Taped Shut

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

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. Oh well. Early success 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, and my appreciation of the music of the 90's.

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

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)

last saturday

these sounds, even in the haze:

"bedawze the sickness

belight the waste –

bethrone the barnacle'd husk of this world."

more and more:

a blitz and a blight and a shack and a surface

of okra and solidarity and bad cornmeal – who

were you, my brother? Blackened? Fuck your husk,

my brother – i choose the family i chose.

so rise up and dance with the damned

we walk in herds with our cousins

we shamble along

as empty pages in the back of a book no one

even ever glanced at or picked up or

wondered about –

and improbably,

we demonize this mortality,

a simplicity in the territorial coil –

a dead shackle coated in the slick

grease of what came before

"you are warped and ridiculed & yoked by

paralyzing quiet. you are shackled. you are

shackled. we are voices in the maze, the string in the

maze and you are shackled."

And the night comes on,

a balmy dream of evening surrounds Shea's

desperate grief –

he leans in and the voices mute the

wind whistling through treetops and

skittering across chainlink fences –

"we promise nothing, only offer."

"tomorrow is promised to no one," Shea says.

Bride Flight: Roy Batty Dies In The Beginning

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

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

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.

I Met Tom Sizemore In An Elevator Once...

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

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

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

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