I’ve been mulling why last night’s semi-finalist announcement gave me so much happy vim. It’s definitely good news but a long way from being significant in the long-run. It will take a lot more of this to build a profile as a playwright. Finishing one small step is worth some inner glow but this feels out-of-proportion to that.
I think it comes back to breaking out of that scrum of 350+ contenders. They culled about 90% out and I was still there when it was done. As with the “roomful of strangers” auditions of which I’m most proud over the past year, it gives me a lot of confidence that my work not only stood on its own but made a worthy noise. Even for the best work, that’s no guarantee with the inverted taste pyramid that mass contest reading can create, and the subjectivity of the small number of people who will read/evaluate your work.
Breaking through is a powerful affirmation of the work. It makes me think about what Stephen King said about why he published those books under the “Richard Bachman” alias – that restless, wondering itch as to whether he had made it due to talent or luck, whether he could DO IT without the strength of his name to backstop him.
I have no such name strength, but I am constantly wondering if I can DO IT. So that explains the balance of the satisfaction, I think. Whether I win or not, someone thought I was good enough that I might be worthy of winning, and the difference between that and zero response at all is amazing.
Just learned that one of my short scripts, A Point of Honor, made the semi-finalist cut at a 10-minute playwriting contest at a regional theater in the Twin Cities area. Top 40 out of 350+. The top 20 cut happens mid-March, until then, I’ll be having a one-man dance party up in here.
I know, proportionally-speaking, this is in a far different league than anything I’ve got happening, Hollywood-wise. Even if I was one of the 10 winners to be staged, I’d probably win about $30 and some pictures from the production. Going to SEE it would set me back hundreds since it’s halfway across the country.
But as I said not long ago, I’m at the very beginning of my efforts to let the world know I’m a playwright, too. And I am fueled by any opportunity for an audience to really see my work realized, which is so rare in screenwriting.
Plus, this was the first submission I made, and there are a couple others still floating out there right now. That’s a confidence booster. After all these years there is still a voice inside me suggesting that the moment I show work to anyone, I’ll be found out as a total fraud. So now the delusion can continue!
Originally published 5/19/2005
Kingdom of Heaven
Director: Ridley Scott
Writer: William Monahan
Producer: Ridley Scott
Stars: Orlando Bloom, Eva Green, Jeremy Irons, David Thewlis, Liam Neeson, Marton Csokas, Brendan Gleeson, Edward Norton
In Spartacus, after a great battle Stanley Kubrick panned languidly over an extraordinary composition of the grotesque dead. Although there was blood and severed limbs everywhere, its stillness and exactitude made it painterly, even beautiful.
In Kingdom of Heaven, there is a similar tableau; but in this one, nature takes its course and the scavenger birds show up for their meal.
Solemn, serious, sparse almost to a fault, this sword-clanging epic from director Ridley Scott dares to address that diciest of historical subjects – the Crusades in the Middle East, and the battles for the “Holy Land” whose passion still inflames our world today. It does so neither condoning nor condemning Christians or Muslims as a people, but by showing how claims of spirituality can cloak simple savage ambition, and the work of impassioned fanatics of any stripe can lead to tragedy for all.
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Originally published 4/30/2005
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Director: Garth Jennings
Writers: Douglas Adams and Karey Kirkpatrick, based on the book by Douglas Adams
Producers: Nick Goldsmith, Jay Roach, Gary Barber, Roger Birnbaum, Jonathan Glickman
Stars: Martin Freeman, Mos Def, Zooey Deschanel, Sam Rockwell, John Malkovich, Anna Chancellor, and the voices of Stephen Fry and Alan Rickman
I should start by saying I very nearly brought a towel with me to watch The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the adaptation of Douglas Adams’ book series/radio play/TV miniseries/computer game. If you understand what that means then you know I have anticipated this movie for a long time, and whether my opinion comes from the perspective of distressed fanboy or simply a disappointed moviegoer I will leave to you to judge.
But what has arrived on screen after decades of development is an awkward bad marriage of slavish devotion and blockbuster audience whiplash. While some segments of the book are realized and reproduced word for cheeky word and will get their deserved laughs of recognition, the story and characterizations gyrate away from their natural shape out of a desire to be more conventional, more well-loved.
What makes the Guide series special is that it does not try so hard to be loved – it is eccentric, slightly anarchic, willing to pursue bizarre tangents and in teasing love with humanity’s petty foibles and arrogance. And its protagonist, Arthur Dent, is no classic hero, but an uneasy grump sure that the universe is out to get him, and never more surprised than when he learns it actually is.
This is not the stuff you make a Star Wars-sized movie out of, and yet you either must spend that amount of money or submit to the staples-and-cardboard ethos of the TV miniseries. It’s a devil’s bargain, because the movie is whimsical and amazing to look at – the Jim Henson Creature Shop-designed Vogons are like 8-foot Dickensian toads re-enacting Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, while the Heart of Gold spaceship our heroes travel on looks like what might happen if the Sharper Image catalog featured a spaceship designed by a light-hearted madman.
In exchange Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman from the British original of The Office) is now more of an Everyman Doofus, a likable nebbish who just needs the courage to be more daring and spontaneous. In the world of Clever Screenwriting this is called creating a “character arc”, and the whole story now must be bolted to this narrow definition of emotional growth.
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Originally published 4/29/2005
Kung Fu Hustle
Director: Stephen Chow
Writers: Stephen Chow, Tsang Kan Cheong, Chan Man Keung, Lola Huo
Producers: Stephen Chow, Chui Po Chu, Jeff Lau
Stars: Stephen Chow, Yuen Wah, Yuen Qiu, Leung Siu Lung, Huang Sheng Yi, Chan Kwok Kwan, Lam Tze Chung, Dong Zhi Hua, Chiu Chi Ling, Xing Yu, Feng Xiao Gang
First off, I don’t want to hear any more of this guff about how violence isn’t funny. Violence is hilarious – anyone who says otherwise never saw a Road Runner cartoon.
Filmmaker/Hong Kong comedy superstar Stephen Chow has seen a lot of Road Runner cartoons, as well as a lot of movies – especially kung fu movies. He has clearly seen enough of them to understand what can be fundamentally silly about them. When you have two people observing a fight and the dialogue goes: “What’s that! The Toad style from the Kang Tun School?”, followed by, “Oh no!”, if you can’t see what is funny about that there’s no hope for you.
Previous Chow films like God of Cookery and Shaolin Soccer have proved so crazily unusual and popular that they have given rise to a new genre in Hong Kong filmmaking, one whose name is literally translated as “nonsense”. Kung Fu Hustle is a delirious collision of nonsense, cartoon humor and martial arts, a work so refreshing and giddy it totally lacks for comparison or adequate description.
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Originally published 4/24/05
The Interpreter
Director: Sydney Pollack
Writers: Story by Martin Zellman & Bryan Ward, Screenplay by Charles Randolph, Scott Frank, Steven Zaillian
Producers: Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Kevin Misher
Stars: Nicole Kidman, Sean Penn, Catherine Keener, Jesper Christensen, Yvan Attal, Byron Utley, George Harris, Earl Cameron
You might not have predicted it before, but in The Interpreter we discover to our pleasure that Sean Penn and Sydney Pollack make for an ideal actor/director collaboration. Both are defined by their exactitude and attention to detail – as Tobin Keller, a Secret Service agent clinging to his work for a respite of sane routine, Penn doesn’t just recite the expository dialogue about the shambles of his personal life and leave it to the set dressers make up his office to show he slept on the couch there. His stiff body posture, the way his shirt wrinkles, everything is adjusted just so and we get that extra little breath of authenticity.
The same goes for Pollack, whose best work as a director comes when he is unobtrusive, eschewing flash, and efficiently thorough. In this story of murder and conspiracy at the United Nations, he finds plenty of opportunities for pleasing detail, even winning the unique privilege of shooting in and around the actual U.N. building.
There’s an inimitable authority to the General Assembly Hall, one believes that the world can be re-shaped in this room without the room having to spell it out for us. Darius Khondji, one of the best cinematographers alive, shoots it in a way that’s all the more beautiful for how little it calls attention to itself, unlike his more colorful work in movies like Se7en and The City of Lost Children. But all of that patient professionalism cannot overcome a fundamentally sloppy story and a fatal casting miscalculation.
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Last night I found an excellent resource for identifying theater companies around the country that support new work either through productions, readings, contests, or fellowships. What’s funny to me is that even though I was writing plays before I ever finished a screenplay, I am decidedly behind-the-curve now when it comes to the process of putting work out into the theater world. Even back when I produced the Hotel Chicago reading I didn’t really have any road map for what I would DO with that play if it worked. After Bradley staged those 10-minute plays a couple of years ago I made a run at submitting them to a publishing house, but they were rejected.
Since trying to get my prose published involved a very similar process, this feels more familiar now, and if (when – say WHEN damn it!) I finish this full-length piece, I don’t want to be caught napping if I try a reading of it and find out I’ve actually created something pretty good. Not to mention, as long as I’m working up to the magic number of scripts to produce that 10-minute play showcase, nothing’s stopping me from getting the already-finished ones out there.
Since I was still semi-cold-whacked last night and couldn’t focus much on writing, sniffing out targets was a satisfying use of my time. It ended with me in a terrific muddle, though, because I have a lot of different goals for my writing time right now, all of them require finishing large projects in different forms and then a LOT of dedicated non-writing time for stuff like editing and submissions.
Seriously – do I edit my existing short stories and do a bigger, better-informed batch of lit mag submissions using what I’ve learned on Duotrope? Do I finish the two novelette-length prose pieces I’m well-into and start prepping the self-published story collection I’ve been thinking about since last year? No reason I couldn’t pursue both those goals relatively-simultaneously, but the picture gets more complicated when you throw in this full-length play. And the 10-minute plays (I’m 3 pages into #6 out of the 8 I need). And oh, right…screenwriting.
The short film has everything it needs – I just have to get my ass to the restaurant I want to book and charm the owner. So no writing needs to happen there. I have a good enough number of finished un-circulated scripts right now that arguably there’s more advantage in trying to circulate them and get more people interested in my work than in just writing another spec that nobody’s reading.
But then I think things like – you know it’s kind of ridiculous that you haven’t written a horror movie yet. The appetite for horror is inexhaustible out here, and I do have a premise that’s already gotten a chuckle out of a highly-successful horror filmmaker I know. So really, why not just throw that in there? It wouldn’t take long, right?
No, idiot, it would take months. Months in which not much else would be advanced.
I think I need to take a long walk with myself and find a little clarity about just what I want to get done writing-wise in the next few months. After all, I’ve got to squeeze all this in around work – AND play rehearsals.
Man, I’m lucky my girlfriend understands me.
So yes, now that we’ve spruced up a few things around here (not exactly .com version 3.0, maybe like a version 2.1), I’ve made another effort to migrate over some of my movie review archive. There are still well over 200 from the old blog that I haven’t posted here, but because I’m me, I can’t just do a cut-and-paste job, I have to check for lingering errors, plus update the links at IMDB (who still, via their “External Reviews” pages, treat me as if I am a legitimate critical voice), and delete or filter the old postings.
I’ll try not to drown you in them – at most you may see four at a time like we did today, and I’ll be sure to mix in fresh content as we go.
And yes, I just decided that this counts.
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Originally published 4/14/2005
Melinda and Melinda
Director: Woody Allen
Writer: Woody Allen
Producer: Letty Aronson
Stars: Radha Mitchell, Chloë Sevigny, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Will Ferrell, Amanda Peet, Jonny Lee Miller, Brooke Smith, Wallace Shawn, Larry Pine
There’s a moment in Melinda and Melinda where a character regards their reflection in the mirror and we know exactly what they are about to berate themselves over. They never say it, but they don’t have to – another character already did, just in a different version of the story.
And it’s that it is two characters we would hardly imagine as reflections of each other, and that they are heading towards destinations which, though not the same, certainly pass a few of the same landmarks along the way, which makes Woody Allen’s latest movie his most involving in years. It is also many other things – sloppy, thought-provoking, delicate, maddeningly-obvious, well-written and badly-written. How much more exciting it is to take in, then, than another exhausted and minor farce like Small Time Crooks.
Over dinner, two playwrights argue over whether life is essentially tragic or comic. The comedic playwright (Wallace Shawn, settling in for another long and profound meal) argues that life is tragic, otherwise people wouldn’t need the release of his comedies. And the tragedian (Larry Pine) counters that if life were not inherently comedic, audiences wouldn’t recognize it in his friend’s comedies, which is why no one comes to see his tragedies. One of their tablemates throws out a challenge: to interpret something that happened to some “friends” not long ago – an unexpected guest named Melinda (Radha Mitchell) crashed a dinner party and, subsequently, the lives of those at the party.
Each playwright then spins their version of the tale – the comic who thinks life is tragic doesn’t see how this story could end any way but comedically, and vice-versa. And while both stories deal with much of the same subject matter as they cut back and forth, they demonstrate that all can be either funny or sad. Infidelity, neurosis, broken homes, people who drink too much, lies, suicide – all either funny or sad, depending on how you see it.
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Originally published 4/7/2005
The Jacket
Director: John Maybury
Writers: Story by Tom Bleecker and Marc Rocco, Screenplay by Massy Tajedin
Producers: Peter Guber, George Clooney, Steven Sodergbergh
Stars: Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley, Kris Kristofferson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Daniel Craig, Kelly Lynch, Brad Renfro
The Jacket is a good movie with a great movie sitting just out of its reach. It is resolutely the sum of its parts when you yearn for it to be more. Where you sought deeper emotional closure you find only the pleasing-but-square termination of plot lines, and in the jungle of details you hoped would form some richer tapestry you find only irrelevancies. I can’t really share which details are so irrelevant, as it would take away from whatever mystery the movie has to offer, so I will endeavor instead to just get you off and running as the movie does.
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