ROGUE ONE: On Prequels (A Non-Review)

A lot of my friends love ROGUE ONE. Bully for them. I don't. I feel sort of bad about it, and maybe an eventual revisit will warm me to it, but I have very specific problems with prequels, and they may explain why this film left me colder than SNOW FALLING ON CEDAR.

Most prequels don't need to exist and probably shouldn't. The problem prequels run into frequently is they tell us information that is irrelevant. For instance, I know Anakin is going to turn bad. Seeing that happen isn't interesting if I'm not emotionally invested. To make me invested I need to care about that character. Lucas spent three films not doing that. OZ, THE GREAT AND POWERFUL is charming at times, but what parent or person wouldn't rather watch the 1939 film? The Hobbit films at least had their roots in a book, but it was distended beyond nature - it's the Mr. Creosote of trilogies. But more than that it tries to engage you with spectacle that only works when you have a rooting interest. The problem is often how, and how is so often overlooked in these films.

What are good prequels? My list is thin. The best example currently going is BETTER CALL SAUL. There are a number of reasons for this. But foremost is that the creators from the first frame show that whatever Saul/Jimmy/Cinnabon employee man does, his fate is determined. And so we can wonder if the events, as they unfold, are inevitable. Jimmy McGill isn't loved by his brother. But Jimmy had bad tendencies. Would brotherly love have fixed or enabled him? Is Chuck right, even if he is an asshole? The little things add up, but this show has given those little seismic shifts the weight of earthquakes.

My mind then goes to RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. What is so great about this film (and less so, so far, about the sequels) is that it showed something that we never got to see if we take certain time travel theories to be correct (essentially, if we accept that Taylor arrived on timeline A, the time travel of Cornelius creates a timeline B by altering events of the past. This may have been explained in the films proper, though the films suggests that Taylor's craft was not created in 1968, while Cornelius and Zora arrive in 1971 most obviously). But the story of RISE is about enslavement and rebellion and it works by creating a new template for the franchise. It also works because it adapts modern concerns to the franchise, while the first film ended on a note of nuclear panic, this later film is about genetic modifications and superbugs. It also wasn't a story that had been previously told in the franchise, even if it has similarities to CONQUEST.

The thing about THE GODFATHER PART II is that the prequel elements are also not telling us anything we knew before. It works because it acts in parallel with the story of Michael Corleone. Perhaps we thought Don Vito was mostly honorable, but it paints a portrait of immigrant life which feels historically correct. A minority oppressed, with limited opportunities, and one oppressed by its own. Vito built an empire on blood, and the family paid the price, but Vito hoped his legacy would be Michael, but not the Michael Michael became. Seeing the life of Vito is not telling us things that had been explained or inferred by the first film.

You know what's a great prequel? KILL BILL VOLUME ONE CHAPTER FIVE. We know that the bride defeated O-Ren Ishii, it's obvious from the end of the first chapter of that film. What we don't know is the how. And the how is fucking amazing. And I gauge prequels on the how.

So, ROGUE ONE. The information about how the rebels got the missing plans was covered in a crawl, so it was disposed of within, literally, the first three minutes of the original film as a minor detail. But going in to this film, I knew two things: The new characters can't play a part in future films, and the rebels gonna get those plans.

Here's where disappointment set in for me: At no point does anyone have any great special skills to get those plans, nor do the main group of rag tag thieves have that many defining character traits. People will probably point to the new droid (and he's the best thing in the movie), or Donnie Yen, but that's not enough. I kept waiting for something, anything to happen where someone had a special set of skills that were useful. And though that sort of happens a little bit, so much of the third act was for me more impressive spectacle versus engaging craft.

Now, here's where I can play a little bit of devil's advocate and say that this might possibly be the point, that it's not about skilled people doing things they are good at but ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances who have to deal with the cards they're given.

And if the film was that subtle, I would totally forgive it if the film's denouement wasn't as ham fisted as a punch from Porky Pig. I guess some see the ending as the natural conclusion to the narrative about hope. For me It was fan service dialed up to eleven. And maybe I'm not connecting to the thematic resonances therein. But perhaps I'm too turned off by a kung fu Darth Vader and a poorly acted CGI Tarkin to care.

I think you could probably take a character getting coffee and turn it it into a feature film. About how the beans were grown, about how they were cured, about how they made their way to a Starbucks (or wherever) and make it interesting, but if that's the case I have to be engaged on a level more than "Eventually these people get their coffee" and that was how I felt about ROGUE ONE. Eventually, the rebels are going to get their Grande Mocha.

Dancing Days are here again...

I wish I knew more people who loved to dance as much as I do. At The Short Stop, I was and am known as "the firestarter." I wonder how many other people know what that's like. When I dance, I can get people dancing. I don't know if it's because of my enthusiasm or skill, but I know it to be true. I may be the first person dancing on a Saturday, but eventually people are going to dance on a Saturday because it's Saturday. When you can get a crowd whipped up on a Wednesday, that's when you know it's not just the day. I wonder about my movement. I know I've gone through transitions. I've moved my hips more, my legs more, my arms more. I've found patterns I like to repeat, but it's all self-taught. There might be a little Travolta (very little) or found items, but maybe it's best if it's primitive. No idea.  Rhythm is math, understand the math.

One thing dancing has made sacrosanct is that woman are to be treated kindly or left alone. I say this because one thing the dance floor has taught me is what it means to be objectified. On an off night, people can do what they want, but when shit gets crowded, you get guys who are on the hunt. What that means is a line of guys just looking, dudes who get into groups and will stand around in the middle of a dance floor (MIDDLE OF THE DANCE FLOOR!!!) not dancing, sometimes just looking at their phones. This makes me think an entire generation of people don't know how to interact, so they just want to be in it.

But I also know that as someone who hits the floor so regularly and with such passion, that I am captured on people's phones. People think they're being subtle, but they're not. Some days I treat it like my friend Scott - who used to pose in the background of photos at Universal Studios, creating an album of images that will never be seen by anyone - as something that happens but is my personal in-joke. These days when I see phones pointed at me I get mildly annoyed because I know that this is going to end up on social media platform to which I have no access and I have no idea how what I'm doing is being viewed. Am I being singled out because of my skill, or is it "look at the white guy!@!" I have no idea. Because these people don't talk to me, I can't be sure. And that makes me mad at the level of a dull ache.

Being objectified also means that people will touch me. My ass has been pinched often, women have tried to kiss me, and people will offer me advice I don't want about how to dance. I don't need to be told how to dance, and I generally don't want advice from someone I don't know. I have control. It may look frenzied or big, or whatever, but I know what I'm doing and I know the space I have, which means when I have a lot of space I like to take advantage and go big. I would compare this to being a woman if it happened all the time, but really it only happens when I'm dancing so I won't pretend to relate. If I do talk to a woman on the floor it's because I know she's interested, or I feel the need to tell them they are a great dancer and I leave it at that.

Unfortunately, flattery is my downfall. It's late Friday and I'm at home without going out. That's because I threw my back out a while ago, and I don't know if it recovered. I often carry groceries in a backpack and I think the weight differential puts my spine out of whack. Sad. But the reason why I'm hurting so bad is because I was out Wednesday night after work, and I got the dance floor going. I hit, and people joined in. Eventually a woman - who had a boyfriend - hit the floor. I had been peacocking for a while as there was enough space, but the people who were clapping on my moves made me feel supported. Even though she was with a guy, she wanted to dance with me, and that seemed awesome, so I danced with her, eventually going full DIRTY DANCING. When she came over to show me all the photos her boyfriend had taken, I couldn't be happier, happier to be included in this game. But my back showed signs of distress, which I ignored because the DJ was cute and I was being properly lauded.

I recently joined Tinder. I don't care for swipe culture, but I also felt it was important, as I think I'm ready to date again for the first time on social media. I want people to know I'm ready. I have no idea how many swipe right or lefts I've gotten, but I figure that if I'm at a club and people see my profile that it can't hurt. Then again I was at work today, and as I got out of the elevator to go to work, I got a "yeah" nod from a female who must work near me. I assume this happens all the time to women, but it happens to me only from time to time. It's that "yeah" nod that suggests that person is in to you, sold American. And that's the divide from men to women perhaps, though perhaps not, of when I want to be objectified.

Camus had a point talking about Sisyphus

I lived on Beachwood Drive for about ten years, give or take. For those who've never visited Los Angeles, what may be most famous about said street is that it seemingly leads directly to the Hollywood sign. You know, that sign that says Hollywood and gets destroyed a lot in post apocalyptic and disaster movies. Note: The street doesn't actually get you to the sign.

There were two things one would encounter because of this, often on a daily basis: Tourists asking you to take their picture, and tourists parking illegally in your driveway so they could take pictures. Never mind the absurdity of taking a picture in front of a sign that is famous for being a sign that is famous (Hollywood in a nutshell). But no matter how nice or how awful you were to these people, there was nothing you could do about it to make a change. How could you? Were they going to tell the next person you ran into? No.

I walk a lot every day if I can help it. And the one thing you can not change is that some people have spacial awareness and some people do not. Some people do not almost blissfully so, to the point that it leaps over into awareness of being an asshole. But no matter how nice or how awful you were to these people, there was nothing you could do about it to make a change. How could you? Were they going to tell the next person you ran into? No.

I go out dancing all the time. Gross dudes don't understand they are gross dudes. Here is the one time that sometimes Sisyphus makes progress that seems real, even if it isn't. I don't usually peacock to peacock, but if the floor is right (that is to say, if I have space), I will go big to make a point. Sometimes that inspires gross dudes to go with me, like they think I'm on their side. But more often than I'd hope they get the point. And they do because ironic dancing only gets you so far when faced with skill. I have been going out dancing since I was able to buy a drink, and at this point I have to admit to myself (and others) that I'm good because false modesty becomes unbecoming.

But even if I win the battle, the floor usually hits capacity, and there's nothing I can do about gross dudes who don't understand that women like watching me dance - whether it's because they think it's funny a tall blond balding white guy is throwing down, or because they might want to fuck me - and that seeing me dance inspires them to dance, and that women don't want to dance when the see guys who stay on the floor and don't dance but either stare or look at their phones and don't like guys who stand in a line by the side of the dance floor. I don't like describing women as prey but as I have probably said before, a dance floor is an ecosystem, and any ecosystem with too many predators is doomed to collapse. But this is also about who's in the bar at the time.

It's funny, I was thinking about this last night, there was a guy in a toque who was standing around the floor in the middle of the dance floor, who migrated to the center, and I was dancing near him. Amerie's 1 Thing came on (for reference), and I was like "time to show off" because... that song and immediately after throwing down the two hottest ladies in the club started dancing near me. As if the fates wanted to prove my point. But this dude persisted in hanging out in the middle of the dance floor. The middle is sacred to me. One of the old bouncers at the Short Stop (my joint) used to call me "fire starter," because I could get the floor going, and if you're in the middle - if you're in the focal point - you want to be throwing down because that's where the energy comes from. To stand in the middle is an affront.

After, this led me down a rabbit hole of thought. What I've experienced of late is that more people than you'd expect aren't so much cold as anti-social, or ill equipped with social interactions. Everyone wants to be a little bit Don Draper - to be the playboy, what have you - but so few of us are. And I want to be inclusive, you always want to be inclusive, because it results in better net gains, as it were. I was totally dancing with the lesbian couple next to me and we were all digging it, but this guy I couldn't get a bead on - but at this point with legalized weed so many people are probably stoned all the time and don't even know where they're at. Part of me want to grab this guy and ask "Why the fuck are you standing here? What do you think you'll accomplish? Why aren't you sitting down or standing on the side of the floor?" Honestly I wanted an answer, I wanted catharsis. But the truth is that there was nothing I could do about it to make a change. How could I? Was he going to tell the next person I ran into who did the exact same god damn thing? No. But I move the bolder up the hill just the same. 

Ten Declarative Statements About Prince

1. Prince made you want to dance.
2. Prince made you want to fuck.
3. Prince made you want to believe in God.
4. Prince made the Super Bowl cool.
5. Prince made the Eighties, if not cool, bearable.
6. Prince made Minnesota cool. Minnesota.
7. Minnesota.
8. Prince concerts were always an experience worth having.
9. Prince knew he was Prince and had fun with it.
10. Prince is gone and the world is a less funkier, sexier place for it.

Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Redbox

How movies are bad these days has changed by leaps and bounds, and it's partly to do with the current studio system. With fewer and fewer mid-range budgeted films, there's less room for filmmakers to learn their craft before moving on to the Jurassic Worlds of cinema. And with Disney currently operating as it does (and this may change due to filmmaker pressure at some point), the standard "one for them one for me" model isn't tenable. You make a hit movie for Disney/Marvel, they're not really in the business of making passion projects. Do you see Joss Whedon getting his next film going at Disney yet? Shouldn't he? Auteurism has been ceded to the studio/brand. Who senses that Justin Lin touch in Fast Five, or James Wan's hand in Furious 7? J.J. Abrams and Sam Mendes are hit directors whose biggest hits mark their films as professionally made, but with little sense of the filmmaker behind them (at least in their franchise work). 

Twenty years ago, I would go see films that might be bad, because you never knew. In 1996, critics were just likely to be dismissive of Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy as they were The Frighteners, as they were Kazaam, as they were whatever Jean Claude Van Damme was doing at the time (in this case Maximum Risk). Sometimes they were right, but also, they may not have grasped what Hong Kong filmmakers were doing with craft as they used JCVD to make whatever insane piece of art they were after. Reasonably budgeted movies had a certain autonomy. But even the big summer films of twenty years ago often had the stamp of the director, of someone or something behind it that wasn't a brand. Here's a list of the top ten films of 1996:

1) Independence Day
2) Twister
3) Mission: Impossible
4) Jerry Maguire
5) Ransom
6) 101 Dalmatians
7) The Rock
8) The Nutty Professor
9) The Birdcage
10) A Time to Kill

Five of these are definitely products of their director, but even of the most cynical it's hard to say that something like Twister or Independence Day were noted to death. Fox heads may have had some input in ID4 (a film I like), but the film seems to be a pleasure machine based on what audiences had liked before as surmised by the filmmakers. It feels naive in its cynicism; it loves its cliches. Two of these seem like straight-ahead hackwork: Dalmatians and Twister - but even Twister, bad as it is, was mostly a success due to audiences reacting to changing technologies, much as people responded to 3D regarding Avatar. A Time to Kill is just Joel Schumacher adapting a popular novel so it's a non-starter, benign. I would find it hard to say any of these films are truly great, but I would say most are entertaining, and have personality.

I've seen all of the Marvel proper movies in theaters, and have hated a couple (looking at you Thor), so it's not that I get angry at all studio-run projects, but when big movies are bad these days, there is nothing for someone who loves films to get all that excited about, but this also points out why the best Marvel movies often have the stamp of their director(s). The turning point for me with trusting criticism of big budget movies is two-fold: Critics are now more sensitive than ever to geek concerns, and bad studio product movies are bad in ways that make them no fun to read/watch.

As for the first point, well, let's face it: geeks won. Ain't it Cool may not be the powerhouse it once was, but it seeds are planted, and not just at Hitfix. Critics who are in their thirties and forties grew up with Spielberg and Lucas, and though they may not even be versed in Hitchcock (to be fair, many are), they aren't as snobbish as the old guard who may have worshiped Cukor and Stevens and Stanley Fucking Kramer. The old guard are the ones who favored films like Out of Africa, or Gandhi, or Chariots of Fire, films that have no great value these days, the people who may have given The Artist four stars. I may not always agree with Devin Faraci, or Drew McWeeney, or Eric Vespe, or a number of the film critics that (full disclosure) I've known socially (in some cases just online) for years, but I know that they are nerds/geeks/whatever the polite descriptions of indoors kids are. Or, more to the point, they are the target audience. And as time passes, at least for the foreseeable future, this will only grow more the case as Hollywood churns out films based on the brands critics grew up with.

The second point is that I saw Star Trek Into Darkness in theaters, and that was a film that I made a promise to myself after, and that promise was that I wasn't going to pay to see a film that I knew I would hate simply to be a part of the conversation. This advice has served me well, as I skipped The Amazing Spider Man 2, Jurassic World and many more in the theater. I caught up with them on home video, and they proved to be as bad - if not worse - than I feared/heard at the time. I hate beating up on films like Fantastic Four or Terminator Genysis, but they seem a product of current Hollywood thinking as much as anything, and when they hit home video, there were no champions for it, and it's unlikely that auteurism 3.0 in twenty years will make a great case for these films. These are not the sort of detritus that turn out to be hidden greatness. I know this because I could find that in the films of twenty years ago while I was watching them. I could be proven wrong, and would love to be, but it comes down to voice, and what marks these films is a lack of it, or a lack of an original one.

The problem is that without that voice, without a sense of real guidance, these films are bad in ways that aren't interesting. Say what you will about Sucker Punch, but that's a fascinatingly bad/misguided film. That's a film that's after something, that's trying to say something and may have utterly failed in doing so, but it is also after something beyond branding. Even Man of Steel, as flawed as that movie is, has a guiding voice and an idea behind it, whereas with so much of modern cinema it doesn't take sunglasses to read that the main idea behind them is CONSUME. And on some sort of political level, I can't support paying for art that is so cynical. At the end of the day, the Marvel films are usually at best fun rides, but it's hard to say they're more than that. The same goes for the new Star Wars (which I like), but at least they're enjoyable. And it makes me wish more people would give a director ten million dollars to make a film with Jean Claude Van Damme and leave them well enough alone. You might get shit, but you might get art. Throwing half a billion dollars at a filmmaker that has a checklist that's more important than the story? Fuck off.

Contextualizing FARGO

The passage of time makes it harder to see how gravitational pulls effect orbits. Supposedly Howard Hawks was one of the first directors on CASABLANCA before he made TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. Do we see that the similarities between the two as studio mandated, that Hawks - unable to do his version - eventually made the film he wanted to make without those impediments, or that Hawks was aping the success that came before? As it's always hard to parse the rumors of that period, it's hard to know for certain as Hawks loved to take credits that may not have belonged to him (and denied some that may have).

This I can say for certain. In the spring of 1994, the Coen Brothers had their film THE HUDSUCKER PROXY come out and do a belly flop in theaters. I remember seeing it, and though I loved it from frame one, and though the darlings of the independent scene may have "sold out" successfully, they did not attract a mainstream audience in doing so. Two months later, a little film called PULP FICTION won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, a prize the Coens had won with their previous film three years before, and with it Quentin Tarantino achieved commercial and critical success the likes of which the brothers had never attained. Maybe it was Harvey, maybe it was the zeitgeist, it doesn't matter.

When we talk about the Coens, they're the modern - albeit stoned - iteration of the Kubrick model, in that though they are more public personas, they do little to reveal themselves or what they think about their material - to this point previous special editions of FARGO have gotten little input (or output) from the directors on the material. Joel and Ethan Coen made their breakthrough movie with paltry means with their debut BLOOD SIMPLE, which was a neo-noir through and through, casting a old testament biblical light with some impressive directorial chops onto the genre. And when we think about masters such as these, it's not always that we see them licking their finger and seeing which way the wind blows.

As such, this much is true: FARGO was the movie that reignited them, made them Oscar favorable, and cemented their place as masters. On paper, it's hard to say that anything that happens in FARGO was drawn at all from Tarantino and his previous films. But it's also not hard to see filmmakers who may have felt that they needed to do something of the moment but also that had their own spin on it. A spin that Tarantino may have taken farther in his own works to that point, but is it so hard to trace a line between RESERVOIR DOGS and BLOOD SIMPLE, even if surface details muddy the point? Can one not apply the saying "The innocent must suffer, the guilty must be punished, you must drink blood to be a man" to RESERVOIR DOGS?

FARGO is rarely compared to PULP FICTION for a number of good reasons, and yet I am left wondering if the former's existence have everything to do with the latter's. Even if the Coens were going back to basics, which to some extent they were - though some they weren't - context tells you a lot.

THE REVENANT is a Cannon movie in Oscar Clothing

Hitchcock once said something like "plausibility is the province of dull critics," but let's look at what happens in THE REVENANT from the perspective of the Ree/Arikara tribe over the course of the movie (from what I remember, granted):

Before the movie begins the chief's daughter is kidnapped by French trappers for the purpose of rape.

The Ree then attack the American trappers headed up by Domhall Gleeson, Tom Hardy and Leonardo DiCaprio with the precision of World War II snipers, reducing what was a party of 40 to around - and soon less than - ten. They do this because they are looking for the chief's daughter.

Leo's Hugh Glass says they should abandon their boat. They do, which is smart because the Ree are already down river and torch the boat. The Ree then go to the French trappers (who have the chief's daughter) and get horses. Not noticing that the daughter is somewhere nearby.

They then find the remains of Hugh's Indian son and then when they see Hugh by himself in the water, even though there's no way he could have the chief's daughter, decide to try and kill him, because... I mean, I get it, I'd try and kill him too for fun, but whatev's.

I think there's another cutaway to the Ree, but the next time they have a real presence is after Hugh has freed the Chief's daughter, and if we're to believe the French trapper who shows up at the American post, Hugh somehow slaughtered the entire French trapping community by killing two guys (using a pistol that could only have fired one shot at the time) and scaring off their horses, but him having Hugh's water bottle is the tell. It's possible the Ree got to the French as well, I can't tell if that's not clear, or the film's reshoots turned what was meant to be a much bigger scene of Hugh killing the French into a smaller one and then things didn't cut together, or if the script didn't have shits to give.

Geographically, one would think the Ree would run into the French camp and then either find or be able to track the daughter from there, but the next time we see them they're trying to kill Hugh again and send him riding his horse off a cliff.

Side note: When the American hear about a survivor who fucked up the French, they go out to look for this person. 1) Geographically, wouldn't they then run into the Ree first? 2) The dude went off a cliff. So what's the path that would make that easy for them to run into him?

Side Side note: The French kill Hugh's friendly Indian companion. Why? They obviously have dealing with the Ree all the time, or enough that they know that they're both deadly and nearby. Perhaps getting away with stealing the chief's daughter emboldened them, or perhaps nothing that happens in this movie makes any sort of character sense (just a thought). But even if he's a part of a different tribe, wouldn't that stoke the Ree up? Or is it more plotting for the sake of leaving Hugh alone?

Side Side Side note: For a film that made a big fucking deal about shooting in natural light and DiCaprio eating a real raw Bison liver, his character is attacked by a bear and lives. That's fine, that's based on a true story that was mostly ignored for the rest of this tale. But then he also goes down the rapids at one point and jumps off a cliff and falls into a tree a little bit later, but that seemingly doesn't do any additional damage to him, and he's able to go toe to toe with Tom Hardy at the end, seemingly with no noticeable limps or broken bones. Even Rambo would find this implausible.

So then the final moment of the Ree is when Hugh sends the dying but not totally dead Tom Hardy down river so the Ree can finish the job of scalping them they started years ago, and this time the Ree don't try to kill Hugh, maybe because the chief's daughter is there. But then Hugh says some mystical shit about not being consumed by revenge after sorta spending the last ninety minute of the movie supposedly consumed by revenge (this is non-text subtext in that the audience is to assume this, even though nothing in the movie makes it clear until Leo finally says something about it, near the end of the film, even though, you know, he has these visions that are mostly about his dead wife and son and not about his all consuming need for revenge, which he seemingly has at some point) so he lets the Indians, which we suspect that Alejandro G. Iñárritu would not treat like bloody savages, act as bloody savages because they finish what Hugh started.

One wonders if the moment that DiCaprio stares into the camera at the end of the film is the actor asking us if we believe this shit. I don't.

Another sort of nitpick. There's a shot of Hugh, having finally dragged himself away from the camp, seeing water. This is at a point where he's not really walking yet. Where does he see that water from? The top of a cliff. The next shot? Him drinking water. Dude can't walk. Top of a cliff. So, what, two, three days later?

Also, it's made mention that DiCaprio's Hugh Glass is a great tracker and guide. At no point in the course of the movie does he ever use those skills, unless we are to believe his plan was to get Domhall Gleason killed and then use him as bait the entire time. And that's possible, the character could just hate gingers.

Best of 2015 - Unfinished

I don't like to talk about my living, but I work for Sony DADC doing DVD/Blu-ray QC, and I have yet to see some of the contenders for best of 2015 partly because I will be working on them. Such is why I have to say that this list is unfinished and may never be. But, let's do it.

1. MAD MAX: FURY ROAD - I ended up working on a release of this movie, and my job is such that I don't always get to watch a movie from beginning to end. Some times I only get to watch, say, the first or last thirty minutes of a movie. But I never had a pass on FURY ROAD where I didn't jump up and down like a little kid when the tanker is being attacked by the men on the sticks. At worst, one could say that FURY ROAD is nothing more than the platonic ideal for an action movie. Nothing more...

2. CAROL: Todd Haynes is a master, and this is one of the best love stories this side of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. How amazing is Kyle Chandler? That guy can do anything. Seriously. Compare his performance in this to his work in THE WOLF OF WALL STREET and FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS. Dude can play any kind of America male. And he doesn't even give the best performance in the film.

3. TANGERINE: Great films are often not only entertaining, and TANGERINE is entertaining AF, but it also paints a portrait of a world and a place that you get to experience. As someone who lives not far from Santa Monica and Highland, there was something magical about getting a look, however "real," into the world of the trans people who are around but are generally not people I get a chance to rub elbows with. It's too bad that "I felt like I learned something" is often an insult, but like the great works of neorealism - which this is a peer - you get to experience empathy while watching this movie while also being entertained.

4. BRIDGE OF SPIES
5. THE MARTIAN: Masters doing master shit. This is cinema. Both are films that people are going to start watching on cable and forget that they had other things to do. Would it help?

6. MAGIC MIKE XXL: Joy. That Channing Tatum sure knows how to dance, doesn't he?

7. STEVE JOBS: This is Aaron Sorkin's best screenplay, which is saying something. This is also Danny Boyle's best movie, which is also saying something.

8. RICKI AND THE FLASH: I have seen this film three times now. At first it was like "oh, this is better than I thought it would be." By the third viewing, when I break down as I sing along to "My Love Will Not Let You Down" I have to acknowledge that this is a kind of perfect movie.

9. DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL: When I first heard Liz Phair, I felt like something exploded inside of me, as I was a teenage boy who didn't realize that a woman could feel like that (it was a different era). I can't imagine what a teenaged me would have made of this film, but like TANGERINE, there is truth here.

10. SICARIO: I never thought the guy who made PRISONERS would ever make anything that wasn't pretty nonsense. I was wrong.

11. IT FOLLOWS: It's called dream logic, and I'm fine with that.

12. EX MACHINA:  A brilliant heist movie wearing science fiction clothing.

13. THE GIFT: It's unfortunate I wasn't asleep at the wheel when I was watching the MPAA card for Joel Edgerton's feature film debut, but it's also telling that he manage to grip me and fear for the possible violence ahead even though the film received its R rating solely for language. Being such a master of tone on a first film suggests Edgerton could be the best actor/director going today, so someone should give the man some real money.

14. THE LOBSTER: "We developed a code so that we can communicate with each other even in front of the others without them knowing what we are saying. When we turn our heads to the left it means 'I love you more than anything in the world' and when we turn our heads to the right it means 'watch out, we're in danger'. We had to be very careful in the beginning not to mix up 'I love you more than anything in the world' with 'watch out, we're in danger'. When we raise our left arm it means 'I want to dance in your arms', when we make a fist and put it behind our backs it means 'let's fuck'."

14-16. SPOTLIGHT/ROOM/BROOKLYN: SPOTLIGHT is probably my favorite of these three, but they are all solidly made, well-acted films that will probably come off better when they are out of awards season. SPOTLIGHT is the sort of film that could be called underrated, unless it wins too many awards, and then that could be held against what is a great little movie about procedure.

A case could be made for: BLACKHAT, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION, STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS, CREED, MISSISSIPPI GRIND, MISTRESS AMERICA, GRANDMA, THE WALK, IRRATIONAL MAN, INSIDE OUT

MORE TO COME... EVENTUALLY

A Year on the Ropes

I don't enjoy talking about personal stuff online.

Or, to be fair, that's not entirely true.

I've become conditioned to not write about personal stuff online because it becomes a wedge issue. When it comes to Twitter and Facebook, I can't say that everyone who follows me or friends me is actually a friend. It could be because I said something clever, or because they know me from writing online, or because the matrix suggests I'm worth friending or following. Which leads me to also know that it's better not to engender hate or empathy from strangers because there's little to enjoy about feeling like someone's bragging or begging, as I've been on the other side of it. Mostly we don't care.  I view most social media as a place to plant opinions and crack wise. And whether or not I'm in good spirits or ill, financial gain or strife, I don't like talking about it because I don't know how it's being consumed. The internet shows that empathy is often in short order, even when some seem to be supportive.

There's also a sense of a spigot being put into a dam. Once a little is let out, a lot might follow. I'm of a generation that doesn't believe in oversharing. I live a life where it would be an insult to be compared to a Kardashian, and perhaps if I achieve or achieved mega-success, it's not so much bragging as the baggage of that lifestyle. I am and have been friendly with successful people. I see how they behave on social media. I get it. Acknowledge at best and move on.

There are two things that defined the last thirteen months of my life: 1) the woman I met and 2) the exercise I've been committed to. And a third thing: 3) A lack of permanent employment. I talked about one of those things on social media. Number 2.

Basically, at the end of June, Screencrave folded and Screencrush put me into a position where I could pitch things, but I was no longer functioning as an editor. I went from scraping by to having nothing to rely on. Both I could see coming down the pike. With the former, the site took a big hit in 2011 and never really recovered. With Screencrush, I went from having a staff of five to six people, and an eight hour shift to working with one other person for four hours. I went from Chud, where I got to write longform essays - which I did as a hobby mostly for fun - to writing about the latest trailers for whatever had just come out. And, honestly, it may have made me a worse writer. Churning out two hundred words about the third TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES trailer, a film I have and had no interest in, becomes a grind.

I was always told I could take my time, but my instinct was that such material should be served as hot as possible. Ben Affleck as Batman? First up means the most hits. There are at least a dozen sites covering the same beat. Ultimately much of the writing was about writing about advertising, and coverage. Fans don't want to read that you think the latest superhero film looks like doo-doo, unless everyone has already decided a film is crap - or your demographic has. But even then, you could invite the wrath of a publicist. And though Miles Teller and THE FANTASTIC FOUR might be toxic at the moment, that doesn't mean Fox or Teller won't remember.

My interest in cinema has always covered the spectrum, from silents to indies to everything in between, and it became obvious quickly what the beat was: Superhero rumors and blockbuster cinema, which is what it is. I would be just as happy to write about Hitchcock's filmography, but as we've learned, the internet isn't champing at the bit for that. So when I was cut loose, I wasn't actively pursuing other opportunities in the same field. I started online at Binaryflix (a long defunct DVD review site), and after fifteen years of writing online I was okay with basically churning out articles upon request and the odd review of Blu-rays for Collider.com.

The funny thing was that when I got the call from the editor-in-chief of Screencrush about my demotion, I couldn't have really given a shit. A week and a half earlier, I met a woman. She lived in my apartment complex, we met outside on a summer day, and I had charmed her. It also turned out she was famous. She suggested we hang out before she left town, and though I was reticent, when my roommate basically shamed me into asking her out (though I was building up to it), I contacted her. And we basically saw each other every day before she left town, going to an art thing, or out dancing, or just having some soup. The day I got the call, I was supposed to meet her to watch the World Cup, and my first thought was that it meant I was free to enjoy the date, and wouldn't have to run back to work.

The Lady in Question

She was leaving the next day, and my cinema-addled mind felt the whole thing had a taste of BEFORE SUNRISE, so more time was more time. The most beautiful woman I have ever known wanted to spend time with me and so how could I be bummed that I was out of work?

The other thing was that a friend told me he had a job for me when a project came together. We had talked about it a couple weeks previous, and it seemed like it could "go" shortly. What's a couple of weeks? My mom said she would help me out, and I still had some money coming in. The lady of my life was gone, but about two weeks later I sent her an email saying I missed her, and a flood of emails, with videos and messages went back and forth culminating in her mentioning a party she had to go to in Sommerset that weekend. I said I couldn't afford a flight. She said she had frequent flyer miles. I had never met my nephew before, and he lived in London, so how do you not?

And it was crazy. It was a mild notion on Tuesday and by Thursday I was heading to LAX bound for London. One of the many favorite parts of my trip was going through customs, where they asked me where I was staying and how long I would be there, and I honestly had no idea. The three days I spent with her in England were pure fucking magic, and I remember so many details. One of my favorite, the one I'll spare, is how we noted that my arms are as big as her legs, and we would compare the two. Sometimes the intimacy of a touch is the most meaningful.

I would never talk about any of this stuff online, though when friends would get in contact, I loved to share the story. You work out the rhythms of how to contract or expand the narrative for maximum interest, you judge how much people want to hear. I found that women tended to appreciate (or pretend to) the story more than most guys. Leonard Maltin told me about seeing THE POSTMAN on the Warner Brothers lot while we were attending a screening, and it was a great moment for me. I've always liked Leonard Maltin, and was happy to hear a great private anecdote, and was melancholy when I heard him tell the same story on a podcast. But I realized also that some stories are going to be dined out on for a lifetime. As I had one of those, I couldn't blame him for doing the same.

But I also know that mine is the sort of story that - even with close friends - can go be toxic. Morrissey had a point about how we hate it when friends become successful, and though that's not always the case, you don't want to alienate people with your great story or luck. Social media makes such confessions a minefield.

On a emotional level, I was happy it happened as weeks stretched into months, and prosperity seemed just around the corner. As with many movie-related enterprises, there is rarely an expedited process, and so what seemed like something that might start shortly kept moving the goal posts. All the while the Lose It app showed my progress. Eventually I won and went from around 300 pounds to around 200. I would walk for hours and hours, or hit the gym and burn as many calories as possible. I would go out dancing and count the minutes to see how much I was doing. I would also hit Linkedin every day and scour for work. What seemed right? I had a number of great jobs over my career, but they weren't exactly trade skills. Most fit into something akin to middle management, and most were jobs that I got through a friend (or a friend of a friend). Linkedin updates at the end of a day around six or so at night, so I would figure out walks and exercises that would keep me busy enough to come back and check in around then.

After a while craigslist and other sites enter into the picture. You take risks. You change what level of shit you're willing to eat. I found some things that felt like iron pyrite, but some I pursued in the odd chance it would lead to gold. At points I felt like Dave in the airlock in 2001, going into the atmosphere hoping that you could complete a task before the cold of space killed you. That airlock was something I felt a couple of times, but I have been able to scrape by- even if I have incurred debt along the way, signing up for multiple credit cards to help pay the bills. I hated a lot about my life, and when struggling like that, it makes you feel less sharp, less on point. Some days you want to see everything that's happening on Twitter, some days it just feels like being raked over the coals and you only check your mentions. You're not engaging in the world in a way you want to, you try to stuff any suicidal thoughts away as foolish, because you know that that thing is about to happen if you just wait and you also know that a beautiful woman once sent you to London to spend time with her, so how are you not awesome?

But when the months pile up, it's hard not to enter a perpetual state of depression, or at least feel a level of failure that wears on you, and it makes writing for fun or about anything a greater task. It makes reading stressful. And so her picture became a totem. And so I fought off the bad thoughts and lack of success with thoughts of when it did work, when I was in better straights, and thought about the end of the tunnel. And you keep looking for it. And you try your best to take a job doing something you know is beneath you, but you would be happy to work, because you would be happy to take anything.

And so often the forms and the amount of backstory needed becomes a hurdle. I'm 39, I've had lots of jobs. For the love of god, don't make me list every single one. I don't use drugs. Don't make me pee.

As of Monday, 8/17, I will have full time employment for a while. And it's something I'm comfortable with on a lot of levels. I am excited about the job as I will be working on the Sony lot. I will also not publish this until either late into Monday or sometime soon thereafter. Because I am superstitious, and because the last year and change have led me to not count anything as golden until it becomes concrete.

When I left her in the King's Cross station to return to her European home, I knew it was likely over as I had neither the funds nor the location to make a relationship work. I emailed from time to time, hoping she would want me as a plus one again, but did not count on it, though as one does when a relationship is virtually over, you hope a repeated trick has the same value the second time. As I've said, when it's a one and done, it is what it is, but when you get a sequel, you hope for a franchise. It was not to be, and we haven't spoken in a while, though my guess is if that I went to Europe on an extended vacation, I might be able to spend some time with her, if she wasn't otherwise disposed.

That said, her presence in my life is one of the things that has kept me going over the last year and change. Maybe in a good way in that I never hit levels of depression where I was thinking so poorly that I truly contemplated a real end to things, and maybe in a bad way, in that I didn't feel the fire under my butt until relatively recently.

I don't like FORREST GUMP, but I also accept that the feather metaphor isn't total junk. Sometimes we float through life. I am happy where I am right now, I'm happy to know I've got a steady gig for the next couple, even if it isn't permanent, and even if it just gets me through the next few months. But also, that's sort of the world we live in right now, at least for me, nothing feels permanent, but it's good to enjoy what's happening while it is. It sucks to be out of work, or doing jobs that feel like shit. I've been there, I've done it over the past couple. But also life can be great, and sometimes patience is required. Oh well. I'm not dead.

It also raised a question of my writing. For the last couple of years, without steady employment, it's been hard to write for fun. Oh, I've had ideas and things I've plugged away at, but without a safety net for mental security it's been hard to tinker with things without feeling guilty. Without hating myself coming to the forefront before tinkering.

If things work out, you may be seeing more of me here. Or working on projects that aren't here. But - with the break - I think I'm back to wanting to essay shit. And to work on other things. I wrote this, right?

Cameron Crowe and Lloyd Dobler

ALOHA opened this past weekend to bad box office and even worse reviews, and you could see this coming for a number of reasons, not all of which had to do with the Sony email hack. Cameron Crowe has been in a rut for a while, which is unfortunate as he used to be a vital artist. I fell in love with Crowe's first film SAY ANYTHING when it initally hit home video and enjoyed his follow-ups for the most part until I had a breakthrough with ALMOST FAMOUS. I realized that it's kind of a bullshit movie, and then later hearing the commentary for SAY ANYTHING, it became obvious why I have never loved another Crowe film as much as his first film.

As for ALMOST FAMOUS, there's nothing all that wrong with an enjoyably full of shit movie if it's made well and is inoffensive (like GOOD WILL HUNTING, which requires as much suspension of disbelief as any superhero movie), but ALMOST FAMOUS is supposedly autobiographical. And that means that either Crowe never saw too much of the dark side of Rock and Roll, or he didn't want to show it. Both are possible (he was 13 when he started writing for magazines), and it's why the moments when the film gets a little darker, like when Billy Crudup shows that he's capable of violence, are where the film is at its most interesting. But when Crowe's/William Miller's first sexual encounter with a number of groupies is portrayed through hankerchief juggling... an act that if the character is 15 could be considered statutory rape (though likely gets the SOUTH PARK/THAT'S MY BOY "Nice" reaction from most), and if it was his first time... especially if it was three groupies it would be weird and awkward and likely quick. And you could argue that he tries to get that across in that William is more in love with Penny Lane, who seemingly gives permission to him to have sex but also maybe feels bad about it as well, but it also reveals the truth about Crowe: he's a nice guy. And it seems the best/worst thing to happen to him was John Cusack.

On the commentary track for SAY ANYTHING, Crowe talks about his initial conception of Lloyd Dobbler, which was based on someone that Crowe knew. He was a Southern gentleman who had the positivity of a motivational speaker. That was his concept for Lloyd, someone who could not be deterred, whose unerring sense of rightness would guide him to the life he wanted. And what Cusack brought to the part was the dark undercurrent. Cusack's Lloyd knew pain all too well and his positivity was a choice made in face of how much things sucked. When Lloyd is driving around in the rain, one doesn't get the sense that this is the first time his heart has been broken, it's that he can't understand what he did wrong (spoiler: he did nothing wrong). SAY ANYTHING seems grounded in a reality that Crowe knew, but the reason why the film works is because of Cusack, unquestionably. And for better or worse, Diane Court is one of Crowe's most rounded female characters.

SINGLES came out at an interesting moment, and it's mixture of romantic comedy and grunge documentary that's fascinating even if it's more charming than great. And then came JERRY MAGUIRE. I still like the film, though I haven't watched in a while, but what makes it interesting is how much Crowe actively paints himself into corners. The main character is a sports agent, seemingly the most detestable person imaginable. The love interests get married before they fall in love, etc. etc. But here, we start to see that Crowe is getting removed from regular people, and that he wants to emulate his success with SAY ANYTHING, though it doesn't comes as organically.

Post-ALMOST FAMOUS, Crowe made a remake for Tom Cruise with VANILLA SKY, which is a bro midlife crisis film that never meant much to me. Then there's his latest trilogy, and I go back to that commentary track. The big problem with these films, with ELIZABETHTOWN, WE BOUGHT A ZOO, and likely ALOHA - which I will eventually watch - is that Crowe likes to graft pain onto his main characters. In ELIZABETHTOWN - which due to the nature of DVD post-production work, is a film I have seen over ten times - it opens with the Orlando Bloom failing big and nearly committing suicide, in ZOO, it's that the protagonist's wife recently died, and in ALOHA, the main character was declared dead and left heavily injured in Afghanistan (though this was more fleshed out in the original script than the finished film).

The problem, especially in ELIZABETHTOWN is that it seems that Crowe only superficially understands darkness, and that's why ALMOST FAMOUS turned out as it did, but he still wants to have that dark energy in his movies. And when you realize that Lloyd Dobbler's character wasn't meant to have that weight, it explains a lot. Would ELIZABETHTOWN be a better movie if the main character wasn't suicidal? It strikes me that part of the problem is miscasting, but that Crowe's initial choice for the role was Ashton Kutcher suggests either that he's at the mercy of the studio system, or that he doesn't understand that pain. Other names that could have played the part are (according to wikipedia)  Seann William Scott, Colin Hanks, Chris Evans, and James Franco, so perhaps it is a generational problem. That film doesn't know how to mix pain with joy, the sweet and the sour. It's a hard chemistry problem to crack, perhaps even more so when you first did it accidentally.

For the Record: INTERVIEW: DAVID LYNCH & LAURA DERN (INLAND EMPIRE)

There are certain things that I would love to have listed on my tombstone. A collection of the eccentric moments in my life that I’m – for better or worse – proud of having experienced. And I’m sure by the time Andre Dellamorte III sits on my lap, my story of having coffee and pie with David Lynch will likely involve me saving his life, or telling him a joke that made coffee and/or pie shoot out his nose.
Alas, such is not the case. I did have pie and coffee with David Lynch, and I’m sure I’ll be bragging about that for years to come, but it was because I was invited to attend a junket with David Lynch and Laura Dern at a nearby Marie Callenders, where we were served pie and coffee and got a chance to have a roundtable discussion with one of the few artists who managed to make transcendent work in the 80’s, and one of the stars of Jurassic Park. Though that’s not exactly fair to Dern, who has been one of the best female actresses going for nearly 25 years, with great performances in Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, and Citizen Ruth. INLAND EMPIRE is their latest collaboration. Lynch is a mad gesticulator, his hands were often in motion when answering questions, and not being able to transcribe those movements is something of a loss.
As David sat down with us someone commented that pie and David Lynch go together
David Lynch: It’s the Twin Peaks thing, I guess.
Someone chimed in "I’ll take Marie Callendar’s over Four Seasons any day."
Lynch: You and me both. (This place) is way more of a restaurant than I thought.

Someone asked if he’d tried the pie yet, as a chocolate cream pie was put at the center of our table.
Lynch: Not yet, not yet. I was thinking about Banana Cream Pie. What are you guys gonna have, you’ve got Apple pie? Nice. But now you want the chocolate cream.

So what’s your favorite pie?
Lynch: Well, I like cherry pie, I like blueberry pie, I like banana cream pie, and I like Dutch Apple pie, I guess those would be the top four.
How is Dutch Apple pie different than regular apple pie?

Lynch: Dutch apple pie has something on top. What is it, cheese? It has that crumbly top. Yeah, yeah yeah, that’s it, a real crumbly top. Killer pie, beautiful.

Do you have a least favorite?

Lynch: I don’t think I’d be wild about rhubarb
And at this point Laura Dern joins us.
Laura Dern: I love Rhubarb!

Lynch: Really?

Dern: Yeah.

Lynch: Wow.
David said he wanted banana cream.

Dern: Oooh, banana cream! Does that mean we get a piece of pie at every table we go to? Oh, this is fantastic. I should get a coffee.

Lynch: I’m getting a coffee, I think. I think so. (To us) Fire away!
How long were you guys in production on INLAND EMPIRE?

Lynch: Well, production is a weird thing, how long over from the beginning to the end was about three years, but we weren’t always shooting every day, you know what I mean? A lot of days we weren’t shooting.

(To Dern) So he’d just call you up every once in a while and say "I’ve got a camera, I’ve got an idea?"

Dern: Pretty much, right?

Lynch: Yeah. (pause, followed by laughter)
It seemed like there were a lot of different styles in this picture in comparison to some of your other work, handheld type of stuff, did you take a different approach to this project?

Lynch: Yes, because I was shooting DV with a small, lightweight camera. It was so beautiful to me, to be able to hold the camera and float around, and you know, let it move according to what I was feeling or seeing. Whereas before you’re behind a massive camera, in front of you is an operator and a focus puller, and you’ve got a kind of barrier, and if you wanted to move, if you felt a thing, it wasn’t possible. Like I say, on the next take you might say "can you drift in on this line a little bit like this," but it may not happen the same way on the next take, so it gives you this ability to really be in there and stay in there, because it 40 minute takes, it’s very beautiful.
(To Laura) How different was it for you, having worked with David on previous projects?

Dern: You know, again, I’ll almost repeat the same idea. The liberty that comes with working with DV, you’re liberated as an actor, in the same way David describes you never miss anything because you’re right there. You never miss an opportunity of being in the moment, because suddenly now – not just the performance – but the camera is offering that in the moment opportunity, you can catch anything, and he can hear what the actor – seemingly off camera – is doing and want to capture that and just flip around, and because of the luxury of a 40 minute take if you need it – I mean 40 minutes in the camera – that you can shoot an entire scene without ever stopping and he can get all the coverage he wants and we are staying within the moment of acting out this scene, and not cutting and resetting but in fact even while filming talking to me, because of the luxury of the lack of expense as well, to say let’s do it again, okay, go back to this line, let’s keep going. And you’re just, as an actor, it’s an incredible feeling to stay true the mood, the feeling that’s going at that given time.
David, could you talk about how this film relates to your other work? Because there seem to be similarities with Mulholland Dr, and we actually saw clips from Rabbits in this film. Is this film an extension or how do you view it?

Lynch: It’s different but… similarities, because it deals with – as Mulholland Dr. did – the movie industry. But… And it has, you know, a female lead, um (laughs)

Dern: Thank you (more laughs)

Lynch: You know, and then it kind of takes off and becomes different.
It felt a bit like a collage of some of your previous works, was that intentional?

Lynch: No. Ideas come along, and you pick an idea, and sometimes you catch an idea that you fall in love with, and you see the way cinema could do that. It’s a beautiful day when that happens, and the idea tells you everything. Now you – because we had our kind of mechanism, we kind of fall in love with certain kinds of things, but every film is different, and it’s based on the ideas that come. And they are the things you try and stay completely true to, and all the elements you try to get to be feeling correct before you walk away, and you go.
So, Laura, with this role, there’s so many different levels, so many different performances, various different versions of the same person, how was that working for you?

Dern: You know, more than ever, the day’s work was at hand, and what I had. Given that we shot in such a way that we would, David would a write and we would film that, and then he’d write another scene and we’d film that and so on, it forced me – very luxuriously – into the moment. I didn’t necessarily know what was coming before or what was coming after, and whether one perceives it that I am different people, or that I am aspects of one person, either way you can really only act one way, which is being the person you are in that moment. So in a way, not knowing everything, and trying to somehow get to what would be logically minded as an actor and try and help the audience understand how this relates to that, etc. I was freed from any of that, by David keeping me in the moment with whatever character I was playing, or whichever aspect of the story I was involved in. And that was extremely freeing, and in a way I think allows for more imagination as an actor, because as much as an actor wants to believe this is just for my own experience, that they are not informing the audience. There can be a pitfall of feeling like "because my character is going to do this five scenes from now, maybe I should give them a little taste of that, so they know that it’s coming," but as we see, human nature doesn’t work that way. Where people cry in the news when we hear "so and so, who seemed like such a nice guy, did this atrocious thing." And so being forced by the director, if you will, to just be this aspect of what I suppose this is for, I think made me get to be braver by default, not intentionally.
Would you only want to approach a movie with this scene-by-scene approach with David? Is he the only one you’d feel comfortable with?

Dern: Well, I’d rather only work with David, period. (laughs)

Lynch: You’re working with me now, but watch what happens next time "Oh, I don’t even want to work with Robert." (more laughing)

Dern: They know, we’ve met many times before when you weren’t here. (again, this entire exchange is peppered with laughter)

Lynch: Exactly. It’s all baloney! (more laughing, as per last sentence)

Dern: Going back from their lunch. "Can you believe it? Poor David Lynch, he doesn’t
realize that Laura has said that so many times today." But I think, for myself, I’ve watched David do this with many other actors on this movie, but I don’t know if I could have done this with many other directors, because, and we’ve been asked if we have a shorthand, in fact we have a remarkable one. And I’m sure he has it with the other actors he works with, but for me, I have the ability from knowing him since I was seventeen, separate from who he is as a director to me, to intuit what he means, and he can intuit what I’m going to express before it happens. So it’s not just what the movie’s about, or the character I’m playing, but even as an operator, a cinematographer, I felt like David moved his body and camera just into place just as I was thinking of moving that way. You know there’s that thing that happens…

Lynch: Laura actually directed this picture.

Dern: Wonderful.
With that scene by scene approach to filming, did you ever consider releasing it as a series of short films?

Lynch: No. (laughs)

Dern: A set of long films.

Lynch: No. After a while, the scene by scene revealed more. And then I wrote a lot of stuff, and then we went and shot more traditionally. We could shoot for several weeks, and have stuff to shoot, and organized like a regular shooting schedule. But it was just in the beginning that it was scene by scene. And those, were, could have ended up just being that, a scene, separate, by itself, for the internet or whatever. But I didn’t know what it was going to be, so I’d shoot a scene, and then I’d get an idea for another scene and shoot that scene, and lo and behold, after a bunch of them, a thing came out.
Your working process on this was different

Lynch: A little different.
So, with the freedom of digital video, do you see yourself making movies more in line with this, or this kind of process?

Lynch: Not this process, but with digital video. And I think, maybe, I would, it would be nice to have a script written up front, but it just didn’t happen this time.

Dern: But, as he said, there were chunks of the film that surfaced, that you wrote. Towards the end, I mean, we shot for a month.

Lynch: It all starts coming more and more and more.

Dern: But we shot for like, four or five weeks solid at one point, almost like a traditional movie.
So it was all linear?

Lynch: Totally linear. It’s a straight ahead linear thing. (laughter) No, it wasn’t all linear, but there were a lot of scenes that were there, some could have been back in time, some could have been here, and then a chunk right now, like that.
Laura, when you were shooting the opening sequence with the creepy old woman (played by Grace Zabrinski), was it as creepy to shoot as it was to do it?

Dern: Well she is the nicest, loveliest lady, but having met her on Wild at Heart, I’m just damned terrified of her every time I see her. I can’t get over who she has been made out to be by David when I see her. It’s the beauty of working with David, is that you are – speaking of being in the moment – you are there in the moment, you may have a sense that something is disturbing, or a sense that something is funny, but when you’re in it you’re just trying to make it as authentic as it is, and then when you reflect back, or when you see it as an audience something that even seemed straight while you’re shooting it to me is just hysterical. I pretty much think he’s the best comedy director going, you know other people don’t see it that way.

Lynch: Laura is seeing a psychiatrist.

Dern: Hilarious. Her speech is hilarious, but I was doing it she was terrifying, so I don’t know why it worked out that way because I wasn’t sitting across from her.
The last question call is given

Lynch: Whoa that was quick, how can we possibly get into this?
I have to ask, is Twin Peaks ever going to be released on DVD?

Lynch: For sure it is.
We’re still waiting for Season Two.

Lynch: Yeah, it’s coming out, I think next spring. I think so.
What about Lost Highway?

Lynch: It’s all color corrected, timed, high def masters ready, it’s, I think Universal owns it now, and Lost Highway did not make a lot of money at the box office, so they probably have it way low on some list for DVD, I don’t know when they’ll get to it, I haven’t heard a thing. You’re going to have to write to Universal.

INLAND EMPIRE is already open in New York and Boston, and opens in LA on Friday the 15th.

For the Record: TROLL 2

The Film: Troll 2 (1990)

The Principals: Michael Stephenson, George Hardy, shitty puppets, Claudio Fragasso (director)

The Premise: A young boy named Joshua (Stephenson) has been having conversations with his dead grandfather Seth, who keeps warning him about Goblins. His family decides to go to a town called Nilbog for vacation. Nilbog is goblin spelled backwards. Do the math. 

Is It Good: In the words of our foremost poet-laureate “Aw, hell no.”

This is a movie called Troll 2 that features no actual trolls. They’re all goblins. This was made by an Italian (Fragasso) in America at the tail end of the Italian horror renaissance. There’s a horror subculture that regales the Italians, but horror fans are often the most forgiving, and there’s a lot of terrible Italian horror movies. Oh sure, you can call Dario Argento a master, there is a case to be made for Lucio Fulci, and there’s no denying Ruggero Deodato has his moments. I’m not denying the Italians (hello, my name is inspired by Dellamorte Dellamore) but many of the other big names – like Umberto Lenzi and Bruno Mattei – made shitty knock offs that are mostly laughable. That’s also appealing in its way as their films often mimicked something successful in America. It says something about his gifts that Claudio Fragasso worked a lot with Bruno Mattei and co-directed Rats: Night of Terror (if you haven’t seen Rats, it’s totally worth seeing for the surprise ending).

I have not seen Best Worst Movie – though I will – but I was indoctrinated into the Troll 2 cult by old video store coworkers. A number of the girls there (it would be fair to call them hipsters) really got into the “so bad it’s good” type of cinema, and they were obsessed with this movie. And you can see why they were so stoked: It doesn’t take long into the movie to realize that the director’s command of performance and acting was non-existent. All the actors are uniformly terrible, though you build up sympathy for Stephenson’s Joshua because he’s trying and he’s a kid. The girls were obsessed with Stephenson. Side note: as Best Worst Movie was taking off I had dinner with Stephenson through mutual friends, and I had to tell those old coworkers about it. I was star struck, but in that way you might be if you saw someone you recognized from a porn video.



The driving force of the cult of this thing is apparent right away, which is the complete disconnect from good acting and the weird interpretation of standard movie tropes. It’s one thing to be bad, but it’s something way more awesome if you’re crazed. Joshua constantly talks to his dead Grandpa Seth, who acts partly as a Obi-Wan Kenobi figure and partly as a get out of jail free card whenever Joshua needs help. Which leads to a scene where Joshua’s family is about to eat dinner, so grandpa Seth freezes time and Joshua figures the only way to stop people from eating is to pee on their food. This actually happens, by the way. Though the actual score is fun, the poor music choices also help amp up the camp (up). The family sings “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” terribly (which Kirk, Spock and Bones did in Star Trek V, leading me to a new pet theory: any film that uses this song will be bad), and Joshua’s sister doing a workout to music obviously created specifically for the scene.

There is a war going on for the film’s tone, but you can tell there’s something of a fairy tale quality to the movie, as there is an evil witch and fairy tale logic. For example, eating the Goblin’s food turns you into Goblin food, and because the goblins are vegetarians, Joshua is able to ward them off by eating meat. Every once in a while things seem so uniquely terrible that you almost think the film is intentionally doing what it’s doing, but then those thoughts pass as shots linger on terrible actors. This is also – strangely – a dead teenager film, as Joshua has a sister who’s got a boyfriend who wants to go on their vacation, but instead takes an RV with his friends to follow the family, which means additional corpses. One of his friends dies eating corn on the cob that explodes into popcorn as he’s eating it.

And finally, man I love the Goblin costumes. My favorite has always been the one that looks like Edvard Munch’s Scream guy.



Is It Worth a Look:  It depends on your tolerance/appetite for good bad movies. There’s no denying the film has a charm because it is so uniquely terrible. I go back and forth on my feelings about liking a film for those reasons. Yes, I own The Room, and Battlefield Earth, but I don’t know how much energy should be spent on appreciating something terrible. Then again, I just bought this film on Blu-ray, so I’m kind of an asshole. Yummy! Mom is so good.

Random Anecdotes: The costume designer for the film was Laura Gemser. Gemser played Emmanuelle, and spent much of the 70’s in films where she was naked, having sex, getting raped (oh, the Italians!) and/or “exploring her sexuality” (read: fooling around with chicks). Sometimes this would start or end with her wearing a nun’s habit. I have no knowledge of what she did in her off hours, though her transition into costume design leads me to think it was knitting, and possibly darning. If I ever see Michael Stephenson again, I’ll have to ask him about her, though that’s possibly mentioned in his movie Best Worst Movie, which comes out on DVD 11/16.

For the Record: ONE FOR THE ZIPPER: LESLIE NIELSEN 1926-2010

If it weren’t for David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, the passing of Leslie Nielsen would have mostly been noted by fans of 1950’s sci-fi. Without ZAZ, Nielsen would be best remembered as the vanilla lead of Forbidden Planet. To be fair, Nielsen gave what the role required: a stiff resolve, and the look of the perfect American (or North American, Nielsen was a Canadian). But in terms of acting, the role didn’t require a lot of heavy lifting, and Nielsen was another in a line of handsome but bland actors who slummed in those (at the time) children’s pictures. After that, it would be probably be his role as the Captain of the ill-fated Poseidon in The Poseidon Adventure to which he was most memorable on-screen. Had it not been for his willingness to make fun of himself (and perhaps a vague similarity to Ronald Reagan), he would have continued on the road he was on for most of his career, which included guest spots on such shows as Fantasy Island, The Golden Girls, and Murder, She Wrote. Perhaps the autumn years would have been spent at cons getting horror fans to pay money for his autograph because of his brief turn in George Romero’s Creepshow. It was a career littered with special guest spots and lower-billed authority figures, the career path of many who came to close to becoming studio system stars, but didn’t have that extra oopmh.

But when Leslie Nielsen was cast in 1980’s Airplane! a second career was born, albeit one that took almost a decade to come into bloom. Nielsen was one of many older actors called on to mock their straight-faced demeanor and bland good looks in the hit comedy, and though both Robert Stack and Lloyd Bridges would return to work with ZAZ, it was Nielsen who they based a show around with their dismal failure Police Squad (in Color!). Running an all too brief six episodes, Police Squad is one of those great flukes of television history, and one of the most unintentionally perfect shows ever to air. Nielsen’s Frank Drebin is an ingenious comic lead – he’s a clueless but effective police detective in the middle of a ZAZ world. The show cemented his rhythms for these roles – Nielsen was drop dead funny when he was completely oblivious. And the show wouldn’t work without such a great anchor. But even after that, it took time for Nielsen to catch on, so much so that he was cast in a relatively serious role in Barbara Streisand’s Nuts in 1987. It was when Drebin was resurrected for 1988’s Naked Gun: From the Files of the Police Squad that he finally caught on. The film was a smash hit, and it cemented Nielsen’s comic chops (while also spawning two sequels).

Though Nielsen could be the highlight in some truly terrible comedies, he was limited by the quality of the writing. Too often he was called on to mug, which works against what made him so great – Nielsen’s comic persona is based around him not being aware that he’s saying something funny or outrageous. Unlike Bridges or Stack, or even Peter Graves, Nielsen’s lack of definition in the early part of career made him perfect as a representation of an earlier era without the baggage of well-known roles. But even if the movies were lesser, Nielsen had a joy about him even in something as flimsy as a Scary Movie 3. He knew what a gift his second career was, and even when he wasn’t funny, he could make a bad comedy that much more lively. 

The legacy of his work is undeniable, as his work with ZAZ was very influential on a lot of comic writers, but specifically in Nielsen you can see the template for Stephen Colbert, and Police Squad was obviously the blueprint for shows like Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. Though the Naked Gun franchise has not aged as well as Airplane! or Top Secret!, the first film still has some great laughs (as do the sequels), and I’ve intentionally kept this piece from becoming a quote fest – there are just way too many great lines that Nielsen sold as well as any great comic performer. But if any work should be saluted as Nielsen’s greatest accomplishment, it should be Police Squad (in Color!). The show never lurched above minor cult status in America, but I suspect it made a larger impression in England. When I talked to Peter Serafinowicz and Robert Popper about Look Around You, Police Squad was one of their biggest reference points, and Edgar Wright also mentioned the show while noting Nielsen’s passing. If you have yet to experience it, here’s a taste:

http://youtu.be/A_3rJqHWYjs

For the Record: I KNOW: IRVIN KERSHNER 1923-2010

Peter Bogdanovich: “Isn’t it too bad she (Greta Garbo) only made two good pictures out of forty?”
Orson Welles: “Well, you only need one.”

I moved to Los Angeles in 2004 – in fact I moved in the day of the presidential election, which reiterated what the most of my year had essayed. It was a tough but hopeful move, and one of the nice things I had to look forward to was that my friendship with Jeremy Smith and my writing meant that I could do something I had wanted to do since they started appearing on Ain’t It Cool News: I was going to be a part of their Jedi Council. Okay, admittedly, it was silly and a bunch of geeks bickering over what had already been a wounded franchise, but I am a nerd and even if my first go-around was an off night (Drew McWeeny couldn’t make it), what did come of it was great. I not only got to meet some of the people who would become some of my closest friends, I also got a ticket for a screening of The Empire Strikes Back at the Arclight with director Irvin Kershner in attendance.

Watching the film again on the big screen brought back many memories. My parents say that the first movie I saw in the theater was Star Wars, but I have no real memory of that. Instead, what I remember was seeing Empire. I think we came in during a scene where they’re getting the troops together on Hoth, but that can’t be because that comes after the scene with the Wampa, and I know that I spent much of pre-school hanging upside down (but still using one hand to support myself) and trying to use the force. I was four then, and the color scheme of the film’s epic final confrontation, and the power of that whole last stretch of the film was imprinted on me. Something reinforced when I watched the film again almost ten years later when I wanted to buy a laserdisc player, and my friend Chris showed me the film in widescreen. Or when I worked a shit job just so I could afford the $250 laserdisc box set of the trilogy (all in CAV, with sparse commentary tracks!). But – at the Arclight – it was the special edition cut of the film (unfortunately), the one that my friends and I went to see repeatedly. When that version came out in 1997 I was working at a video store and going to college, and my best friend and I went to the Eastgate theater to see the first show. He wanted to live it, so he spent the night outside the theater with a number of other die-hards. The special edition – fixes and slapdash “new” stuff – still worked like gangbusters. And watching it in 2004, I noted what has come to be my trigger with the movie, as I always fall into the film at the same point. It’s the push-in on Carrie Fisher as the shield doors are closed.

It’s film-making 101 right there: we know that Princess Leia is concerned that both Luke Skywalker, and now Han Solo are locked outside the base in the deadly freezing temperatures of the planet. We are told that they both have a very low probability for survival. Leia doesn’t break, because she’s in a leadership position (even though everyone is being sensitive around her) but the push-in lets us know cinematically that she is feeling that door closing. And here Kershner shows what he brought to the table, because this (mixed with the great blues and whites of this section of the film) doesn’t seem to come from Lucas. There are elegiac moments in the first Star Wars movie, but Kershner’s work deepens the characters, and gives a greater sense of visual poetry to the universe. The audience at the Arclight was into the film, and then they brought out Kershner to a standing ovation.

Watching the Q&A was weird, because you want all great directors to be great storytellers, and Kershner at first didn’t come across as a great speaker, but he eventually came to life. He covered the usual bases (“who wrote it?,” etc.) but the longer he spoke, the more it crystallized in my mind: Irvin Kershner is Yoda. Not only does Kershner’s voice resemble the Jedi master, but Luke Skywalker was always a George Lucas surrogate, and Irvin Kershner was one of Lucas’s teachers at USC. Yoda spends much of Empire schooling Luke, just as – for many fans – Empire takes the ideas and characters from Star Wars and takes them to the next level. Such might explain why they never captured the Yoda of Empire again.

In fan circles, there’s always been a question of who to credit for the success of the film. There are those who give a lot of love to Leigh Brackett (who all involved now says got a tribute credit for her work, which was mostly discarded), while there are a number of Lawrence Kasdan partisans, and others who give it up to George Lucas’s bank-betting production (less so now that Lucas has returned to directing). Regardless, it’s easy to wonder how much Irvin Kershner had to do with the success of the film. On the positive, when you take out Kershner and put in someone else you get Return of the Jedi, which was written by Kasdan, and had Lucas – some say micromanaging – on the set . But then there’s also Kershner’s post-Empire track record, which includes Never Say Never Again (which I recently revisited and enjoyed, though at the time Disco’d out, video game playing Connery Bond was a huge disappointment), and the wrongheaded Robocop 2. And now there’s the J.W. Rinzler making of book, which goes into greater detail on the making of that film. But all evidence is that Kershner was no Tobe Hooper, no Christian Nyby.

But for those Star Wars fans who go digging, Kershner’s body of work offers few answers to how he did it. Perhaps best known of his earlier films is the John Carpenter-penned The Eyes of Laura Mars, which Pauline Kael flipped for but never made a great impression on me. I was fond of A Fine Madness, which is a fascinating pop-art late 60’s movie that tried to help Sean Connery shake the bonds of Bond, but is very modest in the scheme of things. S*P*Y*S reunited Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland post-M*A*S*H to little greater ends. And the intersection between Auteurism and fanboyism has never led to DVD releases for The Flim-Flam Man, or The Luck of Ginger Coffee. If nothing else, perhaps Kershner’s passing will drum up some interest in the rest of his body of work, even if thirty years post-Empire has done little toward that. But Kershner – and his role in creating what is one of the great and defining works of cinema fantasy – has earned his place in the canon, because regardless of how it came out, he created a masterpiece, and his fingerprints are undeniable. As Orson Welles said, you only need one.

For the Record: The Tourist

What does it mean to win a foreign film academy award? In the modern world, it means you can go to America. Not everyone does, of course, but usually the awarded film features great performances. Director Andrew Dominik said of his Chopper that when you make a film like that, actors want to work with you, and such seems the case for Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who came out of The Lives of Others looking like a champ. For geeks, he was the man who denied Guillermo Del Toro an Oscar, but the film was considered one of the best of the year.

Regardless, his work caught a lot of people’s attentions, which is why he was able to make The Tourist with Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. Depp stars as Frank Tupelo, the titular tourist who takes a train ride with Elise Clifton-Ward (Jolie). She is being followed by international agents (headed up by Paul Bettany) as she is the lover of a mysterious accountant Alexander Pearce, who is worth a couple billion dollars and is wanted by the British government for $775 Million in back taxes. Elise is contacted by her lover to go on a train and find a dupe, who turns out to be Frank.

The film starts with a set-up that’s both familiar and new, and von Donnersmarck and his fellow scripters Christopher McQuarrie and Julian Fellows (in adapting the French film by Jerome Salle Anthony Zimmer) obviously are careful of their Hitchcock. That’s the activating agent for this film (and likely the original), as the two strangers meet on a train, but Depp’s Tupelo is no Roger Thornhill. Tupelo is a bumpkin, touring Europe after the death of his wife, a math teacher who smokes an electronic cigarette. Elise chides him for his behavior, and coaches him how to act as a man. It’s a charming scene, and though everyone involved seems to know what they’re riffing on, it’s still got enough sharp edges to make it pop a little.

When the two de-board, it’s revealed that the police know he’s a dupe, so they back off, but enough information leaks out that illicit gangster Reginald Shaw (Steven Berkoff) is on his trail. His order to his men: you can kill Elise, but Frank must be left alone. Elsie invites Frank on a night on the town, and the come close to consummating a relationship, but he is weak and is aware that there is another man. From there the film becomes a chase, as Shaw wants his money, and chases Frank without knowing that he has nothing to do with anything, though word is that Pearce has gotten plastic surgery, so any one is possible. But it’s also about Frank becoming the man he’s always wanted to be, and a man of derring-do (which is the theme of all these sorts of films).

What’s unfortunate for this film is that Brian De Palma ruined Hitchockian riffing. Where De Palma was able to steal from Hitchcock and turn it into a game, his knowing acknowledgement makes those that follow come across as less clever. The Tourist feels familiar in its To Catch a Thief meets North By Northwest trappings, and there’s a sag to the film because it comes across as a xerox. There’s no edge here, there’s nothing more than feeling like a riff until the final reveal, which I will cover in a spoiler section. And if you like a reasonably well made riff on Hitchcock then this will surely fulfill your needs, but it feels like exactly that (and no more). In every way this film feels like a movie out of time, as this sort of thing seems to be something best done two decade or more ago. But if I don’t dislike the film, it’s because it feels old school, with a nailed down plot and enough twists and turns and practical action to keep a viewer engaged.

What I think makes the film is the ending, which moves us into spoiler territories, so beware. End of line, I modestly liked the film, and there’s some appearances by actors I didn’t know were in the film that lifted the movie for me, and as a star showcase, character actors having fun sort of film, I found it to be harmless fun.

SPOILER DISCUSSION

What I think makes the film is that in the end moments, there’s a twist ending (which the writing credits might make more evident) where Tupelo is revealed to be the sought after man in question. What I like-to-love about this ending is that Johnny Depp is our everyman, just as so many ultra-famous people have been before. What makes the ending for me is that it says that what we trusted was that everyman is revealed to be a billionaire. In that way, the film is a very interesting comment (intentionally or no) on so much of pop culture and films like this. And that was enough for me to view this film as a minor success.