Maximum Randomness

I Will Always Hate Christmas...

2011-12-28T17:37:00.000-08:00

...and while tragically post-hip microbes will peg their skinny jeans and pretend to hate the Black Keys for selling out (while overlooking how damn fine "El Camino" really is), I have a legitimate bitch against Christmas: my grandpa died on Christmas Day, 1988.

My wife has been telling me (literally for years) that my Papa wouldn't want his death to forever haunt my Yuletide joyousness. He'd want me to get over it already and enjoy Christmas again... which apparently means pretending to like Christmas music (I still don't understand how people can listen to it and claim to enjoy that ear-dissolving swill with a straight face), learning to like eggnog (it's nasty, even with brandy), and just having fun!

Fuck Christmas... and while we're at it, fuck fun. We celebrate the hypothetical birth of a mythical half-man deity by embracing a grab-bag of pagan rituals while slathering the whole thing with a healthy sheen of good old American materialism. My birthday is alarmingly close to Thanksgiving (and in 2012, the two days will be one in the same... which means that while I'll have the day off, I'll miss out on the pleasure of forgetting to take the day off and acting like a martyr at work. Always fun.), so every year around November 15, I start to withdraw and shut down.

I know this batch of navel-gazing goo is precisely the kind of boo-hoo bullshit loathed by any of you Hypothetical Readers (who actually read my blog - I have come to realize that a great deal of the views I receive are directly related to the number of Google hits on "dark superman" or "superman vs batman," since Google helpfully tracks this shit for no good reason... all of this of course tracking back to this blog entry; I almost expect DC Comics to shut down my blog because those pictures are getting free traffic). I know we all have our demons, but my beloved grandfather (who turns out to have been something of a chauvinist who was impossible to live with) dropped dead of a heart attack on Christmas Day when I was 10 years old. I think I'm allowed my bitterness.

Because even I thought the ache for Papa would fade as I got older, but every year I seem to miss the man even more. He was 63, which was young even for '88. Each year on my birthday, he would give my younger brother his own, smaller gift, and vice-versa. I've never known anyone since who did that. For me, Christmas is the hollowest time of the year - cheap knick-knack garbage in the CVS aisles, fluffy, easy-listening Christmas tunes piped into the Barnes & Noble while the fat lady with the ghastly Rudolph scarf spills a peppermint-pumpkin-mocha across the coffee table book display. Christmas is not magical or holy or sacred or special - it's crooked and canned and plastic and useless to me.

And you know that there's no evidence to support the date of December 25 as the birth of Jesus Christ, right? You know that the date was co-opted by Christians and Santa-worshipers and actually refers in deep pagan myth to the day of the death of Nimrod, the son/husband of the goddess Semiramis, eventually to be known as Astarte, right?

Good, just checking.

Taped Shut

2011-12-05T10:59:00.001-08:00

Sometimes, I wish
my mouth was taped
shut,
that way
I wouldn't be so
horrifically wrong
all the
time.

Mr. Faded Glory - Pearl Jam: Twenty

2011-11-30T11:41:00.001-08:00

I'm nostalgic about the 1990's. It's not that I miss high school. At fucking all. As a graduate of the Rio Vista High School Class of '97, I can say with absolute certainty that those four endless, hellish years I spent in that house of horrors the city fathers for some reason called an institute of learning were definitely some of the worst of my life... and I once lived in a shed in the middle of the Washington state woods with an insane hippie chick.

I'm sentimental about the music, I guess, but I didn't know that until I watched Cameron Crowe's wonderful documentary Pearl Jam: Twenty. Crowe was given extraordinary access to a band that has outlived the "grunge" pop-culture craze which practically haunted every band to come out of Seattle in the wake of Nirvana, and indeed is the last of those bands still touring and recording with their original line-up (minus Pearl Jam's bizarre list of former drummers, recounting in a very funny, This Is Spinal Tap-sampling montage) - Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Mother Love Bone, Hole... all gone. The film is a little too exhaustive in closely chronicling the band's timeline, and it comes at the expense of incisive insight into the band's in-fighting and personality clashes. Still, to see this great American rock band's life captured like this, and by Cameron Crowe (whose second feature film, Singles, featured members of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden in cameo roles), is an amazing experience.

I can't imagine anyone under the age of 25 or so really appreciating this film or even understanding it. Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chili Peppers... these bands were the soundtrack to my wretched high school years. Did I mention how much I hated high school? (I did? Really? Shall I beat that shit right into the ground? I was unpopular, insecure and had few friends. I'm grateful for all that, looking back... I know too many people whose high school years turned out to the best years of their life. I like to think that mine are still ahead of me.) Pearl Jam: Twenty is clearly for Pearl Jam fans, but it reflects the shifting realities of an entire generation.

I turned 33 years old on November 22, 2011. Typing that sentence was not quite as painful as I thought it would be, but it's still a reality I'd like to somehow negate. As George Clooney's character said to Sam Rockwell's Chuck Barris in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind; "You're 32 years old, and you've achieved nothing. Jesus Christ was dead and alive again by 33. You better get crackin'." He could be talking about me, or damn near everyone I went to high school with. Or almost anyone my own age. Mine is a generation full of late-starters... I don't know why, but it might have something to do with Pearl Jam.

I'm kidding. Kind of. In an indirect way, it's all Eddie Vedder's fault. For a very, very short while I sang in a garage band, and one of the songs the guitar player insisted I sing was Pearl Jam's "Alive." So I did, quite a few times, but I guess I was trying too hard to sound like Eddie, I didn't really have the "self-balls" (as the guitar player told me) to be a frontman for a band at the time, so they fired me. And despite my love of listening to and playing music, I haven't seriously pursued musical performance since then. Is it too late? Depends on your point of view: Howlin' Wolf did not have a steady career until he was well into his 40's. It's too late for me to be a wild young rock star, but that didn't really turn out too well for Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin or Robert Johnson, did it? And life ended badly for Andrew Wood, as well.

The story of Pearl Jam exists in the shadow of the influential Seattle band Mother Love Bone. That band featured future Pearl Jam members Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard, and its lead singer was a fireball named Andrew Wood. Amazing archive footage reveals Wood as a charismatic, glam-influenced frontman, relentlessly "on." Wood's tragic death at age 24 from a heroin overdose still affects the surviving members of Mother Love Bone. Stone Gossard thought his career was over, but he approached Mike McCready, a Seattle lead guitarist, who insisted that Stone hook up again with Jeff Ament. The founding lineup is complete when they hear a demo recorded by a San Diego surfer and musician, who laid his vocals over one of Stone and Jeff's instrumental tracks. According to the film, the song would end up being the haunting, bluesy ballad "Footsteps." The singer, of course, was Ed Vedder.

Circling back to that abortive attempt to start a band in high school: on at least one occasion, the guitar player would put on Pearl Jam and tell me that this was how I should be singing. The problem: despite the countless soundalike ciphers that would follow, only Vedder really sings like Vedder, which is how it should be. We were handicapped by ludicrously high expectations, and I was hamstrung by my crippling shyness and insecurity. I'm somewhat happy to report most of that shit has been sloughed away - mostly by life itself, partly by film school... you can't be a withdrawn loner and expect to get any movies made. Well, you can, but they'll be really shitty movies.

Watching Pearl Jam: Twenty made me wish I'd been far more hungry and confident in high school - but that's probably the most common regret in America. (Aside from the Democrats nominating John Kerry in 2004 - we really should've stuck with Howard Dean.) I've come a long way from the core group of "alternative" rock bands I used to endlessly listen to from 1992 - 97; I discovered Tom Waits, delved deep into the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Neil Young and jazz greats like Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk. I was gripped by a bizarre urge to the get to the bottom of the Great American Blues Myth, and studied up on Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and all the monstrously brilliant men and women who shared the stage with these people (including Charley Patton, who happens to be the proto-Jimi Hendrix. Playing the guitar with your teeth? Upside down? Around your back? Charley did it all first.) Lately I've been listening to the new Black Keys single "Lonely Boy" and the Trent Reznor/Karen O/Atticus Rose cover of "Immigrant Song" over and over again, but this movie has reignited my love of Pearl Jam. It may have been instrumental in reigniting my general motivation (which has taken a nose dive as I slog through my spirit-crushing cubicle job). Time will tell.

My favorite scene: at the band's tenth anniversary concert in Las Vegas, Eddie Vedder sang the great Mother Love Bone song "Crown of Thorns." The story of Mr. Faded Glory, a somewhat death-obsessed worldview, and a love that leaves me alone. Vedder acknowledged the past with that performance, and the song has remained in their concert set list ever since. You can disagree with their politics - and indeed, they're not exactly known for their crowd-pleasing sense of humor (take the much-booed rendition of Vedder's protest song, "Bu$hleaguer," featuring a George W. Bush mask impaled on a microphone stand as Vedder intones the not-that-clever lyrics while pouring alcohol in the mask's mouth.), but they scaled back their career, and have survived.

Twenty years. Holy fuck. Love it.

Adapt This: Zodiac

2011-11-01T09:57:00.000-07:00

We have madmen waiting...
-Mideast terrorist leader,
1978
-opening quote of Zodiac, by Robert Graysmith

Sometimes, if you’ve seen the movie, you don’t need to read the book (The Boys From Brazil,Rosemary’s Baby, Marathon Man). Sometimes, the movie is a wretched pile of steaming garbage, making a great book seem even better in comparison (I’m looking at you, The World According to Garp and Beloved). Then you have cases like Zodiac, in which a terrific book is turned into an equally terrific movie, while being utterly different from each other.

I am well aware that David Fincher’s Zodiac has its haters. And while I’m not entirely clear whether these folks take issue with the film or whether it has something do with Fincher himself, I urge them to watch it again with an open mind. Zodiac is a richly layered, endlessly fascinating probe into one of the most haunting and perverse serial killer cases in American history. And to this day, it remains unsolved. I believe Zodiac is one of Fincher’s best films, far superior to his wildly over-rated The Social Network. Despite Fincher’s usual distant, coldly methodical tone, I also believe this is his most personal film, for a variety of reasons.

First, the basics: between December 20, 1968 and October 11, 1969, a deranged nutjob sent taunting letters to several newspapers in the California Bay Area which claimed responsibility for a series of brutal murders. The man who named himself the Zodiac sent four complicated cryptograms with his letters, only one of which has been persuasively decoded. Six victims have been confirmed to have been the work of the Zodiac Killer, and there are several more suspected, suggesting that Zodiac might have been active as early as 1966 and as late as 1971. The case remains open in Solano County, Napa County, and the city of Vallejo, California. While the case was labeled as “inactive” by the San Francisco Police Department, it was reopened sometime between 2004 and 2007.

Robert Graysmith was working as a political cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle at the time and was right in the thick of things. After spending years collecting a private scrapbook covering the killings, he published his famous nonfiction book in 1986.

Enter screenwriter James Vanderbilt (Darkness Falls, Basic, the upcoming The Amazing Spider-Man). After reading the book in high school and then meeting Graysmith (and according to some accounts, personally optioned the book at the age of eighteen - as a member of the storied Vanderbilt clan, this was possible.), Vanderbilt pitched the idea to Phoenix Pictures’ Mike Medavoy and Brad Fischer, who agreed to let him have more creative control over the project. The script attracted David Fincher, who grew up in Marin County. As Fincher told the New York Times:

"I remember coming home and saying the highway patrol had been following our school buses for a couple weeks now. And my dad, who worked from home, and who was very dry, not one to soft-pedal things, turned slowly in his chair and said: ‘Oh yeah. There’s a serial killer who has killed four or five people, who calls himself Zodiac, who’s threatened to take a high-powered rifle and shoot out the tires of a school bus, and then shoot the children as they come off the bus.’"

What fuels such an obsessive, morbid fascination with these kinds of things? Are we a culture of potential sociopaths, a culture of unfeeling savages so empty and devoid of human empathy that we study instances of sheer horrific tragedy just to give our own private prick-ish tendencies some kind of perspective? Kind of, yeah. But you're not here for my armchair sociological insights. Like Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac Killer is one of unknown boogeymen that still have the power to haunt our collective psyche. It's enough to inspire a former cartoonist's decades-long investigation - not to mention getting the preternatural attention of David Fincher.

So how is the movie different from the book? If you're tempted to wonder if the book is "better," know that such qualifications are pointless here. I'm sure much the same can be said of the upcoming Moneyball, an intriguing-looking movie based on - by many accounts - a relatively dry, statistics-drenched work of nonfiction. Robert Graysmith's Zodiac gives us the facts in a straight-forward, exhaustively researched, detailed narrative. The prose is thoroughly readable, and as one reads on, becoming utterly absorbed in what happened all those years ago, there is the sense that Graysmith meant his book as a tribute to the victims, the majority of them young couples ambushed on a date, next to a lake, in a parking lot. I think that Graysmith, subconsciously or not, considered himself a recording angel. These people existed. They were brutally killed. The killer wrote letters to the police, mocking them with cyphers and riddles. He was never caught or even concretely identified. How fucked up is that? Who would do these things and why?

The movie is a gripping dramatization of these events. Fincher has been lauded by critics for being able to craft a film so full of names, dates, events and mysteries and never once is the viewer lost or wondering what just happened. But what was this director's driving need to tell this story borne of? He's from the Bay Area, and on some primal level, these killings still haunt the area. I feel an odd connection to this story as well: Zodiac's first confirmed victims, David Arthur Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen, were killed in Benicia, California; Michael Mageau Renault and Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin were attacked in Vallejo, California; both towns are part of Solano County, as is my own hometown of Rio Vista. I know Benicia, I know Vallejo, I know San Francisco - this part of the world is famous for its tolerance and accepting attitude. The knowledge that this place can also breed such vicious, unfathomable violence is deeply disturbing... and endlessly fascinating.

David Fincher had already directed a serial killer movie, the modern classic Se7en, which propelled Brad Pitt's star deep into orbit, put Kevin Spacey on the map in a big way, and made it common practice to put numbers in movie titles for no reason. That movie was a hard-line thriller, heavy on style and atmosphere and grisly hideousness. Zodiac recreates the killings in clear-eyed detail, but it's not about the gore (and aside from a graphic stabbing scene and a slow-motion gunshot to the head, it's a surprisingly bloodless film), it's about the three men who made the Zodiac killings a personal mission.

Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal as his most wide-eyed, earnest and convincing) was a divorced cartoonist. Dave Toschi (a strong Mark Ruffalo)was a flamboyant, well-known San Francisco supercop, the basis for not one but two iconic movie mega-detectives: Bullitt and Dirty Harry. Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr., typecast but excellent) was a boozing, driven crime reporter who suffered a personal melt-down in the wake of the Zodiac killings but went on to publish probing accounts of the Patty Hearst kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army and later a book on the subject. The unique structure of this film places each of these characters in the role of central protagonist at different times. And we cannot overlook the solid supporting performance by Anthony Edwards as Bill Armstrong, Toschi's partner and the cop whose notes and reports supplied some of the most detailed accounts of this case.

As time passes, the case grows cold and the public consciousness moves on. Avery melts down and disappears. Toschi fights crime, one day at a time. Graysmith gets the bright idea to write a book about the case, thinking that something new might shake loose. Graysmith gets Zodiac's - or someone's - attention, culminating in one tense, wordless encounter in a hardware story between Graysmith and everyone's favorite suspect, one Arthur Leigh Allen.

This all occurs under Fincher's steely, demanding direction. Vanderbilt's incisive script handles the meta-story in an admirably restrained way. The book studiously ignores the personal lives of these three men. Avery's meltdown is never mentioned, Toschi's obsession is hinted at, and as for Graysmith... well, he wrote the book, after all, devoting years to a maddeningly unresolved series of crimes. Fincher, Vanderbilt and the producers did further research, wisely realizing that to hold an audience's attention they'd need more than a series of grisly murders and that huge central question: who did this?

Jake Gyllenhaal turns in what is still his best performance to date, infusing Graysmith the Eagle Scout with a deeply honest urge to solve this puzzle. Graysmith's near-desperate confusion and befuddlement is a proxy for our own: why, after shooting at couples in parked cars, did Zodiac shoot cabbie Paul Stine in the middle of San Francisco for no apparent reason? Was Zodiac really responsible for the 1966 death of Cheri Jo Bates in Riverside? These questions whirl around the story, often leading to dead ends and red herrings. Indeed, the single most terrifying sequence in the film follows Graysmith as he is lured into a very creepy man's basement (played by the very creepy comedian Charles Fleischer - the voice of Roger Rabbit, of all things) by the promise of previously undisclosed evidence of Zodiac's identity. Fincher pours on the intense, stylized lighting, setting the encounter on an appropriately dark and rainy night. It's genuinely chilling, and ultimately fruitless.

As is the investigation. Arthur Leigh Allen was - and remains - the best suspect. A convicted sex offender, Allen was ambidextrous, which means he could have written the Zodiac letters with his non-dominant hand while in a disturbed state of mind. He had admittedly talked about shooting little kids as they came bouncing off the schoolbus - one of Zodiac's early threats. He lived right across the street from the first victim. He was one weird bastard. Was it really him? Was it one of the other suspects outlined in the book? How can we be sure either way?

Fincher may not have been driven by Graysmith's need to solve this, to honor the victims and not let this tragedy dissolve into the background. Fincher is not the most beloved director in La-La Land, and I would guess that this film is less about honoring the memories of the dead and more about the nature of obsession. Fincher is known to take a Kubrickian amount of takes per shot. Ruffalo recalled that the director required fifteen takes of him shuffling through a bunch of files. This exacting nature fits the material perfectly. Keeping Vanderbilt's studio-aggravating open-ending must have proved gratifying to a man who, upon receiving the green-light call on Fight Club, hung up the phone, turned to his assistant and said, "Those idiots just green-lit a $70 million experimental film."

There is a coda of sorts: one of Zodiac's few survivors, Michael Mageau, picks Arthur Leigh Allen's picture out of series of photos, identifying him as the man who shot him. This is a logical place to end things, but it's remarkably unsatisfying. In Graysmith's book, once the facts as he knows them are set forth, the incomplete and unresolved story laid out, he goes on and on in an extended appendix describing Zodiac's cars, his speech patterns, his weapons, his possible training. The book ends with this description from Zodiac's psychological profile:

The sexual sadist kills to achieve sexual pleasure. May never have had sexual intercourse. He seeks dehumanization of his victims into objects that he can have control over, power over. He takes great pains in appearing normal and in evading capture.

Whoever Zodiac was, he left a legacy of eternal shadow. I urge those who did not care for the film to try it again, and to read the book. You might learn more about yourself than you might expect, depending on how you react to what you find in there.

Last Saturday (sketch)

2011-10-17T21:40:00.001-07:00

last saturday

thesesounds, even in the haze:

"bedawzethe sickness

belight thewaste –

bethrone thebarnacle'd husk of this world."

more andmore:

a blitz anda blight and a shack and a surface

of okra andsolidarity and bad cornmeal – who

were you, mybrother? Blackened? Fuck your husk,

my brother –i choose the family i chose.

so rise upand dance with the damned

we walk inherds with our cousins

we shamblealong

as emptypages in the back of a book no one

even everglanced at or picked up or

wonderedabout –

andimprobably,

we demonizethis mortality,

a simplicityin the territorial coil –

a deadshackle coated in the slick

grease ofwhat came before

"youare warped and ridiculed & yoked by

paralyzingquiet. you are shackled. you are

shackled. weare voices in the maze, the string in the

maze and youare shackled."

And thenight comes on,

a balmydream of evening surrounds Shea's

desperategrief –

he leans inand the voices mute the

windwhistling through treetops and

skitteringacross chainlink fences –

"wepromise nothing, only offer."

"tomorrowis promised to no one," Shea says.

Coke & Computers & Johnny Cash

2011-09-07T11:52:00.000-07:00

I recently finished Stephen Elliot's excellent nonfiction-true-crime-drug-addled-memoir The Adderall Diaries. It's a completely engrossing, steadily hypnotic account of a year in the life of someone addicted to a completely legal and FDA-sanctioned version of bad old speed - Adderall, like Ritalin, is most often prescribed to people with what they're calling attention-deficit hyperactivity-disorder... but it's just a smoother, gourmet version of crystal meth.

As I ride the very last wave of my 15-30 mg/day Adderall habit, I feel the urge to not just defecate, but to share an observation noted in Joe Hill's terrific novel Heart-Shaped Box. At one point the main character, a fifty-four-year old heavy metal rock star named Judas Coyne, reflects on the nature of addiction, and why he fucking hates computers: the notion of being "wired." Having once spent four years wired on cocaine, Jude had no inclination to get wired again. A lot of people wouldn't understand the parallels he draws between coke and computers, but Hill describes someone hunched over a computer, endlessly refreshing some meaningless bit of information... it really is the same thing.

These things are sucking the life force right out of us all. I'm no different, I'm as hooked on technology as anyone, to the point where I didn't even realize it, at least not consciously. Then I caught myself taking my cell phone with me wherever I went - not just from my cubicle at work to the bathrooms down the hall or to the kitchen area of the office to get a cup of water... from room to room of my house, from one side of the goddam living room to the other, as if terrified the fucking thing would break the invisible tether between us and float out into the world and latch onto a different owner. How pathetic.

Not that this has anything to do with Johnny Cash. I just threw that in because I feel better after I listen to Johnny Cash.

UPDATED: I've been off Adderall for a solid week now.

UPDATED AGAIN: Fuck my life.

Say My Name, Bitch!

2011-08-12T01:12:00.000-07:00

The other day I had the idea of re-naming this blog something else. Something clever. Something memorable and funny, the kind of blog name you'd keep with you, like a secret. (That's a Built To Spill reference for you aging hipsters out there.)

I must have been drunk, because I don't remember what it was. This sucks. I don't like the name of this fucking blog anymore, and I usually don't have anything to say... at least nothing I want to share with the six or seven people who read this thing.

Actually, what I'm not sharing is exactly what I'd tell the people who follow this chronicle of my increasingly hideous cubicle existence, so why wouldn't I spill the meta-beans all up on here?

Because I'm not an asshole, okay? Or at least I try not to be one, and succeed at something like a 60/40 rate - you can guess which is which because your guess will tell me all I need to know about how you feel about me.

Deal with that. Good night.

Oh, and if you can think of a way better name for this lame blog, I'll totally steal it. Go!

Bride Flight: Roy Batty Dies In The Beginning

2011-07-19T17:11:00.000-07:00

I bet you thought this movie was going to be about Rutger Hauer.

Here's a review of a film that an "editor" refused to publish. "Too rant-like," and "too many Rutger Hauer references." And those are bad things? Anyway:

Bride Flight is an earnest, (if uneven) melodrama following three war brides who emigrate to New Zealand after World War II to join husbands they hardly know. There’s plenty of promising elements to this film - there's the backdrop of the early 50's, the giant and irrevocable life change uprooting three women from Holland to a strange new life in New Zealand (which in the '40's might as well be literally the middle of nowhere), and a love triangle that somehow becomes a quadrangle.

The major letdown: the opening scenes introduce Rutger Hauer, (who at age 67 can still own the screen) as Frank, a vintner whose death brings together the three women of his past. The major problem of the film can be summed up thusly: lack of Rutger Hauer. As Frank dies in a vineyard, we flash way back to the titular flight of brides. Despite the relatively bankable presence of Hauer, the real focus is on the brides he meets on the plane to New Zealand. Esther (Anna Drijver) is a tough-as-nails fashion designer. Marjorie (Elise Schaap) is a snooty rich-girl with a devil-may-care flapper attitude. Ada (Karina Smulders) comes from simple "farm stock" and once young Frank sees her in her future wedding dress, sparks fly.

It’s another touch of the unabashedly melodramatic. Frank comes in and they share those Meaningful Looks so crucial to these kinds of romantic dramas. Suddenly, the plane hits a convenient lightening storm, sending luggage and bodies flying around. Predictably enough, Ada ends up in Frank’s arms and the two share a brief, passionate kiss during a layover (it’s a long flight, indeed).

Despite Ada and Frank’s love at first sight, Ada has been married by proxy to a devoutly religious man who never really attempts to get to know her. The other ladies head off to their respective lives. There are interesting, unexpected touches in this film – such as the sequence following Ada and her new husband through a tidy suburban neighborhood. Ada gazes hopefully at the rows of neat little houses… only to discover that her new home is an abandoned WWII pillbox on the side of a mountain, which her husband is renovating… and which is missing a wall.

Marjorie marries a nice man but miscarries (a melodrama staple) and may never have children again. Esther ends up sleeping with Frank and finds herself pregnant with his unwanted child, meets up with Marjorie and… well, this stuff pretty much writes itself, doesn’t it? Much of the film focuses on Marjorie and Esther and the choices they make.

Halfway through the film, the major plot thread becomes Ada and Frank’s torrid affair, culminating in a surprisingly graphic sex scene around three-quarters of the way in. The script has stacked the deck so shamelessly against Ada’s husband that by then we are rooting for the lovers, despite the ever-present knowledge that perhaps we shouldn’t be.

Everyone living meets up years later for Frank’s funeral, played very well by a group of older actors, but the clumsy flashback structure is one of the film’s major problems. A nicely-written and underplayed scene will suddenly cut to a shamelessly over-acted batch of teary nonsense.

On the plus side, the cinematography makes the most of New Zealand’s beautiful landscapes, although the film’s modest budget tends to show at times. There were a few shots where I caught a glimpse of modern-style cars at the edge of the frame.

Getting back to my first big complaint: lack of Rutger Hauer! This iconic actor dies off in the first scene and is never seen again. Except as a corpse. It doesn’t help that the absolutely hopeless actor playing the young Frank, Waldemar Torenstra, has all the depth and subtlety of Hayden Christiansen in the Star Wars prequels (which is to say: none - in case my bilious sarcasm was a hair too faint.) If you stick with it, Bride Flight becomes fairly engrossing, but only for about a grand total of a half-hour. This film may have been meant as an ensemble piece, but the story’s focus swings back to Frank and Ada far too much, touching back on the other characters at only the most plot-convenient times.

Maybe I’m being too hard on Bride Flight. It’s certainly watchable and fitfully entertaining. The trailers frontload the presence of Rutger Hauer for an American audience, clearly teasing him as a main character. Those interested in the actor might go out of their way to see this, only to discover that he’s a background player. There was no need to pander to an American crowd this way. I kept wondering when I’d see Rutger Hauer again, and thus wasn’t terribly invested in anything else going on. I can recommend this movie… but just barely.

On Superman Returns Vs. The Man Of Steel

2011-06-22T12:18:00.000-07:00

Now for something completely irrelevant to anyone and anything. One of my best film teachers always said "No Disclaimers" before screening our work, but I'm disclaiming here: I found myself musing on the whole Superman reboot thing and starting writing this... and forgot about it for awhile, and then remembered it and so here it is. Enjoy! Ignore! Avoid the Green Lantern at all costs!

With the cast of Zack Snyder's Superman reboot (now officially titled Man of Steel, and while we're on the subject, don't miss this highly entertaining account of Michael Shannon's casting as General Zod) officially in place, it's tempting to completely forget Bryan Singer's initial attempt at rebooting Superman for our generation. It's even more tempting to dismiss Singer's Superman Returns as a terrible film. I'm here to argue that, in the wake of the chilly reception of Snyder's Sucker Punch, we movie freaks might find ourselves wishing we'd stuck with Singer's vision. Let's explore why.

Bryan Singer is a great director. Let's just get that out of the way. His second feature The Usual Suspects, which launched the second major wave of Witty Crime Flicks (after Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction), won Kevin Spacey and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie their first Oscars and became (and remains) the benchmark for modern-day, Rashomon-esque mysteries.

After following that film with his underrated Stephen King adaptation Apt Pupil, Singer invented the modern comic book tentpole movie (for better or mostly worse) with X-Men. That film, along with its even-better sequel, X-Men United, has directly influenced every major comic book film made since. If you doubt that (and if you're reading this at all, I'm guessing you probably won't), watch Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins and note the similarities: both took a grounded approach to the world of the comic book superhero. As Roger Ebert noted, Nolan's film is not realistic, but it thinks it is. So does Singer's X-Men, which parallels the prejudice and hostility those mutants face with primary villain Magento's experience during the Holocaust.

This is the major break with comic book movies of the past, the "gritty" approach. Even after the wild success of Richard Donner's Superman: The Motion Picture in 1980, Hollywood remained skeptical about the future of comic book flicks. Studio executives - flighty by nature, since they know they're about to fired any day for helping run the company off a cliff - remained unwilling to delve into that strangely fascinating alternate reality comic books presented. This was a world of amazing powers and larger-than-life personalities, of storylines that wouldn't work nearly as well in a novel or short story... these are colorful, violent, wondrous Thrilling Wonder Tales, best suited for a visual medium. Is any wonder that they adapted Superman for television in the 1950's or first tried Batman for the screen in the 40's?

Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan's involvement seem to promise a "grittier" Superman. I know the approach worked for Batman, but Superman has always been a much more colorful and upbeat hero, which the world of his comics generally reflects. Richard Donner's original film kept that color palette firmly in mind, and while Richard Lester's inane follow-up (let's just forget about Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, okay? I mean, watch it if you want, but even when I saw it at age 10, I though it sucked), over-played the candy-colored thing, Superman's universe should be a little bright and other-worldly.

Still, if Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan have balls, they'll color Supes with the Americana shades of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, which has Superman ordered by the U.S. President to take out his pal Batman for good. Superman bows to the man, illuminating the blindly obedient dark side to a life committed to Truth, Justice and the American Way.

Further still, I may be completely wrong. After watching the Green Lantern flick with Ryan Reynolds (read my review on The Film Stage), I have to say maybe Nolan's approach to Superman will be the best way to do things, after all. Green Lantern was preposterous, (as is all comic book-related stories) and uneven, clearly fragmented from all the different script revisions this potential franchise was forced through.

The lesson of all this (for those of you still with me), is that these types of movies benefit from the focus of a singular vision. Christopher Nolan once said that as a director he's more of a human lens, focusing the hard work of hundreds of people into a unified whole (paraphrased). We can all argue that any fucking movie benefits from a unified vision, but Nolan's and Singer's films are successful because the studios footing the bill trusted the intelligence and confidence of these filmmakers and trusted their vision. Can Zack Snyder match that? Visually, he's got a dynamic style - but after seeing Sucker Punch, which is the first of his films he's written, I'll say he needs a goddam writer. Either way, I'll still see Man of Steel because the hope for a good, escapist popcorn flick is never a waste of time. I think.

Don't Go To Film School

2011-06-02T11:50:00.000-07:00

Seriously. Don't bother. I'm so far in debt from student loans that it's ridiculous to even think about. I was 27, and literally doing nothing with my life. I'd spent my 20's in a drug-fueled personal odyssey of utter bullshit, thinking that by emulating my literary heroes (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Kesey, etc.), I'd have something to write about.

What I didn't understand is this: you cannot and should not try to live someone else's life. I tried that for too long and woke up one morning stinking of gasoline with the cops at my door. I was living in my grandmother's house, wasting my time with losers who I thought were my friends, got stinking drunk on Wild Turkey and set someone's car on fire. After two months in jail and then a year of doing odd jobs without any notion of what to do with myself, I signed a student loan deal and moved to LA.

I was from a small town and Los Angeles overwhelmed me. The school I chose was not UCLA or USC or even Loyola Marymount - it was a jack-of-all-trades school which offered no Master's degrees and has probably lost its accreditation.

I was desperate to get the fuck out of my town and I wanted to make movies somehow, so I jumped on the first wagon I could find. That was a mistake, and even if James Joyce did say "A man of genius makes no mistakes," it was still a fucking mistake because I'm no genius. If I was, I'd probably have stayed in my hometown and learned to make movies on my own and then moved to LA on my own terms.

I learned a lot in film school - the nuts and bolts of filmmaking, the basics on navigating the oceanic mass of Los Angeles - but my advice for anyone planning on taking out a massive debt for the rest of your lives based on a hope and dream: stop and think it through. Like I didn't.

There are a whole mess of books about filmmaking I wish I'd read before taking that leap. The best are IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE by Walter Murch, REBEL WITHOUT A CREW by Robert Rodriguez, and SHOT BY SHOT, by Steven D. Katz. Read these, my hypothetical neophyte filmmaker. Get your hands on any kind of camera and shoot something. Anything. Find something to edit on - most Macs come with iMovie and there are ways to get Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere that aren't strictly legal, but they work. Work on scoring your little film. Screen it somewhere, even if it's just your parents' living room. Get it seen. Get some feedback. Then do it again... and again and again... when you're ready, find some kind of on-set or in-office film job, learn the hands on mechanics of how it works. Keep making movies. Write a few scripts. THEN go to Los Angeles.

Learn from my bonehead mistakes. I moved back to Northern California with my tail between my legs, and now I regret it. I should've stayed. I'm going back, though. I'm 32 now and I'll have to start from scratch, but I've learned that wasting away in a cubicle is no way to live, not when what you really want to do is make movies.

Negative Creep

2011-05-20T22:50:00.001-07:00

I used to think about alleys

I would pass them in cars or on foot

or on buses or trains or bicycles or dead chariots

and they were dark and I loved them

and still do

and the bars,

when I was a teenager they were

fascinating, self-contained universes

of self-pity and stained, warped wood-paneling

I was unwound and terrified on

a New Year's Eve in Sacramento

and walked around and didn't dare to

walk into any of the dive bars

because why would I? what's in there? what was

I missing?

I was missing wretched skanks choking

on cock in the bathroom,

their noses plugged with meth,

their teeth loose,

their eyes pure and bloody

men in corners who weren't smart enough

to be desperate and thus were dangerous,

dead eyes on hairy spiderlegs, skittering

across black fluorescence –

I was a negative creep and I was stoned.

someone lent me their lungs and I vomited them back up.

I shattered bottles against shithouse walls to read

the notes I'd put inside.

I'm still a negative creep, buried alive in Oakland.

-5/20/11

I Met Tom Sizemore In An Elevator Once...

2011-04-26T13:40:00.000-07:00

Want to hear the story? I thought so.

It was May of 2008, and I'd just gotten back together with my girlfriend (we're now married). She was living in big loft in the Easter Columbia building in downtown L.A. and I'd been living there too until we broke up for awhile... why did that happen? Let's save that epic melodrama for when we're in dire need of a telenovela plot to drown with beer and tears.

Anyway, the Eastern is a big, green, Thirties-era building. It's one of those gorgeous, old-L.A.-style joints right out of Chinatown. The lobby looks like it was designed by Salvador Dali if he'd been obsessed with Art Deco.

Anyway again. You need one of those magnetic key-fob things to get in and out of the building and access the elevator... I had forgotten mine... well, no, see I didn't have one anymore because my girlfriend (now my wife) hadn't given me my old one back because at the time her mom wouldn't give it to her.

So I asked the nice but intense lady behind the lobby counter to let me back upstairs. She knew I at least used to live there and since I never made any kind of fuss and was always polite (suspecting that she was some kind of Krav Maga expert or something since she was a little scarily calm), she agreed.

So I'm the elevator and about to hit the 10 button when someone calls, "Hey, wouldja hold that thing, man?" So I do so. Because that's the kind of person I am. I hold elevators for people. I don't just pretend I don't see them and ram the CLOSE DOOR button like many of the fucks who work in my building.

Anyway. A stocky white dude gets in (wearing a bright orange shirt underneath a cream sport coat - don't ask me why I remember this), joined by two sketchy-looking black dudes... I'd been in L.A. long enough by that point to know that these guy might as well have had the words COKE DEALER stamped on their skeevy leather jackets.

The stocky white dude turned out to be Tom Sizemore. He didn't have a fob on him either, so the lady at the reception desk had to let him up.

"You ain't got a fob fucking thing?" Tom Sizemore asked me.

"Well, my girl's mother owns the apartment and she's not too happy that I'm back in her life," I said, trying to sound too stupid or insane or nervous while images of Sizemore in Natural Born Killers ("MICKEY! I'M COMIN' TO GET YA!") or Heat (that scary look he gives that trucker dude in the diner near the beginning when they're planning on killing that long-hair psycho for fucking up the armored car heist), "So I don't have another one yet."

"She took you back, though, right?" Tom Sizemore said to me.

"Yeah. We're good now."

"Well," Tim Sizemore said, "I'm kinda in the same situation. I don't have one because my girl just let me back in, you know?" Then he grinned - that charming, half-mad grin of his and said, "Just be yourself."

Then it was the 8th floor, and they all got out. The black dudes were huddled in the corner of the elevator, perhaps hoping I wouldn't remember their faces. Not too long after that, Tom Sizemore was pinched for possession.

That was how I met Tom Sizemore.

Death Is Not The End

2011-04-20T11:33:00.000-07:00

My mother's mother died this past weekend. She was seventy-something, a lifelong drinker, a horrible woman. I'm going to be a pallbearer at her funeral tomorrow, and I was asked if I wanted to say a few "not-mean" words at the church service.

Having already performed this duty at two different funerals, I declined. My brother will read some form of the pleasant eulogy I composed for the occasion:

Jean Moran, was not your typical grandmother. My childhood memories of her do not include home-made apple pies, a cozy kitchen, and treats. No, I grew up around my grandparents' hillside pool, spending holidays with my wide range of Moran cousins at the end of the exclusive cul-de-sac in Moraga. The journey there from my hometown of Rio Vista was always a strange trip for me growing up, a metaphoric and literal jaunt from my little river town to landscaped suburb beyond Lafayette.

Indirectly, Grandma Jean taught me how to be tough. How to survive, by any means necessary. She had an edge to her, and could be abrasive, but she was caring, overall. I'll miss her, but her last days were filled with pain, so I think she's finally at peace now. Would she want the rest of us to be at peace? You knew Jean, you tell me. All I can say is: I love you, Grandma, wherever you are.

Here's the optional content:

Jean Moran was widely despised and I'm sickened to remember that I am related to her. She boycotted my parents' wedding, made my mother's childhood a living hell, and reigned as the drunken matriarch to a spineless, equally drunken Irish fool. I am glad she's dead, and I'm not sorry that I never visited her. Good night, and good luck.

Does that seem cruel? I'm sure it does. I'm sure I don't care much, either way. I hate funerals and don't want one when I'm gone... even if I ultimately leave fonder memories that my grandmother did, there will undoubtedly be those out there who loathed me in life, hate the fact that I'm dead and they can't get to me, and I just don't want to subject my wife to those people. I'm fortunate in many ways, and I love my life and my wife, but I'm still angry.

The funeral will be a disgusting charade, with a parade of people looking morose and pretending that Jean Moran wasn't a hideous person, someone who oversaw her children's abuse at the hands of their father, who saw to it that only a handful of defiant relatives attended my mother and father's wedding (my mom was pregnant with me at the time, her parents didn't approve of my dad, who is a genuine and decent person, etc.), and who only accepted my mom back into her life after I was born. I'm the oldest of her grandkids, and I stopped talking to those people long ago.

But I'm going. I'll pretend, like the rest of them. But I'm not saying a goddam thing.

Fierce Invalids Which Sound Poorly Adapted

2011-03-28T20:40:00.000-07:00

So I'm blogging for The Film Stage when I come across this entry on the 2008 Black List - for those of you just in from distant lands (the second time today I've used that phrase, which I cribbed from William Goldman because it's funny), the Black List is a compilation of the best unproduced screenplays currently floating around Hollywood. This one made me want to scream:

FIERCE INVALIDS HOME FROM HOT CLIMATES by Eric Aronson
“Based on the novel by Tom Robbins. An irascible, world-weary CIA operative is duped by his boss into helping re-place a listening device back in Russian hands that is vital to spying on them.”

If you are a fan of Tom Robbins and that very fine, wild-ass book of his, I hope you're saying What The Fuck? right now. Come on, all together: WHAT THE FUCK?

I know, I know. I'm calm. It's just... the premise up there is not even remotely close to what the book is actually about. Like most Robbins novels, Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (the title taken from an Arthur Rimbaud poem) is equal parts sprawling, funny, sexy and profound - and profoundly silly. Here's what the book is really about:

Plotwise, Switters is a CIA agent and bon vivant who finds himself in South America on a routine, tedious assignment. He ventures up the Amazon River and meets a tribal shaman with a pyramid-shaped head who gives him a hallucinatory elixir. The next morning, Switters is convinced that a group of cosmic overlords he saw in his revelries have exacted a price for all the truth poured into his noggin: his feet must never again touch the earth on pain of death.

He spends the rest of the book in a wheelchair, observing life from an inch and a half off the ground, which summarily astounds his grandmother, Maestra, as well as the sixteen-year-old stepsister he pines for, a middle-aged defrocked nun in the middle of an Arabia desert who he finds equally alluring, and his wingnut CIA pilot best friend.

That's just the "what happens" part of the story. Robbins has said that he writes another book when he feels it's been too long since he read a book that makes him think, make him laugh, and makes him horny. Switters is total contradiction, a man of action and former rugby star who is so squeamish about bodily functions that he imagines his digestive system as a kind of light-radiating crystal which magically transforms his food into a substance he doesn't like to think about. He wants to de-virginize his stepsister and then becomes fascinating by a fifty-year-old nun. He is as drawn to center stage as he is to the hermit's cave, and "the more advertising he sees, the less he wants to buy."

I know the nature of adaptation is change, and that you cannot and should not be literally faithful to the source material. But you should keep to the book's spirit. I admit I haven't read the script by Eric Aronson, so maybe he manages to pack in the novel's humor and Robbins's ever-present voice.

We'll see. The one other film adapted from a Robbins book is Gus Van Sant's Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, starring Uma Thurman as a free-spirit with enormous thumbs who decides she was born to be a hitchhiker and ends up on a lesbian commune. That film was a total failure... and the book wasn't that great, either. There are other, more cinema-friendly Robbins books that should be explored (like his great Jitterbug Perfume, which features the Great God Pan, a thousand-year old janitor, and history's greatest bottle of perfume) and while Fierce Invalids has the potential for a great movie, the plot described above probably does not.

Oh well. Why do I let these things bug me?

Win Win - A Dramatic Comedy That Floors You

2011-03-18T11:14:00.000-07:00

Paul Giamatti and Alex Shaffer

A "dark comedy" is usually a tough sell with audiences, and typically manages to find a niche crowd at best. It's a shame, then, that writer/director Thomas McCarthy's new film is being marketed that way. Win Win is an acutely observed and flawlessly acted drama, with another terrific performance by Paul Giamatti as an ordinary man forced to make a series of difficult decisions to keep his family going. That the film is also seamlessly funny is a testament to director McCarthy's skill with his actors. (This from a guy best known to audiences as Dr. Bill, Ben Stiller's obnoxious brother-in-law from Meet The Parents.)

Giamatti is Mike Flaherty, an honest lawyer and high-school wrestling coach in small-town New Jersey about to lose his practice. When he realizes that he could make an extra $1500 a month by assuming guardianship of his elderly client Leo (Burt Young), Mike takes advantage of the man's beginning stages of dementia, places him in a home and collects the check.

He shares this plan with his best friend Terry (the scene-stealing Bobby Cannavale) but not with his wife Jackie (Amy Ryan). Mike's little arrangement is technically against Leo's will, since the old man just wants to go back home – Mike simply can't work, tend to his family and give Leo the proper care. So the old guy is cared for in the home, Mike keeps his head above water, with no one the wiser. Win-win, right?

Then, one day, Leo's 16-year-old grandson Kyle (the amazing Alex Shaffer) shows up, looking for the old man, who he's never met. Kyle's mother hasn't spoke to Leo in twenty years, and is in rehab in Ohio. Now Kyle wants to live with Leo, and Mike has to begin spinning a web of delicate lies to keep this arrangement going. He and Jackie take Kyle in. When the boy proves to be a gifted wrestler, Mike recruits him and his team starts to win. The talented new kid infuses Mike with new confidence and a sense of purpose. Everyone around him benefits, including Terry, who needs an outlet to keep from staking out his ex-wife's house and makes himself an assistant coach.

Talented or not, Kyle is troubled – and pretty heavily tattooed for a teenaged kid – but unlike other movie runaways, is respectful and gracious toward Jackie and Mike. He is straightforward and unpretentious, probably because he has no real influence, parental or otherwise. Kyle has to decide his own personality – luckily for everyone, he's a decent person. Everything starts looking up – and then Kyle's mother appears, with a lawyer in tow.

Win Win is a rare film, balancing an increasingly tense, complicated narrative with a comic buoyancy that never intrudes on the story. The recent Cedar Rapids tried for something close to this, but too often went for the gross-out. As Mike's scheme threatens to spiral out of his control, we empathize, partly because it's Giamatti, whose characters are so effortlessly lived in. Partly because – well, what would you do if it were your family and home on the line? McCarthy's film lets the other characters judge Mike, but allows us to see his situation as it is, as most of ours tend to be: complicated and beyond a simple right or wrong choice. McCarthy is also the director of the almost-universally acclaimed The Station Agent and The Visitor, both of which feature characters who act in refreshingly unexpected ways when faced with life's curveballs.

Any judgment of Mike from the audience is a reflection of how we judge ourselves when forced to make moral decisions like those in the film. The fate of the world may not hinge on the outcome, but the fate of our mortgage might. The central question of Win Win is worth asking, since the rest of us do anyway: can't we have it both ways? Usually not, but that doesn't stop us from trying.

Grade: A

Updating

2011-03-04T23:21:00.000-08:00

...is overrated. Since no one reads this goddam thing, here's a video of my dogs:

Okay, it didn't work. Trust me, it's adorable.

Cool? Good. Now check out TheFilmStage.com and follow me on my new Twitter page. Because it's mostly fun - and if you're job is as boring as mine can be, what else do you have to do?

That Mean Old Evil Train Took My One and Only Friend

2010-07-30T16:25:00.000-07:00

Upon reading Roger Ebert's Great Movies essay for Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train, I realized that the notion that all three of the stories - the Japanese couple obsessed with Elvis, the three hoods (with at least Joe Strummer clearly obsessed with Elvi), the weird Italian lady-con man tale with at least one of them obsessed with Elvis - occurring at exactly the same time never came up in my mind while watching it. I haven't seen it in a long time, but I recall thinking it was one of the better Jarmusch films.

See, as much as everyone seems to love Stranger Than Paradise, I can live without it. I do love Broken Flowers, though, and wasn't too crazy about Coffee and Cigarettes. Although I did love Dead Man and am fond of Down By Law.

So the point of this is: I'm soon going to watch Mystery Train again and try to rip off some of Jarmusch's story-telling techniques and apply them to a sci-fi spec script I need to re-write. It's called PATHS and the first couple of drafts shifted dramatically back and forth in the timeline, which left every reader who's tried it completely lost.

Good?

Good.

The Deep Pockets of Corporate Media (or something...)

2010-07-16T13:18:00.000-07:00

My job can be moronically funny at times. I work for what I've heard my co-workers describe as "the biggest media company in the Bay Area," which to me is like saying that "Candlestick Park is the biggest stadium that isn't AT&T Park."

Wait, does that even make sense?

Nevermind. My job - as a Production Technician, if you please - consists of interpreting the often maddeningly vague (and usually totally wrong) line-item orders for various media clips sent to us from a gaggle of salespeople known as Account Executives, or AEs. We also know them as Idiots, Assholes, Fuckwads, and Evil Pricks.

Not that they're bad people, mind you. No, the AEs are simply salespeople. They are scattered around this country, in the various company offices. There's one in St. Louis, one in L.A., one in San Diego, one in New York, Chicago, Miami, Indianapolis... we're all connected by email, and despite the time difference, communication is usually not an issue.

Let's say that Shell Oil had one of their executives making some speech as some technology event somewhere, right? They know that the footage of this only exists on some obscure website, and since they lack the capacity, knowledge and patience to get that footage and convert it into their preferred format - usually a Windows Media video file, but we also get orders for Quicktime, Flash, AVIs, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, DVDs and even Betamax tapes - they call us.

Well, they call the AE linked to their particular account and the AE enters the order, and it comes back to us.

Now, these AEs clearly have no fucking idea what we editors do back here... we're cloistered on the other side of the building, well away from where the AEs are clustered together, trying to fleece their clients for as much as possible by evidently promising them the fucking moon. Which makes us look like lazy hacks when it proves utterly impossible to render a clip downloaded from some fuzzy DVR in, say, Wichita, Kansas in "crystal-clear HD," (as I've noticed many local news affiliates around the country now boast in their opening show graphics. Like it matters.)

So for the hard-to-find stuff, like CNN footage from 2005, which apparently no other company has any more (we get orders from The Daily Show on Comedy Central pretty regularly, usually for that night's program), it makes sense for the business to come here. Still, there are days when I truly feel like calling up someone from these companies and telling them how badly my company fucks them on a regular basis.

But that would be wrong... right? Right or wrong? It doesn't matter, because there's no way I'd do that - at least, not while I'm still working here.

The other day I had an order from Atlantic Records for two clips from those glossy, mindless staples of tabloid nonsense, Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight. Each clip concerned some pop singer who did some kind of awesome Prince impression at a BET awards show. Total cost - for roughly 40 seconds of video - $268.17.

Wow. Seriously, what is wrong with these people? I'm asking YOU, Hypothetical Reader. These companies are supposedly hemorrhaging money, laying off thousands of people, yet they blow what amounts to one person's daily salary on these bullshit clips? I could've shown someone how to rip this shit from a DVR in about ten minutes, for free.

I wish I had a point to make here. I don't. It's just horribly wasteful, and I disapprove.

The Good, The Bad and the Freakin' Weird

2010-05-24T12:03:00.000-07:00

Here's how I connect dog parks to working as a PA.

Sort of.

Anyway, I live with a woman and three dogs. The woman is my wonderful wife, the dogs are my kids and my best friends.

There's a great dog park/beach up in Richmond, almost directly across the Bay from the Golden Gate Bridge. My wife's friend clued her into the place, and now Point Isabella has become a regular destination for outings with the pups, especially since my wife has apparently become a little obsessed with the vague threat of mountain lions or cougars or something leaping out of the brush in nearby Joaquin Mill Park and attacking our 7-year-old toy poodle, Bear. (This is thanks to my wife Sarah's friend Ailish. So thanks again, dammit.)

As dog owners know perfectly well, be wary of damn near all off-leash dogs when at a dog park. There are certain breeds you don't really need to worry about at all: golden retrievers, most black labs, St. Bernards (St. Bernies just sorta lay there and check you out). Goldens are generally good-natured and just wanna chase balls - they retrieve, after all. Black labs, like our dog Lily, love to eat, swim, and shred their toys.

And then you have your mixes - we have a two-year-old dog named Ollie (short for Olive, and although that's the name on her papers and dogtag, no one calls her that and she won't answer to it. Go figure. Go on, figure it out and get back to me.) - Ollie is mix of chocolate lab, weimaraner... and some other stuff. She's a little neurotic, obsessed with chasing balls, and can get kind of aggressive when other dogs hang out around her too much... especially if there's food nearby.

Ollie and Lily are like sisters, and if other dogs at the park try and play with Lily too much, Ollie gets snappy with them. We're working on modifying that behavior by crating her again. We had stored the crates once we moved to Oakland from L.A., mostly due to the lack of space (the bigger these dogs got, the bigger the crates), but we now realize that this might've been a mistake.

Dogs, like almost any other creature on the planet, like to feel safe and secure. They don't seem to like their crates much, but when things get tense (like mommy and daddy arguing about daddy's habit of leaving his pants unfolded on the bed, his shoes scattered around the floor and the used Q-tips that mommy finds, like, everywhere), Ollie and Lily both usually dive under the bed to wait out the storm.

After Ollie went a little nutty on one of Sarah's mom's toy poodles (a teacup poodle, really, a tiny little sack of bones smaller than a game hen, but a sweet, old dog), we started crating her again... and it looks like this is starting to work: Ollie is less aggressive and a little calmer now that she has her little home to run into whenever she needs to.

Which brings me to people at the dog park: two major things get on my goddam nerves... 1) why do people insist on not only acquiring massive, mutant-looking pit bulls but also bring them to dog parks to socialize with other breeds and then let them off their damn leash, where they make a bee-line for my dogs and end up starting shit because Ollie hates sharing her ball and she shouldn't have to because it's hers! Dammit! Okay. 2) some people seem to encourage their dogs' bad behavior.

The other day, while my wife and I were at Point Isabella, I spied a few people chatting. Their dogs, though, were positively yelling at each other. One guy had a black mix - this little dude seemed part setter, part lab, part who-knows - and this dog was bouncing up and down, ceaselessly barking at this other dog, who kept backing away, toward it's owners legs... the barking dog's owner kept chanting "Get 'im! Get 'im, boy!"

These owners irk the living shit out of me. Dogs have enough problems - mock me if you want, but some breeds are prone to diseases like leukemia and others, like German shepherds, have notoriously bad hips and can end up immobile and in pain during their later years. Add the fact that it's just not a dog's world - they like to bolt in any direction when an interesting scent crosses their naughty little noses - like the early morning a few months ago when I took Ollie and Lily out front to their business. A squirrel was climbing up a telephone pole across the street, and the damn dogs just took off. There was no traffic, thank whatever god watches over dumb dogs, but it still freaked me out. It's just not a dog's world.

Which brings me back to PA work... somehow. I only have the flimsiest possible connective here, but bad dogs are like bad PAs - surly, unpredictable, and not very friendly. Of course, some say there are no bad dogs, just bad owners, and that's only partially true. Some dogs are just born nasty, but a good production manager can make a bad PA into a marginally useful one.

Then again, a bad production manager will try to stick you with the cost of repairing a fucking van whose side you crunched in, even though you never should've been driving the damn thing in the first place, but since the producers are too cheap to rent a third production vehicle, they borrowed the DP's personal van, which you weren't used to and went ahead and scraped the side door across a corner of the local parking garage. After you raise hell and they finally back off - and the company agrees to cover the repair cost, as bloody damn well they should - you're promised a spot on the next round of shooting, and then told a mere week before expecting to go back to work that they don't need you.

The film industry can be a big dog park, full of squabbling, yapping, nipping, biting... and, sometimes, full-on, fur-shredding dogfights.

And, because my wife likes to read my movie reviews, here's the last review of mine which was posted on MediumRareTV.org:

The Good, The Bad, The Weird

Directed by: Ji-woon Kim
Written by: Ji-woon Kim, Min-suk Kim
Produced by: Jae-Won Choi
Starring: Kang-ho Song, Byung-hun Lee, Woo-sung Jung
Running Time (in minutes): 130 mins.
Language: Korean and Mandarin (w/English subtitles)
Rated: Not Rated

So what's wrong with making a Korean version of a legendary spaghetti western (Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly)? After all, John Sturges's The Magnificent Seven is a retelling of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Leone's A Fistful of Dollars is Kurosawa's Yojimbo. In a way, it seems only fair, especially as talk persists of an unfortunate American remake of Chan-wook Park's great Oldboy.

And from a technical standpoint, The Good, The Bad, The Weird is damned good. Hotshot South Korean director Ji-woon Kim telegraphs his slick intentions with an early shot – the camera follows an eagle as it swoops down, snatching a snake up from a set of railroad tracks just as a train comes roaring by, kicking off the first in a relentless series of shoot-em-ups and chase scenes. As shot by cinematographers Mo-gae Lee and Seung-Chul Oh, they're full of virtuoso tracking shots and bright comic book colors.

Which is what The Good, The Bad, The Weird feels like – a graphic novel version of a spaghetti western. And the plot? There's a treasure map. In 1940's Manchuria, The Good – bounty hunter Park Do-won (played by Woo-sung Jung in the Clint Eastwood role and no match for Clint's flinty scowl) – tracks bandit Yoon Tae-goo (Kang-ho Song, from The Host and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) – here known as The Weird, but everyone in this movie is pretty weird – and both are being hunted by The Bad, brutal killer Park Chang-yi (Byung-hun Lee, whose badass performance steals the show). It turns out almost everyone in Southeast Asia wants this map, including opium-trafficking freedom fighters, a pack of Mongolian-warlord-type goons and the Japanese army. So when the treasure turns out to be... well, that's one clever way to end all of this nonsense.

The wispy-thin plot is just an excuse for one elaborately-staged gunfight set-piece after another... and I'm not complaining about that. For the first hour or so, it's fun – especially when neat little touches show up, like when The Weird uses a copper deep-sea-diving headpiece as a bulletproof helmet (don't ask). What's missing is the epic undercurrents of Leone or Kurosawa's approach to this kind of movie... or, for that matter, Howard Hawk's or John Sturges's or Quentin Tarantino's (there are times when some of the fight scenes feel like outtakes from Kill Bill Vol. 1). The Good, The Bad, The Weird has its moments – the opening train robbery-chase-shoot-out sequence, for instance – but it clocks in at two hours-ten when it should come in at a neat ninety minutes.

Director Ji-woon Kim has clearly seen enough Leone westerns to know that when in doubt, go for the Extreme Close-Up, but he can't calm down long enough to let his characters gain more than one dimension. Only in the final standoff between our three capitalized archetypes does something approaching the grandeur of Sergio Leone's original finally appear. And that treasure? If your eyes don't glaze over by then, it's worth finding out. Just barely.

Match That Media

2010-02-19T12:01:00.001-08:00

Since we freelancers need all the help we can get, Media-Match.com - a Mandy-like jobs site for us poor fools obsessed with bursting up through the ranks of the entertainment industry like Mario through a row of blocks that might or might not contain little surprises - has offered a free one-month subscription to those who mention the website on their blog.

So this is a shout out to Media-Match, which likes to send notifications out to non-paying members (it's not very expensive, but sometimes it's either a monthly payment to them or more cheese, and I have to pick cheese because I like cheese - with crackers and salami) that potential employers have been searching for candidates just like you! So why not come back into the fold?

They're a little like Jehovah's Witnesses that way.

Overall, I recommend everyone give it a go... for a month. Start a blog, mention them, get yer free cheese, see if it's worth it, eat the cheese or make a sandwich.

Here's the jobs board page: http://www.media-match.com/jobsboard.php Enjoy!

UNDERRATED: THE MIST (2007), directed by Frank Darabont

2010-01-23T09:43:00.000-08:00

Stephen King's novels, novellas and short stories are among the most adapted properties in modern cinema. Brian DePalma's superlative screen version of King's first published novel, Carrie, still holds the gold standard. (Rounded out by Kubrick's The Shining, Rob Reiner's Stand By Me and Frank Darabont's Shawshank Redemption, and – in my ultra-humble estimation – David Koepp's supremely nasty Secret Window, in case you were wondering.) The Mist, while not in the same league of those earlier films, has its own exploitive charms to dig on and celebrate. Once again written and directed by Frank Darabont – who's proven several times that he's one of the best in the business at interpreting Kingworld – The Mist is based on a novella from King's mid-Eighties short story collection, Skeleton Crew.

In yet another small town in Maine, a freak storm wreaks havoc on a lakeside community. The lights go out, trees are knocked aside like Lincoln logs, the windows are destroyed in the studio home of illustrator David Drayton (played with appropriate gravity by Thomas Jane) and his wife and son, Billy. The wife is essentially a nonentity, and the kid is Cute Enough. All fine so far. David has a high-toned New York lawyer neighbor, Brent Norton (played by an entertainingly bilious Andrew Braugher), and hey there's bad blood between these two! Predictable so far? Sure, but the story unravels at a steady, well-acted-and-directed pace. As David, Brent and Billy head into town for groceries, we learn about the Mysterious Government Installation Nearby, the Arrowhead Project, and catch a glimpse of the mysterious mist swooping in over the lake.

Now, then. Everything's set up nicely by now. The mist overtakes the parking lot of the grocery store, some young Military Police show up to grab a couple of their buddies about to go on leave, and we meet Mrs. Carmody, our resident Small Town Nutjob. Mrs. Carmody, as played by Marcia Gay Harden, is an inexplicably young spinster (who's in her sixties or something in the book, but whatever). There's a sweet little moment between one of the Army guys and a pretty young thing working at a cash register.

All hell breaks loose at this point. A bloodied man comes tear-assing into the store with the mist roiling in at his heels. Something in the mist took a friend of his, and it'd be a damned good idea to stay indoors.

So begins a classic siege-flick formula. People become unglued, the social order begins to break down, and we're left rooting for David Drayton, who only wants to protect his son. Critics dismissed the movie's cardboard characters, but there really isn't time for anything more than sketches of real people. Darabont knows that he only has to suggest these characters within the dialogue and action, and lets his actors leap onto their haunches and start chewing on the scenery.

Andre Braugher in particular fares well in his role as the staunch, skeptically crass prick lawyer from the city. He's a nasty piece of work, leading a group of naysayers – Drayton and his pals call them the Flat Earth Society – into the mist and certain disaster, in a tense scene that definitely silences any of the doubters inside the grocery store and spins the movie into a fresh circle of hell.

There's one particular set piece that deserves attention: our first glimpse of precisely what's waiting in the mist. I can't understand exactly why critics pissed all over this movie, but I suspect the fact that the studio insisted Darabont release the film in color – rather than the director's preferred black and white – explains it all. In the first really scary sequence, David heads into the back of the store and discovers that the generator's exhaust has been blocked and is spewing smoke inside the room. He shuts it off and immediately hears something slithering across the steel loading doors. When the doors bulge menacingly inward, he knows Something's Wrong and grabs his pal Ollie, the store's assistant manager, local yokels Myron and Jim and a checkout boy, Norm. David's concerns are mocked, of course, and against David's better judgment, the doors go up.

The mist slips in and Norm is immediately snagged by a CGI tentacle – all of this follows Stephen King's story damn near word for word. Darabont throws in his own brutal touches, however, such as the moment when another tentacle – gruesomely pink and thick as a tree trunk – wanders inside. The tip of this one yawns open, revealing a few rows of revolting fucking teeth, dripping with goo. It's awesome, and this little detail is not in the book.

This first glimpse of the CGI creatures – and the subsequent beasties that terrorize our hardy band of survivors throughout the next few days and nights – are far more convincing in black and white. This reflects Stephen King's own comments on his story, that he wanted people to have the feeling of watching a black and white horror flick, alone in the dark with the monsters.

The Mist is admirable for Frank Darabont's daring. It's worth seeing for how closely he hews to King's story, and for the ballsy liberties he takes, such as the very end scene, suggested in King's story but far darker – and logical, and terrifying – than King's own. It's a stark, vicious movie, and will hopefully find it's audience in the future.

The Dark Knight of the Soul (Rated Just Right)

2009-11-12T06:36:00.000-08:00

To start off my long-gestating collection of well-thought-out (well, for the most part) essays on certain movies, records, books, comic books, comic book characters, graphic novels, graphic novel movie adaptations, adaptations in general, assorted collections of poems and overall - and in general - whatnot, I figured the most direct way to communicate what I'm getting at here is with the Second Highest Grossing Flick of Like All Time And Stuff - adjusted for inflation - Christopher Nolan's THE DARK KNIGHT.

And it's rated just right. Which is to say: simultaneously overrated and underrated. Such contradiction in a work of art is not unique to the world of flickdom, although no graphic novel or nonfiction rehab memoir gets nearly as much press as some comic book movie directed by the "Memento Guy."

The Dark Knight was over-hyped long before it ever entered pre-production. Such expectations, having been amplified to a degree no summer blockbuster movie could ever match (the relatively hushed, expectant wait for James Cameron's AVATAR reflects the lessons painfully learned by a hyperactive ad campaign). The film symbolized a major investment in the vision of a director with but four features to his credit - each one terrific in its own right, including Christopher Nolan's own Batman reboot. Grounding the cinematic world of Batman in cold, hard reality was not only a great idea, it was kind of an inevitable evolutionary step in the history of a character that has become the most prominent comic book superhero in American history. Arguments for Superman are acknowledged, accepted, and to some extent agreed with, but Batman is now the indisputably most iconic superhero figure. The key to understanding Nolan's success with The Dark Knight is his treatment of the badass, schizophrenic main character; Nolan seems to understand that this borderline-sociopath is also the great divided id and superego of us sycophantic citizens of Americana, Inc.

Batman/Bruce Wayne is a screwed-up rich kid with a conscience and deep, almost Puritanical streak of basic morality co-existing in the same mind and body as an angry, blood-chilling crimefighter. The stories that have filled the comic book pages and celluloid frames reveal an extraordinary flexible character, a superhero of dangerous, sometimes frightening fire who is still a powerfully neurotic, deeply lonely and driven man, aching to erase a permanent open wound to his psyche. Like Superman and Spider-Man, Batman lost his parents, but right in front of his eyes. He witnessed cold-blooded murder at a point in life when most people have yet to form any kind of self-consciousness or individual identity. His family would have been his universe, as it should be for all little kids.

Yet all this Freudian fire and brimstone is still confined within comics or flicks or queerly campy (or campily queer, your choice) TV shows starring the Mayor of Quahog. Mostly. In The Dark Knight, the lived-in, anti-Tim Burton quality to Gotham City reinforces the shock at seeing Batman or The Joker against the background of a sorta-sane, contemporary world. Either figure's appearance is at once ludicrous and somehow deadly serious, almost a blight on reality.

After all, it's just a comic book movie. It's also a moving tragedy and an assured, epic-scale crime film, and if Nolan decides to make a third one (as he's said in various interviews, and then move on from the Bat-universe), it'll be welcome. In the end, his first two still say it all.

THE HEIGHT OF HYPE

2009-09-12T21:56:00.000-07:00

This land is your land, this land is my land.

-Woody Guthrie

This is an examination of two films, both nominally documentaries: Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and the right-wing "response" (more of a shrill hatchet job, but then I'm biased and admit it), FahrenHYPE 9/11. With a world economy brought to its knees by unchecked greed, a president heckled loudly by a boorish, petty congressman, the gulf between class, race, creed only continue to grow. Were I religious, I'd say it's about time to start praying. Had I any real faith in our political system, I'd say it's way past time to mobilize and vote some idiots into office that can actually change things. We can only judge our government according to how our daily lives are going. So take stock and start asking: in the greatest country on the planet, how is there room for rampant despair?

America was built on propaganda. Before Thomas Paine published his pamphlet Common Sense, many of the original American colonists were either ambivalent toward the Revolution or in favor of their staid, familiar existence as British subjects. Paine combines his formidable reasoning skills (even drawing on bits of scripture which condemn the rule of kings in general) with a passion for his cause, and helped influence perhaps the first court of public opinion in American history. Common Sense contains an exhaustive, detailed defense of the Revolution and argument for independence, and while by today's standards most of the language is dense to the point of gibberish, there are some passages which could have come straight from a hyper-extreme web blogger or, say, a book by Michael Moore. For instance:

Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then are you not a judge of those who have. But if you have, and can still shake hands with the murderers, then are you unworthy the name of husband, father, friend or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward, and the spirit of a sycophant.

In Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore provokes similar reactions to his harsh indictment of the presidency of George W. Bush. Using a mixture of facts, footage both originally shot and (as it turns out) found, as well as a comedian's natural timing, Michael Moore paints a portrait of an ineffectual American President. Through inexperience and a myopic sense of bravado, Moore's version of Bush squandered a rare moment of national unity in the aftermath of the single worst attack on American soil and re-awakened the American War Beast, which wholly consumed at least two Presidents (LBJ and Nixon) and sharply divided this country for more than a decade.

Moore lets the images and numbers speak for themselves in his film, and rather wisely keeps himself behind the camera most of the time. The harsh truth is that Michael Moore is not really an attractive man, and he knows it. His Everyman aura, heightened by the omnipresent baseball cap and sweatshirt, lends his stunts and inflammatory accusations a common, easily approachable feel. Then there's the comedy involved.

Sigmund Freud wrote that "Wit is the denial of suffering;" while everyone to some degree suffers in their lives, the witty jokesters among us deny that suffering a major influence over them. As Tom Robbins writes, in his novel Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates:

Certainly, a comic sensibility is essential if one is to outmaneuver ubiquitous exploitation and to savor life in a society that seeks to control (and fleece) its members by insisting they take its symbols, institutions, and consumer goods seriously, very seriously, indeed.

This is the major difference between the two films, and in my opinion a major, hidden reason for a lot of the right-wing bile in the slap-back at Moore, FahrenHYPE 9/11. The fact that people like Moore can still find a lot to laugh at in this post-9/11 world is seen as shameless, exploitive and sometimes even as "treason."

Moore's film is no documentary...on his website he indeed backs up his assertions with a lot of references, but even former President Clinton, in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine prior to the 2004 presidential election, stated that while every American really ought to see it, Moore "connects the dots a little too closely." That he does. Is this whole mess about keeping the oil lobby smiling, rolling in petroleum and counting their revenues? We can all theorize. Still, Michael Moore - and the left-wing's polemic in general - has a better grasp on humor than the right.

Compare the bitterly funny scene of Moore hiring an ice cream truck and reading the sections of the Patriot Act (an Orwellian title if there ever was one) to the angry ranting by Ann Coulter (whom actor Richard Belzer has called a "fascist party doll" on HBO's Real Time With Bill Maher)-both films are pretty blunt, but Moore's wit owns a deft, poignant edge the other one cannot quite find. The only comedy relief is unintentional: the old Dixiecrat Senator Zell Miller - who once angrily denounced integration as a betrayal to the "Party ideals" - yammering on like a weird old Southern Muppet. Moore knows instinctively that people are loosened up by humor, and constricted by the kind of self-righteous bleating so prominent in FahrenHYPE.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is not a documentary, and about as balanced as an episode of The O'Reilly Factor. And indeed Moore hits some sour notes-such as claiming, in that too-obvious phony solemn tone, that Iraq had "never murdered a single American." I was in high school when the Gulf War started up, and while it had a thin premise and was not a really good movie, it happened, and Americans died there. Moore should have behaved himself a little more.

The right-wing's bitch-fest did not exactly play it straight, either. What was not given prominence in FahrenHYPE was the writing credit of the narration: it was written by Dick Morris, the former Clinton Administration advisor who went on to become a harsh critic of the Clintonistas, even stating that he'd leave the United States is Hilary Clinton were elected president in 2008. A conflict of interest, to say the least. All the somber music and American flags rippling in the wind, the almost palpable sneer as the right-wing pundits defend their current champion, none can excuse the one statement in Moore's film that only reinforced my own spite in general regard to our blessedly-former President of these United States: Bush mobilizing his "base."

It was a charity dinner. And Democrats were there. Fine. Yet seeing the President of this country calling the elite - and the "elite" refers to filthy rich Democrats and filthy rich Republicans equally - his "base," saying between the lines that the interests of the rich will always be his first priorirty, was a sad moment for this so-called democracy of ours.

Propaganda built this country. It goes unnoticed most of the time, fed to us from the radio, the TV, the Internet, the movies, and even each other: most people are walking billboards without realizing it. Still, we know it when we see it, and respond on some instinctive level. The truth is that both films succeed in cancelling each other out. That is the "easy" truth.

The harder truth, for me anyway, is that Michael Moore's film may have cost John Kerry the 2004 election without meaning to. The three million people who gave Bush the edge (and for all the GOP's crowing, that was hardly a landslide in the Reagan Vs. Mondale tradition) may have voted in sharp response to the criticism of their hero. Record voting turnouts don't mean everything.

If Americans could learn to think critically of themselves and their place in the world, neither film would have been necessary. This only underscores a deep pulse of resentment growing under the surface here in America, a frustration at the unchecked divisions that are only multiplying. In the end, neither film could really coerce anyone into stepping in line with the filmmakers' ideals. Both Michael Moore and Dick Morris are too inflexible...if someone is unwilling to explore a different opinion, they are not equipped to handle a rational debate. Instead, they rely on pathos and propaganda to influence people. This is as American as it gets: taking the easy way out. The two films are dark reflections of each other, and in the howling rage either side can conjure up only expands the divisions between us all.

Freelancing Funny People

2009-08-30T09:50:00.000-07:00

So there's a billion different ways to start a career in the picture business. George Lucas was a student observer on Francis Ford Coppola's early film sets, and his ideas caught the great Godfather's attention. My friend Kailey Marsh (who'll probably run a studio one day, only to get fired when she produces one of my scripts, land a sweet development gig and win Oscars) was a development intern like me, then moved on to become a producer's assistant. My cinematographer buddy Ryan Elwell works at Entertainment Studios. (And if I know him at all, he's patiently, determinedly watching for his break)

Me, I'm finally picking up work as an editor. I just came off of an editing project for some grad students at Singularity University, located on the grounds of the NASA Research Center in Palo Alto. A day after completing my work there, I landed a one-off PA gig on a public service announcement-type project. That week alone was enough to cover my half of our rent here in the Land of Oak.

Freelancing seems to be the type of dice-rolling, edge-of-your-pants, palm-sweating goddam lifestyle that keeps things interesting. It's like working on MY NAME IS KHAN: every day is a new place, a new set of hysterics and problems and headaches, and is never anything less than damned strange and fascinating. I seem to be shying away from the staid, day-job existence I once sought out as a writer. And let's thank all the holy-rolling cosmic forces for that, yeah?

Or maybe I've become accustomed to this type of work-life. I certainly missed the fun after KHAN was over. Not the most stable of stabilities, right? After the funhouse ride of L.A., though, I must have decided deep down that life doesn't have to be boring, and normal is a make-believe standard that only applies if you're scared to explore all of life's funky little possibilities. And shit.

Which brings us to Judd Apatow's FUNNY PEOPLE. Seth Rogen's struggling comic, Ira Wright, sleeps on a pull-out couch in his buddies' living room. He's a funny man and a talented comedian, freelancing – emphasis on the free – for five minute spots between featured acts at the Laugh Factory until he takes a gig with the devil, AKA Adam Sandler playing a very Adam Sandler-ish sell-out Hollywood douchebag named George Simmons. Yes, it's Sandler's best performance, right up there with it's polar opposite, his nebbishy, insecure basketcase from P.T. Anderson's great PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE. It's also comparable to Jack Nicholson's Viagra-popping, skirt-chasing music exec from SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE.

They both play characters remarkably like themselves. Sandler in FUNNY PEOPLE is isolated, lonely, and takes advantage of the loose tail constantly falling into his lap. Nicholson doesn't date anyone younger than thirty, and his conceited Jack-ness masks a deep streak of self-loathing. Both are brave, stellar performances, in movies that are very good and strangely uneven.

Still, compare FUNNY PEOPLE to Judd Apatow's debut as a director: 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN is a terrific comedy, lauching Seth Rogen's career and Steve Carell's star into orbit. (Aside: a buddy of mine used to at the Border's book emporium on the Promenade in Santa Monica, which is strangely popular with celebrities. Harrison Ford stopped in, as did John Landis for a Q&A, as well as, uh, the bad guy from TWINS. And so did Steve Carell, who sauntered in dressed in the utterly clichéd tabloid uniform: dark blue windbreaker with the collar turned up, sunglasses, a "how DARE you recognize me!" attitude. I'm not saying he's a prick In Real Life... but I'm not saying he ain't, neither.)

But VIRGIN, for all it's charm, humor (the classic "Know how I know you're gay?" sequence) and real love for its characters, remains firmly two-dimensional. Within the first half-hour of FUNNY PEOPLE, the main characters become fully fleshed out and believable, apparently inspired by Apatow's experiences as Sandler's roommate during their starving days of beer and pizza.

FUNNY PEOPLE struck a deep chord with me for some reason. Maybe because I'm starting to write a broad comedy for the first time. "Comedy is for funny people," Sandler's George tells Ira at one point, after Ira has overstepped his boundaries in George's life during the third act. My wonderful girlfriend Sarah thinks I'm funny, but do I make you laugh? Lord knows I try.

High Desert Legends

2009-08-21T20:03:00.001-07:00

Oakland reminds me of Inglewood. It reminds me of downtown L.A., parts of Koreatown, the neighborhood where Sarah and I used to go for Dim-Sum, and it reminds me of the way I looked at the world before I moved to Los Angeles.

While I working on the Bollywood film MY NAME IS KHAN, we had a few shooting days in Sacramento. When I first hung around that town, it seemed impossibly city-ish to me. I was raised in Rio Vista, California, for the love of whatever god can help me get a spec script read. During the second day of the Sac shoot, I found myself looking for Vitamin Water for Manish's assistant around K Street, which is the closest thing to south Beverly's The Grove that Sacramento can offer. Years ago, the place was bigger than life. Now, it was a deserted stretch of mid-town strip mall in a mid-size city in California. Capital or not, Sacramento is forever an afterthought.

That in mind, try this:

HIGH DESERT LEGENDS (PART ONE)

The Making and Near-unmaking of Andrew Wright's Thesis Film

We really should've known. Should've seen it coming. We all sensed it those first days, scouting the location in the horribly bright, terribly hot sun, running around a patch of desert that Andrew Wright's grandfather may have owned in name, but was clearly its own entity. I felt it the instant I stepped out of the cool, air-conditioned backseat and reeled back a step, slugged with the full force of the desert at high noon. Later, DP Ryan Elwell would confirm a communal sense of dread: "I was walking through the shots with Andrew and looking at the sun, the sky, the snake dens... I remember thinking, We're going to try and shoot in this?"

And it's the very senseless essence of such an idea that attracts me to this kind of thing.

I hadn't been assistant director in a long while... aside from a pickup shot-reordering while shooting Mary's narrative elements scene, I hadn't done it since we all shot our portfolio short films, that grand and ancient, epic span of days long gone (and perhaps best forgotten)... the summer before, roughly. Living in Santa Monica. The house with the spare room, left empty since day one... acquiring rats and neglecting them until the poor neurotic things had to be left to their own devices...

"As must we all," I couldn't help muttering. It's Day Two. One twelve-hour span of Student Filmmaking in the high motherfucking desert down, about three more to go. I open the motel room door, take a few steps outside and stop dead in my tracks.

It was five in the morning. The sky the day before had been a smooth and healthy blue at the horizon, deepening to purple, then maroon, then a sheen of black at the very height of what I could see of space. The sun was up and grinning down at us by seven – by nine or ten, we were suddenly seeing the true, crushing nature of the high desert. That was on Friday, Day One.

As AD, I had done the most complete schedule I could come up with... with the exception of Ryan (our DP) and Tammie (his girlfriend and our production designer), the vast majority of us had no frame of reference for filming in a desert. We'd been in high, dry country before, shooting Script Supervisor (and part-time member of the art department, by default) Mary Stasilli's roommate Casey Fergeson's thesis, but as Ryan pointed out, that was different. That land had been tamed. It was used to our kind and not only tolerated our presence, but had been long since cowed by that blind, dumb, indomitable force, human willpower. And making a movie takes a whole shitload of that, on everyone's part.

The hot days on Casey's shoot were unpleasantly bright, with a weird, dry humidity that doesn't make sense trying to describe but no matter. The first day of shooting "Legend of the High Desert," Andrew Wright's thesis film, was brutally hot. I had checked the weather for that Friday... 104° Fahrenheit. Fine. I'm from NoCal, and will match your evil, sweltering afternoon in high August 405 traffic with any windless, cloudless summer day in downtown Sacramento, nearly paralyzed by the heat, humidity, the hot stench of baking asphalt and exhaust dripping from your skin and clothes... or any late-July, 101° mid-morning on the levee, with the sand and mud drying out and stinking to high heaven of the decades of swamp rot and sewage flowing down the Sacramento River... but those were still places that you knew, felt comfortable in. The desert was something else.

I stepped out of my motel room on the second morning and looked at the sky. I couldn't believe it: it was raining. Of all things. Of all fucking things imaginable after that miserable, hot, demoralizing, hot fuckin' hot as fuck day... This must not happen. It can not happen.

"Is it fucking raining?" came a low voice to my right. Danny Puckett had his room's door open and was peering at the sky through his glasses, black horn-rims almost identical to my own.

"Yes." I said. He just shook his head, turned around and slammed his door. There really wasn't much else to do at that moment. I felt the same way.

This is where the rational, reasoning world of basic, common human logic begins to break down. Only pure fools would try and film in that desert on a day like this. And this is when I truly, really discovered that if you want to call yourself a filmmaker, you not only have to attempt the impossible, but slap impossible's bitch-ass face and sit it the fuck down. Nothing's impossible. What one man can do, another can do. This is David Mamet and his judo fixation, Darwin, I. Ching, fuck it man, you got to roll with it...

Besides, somehow, this is my fault. As the AD, everything's your fault. And there's a rush in that when things are rolling smoothly: the DP and ACs are just truckin' along, the actors are troopers, cool to work with, totally cooperative, and all the while delivering pitch-perfect performances while getting clobbered by the blistering sun... the director's happy (for a change, and who could blame him), and the crew hums with a great, positive vibe... this is thanks to you, too... but like every other component to making a movie, if you're doing your job right, no one should notice.

There's a natural high in this that maybe only I could feel. God knows I’m not a pro, but I kind of felt like one by that last day, running up and down a desert road, hollering at the crew to get the shot while promising these leathery, sun-happy, tweeked-out redneck locals that we'll be out of their way in just five more minutes...

I'm certain everyone feels a different version of it. Saturday morning, I was feeling the day's early chill – absent the morning before; the heat had already been in the ground by sunup – and, in my head, drastically revising the shot schedule I'd typed up last night. The High Desert Motel is our base camp for this shoot, which already feels as epic as most of us figured it'd have to be... we're talking about Andrew, after all... there's a sense of endless scale to the stuff he directs, even when it's two people talking in a room... so it's only fitting that as I bustled around, waking up the crew (I've had to do this before... the sadistic Scorpio fucking asshole in me relishes their disgruntled growls... thank God Andy Klun, key grip and practiced smoothie, took it on himself to be their example and popped right up whenever I opened the door), printing out a shot schedule that would be slashed to bits in good time, I was thinking of the motto paired with Andrew's Wrench Head logo: More Epic Than Your Mind Can Comprehend.

Indeed.

Reels

2009-08-10T14:58:00.000-07:00

Are we happy? Content? Searching for everlasting meaning in a mad, mad, mad, mad world?

Naturally. And so on, and so forth.

Here's my editing reel:

http://vimeo.com/3758252

And just for the sake of the good, clean American fun it always is, here's SKILLET, a chilling little horror short I wrote and edited, for last year's 48-Hour Film Project... (we didn't win, but it wasn't my fault... I don't think.)

http://vimeo.com/4139474

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

2009-07-15T10:22:00.000-07:00

The short documentary included here was shot and edited by Aaron Kemp. It is an engrossing, unsettling piece of work. Enjoy.

My Name Is The Wrath of Khan (part one)

2009-07-13T21:01:00.000-07:00

Day 19 finds the crew of My Name Is Khan in Healdsburg, California (doubling for Banville, Georgia), a smallish town of about 11,000 people roughly seventy miles north of San Francisco. This is a Bollywood/Hollywood production of a film starring the Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan, directed by Karan Johar and produced by Prashant Shah... none of whom I'd ever heard of before landing the fluke gig of Production Assistant and driver for the lead actress's costume designer, Manish Mahotra, the "Marc Jacobs of India." Kajol, evidently the Angelina Jolie of Bollywood, was very pleasant to me, even if our interactions consisted largely of polite nods - I talked mainly to her bodyguard, a big, jolly Latino dude with a girlfriend and kid on the way. He was a very nice man, from whom I learned about Kajol's crushing paranoia and fear of the kind of attention generated by Shah Rukh Khan's very presence damn near wherever we wound up shooting.

I don't blame her.

This job is just proof that you can never tell just what you'll find on Craigslist.

I had just moved to Oakland from Los Angeles. The idea was for my girlfriend and I to finish school in a place with actual meteorological changes to the seasons, a place where not everyone you meet is working on a film or about to be working on a film or trying to get the financing for a film or wants to shoot a film or get on the crew of a film or writing a goddam film. When two different co-signers for student loans were turned down, it appeared that the credit fairy had suddenly declined to furnish me with anymore magic dust. I had already dug myself a nice, deep student loan debt. The amount I owe is so absurd that it's hard to take seriously. It's almost impossible to really believe that throughout my three years of film school, I convinced myself that "just one script sale" would make it all better.

This proves that the real world does not really penetrate the wackadoo haze built over LA, like an artificial ozone layer, put in place to protect the City of Angels against the hard reality of the rest of the universe. It's not a nice place to be a writer.

Then again, most places are not nice places to be a writer. Historically, that's what being a writer was all about - making the most of a shitty situation and then, you know, writing about it. L.A. is hideously bright and feels like a never-ending parking lot. The endless buzzing of a few million hustling pricks ready to claw, stomp, fuck and suck their way to the top can be a high, a kind of psychic mindmeld. It has predictably horrifying consequences in the long run: paranoia, a heightened sensitivity to parasitic has-beens eager to try and resurrect their own smothered promise and ambition with the sweat and blood of an "up-and-comer," (which sounds a literary allusion to an early-80's San Francisco bathhouse fling, ickily enough); you become hip to the hype and then fall for said fucking hype, hook, line, sinker, and promise of a back-end percentage.

And just when you think you're out (or at least you think you want to be out) - and, oh yes, I'm gonna go there - they pull you back the fuck in.