It's the rare person who's seen every Woody Allen movie. Woody Allen may not even be that person. How else explain "Alice" or "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion"? Anyway, I'd never seen "Celebrity" until this weekend. That's the one in which Kenneth Branagh plays a free-lance writer who manages to get romantically entangled, to one degree or another, with Melanie Griffith, Judy Davis, Winona Ryder, Charlize Theron, and Famke Janssen. Can you tell he's the Woody stand-in?
Watching Branagh channel his inner Woody is kind of amazing. There's this whine he gets in his voice, along with a physical tentativeness, the hesitation, and general stop-and-go rhythm, that's like a RADA version of Alvy Singer. This is no small feat. Four years earlier, John Cusack played the Woody stand-in in "Bullets Over Broadway," and there's no comparison. That's just a good actor playing an underdeveloped role rather than a good actor (maybe even a great one) doing an inspired impersonation.
This got me to thinking about actors imitating other actors onscreen -- not playing them in a biopic, like Robert Downey Jr. as Charlie Chaplin, say, or in "Ed Wood" Vincent D'Onofrio's cameo as Orson Welles (with vocal assistance from Maurice LaMarche). No, I mean taking over another actor's style and manner and making it his or her own. Between the cult of originality in this culture and actors' egos being what they are, this is a fairly rare occurrence. Offhand I can think of maybe half a dozen other examples beside Branagh/Allen.
Today's New York Times has a front-page story about the survival of movie theaters in small North Dakota towns. The photo at left shows the Roxy Theater, in Langdon. Rural population loss is a major concern in North Dakota, and the idea is that keeping these theaters as going concerns is a way of providing de facto community centers for these towns.
Even today, when the popularity of flat-panel TVs at home and ubiquity of DVD drives on laptops and netbooks have made the multiplex seem like a dinosaur, the idea of vintage single-screen theaters remains very much a part of the romance of moviegoing. It's not the sturdiest part, to be sure. ("The Last Picture Show," which takes its title from the closing of the only theater in a Texas town, is set in 1952.) Movie theaters have been shutting down almost as long as there have been movies. But so long as teenagers want to get out of the house on a Friday night, and people want to share an emotional response in a darkened auditorium with others similarly inclined, there will be movie theaters.
There's a terrific website, CinemaTour.com, whose self-described mission is "to research and
document the locations and histories of cinemas throughout the world." Check it out.
A few months ago, I discussed how Every Villain is a Hero — very few bad guys perceive themselves as bad guys, so you need to think of their motivation in heroic terms.
I just finished playing the Descent into Darkness scenario for Battle for Wesnoth,1 which provides a surprisingly good example of this lesson.
The story follows Malin Keshar, a young mage trying to save his village from orcs. Desperate, he uses a little necromancy in a pinch, which gets him banished from his homeland. As the twelve chapters unfold, bad decisions snowball until the story reaches a satisfyingly bleak conclusion.
Reading up on the scenario afterwards, I came upon this description of Malin’s dilemma, a trope called All of the Other Reindeer:
A character is surrounded by people who constantly put him or her down, usually because of some trait that is integral to them being a hero or villain. It seems the only responses one can make to this are the extremes: “put up with it silently” or “let them die/kill them all.”
If a hero, the character will constantly show their virtue by putting up with it and saving their tormentors’ lives again and again. Said tormentors will be grateful for about five seconds (that is, until the end of the episode), and then start it up again.
If a villain, they’ll inevitably explode and slaughter their tormentors, to the barely disguised envy of the audience. Oh, the hero will stop them eventually, but not before most of those who wronged the villain are taken out.
That’s a great roadmap for one kind of villain backstory.
Update: Shock 'Til You Drop has learned that Williamson is still around, but just busy with The Vampire Diaries, so Kruger is helping out. That's marginally better, but still not the best news for Scream fans.
If you were skeptical about the return to Woodsboro and Scream 4, prepare to rejoice. And if you were optimistic, hold on to your seats -- a pretty troublesome bit of information has hit the wire. While covering the latest bits of casting news, Zap2It has been offering up some context. It seems that, first, Lauren Graham left because rewrites had substantially reduced her role. This isn't so shocking -- you sign on for a good part, it gets diminished, you leave. Roles get axed from films all the time.
But that's only the start of the script woes, which continue with more star unrest and one hell of a pinch-hitter replacement shocker ...
The entertainment world is still buzzing over yesterday's revelation that Oksana Grigorieva -- mother of Mel Gibson's youngest child -- captured racist and misogynistic tirades directed at her by the actor on tape. RadarOnline had the exclusive on that -- and shared some of the lowlights, including such gems as "You look like a f***ing pig in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of n***ers, it will be your fault," and "I am going to come and burn the f**king house down ... but you will blow me first." Gibson, whose image was still taking a beating from his infamous 2006 DUI arrest (he went on a rant about Jews that time), might have just hammered the final nail into the coffin of his career.
If that's the case, Gibson has no one to blame but himself. However, if he does go down for good, it looks like he might take at least one project with him.
Gibson, who's been largely absent from the screen since that arrest, was hoping to resuscitate his career in 2010. He appeared in Edge of Darkness earlier this year and is starring in Jodie Foster's absolutely bizarre sounding comedy The Beaver. In that film, Gibson plays "a depressed CEO who finds a new lease on life when he begins to communicate with friends and family via a beaver hand puppet." The question now is, what do you do with this film?
This weekend at the movies, it's the death of American screenwriting! Neither of the two major July 4th releases, "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse" and "The Last Airbender," have what you might call an actual screenplay. In both movies, characters blurt exposition at each other in endless, unwieldy chunks of monologue, Bella and Edward and Jacob disgorging unedited emotions of teen-diaryspeak, and the anonymous brats of "Airbender" laying down the history and rules of the craptaculous fantasy world in which they move as though they were compiling a user manual.
Children, it's called subtext, and in the craft of screenwriting, you hide what the characters want to say to each other beneath what they actually do say. Or, failing that, you give them something interesting to discuss that isn't baldly about getting from point A to point B in the storyline. "Eclipse" is actually an improvement on the narcoleptic "New Moon" -- I still say Catherine Hardwicke's intelligently swoony direction made the first "Twilight" the best so far -- but it hasn't been written so much as mediated. With "Airbender," the lousy non-script is just one more rancid tomato in the stew. Please, if you have to see this movie, save your money and buy tickets for the 2D version -- otherwise Hollywood will get the message that we're sheep who deserve hideous post-production 3D conversions.
Maybe "I Am Love" ain't so hot on the screenplay front, either --but only because the characters are too busy sublimating and then giving into their most carnal culinary and sexual urges. (If "Eclipse" is all text, this one's all subtext.) It's another showcase for Tilda Swinton (in photo above), here playing a cosseted Milanese wife who falls rapturously in love with a young chef, but the chief pleasure of the movie is the sybaritic delight taken in clothing and architecture and, above all, food, all of which are somehow all about sex and lead there forthwith. Watch this on a very big screen, please, and, as Wesley says, you probably don't want to see it hungry or horny.
"Restrepo" is the latest embedded documentary from Afghanistan, courtesy of co-directors Tim Hetherington and "Perfect Storm" writer Sebastian Junger. I have yet to catch it, but it made a splash at Sundance and has glowing notices at Metacritic. It's at the Kendall Square, as is Michael Winterbottom's "The
Killer Inside Me," a well-made and purposeless adaptation of the notorious Jim Thompson pulp novel. (Consumer warning: the violence toward the film's female characters is extra-extra brutal.) At the MFA is a heartbreaking work of Iranian magical realism called "Women Without Men." And the Dennis Hopper retrospective continues at the Brattle with two genuine oddities from opposite ends of the actor's career: 1961's "Night Tide" (Hopper's first lead and a romance between a guy and a woman who may or may not be a mermaid -- hey, it's "Ondine" forty years early!) and 1994's "Witch Hunt" (HBO movie set in an alterna-noir Los Angeles where everyone can do magic; Hopper plays grizzled detective H. P. Lovecraft, "Phil" to his friends, of which he has none).
Here's the trailer for "Night Tide" -- come to think of it, this could be viewed as a proto-"Twilight" with the genders reversed and even worse screenwriting, if that's possible. Man, I miss the old, weird Hollywood.
One of my frustrations with independent film — and in particular, micro-indies of the past few years — is a lack of narrative ambition.
Flip through the catalogs of any festival and you’ll see movies with fascinating characters and rich settings in which nothing really happens, as if the filmmakers took a Dogma vow to avoid plot.
My hunch is that it’s actually a consequence of thinking small. If you’re making a movie on a limited budget, it may put real constraints on your locations, schedule and cast size.
But that frugality doesn’t need to limit your story. Story is free.
Waiting around for things
I spent last week at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, working with writer-directors on their next projects. I don’t want to single out any one script — I’m eager to see all of these movies made. These filmmakers are very talented.
But I often found myself pausing at page 45 asking “What’s happened so far?” and “What am I curious about?” And too often, the answer was not much.
Some of my red flags:
Are characters waiting around for something?
Do they take half-steps, then retreat?
Do major events (death, abortion, incest) happen off-screen, or before the movie begins?
Do people talk about food?
Could you swap a scene from page 10 and page 34 without changing much?
A few of these projects would fall within the loose borders of the mumblecore movement, stories that focus on the sputtering interactions of a few well-educated characters. This is no ding on the genre; I like my Humpday just fine.
But I wonder if filmmakers are looking to mumblecore movies as an excuse for underwriting and avoiding character conflict.
A lot of story can happen even when you’re constrained to a few locations. Hamlet takes place in a few rooms. So does The Usual Suspects. Both Go and The Nines pack a lot into each of their three-part sections. And while Sex, Lies and Videotape might seem low-plot, the story keeps forcing characters to make choices and face the consequences.
In meeting with the screenwriters at Sundance, I challenged them to look for scenes in which characters were talking about things and show them doing those things. Often, the omitted scenes weren’t more expensive than what they would replace — but they were more difficult to write. The beginning of an affair is trickier than showing it mid-course. A trapped child is uncomfortable to write, but compelling to watch.
The writing is always going to be the least expensive but most challenging part of the process. Making a low-budget movie is a study in compromises. Story shouldn’t be one of them.
"The Invention of Hugo Cabret" is shaping up to be not your average 3D family movie. But, then, it was never your average book. Nominally a young-adult novel, Brian Selznick's 2007 work is one of those magical experiences that sucks in anyone who picks it up -- kids, teens, self-serious grown-ups, whatever -- and spits them out a few hours later dazzled and dreamy. The book is an artifact in itself: 500+ pages long, over half of which are spooky pencil illustrations, "Cabret" feels like it fell out of a wormhole from the steampunk era -- it has heft. And the story it tells, of a resourceful orphan boy, who lives between the cracks of a Paris train station, and the sad old inventor he meets -- an inventor who turns out to be Georges Méliès, the pioneer of movie special effects in the earliest days of cinema -- is a tale to warm a film-lover's heart.
So who better to bring the novel to the screen than Martin Scorsese, the closest this country has to a Cineaste Laureate? The movie version of "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" -- now apparently just "Hugo Cabret" and being shot with the latest iteration of 3D camera technology -- is about to start filming in London, and the cast is solid, weird, and deep. Asa Butterfield (he was the over-curious German kid in "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas") will be playing Hugo, with Sir Ben Kingsley as the mysterious Méliès and Chloe Moretz -- Hit-Girl in "Kick-Ass" -- as his daughter. Sacha Baron Cohen has been cast as the villainous Station Inspector, and in smaller roles are Jude Law, Christopher Lee, Ray Winstone, Richard Griffiths, and the marvelous British stage actress Frances de la Tour, last seen as the wifty aunt of "Alice in Wonderland."
The bad news? We won't see what they've all come up with for another year and a half -- the release date for "Hugo Cabret" has been set for December 2011. Until then, you'll have to content yourself with Moretz's on-set Twitter feed, which is very much what you'd expect from a 13-year-old girl. (I've got one of those at home and have enough OMGs and multiple exclamation points already, thank you.) Some of us can wait. When Scorsese tackles 3D, even in a nominal kiddie flick, the technology may have finally come of age. Just be thankful he got "Shutter Island" out of his system first.
It's the rare person who's seen every Woody Allen movie. Woody Allen may not even be that person. How else explain "Alice" or "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion"? Anyway, I'd never seen "Celebrity" until this weekend. That's the one in which Kenneth Branagh plays a free-lance writer who manages to get romantically entangled, to one degree or another, with Melanie Griffith, Judy Davis, Winona Ryder, Charlize Theron, and Famke Janssen. Can you tell he's the Woody stand-in?
Update: 
The entertainment world is still buzzing over yesterday's revelation that 
