What, Me Guilty?
Jun. 5th, 2005 12:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustTrying to get back into writing-about-movies headspace—I have two articles to turn in by mid-July, one on Deepa Mehta’s finally-finished Water (for Montage magazine), the other on a documentary about cult films called Midnight Movies (for POV magazine…thank you, Marc Glassman)—but I keep drifting off into plotting out new short stories. This is good in a way, or possibly more than one: I recently was pissed off to discover that a story I thought had already been safely placed has reverted back to me, necessitating me finding it a new home; also, the Chiaroscuro short story contest has just started up again (see ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jack_yoniga for details), and I’m determined to finally send them something this time ‘round. Plus, it’d certainly be easier to write said something from scratch rather than cut the aforementioned homeless story down to fit their 4,000 words or under cut-off point.
Checking in at the local Rogers Video, meanwhile (in faint hopes of finding that latest Prophecy sequel…yes, I know it’ll probably suck, but I love that universe), I was very happy indeed to discovered that H2O is out on DVD. As not a massive Paul Gross fan to begin with, I still think it's one of the best performances I've ever seen from him. Also: Smart, political, quite emotionally wrenching, vicious in its refusal to back down from Big Issues with Real Consequences, logical in that bleak way a lot of CBC productions are—in other words, one of those overachieving TV movies that makes me wish like hell we could produce stuff like this for the big screen. American who want to check it out due to Due South resonance should be aware that Callum Keith Rennie’s role is plot-centric but screentime-poor, and that it also involves Canadian governmental structure and French.
Oh, and I bought another album by Nile, that serpent-worshipping bunch of Egyptian-themed death metal freakazoids. Haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet, but the track-listings promise an execration text about Akhenaten ("Cast Down the Heretic"), along with a 9-minute epic based on an H.P. Lovecraft reference ("Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten", which—as Nile founder Karl Sanders points out, in his long and detailed footnotes—is actually less "unspeakable cults" than "unpronouncable cults"). Dude’s such a pedant. But anybody who credits someone on "exorcism chants and Pazuzu bowl" for one track can’t be all bad.;)
Tonight Lena came over and Steve and I took what’s becoming our usual stroll to the Paramount Chapters, where I exchanged a really awful book he bought me for Douglas Clegg’s latest Harrow novel, The Abandoned. I also bought a recently trade-paperbacked book about rats (called, oddly enough, Rats) in New York that I’ve been tracking since it was in ridiculously expensive hardback. Its author was on Letterman at the same time Mom and I visited New York last year, before Cal was born; I remember them staking out the same alley he’d studied with a stationary "rat-cam", which they kept cutting back to every time a rat appeared. The author would then give commentary, his observations ranging from the scholarly to the simply repelled ("Yeah, they’re truly horrible creatures with no redeeming features, Dave"). A must!
At any rate: We hung around in Chapters for a while, then ate (I had edamame and sashimi with water and tea, to make up for breaking Atkins last night and the night before by getting shit-faced drinkin’ Cosmopolitans—and yet, I’ve already lost weight. Must be that basic lack of carbs thing) and came back, spitballing ideas for various things all the way. Because that’s what happens when two writer get married, ideally…they help each other out. And I do like to think it goes both ways.
Okay, well. To return to the subject of my first paragraph, here’s the long-awaited FINAL installment of that stupid "Five Movies Blah Blah Blah" meme. Look beneath the cut for further torment.
5 Guilty Pleasures
Vidocq (dir. Pitof)
Yes, the same guy who directed Catwoman! But please keep in mind that he began his career working for/ studying under Jeunet and Caro, the odd French dudes who did City of Lost Children and Delicatessen. Vidocq, (very) loosely based on the career of France’s first police chief—a former thief/private investigator—stars Gerard Depardieu and a host of other Gallic freaks, all shot in hi-def video against a series of bluescreen backdrops and digital effects which render the film both hyperrealistic (pores on parade!) and utterly surrealistic (especially once our prime villain, mirror-mask-faced soul-stealer l’Alchymiste, makes his entrance). Shallow and barely coherent overall, this film nevertheless creates a mood few others can equal…sort of Metal Hurlant Noir. And BTW, don’t believe the back cover: It’s actually set during the same Commune uprisings as Les Miserables, NOT during the Revolution itself. France had more than one, ya know.
Equilibrium
Ah, what a silly idea, yet executed with such wonderfully solemn awe! Christian Bale, smoulderin’ hot, plays one of the elite killer priests employed by a 1984-type future society that’s outlawed emotion (in order to prevent violence) to track down its "sense-offenders"—people who refuse to take their emotion-killing drugs, amass artwork, listen to music and have sex because they just wanna, rather than to procreate—and kill them real good while doing the "gun kata", a two-fisted type of fu that allows its practitioners to somehow dodge bullets (and shoot targets without even looking at them). Mayhem ensues. Inevitably, Christian is turned to the dark side by the ghost of his dead sense-offender partner and the partner’s living g.f. He brings down Big Evil Brother, using the very skillz "he" taught him! Then cries a single tear for all the ass he’s kicked. The End.
Dracula (dir. John Badham)
I first saw this the summer it opened, when I was probably ten and a half. On the one hand, it features a script by W.D. Richter, the same guy who wrote Buckaroo Banzai, and a fresh-off-the-Broadway-stage star turn from Frank Langella, back when he only had the voice of a thick, self-satisfied gourmand; on the other, it has the most glaring continuity error I’ve ever seen (in a film that’s already established vampires can’t be seen in mirrors, a man spots his vampire daughter sneaking up behind him when he sees her reflection in a pool of water). There’s also lip-service feminism, Kate Nelligan being hella sexy, an A-1 Victorian madhouse, and a killer score by John "Star Wars" Williams. Moves like a (ha ha) bat out of Hell, even though they’ve kept to most of the stodgy conventions of the Balderston-Deanestage version. As a "trained" critic, I have little or no excuse for the fact that I am still completely uncritical about this movie, much like…
…Cat People (dir. Paul Schrader)
In his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind uses the film to illustrate just how enmeshed with cocaine the "normal" process of making a Hollywood film had become by 1980: He tells the sad but hilarious story of how Schrader was doing coke in his trailer before a scene, two A.D.s were sent in to get him, they started doing coke too…and this pattern sort of went on and on until the people outside were left with no one qualified to shoot who was still sober, very seriously considering the prospect of just striking and going home. And to be frank, even when a fan as deeply imprinted as I am watches this messy, messy movie, the fingerprints of this drug-soaked methodology can be seen all over every frame.
Yet there’s something in me which simply responds more—viscerally?—to Schrader’s vision than to the Jacques Tourneur classique whose grave it pisses on with such ludicrous enthusiasm. Guess I’ll always remember it fondly for, if nothing else, teaching me that if I "have" to make up a whole new backstory not really suggested by much of the existent text in order to render that text intelligible, said text may probably suck, and I might be better off making (or at least writing) my OWN film about people who fuck each other and turn into cats instead. Not that I ever have, you understand…yet.
And finally—
The Mummy (dir. Stephen Sommers), plus The Mummy Returns, The Scorpion King and hell, why not, even Deep Rising.
With part of the big chunk of GST cash I just banked, I treated myself to the post-Van Helsing "Legacy" re-release of Karl Freund’s original The Mummy, which—just like the Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolf Man and Creature From The Black Lagoon re-releases—comes with four sequels attached. So far I’ve only perused The Mummy’s Hand, but I already think I know where Sommers got a lot of his ideas…sure, his budget it $100 million higher, but the basic structure’s there nonetheless: Handsome, athletic, verge-of-wacky hero, check. Weaselly yet charming sidekick, check. Snappy gal with hidden talents, check. Ravingly eccentric sub-cast of characters, check. It’s all pulpy, pulpy pulp and tripey, tripey tripe, so much so that you can almost feel the haphazardly stuck-together component parts strain and/or squish between your teeth while you watch. Yet watch I do, grinning foolishly, as the Rock and Michel Clarke Duncan engage in a WWF-style smackdown, or Bernard Hill shows up to invent gunpowder, or the former Noble Indigenous Person villain of The Last of the Mohicans is digested alive by a massive many-tentacled, -mouthed and –stomached ghost-squid from the Blackest Deeps of the Abyss. And thus I keep this crap around, because guaranteed toe-tappers are sort of hard to come by these days. As ever.
(Rachel Weiss and Patricia Velasquez cat-fighting with sais! Tiny mummified jungle hunters who all look like the doll from Trilogy of Terror! "You’ll get yours, Benny!"/"Oh, like I’ve never heard THAT before!" People, come on!)
‘Night, guys. Steve’s snoring, and I am very done.
jack_yoniga for details), and I’m determined to finally send them something this time ‘round. Plus, it’d certainly be easier to write said something from scratch rather than cut the aforementioned homeless story down to fit their 4,000 words or under cut-off point.Checking in at the local Rogers Video, meanwhile (in faint hopes of finding that latest Prophecy sequel…yes, I know it’ll probably suck, but I love that universe), I was very happy indeed to discovered that H2O is out on DVD. As not a massive Paul Gross fan to begin with, I still think it's one of the best performances I've ever seen from him. Also: Smart, political, quite emotionally wrenching, vicious in its refusal to back down from Big Issues with Real Consequences, logical in that bleak way a lot of CBC productions are—in other words, one of those overachieving TV movies that makes me wish like hell we could produce stuff like this for the big screen. American who want to check it out due to Due South resonance should be aware that Callum Keith Rennie’s role is plot-centric but screentime-poor, and that it also involves Canadian governmental structure and French.
Oh, and I bought another album by Nile, that serpent-worshipping bunch of Egyptian-themed death metal freakazoids. Haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet, but the track-listings promise an execration text about Akhenaten ("Cast Down the Heretic"), along with a 9-minute epic based on an H.P. Lovecraft reference ("Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten", which—as Nile founder Karl Sanders points out, in his long and detailed footnotes—is actually less "unspeakable cults" than "unpronouncable cults"). Dude’s such a pedant. But anybody who credits someone on "exorcism chants and Pazuzu bowl" for one track can’t be all bad.;)
Tonight Lena came over and Steve and I took what’s becoming our usual stroll to the Paramount Chapters, where I exchanged a really awful book he bought me for Douglas Clegg’s latest Harrow novel, The Abandoned. I also bought a recently trade-paperbacked book about rats (called, oddly enough, Rats) in New York that I’ve been tracking since it was in ridiculously expensive hardback. Its author was on Letterman at the same time Mom and I visited New York last year, before Cal was born; I remember them staking out the same alley he’d studied with a stationary "rat-cam", which they kept cutting back to every time a rat appeared. The author would then give commentary, his observations ranging from the scholarly to the simply repelled ("Yeah, they’re truly horrible creatures with no redeeming features, Dave"). A must!
At any rate: We hung around in Chapters for a while, then ate (I had edamame and sashimi with water and tea, to make up for breaking Atkins last night and the night before by getting shit-faced drinkin’ Cosmopolitans—and yet, I’ve already lost weight. Must be that basic lack of carbs thing) and came back, spitballing ideas for various things all the way. Because that’s what happens when two writer get married, ideally…they help each other out. And I do like to think it goes both ways.
Okay, well. To return to the subject of my first paragraph, here’s the long-awaited FINAL installment of that stupid "Five Movies Blah Blah Blah" meme. Look beneath the cut for further torment.
5 Guilty Pleasures
Vidocq (dir. Pitof)
Yes, the same guy who directed Catwoman! But please keep in mind that he began his career working for/ studying under Jeunet and Caro, the odd French dudes who did City of Lost Children and Delicatessen. Vidocq, (very) loosely based on the career of France’s first police chief—a former thief/private investigator—stars Gerard Depardieu and a host of other Gallic freaks, all shot in hi-def video against a series of bluescreen backdrops and digital effects which render the film both hyperrealistic (pores on parade!) and utterly surrealistic (especially once our prime villain, mirror-mask-faced soul-stealer l’Alchymiste, makes his entrance). Shallow and barely coherent overall, this film nevertheless creates a mood few others can equal…sort of Metal Hurlant Noir. And BTW, don’t believe the back cover: It’s actually set during the same Commune uprisings as Les Miserables, NOT during the Revolution itself. France had more than one, ya know.
Equilibrium
Ah, what a silly idea, yet executed with such wonderfully solemn awe! Christian Bale, smoulderin’ hot, plays one of the elite killer priests employed by a 1984-type future society that’s outlawed emotion (in order to prevent violence) to track down its "sense-offenders"—people who refuse to take their emotion-killing drugs, amass artwork, listen to music and have sex because they just wanna, rather than to procreate—and kill them real good while doing the "gun kata", a two-fisted type of fu that allows its practitioners to somehow dodge bullets (and shoot targets without even looking at them). Mayhem ensues. Inevitably, Christian is turned to the dark side by the ghost of his dead sense-offender partner and the partner’s living g.f. He brings down Big Evil Brother, using the very skillz "he" taught him! Then cries a single tear for all the ass he’s kicked. The End.
Dracula (dir. John Badham)
I first saw this the summer it opened, when I was probably ten and a half. On the one hand, it features a script by W.D. Richter, the same guy who wrote Buckaroo Banzai, and a fresh-off-the-Broadway-stage star turn from Frank Langella, back when he only had the voice of a thick, self-satisfied gourmand; on the other, it has the most glaring continuity error I’ve ever seen (in a film that’s already established vampires can’t be seen in mirrors, a man spots his vampire daughter sneaking up behind him when he sees her reflection in a pool of water). There’s also lip-service feminism, Kate Nelligan being hella sexy, an A-1 Victorian madhouse, and a killer score by John "Star Wars" Williams. Moves like a (ha ha) bat out of Hell, even though they’ve kept to most of the stodgy conventions of the Balderston-Deanestage version. As a "trained" critic, I have little or no excuse for the fact that I am still completely uncritical about this movie, much like…
…Cat People (dir. Paul Schrader)
In his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind uses the film to illustrate just how enmeshed with cocaine the "normal" process of making a Hollywood film had become by 1980: He tells the sad but hilarious story of how Schrader was doing coke in his trailer before a scene, two A.D.s were sent in to get him, they started doing coke too…and this pattern sort of went on and on until the people outside were left with no one qualified to shoot who was still sober, very seriously considering the prospect of just striking and going home. And to be frank, even when a fan as deeply imprinted as I am watches this messy, messy movie, the fingerprints of this drug-soaked methodology can be seen all over every frame.
Yet there’s something in me which simply responds more—viscerally?—to Schrader’s vision than to the Jacques Tourneur classique whose grave it pisses on with such ludicrous enthusiasm. Guess I’ll always remember it fondly for, if nothing else, teaching me that if I "have" to make up a whole new backstory not really suggested by much of the existent text in order to render that text intelligible, said text may probably suck, and I might be better off making (or at least writing) my OWN film about people who fuck each other and turn into cats instead. Not that I ever have, you understand…yet.
And finally—
The Mummy (dir. Stephen Sommers), plus The Mummy Returns, The Scorpion King and hell, why not, even Deep Rising.
With part of the big chunk of GST cash I just banked, I treated myself to the post-Van Helsing "Legacy" re-release of Karl Freund’s original The Mummy, which—just like the Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolf Man and Creature From The Black Lagoon re-releases—comes with four sequels attached. So far I’ve only perused The Mummy’s Hand, but I already think I know where Sommers got a lot of his ideas…sure, his budget it $100 million higher, but the basic structure’s there nonetheless: Handsome, athletic, verge-of-wacky hero, check. Weaselly yet charming sidekick, check. Snappy gal with hidden talents, check. Ravingly eccentric sub-cast of characters, check. It’s all pulpy, pulpy pulp and tripey, tripey tripe, so much so that you can almost feel the haphazardly stuck-together component parts strain and/or squish between your teeth while you watch. Yet watch I do, grinning foolishly, as the Rock and Michel Clarke Duncan engage in a WWF-style smackdown, or Bernard Hill shows up to invent gunpowder, or the former Noble Indigenous Person villain of The Last of the Mohicans is digested alive by a massive many-tentacled, -mouthed and –stomached ghost-squid from the Blackest Deeps of the Abyss. And thus I keep this crap around, because guaranteed toe-tappers are sort of hard to come by these days. As ever.
(Rachel Weiss and Patricia Velasquez cat-fighting with sais! Tiny mummified jungle hunters who all look like the doll from Trilogy of Terror! "You’ll get yours, Benny!"/"Oh, like I’ve never heard THAT before!" People, come on!)
‘Night, guys. Steve’s snoring, and I am very done.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-06-05 11:52 am (UTC)Movies that parody their genre are cool, but the movies I love are the ones that try hard to make the crack-headed material work.
Re: Equilibrium
Date: 2005-06-06 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-05 05:31 pm (UTC)A limit of 4000 words seems to give many writers a heart attack. *g* Personally, I love it. I had a story waiting to go on June 1. The panel of judges kicks ass this year, too.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-06 10:53 pm (UTC)As for the enforced word-count, yeah, I understand how it can be challenging and exciting on that level. But since the stuff I normally write tends to all clock in at between 5,000 and 7,000/8,000 words, it feels a bit unnatural. Still, for thsi piece, I think it could wor,: Lean and mean. Heh.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-17 03:08 am (UTC)Sometime, if you're willing, I'd love to read one of your non-fic pieces...strictly to see what else we have in common, you understand.;)
Really? :D I will happily send you one, but I'm still fairly new to the speculative/original fiction arena, and my short stories are, er...how to put this tactfully?...many of them suck. *g*
I think I still have your email address...I'll test it out.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-19 07:52 pm (UTC)