Vicky Cristina Barcelona

So I just saw this and I think it's worth a little blather. First I'll paste in the opening plot description from Wikipedia and then we'll get to my own thoughts.
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Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlet Johansson) visit Barcelona for the summer, staying with Vicky's distant relative Judy (Patricia Clarkson) and her husband, Mark Nash (Kevin Dunn). A Narrator (voice of Christopher Evan Welch), present throughout the film, describes the two friends: Vicky is practical and traditional in her approach to love and commitment, and is engaged to the reliable but unromantic Doug (Chris Messina). She is in Barcelona getting her masters in Catalan Identity, a project spawned by her love of the works of Gaudí, and is emotionally moved by Spanish guitar. Cristina, on the other hand, is spontaneous and unsure of what she wants in life. She is just out of a relationship and wants to get over the bad time she had making a 12-minute film about Love.

At an art exhibition, they notice the artist Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem). Cristina is impressed with him at first sight, and grows intrigued when Judy and Mark tell the girls that the artist has suffered a violent relationship with his ex-wife, María Elena (Penélope Cruz). Later that night, the girls notice him across the room in a restaurant. He approaches their table and abruptly invites them to accompany him to the city of Oviedo, where they will sight-see, drink wine and, hopefully, make love. Cristina accepts at once, but Vicky is skeptical and refuses. She is eventually convinced however, and the pair accompany Juan Antonio to Oviedo on a small private plane during a storm...

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First off, this is a good movie to get you talking afterwards if only because it is very difficult to watch this without being drawn to trying to figure out how much of yourself there is to be found in either of these two women who sit on different sides of the fence when it comes to love.

Secondly, even though it seems ripe for having a bunch of simple characters that embody certain arguments and nothing more...this pitfall is carefully avoided. Bardem is introduced as a musk-laden, life affirming Spanish Lothario to be sure...but as you get to know him, other sides to the man come out. The two girls may be presented by the narrator as basically being "the reckless, passionate one" and "the uptight, overly planning her life one" but they two show elements of the other (as best friends often do) while also showing sides that are something more than their core element or the exact opposite of said core.

Allen shoots their story in some of the most picturesque Spanish cityscape and countryside you'll ever see. I've often said that if you can't afford a trip to Japan, that renting Lost in Translation is a cheap substitute and I'll say the same about this film with regard to southern Spain. His knowledge of their art and architecture is frequently injected into the narrative without being overbearing or coming off as Allen wanting to show off.

His relatively hands off and trusting style of handling the cast pays off handsomely when you consider the talented roster. None of the drama slipped into melodrama and everything felt quite natural. The character of María Elena might be a bit much for some people, but I found that she was fleshed out enough for me to not just think "Here comes the crazy lady" every time she entered the room.

I've heard several people sing the old song about how "Woody Allen's finally got It back!", but given that this was said about Match Point and a few of his other films of the last fifteen years...well I just think that there are fans of his that need to move on from Annie Hall the way there are Radiohead fans who need to move on from OK COMPUTER. I feel it's a strong effort and I was pleased to see that all the work he's been doing with Scarlett Johansson seems to have helped her become a more interesting actress. Sure she's playing something of a sultry sexpot once again, but compare her character in this film to the one she played in The Prestige and I think you'll see what I mean.

I highly recommend bringing a friend with you and a partner if you've got one (certainly, judging by all the couples in the audience when I was there...I'm not the only one who thinks this is a good date movie) and to go for a meal or a drink after, somewhere you can discuss what you've just seen. Me? I'd see it again in theaters and I'm certainly going to have a peek at it on DVD if the price is nice.

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MEANWHILE: My friend Sara got a role in a neat little music video you might like. Warning: The music is actually pretty good!

Roadsworth

Getting talking with some folk at a party last night, I brought up my show and this Friday's interview with Posterchild as well as the Vespahead thing etc. One of the people I was talking about brought up a character I'd never heard about - Roadsworth. As his name suggests, all his work is done literally on the street. Apparently he was arrested a few years ago and presented with an impossible fine, which was later dropped when the city of Montreal ended up hiring him to do work for them.

Lo and behold, there is an NFB documentary on the guy - enjoy the trailer.

Meaty Posts should start with Meat

These are the boys, the meaty boys, which have my back this week.
Last night Roberto and I finally saw "There Will Be Blood". I went in with high expectations which were completely met and then met some more. Daniel-Day Lewis earned that fucking Oscar! For those of you have either seen it or don't care about SPOILERS, here is that final scene which made me have to work very hard not to pump my fist into the air and scream "EEEEEE...YYYYUS!". It was not the only scene to have this effect!



For those of you who didn't already know, Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood composed the entire soundtrack and did a magnificent job. During the very few shots where my attention may have wandered - namely broad California scenery shots - his soundtrack kept me absolutely riveted and contributed to the feeling that if I looked away, even for an instant, I would miss yet another magnificent example of What Film Should Do. Here's a clip of the music.



And if you feel like watching one of the horrors I came across in my failure to find my favorite scene, then go on ahead and do that to yourself!



Armed with what I knew going in, I very much expected the film to be evenly split between Eli the young pastor and Daniel the oil man. I should have paid more attention to the poster! This is a Daniel Day-Lewis marathon and though other actors put in strong performances, this really is all about him. He owns every scene he is in (about 90%) and you are always curious as to what he'll do next, even if it seems obvious. The charisma of his performance is such that you find yourself looking at the world through his characters own willful, misanthropic, pragmatic eyes and thus your opinion of his two more despicable acts has a way of being more sympathetic than it might be otherwise.

It's a shame we had to wait five years for another Paul Thomas Anderson film, but it was a wait that was richly rewarded. His cinematography took a film which may appear to have no need for the big screen and made that size screen borderline mandatory. Columns of oil, gritted teeth, bible thumping and other things which are not CGI muppets are presented with an intensity that matches Daniel Day-Lewis's frequent outbursts - including a part about halfway into the film where he just slaps the shit out of the sniveling young priest (which, frankly and a little sadistically I admit, I could watch on a continuous loop for some time).

So yes, this kind of plays to my "beliefs" at times and thus the final facet which the film maker has little control over - whether or not the story plays to your personal views - also fell into place. Grab your wallet and run to the theater as fast as you can!Speaking of the imaginary beast brigade, the second big Scientology protest happened yesterday in 'celebration' of L. Ron Hubbard's birthday. The Toronto protest got a decent crowd and I nabbed a few photographs. Good on the three hundred plus got out there and gave these odious shit-merchants a poke in the eye. Another protest is already planned for April 12th and I think I'll finally participate.Finally, I've recently learned of a real-life fellow who seems every bit as driven and strangely admirable as Daniel in "There Will Be Blood". His name is Joaquin Balaguer and I strongly suggest giving his wikipedia entry at least a little perusal, as he is just about the best example of a literal enviro-fascist as I've ever come across in my readings on history and politics.

More Sweding

You may recall my rambling about "Be Kind, Rewind". Well, here is a particularly fun Swede of Star Wars that my room mate bumbled across. Enjoy!

Last night I caught Be Kind, Rewind. The sweded films they have online are pretty fun! My personal favorite is the Robocop swede...

Though I rather admire how Michel Gondry sweded his own film trailer! I suggest you watch the official one first and then his.

Macro to Micro

SCRIPTIN' FANCY-LIKE: It's a big, overly detailed world

Right then, the other night I watched a film which bears some broad similarities to a project I am working on. It was last year's Children of Men. If you don't want to risk spoilers, you'd best stop reading now.

Watching it has helped remind me of my priorities for a project of mine which also takes place in a near future with a dramatically altered world stage. I must confess to having almost entirely fallen into a trap I knew would be a danger with such a script...I became obsessed with world building, with the macro, with the background...and neglected the story! Good thing it's not too late.

A nit picking obsessive could take some real gripes with Children... and on the surface, that nit picker might not seem so much of a narrow minded idiot. There is no explanation for why children have ceased to be born, nor is there ever any explanation for why one woman - a MacGuffin/character hybrid if there ever was one - is suddenly able to be pregnant after an eighteen year gap between her pregnancy and the last one humanity has seen. This, and several changes between the book and the film, certainly got up this person's nose.

But there is such a thing as knowing what's important to the story - what's needed to simply have a story. It's an old truism, but we really do need a compelling human connection to care about any story. Alternate history novels are particularly vulnerable to forgetting this, though there are some stellar examples of what can happen when the writer does remember. I'd also argue that these kinds of stories are even more vulnerable than usual to having plausibility tossed aside in favor of expressing a personal agenda, but I'll try not to digress!

So you get this tug of war between wanting to have a world with a unique enough hook (No new kids for 18 years and the world is falling apart) to snare people who see a trailer or read a blurb, while having that compelling human element which will maintain interest while the film is actually viewed, as well as hook those potential viewers which are not so fussed about high concepts. The latter is expertly achieved in Children of Men and even a high concept junkie like myself found himself, during the tense chase scenes, finding myself drawn in because I cared about the fate of the people I was watching - not the hypothetical fate of humanity as represented by the growing fetus inside one of them.

You have a paternal relationship between Michael Caine's marvelous character (Jasper)and the protagonist, Theo. Though you quickly learn that Theo and his former wife (Julian) have been apart for some time, something which was certainly contributed to by the untimely death of their child, they are shown as still having troubles but not having forgotten why the came together in the first place. There are only a few glimpses of their love for each other, the last of which is very wisely placed moments before Julian's death. Sucked into the individual level, you are quickly pushed back out to the macro as you are made to want to know what might threaten the surviving characters.

The same dynamic plays out with the human cargo/MacGuffin character, Kee. She's more interesting for her mouthy attitude and burgeoning friendship with Theo than her carrying the sole human fetus on this broken Earth. Removed from context, it rightly seems absurd to come out with something like "Of course she is carrying the sole human fetus, what else has she got?" - but let's face it, in a film with high concepts and higher stakes...that sort of thing is expected, for without it there would not be the story being told. It's her mouthy attitude, immature approach to her role (i.e. wanting to name the first human baby in eighteen years "Bazooka") and the development of her relationship to and with Theo that makes the viewer give two shits.

So therein lies the challenge which I must force myself to undertake, if I want my own thing to get anybody excited. Having looked broadly across geography, history, economic theory, political theory, environmental theory and even some sociology...the time has certainly come for me to shove my nose right down to the ground level and create some engaging individuals to inhabit this world. Sometimes I would, not always incorrectly, tell myself that the world needed further work because of how it's details would trickle down into those which define the characters and their immediate settings. A certain even might be the direct cause of one character's cynicism, say. But what I've needed to remind myself is that it can work the other way too, plus not all facets of an individual are shaped by the world at large. I gather that people can influence people? Personal events as well as world events, yes?

So that's that then. Next time I post on this, I'll discuss another challenge which I am currently facing and which every alternate future or history story has had to wrestle with - how to convey and prioritize the information which makes up the world itself.

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Meanwhile, the Writers Strike seems to be having a rather large monetary effect on the industry?

"Electroma" or "I refuse to make a stupid pun in the title of any post about a movie"

So Daft Punk have done a little movie, which I caught at The Mayfair this Friday night past. I'm still thinking about it two days later and since it is a highly unusual film that is primarily doing the "midnight movie" circuit, I reckon it's worth talking a little about it here.

Firstly I think it's only fair to tell you what I wish I had been told. There is no music by Daft Punk in the film. None at all! There is a soundtrack that was selected by them, but nothing actually by them. Those hoping for an extended music video would be far better off pursuing a copy of Interstella 5555.

It's also short, though not a short, clocking in at 74 minutes. Odds are though, it will not feel short. Some shots, particularly later in the film, push the one minute mark. These shots are primarily of our two protagonists - actors done up in the traditional robot garb of the two lads who make up Daft Punk - wandering a Californian desert. The entire movie takes place in a nameless, dry area of California. But this is not a Hollywood movie by any stretch.

The promotional email I received used a lot of the usual suspects names to endorse it. I think the only name worth mentioning is Michel Gondry, who I could have sworn had been brought in to direct one of the middle scenes, and perhaps George Lucas - though only for THX 1138 .

I can't talk about the story really, since it is very minimal. Let's just say that they are on a journey and leave it at that. I will say that you do get treated to good music (just not Daft Punk), inventiveness, very strong cinematography and even a few laughs. It's easy to lose yourself in the film and that's always a lovely feeling, but at parts it is also easy for your mind to wander elsewhere. It's worth watching and it could easily find itself being studied by future generations of film students, but I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with the $10 I spent on admission. If anybody who reads this here ol' website ends up seeing it, I'd love to hear what your impressions were.

Scriptwriter, Know-It-All in Training

If there is reason I'm often grateful for choosing this difficult career path it is that it gives me a legitimate reason - not that "general interest" isn't one, but you know - to research pretty much everything in the known universe. One of two web series I'm working on for my new collaborator, the same fellow with him I am recording a second monologue tonight, is somewhat high concept and rooted in a twenty years ahead projection of the modern global scene. A "The World in 2008" issue of The Economist which my pal Rob gave me has been an invaluable leaping off point and another present, from Tom, looks to be quite useful as well. From that I'll leave it to you to guess at the nature of this series - for which I'm trying to get...

1) A treatment
2) A thirteen episode, episode guide
3) A scripted first episode
and
4) A character guide

...finished up. It's going well so far and given the novelty of the distribution medium (webisodes - a rare example of new jargon that I actually like) and how it shapes the message, I've been thinking a bit more about the business of storytelling and how it affects the story being told. For example, I've been making a list of neat background elements which I feel could help to snare those valuable OCD cases that turn a show from just "popular" into "cult". These nibbits are useful for the writer since they expand the world of the story and thus give you more room to tell more stories after - but let's face it, "stories" become "DVD's" and other salable products, which lead to money which I'm told a lot of people are fond of. This is an angle I haven't thought about much before now, I must admit.

I MUST

Meanwhile my favorite writer-director, and basically a huge inspiration behind my original decision to pursue this career, P.T. Anderson has finally come out with a new movie since the criminally underrated Punch-Drunk Love. There Will Be Blood looks very interesting and I will almost certainly review it in some depth after I see it. Until then, cheggout the trailer...

This is not a blog

The last little while I have taken approx. one (1) metric fuck-tonne (phoque-tunn) of photographs! Maybe you will get to see some of them?

It occurred to me the other day that though I have gone into the city to see Hyde or St. James park...I hadn't walked the twenty minutes it takes for me to get to what is my larger local park - Finsbury Park. I'd also had Finsbury on the brain a little bit since watching Cronenburg's new film, Eastern Promises.

The above was almost certainly a political satire sketch being shot since, two seconds after I took this, the flasher opened his jacket to reveal his being nude but for a large cardboard cartoon of Gordon Brown's face over his crotch.

I'd read in more than one source about how the film was supposed to show a different London than what the tourists see, than what generally gets shown in films set in London - particularly ones made by American film makers. Thinking back to Woody Allen's portrayal of London in Match Point, this made pretty curious - especially since I live adjacent to areas where filming took place, such as Hackney and Finsbury (and had spent my first month here living in the former).It was a Cronenburg film about the Russian mafia, so understandably everything was pretty dark. But I would say the film did follow through, with only one or two shots of the Thames and the Gherkin, while the majority of the film felt very authentic. I'd get into the story etc, but you can find plenty about that elsewhere. Suffice to say, for those give a hoot, I thought it was a fairly impressive film that delivered what it promised and succeeded in surprising me where it wanted to. Can't ask for much more than that!
Meanwhile, I'd go on but I'm rather tired from a night on the towne. One thing I don't mind sharing from it was that the first stop for my pals and I was an establishment that had decided to try and work around the anti-smoking bill which was passed several months ago. Why, it wasn't a bar...it was an art gallery that served drinks! Really, it was a hilariously decorated squat with a great bit of graffiti on it's front. I'm glad I got to see it, since disapproving folk have noticed and made some legal noises that will result in it's closure some time not too far down the road. The two spirited folk behind the place plan to just keep having fun while dragging their heels, then moving on to other fun ventures when the law eventually clamps down. I gotta say, I admire their spirit!

Of cult gangster films and the adornment of dorm walls

To all my North American readers, though residents of other nations may have run into this phenomenon too, I'd like to ask you to bring yourself back to three iconic images which you see again and again on bedroom walls of those between the ages of 14-29 and in especially high concentration in "counterculture" poster shops as well as dorm rooms.

You've got your Scarface.

Then you've got your classic Pulp Fiction and your "Jules and Vincent" Pulp Fiction poster.

To a lesser degree you have your Goodfellas and your Godfather, but these three posters are the truly ubiquitous ones.

So yes, you certainly see them in England but there is one homegrown film which has a similar role.

(Micheal Caine is) Get Carter

Coming here I kind of remembered that there had been such a film, but only thanks to the shit-awful American remake from 2000 starring Sylvester Stallone, his then dying career. But when I started exploring film circles, book shops, poster shops, theater bars and the like I noticed one image kept coming up again and again.
Generally in black and white, sometimes in color, this is the most highly reproduced image from the film. From everything I'd read and all the evidence of the staying power this film has had in the popular culture of England, I'd say this is one of the essential English gangster films. You can read a synopsis and get a bunch of trivia at the site I linked to (or good old Wikipedia, of course). Maybe even IMDB, but why would you want to hurt your eyes on such an ugly website? (I mean really, is it just me or is it about as aesthetically pleasing as a Dee-Lites' video?).

What I'll tell you is my own reaction to the film, which I decided to pick up a couple months back when I'd noticed this very image stenciled on a wall near Leicester square (didn't have my camera at the time and, sadly, it had been obliterated by the time I came that way again). Like a lot of films older than about twenty years, the pacing can feel slow at times. But it's the steady building of an incredible momentum that carries you through the last third of the movie with an intensity that's impossible to ignore. It raises questions in you, early on, that you have to have answered. Best of all, it warrants repeat viewings and not just for film nerds who want to study it.

I'd seen Alfie not long before Get Carter and what struck me was how similar Alfie and Carter were and how these similarities highlighted the contrasts. Both characters are very sure of themselves and quick to assert control over any situation they find themselves in. Both cast a hard exterior and yet obviously are very sensitive to a few, highly specific facets of life. The differences lay, of course, in how they enact these characteristics and the fates their behavior brings them too.

I strongly recommend watching the two films back to back, which shouldn't be hard as any video store that carries classic Caine will have both. Anyways, enough of that then!

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Meanwhile, I'm blatantly stealing this clip from Posterchild's site. Just to warn you, it does feature scenes of (albeit animated) torture.

He put it up because of the stencil technique employed. I'm putting it up because I found it to be a suitably gripping piece of film work and an interesting angle on a well worked subject, an angle which I feel runs parallel to Adam Curtis' take on similar matters.

Phew! New comic and an honest to goodness little art upgrade

Only a lil' one, I know, but still it is a comic! I learned a lot while creating a reference page for Charlotte and salvaging/partially redrawing the disaster I aborted this past Wednesday. But it all took precious time! Still, I'll be much better prepared this coming Wednesday.

Blogger is acting WEIRD about uploading images. When I moved my small archive of twelve strips to the new address I had to put them on Photobucket and link to them as I kept getting that damn problem. But then, when I was done the new comic I tried regular uploading from my hard drive and wam bam spickidey spam....it worked?

Meanwhile, it's been a quiet weekend thanks to an incredibly sore right foot that has kept me from wanting to walk too far. This is what I get for having feet one size larger than what 99% of shoe stores in England carry, thus necessitating my getting my parents to send me a new pair of dress shoes from good ol' PayMore ShoeMoreShoe. While wating for them, I guess I've basically been walking on soles so thin as to not count under the Geneva conventions and thus here we are.

I did see Superbad though and I'd give it a hearty recommendation, even over Knocked Up. It just held together better, albeit probably because it had a simpler premise, and the overall theme of friends helping each other through tough transitions was executed in such a way that it was impossible not to see all sorts of funny and/or heartwarming similarities in my own life while watching. It doesn't desperately need the big screen though, so waiting for rental might not be a bad idea.

Committed

Just thought I'd share a short film by my friend Gina, who wrote and directed this as her final project this year. I rather enjoyed it and if you feel the same while also being in posession of a YouTube account, then by all means please head over and give her a nice rating and/or comment.



Meanwhile, in my own film adventures, some of you may recall that I've been working on another, minimalist short to make with Myspace Man* while Momentum's arduous pre-production grinds away. For the past month I've been bashing my head against the laptop in trying to come up with a five minute comedy centered around a tennis match but luckily it turns out Mr. Man and I are both huge Fallout fans (and fans of the post-apocalyptic genre in general). After discovering that during a recent chat, the mini-short has now taken a decidedly different direction which seems to be massaging all the right brain meats for me to start cranking out pages at an appreciable pace. This is something we want to get working on asap and hopefully I will be able to flash it by y'all before the end of the year.

*For those of you recently tuning in, "Myspace Man" is my nom de plume for a fellow that I am collaborating on film projects with at the moment. Three guesses which poorly designed social networking website I met him on.

If I was offered a job where I was paid to look for work...

...I'd probably turn it down!

While I'm sitting at my laptop and probing the luminiferous aether of employment, here's a grab bag of amusment and disgust for you all to peruse. Just call me shameful Thomas.

My favorite guest comic by Ryan North

My favorite guest comic by John Allison

Chris Onstad doesn't ever do guest comics, sadly, but here is one of my favorite one-shots of his.

If anyone had any doubts about how ghoulish television programmers can be, this ought to stamp those out.

Captain Nemo would be proud.

And finally, I really think that we can thank Napoleon Dynamite for Eagle vs Shark.

Toss in Superbad and I really do think that for the first time in years, nerds - realistically portrayed nerds, mind you, not "nerds" - are going to be a new trend in film protagonists.

I gotta say, I'm in favor. These kinds of characters are way more interesting to watch then the vaseline coated WB set.

I.....can't.....get this....out of my head!

I saw it this afternoon and I'm tempted to see it in theaters again. It was everything it promised to be and then some.

True story.

Writing oneself into a corner can still be profitable some times

Man, I've been stuck on a Bronze Age Sky God story called "Spec-Ops Delight" for a while now. As the name suggests, it's the third in a trilogy (EVERYTHING HAS TO BE) with "Aircraft Carrier Delight" and "War Room Delight". But I think I'm going to break the rules and leave it at a duel...ogy....for now. Naming the country was perhaps a fool mistake and though sending a half dozen Clint Coltrane types into the palace of The Foreigners leader may seem like a recipe for komedy laffs, I'm finding it isn't!

But one good thing came out of the scraps. I'll just paste it in here.

"They were the top fighters of the U.S. army, men who made Clint Coltrane look like a collection of fast food condiment packets festering in the backseat of a station wagon with no air condition on a summer’s day, while you write overwrought metaphors and keep wondering why the publisher hasn’t called back...It's important to note that the U.S. special forces spoke in English, but only technically. Military shorthand, urban slang, spanglish, codenames, film quotes, redneck slang and other sub-genuses of that great beast - American English - all mixed and matched within our heroes lexicons. "

Trying to figure out how they would sound when speaking this hyper bastardized version of English was the hardest and most enjoyable part of brainstorming for this short story. Hopefully I can find some way of working it into future projects.

Meanwhile, brainstorming for the short film sub project proceeds apace, with some serious light bulbs going off while riding the train into work today. While chucking down some dialogue I remembered something my collaborator (Myspace Man) said to me when we first met to discuss what would become Momentum. He mentioned how a lot of the writers he'd turned down couldn't' seem to realize that writing a film is different from writing a play.

Now I have tried very hard to view plays as I view any medium of story telling and I'd say that by now I do in fact feel this way. But I must admit that for years I have had to fight down a bias against them, which made any play have to work twice as hard for me to enjoy it as much as a movie, television show, book or comic. It's tricky to sum up, but I guess there was just a certain smugness and winking to the audience in a lot of the first plays I was exposed to which smelled to me of a big circle-jerk between those who made plays and those who regularly patronized them.

For reasons I have yet to nail down into precise explanations, romantic comedies can be the absolute worst for coming off as poorly adapted plays. A very good, recent example of this would be a British film I saw recently that is called Scenes of a Sexual Nature.

It tells little stories of seven pairs of people all enjoying a sunny day in Hampstead Heath park. Every single one of these stories is ether contrived, old hat or both and made all the more grating by having a kind of swagger to their telling which is there to tell you that they are totally real vignettes of things that happen all the time in real life yet are fresh and ca-razy. The dialogue always sounds unnatural and is delivered in the manner of an amateur play actor who isn't quite sure about the difference between projecting your voice to the back rows and shouting. From the incredible "Man gets caught looking at attractive woman by his less attractive wife, then fails to lie his way out of it" scenario to the "Pair of gay guys discuss things that you wouldn't expect from two gay guys, like wanting kids or being monogomous, as if they're real people or someting" scenario....the whole thing just screamed "Crappy amateur play!" at me.

SO to come back to the point, when I was tossing down dialogue this morning and thinking back both to my collaborators remarks...I tried to use that crappy movie as a benchmark against which to measure my own words. Put a gun to my ahead and ask for a short itemized list (this happens all the time) of what makes a film script that reads too much like a play and I'd give you this:

1) Smug self awareness.

2) Far too little communicated by what is seen as opposed to what is said. Basically an overabundance of exposition.

3) Very specific situational happenings being put out as universal truths.

But I'm open to input on the matter!

This! Is! EXPECTED!

So anyways I just joined the majority of the Western World and saw 300. Good fun, if a bit of a let-down from how sweet the trailers made it appear. Strangely, I haven't read the source material but now I want to for but one reason: to see if that line from early in the film where King Leonidas refers to the Athenians as "boy-lovers" was in the comic. It's pretty common knowledge that homosexuality was actually viewed as better by the Spartans (as neither partner was tainted by "the frailty of the female sex"). So it came across a bit odd to have this frat boy "Hey them guys in Athena-Gamma-Delta house are all queeeers" remark pop up.

You may recall that good ol' Fight Club had a similar mix of aggresion, maleness, bonding and shirtlessness. Aside from cries that it was pro-fascist, something 300 has also suffered a bit of, there were also the crieso of "man look all them homooooosexual undertones!". Learning from that, I think that perhaps this line was included with the hopes of pre-empting such comments. I don't think it succeeded but it did muddy the waters by bringing in accusations of homophobia.

But then, I wouldn't be too surprised if it is in the original work as Frank Miller is not the most likable guy. He can really embody some of the worst of right wing thinking in America and I believe it says a lot about him that he is seriously pushing to do a mini-series where Batman hunts down Osama Bin Laden. Sure, I have a copy of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns as well as Year One and even a Sin City volume. But it's interesting to have 300 come out because it is, frankly (oh ho ho) the last work of any quality that he put together before losing his mind and starting to write strangely mysognistic drivel.

I know we have another Sin City on the way, but what happens after that? Batman and Daredevil have both had claims layed to them that make it nigh-impossible for a direct translation of Miller's work on either character. Martha Washington is, oddly, too anti-American to have a chance in hell of getting made. Sin City 2 will scrape that barrel of stories clean and 300 isn't exactly set up for a sequel. So all that leaves, as the man isn't terribly prolific for someone who has been in the comics game for almost thirty years, is Ronin. Given the success of 300 thus far, it isn't hard for me to say that we'll probably see Ronin come out some time in the next few years - especially as it is another historical piece that they could film entirely in front of a green screen. As a result, I think I'm going to look into picking up a copy of that instead of 300 - especially since it's likely to be used almost verbatim for the storyboards.

Meanwhile, today has been a good day for writing and drawing of my own. Tom set me an intersting challange wherin I am to try drawing one of my webcomics characters with a 15 minute time limit, then 30 then again with 45 minutes. I'm doing one of Clive as well as one of Devon and I've done the 15 minute drawings for both. The 30 minutes should be done by the time I crash (drinking and talking over the film project on a work night has caught up with me) and it'd be fair to expect pics some time tomorrow.

In the interest of still being able to talk about whatever film work I get involved with, while respecting people's privacy, I think I'm just going to use alias' from now on. Keeping tight lipped about what is the primary reason I came to England in the first place just seems too bloody stupid not to do so. Thus I will refer to the fellow whose script idea (related to Parkour and technology in the community) as MySpace Man - since that is, oddly, how I found out about him.

I was just thinking today that it is a real shame I wasn't doing this blahhhhg thing a few months earlier, since I could have captured the pre-production and shooting of my trailer. Ah well, even though I'm currently developing an idea of MySpace Man's, there is a good chance this could lead to the making of one of my own shorts. I'll tell ya, few things combine such a density of amusing and interesting anecdotes into a short period of time as working on a film. All the more reason to make sure I'm well rested so I can continue work on the script tomorrow!