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.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Friday, July 16, 2010
The Deep Pockets of Corporate Media (or something...)
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.
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.
Monday, May 24, 2010
The Good, The Bad and the Freakin' Weird
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.
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.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Match That Media
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!
Saturday, January 23, 2010
UNDERRATED: THE MIST (2007), directed by Frank Darabont
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.
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.
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.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
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?
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.
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."
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.
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