The Dark Knight of the Soul (Rated Just Right)

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

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

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

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)

or

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

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

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)

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.