Movie Night with Urbaniak: She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
So urbaniak and I have been watching some of the classic John Ford-John Wayne movies. We started with The Searchers, because everyone does, and then moved to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, then Fort Apache. The result: Urbaniak feels that this Wayne guy could really be going places. "He’s my new favorite actor," quoth the thespian, who apparently had never really sat down and watched a John Wayne movie before. Not even True Grit.
Some thoughts on Annie Hall and romantic comedies in general
mimitabu writes:
"Do [romantic comedies] usually have a protagonist? what does s/he usually want? "Get back into a family"? "Find happiness"? "Get over my ex"? "Become a better person so i can be a better father/mother"? Then i thought about the best romantic comedy, Annie Hall. i thiiiink you once wrote here that it has brilliant script, but i don’t believe you’ve ever posted an in-depth analysis of it. Does it have a protagonist? Is it Alvy? What does he want? "To get the eggs"? Is he just living out some sort of narcissistic pathology? Are there rules that Annie Hall follows that other successful romantic comedies also follow? If so, do they do away with the idea of a protagonist altogether?
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Clint Eastwood: the good, the bad and the ones I haven’t seen
I’ve been thinking a lot about Unforgiven lately, which leads me to think a lot of Clint Eastwood, which leads me to think of, strange as it sounds, Woody Allen. It’s hard to think of Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen as even existing on the same planet, much less as comparable artists, but they are two of my favorite living American directors, they are roughly contemporaries (Eastwood is five years older), they both get to make just about any kind of movies they want to make, and, since the mid-1960s, each has managed to get at least a movie a year into the theaters, on their own terms and following their own particular muses. Nobody gets to make movies in this manner any more.
(Thinking about Clint Eastwood also, inevitably, leads me to think about John Wayne, whose work urbaniak and I have been soaking up lately. I grew up watching Clint Eastwood movies, assuming they were some sort of "answer" to John Wayne movies. Wayne, popular imagination had it, was a reactionary crank who stood for everything Just and American, while Eastwood was a cold-hearted psychopath intent on critiquing everything that Wayne stood for. I thought all that without ever watching a John Wayne movie, and so now I’m lost, because I’m learning that John Wayne, too, was also intent on critiquing everything that John Wayne stood for. And then, of course, Eastwood has spent a good deal of his career critiquing everything that he has stood for. It’s all so confusing.)
Anyway, nobody asked, but because I’m a list-making sort of person, here is my listing of Clint Eastwood movies in order of preference:
They grow up so fast
Sam (7) and I were watching the groundbreaking series Planet Earth the other day, the "Shallow Seas" episode. To give a little shape to its eye-popping array of fabulous images of animals doing things, "Shallow Seas" incorporates a little tiny "plot:" a mother humpback whale gives birth to a calf at the Equator, then hangs out with it for five months while it gets big, then swims with it to the North Pole, where the seas are rich with whatever humpback whales eat. In this arduous five-month period, the mother humpback eats nothing.
Anyway, Sam and I are watching "Shallow Seas," and they tell us about the mother humpback and her devotion to her calf, and then they tell us about coral reefs and sea-snakes and brittle stars and a whole bunch of other critters, and then they come back to the mother humpback and her calf and "check in" with them, as they’re heading north on their long trek.
And Sam says: "Wait. Did they follow this humpback and her calf all the way from the Equator to the North Pole? Why would they do that? Wouldn’t it make more sense to shoot one humpback and calf at the Equator, then go to the North Pole and find another humpback and calf that just kind of looks like the first one? I mean, it’s not like anybody could tell the difference."
Already a producer.
Nota bene
Michael Kupperman, one of America’s greatest cartoonists, has a blog. You should go read it.
Favorite Screenplays: Death Proof part 3
Part 2 of Death Proof begins with the "Psycho scene," where an "authority figure" declaims, for the audience’s benefit, the subtext of Part 1 — Ranger EarlMcGraw tells us what we’ve already grasped, that Stuntman Mike is a dangerous psychopath who crashes his "death proof" car into women’s cars for his sexual gratification. The scene is a gentle dig at Psycho‘s famously inept coda, but Tarantino adds a couple of icky layers to it: first, he includes Dr. Block, a character from Death Proof‘s co-feature Planet Terror, and gives her a weird, violent reaction to kindly, wizened Ranger McGraw, a reaction that can only be appreciated by watching the other movie (Dr. Block having her own problems with men). Then, after McGraw has finished his spiel on Stuntman Mike and his sick pathology, he announces that he’d rather follow the Nascar circuit than investigate Mike’s crimes, placing Mike’s MO in the broader context of a national malaise: there are millions of people who find some level of gratification watching stock cars smash into each other.
Favorite Screenplays: Death Proof part 2
It sounds like a strange comparison, but Tarantino, in one way, reminds me of Spielberg, in that his movies are always thematically quite dense. Death Proof, like, say, Jurassic Park, features a strong theme that resonates down to the smallest of details, from broad story outlines to the tiniest of gestures.
Happy Valentine’s Day from What Does the Protagonist Want?
Click for larger view.
Sam’s valentine for his class this year. In case it’s not clear, that’s Indiana Jones, clutching a stolen heart, being chased by a giant rolling m&m. (Small bags of m&m’s were taped to the back of each valentine.
As an added attraction, beneath the fold I’ve compiled a collection of my favorite valentine designs from around the internet. If you "get" every single one of these jokes, congratulations! You’re a geek.
Feel free to post your own finds.
Favorite Screenplays: Death Proof part 1
Quentin Tarantino’s movies are explosions of meaning. They spew significance of many different kinds in every direction on a shot-by-shot basis. Every element of every shot is fraught with references, usually to other movies. As such, they invite multiple readings from a number of different points of view and philosophical schools. For instance, I just read a book-length monograph on Pulp Fiction that examined every aspect of the movie but one — what the characters in the movie do and say.
I am not smart enough or cool enough to catch every one of the thousands of references that give Tarantino’s movies their postmodern punch — I’ve never seen a Shaw Bros kung-fu movie, for instance. So I will limit myself in this analysis to what I do understand: characters and their motivations. And I will leave the examination of angles, design choices, costumes, hairstyles, cultural freight and songs to others.
Screenwriting 101: The Pitch
What would you say are the top three pitfalls of pitching? Like, what are some rookie mistakes; what should come out of a successful pitch meeting; what are some things that you should never, never do? —pirateman
So in that situation [where some stranger walks in and ruins your pitch] do you just run with it and incorporate it or argue for your original point? —johnnycrulez
If you’ve been reading this journal for very long, you know that I’m the last guy you should ask for advice about pitching.
I hate pitching with a passionate, burning intensity. Partly because it’s a degrading, humiliating experience antithetical to good writing, and partly because I suck at it.