And Then Here We Are

This blog has been around for a year now. Happy anniversary.

When this started I was writing the screenplay for Archie Hotel. I finished it. Brandon and I fought like squirel versus weasel to come up with the final draft. Then the company began filming it. Then we realized a feature was too big and somewhere between July 8th and August 3rd we gave up on it.

Not 10 days after relating our defeat we had the script for a short. We casted it. Filmed it. Took pictures. By mid-October we were done with production.

And now we sit in post-production limbo as we wait for the final edit. A few days past we watched a rough cut. I'll tell you all now: it was good. Prepare yourselves.

Yes. Exactly. Yes.

Sometimes someone says something you have always known but never put into words. Ted Hope said this at Hammer to Nail:

In terms of the filmmakers who create them, some films are challenges; some are proofs. In the Challenges, the filmmaker is hoping to discover things, hoping to learn things in the process. In a Proof Film, the filmmaker is showing the audience what she or he knows. With a Challenge, the audience is aligned with the movie, trying to discern whether the filmmaker will meet the challenge; whereas with a Proof, the audience is dictated to, watching something unfold according to a recognizable formula. A Challenge is involving, whereas a Proof is a passive experience for the audience. Ambition is to go to places you have never gone before with the hope that you will discover something positive in the process—a challenge and not a proof.

Read more.

Here's to challenges.

Dialogue

My posts are long. And far between. So here's a quick thought on dialogue, the 2x4 of the screenwriter's trade.

I wrote a play once. Back in junior college when I wanted to be Eugene O'Neill. I sent it off to Jeffrey and received back one of the only pieces of literary advice for which I have ever had much use. This was a two-man, one-act ditty about a hit man, his mark, and the inevitable change of heart, all set in the junior college romance of a Vegas all-night buffet. Jeffrey said, "Both these guys sound like you." It was true. And that fact has become one of the guiding principles of my screenwriting.

Now this is not to say that you can't have a successful work wherein the characters all sound the same, far from it. But a 60 year old retiree and the 30 something punk who has been sent to off him should not sound like a middle class 19 year-old chick from California.

How, then, do you make ten characters have their own voice, and not sound like you? Personally, I cheat. Syd Field says, "Dialogue is a function of character. If you know your character, your dialogue should flow easily in line with the unfolding of your story." Now that would be wonderful. But knowing the ins and outs of a character and knowing how those ins and outs influence the way they construct sentences is a whole new world of "Knowing".

I say, why go to all that trouble when the world around you is already filled with people who talk in a way that is wholly unique, wholly their own?

So, the main character in Fine Arts? A guy I had a crush on in high school. His coworker in that script? A current coworker of mine.

And in the new script I'm writing, the love interest talks like my ex-boyfriend. The protagonist takes word right out of the mouth of one of my best high school girlfriends. Fun fact: I sometimes futz with the names of the characters to give a little homage to the source material.

Now this is not to say that the characters ARE the people I'm referencing. They most certainly are not. I'm just borrowing the way people I have known talk, as a tool to get out of my own head, out of my own way of saying things and constructing thoughts.

Damn. That wasn't a very short post, was it? I blame god.

Sucking Blood Without Sucking Ass

I saw the best vampire movie ever last night. Although I'm a big fan of the Vampire in all its cinematic manifestations, Vampire Movies have always been categorized in the “Guilty Pleasures” section of my film appreciation catalogue. I’ve seen every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in chronological order, not once, but twice. I enjoy repeated viewings of Underworld. I’m even contemplating seeing Twilight, despite the fact that every shred of reason in my movie-loving brain revolts at the thought.

But last night, Let the Right One In went ahead and let me put an honest to snot Vampire Movie in my “Good Cinema” section. It was beautiful and cold and quiet and satisfying and romantic and wonderful. And it was about vampires.

Aside from the exquisite use of silence and sound, the beautifully composed scenes, spot-on character development, and heart-wrenchingly perfect relationship development--you know, all the stuff that went into making it a good movie--this film did something that the Vampire Genre has been sorely wanting for years now: it treated vampires like vampires.

The vampire myth is old, old, old. And with anything that’s been around so long, that’s been re-imagined in so many novels and films and TV shows, there’s going to be a bit of variation in the lore. Some vampires have to sleep in coffins, some don’t. Some are harmed by crucifixes, some are “quite fond” of looking at them. Sunlight is a generally agreed bad thing for the undead, though the degree of adverse effects seems to vary. But one fact that's consistent, or else you just aren’t dealing with vampires at all: Vampires drink blood. This should, then, result in human death.

But just look at all the pussyfied ways the purveyors of vampires on screen go about getting around this messy fact so as to make the Vampires more "sympathetic" or some crap. In Buffy, Angel, and later Spike--the Vampires with Hearts of Gold--drink blood from the butcher shop. The "good" vampires in Twilight are known as “vegetarian” vampires, feeding off animals, not humans. In Underworld they drink synthetic blood.

Come on.

First off, vampires are not people, they are a myth. One we created for myriad reasons--to fablize death, to exemplify man's exploitation of man, to scare ourselves, to entertain. They are human-like, but not human. They occupy a position both above and below man. Vampires are immortal, they get to see in the dark and have superhuman strength and can climb buildings and can sometimes change into bats, but they are also monsters, doomed to feed off humanity. Finding convenient, "inoffensive" ways of dealing with this "problem" does a disservice to the genre specifically, and to storytelling in general. It's like eating just the middle part of the brie. Sure it's yummy and creamy and easy to take, but without that rind, you don't get all the complexity of flavor, the bitterness with the smoothness, and you're just cheating yourself.

Let the Right One In took the Vampire Genre and used it to a most spectacular advantage. In the cold nether regions of Sweden, everything and everyone is insulated, metaphorically as well as physically. The camera even keeps its distance, never giving us a clear image of who we're looking at until a young boy, one who is rarely interacted with except as the punchline to a bully's torment, meets a young vampire. Then the camera is all up in there, intrusively close to the young couple's faces. So close that we see every nonexistent pore of the young boy's paleness and youth, and see the flecks of color in the young girl's very dark and very old eyes.

The relationship they form becomes furiously close, but because she is a vampire, there is necessarily some unpleasantness. In one scene, a working class man embraces his friend at the end of a pleasant evening as both men prepare to head their respective ways home. They tell one another how lovely it is to be friends, and how they look forward to seeing one another again. They part. The working class man goes one way, his friend another. The friend turns and walks beneath a bridge and the vampire girl eats him. Later, she eats the girlfriend of that newly bereaved working class man, and when the working class man comes to rightfully seek revenge and slay the vampire girl, the young pale boy intervenes, thereby sealing the fate of the working class man, and cementing his devotion to this violent, murderous girl. And that's love.

In another display of strength, this movie also doesn't shy away from the problem of immortality. It shows it straight on, in all its sad, unfortunate glory. And consequently creates one of the most fully realized love stories I've seen in years. The boy and girl are both 12, but she has been 12 for a very long time. And will continue to be 12 long after the boy is dead. We're shown just what this will mean for them. At the beginning of the film, the vampire girl arrives in town with an old man. What we assume to be her father turns out to be a servant of sorts, going out into the cold and trying to bring her back blood. Slowly we realize he is in love with this girl, and as his age renders him useless, as he sees the girl necessarily begin to move on to the young, pale boy, the old man offers the ultimate sacrifice to her. And she moves on. In this, the film shows us simultaneously the beginning and the end of a budding relationship.

In every relationship there is self-sacrifice and loss off self. There is heartbreak. And ultimately, the relationship will not last. This is truth. Fairy tales be damned because no story is happy if you follow it long enough. But we run around falling in love anyway. And fairy tales be praised because that's why we're here. To ruin ourselves and mess up and get hurt, but not before loving. Not before love.

Let the Right One In was able to do so much more, show so much more than any genre-less picture. It made love all the more real by showing the terrible things we're willing to do for it. It made love all the more lovely by showing the inevitable end of every romance. It was able to do all this so well and so effectively because it used the Vampire Myth properly. There's just not as much life in synthetic blood.

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.