Spike

Old Boy
Gravity
Hunger Games (2)

I used to live in the same dormitory as Spike Lee. My roommate, in fact, became part of his crew at the very beginning of his career. I've never liked any of his movies, except as he got older. I even like the flaws. Even though Old Boy is a pretty awful movie in every way --- based on a foreign movie apparently, which I haven't seen --- I still enjoyed it and felt it was worth seeing. Apparently distributors don't because it's hardly showing anywhere, but compared to the absolute drek of Hollywood in general, a pretty awful movie by Spike Lee is better than anything put out by the studios, with the exception, of course, of Gravity.

Also The Hunger Games (2) pretty much makes up for the horrible first one, which made you nauseous but not because of the story.

STOP SHAKING THE CAMERA!  It doesn't make anything feel immediate or intense. What makes for intensity is real emotion.

The Oranges

As a failed screenwriter, it irks me to no end go to the theater and some piece of shit movie like The Oranges.  The cast is fine, even though they were all miscast. This time we have to single out Jeanne McCarthy, the casting director, for being an idiot.

Many of the people involved in this wreck worked together on previous projects like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But the screenwriters were two nobodies. In normal circumstances, a script with so many holes in it wouldn't make it through a cheap screenwriting workshop.

It's narrated, for one thing. Voice overs are always a sign of bad writing unless there is something particularly interesting about the voice. Good examples are Sunset Boulevard and American Beauty, where the narrator, a character in the movie, also happens to be dead. A medium good example out now is Looper. Other examples where the character's voice is unique are Blade Runner and Days of Heaven.

In this case, the voice over is Alia Shakwat and there's no real reason for it. She doesn't figure in the plot, describes herself as a fifth wheel which begs the question... why is she there?

I can't go on. It was just stupid and boring and the screenwriters didn't deserve to have it made.

Retard

Going The Distance, by Geoff LaTulippe.

Another pussified movie, where the men are all basically girls and the girls are young women, but not women. What I can't understand about modern, presumably young writers (this is Miss Tulip's only credit), is their fear of germs. There is much too much made over the fact that the dork to the left and Drew Barrymore, (who needs to start being more selective, or switch to theatre), begin to have sex on the dining room table of her sister's home. The sister, Christina Applegate, behaves in the script as if some sort of nuclear device scattered radiation on the table. She gets into full combat cleaning gear and starts scrubbing the table, and with her heavy latex gloved hands, removes a possible pubic hair and almost pukes. 

These sorts of gimmicks are supposed to be funny, but they're only funny to people who laugh at anything that's put in front of them. This got a 6.5 on IMDB which is pretty good for how actually bad it is.

Well I haven't written a movie review in a long time, so what shall I tear apart for my first day back in the Blogosphere (a.k.a. useless writing storage place).

I think what I'm going to tear apart is all the people who hate the director Roman Polanski.

Almost no one understands that the entire Polanski story (the murder of his wife by the people in the picture, the sex with the young teen girl, his flee from the country, then his recent arrest in Switzerland and subsequent release) was about fame and the truly sick obsession America and her people have with it. Maybe it's because so many years ago Emerson wrote that biography was going to be the only American form of literature, and somehow that has turned into "Fame is the only form of American literature."

Polanski actually made the story better and more famous by doing what he did. He actually extended the story, so that it still has relevance thirty or forty years later.

Oh. Yes. Everyone calls him a coward because he didn't want to face his sentencing. What they don't know is that he had already been sentenced by the corrupt judge who was in charge of his case and had already served out his sentence in jail. The judge and his bailiff used a subtle illegal tactic to put Polanski in jail "for observation," for up to forty days. Polanski's lawyer, the prosecutor and the judge, and the family of the victim had all agreed that this would be enough and, especially important to the victim, it would end all the coverage. Well the judge decided, after the fact, that he wasn't satisfied and wanted to punish him some more, so he pulled the prosecutor and Polanski's lawyer into his chambers and told them what he was going to say and what they were to say in response. The judge planned to jail him, and then start deportation proceedings, which seems oxymoronic.

The judge held press conferences with the Hollywood press and loved seeing his picture in the papers. He was an ass-sucking viper, just as bad as the papparazzi, and he didn't want to let the Polanski fade, because the case was his ticket to the front pages. A more recent example of a judge that loved the media attention was Ito, in the OJ case. That case would never have taken a year if it had not been televised.

The victim, who is now a middle aged woman, said in the documentary that the judge ruined her life. Polanski said at the start of the documentary, that he fled the country because of the corruption of the judge, and for no other reason. And I believe him. The fact that he voluntarily went to jail for "psychiatric observation" shows that he didn't want to leave the country, or stop making movies. For fuck's sake, his wife is buried in L.A.

Everything points to the corruption of the judge. But here in America we don't believe that judges are corrupt, or have the freedom to do almost anything they want, or that corruption exists outside Washington D.C. Law & Order has persuaded us that judges are sensible, reasonable, arbitrators of good law. Even when they're making terrible decisions or decisions that are based on personal feelings, they hide those decisions behind the obfuscation of law.

But they aren't saints, and we need to find a way to remove them from their positions of power. We cannot have simpletons and vanity cases in the position of sentencing people to death, or, in the case of Roman Polanski, jailing them and then start deportation proceedings at the same time.

So Polanski jumped bail. Hopefully whoever put it up got their money back somehow. And the victim, whoever she was, has moved on, from an encounter that her mother forced her to do and changed the course of her life, because Polanski thought she was "just" a young pretty girl and could give her the same drugs that everyone else was using.

The only thing I question are two things: In Bugliosi's book about the Manson killings which is called Helter Skelter, I think, he said that Polanski went into the crime scene and retrieved some "sex movies" he had made with Sharon Tate. Why was he allowed to do that? And after having your wife and baby killed by a demented bitch with a knife, why would you give drugs to a young girl, whether she looked 18 or 25?

But this could be the same question asked of those parents who sent their kids to "play" and "sleep over" with Michael Jackson.

Hollywood SUCKS!

The Edge of Darkness

Edge of Darkness, by William Monohan and Andrew Bovell

To be paid six figures for screenplays that use lines from your other screenplays kind of makes me sick. Enough with "You gotta decide which side you're on. Hanging on the cross or banging in the nails." Mr. Monohan has used it twice by my count and it's a little irritating. For one thing, what if you don't believe in Christ?

Another writer who did this was Lawrence Kasdan with Raiders of the Lost Ark and some other flick I've forgotten where he had the woman kissing him in one spot then another until he finally reached the lips.

It wouldn't surprise me if Mel Gibson asked that the line be added even though it was in another screenplay because from his body of work, it's clear that he thinks of himself as Christ, or wishes he could have been. In this movie everyone's a martyr and the body count is about twenty or so -- I wasn't going to count but there were so many it started to feel absurd. A cop out of control, totally abusing his authority in trying to find out who killed his daughter. Eh. Whatever. The movie felt strangely dull and emotionless, although tense at times. Body of Lies, the other movie to use the cross/nails choice metaphor was better but there you had an actor/artist who does not have an agenda. Gibson's agenda is to portray himself as victim/martyr and it dulls the ability to feel for the character.

His homophobia makes it a strange choice to fist a puppet in his latest movie, but perhaps he just thought of it as fisting a beaver. I can't believe they allowed that movie to be called The Beaver. And I can't believe there aren't more jokes going around. Go figure.

Oh by the way

In case you thought the death of Agatha Laurents, I mean Arthur Laurents, was a sad occasion, let me just tell you the shrimp was a bitch. I put up all the front money for what he called "his greatest and most public flop" and obviously, I lost all the money I had put up for it. When I was invited to a private performance by Richard Maltby, Charles Strouse and Arthur Laurents in Charles's apartment, the three of them started screaming as soon as Charlie Strouse was out of the room. The apartment was on Central Park South (Charles Strausse's apartment) and as soon as the "performance" broke up, Arthur Laurents walked up to me and asked me what I thought. And he knew I was the primary investor so maybe this was my fault. But all I said was that the show needed a second act. He turned around and walked away from me like the sad little midget he was. I hated him. The other guys: Richard Maltby and Charles Strouse were cool in a certain way, but as soon as Arthur Laurents looked up at me and said, "What do you think,"I knew he was fishing for praise. He had also previously trashed a play I had semi-financed called "Mountain," and he said "Len Cariou is in it, so it can't be good."

The big problem with Nick & Nora is that there was never a writer. Arthur Laurents said that he always hated the Nick & Nora movies, so why did he agree to write one? He never wrote a second act, but tried to imitate Hal Prince in creating a sung-through musical, which is basically a form of musical theatre opera.

He died recently, as we all will do, and he said that Nick & Nora was his greatest and most public flop. I'm glad I got to pay for it.

Water For Elephants

Water For Elephants by Richard LaGravanse.

I love Mr. R. G. He was born 15 days before me. We're both Scorpios of 1959, and every movie and adaptation of his that I've seen I've loved. So maybe I was being a total queer for wanting to love this movie, but it's only because I've wanted to be fucked by R.LG for just about ever.

This movie got really bad reviews which I didn't know because I had no intention of spoiling my experience with reviews or movie vs. book comparisons. The first time I saw it, I thought it was spellbinding and sort of gorgeous. The second time I saw it, I had a lump in my throat that I thought was going to come out in the form of tears, but I was with someone, so I swallowed it down. I finally read the reviews after the third time I saw this and I have still not read the book, but I thought for a movie to convey what it was able to convey (movies can never completely capture a book, so to compare them is not really fair, IMHO), it deserved way better reviews than it got. You get the sense of what it must have been like for "entertainment" to come to town, (the circus); you understand how frustrating it must have been to be a struggling Ringling Bros. competitor (Cirque du soleil and the Big Apple Circus are the only remaining ones.) And what you really get a great sense of is the absolute desperation and poverty that these people (1931-1936) lived in. There was no one to take care of them. If they failed at their job they were thrown off the train. The beautiful GORGEOUS Reese Witherspoon is absolutely willing to give up her fantasy relationship with the Vampire guy. And he is too. (Robert Pattinson). The romance doesn't actually resolve itself until the last frames of the movie, which is a brilliant move, in my opinion, kind of like finding out what Rosebud means at the end of Citizen Kane. Oh and the elephant is one of the most extraordinary characters ever. I loved this movie from start to finish, and I love Richard LaGravanese. Living Out Loud. The Fisher King. and other great movies. He is a great writer.