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

That Mean Old Evil Train Took My One and Only Friend

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

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

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

Good?

Good.

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

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

Wait, does that even make sense?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Good, The Bad and the Freakin' Weird

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.