Evolution of Narrative Film I

This might be the easiest college class of all time.  There are three tiny papers, including one about which film you watched was your favorite.  You spend the entire time watching movies or clips from movies and listening to Tom “my uncle wrote Citizen Kane and my dad wrote All About Eve” Mankiewicz tell generally fascinating stories from his decades-long career as a writer and director.

Like everything, though, there’s a downside.  Here’s that:  the class starts at 9 AM and lasts for four hours.  It’s not really a major issue, but I know I had a hard time fully appreciating movies like Bertolucci’s The Conformist at that hour.  The slower-paced movies we watched were, I’m sure, nodded off to with regularity.  I’m proud to say that I managed to keep awake through every class meeting, but there were mornings it was hard.  The class meeting in the big fancy theater where you’re not allowed to bring food or drink – like coffee – didn’t help, either.

Short Film Form

Oh, man… you know what I really want to do at 9:30 in the morning? Watch largely mediocre short films for three hours.

This class, one of two I had that met in the gigantic state-of-the-art theater (the Folino), was set up as follows: students had to write a pair of analysis papers and also show up. It was not difficult.

So what did I learn in the Short Film Form? Well, the biggest lesson is that most short films aren’t good. A generous 40 percent of them are decent, maybe five percent are good, and the remaining 55 percent are somewhere between bad and terrible. I imagine if I delved into the percentages a bit more and gave it more thought I would find that my opinion on short films pretty closely resembles my opinion on regular films.

I wrote papers on two awful movies, and it turns out the one I hate the most is the one that was nominated for an oscar. Another one of the movies I didn’t like won an oscar. I’m not going to single out the movies I hate too much, because my tastes are, I’m learning, weird.

There were a few that I really enjoyed, though, and here’s one.

new year’s resolution

try and guess what my new year’s resolution is.

Too late, it’s to not let this badass blog banner go to waste.  So I’ll make an effort to actually update this thing more often than every four to five months.

So I’ll try and catch up in healthy-sized rants, but tonight’s new year’s eve and there’s a goddamn bassline getting rehearsed directly underneath my chair, so I’m not going to start right now.  Instead I’ll just say that if I don’t post in the next few days it will be because I’m in prison for using a bass string as a garrote and brutally murdering an apartment full of inconsiderate revelers.

Also, we got a dog.

travel

Okay, so here is a brief summary of what’s been going on by way of an excuse for not having updated here in nearly a month.

On July 23rd the relocube got dropped off and the next four days were spent packing, giving things away, and filling the cube with everything we own.

The cube got picked up sometime after the 27th, and by then we were out of there.  We turned our keys in and headed west.  We spent a few days in Asheville eating delicious ice cream and hanging out with my family and their cats (Shleeve, this means you).

We drove by the Nantahala River in pouring rain and stopped at Lookout Mountain.  We passed into Georgia and Tennessee before heading into Alabama.  In Birmingham, we found excellent Greek food and slept for the last time on our very nice contoured pillows.  Those got left in the hotel room, and we moved on to rainy Mobile.  We had a casino buffet dinner in Bilouxi and then pressed on to sleep outside New Orleans.

The next day was humid and hot and New Orleans-tastic.  We sweated and ate beignettes and po boys.  We walked the French Quarter until my feet wanted to fall off.  The following day, we drove a long, long stretch of road north across Lake Ponchatrain and then West on the 10 all the way to San Antonio.

San Antonio is really nice.  Amanda and I both got hats from the same shop that once sold a Stetson to John Paul II.  It was several million degrees outside.

We were planning on going north and west toward New Mexico from there, but instead, we went to Del Rio.  There’s supposed to be a really nice lake in a park there right beside the border with Mexico, but somehow (in the driest place I think I’d ever seen) it was flooded.  So we drove out there and ate at a Chilis and marveled at the terrible motel six before finding a different place to sleep.  We rode the northern edge of the border and got dismissed by border patrol as we headed toward Carlsbad.

We spent the night in Carlsbad and then spent most of the next day in Carlsbad Caverns, which is really spectacular.  We headed north to Roswell and slept in the kind of roadside motel you generally only see in movies.    We headed back into Roswell to see the International UFO museum, which was fantastic, and then we headed north to Santa Fe.

The best place to eat in the entire world is the Tune Up Grill in Santa Fe.

We headed into Albuquerque and then moved on to Gallup.  We stopped along the way in some park called Mal Paise and also in the Painted Desert, both of which were nice and incredibly sunny.  We headed to Flagstaff and skipped the Grand Canyon due to sunburn and exhaustion.  We visited Mojave and slept in a casino in Laughlin, NV and finally we made it to Orange the next day.

What followed was three days of apartment searching before finding a fantastic place in Santa Ana.  A week ago today, our relocube was brought to our new apartment, and we spent the past week hauling our belongings up three flights of stairs and arranging them into a functioning home.

It’s been a busy several weeks.

Making Movies

Sidney Lumet is a director I can usually take or leave.  I like 12 Angry Men and really like Dog Day Afternoon and I hated Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.  Oddly, I haven’t seen much else he’s done, which is a feat since he’s got 70 directing credits on IMDB (more than a few for TV episodes, but probably still 50-odd movies).

Somehow, in the 90’s, he found time to write this book.  It’s an easy and enjoyable read if you’re remotely interested in how movies get made, and it also has some interesting reflections of some of Lumet’s films.  There’s a part in the book where he describes a poster for The Hill that made me laugh out loud.  If I could find the poster, I’d put it here, but I can’t.  It apparantly had a picture of Sean Connery screaming with a thought bubble coming from his head with a belly dancer in it.  Above this image of a Connery enraged by belly-dancing (apparently) is the huge-lettered phrase, “EAT IT, MISTER!”

This is an illustration of what working with studios and marketing can be like on a bad day.

The only problem I have with this book is that I feel like it’s pretty a-typical.  Reading the book makes me really want to work with Sidney Lumet (which is unlikely to happen since the man is in his mid-eighties).  Lumet states that the contempt which much of Hollywood has for writers, for example, baffles him.  He wants writers involved and respected throughout the process.  I guess I can only hope that the people I might work with in the future have read and absorbed this book like I have.  At least, since it’s required for Chapman, I can assume that the people I’ll be working with in the immediate future will be aware of Lumet’s philosophies.

Making Movies by Sidney Lumet

In the Blink of an Eye

It’s really only half a book.  In the Blink of an Eye is 70-odd pages, and the second half of the book is about digital media.  Technically, the whole book is In the Blink of an Eye, but I only read the first bit.  It’s a matter of time, though, rather than desire.  In the Blink of an Eye is a quick, interesting, comprehensible introduction to good editing.  I read it in two hours.  If I didn’t have four other books to read (all of which are massively larger than this one), I’d certainly have read the second half.

In the Blink of any Eye by Walter Murch

The Bicycle Thief

Watching this movie made me want to get a pizza and a bicycle pretty much as soon as possible.  I got the pizza already, but the bike has to wait until I get to California.

This movie is great.  I think it might be my favorite of the ‘number one of all time’ movies (in your face, Orson Welles!).  I found myself initially underwhelmed, and by the half-way point I was hooked.  In case you haven’t seen it, the last half is the money half, so I only got more pleased (in a depressing, not so pleased sort of way.  Why is it that so many of the ‘great’ movies are downers?).

I don’t want to get into it too much because I think you should see it and I also think that one of the reasons why I liked it as much as I did was that I only really knew what the title told me about it.  The copy I saw was scratched and beat up and the subtitles were only on about half the dialogue, but that was a-okay.

Also, the first time I saw the son in the movie, I laughed out loud.  He’s every over the top stereotype you know about Italian people (except that he’s not in the mob) in a miniature form.

One final note:  my step-brother Geoffrey Lorenz is the most looked-alike person I’ve ever seen.  In what will probably be a recurring theme, I’d like to post the Geoffrey Lorenz from The Bicycle Thief, Vittorio Antonucci.

In the Bedroom

It’s not a very enjoyable picture, but it’s a good one.  One of the precepts of screenwriting is that the second act is the hardest to write, but it seems like a corollary to this is that often, in good movies, the second act is the easiest one to watch.  Or the best, maybe.  At least, that was the case here…  so much so that I kind of wish the last 20 minutes of the movie hadn’t happened.

Some of the things I really liked about this movie:

The absence of a soundtrack.  Don’t get me wrong, I love a good soundtrack (by which I mean, in this case, music playing in a movie without an on-screen source).  I listen to particular music when I write, and I often picture songs playing over scenes.  That being said, a lot of movies don’t benefit from songs or scores, and In the Bedroom is probably one of them.  There’s a scene with music playing on a radio, and the music that Sissy Spacek’s character is involved with works wonderfully in a couple of scenes, but otherwise the silence in the background is stark and perfect.

The advertising and the summaries that came out about the movie were excellent.  So often, a preview or the summary on the back of a DVD will give away so much of a movie that watching it is often a waste of time.  This movie managed, somehow, to keep the information about it confined to the first half hour or so of the film.  I’m sure if someone wanted to dig, they could find more than this, but that you have to dig is refreshing.  I thought I knew what the movie was about going in, and I was glad I didn’t actually know very much at all.

This is probably the only Sissy Spacek movie I’ve ever seen where she didn’t strike me as shy and tame and boring.  Also, I was expecting Marisa Tomei to bring one of her over-sexed characters to the table, and was pleasantly surprised.  More of this sort of thing, please, and less of the gyrating we got in The Wrestler or Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.  We all know you’re still attractive, okay.  You don’t have to prove it.

Things I wasn’t so keen on:

Without giving anything away, the whole legal part of it strikes me as absurd.

The last part of the movie felt artificial, probably because of the above issues concerning the legal wrangling.

Bonnie and Clyde

I really like Bonnie and Clyde, except for one thing.  The goddamn banjo music.  Virtually every time a car drives off into a scene transition, this absurd ho-down jamboree starts up.  It doesn’t matter if they’re going to pick up dinner or just shot a guy…  same ridiculous banjo hootenanny.  If that music could be excised, I’d have no complaints.

Also, like most movies Bob Towne has a hand in, it starts when it starts, and end right when it ends.  No wasted anything.

Rules of the Game

Can I just say I don’t get it and move along?  Technically, it’s nice…  I guess.  But the story seemed so contrived, and I feel like the characters are a reflection of a part of society that I have absolutely no connection to at all.  Adulterous pre-war French snobs are so removed from my experience that I don’t know if this is biting satire, farce, comedy, absurdism or (god I hope not) perfect realism.  Rant after the jump which may contain spoilers.