Category Archives: film

Top Ten Animal Films (According to Dee)*

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*No cartoons, animatronics, etc

  1. Orca, the Killer Whale (Michael Anderson, USA, 1977) This is pure camp, but I was born the year it came out. I’ll never forget when he bites off the broken leg – cast and all – of Annie (Bo Derek).
  1. Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner, USA, 1990) It is the cheesiest of films, I concede that, but the wolf, Two Socks, is awesome. It’s one of the saddest moments in film when those bastard soldiers shoot and kill him.
  1. Tarzan the Apeman (W.S. Van Dyke, USA, 1932) Cheetah is a star, but it’s really all the elephants and crocodiles that make this film amazing. (Not so much the fake hippos.)
  1. A Boy and his Dog (L.Q. Jones, USA, 1975) This is camp apocalypse – before apocalypse was hip – with Don Johnson and his bitter mongrel, who thinks profoundly and cruelly on humanity but remains loyal to the end.
  1. The Secret of Roan Inish (John Sayles, USA, 1994) The magic in this film is very real. The seals come out of the dark sea in a wonderful, terrifying way. They know more than you would think.
  1. Gorillas in the Mist (Michael Apted, USA, 1988) The gorillas are incredible, just incredible. I know this film has animatronics, but it was shot on location and there are incredible shots of the gorillas in their habitat.
  1. The Edge (Lee Tamahori, USA, 1997) Bart the bear is a force, not only in the way he flings that poor guy around but also in how he lowers his ears and pushes out his lower lip. He also dies the tragic death.
  1. Babe (James Cromwell, USA, 1995) I admit there are too many visual effects – puppets too – but there really is a border collie and a pig. And it’s a great pig. “That’ll do, pig.”
  1. Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, USA, 2005) The rogue bear is pretty horrifying – devouring Treadwell and his girlfriend – but that is what bears do. There are so many other great bears in this and Timmy, the fox.
  1. Born Free (James Hill, UK, 1966) Elsa! Elsa! Elsa! Kitten or full-grown, Elsa is the second greatest of cats. (Apollo rules.) There’s Pati-Pati too – a rock hyrax! – the other lions and elephants. Nothing compares to this one.

The Edge: Of Good Writing

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Screenwriting is a most inconsistent proposition. While there are many films that have great scenes and characters, the work is often lacking in its overall story. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s films, including The Master, fall into this category as does the work of many modern screenwriters/filmmakers, such as Gaspar Noe, Terence Malick, Pedro Almodavar, Jim Jarmusch, and that other Anderson, Wes.  I posted recently on Andrei Tarkovsky’s film The Sacrifice, and his struggle with story-telling.  This too is an issue for many of the great auteurs: Francois Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni and, even my favorite, Werner Herzog; it’s the image, the motion, the atmosphere first and everything else after that. This is not say that the story arc of Hollywood should be subscribed to in any way. There is nothing so painfully innocuous as to be dragged along through the introduction, conflict, rising action, climax, denouement and all the pain-in-the-ass red herrings in the films of Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg, Jimmy Cameron or Clint Eastwood.But there is a middle ground out there, something between the poetic image and the Hollywood ride. It’s as hit and miss as the rest, although there are diamonds in the rough. One film that comes to mind is Greg Motolla’s Superbad (written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg); as stupid as this movie can be, the story is true, the characters honest. Another surprising film is Lee Tamahori’s The Edge, written by David Mamet. This film is typical Hollywood, “Jaws with claws” as it was dubbed; however it is well-written. The story structure is effective – except for a weird denouement/climax #2 – and the arc is clear. The characters are engaging, even as types, and interact in an interesting way with both each other and their environment. The message is loud – We must face our demons! – but it’s a good film. And the bear is great. Really.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice

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Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (Sweden, 1986) offers a hypnotic sequence of images, the camera tracking sideways across rooms and fields, fog horns and chanting girls in the background. Amazingly, the 143-minute film is comprised of only 115 shots, some of these over eight minutes in length. This, Tarkovsky’s final film made while diagnosed with terminal cancer, is a staggering work that strikes at a primal level. And while the film can get bogged down by an obscured story and series of monologues, the images are profound.The colors transform throughout, sometimes into black and white, often washed out, dreams and reality, from an apocalypse through a glass partition to a sleeping boy, until it all seems to mean the same thing. It’s us and all in our head.

Sexy Robots from Outer Space

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I’ve given up on Battlestar Galactica. I lasted through six episodes and lost interest. Not only did the story get boring – how many hyper-jumps can you make in one episode? – but the characters were just wooden and silly…which of course leads to the disappointment of the highly touted sexy Cylon, Number Six:The red dress is something, but she isn’t. The truth is that she is exhausting in her incessant nymphomaniac demands and in the end makes sex seem dull. There is no subtlety, no mystery. Number Six offers no more than a Westworld Medieval robotor the amusingly named Gigolo Jane from A.I.The problem is that Number Six doesn’t have the substance of a major character; there’s only the one look and the one demand. While she might look great in her red dress, she remains light years behind her predecessors, Maria from MetropolisTerminatrix from Terminator 3or Pris from Blade Runner.Being a sexy robot isn’t easy. You can’t just stroke and pose like Galaxina. You have to come through with something else, an out-of-this-galaxy sort of appeal. A name would be good too.

The Final Image

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I have come to the end of the third draft of my novel, My Bad Side. I’m happy with it, I suppose, but the ending is still not complete. It’s an important aspect, a frozen final moment for the reader. It needs to have substance; it has to be worth getting to. And yet it can’t be packed too tight; that just makes it trite and ridiculous. Anyway, this is essentially what I have right now:

Well, there isn’t a boot, but there is a deserted beach, and it’s cold. The feeling is right in this image; it’s bleak – with tinges of blue, green and red – but it needs more, uh, Totoro wonder…

more Ursula sexuality…

more Mr. Fox furry, uh, fury……

…a sort of half naked cartoony world , I guess, but  cold…sort of like this…

But more…ahh! I’m still working on it! I’ll figure it out yet.

Sell Out?!? Okay.

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Integrity is a catch word in the creative business. Whatever the vision, the aim, no matter what, we know that we must keep our integrity intact. We can’t allow the corporate world to debase and pervert our dreams. We cannot compromise ourselves for money. …unless of course that’s what we want to do.

I had a dream. There was a major science fiction film in the works. It involved eight worlds that were interconnected…that was about all they had. But the budget was big, a mega-monster, and somehow I had an inside track on writing the script. I was suddenly willing to do anything to get it. I offered to just give them my novel My Bad Side immediately, the book I’ve been working on for over four years, the book that defines my vision, and they hadn’t even asked for it. “It’s yours! Take it!” Just like that…just so I could maybe write a draft of this giant sell-out thing.

I woke up doubly disappointed. Mainly it was because I had been so willing to sell out…but more than that, it was the sad fact that there was no such film….which got me to thinking..

“It’s like this. There are eight worlds, and they’re all interconnected…”

Are We Worth It?

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In the film I’m Still Here (see yesterday’s blog), Joaquin Phoenix presents himself as a vile, cruel and vindictive drunk.  It doesn’t come across as a joke, but a dark challenge to humanity, asking the chilling question: How bad can we be?

If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet, a recently opened Off-Broadway play by Nick Payne, examines this question as well. The fatherly academic George underlines his dim view of a species that willfully destroys its own world by directly asking, “Are we worth it?” The audience is left empty and doubtful too after witnessing the characters, including Jake Gyllenhaal’s most profane Terry, drift around in their sad isolation, as the stage floods from our suicidal global warming — depressing stuff indeed.

This isn’t anything new. Our storytellers have gone at our damaged and demented psyche from the beginning – including Aeschylus’ The Oresteia and Shakespeare’s  The Merchant of Venice – right through to this not-so-sunny day. The message is always the same: we’re just not that great.A similar malaise permeates my novel, My Bad Side. No matter how much we have – and that’s the goal, isn’t it? – we’re still stuck with the knowledge that we’re just not worth that much. As Crystal states: I drink too much. I have a problem with it. But so fucking what? Everyone’s got something. Everyone’s dragged down by something. There isn’t much of anything in this life but pain and tears. The Greeks said it. Shakespeare said it. Salinger said it. Fucking everyone. That’s just what we have in this life, Anne-Lynn, a few moments of happiness and the rest is suffering and death. That’s life.

Uh…yeah, well, maybe we should just forget all of that for now.  Everything’s cool., right? And it’s Friday! Time to party.

Still Reel: Herzog, Phoenix & Synecdoche

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“Filmmakers are liars.”  So said Werner Herzog at the New York premiere of his 3-D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams in 2011. He explained that  film is a constructed thing, made up in its framing, lighting, editing, acting and the arc of the story. No matter how Cinema Verite any film might claim to be, it will always be what it is: fabricated and artificial.

Joaquin Phoenix’s film, I’m Still Here, attempts to address this issue directly. As he explained on The David Letterman Show, the film looked to “explore the relationship between the media and the consumers and the celebrities themselves. We wanted something that would feel really authentic.” Indeed, the film makes a mockery of the Hollywood machine, the audience, even himself.

The thing is that film – as is writing – is just a synecdoche, a small part of something else. In other words, even though a narrative might strive to be more than it really is, with the characters staring back, time codes in the left hand corner, it remains just a story, a splinter, a rejoinder, a sigh, a whimper.

As Dee says in My Bad Side: “I mean, I know there is only death, just that. I know it is just about waking up and getting out of bed until I don’t. And then it isn’t. I know that dreams are chemical. I know I am stuck in this life. And I know that is it. I hate it or say that I hate it to myself, but it isn’t that bad a thing.

Writing Rule #1: Don’t Get Cocky!

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Writing Rule #1: Don't Get Cocky!I had a pretty good writing day yesterday. After a dozen or so attempts, I had finally worked my way through a scene that had been a morass.

I felt suddenly clear, not angry, nothing like that. I was in the moment. I only had to fill it. “You remember when we were on the dock?”

I made significant headway after that, another 15 pages, rocketing through it all. Everything was making sense. I had found my way. I knew the next day would be easy, more of the same, clear sailing until the end.  I was on auto-pilot. And then I ran into this:

I accepted his sudden blindness for nothing but his need of this. I knew there was nothing else to it, holding my hair back and kissing his neck, my practiced breath, my shoulders forward, and had a feeling of being held there and then all of me sloping down through me…

Writing Rule #1: Don't Get Cocky!

There was more of this, a lot more. It was a wall of awful. I stared. That was all I could do. I had gotten cocky. I had screwed up. I had thought I had it, when I had nothing.

I sat and stared. My mind was blank. I was beaten. I started to write and stopped again. I got through maybe a sentence and stopped again, until finally I had insect momentum and went at it again. I clawed through maybe a page, and then did another, went backward, went ahead and then maybe three more.

I used to dream about flying, almost every night. And then I bragged about it. “I fly every night.” It ended there. I’ve flown maybe twice since then, over 15 years ago. What an idiot. I must be patient. I believe that I’ll have it back tomorrow. I’m building back. I just have to think about yesterday and remember that I can fly…if I want it.

Writing Rule #1: Don't Get Cocky!

Making a ‘Bad Side’ Movie

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It looks like we might make a short film out of the opening scene of My Bad Side. Yesterday, I met with Mike, a filmmaker, to discuss this possibility. The opening scene (written in Blog #1 “The Beginning”) runs like this: Dee comes home in a cab, talks with the doorman and then confronts Derek in her apartment, and when she realizes that Derek has shot her exotic cat Apollo, she wrestles the gun from him, shoots him, and flees the building (and city) with her wounded serval.

Serval in the wild

It was a dynamic discussion, focusing on how to shoot each scene: cab, outside building, elevator and inside apartment. Is it a yellow cab? How old is the doorman? Is the TV on in the apartment? Exactly how does she get the gun? We also discussed how to light, costume and cast. One thing we decided immediately is that we will not be using a serval for the shoot (as exotic pets are illegal in the New York) and are considering my dog Biba instead.

Biba cast as a serval