I hosted another Screenwriters Salon for the Seattle International Film Festival. This one was called Writing the Video Game.

Here in Seattle we are right across Lake Washington from Microsoft (home of the Xbox) and Nintendo’s HQ. Consequently, we tend to hear about their successes, failures and needs. The mantra for video games right now is that they are in desperate need of good writers. There are too many games that go out where the dialog stinks and the information that is doled out between battles is incomprehensible. Or so they say.

It’s funny. They say the same thing about Hollywood movies. “We need better writers,” they say, usually followed by something like, “quality will win out,” which is their blanket way of saying they have no idea where quality writing come from so everybody should give it a shot. (They know how we all believe we write quality scripts; it’s other people who write crap!)

So video game producers have begun to hire screenwriters to work on their games. That’s how our panelist Matthew Obst got involved. He was teaching a screenwriting class at the Northwest Film Forum when a video game company contacted him. He applied for and got the job. Of course, it helped that he has been playing video games all his life and keeps up with current trends.

Just so you know, our other panelist was Mark Terrano, Founder and Design Director of Hidden Path Entertainment , who had also worked for Xbox and on the game Age of Empires. He gave a fun and informational history of video games and video game genres.

The biggest difference between writing for film and writing for games is the fact that in a screenplay you are responsible for plot twists and describing scenes, while when you write for a game you are responsible for dialog and every piece of text that appears on-screen, like billboards and building names. It’s better to think of a writer on video games as a Script Doctor, a person hired to improve the dialog and punch up any text.

The other big question was: How’s the market for video game writing? As it turns out, not good. Or rather, it tough. Just like Hollywood, even though they say they need more and better writers it’s incredibly hard to break into writing for video games. You need to be well-versed in game trends, you may need to work for free (as an intern) to meet the right people, or you need to know somebody.

Then again, because screenwriters are used to facing impossible odds like these, it sounds like a match made in heaven.

FILM New Gig

2007-04-07T17:59:00.000-07:00

So I just got a gig writing for the Seattle-based website Film.com. Back in the mid-'90s when the site first launched it would host different writers giving multiple points of view for the same movie. I was the film editor for The Stranger and I helped them out by giving them some of our reviews (The Stranger didn't have an online presence back then). RealNetworks bought the site and it ran for a while before shutting down. But RealNetworks still owned the name, which is a valuable bit of Internet real estate, no?

Last year the Film.com site relaunched, this time in more of a "blog" format. More recently, they opened up an "indie" tab, and they just tapped me to write about indie film. My first entry can be found here.

What the heck. Check it out. I'm planning on posting there a couple times a week or so.

FILM Blades of Glory

2007-03-30T13:12:00.000-07:00

It took me a long time to warm up to Will Ferrell, though I still can’t bear to watch reruns of that damn cheerleader sketch on Saturday Night Live and I haven’t yet seen Talledega Nights, but I must admit that I really enjoyed Blades of Glory. Ferrell is funny in it as the hyper-macho figure skater who is blissfully unaware that figure skating is the most feminine of the sports. The fact that he teams up with the most feminine of the male figure skaters (Napoleon Dynamite’s Jon Heder) is inevitable.

There are three reasons why this movie works so well.

1. Craig
2. T.
3. Nelson

As the supporting “coach” character, Craig T. Nelson is given the difficult task of selling the premise. Why would he encourage the return of two egomaniacal rivals fallen on hard times, much less coach them? The answer happens in a pivotal scene where he’s watching TV and sees a news report that has footage of the two skaters fighting backstage at a children’s skate show. He watches the fight, he pauses his TiVo, he rewinds, he watches, he rewinds, he pauses again. Though it’s never explained in dialog, we see exactly what he sees: during the fight, the two naturally perform lifts and throws that will translate perfectly onto the ice.

Nelson inhabits his coach character with the intensity of a mad scientist. It’s as though he doesn’t realize he’s a supporting character, not that it would matter to him anyway. I would totally watch a spin-off project with him; maybe not a feature film, but certainly a half-hour profile of the character for Comedy Central.

The rest of the movie (the stuff without Craig T. Nelson) also works. The humor grows organically out of the characters instead of through pre-imagined situations that they had to shoehorn the characters into. Heder’s Jimmy MacElroy has the benefit of a backstory (he was adopted by a man who raises Olympic medalists), and even Ferrell’s macho, womanizing, drunken, innately talented Chazz Michael Michaels has more depth than you would expect. And the pacing never slows, which smooths over some of the bits that don’t quite work like a zamboni over center ice.

FILM Spy in the House of Optimus Prime

2007-03-24T10:00:00.000-07:00

I'm still friends with most of the publicists in Seattle, which gets me into screenings and sometimes a little bit more. Sometimes swag will make its way down to me. The latest piece is a t-shirt from the new Transformers movie. I never watched the Transformers when I was younger (I think I'm just a year or two out of that age range) and I never saw the original animated movie (famous for being the final roles of both Orson Welles and Scatman Crothers; also for using the voices of Eric Idle, Judd Nelson, Leonard Nimoy, Casey Kasem and Robert Stack).

Anyway, this new Transformers t-shirt has a symbol for the Autobots (the good guys) on front, and the symbols for Autobots vs. Decepticons on the back. Nowhere does it actually say "Transformers."

I like this t-shirt, and have worn it around town several times. Every time I wear it somebody, usually an adult male in his 20s or 30s, tells me something about how they used to love the Transformers, or how they're looking forward to the new movie. Usually they'll drop references to characters that I know nothing about. They see me as a fellow member of this cult, someone who shares in their nostalgia for a TV show from the ’80s where trucks turned into fighting robots.

But I'm not, and I have to admit it makes me feel like a bit of an imposter. That won't stop me wearing the shirt, though. I like the abstract design of it, and the fact that it's not your typical movie-hawking t-shirt. I like the fact that it is written in another language, one that only fans of the show can read. I like the fact that it exposes this normally quiet Transformers cult. And I'll no doubt keep wearing it long after the summer release of the film when it, once again, turns into a small cult item speaking a secret language.

FILMMAKING - Perfect Sport - ... and That's a Wrap!

2007-03-20T16:19:00.000-07:00

Funny how working 12 to 16 hours a day, six days a week, can get in the way of the habit of blogging. We wrapped Perfect Sport more than two weeks ago and I’m just now writing my wrap-up of the film. But I need to get this out of my system before I can move on to more current things, so here goes.

ANTHONY O’BRIEN

I remember the first day on set. I hadn’t met the director yet, and we were setting up the first shot. The lead actor was giving a lot of input. I mean, a lot. I was wondering when the director would step in and put that actor in his place! And then I found out that, yes, the lead actor was Anthony “Tony” O’Brien, the writer, star and the director of the film. So that was why he was giving so much input and people were listening.

Tony is an impressive figure. At age 22, he has already starred in and directed his own feature film. It’s enough to make you hate the guy. And that’s jealousy speaking more than anything else. He claims he’s going to edit the film himself, also, but I hope he finds someone to do that and guides the choices, because it’ll be good to have someone piece the stuff together with an objective eye and without memories of what the shots were intended to be.

FRINGES OF FAME

It wasn’t until well into the shoot that I found out that our lead actress Jessica Rose, was famous. You may be asking why it took me so long. Well, that’s because I had heard about the whole lonelygirl15 phenomenon without ever investigating. It was one of the first “video blogs” to make it big, and then got even more famous when it was discovered that it was scripted. To learn more, just click on the link.

But that’s not all.

Another of the female characters is Fallon, the slutty younger sister of the lead character’s best friend. During the party scene, I remember Tony encouraging her to dance even more seductively for the crowd of rowdy extras, and then turning around at the monitor and saying things like “Harvey’s going to kill me.” Or maybe that happened during the scene where Fallon seduces Tony’s character and gives him a blow job in the bathroom.

Turns out Fallon was being played by Stella Keitel, the daughter of Lorraine Bracco and Harvey Keitel. Rumor had it both Harvey and Lorraine were talking (seperately) about visiting the set, but neither one did. And I don't think Harvey would have killed Tony for the stuff we shot. Then again, there's still time.

The other “name” was working behind the scenes. One of the producers on the project was a young man named Zach Mann who, as it turns out, was a cast member on The Real World: Key West.

Here’s the kicker about this whole “fringes of fame” bit that I’m writing, which was emphasized by the Perfect Sport sound mixer Steve Jones when he stopped by the coffee shop where I am writing this to drop off my birthday present: We are getting old. If we were younger and more tuned into the whole MySpace and Internet worlds, we probably would recognize all of the above names.

And really, the true audience for this high school wrestling movie are people who will recognize Jessica Rose by sight, and know who Zach Mann is from watching MTV. So there.

FILMMAKING - Perfect Sport - Welcome to Set

2007-02-15T16:52:00.000-08:00

Having arrived back in Seattle from Rotterdam on a Sunday night, I had less than 36 hours to get over my jet lag and finish prepping my script breakdown before jumping on a ferry to Vashon Island and heading straight to set for an indie feature that I was to be the Script Supervisor on.

The project is called Perfect Sport, and it's a high school wrestling movie. Though there are elements of comedy, including the requisite high school party, the movie is a drama that ends with a burst of violence. The plot: When his single mom goes off to the Iraq war, high school senior Lee is left to take care of his younger sister. A star of the high school wrestling team, he finds a father figure in Joe, a former wrestler brought on as assistant coach who has a dark link to steroids. Needless to say, things spiral downhill, and the discovery that his sister has been raped drives the movie to its final confrontation.

Graduate of the New York Film Academy (the one in Burbank, California), Anthony O'Brien co-wrote, stars in and is directing the movie. He tells me he's going to edit it, too, and I'm sure he did his fair share of the early producing responsibilities. Anyway, he went to high school on Vashon, where he was on the wrestling team, but now lives in LA. He says he is looking forward to moving back to the smog-free beauty of the Pacific Northwest.

Most of the key crew members come from LA, including the Director of Photography, the gaffer (the DP's right-hand man), two camera operators, the 1st Assistant Director, the electric department, and I think a couple more. The rest of the crew is filled out with locals (the grips, me, the sound guys, some camera department folks) and a few people from Utah (I'm still a little confused by that connection, but they're good people nevertheless).

It's always interesting to see how the LA and local crews will mix. Or rather how quickly they'll mix, because all crews become family by necessity and close proximity. In this case it was pretty quick, and I think the grip department in specific (Bruce, Garrett and Patrick) impressed them right away.

In my own little world, because I am a self-taught Script Supervisor, I worry that I'm missing basic elements of my job, that my forms are improper, that I'm doing it wrong compared to the LA Script Supervisors out there. After a couple of days those fears pass because, when it comes down to the job itself, I'm pretty darn good at it.

IFFR - Wrap Up

2007-02-11T16:58:00.000-08:00

I left Rotterdam last week Saturday, stayed a night in Brussels on Saturday night so that I could take my bright and early Sunday morning flight out of Brussels on Sunday. I got back to Seattle on Sunday night (after a 6 hour layover in New York where I went to visit my buddy Phil Campbell, who I will certainly write more about later because the book he wrote while in Seattle just got optioned to be made into a movie). Monday I spent doing laundry and getting ready to jump on a ferry bright and early the next morning so I could head to Vashon Island to work on an indie film called Perfect Sport. Or maybe it's The Perfect Sport. I gotta check on that. It's a high school wrestling movie, and it's part of my busy, busy schedule.

IFFR - THE PEOPLE

I wanted to say a few things about Rotterdam before putting it behind me. First, I had a great time. The staff was friendly and helpful (I had a lot of questions early on), and met some fun filmmakers. First I want to give a shout-out to Blue and Laura Kraning. Blue made a doc about the fans who entered a contest for cannon owners who wanted to help blast Hunter S. Thompson's ashes at his funeral/wake. Laura made an observational doc about the people along the rainiest Rose Bowl parade route ever. Then we went out drinking a couple of nights in a row (after my requisite four movies/day, of course). They are good people.

I also met Nina Davenport, who won the Dutch film critics award for her movie Operation Filmmaker. After actor/director Liev Schreiber sees an MTV report about an Iraqi kid who just wants to make movies but his film school got bombed, he decides to give him a Production Assistant job on his feature film Everything Is Illuminated. Davenport was hired for a week to shoot the happy scene, but she got sucked into the bigger picture. As it turns out, the movie becomes more about adolescence and entitlement, as the young man takes every opportunity for granted and uses favors from his new friends to get visa extensions and more.

Another guy whose company I enjoyed was Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra, whose movie Honor de cavalleria explores the pages between the grand adventures of Don Quixote, when he and Sancho Panza are traveling from one spot to another or just waiting to go to bed. It's a peaceful and painterly kind of movie (which is another way to say that this is not an action film), and it turns out to be more about Sancho than Quixote, which is nice. Serra himself is not a bashful man, happily saying his movie is the best Spanish film of the last 25 years. He is a funny and confident man, and I know he believes every one of his own exaggerations.

Then there were the short filmmakers I met, including director David Garrett and producer Kaer Vanice for the short film Warlord, which is a charming, post-apocalyptic look back at a boy rebelling against his mother's attempts to kill him with fast food and consumer culture, and how he formed an army of neighborhood children for the sake of survival. Fun and over the top.

Oh, and another shout-out to Henk and Emile, who ran the cell phone short film challenge. Also to Robert and Jessica, who made the short film Forgetting Betty, and who were always pleasant company at every festival event I saw them at.

FESTIVAL TIPS

Before I close the book on this year's Rotterdam festival, I want to throw out a couple of tips to other people who may be festival hopping in the near future, be they filmmakers or film programmers or film critics or just plain film lovers on a budget. Actually, I'VE ONLY GOT ONE TIP: If you can find a hotel that includes breakfast, then book that room because you can always make little sandwiches to take with you for lunch. That way you save time and money! Of course, I didn't see the little sign in my hotel's breakfast nook that said "Do not take food out of the breakfast nook" until the last day, so I guess they were on to the likes of me, but I was sneaky every time anyway. Be sneaky and have fun.

Finally, I'll leave you with the titles of a few of my favorites from the 31 films I saw in a little more than a week at Rotterdam: Rescue Dawn, Zidane-un portrait du 21e siècle, Le prestige de la Mort, One Way Boogie Woogie/27 Years Later, and I also liked the Guy Maddin-stylings of La antena.

IFFR – Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

2007-02-03T04:07:00.000-08:00

With smoking bans taking over some of the biggest cities in the world, not to mention good ole Seattle, it was strange to come to a city where people light up cigarettes everywhere. Even though the smoking bans are a product of the new millennium, of the aughts (is that the right word? No wonder nobody calls this decade anything), I’ve gotten used to coming home from bars without the smoke infusion in my clothing.

Then I got to Rotterdam and I remembered what it used to be like in Chicago, in Seattle, in bars across the world. Here everybody smokes in bars, in restaurants, in cinema lobbies, everywhere. Combine that with the post-war architecture, a city whose bombed out sections were built back quickly, and the whole place feels like a time-warp back to the ’50s where people smoked in their homes and offices and cinemas and anywhere.

The bright side to this freedom of self-destruction is the fact that they’ve got bars everywhere, too, and by that I mean that every theater and every multiplex has a bar tucked safely inside it. If the movie was bad, if you’re between films, if you need to prepare yourself for something you think will be terrible or difficult or devastating, you can get yourself a drink. Kinda crazy.

IFFR – Short Film Awards

2007-01-31T05:06:00.000-08:00

The results came in on Monday night about the short film awards. Before I get to that, I want to mention how Henk, one of the two students who were running the contest by handing out phones (but not one of the judges), told me there was one other entry that I needed to see. He brought me back, behind the scenes, where the computer server was and cued up a short.

It was called “Whatever Makes You Happy.” And I’m the star of it.

Apparently, when Adam, his friend Andy and I were at de Doelen finishing up our cell phone movies by adding titles and adding music, there was a guy at our table who was also entering the contest unbeknownst to us. He had turned his camera phone on me, catching me laughing and being amused with what was happening on my phone. The guy stopped filming when he thought we caught him doing it.

I’m happy to be in the movie, but I take issue with the title. It seems a little ironic, a little distant, like it’s scoffing at somebody who is having a good time. I’m also a little surprised at how big my beard has gotten. My face is silhouetted in profile against a window and POW! Look at that beard!

At that time, as Adam was adding music (the phones have stock music that can loop under the movie you make, which is cool) he also needed to add titles. His titles weren’t snappy enough, so for his movie that pans along mannequin heads in a store window, with the music from Psycho playing underneath, I suggested something that became “Dressed to de Palma,” which plays off of De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and his love of/appropriation of Hitchcock. Adam did another one with his friend Andy sort of walking and spinning on those metal planks with the Pathé theater in the background. The movie got good when he added silent film music, but he still needed a title. I suggested “Pathé Ballet.” I forget what his third one was called off the top of my head.

Anyway, I’m at the awards. I had eaten dinner with Adam earlier and he said he would meet me there after he went to a screening of something or other. I was hanging with friends of Henk and Emile, other students, and Henk kept asking me if I thought I would win. To be honest, the day before I did believe I would win, but then I got past that because thinking that way leads to madness.

Oh, then Henk told me that he got into a bit of trouble because apparently Adam and I were not supposed to be able to enter the contest. It was only for directors who came to the festival, and not for industry. This became an issue because the two best movies, according to the judges, were not made by directors visiting the festival.

AND THE WINNER IS…

So the awards ceremony starts. It’s a ceremony for the short films in competition at the festival, but they start with the One Take Challenge winners. There’s two categories, a student category and a directors category. But we don't care about the student category because we don't know anybody there.

And the winner of 500 Euros and a brand new phone turned out to be… Adam Sekuler! Which is awesome. If it wasn’t going to be me, I’m glad it was him. After all, I wouldn’t have even joined the competition without him. And the movie he won for? None other than “Pathé Ballet.” I do believe that the title helped push it over the edge and into the winner’s circle, but that’s because it works well with the content and the music. Taken separately, that’s not a winning movie. Together, that makes Adam 500 Euros richer and the recipient of a brand new, James Bond edition of a Sony Ericsson phone.

But Adam wasn’t there. Part of me wanted to pretend to be him while accepting the award, but that would have been a hollow victory. So I went on stage to accept for him and said he was at a movie. And for Seattle! Adam, if you’re reading this, come get your phone. As for the money, they were smart enough not to give it to me to give to you.

Oh, and for those who want to know the winners of the official Tiger Awards for short films, they went to Hinterland, The Flag and Video Game. The judges said it was very contentious, and they gave out a couple of honorary mentions. The judges said they argued quite a bit, and I can't tell if they gave out three awards because they couldn't agree on one, because it looks like they did the same thing last year. Maybe they always give out three awards. Actually, looking at their official site, it looks like maybe they do present three every year. That's nice for the judges, especially when they disagree.

IFFR Dutch Films

2007-01-31T05:03:00.000-08:00

This year Rotterdam had massive difficulties with their catalog. The festival opened on Wednesday and the catalog wasn’t ready. They did have a handy little guide that has grids of when and where all the screenings are, including press and industry screenings, which also contains two- to three-sentence descriptions of the movies. But they didn’t have the big book with the in-depth descriptions. Thursday was the first full day of the festival, and they were saying they hoped to get the book out by Friday. Well, they finally got the catalog out on Saturday, but by the time I showed up to get mine they told me they had run out, and could I come back on Monday. So I finally got my catalog halfway through my stay at the festival.

That’s not good. Not to mention the catalog is incomplete.

A piece of paper in each catalog says this: “Due to technical problems there has been a delay in the delivery of our catalogue. It also appeared that some titles were not included, which are listed below. Full information of these titles has already been published on www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com.” Then it lists the titles that aren’t there.

What it doesn’t list are the Dutch movies that are playing in the festival. After each title there is a two-letter code that says what section of the festival each title is in, like TG = Tiger, and KA = Maestros: Kings & Aces. That sort of thing. Well, there’s one symbol that’s not explained anywhere, and that is DT. I must assume that means “Dutch” because they are Dutch films. But that’s nowhere to be found in the little catalog or the big. The little catalog has the two- to three-sentence descriptions of these films, but the big catalog omits them entirely.

Are they ashamed of their own cinema? They shouldn’t be. I saw one comedy called Waiter that I liked quite a bit. Apparently it’s already been in the theaters in the Netherlands. It must not have gotten international distribution, and that’s a shame because it was very amusing.

I think I’ve been here a week already. The festival haze is starting to kick in. I’ve been averaging almost four movies a day, I’ve seen 24 movies so far, and I think I have 2 and a half days of viewing left. I’ve liked some movies quite a bit, disliked a few, thought a bunch were “not bad.” Par for the festival course, eh?

IFFR Festival - Contest

2007-01-29T06:36:00.000-08:00

My short film has been posted onto the contest website.

You can find it HERE. Scroll to the bottom and click on "Free Phones!" That one's mine. But we were allowed to make more than one. I've got another one in there called "Tribute to Christopher Doyle."

I saw my "Free Phones!" short play on a monitor at one of the venues. I've now had a movie play in Rotterdam. Adam Sekuler's short "Dressed to de Palma" played on the monitor, too. You can find that on-line also.

So you've got my two titles, so here are the titles to Adam's other movies (be sure to have the sound on, because his movies work better with the soundtracks he added):
"Pathe Ballet"
"Sky Turns"

So that's how we've been spending some of our spare time.

IFFR Festival Day 3

2007-01-29T06:33:00.000-08:00

Frustrating start to the day. I had been using my cell phone as my alarm clock because my room doesn't have one and I didn't want to set a wake-up call. That's been working great up until now. Here's what I wanted to get up for: A boat cruise with Industry and short filmmakers. We were to meet at the port-of-call at 10am, and the port-of-call is right by my hotel. I went to sleep with my phone on one bar of battery (out of three), and during the night it died. I woke up at 10:30. It put me in a foul mood for a while, but then I shook it off and ended up watching four movies. But it was a late start, and a frustrating one.

IFFR Festival Day 2 – The Contest

2007-01-28T06:58:00.000-08:00

On the second full day, I walked out of a film (I lasted an hour, and I’m not sure how, as it was a low-tech, long-take, poorly thought-out thing) and on my way back to festival HQ I ran across Adam, his friend Andy who was on break from studying law abroad, and some other woman they knew. They were heading back to the place I just left to pick up cell phones and become part of the One Take Competition 2007. It’s a contest for people to make short films, maximum of two minutes, on cell phones that they provide.

Sounded interesting, so I joined them. I didn’t really think they’d be handing out cell phones to strangers, but it was worth looking into. Sure enough, we found a student of the Willem de Kooning Academy, Henk Jelle Groot, who pulled out four cell phones to give to us for 24 hours. In that time we could make as many 2-minute (or less) movies that we wanted to, as long as they were one take with no editing. We could, however, add text over the picture or title cards at the beginning or end.

As Henk was explaining how to use the phones, and answering some of our questions, I started to use the phone to videotape his presentation. I thought the clip would be disqualified when I let it go to 2 minutes and 5 seconds, but I learned that there is a “trim” function on the phone that we could use to shorten the movie. This clip was safe.

The rest of the day, between going to movies, I made some movies. I kept thinking of text that I wanted to place over it, like the shot of the reflections of water on the metal town square and how it’s all about to turn to ice again. Or the office building where we could watch workers as though they were characters in their own movies, and mine. Or the condemned building where I don’t know what I would write, but it looked cool. Or the Belgian Fries stand at dusk, with the neon overhead, that looked like a set from a Wong Kar-wai film.

I started with the instructional footage, where Henk was giving four strangers brand new cell phones, in their boxes. I called it “Free Phones!” I added text that said everything we were thinking, like: we could have given them fake names, he never checked our I.D., we could just steal these phones… but if we did that we couldn’t enter the contest. My final flourish was the last thing I wrote: “Stealing images” [followed by] “is more fun” [followed by] “than stealing phones.” Bam! It felt good! It was funny. It described and supported the contest. I liked it. That took quite a while to edit, which I did before going to some film, I forget .

I knew I couldn’t do one as intricate as that again, so I chose my other favorite clip: the Belgian fries stand. I trimmed it a little bit and called it “Tribute to Christopher Doyle” because Chris Doyle is the cinematographer who helped make Wong Kar-wei’s images famous. It didn’t seem quite complete, but it was free to enter so what the heck.

Then next day I ran across Adam and Andy in de Doelen (fest HQ). They had shot some movies too. They liked mine (just one typo, but no way to fix it), and Adam was already proclaiming it the winner. He made three, all pretty good city snapshots, but they got a heck of a lot better when he figured out how to add music. I helped him with his titles, too. I can’t remember what his abstract, mobile sculpture piece got called (his best, I think, with an ominous soundtrack), but I helped him come up with “Pathé Ballet” (which shows Andy walking and spinning in front of the Pathé theater, with a silent movie piano underneath) and helped give the inspiration for “Dressed to De Palma” (shots of mannequins in a window with a version of the Psycho theme playing underneath). It’s the music and the titles that make him serious competition for me.

Then I added some nice, spacey music under my Christopher Doyle movie, and it got a whole lot better.

We turned in our phones after finishing the sound. Henk was there with his fellow student, Emile Steginga, a guy who is two meters tall (which translates to 6 feet and nearly 7 inches). They both really enjoyed my movie. They’re not the judges, but they may have some influence.

DAY 3

I saw Henk and Emile both again today, and they still like my movie best. I don’t know who the judges are, but that bodes really well. They said that they uploaded a few choice phone videos to play on the festival monitors around the fest, and mine is one of them. That means one of my films is playing Rotterdam! Yee-haw!

We find out Monday night who wins. I'll post a link when you can see my movies.

Holy crap, I forgot to tell you about the best part: the prizes. The winner gets one of the phones (the special James Bond edition) and 500 Euros. Wish me luck!

IFFR Festival Day 1

2007-01-28T05:38:00.000-08:00

There can be upwards of seven screens running simultaneous press/industry screenings, which is awesome. Two of the screens are in the Cinerama, a multiplex two minutes away from my hotel. It’s particularly nice when my first chosen press screenings of the day are there, which happened two of these first three full days of the festival. The rest of the venues are less than a 10-minute walk from there. Very handy.

Saw four movies on the first day, including the official opening night movie La antena, which is a fun and stylish, Guy Maddin-esque silent(ish) film set in a sci-fi alternate 1950s. Whereas Maddin is increasingly allowing the grain and edits to show, this is more slickly put together, but it shares a similar fondness for absurdity. Rounded out the day with email and food and tried to catch up on festival reports and blogging, and it is sort of impossible to finish all that, so eventually it was to bed, to bed!

I should mention that when I read the paperwork I turned into the hotel to cover my room and expenses, it indicated that I wasn’t supposed to be part of the free breakfast that the hotel offers (do some people pay extra for that?). But I pretended I didn’t read it because the staff never told me not to come to breakfast. So I have been going down every morning and filling up on fried eggs, tiny pastries, coffee and orange juice, sometimes cereal with yogurt, and then I make tiny little meat and cheese sandwiches that I bag and bring with me for lunch.

IFFR Opening Night

2007-01-27T02:56:00.000-08:00

Adam Sekuler and I knew we couldn’t get tickets to the official Opening Night film La antena, but I suspected we could get into the opening night party. I asked at Guest Relations if there was anything at all we could get into this evening, lest we spend a day in Rotterdam without seeing any movies. Turns out they had a second opening night film (not quite sure how or why), and there were tickets available. And it was Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn. Hot damn. All that and the opening night party too.

We wandered back to our respective hotels, but not before stopping for dinner at a Tiki bar. Not bad, either.

I meant to finish unpacking when I got back to my dorm room, but I looked at that little twin bed and I knew that I needed a nap. With no alarm clock in my room, I pulled out my thought-to-be-useless-in-the-EU cell phone and set its alarm. When I woke up, there was no time for unpacking. Alas.

Met Adam in front of the Pathé, a giant aluminum box full of state of the art theaters that is situated on a sort of town square/stage that is made mostly of aluminum planks. The sun had set and the water had frozen on the metal, and though that was slippery as all get out, it wasn’t as slippery as those sections of the square that are made of wood. It was slow going across this glacial expanse.

Once inside we were handed glasses of champagne. Nice. We mingled, and by “mingled” I mean we walked around the lobby talking to one another because we didn’t know anyone else there. But we had each other. Another glass of champagne and it was into the theater. Big huge screen, curved so it didn’t lose focus on the edges. That’s how big it is.

The movie was great, and when we got out we headed over to the Opening Night Party. Spoiled by years of free beer and wine at the Seattle International Film Festival, we were surprised to see that we had to buy our drinks despite prominent advertising for their booze sponsor. Ah well. C’est la vie. We wandered the party and still didn’t know anyone, so we headed home to get ready for the first full day of screenings.

IFFR Getting There

2007-01-25T02:29:00.000-08:00

On my way to Rotterdam for the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), left the house early in the morning to catch the 8:30 am flight to Chicago, then to Brussels. I arrived at 8:00 in the morning the next day, Rotterdam time. The time change is 9 hours, so either I arrived at 11:00 pm Seattle time or I left at 5:30 pm Rotterdam time. Either way, I got 4 to 5 hours of sleep, which seems like it was pretty good.

Upon arriving in Brussels, I met up with Northwest Film Forum program director Adam Sekuler, who is also a programmer for experimental films at SIFF. We traveled to the airport together (thank you, Heidi), but he transferred in New York to Brussels when I transferred in Chicago. We arrived in Brussels within 10 minutes of each other.

After getting our bags, it was time to figure out how to get to Rotterdam. The easy part was buying a train ticket to Rotterdam from the airport, costing a mere 25 Euros. Then nothing was marked with anything that was on our tickets, so we asked and were directed to track 1, to Brussels-North. We got off there and looked for any mention of Rotterdam, but no luck, so we asked again and they said take the train to Amsterdam. Of course. We found that, and when we got on that train the conductress told us we’d be changing trains at Antwerp-Berchem. Why not, eh? Once there, we had a straight shot through the farmland and the green scenery to Rotterdam.

Once we got to Rotterdam, things didn’t quite fall into place like I’m used to. We find the Metro station, and there’s ticket purchasing machines that we interact with, but none of them have the names of either of the stations that we need to get to. A helpful Metro employee sees our confusion, asks if we have any Euro coins (not enough) and brings us up to the separate Metro ticket counter. They don’t take credit cards, but I changed some money over, and we buy our tickets. The Metro woman explains that, before I enter, I need to fold the ticket after number one so it time stamps onto the second strip because I’m only going one zone. Adam needs to fold after the two and stamp the time onto number three because he’s going two zones. Make sense? Not to me, neither. Maybe if I could read Dutch it would make more sense.

We split up and agree to meet at “de Doelen,” the festival’s headquarters. I check into the EuroHotel, only to discover that the room is the size of a single occupancy dorm room: Twin bed, desk, wooden armoire thing standing in for a closet, nightstand, TV. What makes it better than a dorm room is the fact that there’s a bathroom and shower included. Ah well, all the more reason to stay out and see more movies.

I meet Adam at my Metro stop (my hotel is on one off those crazy, old-European angled streets that doesn’t feel like it’s on the same plane of existence as the rest of the city, and too hard to explain how to get to at this point) and we decide to walk to “de Doelen.” We walk to the next big intersection and take a right. Just like my map says. But apparently we didn’t go “right” enough. We get a little lost, but it’s a nice day, and we find our way back to the festival headquarters.

And you know what? When it comes right down to it, the Rotterdam weather has been quite nice today, sunny and in the low 40s. And somehow everything that’s green, like the grass and the leaves that are still on trees, everything is extra green. Very pretty.

FILM Zoo interview

2007-01-20T09:42:00.000-08:00

My interview with Charles Mudede, one of the author’s of the Sundance documentary Zoo just posted to GreenCine daily.

If you don’t know about the movie, which is stirring up all sorts of controversy at Sundance, here’s a brief excerpt from my introduction to the piece:

"Back in 2005, when the Seattle Times reported on the 'Enumclaw Horse Sex Incident,' the story spread like wildfire across the Internet and became their most-read story of the year. It also caught the eyes of Seattle-based director Robinson Devor and writer Charles Mudede, whose dreamily poetic feature film Police Beat debuted at Sundance just six months prior. The resulting documentary essay is Zoo, which is premiering at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival."

Go to http://www.greencine.com/article?action=view&articleID=396 to get the whole article.

Hopefully by the time you read it, they will have changed the author byline from Sara Schieron to my name. I assure you that I did not intentionally write the piece under the pen name of Sara Schieron.

FILM Perfume / Notes on a Scandal

2007-01-19T23:10:00.000-08:00

OBSESSIVE COMPULSIONS, PART I

Obsession can be a funny thing, both “funny ha-ha” and “funny destructive.” Obsession will sneak up on you, too. You don't always recognize it as its grip on you tightens. I know that whenever I say yes to “just one more game” of online Sudoko, each blog entry will take that much longer to write. But there’s something about that obsessive drive that is positively cinematic, probably because the object of the obsession is usually something other than video games and the like. In movies, obsessions are pushed to the extreme and either destroy other people or the person who harbors it, sometimes both.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is about an artist who is obsessed with smells. Born behind the stand of a fishmonger in stinky 18th century France, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw) grows up to realize that he’s got the best, most accurate sense of smell in the world. That’s not enough to break him out of poverty and manual labor until he stumbles across the once-famous perfume maker Giuseppe Baldini (Dustin Hoffman), and helps him to mimic and surpass the trendy scents of the day.

Jean-Baptiste is an artist when it comes to mixing and manufacturing scents, but he isn’t interested in money as much as collecting the scents of "real life." More specifically, he’s looking to capture the smell of the beautiful plum seller who he accidentally killed one night. His art is his obsession. Of course, to bottle the scent of a beautiful young woman you need to kill her first, and so he becomes a serial killer.

Let me just say right now that the movie is great, and the reason it’s great is because it’s really, really funny. But it’s a deadpan kind of humor, a British style of humor. It’s as though the narration by John Hurt was written by Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) or was pulled from a Monty Python sketch. Pip pip to German director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) for pulling off what many have said was an impossible book to adapt. The only other director I can think of who could have pulled it off is Quentin Tarantino, but I only say that because I think he could have matched the humor and style that Tykwer infused into it.

OBSESSIVE COMPULSIONS, PART II

Another cinematic example of obsession can be found in Notes on a Scandal. The beauty of this film is that it is completely subjective. Cate Blanchett plays Sheba Hart and Judi Dench plays Barbara Covett (damn! I had no idea that was her last name! That is too perfect, too spot-on, which is probably why they left it for me to find on the imdb instead of emphasizing it in the movie itself).

The whole story is from Barbara’s point of view, the whole movie is a visual representation of her personal diaries. Whenever we see Sheba, it’s filtered through Barbara’s perception of her, and Barbara is completely obsessed with her. That’s why Sheba is always portrayed as such a bohemian and sexual being. It’s all that Barbara can see in her. And yet she’s in denial about depth of her feelings for Sheba. If there’s one thing that’s more interesting in cinema than obsession, it’s self-denial. That goes for books as much as movies, maybe more. There’s something so engaging about questioning the narrative voice, the authoritative voice of a story.

When my friends and I got out of the movie we had the discussion as to whether Barbara was a lesbian or not. The real question is whether she knew she was a lesbian. My take was that she was from a generation where being a lesbian was not an option, and she has led a repressed life for so long she doesn’t realize how her obsessions manifest themselves, and never realizes why another female teacher may want to take out a restraining order against her. And because the movie expresses her point of view, we’re never supposed to realize why either. Unless we start to doubt the author’s intent. And for me, doubting the author’s intent is always fun.

FILMMAKING January Jobs

2007-01-16T00:55:00.000-08:00

BACK TO LIFE, BACK TO REALITY

Like most people who work in the film industry, especially in Seattle (though it's probably the same in every city), January starts out dead. And I was starting out with a little more than pocket change. I was worried I would never pull a paycheck again. The freelancer's lament, et al.

At a New Years Day party I fronted the fact that I was a Script Supervisor looking for work. At a fundraiser for the Seattle filmmaker (as a writer/director and as a 1st Assistant Director) Megan Griffith's new feature, I did the same thing. And it is starting to pay off. I think it was all on the same day last week that I got three job offers. One possible job offer from the new TV show from "Bill Nye the Science Guy." One job offer from this movie that's shooting on Vashon Island in February. Those are the two jobs that I got from networking at these parties, and of course they conflict. Because the TV job would be longer term, I'm (still) holding out hope for that one, and will have to tell the Vashon Island job whether or not I need to pass on Wednesday or so. But that's only two of three jobs.

Another job offer came in out of the blue. Last summer I worked on a show for Fox Sports called Destination Wild, and the producer of that recommended my services to a guy who was coming to Seattle to shoot a corporate video for ClearW*ire, which is a new wireless cable company based on WiFi technology and the like. Initially that also conflicted with the TV job, but when the TV job got pushed I took the corporate gig. I'm working on that coporate gig right now.

That's why I haven't finished my reviews of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and Notes on a Scandal. I've been busy.

Plus, I've been transcribing my interview with Charles Mudede, the author of the new Sundance documentary Zoo, which I'll link to when it posts.

Plus, I've been getting ready to go to the Rotterdam Film Festival as a programmer for the Seattle International Film Festival. More on that later.

FILM 51 Birch Street

2007-01-10T17:26:00.000-08:00

January 12–18
Northwest Film Forum
Seattle

Through shows like This American Life and others, National Public Radio has made a certain kind of storytelling popular. Without the support of text or images, it’s a personal style that is, almost by definition, self-involved. Depending on the narrator, the stories are sometimes witty and sometimes whiny, and almost all of them are punctuated with sappy, inappropriate music.

Well, that style of storytelling is now infecting the personal documentary, as Doug Block’s sometimes fascinating and sometimes annoying 51 Birch Street proves.

Three months after his mother dies, Doug Block’s father announces that he’s going to marry his former secretary. Doug and his sisters are initially shocked, and so Doug starts to investigate whether his now happy and outgoing father ever had an affair with this woman. Then he discovers his mother’s diaries, which gives him a whole different perspective on his parents’ marriage and forces him to see them as people instead of parents.

Sounds fascinating, right? It is. So is the home movie footage that he incorporates into the piece.

But that’s only half the story. The other half is Doug’s whiny and annoying journey of self-discovery, as spoken through his narration. It’s everything that’s bad about NPR personal stories, which means most people won’t mind it. For example, after he finds his mom’s diaries he says in his voiceover, “Mom’s secrets are here for the taking, but do I have the right?” Please! Either take them or don’t, but don’t dwell on the hesitation.

By speaking over chunks of the footage, he tries to make the documentary more about him than his parents. Luckily, his parents’ story is stronger, which makes 51 Birch Street worth watching.

EGO Avatar vs. Avatar

2007-01-09T09:45:00.000-08:00

Who’s going to back down first? Two films with the title Avatar were announced within hours of each other, according to the Sci Fi Channel’s entertainment news wire.

James Cameron is finishing up his decade off of feature filmmaking with Avatar, the story of an ex-marine who is unwillingly sent to settle and exploit a faraway planet, who then gets caught up in a battle for survival by the planet’s inhabitants.

Once again Cameron is going to be pushing the edge of technology by combining live action with “virtual photorealistic production techniques,” or in other words using motion capture and cutting edge visual effects to help create an entire alien world and ecosystem that a live-action human protagonist will enter. He’s working with Peter Jackson’s visual effects house, and it shouldn't be a suprise that he is helping create a brand new digital 3-D format for its 3-D release. He starts shooting in April for a projected 2009 release.

Meanwhile, M. Night Shyamalan has his own Avatar in the works. It’s based on the Nickelodeon animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender but will be live-action. The show is set in a world of martial arts and magic, and follows one of a long line of “Avatars” who “must put aside his irresponsible ways and stop the Fire Nation from enslaving the Water, Earth and Air nations.” The show is quite popular with kids 6 to 14, and Shyamalan does seem focused on pleasing children (his own and others), what with the “bedtime story” that was Lady in the Water.

As of right now the titles are the same. If it were any other filmmaker besides Shyamalan, I would assume he or she would cede the Avatar title to Cameron, but from what I’ve read this Shyamalan cat is a strange mix of insecurity and ego. He so believes in himself and his own projects that I could imagine him calling up Cameron and asking him to change the title of his movie, despite the fact that it’s been the pet project that he has been thinking about since Titanic.

Shyamalan does have an ego-saving out. The cartoon series does have a subtitle, “The Last Airbender” (whatever that means), which could become the title of the movie. But it is a projected series of films and, even adjusting for a slow creative process, Shyamalan’s film will hit the theaters first. It’ll be interesting to see how this one plays out.

Thanks again to Sci Fi Channel’s Sci Fi Wire for this information.

FILM Old Joy

2007-01-06T09:13:00.000-08:00

Plays January 5-18
Northwest Film Forum
Seattle

I’m not sure why Old Joy works as well as it does, but it does. What I can see is why it ended up on so many top 10 lists last year and will probably win the Independent Spirit Award for best film made for under $500,000. You see, the movie has so few words in it, it’s almost like you need to review it with pictures or photos. But I’ll try with words…

The story is basic. Before his wife gives birth to their first child, Mark (Daniel London) decides to take some time off from responsibilities around the home and go on a camping trip with an old friend he hasn’t seen in years. The old friend is Kurt (Will Oldham), a chronically underemployed free spirit who gets by on charm and grand ideas. John Hartl in The Seattle Times compared them to Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory in My Dinner with Andre, and I wish I would have thought of that myself because it’s a great way to describe this pragmatic guy hanging out with this idealistic dreamer.

This time Kurt’s big idea is to find these hot springs just east of Mark’s Portland home. So they buy some weed and hit the road. And they drive. Sometimes they talk and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they remember mutual friends or make basic observations, and sometimes they just stare at the scenery as they drive. And you are with them doing the very same thing. It’s one of those relaxing road trips where the journey is as important as the destination. It’s sort of uneventful, but it’s never boring.

I don’t know how much footage director Kelly Reichardt had to work with, I don’t know how many improvised conversations she had to draw from, I don’t know how much scenery she filmed, but she and her editor picked the most representational footage for a road trip. The story feels like it’s unfolding before you instead of along some predetermined structure. It could go anywhere, and you’d go right along with it.

Ultimately the trip wraps up, Mark rejoins his wife, and the two continue on with their separate lives. Was it completely transformative? Probably not, but it was a good trip and both are glad they made it. And you will be too if you join them. Heck, I'd go so far as to say that if you feel like going on a camping trip but don’t have the time or inclination to actually get away, then go see Old Joy. It's the next best thing to being there, and a damn good movie in its own right.

FILM Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie

2007-01-03T11:08:00.000-08:00

Good news on the future movie front. A new animated feature is on the horizon, one that doesn’t include talking animals or dancing penguins or anything that has been littering the animated landscapes of late. Instead it will feature talking objects like a hunk of meat (Meatwad), a large container of French fries with laser vision (Frylock), and a large shake with a bad attitude (Master Shake).

Yep, I just read in Variety that the Cartoon Network's Aqua Teen Hunger Force is going to be a movie, and I read elsewhere that it’s going to hit at least 800 screens. Take THAT, Mr. Hou Hsiao-hsien!

The plot? I suppose it would be tough to do 86 minutes without a plot. This comes from the Adult Swim website:

"The Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie Film for Theatres is an action-adventure epic that tackles the mysterious circumstances that brought Meatwad, Frylock and Master Shake together. An immortal piece of exercise equipment threatens the balance of galactic peace, and it is up to the Aqua Teen Hunger Force to run away from it. Complicating matters, the Plutonians team up with the Cybernetic Ghost of Christmas Past from the Future for ultimate control of the deadly device."

"It was too big a story to do in 11 minutes," co-creator Dave Willis told Daily Variety. "It's based on our fear of exercise equipment."

One of the great things about animated films is that it’s relatively easy to get famous people to do cameos because all they gotta do is show up in a sound studio for half a day and record some lines. The Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie Film for Theatres (god, I love that title) has a few people lined up, including cult star/movie whore Bruce Campbell and, in an inspired bit of casting, Neil Peart, the drummer from RUSH!

To read a review I wrote about RUSH’s seminal album 2112, click HERE.

Right now The Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie Film for Theatres is scheduled to be released in March by First Look Pictures. To see a clip that is being touted as their teaser trailer, click HERE.

FILM Rocky Balboa

2007-01-02T17:36:00.000-08:00

EYES ON THE BLOODY PRIZE

In a semi-autobiographical parable, Rocky Balboa is serving to revive Sylvester Stallone’s career. If the first Rocky film charted Stallone’s struggle to make it as an actor (he wouldn’t sell the script unless he could star in the movie), Rocky Balboa takes the point of view of a successful has-been who decides he’s not done yet. Directed as well as written by Stallone, it is chock full of nostalgia. Talia Shire’s Adrian has died from “women’s cancer” and, when he’s not visiting her grave, Rocky is content being a local celebrity who tells tales of his former glory in his restaurant. On the anniversary of her death, he travels to all the locations from the first film that have since been torn down and he remembers how things used to be. It may as well be Stallone looking back on all his successful action movies (including five previous Rocky films), and now unable to find an appropriate vehicle unless he makes it for himself.

So a computer program says that Rocky in his prime would beat the current champ Mason Dixon, a Mike Tyson-like fighter who knocks people out quickly and alienates audiences. Rocky decides to get back in the game, despite the protests of a son who’s trying to succeed in business without the embarrassment of his father’s doomed comeback. As soon as you can say “training montage,” we’re back in Rockyland, complete with that awesome soundtrack.

Could a 50something boxer last 10 rounds in the ring with a boxer in his prime? Doesn’t matter, because the music and editing take your mind off of any questions of veracity. This is, after all, an emotional journey and nothing close to a documentary.

The only place where Stallone stumbles is with the character “Little Marie,” a 30something (or older?) bartender who he used to walk home when she was eight. If this doesn’t immediately trigger strange Oedipal reactions against this coupling, the fact that he meets her on the anniversary of Adrian’s death is another warning sign. Either they’re sleeping together or they’re not, but when he brings her to Las Vegas for the exhibition match you gotta think something is going on. Their relationship is left deliberately vague and she barely talks, which means not only is Stallone using her as a stand-in for a love interest, so is Rocky himself.

If her character takes you out of the movie in a bad way, Burt Young’s Paulie takes you out of the movie in a great way. It’s hard to tell if it’s because Young is old and verging on senile or if that’s how he chose to play his part, but he is hilarious throughout. I hope the next sequel is all about Paulie. The way he barks his lines as though he just woke up, the way he spouts what sound like non-sequiturs, his whole shambling frame, everything about him is awesome to watch.

The success of Rocky Balboa, both critically and with audiences, has given Stallone a Rocky-like comeback. It’ll be interesting to see if he can do the same thing with the rumored sequel to his other iconic character from the Reagan-’80s, Rambo, especially since the political winds have shifted Democratically.

FILM Little Children

2006-12-29T15:39:00.000-08:00

GOD IS IN THE DETAILS

Voiceover narration is a powerful tool when it’s used in filmmaking. Usually the voice is that of the lead character (as in The Pursuit of Happyness) looking back at some difficult point in his life from a more comfortable place. Even Sunset Boulevard can be interpreted this way despite the fact that the main character is narrating from the grave, because life after death can be seen as being more comfortable than his struggles in and around Hollywood (it’s a stretch, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true).

Much more rare is the “omniscient” narrator, the voice of God (aka the author). This is when some respectable voice tells the audience bits of information that the characters either don’t know or aren’t telling the other characters. In one sense, it violates the “show, don’t tell” dictum that’s taught in all screenwriting books (along with “don’t rely on narration”), but rules are meant to be broken and what it really does is mimic storytelling devices found in short stories, giving a more literary tone to the piece.

The secret to effective voiceover narration is the realization that, just because the narrator isn’t seen onscreen, that doesn’t mean he isn’t a character in the story.

SUBURBAN DYSTOPIA

In Little Children, the (uncredited) character of the narrator is played by Will Lyman, an actor who is the voice of Frontline and many other PBS documentaries. He’s a great choice, recognizable on a subconscious level and full of trustworthy gravitas. In Little Children, his is the voice of the author, the one who knows everything about everything that is happening in this wealthy suburban town.

If it’s the flaws of characters that make them interesting, the flaw of the narrator is that he is fixated on people who are living unhappy, unfulfilled lives. He (and by extension the author) must be profoundly unhappy with his own life if he is drawn only to those who are leading lives of quiet, and sometimes not-so-quiet, desperation. It’s telling that one of the most sympathetic characters in the film is that of Ronald James McGorvey (Jackie Earle Haley), the pedophile who can’t control his impulses as much as he’d like to. You can’t tell me that there aren’t any happy people in this town, but those who profess to be happy are treated by disdain by this narrator. I’m speaking of the other housewives, who through this filter are shown as caricatures of suburban bliss, full of longing for what they can’t have and a happiness with being part of the status quo.

Only a self-hating narrator like this one would idolize the adulterous relationship between Sarah (Kate Winslet) and Brad (Patrick Wilson). She’s given a pass because her husband has become addicted to porn, and he’s given a pass because his wife (who comes from money and makes documentaries for PBS) supports him every time he fails the Bar Exam. Their illicit affair is described as a means to “live life” while everybody else is dead inside.

The other big theme in the movie, aside from doing whatever it takes to “feel alive,” is nostalgia. The reason everybody is unhappy is because they’re stuck in the past. The theme is most explicit with Ronald the pedophile, who lives with his mother in a house full of clocks and Hummel figurines for whom time never progresses. Brad also lives in the past, stuck watching high schoolers on skateboards instead of studying for the Bar, and who was a high school sports hero before becoming an academic failure. Sarah apparently longs for the days when she wasn’t tied down with family.

Of course, like most self-righteous and egocentric characters, the narrator doesn’t see his own flaws. He feels he’s describing life as it is. But if that were really the case, then Little Children would be little more than a simple dis of suburban living, similar to those stories of cheating housewives that popped up in fiction back in the ’50s, during the first expansive growth of the suburbs. And Little Children is more than that, isn’t it?

FILM Dreamgirls / The Pursuit of Happyness

2006-12-28T17:19:00.000-08:00

DREAMS DEFERRED

Caught a double feature the other night that expresses two very different takes on the American Dream™. One is about displaying your inner talent and having that lead you to your place in the world, and the other is about working hard to make your own place in the world.

Dreamgirls starts out at a talent competition where a trio of singers are auditioning for Detroit fame and good fortune. All we know is what we see, as the movie doesn’t have time for backstories. Brassy lead singer (Jennifer Hudson) plays by her own rules, and her two back-up singers (Beyoncé Knowles and another lady) play by the rules others have set. Just as the three of them get a gig playing back-up to Eddie Murphy’s Johnny Thunder, so too do all the performers play back-up to the fictionalized history of Motown-inspired Rainbow Records. This would have made sense if the music was half as good as the Motown hits that inspired it, but I digress…

The reason this movie works so well for Hudson, who is a knockout, is because it mirrors her own story. Consequently, hers is a storyline that seems more personal than the rest. Off-screen, she is famous for getting ejected too soon from TV’s American Idol, while in the movie she’s let go from the Supremes-inspired girl-group The Dreamettes because she’s too talented and not good looking enough. Her position as the lead is usurped by Beyoncé, who rises to the top because she is pretty and has a nondescript voice. And maybe that’s true too.

No matter what the girls do, though, the movie just keeps skipping along through the decades, and pretty soon Beyoncé is a Diana Ross-sized disco queen while Hudson raises a child in obscurity before being rediscovered. Not even the men can slow the march of time, though Eddie Murphy has some fun moments in his James Brown-inspired character and Danny Glover is charming as a promoter with integrity. Jamie Foxx, however, is thinner than Beyoncé’s voice is supposed to be.

Meanwhile, The Pursuit of Happyness is a period piece that sticks to just one period in time, the early-’80s. Though it takes some liberties, it too is based on a true story, and a bit more solidly than Dreamgirls.

You know even before you enter the theater how the story is going to turn out. You know Chris Gardner is going to come out ahead. The whole thing works because the movie knows this as well, and tips its hand right away with a little bit of voiceover from Will Smith, as Gardner, narrating the chapter headings of each stage of his life. Another benefit of knowing the ending of the story is that the filmmakers don’t need to shy away from letting their protagonist make mistakes. And he does. Heck, he even points them out in his narration.

Thandie Newton gets the thankless job of portraying his wife, fed up with his home businesses while working double shifts to help their family get by. By the time the movie begins she has already shut down, as if she already knows we’re going to side with her husband. And we do, because we know how it’s going to end. When he applies for and gets an unpaid internship at Dean Witter, she finally decides to leave, and when she offers to take their kid with her we think that it would be a great help for his ambitions. But he doesn’t want to give up his son, and so he must work extra hard to pay for daycare (for a while, at least), sell out of his home business on weekends, all the while studying to become a stockbroker.

In life it’s easy to sit back and complain about how tough things are. Either you have a recognized talent and try to control how other people exploit you, like the girls in Dreamgirls, or you work hard to make people recognize your talents and make the breaks for yourself, like Chris Gardner in The Pursuit of Happyness. The first can be fun to watch, as disposable as television. It’s the second part of this double feature that is actually inspiring.

FILM Children of Men

2006-12-27T12:41:00.000-08:00

I liked this movie. Quite a bit, actually.

When I first saw the trailers, I must admit that I didn’t want to see Children of Men. It looked like it was going to be a simplistic movie dystopia about a world that finally gets its first pregnant lady in 18 years, but with a chase thriller written in. I was worried that it would fetishize children to the point of nausea. At the same time, I was amused by the ad that promoted Alfonso Cuarón as the director of Y tu mama también and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, as if those movies were similar from a very surface Hollywood point of view -- a point of view that doesn’t include themes of the budding sexuality of youth.

Then the reviews came out, and it started showing up on certain respected top-10 lists, and I suspected that the movie was deeper and more interesting than the trailer led me to believe. Combine that with the promise of a miracle birth at the end, and it became my must-see movie for Christmas Day.

MY REVIEW

Children of Men opens in the year 2027. It’s been 18 years since the last pregnant woman has successfully given birth. No explanation is given for the drop in birth rates. I couldn’t help but think of it as a new version of Biblical flood, but instead of rising water the planet’s population was being wiped out through attrition because no more babies are being born.

As it turns out, it isn’t really a Christian film (nor is it an anti-Christian film), though in our culture those are the easiest allegories to jump to. Looking to Wikipedia (and who doesn’t these days?), I see that eschatology is the branch of theology that studies end-times mythology in all the great religions, from Buddhism to Hinduism to Christianity to Zoroastrianism. Heck, even my Viking gods believed their world would be destroyed and a whole new generation would come after it. The movie is bigger than just one religion.

Without the crutch of Christian allegory in his adaptation, Cuarón had to work a little harder to realize the world of his film. He succeeds thanks in no small part to his protagonist Theo (Clive Owen), a world-weary former idealist who thinks he’s given up hope. He reminded me of Humphrey Bogart or one of the hard-boiled, alcoholic heroes of the ’40s, but with a more modern acting style that requires him to emote a little more. Theo gets drawn into a plot to escort a pregnant refugee first to a radical group called “the Fishes” (another Christian allegory? Stop me now!) and then to a boat that will take her to “The Human Project,” a utopia created by scientists and scholars that is so secretive it may not even really exist.

Politically, the movie references the cultural xenophobia of developed nations through Britain’s anti-immigration policies. Refugees are locked up in cages until they are transferred to camps that indulge in torture methods similar to those in Guantanamo. Also, in these end times, a wide variety of religious groups, anti-religious groups, political groups and other militant organizations have popped up. Some of them are for refugees’ rights, others think that moral (or amoral) living will start the birthing process again. The world is a mess.

It all could have gotten heavy-handed if it wasn’t for the character of Theo. Clive Owen does a magnificent job in making an essentially anti-social character likable. In a world without hope, he’s just getting by. He takes the random bits of violence and constantly streaming news feeds for granted. And as an actor, he lets the desire to connect with others show through his cracking façade, along with a long-buried need to believe in something bigger. He seems to be living in that world, surprised by nothing, and because of that he makes the film that much more palpable.

Then Theo goes to visit his dad? mentor?, played by Michael Caine. If Owen is the soul of the film, woken to hope by being given a mission that is bigger than him, Caine is the heart. Taking care of his wife, a photojournalist who is catatonic due to wartime torture, he earns money by selling pot to the immigration officials based nearby. He is hilarious, and bypasses the pitfalls of a character who could have been there just to give the audience a little backstory by laughing world events off with a puff of his special blend “strawberry cough” marijuana.

Before seeing the movie, I was reading a debate about whether Cuarón’s use of long takes was distracting, effective, or just a filmmaker showing off. If I didn’t read about ’em before seeing the movie, I’m not sure I would have noticed the long takes. You see, instead of being part of smooth crane shots and elaborate choreography, like in Touch of Evil or I Am Cuba, they are buried in shaky handheld scenery. Also, there’s no doubt that Cuarón was able to use the best of multiple takes and seamlessly join them with the new technology, so the intellectual thrill of a long take doesn’t mean as much anymore… but still. There were only two scenes where I noticed the length of the take: One during the battle where he jumps on and off that bus and blood gets on the lens, and the other during the birth where the baby looks a little CG to me. For me, it was the blood and the baby that nearly took me out of the movie, and not the length of the shots.

I haven’t seen Soderbergh’s The Good German yet, I’ve only read the reviews (which totally makes this an unfair comparison), but something tells me that Children of Men better captures the spirit of a ’40s wartime film despite its social sci-fi trappings. And for that I thank Mr. Clive Owen.

FILMMAKING That's a Wrap

2006-12-22T20:39:00.000-08:00

After six days of shooting, we finished production on "Alistair MacLean: Y'did Nefesh." Despite the one big weather snafu at the beginning, everything went according to schedule. Looking back, I don't think I would have done much different. We had a great crew, morale never flagged even on the two moderately stressful days (the company move to the set with power, and the long day when we shot the dinner sequence). I'm really looking forward to seeing some of the sequences cut together. Editing is the next big step. More when we start that endeavor...

FILMMAKING Day 6

2006-12-21T08:13:00.000-08:00

Today is our last day of shooting. We've gotten everything we've needed and are caught up to our schedule. I need to dash out to go to set, so I'll be brief. Today we shoot Alistair in front of the Rabbis.

Yesterday we shot out the living room, which went rather smoothly despite the fact that our 1st AD needed to go to work (glamorous short film shoots don't replace living wage work, unfortunately). We also got the last of the kitchen stuff, which included a close-up of the gefilte fish (aka that which causes Alistair to spill the soup) and a close=up of the soup spill itself, from a low angle. We did the soup spill by having a low angle up to the stove, and a large bucket sort of thing surrounded by a wall of garbage bags, while the camera was in a plastic bag that had a filter attachment taped into it so the camera could see. We were ready to do it several times. We got it on the first full take. And it looks awesome.

More after we finish...

FILMMAKING Day 5

2006-12-20T10:29:00.000-08:00

We're about to start our fifth day of shooting and I realize that even though we were unlucky with Mother Nature knocking out our power on the first day, we've been very lucky in terms of weather for the shoot so far. The reason I say that is because it hasn't rained all week... until today.

Luckily we were able to shoot the exterior of Alistair's walk to Dassie's house yesterday under our soft grey cloud cover. Today we finish his entrance to Dassie's house and his first lesson. Long story short, the rain won't affect us.

After the afternoon sequence yesterday, we shifted to set up for the dinner sequence which takes place at night. Twelve people were seated around the table, including four kids, and a shabbose dinner was cooked and brought to set. While lighting was underway, we started the long, difficult process of gathering the props, setting the table, and bringing in the dinner. It's strange to be on a film where the camera department is consistently ready to shoot before the props and set dressing are. Then again, we're working with a volunteer crew, I don't think we have an Art Director (we did have a Set Dresser) on set to answer "art department" questions, and we've passed props notes to a few different people. Most importantly, we're getting everything we need.

Yesterday was a long day. We wrapped around 1:45 in the morning (though the kids were done before midnight). Today will be much shorter. We're scheduled to shoot all afternoon starting at noon, and should wrap between six and seven. Tomorrow is the last day of shooting.

FILMMAKING Day 4

2006-12-19T11:14:00.000-08:00

Yes, it is a little confusing that I'm writing these posts before the titular day of shooting rather than after, but I've got a system going and I'm not going to change it. I'm writing this before we start our 4th day of shooting, and most of the post deals with Day 3. Deal with it.

I've been super happy with the teamwork between my 1st AD Przemek Pardyak and my DP Ryan Purcell. Having gone through the script and the room maps of the locations, combined with what I remembered of the blocking (thank God we rehearsed on location), we were able to create a shot list that was both useful and fairly accurate. Best yet, they've helped us remember to get shots that may have fallen by the wayside.

Yesterday (Day 3) went by smoothly. Once again I'm really enjoying the performances, and am glad that we rehearsed as much as we did. We would have finished early, too, except we spent a long time waiting for a pot of soup to boil over.

Let me explain: One of the last shots in the kitchen has Alistair using a "milk" utensil on the "meat" dinner. Dassie sees this and needs to kosher the utensils that have been sullied, and she does this by tossing them out the window into the boiling cauldron of water (that we shot on the first, power-free day). Then Alistair turns and sees that the matzah ball soup is boiling over and helps save the day.

What we learned is that the "watched pot never boils" rule includes a pot that has a camera looking at it even when people weren't. My buddy Matt was in charge of this special effect, and had it all worked out... in theory. After the large pot of water finally hit a boil, it still wouldn't boil over. He added starch in the form of pasta, but it still wouldn't go. Finally he got the suggestion to throw some baking soda into it. Perfect! Throw a lot in and you get a volcanic eruption. Two hours after setting up for the boiling soup shots, we got 'em.

Today will be a crazy day. We're starting later, getting Alistair's walk-up to Dassie's house, for which we need daylight. Then we move into the final dinner scene, where Alistair finds out whether he'll be accepted into "the tribe" or not. We hope to start shooting that at 6 pm and finish by 1 am or 2 am. We shall see. We need to finish as early as possible because tomorrow we need to shoot the last of the daylight scenes at this location, and because we're going late tonight we need to start later tomorrow, and the sun sets well before 5 pm. Yikes.

Anyway, more later...

FILMMAKING Day 3

2006-12-18T06:55:00.000-08:00

There was power at the location! Not only that, but those who had fallen trees in their neighborhood had already done their chainsaw thing and chopped 'em up, so that neighborhood sound wasn't really an issue (outside of the planes that were determined to fly over).

Yesterday went smoothly. It started slow because the hair and makeup for our lead actress took an hour longer than expected. I don't want to diminish that, because the character is Dassie Goldblatt and she is running the cultural boot camp for boys who want to be Jews, so she needs to have a certain look (which we eventually achieved). This morning things should go quicker for hair and makeup, but even so we gave them an earlier call than the rest of the crew so that they can be done by the time we want to start shooting.

I've been quite pleased with the performances. I know it's dangerous to blog during production, when the cast and crew may log on and read this stuff and it may alter attitudes and performances, but oh well. I'm so glad that we rehearsed ahead of time, because there were some performance alterations that we already had a shorthand for and were able to fix on the fly. We got some funny stuff, which is good because this is a comedy. I'm already looking forward to seeing some of these scenes cut together.

We've got a busy day today, with the "soup spill gag" and subsequent clean-up. Off to set...

FILMMAKING Day 2

2006-12-17T06:58:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we got to the location... and there was no power. It was the first day of shooting, and the first test on how flexible we could be. And it was almost all interiors, which meant we would need lights for almost all of it.

There were a couple of shots we could get, though. One was Alistair's walk up to the house, but that scene continues on inside so that wouldn't really save us much time down the line. We did have another shot that we weren't sure where to put in the schedule. In the script, Alistair uses the milchisha (milk) silverware on the fleashicka (meat) meal preparations (you mustn’t mix them, I've learned), and Dassie koshers the utensils by throwing it out the window into a boiling pot. We decided to get the boiling pot shot.

After that, well... we had another location that we could move to, but that meant calling our actress who wasn't scheduled to perform that day. She is an observant Jew and it was Shabbose, but she said she could help us out if we were desperate because of the power situation. She told us we could call her after 11am, but we needed decisions before that. We decided on the company move hoping that she would be able to join us, or else we would have had to move right back.

Turns out she's also quite the partier. Not only was she super hungover, but she had injured her ankle at the end of the night. Luckily in her first scene she was sitting down and didn't need to move much. By the time we got to the scene where she had to walk in, she had healed enough to mask the limp. Maybe the added concentration she needed to overcome her hangover ended up helping her performance, or maybe not. We got two good scenes on a day where we had to scramble. Nice.

Now it's back to the first location. Hopefully the power has returned. One of the workers told us they were shooting to get it back up last night, but who knows...

FILMMAKING Day 1

2006-12-16T07:07:00.000-08:00

The weather in and around Seattle has been crazy lately. I guess that all started with a more warm and beautiful summer than expected (the upside to global warming?), but the winter is making up for that. Just a week and a half ago we had a generous coating of snow (a rare occurance, not counting the accumulation) in time to host a Monday Night Football game, and two nights ago we had a massive windstorm that played havoc with large parts of the Pacific Northwest.

As you may or may not know from an earlier post, I am directing a short film called "Alistair MacLean: Y'did Nefesh", about a booksmart boy who needs find his "Jewish soul" before he can complete his conversion to Judaism and marry the girl of his dreams, so he enrolls in a "cultural boot camp."

Rehearsals have been going very well, and I'm about to head to set. The only thing is, yesterday when we were loading in we discovered that the location has no power. In fact, the whole neighborhood has no power. I wasn't going to worry about it yesterday until I realized just how many neighborhoods don't have power. The location borders on a really rich area of Seattle (Broadmore), so I'm hoping those rich people do what they do best and get served by society first. For once, that would benefit independent filmmaking.

FILM Surviving the Labs

2006-12-14T23:46:00.000-08:00

For the last four years I’ve gone to the Sundance Film Festival, and whenever there was a film that was too saccharine, too coming-of-age, or trying too hard to be both personal and commercial at the same time, I would wonder how it got into the fest. As the credits rolled (if I got that far), I would inevitably see the “Made in cooperation with the Sundance Labs” logo pass by.

I once talked with a guy who had a job projecting films at the Sundance Institute, and for a handful of years he would see each new batch of filmmakers come through the Labs, and would see how the development process would make every film seem like every other coming-of-age film. Everybody meant well and people loved participating in the process, but even the most interesting young filmmakers would end up writing and making that very same Sundance movie as everybody else. Crap. Or maybe the bad ones were the only ones that were able to raise money to go into production.

Things have begun to change. At least, that’s what it seems like. It’s as though they’ve given up on making the next The Brothers McMullan or anything commercial. In a sense, Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know was the first break-out success for the Labs. July, a successful and moderately commercial performance artist, created a vaguely edgy story that took a cheerful look at the budding sexuality of children. Hardly a commercial concept, but successful nonetheless.

Does that indicate a signal change in the focus of the Labs? Hard to say, but I do hold out hope for one of the new batch of folks invited to the labs. I met Braden King in Chicago before he self-distributed his evocative, black-and-white documentary film Dutch Harbor: Where the Sea Breaks its Back, which he toured with a live score by the Boxhead Ensemble. I saw it when it played at the Little Theatre several years ago, and was duly impressed with its moody and assured filmmaking.

King was just chosen to work on Here for the Labs, which is described as such: “Real and imaginary landscapes merge as a solitary satellite mapping engineer charts the Armenian countryside with an expatriate art photographer revisiting her homeland.” That sounds both interesting and uncommercial. I can’t wait to see it...

BLOG Launch!

2006-12-12T07:09:00.000-08:00

Spletz-O-Rama started just a couple of weeks ago, and since then I've been filling it with content. Now I'm ready to share it with the world!

Along with sending the link to everybody in my address book, I'm encouraging my friends at The Stranger's SLOG to link to it. The timing is good for that, too, because I write about being in the audience for The Colbert Report last week (see below), and Dan Savage is going to be on the show tonight.

Most of the posts are about movies, some are about TV, one is about opera (really), and I promise to write more about robots, hobos and Vikings in future posts.

Welcome to my Blog,
Andy

TV The Colbert Report LIVE!

2006-12-11T14:35:00.000-08:00

Look to an earlier post to see how I got here, but on Wednesday (12/6/06) my best gal Heidi and I went to a taping of The Colbert Report in New York City. The studio itself is on 54th Street between 10th and 11th, around the corner from the studio for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

I’ve been to tapings of TV shows before, including The Late Show with David Letterman and Comedy Central’s The Night of Too Many Stars, but this one was different and, I daresay, better. Part of that may be because The Colbert Report is my favorite show on TV, but I think even more may be because the show is still young and fresh and vital and the people who work there seem excited to be doing so.

WALKING THE LINE

The show recommends that you show up around 4:00 to be let in at 6:00 for the 7:00 taping. Heidi had checked the blogs and found out that if you want to be first in line you have to go earlier than that, and since this was the reason for our trip, we HAD to be first in line. We showed up around 2:15. Mission accomplished. It took about 15 or 20 minutes before the next people showed up, and another 15 minutes before the next. The eight of us waited alone until sometime after 3:30, when the line started its natural growth. While we were sitting around, I headed off to DeWitt Clinton Park to use their bathroom, and on my way back I swung by the Daily Show building and saw Jason Jones doing a “walk and talk” outside. Back in line, I saw that the VIP line had started.

At 6:00 we were let into the waiting room, sort of a dank place full of IKEA chairs and two single-occupancy bathrooms. The ticket to the show also said not to bring cameras, but we had cameras and no place to put them. I was a little worried going through the metal detector and bag check, but we threw the camera into Heidi’s purse and got through no problem. As requested, we didn’t take pictures while inside. Other blogs say that if they catch you taking pictures they just come up to you and delete them. On our way in, we got tickets that said what number in line we were: #1 and #2.

INSIDE THE STUDIO

So then they let the VIPs in. Does that mean they get the prime seats? As it turns out, no. We learned that our waiting paid off. They say the studio only fits about 100 people, split between two sets of bleachers. The VIPs were sitting in the back rows of the first set of bleachers, and we sat down at the absolute best seats in the house: front row, in front of the desk, with a great view of the interview set. I guess this is the point where I'm supposed to say the set is smaller than it looks on TV, but it was about the size that I expected.

The warm-up comedian came out and he wasn’t bad. He found out I was first in line and let me get up and touch the desk. Which I did, right above the embedded monitor. Kind of a geeky thrill, but a thrill nonetheless. The warm-up guy became fixated on my Christmas sweater, which he liked, and also this guy in the audience who looked like a male model (not me), who he hated out of jealousy and spite.

Then Colbert bounded out to greet the audience, running across the front row slapping high-fives to everyone and taking questions before he got into character. I don’t remember any of the questions, but I do remember his responses were sharp and quick. I didn’t ask a question because I already had my chance when I interviewed him for Strangers With Candy on the wonderful film blog GreenCine Daily.

Before returning to his desk to start the show, he encouraged us to give him more of that false enthusiasm and clapping. We did, and he turned to me and compared our audience to an audience at a Nazi rally, as though he is fascinated by and maybe even fears he will be consumed by the right wing persona he plays on TV.

THE TAPING

Most audiences for The Colbert Report don’t get to see “the throw” that happens at the end of The Daily Show, where Stewart asks Colbert what’s coming up on his show. Because The Daily Show was running late, we were lucky. When the satellite connected, we could see Stewart, but the audio wasn’t working. Colbert was testing it by saying things like, “You totally sucked up to John Kerry,” and other insults. Finally the audio connected and Colbert admitted to saying unkind things about him.

The banter between Stewart and Colbert was really funny, and felt as though it could have been a scripted bit. Then they went into the scripted bit, where Colbert grabbed a stopwatch and timed himself saying the 50 states… as a way to test the stopwatch (it always takes him 22.3 seconds, and this stopwatch was .1 second off). We didn’t notice at the time, but he kicked himself after the bit for getting through almost all of it before flubbing ‘Wisconsin.’ Stewart didn’t notice either, or else he would have made fun of him for it, I’m sure.

Then the show started.

Funny stuff, as Carson used to say. When heading over to explain the difference to the interview set (they’ve added the life-sized Nativity scene for the holidays, with a space reserved for Baby Jesus and an offer to bumb Deepak Chopra if Baby Jesus wants to be in the show), Colbert flubbed the name of one of the three wise men. They stopped tape, found a cut point, then picked it up again. He flubbed a line again after the Tek Jansen cartoon, so we did that one again, too.

Who was the guest? When we heard that it was the President of New York University we weren’t all that excited. But it turned into a spirited debate about the dangers of “truthiness,” with the NYU President warning about discounting facts in favor of just going from your gut. Colbert disagreed about it being dangerous. Needless to say, Colbert won (because he felt he won).

Another interesting thing about seeing the show live is hearing the music that plays during the commercials. As he meets with his head writers, the music changes from his theme song to alternarock like Green Day and Pearl Jam, played at loud volume, presumably to keep himself pumped up and to keep the energy up.

Watching the show on the Jet Blue flight home, it was cool to see my Christmas sweater visible in the front row on the aisle. Proof positive that I do, indeed, show up on TV.

EGO The Year My Voice Broke

2006-12-11T08:32:00.001-08:00

This from the AP:

MILAN, Italy - Tenor Roberto Alagna marched off the stage at La Scala when the audience booed him during the second performance of Franco Zeffirelli's "Aida." He was replaced seconds later by his understudy, who rushed on wearing jeans.

"I do not deserve this kind of reception," Alagna told La Repubblica newspaper after his early exit from Saturday night's performance.

"What else could I do?" Alagna said in an interview Monday with Italy's Tg5 news. "Did I have to stay there ... until my voice broke?"

And this from ME:

According to Wikipedia (the "truthiest" source of information), Alagna was a busker turned self-taught opera singer who became an international opera celebrity in the 90s. And he's a diva in every sense of the word. I'm not sure why this sort of behavior fascinates me so. I think it's tied into my love of unreliable narrators, and there is nothing more unreliable than somebody narrating their own story (see also Blogs). Outbursts of ego like this show the cracks in the persona. M. Night Shyamalan exhibits some of the same tendencies. And so does Jerry Lewis when he gets serious. And it's always fascinating.

FILM Conflict Money

2006-12-08T15:07:00.000-08:00

The initial reaction of diamond sellers to the new Leonardo DiCaprio movie Blood Diamond was that it may hurt diamond sales in the Christmas season. But that was before they figured out how to spin the publicity that the movie was to generate. Even though "conflict diamonds" make up less than 1% of the market, diamond retailers have begun advertising "conflict-free diamonds," and I'll bet they charge more for them. Once again, the luxury markets have found a way to exploit the problems in Africa. Brilliantly.

TV/LIFE New York City

2006-12-07T07:28:00.000-08:00

Inside this post is an example of how cool my girlfriend is. On Tuesday she had arranged for us to pick up a friend from the airport. "No, wear that jacket," she told me, pointing to my heavier coat. I was tired from last night's Northwest Film Forum holiday party, so I didn't question. Plus, the car was probably pretty chilly.

We pull off toward the cell phone waiting lot, but then continue to the Jet Motel, which is the place we generally park when leaving town for short trips. Finally I question what's going on, and that's when she hands me the card informing me that we were going to New York City on a red-eye to catch a taping of The Colbert Report. It's an early Christmas present. I was in shock.

We flew to New York with no luggage, kicked around for the afternoon before becoming the first ones in line for the show. I'll talk about the taping in another post. Afterward we went and saw the tree at Rockefeller Plaza before heading down to see old friend "Cousin Michael" at Cafe Habana, a delicious SoHo Cuban joint down at Prince and Elizabeth with great Cuban sandwiches and even more delicious corn (it's the cheese they put on it, which is sort of like a Mexican feta). Then we hooked up with more friends for drinks and ended up at Baracuda in Chelsea, where we caught a very entertaining lip-synching drag queen before heading back to the room she booked for the night.

Anyway, Heidi (my girl) totally went all out, and she thought of everything, down to rescheduling the appointments I thought I had. She is the loveliest, coolest, most awesome and thoughtful girlfriend in the world, and I am lucky to be by her side.

FILM Sátantángó

2006-12-05T12:38:00.001-08:00

Lots of people know Béla Tarr because Gus Van Sant name-checked him when he made Gerry a few years back. Others think of him with Theo Angelopoulos and Andrei Tarkovsky as one of the masters of the very long take.

The 7.5 hour, black and white Béla Tarr movie Sátantángó just played the Northwest Film Forum here in Seattle last weekend. I was only able to see half of the movie (just about four hours), due to a prior engagement that evening. That was a damn shame, but I figured half was better than none. I’ll probably watch it start-to-finish on DVD one of these days.

When people talk about this film, they always talk about its length and not its narrative. It’s easier, really, because the story is delivered even more slowly than the shots themselves. At first I thought it was about a group of folks gathering to split some ill-gotten money. It reminded me of a Western set in some frontier where ranchers are more common than cityfolk. In each chapter there is infighting, backbiting, sleeping around or greed, sometimes all of the above, and these genre elements spice up the movie, energizing even those long shots of people walking in the rainy, muddy, Hungarian countryside.

But in those first four hours, I never really did know how everybody was connected. I did get a little sleepy during the drunken doctor segment, and may have missed something crucial. On reading some reviews after, I discovered the folks are splitting the proceeds from the sale of their collective farm or something. And I did like the parallel storytelling, where every so often we would see a scene from a different character’s point of view, which is something that Van Sant did very well in Elephant.

Of course, Sátantángó is not just about plot. The opening shot could be a metaphor for the whole film (we are all animals in a herd following our basest instincts, perhaps?), where the static camera captures cows exiting a barn, with a slight pan left to capture the stud humping one. Then as the cows start walking off-camera left (something like four minutes into the shot) and the camera pans to watch them. THAT’S when the super-long dolly shot begins, all part of something like a 10-minute take.

I know it may not sound interesting to action movie fans, content-wise, but the quality of the black-and-white photography reminded me older films in a very nice way, and it's hard to imaging the cows being better choreographed, which begs the question of whether it was God or Béla Tarr directing them.

Some people get tired of Tarr’s miserablism, and I can understand that. Nothing seems destined to work out and it looks like everybody will end up unhappy. But because I looked at it as genre fiction rather than a reflection of Hungarian society and moods (and the end of Communism, as some have said), the ugly-on-the-inside characters didn’t bother me so much.

I actually found Sátantángó as stimulating as a good Hollywood action film, albeit at a different pace. Instead of impossible actions cut together to look real, there were impossible-looking shots that shifted halfway through thanks to a surprise (to me) dolly move that would change the look and the feel of the film. If that makes sense.

One of the last bits I saw before I had to leave was the semi-tangential story of the little girl and the cat which totally reminded me of Bresson's Mouchette, complete with Eastern European animal cruelty. That little girl turned in an amazing, occassionally hard to watch, and ultimately moving performance.

Heck, maybe the movie is uneven, but it’s still worth seeing. I'm totally looking forward to watching the whole damn thing, straight through, whether it's on DVD or at another rare theatrical screening.

FILM The Queen / Marie Antoinette

2006-12-05T10:38:00.000-08:00

Let Them Eat Popcorn!

The art houses have turned themselves over to not just one but two movies about European monarchies. Stephen Frears’ The Queen and Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette both look behind the royal curtain into the everyday lives of women of extraordinary privilege. Though the Queens in question are very different in attitude, they make the same mistake in not trying to understand the subjects they rule and, in so doing, nearly destroy the monarchies that they were supposed to nurture.

Of the two, The Queen is more accessible and, some would say, more successful. Helen Mirren plays England’s Queen Elizabeth II, reigning over a country that has given political power to its parliament but maintains its monarchy out of a sense of pride and perhaps nostalgia. If the shift to irrelevance has been gradual over her 50+ years as the Queen of England, the perception came to a head after the death of Princess Diana, “the People’s Princess.”

In a role that could have come across as cold and would have run counter to the movie’s eventual message, Mirren gives a stunning performance of the type that normally wins an Oscar nomination. She somehow manages to show the human side of a woman who believes her public persona should reflect a strict adherence to the pomp and circumstance of her position. Meanwhile, a young Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) has become Prime Minister by playing off of his ability to speak to the populace, a lesson the Queen should learn but doesn’t want to. When she finally starts to notice the people taking an active dislike to her refusal to mourn Princess Diana (who was already out of the royal family and therefore irrelevant), she begrudgingly starts to take the advice of the popular Prime Minister in listening to and acknowledging the grief of her subjects. It not only saves the monarchy, but shows personal growth too.

Meanwhile, over in 18th Century France, Marie Antoinette follows the story of an Austrian Archduchess who is married off to the future King of France at age 14, soon to become Queen. Directed by Sophia Coppola, heir apparent to the Coppola filmmaking kingdom (unless brother Roman finally makes a follow-up to his underrated CQ), the movie has little interest in politics or history. Instead, Ms. Coppola has crafted a coming-of-age story about an upper-class woman who lives in a prison of societal boundaries and etiquette rules, without the confines of monetary limits. Some have suspected that the movie is autobiographical, about her desire to break out of the indulgent laziness of her gilded cage, just like Lost in Translation reflected her dissatisfaction in her marriage to director Spike Jonze and prophesized their divorce, but through all the period detail it’s hard to find an objective parallel between this movie and her life.

I have to admit, however, it is incredibly difficult to identify with the plight of the young Marie Antoinette, considering how arranged marriages have gone out of style and how foreign the customs of the French royals seem to us now. But if you consider moving from the Austrian court to the French court as a move from one high school to another, then the spirit of the movie makes more sense, at least in the first half or so. At first it seems like the movie is going to be about how the young Queen adapts to and overcomes the strange rituals of Versailles, which gives her a definite underdog vibe. But as she settles into being Queen and starts to take the rituals and privileges for granted, that underdog aspect falls away and it becomes harder and harder to identify with her, or even care at all about her.

Just as Marie Antoinette never really considered the plight of her subjects until they showed up as a mob to capture and behead her, so too does it seem like Ms. Coppola never considered her audience and instead indulged in the creation of whatever images and pseudo-autobiographical situations that she could think of, audience be damned. She ended up capturing lovely and engrossing visuals, but with a pace that is slow and observant, which of course led to a mob of critics to call for her own cinematical beheading. In The Queen, Helen Mirren’s Queen Elizabeth sees the error in ignoring public opinion and changes her attitude, leading to a happy ending, the survival of the monarchy, and nearly universal positive reviews. In Marie Antoinette, Kirsten Dunst’s Queen of France never apologizes for her actions or appetites, and ends up with her head on the chopping block, and this divided critics into love-it or hate-it camps.

The Queen is a very good movie, solid and satisfying and well worth seeing. On the other hand, Marie Antoinette may not be as good for you, as it is lighter and full of sweet visuals with little more than spongy substance underneath. Here’s the kicker. Though I think The Queen is a better movie, what with that British struggle against repression, Marie Antoinette is the movie I crave to see a second time.

TV Downsizing The Office

2006-12-02T09:43:00.000-08:00

It's nice that the NBC version of the British series The Office has left those "I refuse to believe that an American version of a cult show I love" in the dust. I mean, people complained when Steptoe and Son was being imported, but Sanford and Son left that show in the dust too.

Like my friend Bruce has mentioned (not here, but in conversation), as an American it's nice to understand the references. When the workers talk about rap stars and American TV and cultural celebrities, to me and my American ears it's much more clear than the original show's references to soccer stars and washed up stars from British sitcoms that never made it here.

Anyway, when Jim went to the other branch office and suddenly there were a whole bunch more cast members, I was curious and skeptical. Sure, the new office was more like a "real" office than the heightened reality of the office we've gotten used to, but could that carry a comedy? We didn't have time to find out before the two offices merged into the Scranton branch. I became even more skeptical. Would this really happen, even in the world of the sitcom, where the (mostly) unseen corporate office is smart about their buisiness decisions? And why haven't any of the new people been added to the opening credits?

Last Thursday, when yet another member of the "real" office quit because of Michael's inane and rambling managerial style, I realized that the corporate office (within the show) is smart verging on brilliant.

Instead of firing people and paying severance, they merged them into the Scranton branch to cause the employees to quit on their own accord. Luckily for us, those who survive this initiation will be the least normal, most myopic, best characters. Welcome, Andy!

And may the best characters join the original cast in the opening credits.

FILMMAKING Alistair MacLean

2006-11-30T21:30:00.000-08:00

About a month ago, maybe more, my buddy Matt Levinthal asked me if I wanted to direct a short film. Two friends of his, Meredith Binder and Ian Stone, had written and were producing a script that they were going to star in but didn't also want to direct. Their first director had to pull out for medical reasons, and I was the next obvious choice. After all, it's a Jewish conversion comedy and I grew up Lutheran in the WASPy Chicago suburbs.

The movie is called "Alistair MacLean: Y'did Nefesh," and no, it's not about the Scottish author who wrote The Guns of Navarone. It's about a booksmart guy who needs to find his y'did nefesh, his "Jewish soul." We've been rehearsing, we've been fine-tuning the script, and we've been filling out the crew. The movie starts shooting mid-December and I'll keep you updated.

FILM re:Volver

2006-11-28T17:58:00.000-08:00

Caught the new Pedro Almodóvar movie this last weekend. Enjoyed it. Some people know how to photograph Penelope Cruz right, and Pedro is one of them.

What struck me in watching Volver (loose translation: To Return) is that Almodóvar may be the most gentle and is probably the best Hitchcock acolyte working today. M. Night Shamyalan has gotten a lot of attention for his cameos and cinematic quoting of the old master, but Almodóvar does a much better job in one very important area: Music.

The only time Shyamalan got the music right was in the opening credits of Signs, where the text combined with a Bernard Herrmann-styled theme to create suspense where there previously was none (I think it was Signs, but maybe it was Unbreakable). Almodóvar gets the Hitchcockian music right throughout Volver. When Cruz finds the dead body and decides not to go to the authorities, the music kicks in to both root her on and warn us that she’s doing something wrong and may get caught at any moment. And then the doorbell rings. She answers the door with blood on her neck (not her own). She blames the blood on “female trouble,” which pulls the movie back into Almodóvar’s other notable genre, which is the female-oriented Sirkian melodrama (for lack of a better term).

That brings up my one criticism of the film. Those two genres don’t really fit together very well here. It’s great to see his women bonding and dealing with the returning mother (one "return"). It is also fun to see how the crime (and the history of the crimes that preceded the crime) also come back (the other "returns"). But they are very different movies. They’re both good movies, however, so I’ll cut him some slack.

Introductions and Influential Movies

2006-11-26T16:42:00.000-08:00

I was sort of dreading this first post. There's an internal pressure to sum things up, to "set the tone" for the whole blog, to get it right. Screw that. But I will play one of those introductory games that you get every now and again on blogs.

The game? "What movie changed everything in how you looked at films?"

For me that would be PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. I suppose I should credit the Medved brothers for making me aware of it in their GOLDEN TURKEY AWARDS book, but whatever the reason, my friend Brian White taped it when it played late night on Channel 9 in Chicago. And we watched it. Sure, it was "bad" compared to empty polish of most commercial releases -- this was, after all, the '80s, when producers and packaged films ruled the roost, and everybody wanted to make their films "in the style of Spielberg" -- but there was something so surreal and watchable about this Edward D. Wood, Jr. masterpiece. We started by laughing at the movie, but after repeated viewings I started to suspect we were laughing with it.

We loved it, starting with the way Criswell bends time in his framing monologue, moving from "Future events such as these" to asking "Who's to say these things didn't take place?" (Forgive me for paraphrasing.) I remember questioning the bad day-for-night utilized in the stock footage driving sequences when they traveled to and from the cemetery, counting the days that passed if it wasn't really supposed to be night.

Along with the wonderfully twisted exposition, I think it was spotting the shadows of the tombstones on the studio's wall that was nothing short of a revelation. Here we could see that this was a set, that the actors were just playing along, that this was a created and obviously fictional reality. This is when I first saw how deconstructing a film could make it richer. We watched that movie dozens of times on crappy VHS, fast-forwarding over commercials. Each time the movie got richer.

People like to say PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE is an accidental masterpiece. I like to think of it as an intentional masterpiece. Even if every bit of evidence points to Ed Wood being just as bumbling and driven as Johnny Depp played him in Tim Burton's endearing ED WOOD, I like to imagine Wood had complete control. I mean, can you imagine anybody making that movie on purpose? That, to me, would be a complete genius.

Welcome to my blog.

-Andy