Nicholas Thurkettle

I wrote this article last year – it was published back then, but reading was something of a pain, since you had to download a .pdf and page through it. They have since made it more easily available; so if you want to read a little travel piece about a State Park in the mountains undergoing an extraordinary recovery from a fire, make like a dance machine and Do the Clicky.

Zombieland
Director: Ruben Fleischer
Writers: Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick
Producer: Gavin Polone
Stars: Woody Harrelson, Jessie Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin, Amber Heard

I hope some day Ken Burns makes an epic documentary about zombies. I think by now they are as thoroughly woven into the fabric of America as jazz and baseball. In the four decades since George A. Romero created the American brand of zombie with Night of the Living Dead, it has become more than a movie monster. The word itself conjures so much about us – the zombie is the dull but ravenous consumer we can be at our worst, it provokes us about the ways we attempt to ignore or defy death, and it forces us to face how we cling to petty and superficial distractions when darker forces are marshalling.

It is also, when it wants to be – this pale, slack-jawed shadow self – bloody hilarious.

Zombieland can only be a comedy because zombies mean so much to us already. This marriage of mismatched buddy road movie with tongue-in-cheek ultra-violence is thoroughly zombie-literate, and can thus dispense with the niceties in favor of 81 minutes of raucous, beautiful vulgarities. It has no interest in bogging us down in consideration of these ghouls, it just wants to take us on a music-cranking, donut-turning joyride through the graveyard with them. It riffs over the horror gospel the way the Sex Pistols punked with My Way, and that mixture of rude surface and underlying impassioned respect makes it a joy for the faithful while showing the uninitiated what a cool place it is to be.
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Originally posted July 6, 2004

Spider-Man 2
Director: Sam Raimi
Writers: Screen Story by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar and Michael Chabon, Screenplay by Alvin Sargent, based on the comic book created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko
Producers: Laura Ziskin, Avi Arad
Stars: Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Alfred Molina, Rosemary Harris, J.K. Simmons

We knew the filmmakers behind Spider-Man were doing something different when everything to do with web-slinging and Spidey-Sense stopped and we were just watching two kids, neighbors in the back yards of their so-so neighborhood, talking about the dreams they have for when they get out of high school.

And so it was established that while this was a comic book movie, with all the fun and action and attitude we were used to, it was also never going to cheat its characters out of the real emotions they’re going through. These are people who are lonely and behind on their bills, and never get enough sleep. It’s no big surprise that a lot of people can relate.
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Originally Published 7/5/04

The Terminal
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson, from a story by Andrew Niccol and Sacha Gervasi
Producers: Laurie MacDonald, Walter F. Parkes, Steven Spielberg
Stars: Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Stanley Tucci, Chi McBride, Diego Luna, Barry Shabaka Henley, Kumar Pallana, Zoe Saldana

One of the dangers of The Terminal, Steven Spielberg’s slight but irresistibly sweet little trifle of a movie, is that you can want too badly for it to be Saying Something. It’s true that, in the story of innocent well-meaning Eastern European Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks), who finds himself forced to live for months in the international terminal of a New York airport, words like “fable”, “allegory”, and “microcosm” do apply.

But to focus on that while watching the movie is to miss its many charms, which lie not in its symbols but in its very recognizable, very human quirks. One woman seated near me chuckled at the appearance of a Dept. of Homeland Security logo, like it was meant as some kind of sight gag about the relative intelligence of the security personnel. But that shortchanges the character of Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci), who runs the security detail at the terminal.

In a lesser movie he would have just been the villain, a simple, scowly killjoy, well within Tucci’s range and willingness to ham things up. If you watch carefully, though, you’ll see that little aspects of his inner life are still revealing themselves up to his very last scene. This is not some incompetent autocrat, this is a man who finds comfort in a system of rules and is actually very good at his job, but finds himself alternately bamboozled, confounded, charmed and frustrated by Viktor Navorski’s refusal to behave like the cynical sneaks his system is designed to deal with.
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I’ve been trolling this website to prepare for my annual post-Thanksgiving shopping expedition. Having a steady income puts some enthusiasm into a task like that. Traditionally I plan one significant present to myself – like last year’s Blu-Ray player, or the cheapo Kodak from which I’ve derived so much pleasure. This year my ambition has been to finally replace my ancient but heroic laptop – I figured months ago that netbooks would be a significant Black Friday battlefield and, judging by the circulars coming out, I wasn’t wrong.

I have enough money to probably sneak away with one of these $250-$400 jobbers, but I found myself seriously examining just what other obligations I could check off my list with that money. What would I really be buying with a new laptop? As is, my laptop is heavy as a mudderfugger, can’t get on-line, can’t play movies, and can’t survive long without an outlet. But I only use it when traveling or leaving the house to write at a coffeeshop or library – so that makes its limitations inconvenient, but not a legitimate obstruction to anything I do.

And if I am honest with myself, I know that the price in the ad will never be what I actually end up paying, once you throw in even basic software, security, and accessories. And if I’m going to do that, I should just customize the thing through the vendor rather than hope whatever configuration Wal-Mart decided to shove in a box and slap a discount on is going to suit me. I’m going to use this thing for a long-ass time.

After tinkering around on HP’s website I had assembled a laptop I liked pretty well; not too fancy, but it came with Microsoft Office and three years of Norton, and cost around $615. Feels like it would be a good machine. But I can’t afford it now. January or February; probably. It means lugging the old beast around Chicago at New Years’ again, but I’m a strapping young man and can handle it.

Deciding against the laptop has been liberating. I stopped at the Aaron Bros. on the way home from work tonight, and bought a couple of picture frames so I can use those color ink ribbons I bought for my photo printer last month. And I looked up the number of the Writers Guild’s Dues Department; because I owe them some money, and I want my awards season screeners, damn it. Getting current with them will feel good.

I don’t know what the replacement “big purchase” will be on Black Friday. As of this moment I don’t seem to mind if there isn’t one. A couple toys for me, a couple of presents for the fam and friends, and the rest – well, I always have a list of things to do with that.

Behind the cut you will find, taken on Saturday, my first-ever Multi-shot Panorama; which proves that:

1) Silver Lake is chock full of The Pretty
2) I am nowhere near good enough in Photoshop to blend out places where the sky failed to merge seamlessly.

Torture your browser window behind the jump:
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Just got back from a much-enjoyed 3-day mountain getaway with Roxie. There will be pictures and notes, but they will take a little time to assemble. So in the meantime, I’m going to distract you with a picture of cats cuddling in a laundry basket.

Fantastic Mr. Fox
Director: Wes Anderson; animation direction by Mark Gustafson
Writers: Screenplay by Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach, based on the novel by Roald Dahl
Producers: Allison Abbate, Scott Rudin, Jeremy Dawson
Featuring the Vocal Talents of: George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Wallace Wolodarsky, Eric Chase Anderson, Michael Gambon, Willem Dafoe, Brian Cox, Hugo Guinness

I have no idea how kids will process Fantastic Mr. Fox, but I am joyful that it exists. It is not immediately intuitive to marry the frank and impassioned awkwardness of co-writer/director Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Darjeeling Limited) to Roald Dahl’s warm fable of the little guys thumbing the big and greedy in their collective eyes. It is not the contemporary wisdom to make an animated film in stop-motion animation when powerful computers are available.

These strange alliances have yielded a truly unique treat – a family film that mixes retro Hollywood artistry with backyard playfulness; that is both anarchic and wise, and which I hope will draw kids in as opposed to animation’s usual way of shouting deliriously at them. The movie captivates because both its warmth and strangeness are tangible; Anderson’s work has sometimes wrapped itself so snugly in its own eccentricities that you cannot access its heart. But coming after his most emotionally-realized film The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox shows him still confident with his muse.
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Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
Directors: Phil Lord and Chris Miller
Writers: Screenplay by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, based on the book by Judi Barrett and Ron Barrett
Producer: Pam Marsden
Featuring the Vocal Talents of: Bill Hader, Anna Faris, James Caan, Andy Samberg, Bruce Campbell, Mr. T, Bobb’e J. Thompson, Benjamin Bratt, Neil Patrick Harris

When writer/directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller were working on their cult MTV cartoon series Clone High, they coined the term “wacky stack” to describe a gag that was so deliriously embellished by one extra idea after another that it became too bloated to be useful anymore. It sounds as if even then they were in the correct state of mind to make Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, an adaptation of the beloved picture book about the tiny town of Chewandswallow, where food rained from the sky. This miraculous boon becomes an ecological nightmare when the comestibles become building-crushingly gigantic. This makes it pretty appealing as visual metaphors for the wacky stack phenomenon go.

Though the book’s narrative was scant, the visual implications of its premise are irresistible to kids old enough to identify the act of junk food gorging and young enough to not yet suffer acne because of it. Catapulting off the book, Lord and Miller have crafted an insouciant festival of gags aimed straight at that level of maturity, but seasoned with touches of Gen-Y wit and a consistently remarkable ability to push their ideas beyond ridiculousness and into deranged idiot bliss while never losing their grip on the story they intend to tell.
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