Nota bene
I now tweet every now and then. I can’t guarantee I’ll tweet anything interesting, but I do tweet.
Venture Bros Season 4 premiere
The premiere of Season 4 of The Venture Bros snuck up on me — I’ve been immersed in a screenplay polish deadline and have not been paying attention to whatever mountain of promotion I’m sure was out there.
Mr. Urbaniak was kind enough to direct my attention to the online presentation. When I watched it, I seriously thought there was something wrong with the website. This episode is far too weird to absorb quickly, this may take a day or two for me to process. Mr Urbaniak explains: "Yeah, the Brock story runs forward from after the Season 3 finale to the present and the Venture family story runs backwards from the present to after Season 3 finale. Crazy kids."
My own perspective on Where the Wild Things Are
I was up for the gig writing the screenplay for Where the Wild Things Are a million years ago, when the project was at Universal. I had mixed feelings about taking on the project, because the book is so slim, and so primal, so, well, "wild," that I knew no studio would spend $100 million doing it properly. Where the Wild Things Are should be weird, intense, edgy and deeply personal, the exact opposite of what i knew a studio wanted out of a four-quadrant hit.
Sam on Where the Wild Things Are
Sam (8), immediately after seeing Where the Wild Things Are:
"Do you think this is the greatest movie ever made, or is that Jurassic Park?"
UPDATE: My wife Sara tells me that Sam is not, in fact, a fan of the book Where the Wild Things Are. (This doesn’t surprise me, I wasn’t either when I was his age.) His actual quote: "I mean, the book is one thing, but this!" The fact that the movie now threatens to knock no less than Jurassic Park off his best-of list makes the movie’s achievement that much more impressive.
UPDATE: Sam and his friend Rahi (7) have proclaimed Where the Wild Things Are "the best movie ever made in the history of everything."
Time Out London loves me! Oh, wait.
Bala and Z? Or — Marx and Engels??
A well-meaning friend of mine saw today that Antz, a movie I co-wrote a long, long time ago, was recently named the 27th-best animated movie of all time by Time Out London! Yippee! That means I beat The Secret of NIMH! Take that, Porco Rosso! Better luck next time, Persepolis!
Let’s see what this prestigious arbiter of cultural taste has to say about this 27th-best animated movie of all time, a movie into which I, yay verily, poured into which my heart and soul! Hmm…
"…a drab and hamfisted Marxist allegory rammed down your throat…‘Antz’ may boast a great array of vocal talent, but it spends too much time pitching gags over the kiddies’ heads and flogging its adult credentials to ever get down to basics and actually entertain. Cartoons, of course, aren’t just for children, but ‘Antz’, in falling back on kid-friendlyby-the-numbers cartoon plotting, plunges between the stools of satire and slapstick." ALD
Ah. So, it’s not very good at all then. "Dreary Whining" is ALD’s final decree. Geez, I never felt sorry for The Secret of NIMH before, but to think that it’s somehow worse than "dreary whining," that must be quite a sad movie indeed.
"ALD"’s point, of course, is that Antz sucks in comparison to A Bug’s Life, which, well, if that’s his or her opinion, I’ve read harsher. If one hates Antz, why put it on the list at all? Or, if you feel a special need to vent spleen upon a movie that blows it, run a special side-column about animated movies you hate.
But the reason I bring your attention to this folly is the idea that Jeffrey Katzenberg, the producer of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, a man who was once described as "Satan" by a friend of mine because of his extreme capitalistic views, would make the first CGI-animated movie from Dreamworks a "hamfisted Marxist allegory." Mr. Katzenberg, let me assure the reader, can be described in many terms, but "Marxist" is not one of them. Not once in any of our story meetings was Mr. Katzenberg ever moved to utter the following: "No, no, no, no, no! Don’t you get it?! It’s a Marxist Allegory, and we’ve got to ram it down the audience’s throat!! After all, we’re a major Hollywood studio!!"
Nota bene
If you have not done so already, for heaven’s sake go see the new Coen Bros movie as soon as time allows. My time is short at the moment for discussion, and I don’t want to spoil any of this altogether astonishing movie, which I believe is the Coens best, which is saying a lot. In a time when American film seems to be getting worse and worse, the Coens keep getting better and better. This is their most fully realized, most deeply felt, most openly profound, most deeply mysterious movie.
Analysis of this complex screenplay will have to wait for the DVD release, but I welcome readers to discuss the movie under the fold. There will be, no doubt, spoilers within, so those who haven’t seen it should probably not venture beyond the link.
Kubrick: Barry Lyndon part 2
So, as Act II begins, Barry has gone from being the not-particularly-distinguished son of a dead almost-lawyer to being the daring challenger to an English officer and gentleman to being a well-to-do fugitive to being an impoverished fugitive. With nowhere to turn and unable to get home, what can a penniless Irish lad do?
Kubrick: Barry Lyndon part 1
As Barry Lyndon begins, the protagonist’s father is shot dead in a duel. We haven’t met the protagonist, we know nothing about him, we don’t know anything. The duel takes place in a long shot, so we don’t even get a good look at the guy who dies. The death of Redmond Barry’s father treated as a kind of abstract narrative joke: Kubrick introduces a character, then seconds later dispatches him to his fate. And yet, I’m convinced that this brief scene contains the kernel of Barry’s motivations and the themes of the entire movie. Barry Lyndon is a drama of class mobility and how the borders of class warfare are defended with lethal force. Barry’s father was to have been a lawyer, which would have elevated Barry into a specific class; his death robs Barry of his status and sets him on a path toward bettering his class by any means necessary. He feels fate has robbed him of his rightful place in society, and he sets forth to regain his social equilibrium. There are many ways to advance,he finds, but fate has a way of striking back.
Kubrick: A Clockwork Orange part 3
Alex has been released from prison. He’s been cured of his violent impulses (and his sexual ones, which society, for some reason, equates) . How do we feel about him now? The Ludovico Technique is harsh, but what will be the effect? Act I was about Alex striking out at society, Act II was about society striking back, now what will happen, now that Alex is all better?
Query
Is it just me, or did last night’s two-hour Season 6 premiere of House totally suck in every possible way?