I have been gone forever. I deeply apologize. I basically gave my heart to Twitter (seriously, it's awesome). Also, since my last project wrapped up it has been vacation-time, personal project-time, and enjoy (not) unemployment-time for a while. There's not much to post on when life's problems get reduced to the Health Care debate and the four walls of my living room.
I hope to recharge into this blog by posting on Sundays a la the Hollywood Juicer. Hopefully that will work. I've never been that good a reporter, I got a C in Journalism class in college.
-Hard Candy -Twilight (pretty in HD, but dumb as hell) -Dead Alive -I Come In Peace/Dark Angel -Polyester -Poultrygeist -Baby Mama -Schindler's List -City Hunter -Three episodes of the first season of ER (1994)
Missed some, but this note taking is a good habit! (says the one with the memory made of mesh.)
I've upped my movie quota in order to not forget that that's the point of my life. I'm going to list what I watch to make sure I don't forget them (tends to happen). So here's the first.
I promise I am not a pessimist. I'm a realist. I didn't mean for this blog to get so snarky and sad, and all of us in LA are a wee bit pissier in the wintertime. I disappeared amidst the studio deadline for our movie and the production of my own little project (updates to come, after the polish that is Color Correction). I meant to triumphantly return to this blog with something a bit more upbeat, but then I came across this angsty piece from a Development Exec Blogger. Despite my vastly improved mood as spring blooms, what he (she?) has to say continues to ring true.
I’m pretty sure the term high concept was hatched years ago by studio execs that were completely stoned out of their head and didn’t have the attention span to read a whole paragraph, so they called their preference to only read one-liners the “high concept.” ... And that my friends, is how good weed and parents who would rather load their own kids up with drugs because they are too proud to call them dumb, have ruined the movie business. Thanks, Mom!
I still love high-concept, though. A high-concept movie with character, that's the one-two punch that puts me in a coma, my friends.
I haven't been this excited for a movie in a very, VERY long time.
I got my hands on a copy of the script (authentically! not from the interwebs!) about five months ago. It is everything you think it is. It's a stunning piece, absolutely ludacris. It is exactly that, Tarantino doing the normally sober and sepia WWII period film. A group of renegade American soldiers, under Brad Pitt's extremist wing, just go berzerker on the Nazis. In violence that echos Tarantino's own precedent with Pulp Fiction's basement samurai Bruce Willis massacre, the weenie platoon just terrify the opposition with fucked up survival choices, battle scars, and the All-American Baseball Bat. With it's swervy structure and devil-may-care mood it feels like you're driving on an Italian hillside at 115kmh , smoking cigarettes out the window. Every once in a while a really exhilarating action scene would show up, a real gun-under-the-table stunner, and with the man's imaginative casting choices, there's creative possibility in the dialogue that I can barely begin to imagine.
This movie's gonna be awesome. I get more excited with every casting announcement. It stars Brad Pitt as a Texan Bin Laden, BJ Novak, Samm Levine of Freaks and Geeks awesomeness, Mike Meyers (Are you for real? Yes, yes I am) , Maggie fucking Cheung as a wizened cinema-owner, and um, Cloris Leachman. I'm not even gonna get started on the other actors since I know that there'll be hidden notes in their resumes as time reveals them (like Chiyaki Kuriyama echoing Battle Royale in Kill Bill). And amazingly enough, Eli Roth, director of Hostel and Cabin Fever, in a major supporting role as the manaically unhinged Mr. Blonde of the team. This was probably the best idea since can openers.
The incredible thing about reading an as yet unseen Tarantino script is that throughout the whole thing, you have pretty intense doubts. You can't help it. The shit is weird. But it's genius weird. You can feel it. You feel that there's something there, you just don't understand it because you're not him. It's the only script I've read that I trusted the writer entirely on. I could tell that only he knew what was really going on, and that I couldn't even come close to really getting it. Only Charlie Kaufman could do the same.
Sometimes it really pays to trust the writer. In this case reading it is not enough. I'll just have to wait and see the movie, and hopefully experience it anew!
"Cassavetes stares at his soft drink for a moment as he calmly considers his answer. “People used to love to call me a maverick because I had a big mouth and I’d say, ‘That bum!’ or something like that when I was young. Mainly because I believed it and I didn’t know there was anybody’s pain connected to the business. I was so young, I didn’t feel any pain. I just thought, ‘Why don’t they do some exciting, venturesome things? Why are they just sitting there, doing these dull pictures that have already been done many, many times and calling them exciting? That’s a lie. They’re not exciting. Exciting is an experiment.’
“You know, in this business, it’s all jealousy. I mean, this is the dumbest business I’ve ever seen in my life. If somebody gets married, they say, ‘It’ll never work.’ If somebody gets divorced, they say, ‘Good. I’ll give you my lawyer.’ If somebody loses a job, everyone will call him—to gloat. They’ll discuss it, they’ll be happy, they’ll have parties. I don’t understand how people who see each other all the time, and are friends, can be so happy about each other’s demise.
“I think people—studio executives and filmmakers—should hate each other openly and save a lot of trouble."
