Nicholas Thurkettle

2012
Director: Roland Emmerich
Writers: Roland Emmerich and Harald Kloser
Producers: Harald Kloser, Mark Gordon, Larry J. Franco
Stars: John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Thandie Newton, Oliver Platt, Tom McCarthy, Woody Harrelson, Danny Glover, Liam James, Morgan Lily, Zlatko Burić, Beatrice Rosen

I lost count of the number of times characters in 2012 ran in from somewhere off-camera and exclaimed “You have to see this!” I didn’t like this movie but I am impressed by it, since it so expansively delivers on that exact carny sideshow pitch Hollywood has been honing since Jaws. Month after month and year after year they promise spectacular violence and catastrophe enjoyed from the safe vantage point of a comfortable multiplex chair. It’s less about entertainment then a sense of destiny created by its own awesome ridiculousness: good or not, you HAVE to see this.

The movie exists as a kind of evolutionary endpoint for Earth-centric cataclysm as a big-screen activity. After a first act consisting of ominous portents, grim world leaders Preparing For the End, and Ordinary Mortals played by famous actors laying out their various subplots, the movie merrily proceeds to spend two hours glamorously and thoroughly destroying the Mother Planet with all the glee of a kid torpedoing toy boats in the bathtub.

Buildings crack and tumble, oceans rise, continents shift, background extras scream and perish by the billions, and the boys in the effects department punch up what must take the prize for the largest fireball any human ever outran in slow motion. Who else would direct this deathstravaganza but Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow’s own Roland Emmerich, a filmmaker who has never had anything more sophisticated to say to moviegoers than “BOOOOM!”
(continue reading…)

Where the Wild Things Are
Director: Spike Jonze
Writers: Screenplay by Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers, based on the book by Maurice Sendak
Producers: John B. Carls, Gary Goetzman, Tom Hanks, Vincent Landay, Maurice Sendak
Stars: Max Records, Catherine Keener, and featuring the vocal talents of James Gandolfini, Paul Dano, Catherine O’Hara, Forest Whitaker, Michael Berry Jr., Chris Cooper, Lauren Ambrose

People don’t remember the urges of childhood. We ran and we screamed and we flailed and we wanted; we wanted so desperately. Why? What was the logic behind those times when we were unwise and unrestrained? It is a mystery we gloss over or ignore, yet matters so much to who we are.

And we can’t trust movies to get it right most of the time. Children in the majority of Hollywood product talk like little adults and betray an adult’s wide perspective. Most filmmakers forget – or just don’t want to face – how agonizing it could be when your world was the exact size of yourself and Mommy, and Mommy was busy.

Not so Spike Jonze’s film of Maurice Sendak’s childhood classic Where the Wild Things Are, which does right by its source material not simply by filming its story, but by translating its truths to the screen. This is a movie about our mighty and inchoate feelings, and how they inspire the bewildering actions that get us sent to our room without our supper. It is painful, and beautiful, and absolutely right.
(continue reading…)

Originally published 9/13/04

Hero
Director: Zhang Yimou
Writers: Feng Li, Bin Wang, Zhang Yimou
Producer: Bill Kong, Zhang Yimou
Stars: Jet Li, Daoming Chen, Tony Leung Chu Wai, Maggie Cheung, Donnie Yen, Zhang Ziyi

You begin with the premise that all movie action is inherently a lie. Outrunning explosions in slow-motion, having vicious fistfights that never leave a bruise – these are contrivances that are at the service of the art. What really matters is: what kind of art is being served?

Like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon before it, Hero (an international hit for the last two years only now getting stateside release by Miramax) comes to us with a treatment of violence that challenges us as moviegoers. It is more like a ballet than a fight, the participants are not so much opponents as trusting partners working in harmony to express a feeling. In this movie, the clash of swords can express vengeance, serenity, rage, sorrow, disdain, conspiracy, love. And it does so in the service of a story that seems at once epic and fable.
(continue reading…)

Originally published 9/9/04

The Manchurian Candidate
Director: Jonathan Demme
Writers: Screenplay by Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris, based on the screenplay by George Axelrod and the novel by Richard Condon
Producers: Jonathan Demme, Ilona Herzberg, Scott Rudin, Tina Sinatra
Stars: Denzel Washingston, Liev Schreiber, Meryl Streep, Kimberly Elise, Jon Voight

When the characters in this remake of 1962’s landmark paranoid head-trip thriller The Manchurian Candidate speak of a tentacular global conglomerate that profits handsomely from war and enjoys influence at the highest levels of government, no bonus points if you can guess of whom in the real world we should be thinking.

In fact, no bonus points will be awarded at all, because the elements of this movie which are meant to provide a chilling satiric commentary are its weakest, and end up serving as a distraction in an otherwise well-mounted vehicle for suspense.
(continue reading…)

Last night I polished up two 10-minute plays. One of them I wrote in a flurry of creativity back in September; the other I wrote nearly seven years ago as a wedding present for a dear friend in one of the many penniless phases of my adult life. The first was relatively simple – its fundamentals were strong, I just needed to clean up a few places in the dialogue where my central idea went cross-eyed.

The second was more difficult. Certainly that many years provides more than adequate emotional distance for re-writing; unfortunately it created more than a little inertia. As in – “the play has existed for this long like this, why should it not stay like that?” This also grows out of the undeniable truth that I was a far worse writer back then, and the script was weak and limp in more than one place. Too many places to salvage in one night? Very possible.

But I have become nothing if not deft. Once I identified the most egregious problem, there was no hesitation; I knew exactly what to scalpel out and replace, and didn’t miss the excised material in the slightest. It is not great now, no, it was not going to be that; but it is…presentable.

Tonight was all the time I had left to generate a third script for tomorrow’s deadline. I came home with an idea and a half-page of scrawled notes. Now after a couple of hours of work/procrastination, I have a half a script. It feels like good stuff – well, it feels consistent to the oddness of my idea. The beauty of the 10-minute play is, since you have far less time in which to wear out your welcome, you can pursue peculiar impulses in bite-sized form. Just throw it up there and see if it plays.

But I think this is all I’ve got for tonight, and I can go to bed satisfied. I think I can make this deliverable with enough time. I might just have to sneak in a few moments to finish tomorrow morning.

Originally published 8/17/04

Collateral
Director: Michael Mann
Writer: Stuart Beattie
Producers: Michael Mann, Julie Richardson
Stars: Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett Smith, Mark Ruffalo, Bruce McGill

Nobody shoots Los Angeles like director Michael Mann (Thief, Heat). The skyscrapers look like Monument Valley in steel and glass. The freeways, shot from directly overhead, look like blood veins pulsing life around a mutated organism.

Vincent (Tom Cruise) doesn’t like it. He thinks it’s too spread out, too disconnected. Of course, what he disdains about it is also what makes it an ideal work environment for him. He can shoot two people dead in an alleyway and, with a quick look around, confirm that no one’s running to call the police.

He considers himself a professional doing a job; nothing more, nothing less. But he’s in denial of his true nature. He’s a virus, injected on this night into the body of Los Angeles to transform and/or destroy anyone he comes in contact with, until he triumphs or is eradicated.
(continue reading…)

Originally published August 12, 2004

Alien vs. Predator
Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Writer: Screen story by Paul W.S. Anderson and Dan O’Bannon & Ronald Shusett, Screenplay by Paul W.S. Anderson, based on the “Alien” characters created by Dan O’Bannon & Ronald Shusett and the “Predator” characters created by Jim Thomas & John Thomas
Producers: Gordon Carroll, David Giler, Walter Hill, John Davis
Stars: Sanaa Lathan, Raoul Bova, Lance Henriksen, Ewen Bremner

In a perverse way it’s refreshing to see a slasher movie where the characters are soberly instructed “nobody go anywhere alone”, then the filmmakers don’t even bother contriving the usual dumb excuses before they start doing just that. The moment they leave the boat they’re wandering to and fro, disdaining the buddy system and inviting a brutal comeuppance for it. I guess it saves time.

It is with a heavy heart that I dub Alien vs. Predator a slasher movie, but in spite of its science fiction trappings it’s little more than a machine for sticking characters in the dark then pitilessly offing them. It is such a shame, because the movie franchises it marries up, both of which have seen better days, were at their best when they took their time and showed us people we cared about.
(continue reading…)

I often say that working in the film business is like being a sprinter lined up in the stadium for a 400-meter dash; only you don’t wait seconds for the starter to fire his pistol, you wait months, maybe years. But he could pull that trigger at any moment, and Jimmy, you’d better keep limber for it, because only one guy gets to hit the tape at the end.

I’m flexing my own muscles right now. If something happens – and it may happen – it’s going to happen unbelievably fast. Stay tuned.

I see I have been quoted with smiley-props on a Ray Stevenson fan forum for my old King Arthur review, and that someone else found this blog by using the search words “jason schwartzman smarmy”.

I highly approve of both these developments.

I don’t know what I’m going to do more often in this life; fall in love or let myself hope I actually have a chance of making a movie. A new opportunity for the latter came into sharper focus today – I have a small raiding party together and we’ve breached the first couple doors of the fortress; and boy howdy is it exhilarating as ever.

It’s small…I’m talking minuscule. This is one of those budgets that wouldn’t cover a week’s food on a superhero movie. There is a legitimate question whether or not the script I’ve written can actually be made for the money that is on the table. IF everyone does three jobs and works for circus peanuts, and IF we catch a couple of breaks on our locations, and IF this camera we have access to can actually live up to its cost-saving billing, and IF we can trim the script and schedule this thing hard and deep with no lube, then…maybe, Jimmy, maybe.

I would be producer, writer, assistant director, and at least a few other tasks along the way. I would have to quit the office job; not immediately but once things started ramping up – which, given the weather requirements of the script might not be for several months. But I also found out today that my screenwriting class is definitely on for the spring, which means money. It didn’t take me long to start working the personal budget numbers. IF the class happened in the fall as well, and IF I finished the novel in a timely manner so I could bring in the rest of that money, and IF I could pick up a few one-off production gigs like I was awhile back, and IF I don’t eat at restaurants or drink in bars for the majority of 2010, then…maybe.

But I’m not walking yet. A good piece of advice I once read about the question of when to leave your dayjob is: “You’ll know when it’s no longer possible to keep it.”

More on this as it develops.