Nicholas Thurkettle

Excellent news today. The three 10-minute plays I wrote recently were all picked by student directors for the Alumni Play Festival happening at Bradley in April. I have no idea if this means the plays were well-liked, or that the others who were asked to submit plays just didn’t come through to the same extent. (You will notice that, as usual, I just can’t take a compliment.)

The last time I visited Bradley was almost seven years ago. The school has always wanted me to come back, and I’ve always wanted to go, but between money, time, and needing a good enough reason to commit the first two things, it never quite happened. Now, to get to see a few scripts of mine on their feet, and talk with this generation of theatre students, and reminisce, and hopefully even coax a few fellow alums down from Chicago for some ol’ times kinds of fun…that all adds up pretty nicely.

And if I happen to pop into a couple of classes to say a few words, and if they happen to cough up a small check, that would make it add up even better. Good luck to that in today’s economy, but I’ll hope.

Now I think I know how baseball fanatics feel, when they draw swords over steroid-inflated statistics, or exactly which of the umpty-ump scandals besmirching The Great American Pastime™ over the course of a century was the one that made it Lose Its Innocence™. When the field is ever-evolving, greatness becomes a moving target, and comparisons to history a trap. But oh, aren’t the arguments fun?

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences threw one humdinger of a curveball when they announced that they would nominate ten films for the honor of Best Picture of 2009, instead of the field of five which has been traditional for over 65 years. This was not an arbitrary act; it was a calculated experiment to see if they could increase viewership for the Oscar telecast by strengthening the odds for nominees that Joe Popcorn Combo has actually seen. This was a bold counterstroke after last year’s snubbing of mainstream masterpieces The Dark Knight and WALL*E in favor of The Reader – a movie so prestigious hardly anyone had seen it at all.

What the Academy remembered is that for the non-industry viewer, suspense over the outcome is not on the shortlist of reasons to watch. The non-industry viewer has probably only seen two or three of the movies in contention, if that, and have only the exposure to, or interest in, the awards season horserace that they get from Entertainment Weekly. They don’t get lost in the weeds of the For Your Consideration ads. When a Best Picture front-runner is a popular, big-grossing movie – particularly if it is still in wide release – ratings consistently go up. I think this is because, for the average viewer, Oscar is coming into their living room to affirm their intelligence and taste, which they enjoy.

Now AMPAS cannot have known that James Cameron was already preparing to handle their visibility problem – his Avatar is already one of the biggest hits of all time, and is becoming the same sort of irresistible cultural black hole as his previous film, Titanic. That makes it a Day One frontrunner for the big prize, the inspiration for many potential blue-skin jokes on the night of the broadcast, and a guaranteed ratings draw.

So has the experience proved useless? I do not think it has. With every film critic, professional and otherwise, making a ritual out of a top 10 list, for Oscar to do the same hardly feels alien at all. And looking at the 10 they chose reveals not 10 movies whose greatness everyone necessarily agrees on, but 10 movies that represent a diverse spectrum of the many things the movie industry does well. We have science-fiction, inspiring drama, wicked social satire, contemporary stories and period stories, groundbreaking visual spectacle, rueful comedy, an inspired pulp war epic, and only the second animated feature in history to be in contention (more on that in a bit). There are still safe choices in there, but also some admirably daring ones. If we keep this up, we might even see a documentary in there someday.

Of course, the Academy is a consensus of voters, so maybe five movies just weren’t a big enough sample to produce good consensus results. Maybe this actually provides a little inoculation against some of the goofier inclusions and exclusions. Certainly you will find boosters disappointed that Invictus couldn’t even make a ten movie shortlist, or that Where the Wild Things Are was forgotten entirely. But aren’t the arguments fun?

Probably the most troubling argument has to do with the new normal of prestige in a Best Picture nomination. With twice as many handed out, are they now worth only half as much honor? And can’t we think of years when there just haven’t been ten truly outstanding films? With the graveyard of Oscar history already haunted by mediocre nominees, haven’t we just laid the groundwork for many, many more? These are all possibilities, and not likely to be solved by half-measures like a field of eight nominees. As the brilliant-but-mortal George Carlin once observed about the 10 Commandments: “10 sounds official. 10 sounds important.”

I don’t think you’re going to see this experiment go away after this year.
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2012
Director: Roland Emmerich
Writers: Roland Emmerich and Harald Kloser
Producers: Harald Kloser, Mark Gordon, Larry J. Franco
Stars: John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Thandie Newton, Oliver Platt, Tom McCarthy, Woody Harrelson, Danny Glover, Liam James, Morgan Lily, Zlatko Burić, Beatrice Rosen

I lost count of the number of times characters in 2012 ran in from somewhere off-camera and exclaimed “You have to see this!” I didn’t like this movie but I am impressed by it, since it so expansively delivers on that exact carny sideshow pitch Hollywood has been honing since Jaws. Month after month and year after year they promise spectacular violence and catastrophe enjoyed from the safe vantage point of a comfortable multiplex chair. It’s less about entertainment then a sense of destiny created by its own awesome ridiculousness: good or not, you HAVE to see this.

The movie exists as a kind of evolutionary endpoint for Earth-centric cataclysm as a big-screen activity. After a first act consisting of ominous portents, grim world leaders Preparing For the End, and Ordinary Mortals played by famous actors laying out their various subplots, the movie merrily proceeds to spend two hours glamorously and thoroughly destroying the Mother Planet with all the glee of a kid torpedoing toy boats in the bathtub.

Buildings crack and tumble, oceans rise, continents shift, background extras scream and perish by the billions, and the boys in the effects department punch up what must take the prize for the largest fireball any human ever outran in slow motion. Who else would direct this deathstravaganza but Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow’s own Roland Emmerich, a filmmaker who has never had anything more sophisticated to say to moviegoers than “BOOOOM!”
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Where the Wild Things Are
Director: Spike Jonze
Writers: Screenplay by Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers, based on the book by Maurice Sendak
Producers: John B. Carls, Gary Goetzman, Tom Hanks, Vincent Landay, Maurice Sendak
Stars: Max Records, Catherine Keener, and featuring the vocal talents of James Gandolfini, Paul Dano, Catherine O’Hara, Forest Whitaker, Michael Berry Jr., Chris Cooper, Lauren Ambrose

People don’t remember the urges of childhood. We ran and we screamed and we flailed and we wanted; we wanted so desperately. Why? What was the logic behind those times when we were unwise and unrestrained? It is a mystery we gloss over or ignore, yet matters so much to who we are.

And we can’t trust movies to get it right most of the time. Children in the majority of Hollywood product talk like little adults and betray an adult’s wide perspective. Most filmmakers forget – or just don’t want to face – how agonizing it could be when your world was the exact size of yourself and Mommy, and Mommy was busy.

Not so Spike Jonze’s film of Maurice Sendak’s childhood classic Where the Wild Things Are, which does right by its source material not simply by filming its story, but by translating its truths to the screen. This is a movie about our mighty and inchoate feelings, and how they inspire the bewildering actions that get us sent to our room without our supper. It is painful, and beautiful, and absolutely right.
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Originally published 9/13/04

Hero
Director: Zhang Yimou
Writers: Feng Li, Bin Wang, Zhang Yimou
Producer: Bill Kong, Zhang Yimou
Stars: Jet Li, Daoming Chen, Tony Leung Chu Wai, Maggie Cheung, Donnie Yen, Zhang Ziyi

You begin with the premise that all movie action is inherently a lie. Outrunning explosions in slow-motion, having vicious fistfights that never leave a bruise – these are contrivances that are at the service of the art. What really matters is: what kind of art is being served?

Like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon before it, Hero (an international hit for the last two years only now getting stateside release by Miramax) comes to us with a treatment of violence that challenges us as moviegoers. It is more like a ballet than a fight, the participants are not so much opponents as trusting partners working in harmony to express a feeling. In this movie, the clash of swords can express vengeance, serenity, rage, sorrow, disdain, conspiracy, love. And it does so in the service of a story that seems at once epic and fable.
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Originally published 9/9/04

The Manchurian Candidate
Director: Jonathan Demme
Writers: Screenplay by Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris, based on the screenplay by George Axelrod and the novel by Richard Condon
Producers: Jonathan Demme, Ilona Herzberg, Scott Rudin, Tina Sinatra
Stars: Denzel Washingston, Liev Schreiber, Meryl Streep, Kimberly Elise, Jon Voight

When the characters in this remake of 1962’s landmark paranoid head-trip thriller The Manchurian Candidate speak of a tentacular global conglomerate that profits handsomely from war and enjoys influence at the highest levels of government, no bonus points if you can guess of whom in the real world we should be thinking.

In fact, no bonus points will be awarded at all, because the elements of this movie which are meant to provide a chilling satiric commentary are its weakest, and end up serving as a distraction in an otherwise well-mounted vehicle for suspense.
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Last night I polished up two 10-minute plays. One of them I wrote in a flurry of creativity back in September; the other I wrote nearly seven years ago as a wedding present for a dear friend in one of the many penniless phases of my adult life. The first was relatively simple – its fundamentals were strong, I just needed to clean up a few places in the dialogue where my central idea went cross-eyed.

The second was more difficult. Certainly that many years provides more than adequate emotional distance for re-writing; unfortunately it created more than a little inertia. As in – “the play has existed for this long like this, why should it not stay like that?” This also grows out of the undeniable truth that I was a far worse writer back then, and the script was weak and limp in more than one place. Too many places to salvage in one night? Very possible.

But I have become nothing if not deft. Once I identified the most egregious problem, there was no hesitation; I knew exactly what to scalpel out and replace, and didn’t miss the excised material in the slightest. It is not great now, no, it was not going to be that; but it is…presentable.

Tonight was all the time I had left to generate a third script for tomorrow’s deadline. I came home with an idea and a half-page of scrawled notes. Now after a couple of hours of work/procrastination, I have a half a script. It feels like good stuff – well, it feels consistent to the oddness of my idea. The beauty of the 10-minute play is, since you have far less time in which to wear out your welcome, you can pursue peculiar impulses in bite-sized form. Just throw it up there and see if it plays.

But I think this is all I’ve got for tonight, and I can go to bed satisfied. I think I can make this deliverable with enough time. I might just have to sneak in a few moments to finish tomorrow morning.

Originally published 8/17/04

Collateral
Director: Michael Mann
Writer: Stuart Beattie
Producers: Michael Mann, Julie Richardson
Stars: Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett Smith, Mark Ruffalo, Bruce McGill

Nobody shoots Los Angeles like director Michael Mann (Thief, Heat). The skyscrapers look like Monument Valley in steel and glass. The freeways, shot from directly overhead, look like blood veins pulsing life around a mutated organism.

Vincent (Tom Cruise) doesn’t like it. He thinks it’s too spread out, too disconnected. Of course, what he disdains about it is also what makes it an ideal work environment for him. He can shoot two people dead in an alleyway and, with a quick look around, confirm that no one’s running to call the police.

He considers himself a professional doing a job; nothing more, nothing less. But he’s in denial of his true nature. He’s a virus, injected on this night into the body of Los Angeles to transform and/or destroy anyone he comes in contact with, until he triumphs or is eradicated.
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Originally published August 12, 2004

Alien vs. Predator
Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Writer: Screen story by Paul W.S. Anderson and Dan O’Bannon & Ronald Shusett, Screenplay by Paul W.S. Anderson, based on the “Alien” characters created by Dan O’Bannon & Ronald Shusett and the “Predator” characters created by Jim Thomas & John Thomas
Producers: Gordon Carroll, David Giler, Walter Hill, John Davis
Stars: Sanaa Lathan, Raoul Bova, Lance Henriksen, Ewen Bremner

In a perverse way it’s refreshing to see a slasher movie where the characters are soberly instructed “nobody go anywhere alone”, then the filmmakers don’t even bother contriving the usual dumb excuses before they start doing just that. The moment they leave the boat they’re wandering to and fro, disdaining the buddy system and inviting a brutal comeuppance for it. I guess it saves time.

It is with a heavy heart that I dub Alien vs. Predator a slasher movie, but in spite of its science fiction trappings it’s little more than a machine for sticking characters in the dark then pitilessly offing them. It is such a shame, because the movie franchises it marries up, both of which have seen better days, were at their best when they took their time and showed us people we cared about.
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I often say that working in the film business is like being a sprinter lined up in the stadium for a 400-meter dash; only you don’t wait seconds for the starter to fire his pistol, you wait months, maybe years. But he could pull that trigger at any moment, and Jimmy, you’d better keep limber for it, because only one guy gets to hit the tape at the end.

I’m flexing my own muscles right now. If something happens – and it may happen – it’s going to happen unbelievably fast. Stay tuned.