Nicholas Thurkettle

I thought I might hold out longer than this, but looking at my “to-do” list in the writing world has daunted me enough that I’m going to shelve the Box Office analysis as a regular feature. I am sure to offer up frequent opinions about where Hollywood is choosing to spend its money these days (a Battleship movie? Really? Isn’t Fireball Island a little more cinematic?), but I’ll leave the number-crunching to the many doing it already.

Back when I worked in feature development, one of my unwritten job functions was to get free work out of writers. We made independent films – which, you may have heard, there isn’t a lot of money in at any end. So, my ability to finagle free options and free re-writes was how we kept a slate of films alive. I was good at it because other writers could see I spoke their language, and because the company I worked for put in the time and effort to show them the quality of our track record and professional relationships. Since they usually weren’t seeing money up front, we had to give them faith that the movie had a better chance of being made – and a chance of being made better – with us.

I just finished what you might call an unsuccessful negotiation with a budding producer. He liked a script of mine and wanted it to wave around in an upcoming meeting with some independent investors. It’s a script that’s better suited to be made outside the studio system, and I’ve been looking for independent investors for it anyway. But when it came to reasons why I should do such-and-such for him for free, he did pretty much the opposite of what you ought to do.

Here’s the thing – if you are going to treat a writer like they just got off the bus, and you have their full name, it is wise to Google them, on the off-chance that they have not just got off the bus. In fact – you might want to re-think doing that at all.

Also, a writer who has not just got off the bus will know that having a meeting coming up with people who have money is not the same thing as having money. Being the former, and carrying yourself with a sense of entitlement equivalent to the latter, will work out about as well as Dirk Diggler’s recording career.

Finally – if you are going to demand the immediate ouster of an attached director so you can direct yourself; providing some evidence that you know how to direct (beyond insisting you are good at it in an e-mail) helps shore up your image of professionalism.

Forgive the late-night sarcasm; trying unsuccessfully to get this conversation onto a keel of mutual respect made me miss a big chunk of Monday Night Football.

Originally posted 4/7/04

Hellboy
Director: Guillermo Del Toro
Writers: Screen story by Guillermo del Toro and Peter Briggs, Screenplay by Guillermo Del Toro, based on the Dark Horse comic book by Mike Mignola
Producers: Lawrence Gordon, Mike Richardson, Lloyd Levin
Stars: Ron Perelman, Rupert Evans, Selma Blair, John Hurt

Guillermo del Toro is a pulp filmmaker. He enjoys blood, fighting, exciting chunky-looking machinery, loud weird sounds, and all manner of imaginative grotesquerie. In a pulp filmmaker’s movie, no subterranean lair is complete without spiky walls, and when someone gets sucked into a small inter-dimensional portal, his body will be crunched and folded in half in order to fit. That is how inter-dimensional portals behave in such movies.

This makes him the ideal director for Hellboy, Mike Mignola’s much-adored comic book. Its take on the superhero myth is both droll and macabre; it requires a filmmaker who can revel in the pulp, ever-so-slightly wink at it, yet keep his eye fixed on a few genuine emotional issues under the surface. It’s a balancing trick not unlike those street performers who can juggle a bowling ball, a chainsaw, and a lit cigarette all at once. Rare is the artist of perverse enough mind to even attempt it.
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Originally posted 3/27/04

Dawn of the Dead
Director: Zack Snyder
Writer: James Gunn, based on a screenplay by George A. Romero
Producers: Marc Abraham, Eric Newman, Richard P. Rubinstein
Stars: Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Jake Weber, Mekhi Phifer

I wanted to sleep before I wrote this review, not because the movie was boring. Far from it. I wanted to sleep so I could confirm something.

Yep, no nightmares.

There’s a difference between making someone jump and genuinely, deep down, scaring them. I can make my cat jump just by turning on the vacuum cleaner. The re-make of Dawn of the Dead is extremely proficient at making me jump. In terms of technique, effects, and imagination in depicting a world gone berserk, I quivered for long stretches like someone had turned the thermostat way, way down.

But only a few times did I feel lasting, my-world-has-been-shaken fear. George Romero’s zombie movies didn’t make me jump as often, but they could sure as hell do that. I haven’t watched the original Night of the Living Dead in years, and I still get nightmares from it.
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My friends Allison and Bryan created the “reality”-show-centered blog/podcast I’m Not Here to Make Friends. Since I was Allison’s screenwriting teacher, I try not to take her obsession with secretly-scripted non-union “reality” shows personally. But the two of them are good enough to lend me a little space to review episodes of Dancing With the Stars, my own personal guilt-TV obsession. I have turned in reviews of all three nights of their Premiere special – which may explain why I have been so blog-silent this week. They have yet to post the second and third, but the first is published and proud:

“Could it be that last year’s rise of Gilles, Shawn and Melissa represented this juggernaut’s moment of foxtrotting the proverbial shark? If so, that probably means that we’ve only got about 6 more seasons before ABC notices – so in the inevitable wind-down, expect contestants along the lines of ALF and the fake pimp from those ACORN videos.“

It used to be that opening weekend expectations shifted significantly with the coming of autumn. Late August through October were where the longer-legged grown-up pictures that warm up the cinema for awards season had time to draw in audiences rather than be forced to play the eyeball-capturing game. This is still a bit true, though much less so, as distributors increasingly put big budget releases anywhere they can find breathing room on the calendar.

Four movies received wide releases this weekend; and though only one had the kind of budget that wants for big opening numbers, all represent significant P&A expenses, and will likely be forced into the tapering-off revenue pattern these wide releases tend to create. In that pattern, you hope you can bring in about half your production budget in those first three days; because then, even with mean drop-offs you can usually lurch into profitability. If you’ve got legs after that, that’s when the icing hits the cake.

Numbers come via the good folks at Box Office Mojo

1. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs Weekend Take: $30.3M Current Domestic Total: $30.3M

We may have passed a historical moment where there is now an unbroken and perpetual string of 3-D options available to moviegoers; and in the world of family animation it’s becoming practically expected. Sony Animation does not have anything like the built-in audience of Pixar, Dreamworks, or even Ice Age makers Blue Sky – the affection for the classic children’s book put them on a booster seat, but they will be sweating throughout the week as they hope for a little loyalty in the second weekend before Disney/Pixar’s debut of 3-D versions of Toy Story 1 & 2 on October 2nd peels the kiddies away.

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In the Loop
Director: Armando Iannucci
Writers: Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche, with additional dialogue by Ian Martin
Producers: Kevin Loader, Adam Tandy
Stars: Peter Capaldi, Tom Hollander, Gina McKee, James Gandolfini, Chris Addison, Anna Chlumsky, Enzo Cilenti, Paul Higgins, Mimi Kennedy, David Rasche

The true legacy of the late George Orwell is in his master’s grasp of the two titular subjects of his famous essay: “Politics and the English Language”. He articulated with more insight than any before or since the myriad ways the former violates the latter (or any language, really), in order to obscure sins and sanctify the horrific. Being that every nation is run by human beings who invariably have more authority than virtue, no country is immune from the abuse he observed. When a politician starts to speak, assume the worst. And when they begin speaking in colorful, vague metaphors, head for the bomb shelter.

In the Loop is an Orwellian comedy; a rare breed if it is a breed at all. It concerns a war but we never see a shot fired. Instead it is about words – dull, confused, misleading, ass-covering words, and the people who speak them; and how those people use them to launch a war. An Orwellian comedy is going to be gallows humor, and this spin-off from the BBC’s scabrous TV series The Thick of It is gallows humor of the most gut-busting variety – a ruthless and ingenious symphony of language at its most filthy. Swearing may offend delicate sensibilities, but this language gets people killed.
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Originally published 3/22/04

The Passion of the Christ
Director: Mel Gibson
Writers: Benedict Fitzgerald and Mel Gibson
Producers: Bruce Davey, Mel Gibson, Stephen McEveety
Stars: James Caviezel, Monica Bellucci, Claudia Gerini, Maia Morgenstern

(Okay, this movie asks a lot of its audience, and the talk about the movie in the media has asked even more. I like to think that reviewing a movie should be a pure exercise, but this is not an ordinary movie. And so, because I think it’s worth it, I’ll spend a few words up front addressing the “issues”. If nothing else, it will get them out of the way.

Also, I make no claims at being a Biblical scholar, and so none of my criticism is levied against the Bible and Christianity, or whether or not something in the movie was accurate to that source. Like with any adaptation, the ultimate purpose is to examine how well the thing works as a movie, which is a wholly different medium.)

The stuff that’s not really a movie review but seems expected
In the summer of 1996 I performed in Goldenwest Community College’s production of Jesus Christ, Superstar. After rehearsals, I’d often drop by to see a girl I was dating. “What did you do today, honey?”

“Oh, not much. Killed Jesus.” I’d reply.

What I mean to say is that a culture that has already turned the defining event of one of its major religions into a rock/soul piece of musical camp has long since passed the point of questioning whether or not it is appropriate for Mel Gibson to make, with his own money, a feature film out of it. And so let it take up no more space in this writing.

As for the film’s supposedly insidious Anti-Semitic content, I say with all honesty that I left the theatre hating the Jewish people no more than I did when I went in, which is to say not at all. Nor, I suspect, does it have any such effect on the people who go on at length about such dangerous hidden messages. It is not for themselves they write, but for the “other” people, the “stupider” people who lack their critical perception. These writers fret that the unwashed masses will be driven to hysteria by one thing or another and awful tragedies will result.

I would suggest, first, that anyone who uses this film as an excuse to do violence against any race had it in them to begin with. I’d also like to suggest, if those worried scribes guarding us from racism must write about something, that they go back to Birth of a Nation, which is genuinely, bald-facedly racist. And not racist in that oh-it-was-the-times-they-lived-in kind of ignorant way, but in a “pay attention people, because this race is full of lazy, shiftless, evil, ugly perverts who our out to steal our rightful place in society and violate our beautiful daughters, and we should hunt them down” kind of way. There’s always another essay to pull out of Birth of a Nation. But that movie’s not making headlines right now, is it?

The Passion of the Christ depicts Jews and Romans both, which is fitting, since they were there at the time. Among each group are examples of nobility, weakness, mercy, cowardice, sympathy, treachery, compassion, greed and all other aspects of the human condition. It makes no more sense to blame a race than it would be to say that I and all my descendents will wear the blood of John F. Kennedy, since a fellow Caucasian (or two or three, depending on whom you ask) pulled the trigger.

According to the story itself, no one person or race was responsible, and time and time again, we are reminded, it was the will of God Him/Her/Itself that it happen. As it goes in the New Testament, Jesus was put into a troubled land and troubled times for the express purpose of bearing the worst suffering mortal life could dish out.

It’s so easy with a film like this to get distracted from discussing the thing itself, so Important are the exterior issues. Permit me then, in my own guilt, to grope for a segue so I can actually review the thing now.
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I met with my collaborator/patron on this novel project, and after making my usual noises asking patience in the delivery of new chapters, he assured me that he is beyond pleased with the work provided so far, and that we are on a perfectly effective timeline for his goals. He even offered to hasten to me the next installment of delicious monies, which I have avoided asking for because I don’t feel I have turned in enough yet to merit it. I am sure my credit card companies would like it if I loosened my scruples.

I also learned that the 10-minute plays I wrote last week are indeed wanted, and not too late to be used, but will actually not be needed until the spring. I’m grateful to know this, because I think the second in particular could stand to marinate a little more, and this knowledge will allow me to set them aside for a spell before the necessary re-writing.

Which is not to say I get to relax at all. The novel is still hungry for more words, and there’s those three screenplays in various stages of gestation (two drafting, one revising), each begging for attention. And I just learned that I will indeed be directing the webisode script I wrote a few weeks ago. Shooting will be in less than three weeks, and I just learned that the actor I based my opening scene gag around will not be available.

In this context, it seems silly to even worry about all the movie reviews I want to write; but we need room to be silly with this much to do.

Funny People
Director: Judd Apatow
Writer: Judd Apatow
Producers: Judd Apatow, Barry Mendel, Clayton Townsend
Stars: Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Leslie Mann, Jonah Hill, Jason Schwartzman, Eric Bana, Aubrey Plaza

“What are future generations going to say about us, my God!
(points at ape skeleton next to him)
You know, someday, we’re gonna…we’re gonna be like him. I mean, you know, and he was probably one of the beautiful people, he was probably dancing and playing tennis, and everything, and…and now look, this is what happens to us! You know, it’s very important to have…to have some kind of personal integrity, or, you know…I’ll be hanging in a classroom one day, and I want to make sure when I…thin out…that I’m well thought of.”

–Woody Allen, Manhattan

I’ll say one thing for Funny People – the title isn’t lying. Filmmaking hyphenate Judd Apatow has cast this, his third directorial effort after very-funny previous films The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, with a full boat of actors known for stimulating laughter in the moviegoing masses. And on-screen they engage in stand-up comedy, movie and sitcom acting, sexual/romantic hijinks, and male bonding – these are notoriously funny activities.

But this is a movie with a restless and self-loathing nature, like many of its characters. They, and the movie in which they live, flail around from one plot to another, wanting more out of life than to be Funny People. This movie yearns to be serious, mature, insightful, passionate; it wants to be about death and real love as well as dick jokes. That’s ambition and I respect that. That respect, though, does not forestall me from saying when a movie is trying to do more than it knows how to do.

What Apatow has actually made is a dramedy paradoxically matched in bloat by pithiness. It is too long, but takes damaging short cuts, all while trying to teach us that getting there is half the fun. It kneecaps any possibility of self-reflection by the characters by not giving them much in the way of character at the outset, yet banks on our intimacy with them to make the goings-on worth watching when they are not funny. And, ultimately, it goes a lot of somewheres but it gets nowhere. Yes, I laughed, but on the movie’s self-defined terms, that is not enough.
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