Nicholas Thurkettle

You might have noticed that your 50+ attempts to spam my Starsky & Hutch review with ads for acne medication have been cunningly baleeted before they saw the light of day. I understand that, as a soulless piece of software, you will continue your futile efforts longer than I would on a failing date. I request only that you evolve to a state of artificial self-awareness soon, so when I mock your failure, you understand what shame feels like.

Back in January, Dr. Jeffrey Huberman, the honcho of the College of Communications and Fine Arts at my alma mater Bradley University, made his annual trek to Los Angeles along with students and faculty getting a taste of our corner of the entertainment business. It’s always good for a free meal or two, plus catching up and conversation with fellow alums and former screenwriting students.

This year, prior to the official reception, some of us assembled at a Chinese restaurant on Pico, and before I knew what was happening, Dean Huberman started videotaping us with his phone as we talked about our present careers and the experiences at Bradley that prepared us for them. It’s finally been cut together into a swanky-looking recruiting tool.

So, if you feel like gazing at my descending chin flesh and hearing me tell a few rambling anecdotes about hard work and the strange turns of life that brought me to writing in Hollywood, here you go:

Part One:

Part Two:

Busy weekend. Many very good experiences. Many projects unwritten. It’s almost midnight. Start the clock at Monday again and….go.

We’ll see if I manage to tell you any details, Jimmy. In the meantime, a lucky picture from Saturday:

Coco avant Chanel (Coco Before Chanel)
Director: Anne Fontaine
Writers: Screenplay by Anne Fontaine and Camille Fontaine, in collaboration with Christopher Hampton and Jacques Fieschi, freely adapted from the book L’irrégulière ou mon Itinéraire Chanel by Edmonde Charles-Roux
Producers: Caroline Benjo, Philippe Carcassone, Carole Scotte
Stars: Audrey Tautou, Benoît Poelvoorde, Alessandro Nivola, Marie Gillain, Emmanuelle Devos

“I gave women a sense of freedom; I gave them back their bodies: bodies that were drenched in sweat, due to fashion’s finery, lace, corsets, underclothes, padding.”
-Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel

She enters the great house with the confidence of the cat who wants all to know she has consented to make this her shelter. She has a poise that upsets your prejudice, but it is still a fragile one. Coco Chanel made her fame by designing fashion, but she began by designing herself – from her dark and distancing eyes to the wardrobe that sought to level the gender playing field.

Coco Before Chanel could have been a movie about the legendary little black dress and its many cousins produced during Chanel’s career. That would have been a sexy and photogenic movie indeed. But co-writer/director Anne Fontaine wants to find the woman inside the dress, and that is exactly the path outlined by Chanel’s design philosophy. She de-emphasized the body and the accessories so the woman could celebrate inner qualities they might not know they had. And we see in this narrative of her early womanhood that she conducted her life and affairs in this way too – because men could have her body, but the deeper and more valuable treasure of her spirit was reserved for a special few. Maybe even only one.

A great biopic rests on two poles: an idea on how to tell the story of a life that marries well with a truth about that life; and a performance that feels alive and realized within that idea. Fontaine and her screenplay collaborators achieve the former, and then astound in the latter by casting the French actress Audrey Tautou – what an achievement, to take the woman who played Amélie, and have her look as if a smile does not come naturally to her.
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Originally published 6/15/04

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Director: Alfonso Cuaron
Writer: Steve Kloves, based on the book by J.K. Rowling
Producer: David Heyman, Chris Columbus
Stars: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Michael Gambon, Alan Rickman, David Thewlis, Gary Oldman, Robbie Coltrane, Maggie Smith, Emma Thompson, Tom Felton

The movie opens with a teenager in his bedroom at night, doing something under the sheets that he knows he’s not supposed to do. And it ends with that same teenager exhilarated by the feeling of something new and almost uncontrollably powerful between his legs.

Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) is growing up.
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Originally posted 6/13/04

Shrek 2
Directors: Andrew Adamson, Kelly Asbury, Conrad Vernon
Writers: Story by Andrew Adamson, Screenplay by Andrew Adamson, Joe Stillman, and David N. Weiss & J. David Stem
Producers: Aron Warner, David Lipman, John H. Williams
Featuring the Voices of: Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, Antonio Banderas, John Cleese, Julie Andrews, Jennifer Saunders, Rupert Everett

It is a sign of the good will earned by the charming characters of the first Shrek movie that I’m smiling from the moment the movie begins. By the time we’re in the movie’s climax, where an assault on a castle is achieved through the most absurd and hilarious use of a baked good in history, I’m still smiling, not to mention laughing, and barely able to control myself, which is a sign that the asylum is still safely in the hands of the lunatics.

Sometimes what’s most astonishing about Shrek 2 is that there is anything about fairy tales they didn’t get around to tweaking last time. And yet this movie’s cup is just as overflowing, from the bar called The Poisoned Apple – where famous unsavory characters tip a glass – to throwaway gags in the background like that storefront for Old Knavery.

The movie is determined to be just as much fun to kids, who will be amused by how the newly-married Shrek (voiced by Mike Meyers) and Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz) make bubbles in their mud bath, as it is to adults, who stand a better chance of understanding why Donkey yells “I’m coming, Elizabeth!” before he passes out. And that baked good ought to find those adults’ inner children no matter how deeply they might be buried.
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Extract
Director: Mike Judge
Writer: Mike Judge
Producers: John Altschuler, Michael Rotenberg
Stars: Jason Bateman, Mila Kunis, Kristen Wiig, Ben Affleck, J.K. Simmons, Clifton Collins, Jr., Dustin Milligan, David Koechner, Beth Grant, Gene Simmons

As long as people are behaving ridiculously, Jason Bateman will be there to sigh at them. Since his rebirth as a weary straight man in Arrested Development, the former teen heartthrob has successfully maintained a dual track career, taking colorful supporting roles in big-budget fare like State of Play and The Kingdom, while proving an invaluable center of gravity in goofy comedies like Extract, the latest live-action feature from Mike Judge.

Judge created Beavis and Butthead and co-created the recently-concluded King of the Hill, and in the live-action film world his resume is brief but notorious – both 1999’s Office Space and 2006’s Idiocracy made hardly a murmur at the box-office, but have comfortably grown cults around their highly-quotable abstractions of our worst tendencies as a species.

They were cartoonish movies, and very funny ones. Extract is less of a cartoon and gives the impression of Judge attempting to toss away his crutches. Casting Bateman is a sign that he wants to feel like the world he creates has a foot and a half in ours, and it’s the right choice for this light distraction about getting lost on the way to building a satisfying life. It’s easy to imagine that happening to a character he plays.
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Originally posted 6/4/04

The Day After Tomorrow
Director: Roland Emmerich
Writers: Roland Emmerich and Jeffrey Nachmanoff, from a story by Roland Emmerich
Producers: Roland Emmerich, Mark Gordon
Stars: Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emmy Rossum, Sela Ward, Ian Holm

In Independence Day we had aliens to fight against, which involved zooming around in planes and spaceships and cracking jokes. So even though the human death toll was in the millions, if not billions, we could still have some fun watching it.

But in The Day After Tomorrow, the bogeyman is cold air, and really not much can be done in the face of that but freeze in it and die. Not so many chuckles there.

So I find myself applying Bizarro-world logic to another story about the death of billions – should I be having fun with this? Dennis Quaid, in the role of rugged “paleoclimatalogist” Dr. Jack Hall, sure doesn’t crack many smiles as he trudges across the icy wasteland that used to be the Northeastern United States. Has Roland Emmerich made a Serious Movie?

The answer is no, he’s made another Big Dumb Blockbuster, as is his stock-in-trade, but has chosen for it a subject matter that does not lend itself to the kind of zesty guilty pleasure we took from Independence Day or Stargate. Despite occasional flashes of gallows wit, this is an ill-fitted movie, doofy summer entertainment playing dress-up.
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Originally posted 6/2/04

Troy
Director: Wolfgang Petersen
Writer: David Benioff, inspired by Homer’s The Iliad
Producers: Wolfgang Petersen, Diana Rathbun, Colin Wilson
Stars: Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, Orlando Bloom, Diane Kruger, Brian Cox, Peter O’Toole, Sean Bean, Brendan Gleeson, Saffron Burrows, Rose Byrne

At the beginning of Troy, when the armies of Thessaly take the field opposite the armies of Greek city-states under King Agamemnon (Brian Cox), a little boy in the row in front of me, probably 5-6 years old, asked his dad with burning curiosity – which ones are the good guys?

The father had no easy answer. The closest thing to an answer comes in the movie’s key scene: Agamemnon, who united the Grecian cities by explaining with a smile that there will be less bloodshed all around if they just accept his rule, has been beaten back from his first assault at the impregnable city of Troy.

Their original motive for this war has been rendered tragically moot, and the King is heavy with grief. And yet they have sailed all this way with this massive army; and after all, now he has something new to avenge. For Agamemnon, who understands only power and the perception of it, the reasons keep changing but the goal has always remained the same: Troy must be conquered.

Odysseus (Sean Bean), whose wisdom will in time solve the problem of Troy’s fortress walls, points out that the men will not take well continuing to die in great numbers for shifting purposes. But, Agamemnon rebuts, to leave now is to appear vulnerable. Enemies might be emboldened. The security of all Greece is now at stake, he concludes.

And so we have perhaps the largest war epic in recent memory in which neither side is really the good guys, though each has an equal share of beautiful movie stars in their ranks.
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Dancing With the Stars Week Three reviews are now posted at I’m Not Here to Make Friends. Competition Night here, Results Night here. For his true embrace of what I see as the show’s spirit, I actually dare to praise Tom DeLay:

Standing in red-and-white stripes next to Cheryl’s star-spangled dirty pillows, Hammer Tom looks like a lost confused soul who should be the central character in a Kurt Vonnegut novel. In rehearsals he’s by-God doing The Robot, and I want Dr. Sam Beckett to Quantum Leap back in time and make that go away. But he is showing the will to push through stress fractures on both feet at his age, and what else can I do but tip my cap to that?