writer. screenwriter. learning person. loves being human.
The movie. May 8. ‘Nuff said. Bring on the Oh-Oh Theme Girl! (Yes, I have just dated myself as someone who grew up on the Star Trek TV show, yes, that one, with James T. Kirk and the green-skinned dancing girl… and the theme song of a woman’s voice singing oh oh oooooooo).
I love Fried Green Tomatoes — book, food and film, but today let’s focus on the movie (although here’s a recipe to placate the hungry and an amazon link for the readers among us).
I’ve always liked this film. I laugh, I cry, and I enjoy very much the company of the varied, interesting, complex women in this story. The movie makes some people grumpy because it chooses not to make explicit the relationship between Idgie and Ruth, but honestly, it’s all there on the screen, in every moment between them. It’s lovely. And then there’s phenomenal Kathy Bates, whose work I adore.
So here’s my Monday treat for you. Evelyn (Kathy Bates) isn’t exactly the most assertive woman on the planet. But lately she’s been listening to stories of a mythical mighty woman called Towanda….
Find your inner Towanda! And give her a hug from me.
Like this? Tell Wes Kim.
The screenwriting life continues to have a storybook-quality wackiness that fascinates, frustrates, amuses, and occasionally depresses me, although really it’s mostly fun as long as I stop attaching to the outcome. I am learning huge lessons in loving what I’m doing in the moment, because tomorrow may never come…
But that’s a story for another time. I find I am reluctant to talk about my particular experience of this screenplay while it’s still ongoing. Not out of superstition, but because it’s too close to me. I wrote a while back about boundaries: well, this is private for me right now.
But I can tell you that there a couple of great roles for women in the script, and that I’m intensely interested in and frustrated by the absolute terror that studios have of movies with women. Who knew girls were so scary? Oh, sorry, girls aren’t scary, they just can’t open movies!
You may imagine my response to this (grin). And after you’ve had some fun with that, go read what Emma Thompson and Liane Balaban (who appear together in the upcoming film Last Chance Harvey) have to say about it.
And can I just say that Emma Thompson rocks?
Enjoy your Saturday.
I haven’t seen Happy Go Lucky yet, but I can already tell it’s a movie that’ll piss a lot of people off. Because nothing bad happens! And that’s not realistic!
Well, no. Maybe not. And right now I think that’s just fine. I know the difference between realism and wish-fulfillment. And why, I ask you, why is it so bad to just throw ourselves every once in a while into the Great Big Mud Puddle of Smoodgy Fabulous Dreams and roll around for a while?
Dana Stevens argues in this review that “for a moral fable like this to work, the protagonist’s goodness needs to be tested against the possibility of real evil or violence.” I get that — one of the things I loved about Lars and the Real Girl was the tension early on that people would be cruel to Lars, and the marvelous sense of relief I felt when they weren’t. Lars was so realistic in that way.
But I have enough real in my real life right now, thanks very much. So I’ll be seeing Happy Go Lucky. I don’t know if I’ll like it — but if I don’t, I sure hope it isn’t because it’s too happy for me.
I’m excited about Quantum of Solace, the new James Bond movie releasing in November. Actually I’m excited about quite a few films right now, including The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow’s new film that played at the Toronto Film Festival and just got a distribution deal. Bigelow rocks as a director. And I’m over the moon about True Blood on TV. But we’ll get to all that another time… today is superspy angst and action, baby!
I’m a Pierce Brosnan fan (loved him in The Matador), but my James Bond heart belongs to Daniel Craig. I think he does an excellent job with the essential tension of Bond, the roughness and rage that is intrinsic to the character no matter how well he wears a tux. With Casino Royale I was glad to see a turn back towards the core character, a Bond who relies more on his wits and his gun (or his hands) than on techno-toys. A more human Bond than the screenwriters and producers have allowed for a long time.
And the trend seems likely to continue in Quantum of Solace. If you’re wondering why the wacky title, the story is here. Not the title I would have chosen, but it’s James Bond, you know? People will find it.
I’ve got two trailers to show you today, because it interests me that they are very different in how they frame one’s expectations. The first is a real mood piece without a lot of information, the second more focused on action and the revelation of story. I admire how the two layers come together in the line “You don’t have to worry about me,” which take on such different tones in the two trailers.
The art and science of trailers is fascinating to me, the way they can spin a story just by recombining snips of action and dialogue. I wonder how that would work with books — imagine a word-trailer that would shape expectations of the story just by the phrases one chose to include.
Oh no, I feel my brain saying to itself, Oh cool! Avoidance behavior!. No, no, I have too much to do today. Quick, let’s watch a trailer before I fall down the rabbit hole.
So. Finally, after all the hype and the waiting, I’ve seen The Dark Knight. I’ll be seeing it again, and may have more to say about it after a more careful viewing, but here’s my gut response:
Awesome movie.
It did things I really didn’t expect, and what I expected was done so well as to be nearly seamless (no such thing as a perfect movie…) For me, this film comes closest to the essence and impact of Frank Miller‘s graphic novel. It’s not all a big party in Gotham, you know? Things happen to people.
It’s not so easy to balance the psychological exploration of what comes when people encounter a monster and find a little of themselves looking out of the eyes of chaos, and the blow-it-up fast-moving fun of a summer movie. But that’s what you get in The Dark Knight, and the ultimate coolness of this film is that you don’t get it in alternate jangling layers, but in an integrated structure that brings you deeper and deeper in, gradually, the way good wine changes as it breathes.
The writing… well, new benchmark for me, for sure. Lots there to learn from about structure, plotting, economy of exposition, showing versus telling, pacing…. And the direction and the performances lift the marvelous words to the place story always wants to go, into the realm of Well, it couldn’t have been any other way than this.
And then there is Heath Ledger, whose performance is absolutely fearless. Never mind the fences — he is swinging for the moon every second on screen, and damn near making it. Brilliant, riveting work, just electric. He found his way into a place that most actors don’t go with their villains — absolute joy. Not the movie cliche of capering gleeful inhuman evil, but the very human abandonment to that which we can no longer resist. In one scene, the Joker says I am an agent of chaos. He’s not kidding: but when he says chaos, he doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter what happens — he means that whatever happens is Nothing But Good. Nothing But Joy. All outcomes equally compelling, equally desired, equally embraced. The difference between the monster and the heroes is that the monster has a pure super-oxygenated joy in whatever the next moment brings.
The next time I write story — screenplay, fiction, whatever — I will think of Heath Ledger and hope to be as fierce and as fearless, to write with the same tight balancing act of skill and abandon, the controlled recklessness, the what the fuck of it all.
So. Wow.
And the audience behaved beautifully. The popcorn was fresh. And I wore my special movie t-shirt:
(Click on the image to enlarge — but be warned, it’s called “Spoilt” for a reason…)
It was a good afternoon.
Since I am going to see The Dark Knight today —
(brief pause for moment of total fangirl squee)
I would love to have a secret science fiction ray gun that I can zap people with in the movie audience who are talking, texting, taking phone calls (!), and otherwise behaving badly. This ray gun would instantly tattoo on their foreheads — in neon — well…. let me tell you a story.
When I was in grammar school, the teachers’ favorite disciplinary tool for low-level offenses was assigning misbehaving students 10 sets of multiplication tables (“multies,” where a single set was “0x0=0” all the way through “9×9=81”), or 50 lines, which meant writing out an assigned sentence that many times in really good penmanship. Multies were easy — most of the kids in my class would get ahead on sets of multies when we were bored and keep them in reserve. But you could never get ahead on lines because the teachers made them up on the spot.
The one I remember most came from Mrs. Atkins, my sixth grade teacher, who was really annoyed one day and sent the entire class home to write:
I have been thoughtless, selfish and rude: therefore I must write this tedious sentence 50 times.
I would have the secret science fiction ray gun tattoo a variant of this: I have been thoughtless, selfish and rude, and need to learn that the world is not my living room.
Or, as I like to say, don’t be an asshole. An extreme response to someone disturbing a really good movie? I think not.
I have been a Stephen King fan since I was a teenager. I think, at his best, he is one of the all-time masters of story and character. He understands how the smallest moment or seemingly unimportant choice can utterly change a life. He can tell a hell of a story. And no one does a particular kind of American voice better. Stephen King books can scare the shit out of me every time, to the point that I get spooked reading them by myself at night.
Other horror books I love: Ghost Story and Shadowland by Peter Straub, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, Stoker’s Dracula, most all of Poe…
And every once in a while I’ll watch a horror movie. I like Alien, Aliens, Jaws, The Haunting (the 1963 Robert Wise film, not the cringe-inducing Jan de Bont 1999 remake).
All in all, a very short list from a very large field. I stopped appreciating horror when the splatterpunks came along in the 80’s. I’ve read the Books of Blood and the rest of the splattercanon, and you know what? Just don’t like it.
Today I watched 30 Days of Night. Well, I watched about 70% and fast-forwarded through the rest. It wasn’t offensive. It was a smart premise. And the violence was as much suggested as shown — it certainly earns the R rating, but it’s not the linger-lovingly-on-the-violence-in-slow-motion approach that made me turn off Robocop (and please, can someone please help Verhoeven with his issues? It’s getting so I won’t watch a movie with his name on it…).
But in other ways it was too routine to elevate it above the formulaic. A bunch of demographically-varied people get picked off one by one, some because they are stupid and some because they are noble. The nice touch was the ending….
SPOILER ALERT
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… in which the hero realizes that he has to become a monster in order to be able to fight them (they are really strong), so he injects himself with the tainted blood of a victim in order to induce a transformation. He saves his ex-girlfriend and the obligatory orphaned child (yep, same old instant-family routine), and then dies in her arms as the sun finally comes up. No last-minute reprieve.
I wouldn’t watch this movie again, but because it bored me, not because it offended me. And I can certainly be offended. I won’t ever watch the Saw movies or Hostel or Funny Games any of the other torture-porn/let’s-get-sadistic-on-someone’s-ass films that seem to be the new splatterpunk.
If it’s true that horror films help us cathartize (is that a word?) deep cultural fears, allow us to bleed energy out of some personal demons, then maybe it makes some kind of sense that so many of these movies are about random, sadistic violence. The kind of thing any of us are helpless to prevent or to control, that we can only try to survive. Maybe that’s how we’re all feeling about our world and our lives right now. There’s a line I heard that to me is a perfect example, from the new movie The Strangers, in which the heroine asks one of the random masked-into-facelessness strangers, “Why are you doing this to us?” and the stranger says, “Because you were home.” It doesn’t get any more pointed than that.
But I fucking hate those movies. In the worst moments (mine or theirs), I leave them feeling both compartmentalized and complicit in something nasty. I feel flattened. Reduced. I hate the whole story ethic that trivializes human violence by making it “just because” and then making that the center of a story. To me, that’s a rotton core. To me, it’s the same nihilism as the root of splatterpunk — let’s just think of worse and worse things to describe, to witness, to be on some level engaged with, and the first one to blink and turn away is a wuss.
That particular kind of human violence is too frightening and too real to treat that way. I don’t want to see it turned into entertainment, any more than I want to see rape turned into entertainment. But clearly a lot of people do want to see it. And I’m curious why. Anyone who has theories to share (actual theories as opposed to judgment of the audience), I’d really like to hear them. As a storyteller, it’s something I’d like to understand even if I don’t ever want to do it.
I am interested in writing a horror novel someday — but it’ll be more King than Saw. I’d like to explore the kind of scare that seems to be out of vogue right now (typical Eskridge timing) — the fear of the unknown and unknowable, the unexplained, the monsters that scare us because they come from deep within us, or because we are tempted to let them that far in. I hope there will still be a place for that when I get around to it.
What horror films or books have you liked? Can you tell me why? I’m interested in refining my own notions about these things.