You and Me: Let's make a resolution!

The end of the year brings year-end lists. And as you might guess, the ones I'm interested in are critic's lists of the best movies of 2008. But there's a problem out there in critic land. As newspapers fold and merge and the printed word goes the way of the abacus, good thoughtful movie critics are losing their jobs. Many of them are finding nice homes online, but the problem still remains, there are fewer and fewer men and women doing the good work of finding cinematic treasures that we'd otherwise never hear about.

Face it. The marketing campaign for most movies outweighs the entire budget for other (often better) films. Without critics, we might see Beverly Hills Chihuahua and The Dark Knight and think we've covered the spectrum of what's out there - and we would be very very wrong. So we support these pontificating film connoisseurs, learn from them and see for ourselves what we think. Many of these critics are damn fine writers and all of them have a passion for film that is unmistakable in their prose, even when that prose is lacerating a recent offering.

The food critic Anton Ego says in Ratatouille (a film you didn't need a film critic to make you aware of, but may have needed to tell you it was worth your time):

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations, the new needs friends...

I am not a critic. I want to be on the other side. Perhaps one day, one of the critics whose opinions I value might see one of my films and rip it a new one. And I'll consider it an honor. Looking to these men and women for advice as they sift through this overwhelming landscape of media, I feel damn lucky that there are still people who care about good, solid, challenging, flickering beauty and are willing to write about it.

So, if you'd like, take a gander at what the critics say:

Andrew O'Hehir
Roger Ebert
Glenn Kenny
A.O. Scott
Matt Singer
And here's an interesting list of top 10 cities in which to make movies. (Current hometown Portland is number 8. Former hometown Los Angeles didn't make the list.)

Okay, now that you've read about some movies that might interest you, here's the resolution: See them.

Poke your head out of your whack-a-mole hole and you'll hear it: Things are bad. Economy swirling the drain. Stock market taking a big poo. Joblessness. Et cetera and so forth.

So why am I lobbying for you to periodically shell out an extra 8 to 14 bucks (double that if you take a friend) from your hard earned, and possibly shrinking, supply of cash? Now, of all times?

Call it a personal favor. But one that will ultimately benefit you. And your brain and heart. In bad times movies are a catharsis, in good times they are a complement to joy. They make us think and feel. They are art. And what, I ask, is the point of us, of humans walking around eating and talking, if not to make something grander than ourselves, to communicate and be communicated to in the thoughtful language of beauty and sorrow and joy?

And for god sakes, if people stop seeing movies, what the hell am I gonna do with my life? Seriously.

Even the most delicious tomato was grown in poo

I asked Brandon how the editing is coming along. He said, "Good." So there you have it, you're all up to date.

In the continuing meanwhile, here are a few more goings on: the screenplay (that will not feature bad guys) is coming along. Characters have been sketched, relationships mapped out, scenarios developed, and two whole pages written. Whoop-dee-doo.

This screenplay, however, will not be the next short the Company is to film. Next on the docket: an Ariana-helmed documentary. And not just any documentary, a documentary about the pursuit of a possibly mythical, but irrefutably fascinating beast. I'll add only that this particular beast is partial to our forested backdrops here in the Northwest, and say no more so as to not spoil the fun.

Jeffrey is also writing a narrative. It involves a coffee shop.

As you can see, the Company is busy making this whole filmmaking fantasy a plausible reality. You may wonder, where did this whole business begin? Well, since you're wondering...

It started with a Christmas present for our families. We wrote, acted in, and edited together a fifteen minute Noir. For reasons of copyright (we used music that didn't belong to us) and artistic integrity (we acted), this particular production will never be posted for any sort of public viewing. If you happen to know a member of one of our four families, ask them to arrange a screening for you. Barring that, just know that our little project turned out about 87 degrees more awesome than we'd expected, and we saw that our love of watching movies could become a love of making them.

Of course there were all sorts of technical things to consider. Editing? How the hell do you do that? So I decided to try something out. Film a scene from a movie, edit it on Apple's magnanimously free iMovie, and convert it to a Quicktime movie file. What resulted is not good, but functional. It helped convince us that it was possible to film things. Recently, Jeffrey (the one member of the Company who turned out to posess acting skills) posted his fantastic and infamous crying scene from our ill-fated attempt at filming the Feature. So I thought I'd post this seminal snippet. Also my grandfather lives in Vietnam and has asked for a recent picture. Hi Ted!

Please note: I do not generally do not wear tights on my head; at the time (mid 2007), the Flight of the Conchords reference in the credits was current; and at all times, in all worlds, in all cultures, and to all humans Deep Forest's Sweet Lullaby is a fantastic and awesome and super great song.

No Such Animal

I’m writing my second screenplay for our Shorts Series. As I mentioned to the Company this weekend, as atonement for the sins of my last script (the internal, pensive, self-reflective slowness of it), I want to write something full of vim and vigor, movement and action and intrigue and all that. A mystery! A thriller! The problem? I don’t believe in bad people. Huh? Yeah, I don’t. People do bad things, but I have a hard time believing there are such things as “bad guys”.

And unfortunately, bad guys are one of the easiest ways to engineer conflict. To make a story that follows a character from desire to the thwarting of the desire to the overcoming of the thwarting to the ultimate attainment of the desire, the easiest method is to stick a bad guy in there. Calvera, Lars Thorwald, The Wicked Queen. From wonderful movies, all of them, and I’m not saying that the respective writers took the “easy” way to writing their stories. I’m just saying that it’s taking me a long goddamned time to come up with mine.

So if I don’t believe in bad guys, I’m tasked with the problem of figuring out why people do bad things. When I was sketching out the antagonist, I came up with four scenarios. I thought they were interesting enough to share. Thoughts?:

1. Anonymity fosters antisocial behavior. See: comments on any Internet site. Good luck reading more than five without someone calling someone else a cock sucking idiot. Something I have to hope they’d not do if they were having the same debate over Heath Ledger’s Joker performance face-to-face. See also: flipping the bird while driving.

2. Authority has the ability to supplant individual responsibility. See the electric shock experiment. See also: war.

3. Public opinion supersedes personal morality. See: American Slavery. See also: Nazi Germany.

4. Fear and self preservation.

Not an exhaustive list, but it’s a start. And that’s what we have to do: Start.

The place where henceforth I'll do it to it.

I had a writing studio for 10 months. And now it’s gone.

It was strange, the space came to me at a time when I felt I needed it. I was having trouble writing while surrounded by all the distractions of home: the Internet, a fridge full of food, boyfriend, soft comfy bed, etc. Having the space allowed me to write two screenplays and a smattering of other stuff, so it worked.

Lately I’d been going less and less, feeling guilty for not using it… feeling extra guilty for not using it and paying for it.

So it’s gone. I still have to write. But now I don’t have to trek across the river to do it. I’ll do it right here. There will be more distractions, no doubt. But that’s just the way it is. The hamster in my head gets angry when I don't write. Makes me feel fat and useless and slobbering, dirty almost, when I don’t write. When I do, it seems like it’s okay that I take up space, ingesting and excreting, daily polluting this world with my big American-sized carbon footprint.

So there it is, my new space, wedged in the corner of the bedroom. Wish us luck.

Nameless Blogger Passing Holy Judgement (with thanks to Mary Shelley)

You might remember what happened the last time the Company tried to catch some Film Festival Fun up here in the great Northwest. Well, this time we bought our tickets early and showed up with oodles of time to spare and see a part of a film festival we sure as heckfire did.

In particular we saw "Shorts II: the Judges Selection," part of the NW Film Center's 35th Northwest Film and Video Festival. It featured nine shorts produced by people living in Portland, Seattle, or Vancouver BC. The judge who did the selecting is a New York director who used Oregon as the setting of her two films. I haven't seen either, but now would like to, if only to look for tendencies or artistic impulses within them that in some way mirror the tendencies or artistic impulses that informed her selection process.

If they were anything, the selections were eclectic. Now I'm not in the business of critiquing fellow filmmakers. I can't say that I was overly delighted with each and every one of the selections. Some I didn't like all that much, though in at least one film, that was the point. I can say that I'm glad we went, if only to see what else is out there, to see what other people are choosing to do with cameras in these northern lands of no sun and so much rain.

The night started out with Smile by Julia Kwan, a film about a Chinese-Canadian family getting ready for their free Sears portrait. It was a subtle character-driven piece about disconnection and other family joys. I thought it worked. Laugh, cry, all that. Of course, I'm a sucker for subtle, character-driven narratives. When you see Fine Arts that fact will no doubt be wholly and perhaps excruciatingly evident.

Smile was one of only two narrative films selected and the only narrative with dialogue. The other nod to story on film came towards the end of the evening, in a piece called The Rifle Workbook by Vincent Caldoni. Set in a nebulous late-nineteenth century Appalachia-esque time and place, it tells the story of towns folk who meet an angel figure in a forest and, after offering up tokens and personal effects, they receive in exchange a lost member of their community. It was a simple story, nicely shot with cool oldey timey film effects. It is also further evidence supporting my position that you can add emotional impact to anything with a soundtrack of either Philip Glass, Godspeed, or, in this case, Explosions in the Sky. No, believe me, it's true. While testing the camera, Brandon filmed me washing the dishes. He edited a two minute bit together with music from The Truman Show and profundity ensued. Try it, you'll see.

Another highlight of the evening was a dance number filmed in Prague called Aboard the Pater Noster by Daniel Conrad. Aboard the Pater Noster translates to "aboard Our Father." In the Q&A following the screenings, Daniel explained that the Pater Noster is the name of the strange (and a little dangerous looking) elevator device that he used in the piece, basically a series of phone booth-sized wooden boxes that are strung along a vertical conveyor mechanism, like beads on a rosary. The short begins with the dancers doing slow, confined movements inside the elevator boxes. This segment goes on long enough to border on tedium, which makes the subsequent explosions of movement and music--on buses, on the streets of Prague, in old museum-like hallways--seem fully alive and unrestrained. Awesome. Beautiful to watch. Made me wish I were more bendy and rhythmically endowed.

The other selections ranged from documentary to performance art to art pieces--all with varying degrees of success. One piece actually elicited a boo from some Podunk audience member. Another made more than one member of the Company physically ill. And of course the warmest applause of the evening was reserved for the tell-it-like-it-is noble homeless guy doc.

In all, I'm glad we went. Sometimes you have to be reminded that it's not just you out there using your strength and will to force something into existence that is bigger and hopefully a little better than its constituent Frankenstein parts. And who knows? Maybe in a year or two from now, some nameless, opinionated blogger will be passing holy judgement on just such a monster offered up by this humble Company. How awesome would that be? Snarky as that future demi-pundit may be, t'would be a blessing that our poor creature was alive enough to be commented upon, before being borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance...