Monthly Archive for February, 2009

I know, I know, I haven’t posted in awhile. I should warn you people before you start making movies: this crap makes you kind of a monster. I don’t have time for this “internet” thing much lately, I’m scampering around like a madman, trying to get this dinky little five minute piece off the ground. Imagine a theatrical release.

So “Slumdog Millionaire” pretty much destroyed the Oscars, didn’t it? Fair enough, I suppose, it was a great movie. I’m still not pleased with how “The Dark Knight” was treated, but in all fairness, most of the Best Picture nominees were really outstanding motion pictures, so it really comes down to a matter of opinion. I won’t lie to you, though: I’m not sure “Milk” or “Frost/Nixon” were totally innocent of simply being the right genre for Academy recognition. Both are great films, but little that they do hasn’t been done before. Tell me the truth, Dear Reader, how many David versus Goliath political thrillers can you name? Probably at least a couple. How about inspiriational biopics about a flawed but charismatic social revolutionary? Yup, you can probably count those out on two hands.

And there’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, since both movies are so well done, but we have to consider that there are other films, also crafted expertly, which defy the genre landscape around them. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Slumdog Millionaire,” both rightly nominated, almost defy a categorization; they are simply stories. “The Dark Knight” is, as you know, a revolutionary piece of cinema, one that has already had a potent effect on what’s expected from comic book superheroes. No one before Chris Nolan has ever ended a comic book movie with the hero absorbing the sins of a friend onto himself and escaping into the night a disgrace, the love of his life murdered, his enemy alive and well. No one has had the bad guy win so many fights. No one has turned an action sequence into an argument about human nature. No one has unblinkingly depicted their superhero with shades of gray, willing to cross ethical lines, going too far in the name of something good.

My worry is, the Academy is no longer an effective barometer of the cinematic landscape. Too often, we are forced to look back and laugh at their ineptitutde, their inability to see the movies that actually mattered. These people handed statues to art house dramas while “Star Wars” and Martin Scorsese flew right over the plate, no one swinging at them. I think they should seriously consider how stupid it makes them look (particularly because they are definitely not stupid) to insist on genre favoritism. Did you know that “Rebecca” is the only Alfred Hitchcock film to win Best Picture? The year he made “Rear Window,” which was not nominated, the statue went to “On the Waterfront.” Not the worst decision ever, but I think any honest appraisal of enduring legacy must favor Alfred over Elia Kazan. What were the other nominees that year? Go look them up, because I guarantee that you probably haven’t seen or heard of any of them. Same thing for “Psycho,” which any idiot can tell you is one of the most important movies ever made. You don’t even want to know how many Oscars Stanley Kubrick, who is repeatedly called the greatest director of all time, was given. I’ll give you a hint: less than one.

These are not little oversights, people, and neither was “The Dark Knight.”

But let’s be fair, there’s also been plenty of good work on the Academy’s part as well. I think they sensed that “Juno,” while great, was a little bit more of a fad than anything else, so they went with “No Country for Old Men,” which has already shown signs of enduring. I’m really impressed that they nominated Sigourney Weaver for her stunning work in “Aliens,” and I’m willing to allow that she didn’t win in light of the fact that she was up against Marlee Matlin (even though I’d still give it to her). Many kudos for acknowledging Kevin Kline’s brilliance in “A Fish Called Wanda” as well; that kind of deft perceptiveness, the ability to see the really great work that all the accolades sometimes miss, is sorely lacking elsewhere.

Anyway, enough about that, let’s talk about something else.

The “Watchmen” movie is coming soon, and I’m very excited. I’ve watched some of the clips they’ve released online, though, and I must say I have some dire concerns. My main worry is that director Zack Snyder is going to stay too close to the dialogue from the graphic novel. This is a mistake. Dialogue is elastic, it needs to grow and shape itself based on its surroundings, and stuffing canned conversations into these actors’ mouths would be the wrong move. The best way to adapt a story from one medium to the next is to be honest about what needs to change. Yes, the dialogue in “Watchmen” the novel works, but “Watchmen” the movie must be constructed as a separate entity, a creature with its own needs. If I were Zack, I would take as little as I possibly could from the worn pages of that seminal comic, because that stuff just wasn’t written to be spoken aloud. Alan Moore does not attempt a naturalistic manner in any of his characters, and I fear that transcribing him into a literal cinematic narrative will create ridiculousness. Roger Ebert coined the idea of “clang” moments (or something like that), which are things that noisily yank a viewer out of the narrative stream. Few things “clang” more audibly than actors who are forced to garble some three syllable word that they know their character probably wouldn’t say.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d adhere to the plot of “Watchmen” very closely, I’d even try to maintain the order of the scenes. But not the dialogue, let that crap air out, write it from scratch. Your audience will thank you, and your movie will feel fresh and distinct. The highest honor you can do your source material is to give it new life in a different medium. Ask Stanley Kubrick, who had more success adapting literature into film than almost anyone. Here’s a guy who successfully translated “A Clockwork Orange” and “The Shining” and “2001: A Space Odyssey” into film classics. How did he do it? He let them change. Good stories will want to change as they find new homes, they need to.

I’m worried that Snyder, who is probably still riding the wave of Robert Rodriguez’s canonical adaptation of “Sin City,” is going to balk at this advice on a philosophical level. He’s going to ignore me, not because my points are invalid, but because his value system demands a reverent, slavish recreation. He got where he is because he appeased the internet forums, the rabid fanboys, and they insist upon the strictest kind of rigor; it’s the same human psychology that led zealous Jews to memorize whole chunks of the Torah thousands of years ago. For his movie’s sake, I hope I’m wrong. You don’t want to waste two years of your life creating a movie that just makes everyone read the comic book. If “Watchmen” is a classic, and it is, then it deserves a loyal but unique incarnation in a new dimension.

That’s my opinion on that.

Here we are, yet again, gathered around a dumbfounded guest, assaulting them with options, demanding an authoritative statement of preference. Last week it was poor Billy, accosted with dozens of house parties, beach trips, and tourist locations, and this time it’s Corelyn’s mother, who is similarly bombarded. We’re already most of the way through her visit, and it feels like she’s been here for two seconds; it’s amazing how fast these things fly by. There’s a tremendous amount to catch up on. As usual, expect me to slant and modify the story to focus on the things I find interesting.

On Thursday evening, I held my first audition, which was for a directing exercise I’ll be shooting next weekend. Unlike anything I’ve done in the past, my auditionees were all members of the Screen Actors Guild, many of them proudly displaying recurring roles on projects like “Scrubs” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.” Most of them were very pleasant, receptive people and I enjoyed working with them. One gentleman (whose resume was actually impressive) elected to randomly begin screaming lines in mid-sentence, take twenty second pauses for no discernible reason, and caress my director of photography’s wrists romantically even though his character was supposed to be addressing a male. It put me on edge, but I knew from my classmates by that point that a certain amount of weirdness is just part of the audition process.

After scoring a quick celebratory drink from the USC Bar (which is equipped with a beer pong table for students…I guess they prefer we drink where they can see us), I caught the bus home and met up with my wife and newly-arrived mother-in-law. After spending some time together, they both elected to turn in fairly early. This presented a problem for me, since the only significant space left in the apartment was the linen closet, so I made my escape. Against my better judgment, I drove out to the Grove and caught the midnight showing of “Friday the 13th,” a remake of the old “classic” from the 1980s.

I’m not sure why I did this. “Friday the 13th” as a series of films is single-handedly responsible for the corruption of the “Halloween” franchise. When Carpenter’s low-budget masterpiece was released, it was known for its white-knuckle terror and ominous, almost elemental villain. But the parade of rip-offs that followed—the original “Friday the 13th” up at the head of the pack with a waving baton in its hand—were more interested in killing off horny teenagers, shrewdly realizing the shock value potential. By the time “Halloween II” came around, trash like “Friday the 13th” was so successful that it began to rip-off its rip-offs; an utterly pathetic display of a mighty giant reduced to the level of peons. There has never been another really substantive entry in Michael Myers’ history.

So what drove me into the bed of my hated enemy? Several things. Firstly, the sad memory of Rob Zombie’s unforgivable manhandling of John Carpenter in his “Halloween” remake. Rob Zombie, by then, had made several films about white trash who like to kill people, and being a creative succubus with no potential for original thought (I probably don’t mean that, I’m just angry), he decided to superimpose this motif into a story that did not want it. Watching him try to mate an elemental, Hitchcockian horror classic with worthless, exploitative torture porn was almost funny. Sitting in the theater, I wished to God they could have given the project to someone who just wanted to ape the material, someone who would’ve just given me a by-the-numbers procedural like “H20,” because that I could have recovered from. What I got instead was like seeing a dance number break out in a Jason Bourne film, it was scarring.

So, when they handed the reigns to Marcus Nispel, an accomplished music video director who updated “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” with frightening but unlovable results, I gambled that this man would put me through the paces without getting in way, and that was my second reason. I turned out to be correct. “Friday the 13th” is a shallow, meaningless horror flick, but it looks good, there’s a surprising amount of comedy, teenagers get chased, and there isn’t any torture. (shrug) You broke even, Marcus. It occasionally got too gory for me, and the sex scenes were pointless (as usual), but the more I reflect on the experience, the more I’m kind of okay with what I got. It got the job done, if that’s what you’re looking for.

And here’s the third reason I went to see it: there was a good chance it was going to be superior to the original, and it was. You see, the first “Friday the 13th” is a piece of junk, almost worthless by any standard, and that makes the idea of re-doing it somewhat intelligent. If a well-remembered movie is actually deeply flawed, then a remake is suddenly an inspired idea that people can get behind. There was plenty of potential for something really interesting, and although they cashed in on almost none of it, the filmmakers did at least make a competent “boo!” movie with a couple of decent set pieces. One sequence, a personal favorite of mine any time someone uses it, involves our virginal (of course) heroes spying on Jason as he lumbers towards his house, wondering if he’ll catch them in their eavesdropping. This scene employs long, unbroken POV shots where we watch our monstrous villain stomp by us, and the thrill comes from knowing that we’ve somehow gotten the upper hand. How long will it last? Can we keep quiet? Another involves a boat in broad daylight, and yet is one of the more effective scenes in the movie. Notice a commonality between these examples? Neither employs pop-outs. Yes, surprising your audience is an important technique, but its use should be sparing and carefully orchestrated, so that suspenseful scenes like the ones I’ve described will hit with more force. “Friday the 13th,” of course, has a few too many pop-outs, but oh well.

The more I recall the experience of “Friday the 13th,” the more fond I am of it. The characters were non-existent and the exploitative elements were unnecessary, but like any good B movie, it charms you by knowing what it is and delivering faithfully. It also helps that one of the lead actors was in the audience with me that night, and there was a macabre enjoyment in the raucous cheers he received as Jason dispatched him onscreen.

Moving right along…

On Corelyn’s birthday, we all visited an absolutely delicious Indian restaurant called “Electric Karma.” The Indian people may know how to make chicken delicious better than anyone alive. The next day, we finally paid a visit to the Getty Museum, and spent a long time lingering in an exhibit called “Dialogue Among Giants,” which centered on American black-and-white photographer from the early twentieth century named Carleton Watkins. His speciality was the West, he loved shooting Yosemite, California, and mining towns nearby. What we saw was breathtaking to say the least; as a person whose line of work involves photography, I found my own talents quite dwarfed. Watkins’ photographs can draw the eye with an almost maniacal precision, creating a deeply emotional experience out of a simple landscape.

After that, we headed over to a fascinating exhibit called “Captured Emotions” about baroque painting in 17th century Bologna. This was an amazing time period: the great masters of the art form had died off, and the world was beginning to believe that painting was a thing of the past, when a sudden explosion of new talent redefined the medium. My personal favorite was “Joseph and Potipher’s Wife,” a lusty piece which captures a moment of heated temptation between the titular Biblical figures. There were several paintings on display that chose this scene, but most of them were reserved and distant. Carlo Cignani, on the other hand, chose to get in much closer with his characters, and to amplify the sexual energy of the moment, and I felt that this most honestly depicted the temptations of the flesh. “This is how it feels to be tempted,” I thought to myself. Very moving.

Anyway, after that we returned to the apartment for a delicious meal prepared by Corelyn and her mom, and we watched Danny Boyle’s (who directed “Slumdog”) “Millions,” about a young boy who discovers a fortune in cash laying around. All in all, I thought the movie was decent at best, but I wasn’t blown away, and I thought it meandered off point several times.

Anyway, I think that gets you more or less up to date. We’re off to go see “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” at the Arclight, which I’m very much looking forward to, as I have not managed to see it yet. My opinions will be forthcoming.

And so begins February, the hectic month of non-stop visitors. The first wave is boarding his flight out of LAX as we speak, which is too bad, because it was perfectly lovely having William here. He arrived on Friday around noon, and even though a class commitment had originally conspired to keep me from scooping him up at the airport, my schedule shifted around unexpectedly and the timing ended up pretty much perfect. This was much to the chagrin of one Becca Lear, who had fiendishly devised a scheme to abscond with William for the afternoon while I languished in an editing seminar, but alas, the righteous prevailed. Later that night, as I received stern lectures about “hogging the Billy,” I told Rebecca that there was some saying I couldn’t precisely recall about “snoozing” and “losing.”

Bill and I descended upon my Xbox 360 within a few hour’s time, which is wholly appropriate to our friendship, but certain wives were forced to cross their arms and tap their feet impatiently at this. Corelyn proved herself eternally the good sport this weekend, patiently allowing us to meander about in our own silly way, witholding comment at all times. Still, I can’t help but feel that Billy’s mistake is to give people like Cor and Becca, who prefer some level of human interaction in their recreational activities, far too much hope. He must learn, as I have, to gaze longingly into Ingmar Bergman film on a Friday night, just as everyone’s about to go out, and maintain a real consistency with this policy.

Some of you may know that the next entry in the “Halo” series is, in fact, an RTS (which is basically a video game version of “Risk” on a smaller scale with more micro-managing) called “Halo Wars,” built by the now defunct Ensemble Studios specifically for the 360. There are many reasons to be skeptical here: RTSes have never worked on consoles (you need to have the sensitivity of a mouse, and a control stick just doesn’t cut it), this is the first time anyone but the venerable Bungie has even touched anything “Halo,” Ensemble Studios was disbanded right after the game finished, etc. Nonetheless, curiosity makes ill-fated cats of us all, so Billy and I downloaded the free demo off of Xbox Live.

At first, I frowned gently. Okay, sure, the presentation was pure “Halo,” and the graphics were great, but Ensemble had clearly done nothing to alleviate the rubbery, molasses-slow response time of a control stick on a real-time battlefield. You have to understand: RTSes require leaping around a gigantic map from an isometric viewpoint, selecting a single, tiny unit from a mass of them, and sending him to an exact point, all within three seconds. With a mouse this is easy, but pushing a stick with your thumb is never going to be precise enough. Many developers have tried vainly to climb this mountain, and the only success so far has been “Tom Clancy’s EndWar,” because it uses voice command. When I found that my camera was sliding around with the same mushy clumsiness that had vanquished “Command and Conquer 3,” I began to give up hope.

But alas.

I had forgotten something very important: “Halo Wars” was designed only for the Xbox 360, and that makes it unique. Any other strategy game on any console was originally a PC game, because that damned control stick keeps new IPs from growing in the soil, and that means the core of the experience was built with a very different gameplay rhythm in mind. I also forgot that Ensemble Studios made “Age of Empires,” have been doing nothing but strategy games ever since, and are as good at RTSes as anyone alive. So of course, this gaggle of geniuses quickly identified that the problem was not the control stick, but the pace of a PC game mixed with a control stick. If you construct the entire experience, from how large the units are on the screen and how fast they move right down to map layouts and control schemes, with a specific console in mind, you can set the game to a pace that a control stick can easily manage. The funny thing is, you don’t have to make it slower than a PC strategy game, you just have to make it different.

Within about twenty minutes, Billy and I were hooting and hollering on my couch, so consumed by the sheer mastery of design on display that we forgot all else. “Halo Wars” is, in many ways, much simpler than most games of its ilk: you only need to collect one resource, buildings have predetermined slots where they can be constructed, and units can be commanded with only one or two buttons. But the more you play it, the more you realize that Ensemble really just trimmed the fat; they’ve been doing this long enough to know that it doesn’t really add that much to the experience to force you to collect lumber and gold, or assign individual units to gather resources, or to plant a building in some random spot. What’s left is nothing but main course, and what a meal it is. “Halo Wars” is, on a very basic level, fun. I don’t know how “fun” is accomplished exactly, but I know that it’s quite difficult, much like comedy.

So Mr. Cover and I vanished into this thing for hours, both on Friday and Saturday. It was like a tractor beam. We still managed to find time to venture out to a night club for some person’s birthday who I do not know. Everyone seemed to have a nice time, even though there were a ton of people we didn’t know, but it wasn’t really an earth-shattering time. Clubbing is a thing I only need to do once or twice a month, because many of the times it’s attempted, I think we find ourselves spending a lot of money, wearing a lot of uncomfortable clothes, bumping into a lot of people, nearly losing our hearing because they play the music so damned loud…and not really having that great a time. Sometimes it works, and when it does that’s wonderful, but I don’t really care to beat a dead horse every weekend just so I can be more like the people in “Gossip Girl.”

On Saturday, after more “Halo Wars,” we grabbed some lunch, met up with the sisters Lear, and took a tour of USC, trading off leader duties between myself and Rachel. I had been deliberately not telling Billy that the entrance to Norris Theater contains a gigantic exhibit called the “Sinatra Hall,” filled to the brim with memorobilia, so when he gazed upon it and flipped out like a six-year-old, I was quite delighted. Among other things, there was a picture of ol’ Blue Eyes sitting next to JFK, whom I am quite fond of, and we both geeked out. I later remarked, “It’s weird that I like JFK, but I’m going into entertainment, and you like Sinatra, but you’re going into politics.” Billy was amused.

We take all of our guests to El Cholo, the legendary LA Mexican restaurant, and even though Mr. Cover is not a man who admires tequila, he found himself with a margarita firmly in his pasty, Scott-Irish hands. We also ventured to the Arclight Theater, where we, true to the “Arclight experience,” missed our showing by two minutes and were refused admitance. We resolved to sit at the bar and drown our sorrows until about an hour later, when the next showing ran. Billy introduced me to a lager made by monks in some monastary somewhere called “Chimay,” and I can safely say it’s one of the best beers I’ve ever had. We then shuffled into “Push,” which had one really great telekenetic gunfight, and other than that was total crap. I remarked on the way out of the theater that the script needed three or four more drafts, because there were plenty of interesting threads that just hadn’t baked in the oven long enough. In particular, I wished the movie had focused more on “Pushers,” people who could implant false memories in your mind, and the ramifications of that. I loved the idea of spending a whole movie with a relationship between two characters, then finding out that the entire memory was fake, and how that would affect the audience. “Push” flirted with that idea, but didn’t have the balls to go through with it.

This morning, we had time only for breakfast before I had to deposit Billy at LAX for his flight. We sorely miss him already. Bring on the next round.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4gJJrhT7MY

Watch that first. Then we’ll talk.

You know…it’s getting a little carried away, this whole Barack Obama thing. I’m seriously waiting for Rolling Stone to do a cover story that reads, “Obama Turns White House Water Cooler into Wine.” Maybe I’m hyper-sensitive about it because I just got through listening to eight years of lambasting Dubya unfairly (in my opinion), but every time I look at any magazine anywhere, all I’m seeing is Messianic pictures of this guy waving at crowds, with big text under his face reading, “Hope” or “Change” or “Why He Will Cure AIDS While Also Beating Up Osama bin Laden.” I mean, I know newly elected Presidents get a little bit of a honeymoon, but this is something else entirely; we’re kind of handing this guy the reigns of public opinion for free, and it makes me feel a little gross.

It’s not just that he hasn’t earned this kind of adoration, but make no mistake that he absolutely has not. He earned it in the campaign, but that’s meaningless now, because he’s the leader of the free world and he has to earn a very new kind of respect. We should all be standing quietly around, faces calm, waiting to soberly analyze his first move, and instead we’re jumping up and down like he’s Elvis and feeding him lines. I mean, guys…he hasn’t really done anything yet, why are we all so pleased with him already? Doesn’t he have to, like, prove himself or something? What if Barack turns out to be a terrible effing President? How stupid will we feel when we look up the National Archives and read about this crap?

Or, even worse, what if this guy is a really good President, and we don’t recognize it? A fundamental law of human nature is that what goes up must come down. Eventually, we are going to wake up from the drunken stupor and start asking the Oval Office, “What have you done for me lately?” Eventually, all this patting him on the back is going to evolve into a cynical holding out of our empty hands, and if that happens, it won’t matter if he’s doing a good job, because no President could possibly change things as quickly or drastically as we would require to be satisfied. If we keep acting like Barack Obama is going to cure cancer, eventually we’re going to start getting pissed off that he hasn’t yet.

Obama captures our imagination, and I get that, but I think the free pass we’re handing him is dangerous, both for ourselves and for him. Our endless adoration now may prevent him from really distinguishing himself on his own steam, and that would be the greatest tragedy of all. I have a hard time believing this man will be bad at his job—anyone who snags the Democratic nomination before he even completes his first term in the Senate must know something I don’t—but I have a very easy time imagining that the kind of miraculous transformation we’re expecting is a fairy tale that will drown out any real accomplishments he might have.

Also, seeing the whole country swoon and fall over for this guy is a little un-American, we’re supposed to keep a cool head about stuff like this. The worst offender is “Saturday Night Live,” which has inexplicably dulled the razor of its satire for this man. Their job is to lampoon and ridicule sitting Presidents, and they have always maintained that they mock both sides equally, and yet the sketches on Obama are (I kid you not) actually complimenting him. One of them “makes fun” of the fact that Barack likes to resolve conflict peacefully; ooooh, burn! You basically tore Sarah Palin down for every word she spoke, and she took it with grace, but you can’t find a single ridiculous thing about a Junior Senator whose middle name is “Hussein,” was married by a preacher who blames the US for 9/11, completely flubbed his inauguration, and may be among the most inexperienced men we’ve ever put in the White House. Nice work, you partisan (*)&*&S(*@#!!@.

Ahem.

My point is, I don’t like to see our objectivity break down. I didn’t like it when we rallied against Bush and blamed him for every mosquito bite anyone got, and I don’t like it when we bow down like our new President is some kind of golden calf that Aaron fashioned while Moses wasn’t looking. We do a disservice to this man by glorifying him before he’s done anything, and we need to cut it out. If you sincerely believe this guy could be a great President, and I do, then the best thing you can do for him is shut the hell up until he walks the walk, so that when he does we can all call it like it is. Right now, we’re creating an emotional environment where no one will be able to tell what Barack actually did for another fifty years.

God bless “South Park” for speaking the truth in that clip (albeit in hyperbolic fashion). I’ve found in my time watching the show that they do that a lot more than you might imagine. Unlike a lot of the overwhelmingly liberal entertainment industry, Trey and Matt will go after any target that deserves it, and I admire that.

Hello again, Beloved Reader. I’m sitting around in the USC library, killing time before my next class, and I thought I’d say hello. There are many things to talk about, as always, but only precious little time.

First! I did not get to watch the Super Bowl. It was tragic. You may or may not know, Dear Reader, that I love the Super Bowl; I even loved it when I knew nothing about the sport. There’s something…exciting about such a gigantic, American athletic competition and I just get swept up in it. I love watching great showdowns between worthy opponents.

But alas, this year I had work to do which I had put off for too long, so I committed myself to my computer while Corelyn went off and attended a Super Bowl party consisting entirely of women…which must have been interesting.

Anyway, the point is, don’t call me and be like, “Wasn’t it a great game?” Cause I’ll hang up on you.

Secondly, the search for a church out here goes on. We attended a charming one called Brentwood Presbyterian last sunday, and came out of it with many positive things to say, but my wife is committed to finding a congregation closer to where we live; she feels a real calling to be involved in her surroundings, and I admire that. Personally, the churches near us are all very different from the kind I’m used to, so it freaks me out a little, but I think if we find a vibrant community, I’ll come to enjoy it.

The keyboard on this computer has really high keys, and it’s giving me carpal tunnel typing this, so I’m going to peace out. Goodbye, Dear Reader.