Some thoughts, kind of, on 2012
2012 reminds me a lot of the night back in December of 1972 when my father packed us all into the car and took us to a late-night show of The Poseidon Adventure. I had just turned 11 and had never seen a "grown-up" movie before. The movie I can remember seeing in theaters before The Poseidon Adventure was The Aristocats.
Venture Bros: Handsome Ransom
What does Hank want? Hank wants a father. Rusty is as close to a biological father as he’ll ever get, but Rusty has no interest in acting the role of father to Hank (Dean, it turns out, is a different story). Hank loves and idolizes Brock, who is now gone, replaced by the obnoxious, overbearing Sgt Hatred. Hank states outright that Hatred is not his father, and he refers to Rusty as a "honky" (which, to be fair, he is).
My Christmas Carol story
It is 1980. I’m in college. I’m taking a drama class. The class is taught by a guy in the drama department. When he’s not teaching drama, he designs sets for the productions of whatever play the school is doing. Which means, in addition to attending classes, the class is required to attend all productions, so that they may then praise the instructor’s work the following Monday.
I suffer through well-mounted, boring-as-all-get-out productions of The Shadow Box, The Country Wife and What the Butler Saw. The last production of the semester is an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
Venture Bros: Blood of the Father, Heart of Steel
As the title suggests, "Blood of the Father, Heart of Steel" is about, well, searching for fathers and steeling your heart. What does it mean to be a man? Are you a man when you kill your father, or when you find him? Does a father hold you back or complete you? Does a father make his son a man by nurturing him or making him fight on his own? And, in a moment of truth, can a man act? Is that what it means to be a man? Can you steel your heart enough to act? And, where do our notions of manhood, or action, come from?
Sam and scary movies
I blame Disney for marketing A Christmas Carol during the Halloween season. Sam (8) has gotten interested in scary movies, but he’s gotten them all mixed up in his head, which is easy enough, I guess, since he hasn’t seen any of them.
It all began with a commercial for Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights, which featured a 20-something guy walking into a deserted, decrepit theater lobby. He’s menaced by the doll from Saw, then Chucky from Child’s Play, then finally a guy in a pig mask, also from Saw. The pig-mask guy has a blade that shoots out from his sleeve and the commercial ends with the pig-mask guy (presumably) slashing the throat of the 20-something guy.
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!!"