Nicholas Thurkettle

Originally published 3/15/04

Starsky & Hutch
Director: Todd Phillips
Writers: Based on characters created by William Blinn; story by Stevie Long and John O’Brien, screenplay by John O’Brien and Todd Phillips & Scott Armstrong
Producers: William Blinn, Stuart Cornfeld, Akiva Goldsman, Tony Ludwig, Alan Riche
Cast: Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Snoop Dogg, Vince Vaughn

I don’t remember the 70’s, only having been alive during a quarter of them. I do remember all the jokes about the 70’s, which helps me in my task. I appreciate the way that director Todd Phillips populates this movie with the detritus of a decade without leaning on it too much as the joke itself (I’m looking in your direction, The Wedding Singer). Hutch (Owen Wilson) has an 8-track at his place, and over a meal they drink RC Cola. The movie feels no need to stop and point it out, and it becomes funnier that way.

I have never seen a single episode of Starsky and Hutch, which doesn’t help me in my task. Because this is a movie that, in trying to be all things to all people, struggles to be one thing at a time. Sometimes it spoofs the show – at least, I think it does. Sometimes it spoofs the 70’s in general. Sometimes it’s just a playing field for Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson to do what People Love Seeing Them Do.

It seems to be here at all simply as a matter of cultural inevitability – that strand of our DNA that can compel us to watch hours of I Love the 80s has also led to the revival and transformation of countless TV titles that should have been one-offs, Burma Shave ads along the cultural highways. That more money is likely spent now producing this goof on Starsky & Hutch than was possibly spent in the entire run of the original series is a fact whose ultimate meaning eludes me.

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Originally published 3/14/04

SPARTAN
Director: David Mamet
Writer: David Mamet
Producers: Art Linson, Moshe Diamant, David Bergstein, Elie Samaha
Stars: Val Kilmer, Derek Luke, William H. Macy, Tia Texada

As a Special Forces operative with espionage experience, tough-guy Scott (Val Kilmer) is several times called upon to exchange code phrases with people. “Get me the Chinaman” he barks into a pay phone – “tell him it’s the only man who ever saw Jesus!”

In most movies, this would be fairly incongruous even as code-speak. But this movie takes place in Mamet world, where convenience store shoppers walk by Scott having this conversation and don’t bat an eye. And this is because, in Mamet world, not only is this normal for code-speak, it’s normal for casual discourse.

Don’t get me wrong, I live for the stuff. No one writes like the acid-penned, rat-a-tat auteur behind House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, State and Main, and a long list of heralded stage plays like Glengarry Glen Ross. His characters spit linguistic convolutions at each other with a private history of nuance that it doesn’t matter if anyone else groks. They mumble the most bizarre non-sequiters straight-faced, like in their universe it’s a cliché as shopworn as “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

In Spartan, Mamet uses this to throw his audience off-kilter, you’re rarely sure there isn’t something else going on in this dialogue you don’t understand yet. It’s a gift, because once you boil the style away the story reveals itself to be a clever but not-exactly groundbreaking paranoid conspiracy thriller.
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I am still tweaking with theme and layout here in NewWebsiteLand, but it seems like time to initiate the most laborious bit of virtual earth-moving – re-locating my archive of movie reviews. They have long been the most popular feature of my LiveJournal blog and they drew the most eyeballs/comments to the Blogspot annex I maintained for a couple of years. The Blogspot copies of the reviews are still linked at the IMDB pages for their respective movies, which took some drudgery. Now it will take more drudgery to re-post the reviews and re-direct said links, but if this is to be the gravity well for Nicholas Thurkettle web content, no sense ignoring the popular stuff.

You ought to see them appearing, one or two per day that I am near home base, relatively soon. But I recently posted my 300th, so it’s going to take awhile.

The wisdom of where the studios choose to invest their money, project-wise, and in what amounts, is a strange sport to study. People root for the financial success or failure of movies they don’t like or haven’t even seen, without any sense of who actually made them. Maybe it is inspired by this vague hope that financial trends might shift what types of movies are made – and it is true that this will happen, but I have never lost by betting on Hollywood’s ability to learn the wrong lesson – after all, this is the town that watched the triumph of Lord of the Rings and made Eragon.

As it has always been, green-light-decision-making is blind, it is fear-driven, and it is only good at what the collective wisdom decided worked before – even if the collective wisdom needs to ignore a few inconvenient realities that, if considered, might suggest that a lot of these people shouldn’t have jobs. In Hollywood, it’s always 2am at the craps table. As William “Nobody Knows Anything” Goldman once wrote: “Anyone who says differently is selling something”.

This is pre-amble to what may, or may not be, a regular feature around here – where I comment on the weekend box office top 10 from my own perspective. Numbers come via the good folks at Box Office Mojo.

1. Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All By Myself
Weekend Take: $23.4M
Current Domestic Total: $23.4M

Tyler Perry proves he does not even need critics to launch one of his pictures. Perry is not re-writing the rule book, he is simply using it more intelligently than his peers, and beating the major studios at what they claim as their game – a branded, steady, cost-conscious stream of audience-targeted “product”. The conventional wisdom is that grown-up dramas are squishy and out of favor, overtly religious movies make people uncomfortable, and movies with black casts are bad investments because they do not sell well internationally. Yet he consistently makes two movies a year that are mostly grown-up dramas, which feature almost-exclusively black casts, and wear their faith on their sleeves – and in spite of almost universal critical panning, they are profitable.

One secret to his success is that he labored to build a core audience that he serves and tends and grows like a garden; he works quickly enough that they doesn’t forget him, and his ego does not demand he re-invent himself with every project, but allows him to play within pre-approved boundaries. His audience knows what they are buying as surely as when they buy a frozen dinner. But the more important secret is mathematical. The man spends wisely. I Can Do Bad All By Myself, like many of his films, is adapted from one of his plays, which he not only performed live but released on DVD, which gave him an inexpensive rough draft to test in front of an audience, and built awareness and loyalty. And the feature version cost only $13M – so after a single weekend it has already cleared the bar for success. Not many filmmakers, on their seventh feature, would be satisfied working at that budget. But not many filmmakers would even have finished three features at this point in their career, much less seven. And what I would like is for some more talented filmmakers to recognize that you can make adult drama at this price – you just have to know how to nurture the audience and then sell it to them.
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(*For the most part. These things are probably understood, but since this blog is in its infancy, a few declarations of principle are appropriate.)

Politics

I won’t pretend I don’t have opinions, that I don’t read newspapers and blogs, or that I don’t vote. I do all those things with fervor. But I do know that if you’re going to blog about politics, you have to be prepared to put a lot into it. You have to be ready to stay current with a volume of scientific, economic, and geopolitical data that I suspect the average Congressperson cannot decipher, as well as deal with explosive tempers, insults, slander and nonsense and barely-coherent idiocy – and that’s just from people who supposedly agree with you. I do not like apportioning that much of my blogging time or emotional energy to it, and so I am generally restrained, if not outright silent, in this medium.

Starf*cking

I have met, seen, worked and talked with a lot of famous people. It’s part of the job. In fact, it is part of life in LA. I know that some people never lose the speaking-in-tongues ecstasy the aura of celebrity can produce. That’s fine – enthusiasm is a good thing. But if I spent every day acting like I was in Ed Sullivan’s audience shrieking at my favorite Beatle, I could not function around here. It is not an appropriate reaction to riding up in an elevator with The Rock or spotting Chuck Woolery at a Walgreens in the Valley (both of which I have done). I am occasionally surprised by my reactions to meeting people, but it’s usually not a measure of their current fame, but rather some childhood memory threatening to yank my grin up to stupid heights – maybe I’ll tell you my Ralph Macchio story someday.

I have found that most famous people appreciate it when you treat them as just folks living and working out here. And don’t act like you know them already; because you don’t. I’m a mostly-unsuccessful writer who does not hang or party with the beautiful people – the deal is: I won’t pretend to be anything else, and you won’t ask me what someone was wearing – I won’t remember anyway.

Relationship Talk

I have a girlfriend – I happen to think she is bright, awesome, and sexy. But we have also only been exclusive to each other for a couple of weeks, and life takes many turns where love is concerned. I will not be discussing them here. I have a blog with multiple filtering levels where friends (and only friends) can access updates of my personal life, and I intend to use it to preserve that distinction with this wholly-public blog. You will likely see references to people I spend time with, but my custom is to do this with nicknames when one has been established.

I wrote a 10-minute play today – truth be told I wrote half of a second on top of that. I could probably bull my way through to a “blackout” on that second one, but I believe a writer should reserve for themselves the affirmative power of the closing whistle after a respectable day’s work. I say I am done and so I am done. Plus – there is football on soon.

I don’t know if the situation I wrote this script for is still available; I’ll find out tomorrow, hopefully after I have awakened with a replenished supply of mojo and finished this second one. The past couple of weeks have not seen a lot of product, and that has a way of putting me into the anxiety sweats. The sense of accomplishment has a way of pushing back at all other problems in life, and so I am constantly recommending short films, monologues, short stories, and stage sketches like this one, as a way to keep your muscles flexed and spirit warm in between the big projects.

My ambition is to be able to publish blog posts here and at Livejournal simultaneously, so I can start attracting eyeballs here but not deprive my longtime readers over there. It should be a fairly simple matter to do it by e-mail without the rigmarole of manually double-posting, but like most simple matters in the programming world, I need to go find the procedural needle in the Matrix haystack first. Trial and error is underway.

Welcome to my under-development website. As you can see – it’s a little bare around here right now. Things are likely to be fluky here in this one-man band for awhile, but the more I post, the more I will learn. In the upper-right hand corner you will see I have a basic bio and services page. Also, I have been blogging for many moons over at Livejournal, and my intent is to merge that work with this professional calling card of a frame. We’ll just see how all that goes…