Burning Questions for "Pacific Rim"

As much as I am a Trekkie and a comic book geek, I have to say that the movie I have been the most fired up to see all summer isn't "Into Darkness" or "Man of Steel", but Guillermo Del Toro's giant monsters vs. giant mecha battle royal, "Pacific Rim".

Movie Trailers: Pacific Rim - Trailer 2


For anyone who's ever loved Voltron - lions or cars, take your pic - or old Godzilla movies, or even that crazy show Tranzor-Z, this movie has got to seem like a dream come true.

Pacific Rim - "Under Attack" Featurette

But the Lovecraft fan in me has these questions.

For instance: given the size of their brains, are the Kaiju (the giant monsters) actually intelligent?  Like, can they strategize in combat?

And, most importantly, who, or what, is on the other side of that interdimensional rift at the bottom of the Pacific ocean that is mass producing these kaiju to exterminate the human race?

Any way, my hope is that this is finally a film that is really worthy of the 3D Imax experience.  With a guy like Del Toro at the helm, my faith is very strong.

Should be a blast.

Episode VII

George Lucas and Kathleen Kennedy on the Future of Star Wars

My earliest memory from inside a movie theater is watching Princess Leia dissing Luke Skywalker for being too short to convincingly impersonate a stormtrooper.  I always remember the scene differently from how it was actually shot: some how, my 3 year old brain knitted together the stark black and whites from the hallways of the Death Star with this scene, so I always remember what is actually an all-black room as a high contrast black & white.

Weird, I know.  Maybe it was just a bit of information overload for my developing cranium.

Point being, while I'm a much more rabid Trekkie than Star Wars fan, I basically know the dialogue from Episode IV by heart.

I remember when the Star Wars movies were good.  Sadly, there's the kernel of a good story in the most recent trilogy, but the difference, as always, is in the storytelling details - the everyday choices made by a director on dialogue, on performance, on camera position, on edits.  SOMEONE could have made "The Phantom Menace", "Attack of the Clones", and "Revenge of the Sith" into good movies.

There was a time that the film snob in me completely dismissed the idea of someone else making Star Wars movies because they're really George Lucas' magnum opus, but clearly George Lucas doesn't agree with me, and he's probably right.

So, my thoughts?

1. Hire JJ Abrams and Damon Lindelof.  Unlike me, they really do froth at the mouth about Star Wars.   And my namesake has gone on record on more than one occasion about why this whole Mitichlorians garbage completely defeats the entire point about The Force.  A great starting place.
2. Do as many things practically and in camera as you can. The CGI is killing the dramatic tension of the action and it's distracting from the drama.
3. Two words: Mark Hammill.

Let's DO THIS.

The Return of Stories About Stuff

Yesterday we were blessed with previews and interviews about two very high profile film projects for next year: Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises and Ridley Scott's Prometheus, and I could not help but notice something a bit different from these two films.

There's a moment in The Dark Knight Rises trailer where Selina Kyle whispers into Bruce Wayne's ear:

"Did you think this would last?  There's a storm coming, Mr. Wayne, and you and your friends had better batten down hatches, cause when it hits you're all going to wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us."

Boy, that sounds very 99%-ish, doesn't it?


Meanwhile, over in the Prometheus world, Ridley Scott talks about how this is a movie about the origins of humanity itself, where one of the main characters, played by Michael Fassbender, is an android observing the human's reaction to the horror.

In other words, it's a true sci-fi movie.



Big ideas for, ostensibly, big summer popcorn movies.

Directors who actually have something to say about our world around us, and are not just interested in driving you into an seizure from 3-D effects.

Young storytellers, take note.

for Heath, or "requiem for a smiling face"

12 years ago, there were no such things as "blogs".

In fact, back in 1996, there was barely even an internet.

Even in my day job, where we were ostensibly on the leading edge of software & technology at the time, we were still using things like VI, the MS WordPad of text editors, to write complex computer programs, line-by-line-by-line. Lotus Notes was the latest thing for intra-company communications, and only senior management had actual accounts on the system. A laptop? You may as well have asked the company to buy you a Rolls Royce while you were at it. And, if you were one of the blessed few to have a company e-mail account, chances are, you were keeping a manila folder in your file cabinet, where you kept hard copy print outs of every single e-mail you ever sent or received.

At home, things weren't much better. I bought a Compaq Presario that year and subscribed to a local Mom & Pop internet service provider to get dial up access to the nascent web. After being spoiled by free e-mail back in college, I couldn't wait to rip open my shrink-wrapped copy of Netscape Navigator and jump back onto the so-dubbed "Information Superhighway".

One night during that same year, as I was listening to Hot 97 on the train ride back to my humble abode in Montclair, New Jersey, Angie Martinez & company came on the air in tears.

Tupac Shakur had just died.

I didn't know this man. And yet, his passing had meaning - real personal meaning - to me.

And, even though I was a relatively content, well-compensated (albeit grotesquely overworked) little corporate drone, I had to say... SOMETHING.... about this to someone.

I was driven..... compelled to write.

So, I sat down at my Presario and composed a little essay called "2Pacalypse", where I related the suddenness of 2Pac's passing to Thornton Wilder's "The Bridge on San Luis Rey", questioning this notion that death is God's way of saying "mission accomplished". Was his soul actually supposed to learn something by getting gunned down on the Las Vegas strip? Were the rest of us supposed to take something away from it? Or was the search for terrestrial meaning at all a fruitless gesture?

Of course, what took me a page or two to say back in the mid 90's I can now do in one paragraph. Practice makes perfect. :-)

Point being, even back then, when I couldn't even imagine living the life that I lead right now, was the DNA for Macroscope.

Even more to the point, I'm still struck by my personal need to respond in a personal way to the passing of a person who had no direct contact with my life.

Then again, as I stated in "2Pacalypse", Tupac been touching my life in some way since 1991. As a popular artist, his music had provided a kind of Greek chorus to my life. I remember cruising the summer streets of Baltimore with my friends to the tune of "I Get Around", or planning to scare the white people in the dining hall at Princeton with a song that starts "...They claim that I'm violent, just cause I refuse to be silent", or feeling warm and fuzzy and agreeable listening to "Dear Mama".

If I can paraphrase Jeffrey Wigand, we artists are in the Emotion Delivery Business.

And anyone who can make you FEEL something will always have a place in your heart, regardless of how that feeling is given to you. They become your friends, you family even. They can make you laugh or cry. They can inspire you, and even disappoint you, even if you've never ever met.

Thus is the odd conundrum that is mass media and celebrity.

Even though he was a stranger, 2Pac's art made him feel like he was my friend.

Which is why I'm suddenly reminded of him and his passing today.

Not that long ago, I hated Heath Ledger.

He didn't really register with me the first time I saw him, opposite Mel Gibson in "The Patriot". I mean, his character irritated me, but there were so many other things in that movie that pissed me off even more (Black slaves who were just tickled pink to pick Mel's cotton? A church full of people burned alive, but everything is cool because Mel killed Jason Isaacs? Shall I go on?), that I just sort of ignored the young Aussie.

"A Knight's Tale" was when he really started to irk me, because I could feel the studio machine tuning up the band to proclaim him "The Next Big Thing(tm)". I'd recently read William Goldman's "Adventures in The Screen Trade", and tended to agree with his thesis that new stars were only created when an established star passes on a juicy role and the producers are forced to cast a talented unknown in the part. Sadly, I think I was unfairly heaping Heath in with my feelings on Ben Affleck in Pearl Harbor ("The Next Harrison Ford"? come ON!) and just this overwhelming sense of Jonestown-style Kool-Aid that was floating around movie marketing that year. In fact, by the end of the summer of 2001, I was so irritated with the kind of films I'd been seeing, that I teamed with a like-minded classmate from film school to write a film that directly addressed many of the failings that we saw while still telling a good yarn.

And after a year of working on said film, we got word that Heath Ledger was going to star in a new movie with the EXACT SAME TITLE AS OURS.

Yes, I HATED Heath Ledger.

But then I saw "Monster's Ball". In particular, this scene made me a believer in Heath Ledger.

(And, if you've never seen the movie before, I beg you, PLEASE don't waste time with this YouTube clip. Just go out and rent the damn thing, because it's just a fantastic film):


I even loved "The Four Feathers". And a big part of what I loved was Heath's performance - just through his body and his face, he was able to transport me directly inside his character's emotional journey, from false pride, to cowardice, to guilt, resolve, sacrifice, despair, and, finally, triumph.

I read an interview with him where he said that, regarding acting roles, he felt like it would be a waste of his time to repeat himself. Which is why he turned down a ton of nice, frothy teen films at the start of his career and was, at one point, forced to borrow money from his agent to survive, waiting for a good, original role.

The guy wasn't just a teen idol-in-training. He was an f'n actor.

And the very best actors have always been anthronauts - literally, "sailors on the seas of humanity" - exploring the uncharted corners of the soul and bringing the breadfruits of this spiritual New World back to nourish those of us who wait on the safer, civilized shores of our own identities.

But, knowing what I know about actors who channel the spirit of their characters, like Mr. Ledger clearly does, I can't help but wonder about the toll it took on him to accomplish... THIS:

Before The Joker, he appeared to be on the path to be a reasonably peaceful & content family man. Then, after locking himself in a hotel room for six weeks to inhabit this most unhinged of all supervillains, he separated from his love and complained that he'd been unable to sleep for weeks.

His brain just couldn't stop spinning.

I believe I even heard that he'd been prescribed Ambien, and it still only helped him sleep for an hour at a time.

Am I suggesting something as crass as "The Joker killed Heath Ledger"? No. What I am suggesting is, when people describe certain actors as fearless, it's not just about doing their own stunts. There are emotional and spiritual costs to doing this sort of work at the highest level.

I remember my father wondering out loud about Ricky Williams: "with all that money, you'd think a guy would be able to keep himself off of drugs".

Sadly, Dad, sometimes, for some people, the drugs are the only things propping them up to allow them to even do what they do. Athletes. Rock stars. Movie stars.

Delivering a feeling to millions upon millions of people, night after night, day after day...

Think of it this way: consider how much energy it takes for you to have the relationships with the people you personally know and with whom you maintain a personal connection. Now, imagine if you had to do that for a living, where every single person on the street feels connected to you. Deeply. Personally. Spiritually.

Every. Single. Person.

The best of them give us all so much. Things we simply could not live without, no matter how much we want to dismiss them as inconsequential.

After I got through shouting "WHAT?!?!?" at my computer screen, hoping that if I said it long enough and loud enough, the sheer force of my voice would change the words to anything other than "Heath Ledger Dead at 28"....

After I got over the deep sadness I felt for people like Michelle Williams and his daughter, or even someone like Christopher Nolan, who now has the unenviable task of looking at his friend Heath's face every single day for the next six months while trying to finish editing his movie....

After taking the stream of phone calls from friends who were as astonished and saddened at the news as I was....

After all that mourning....

All I honestly have left to say is "Thank you."

"Thank you, Heath, for the deliveries"

"They were always right on time."

Send some light and love both to him and the people who knew him best.

Good night, friends.

Dead? or Alive?

One of my favorite comics in the last few years was Mark Millar's WANTED, about weakling slacker kid who discovers that he's the heir to the world's deadliest super-assassin and has inherited his father's superpowers as well as place in a fraternity of comic-book supervillains who secretly took over the world in 1986 and made it the not-quite-so-super place we all see around us today.

It's brillant, and wickedly fun, with characters like Shithead, who's literally a living pile of morphing excrement, and Johnny Two-Dicks, a schizophrenic gangster who reluctantly takes his criminal marching orders from his talking, evil superfluous penis. These characters are unrepentently evil - they kill, rob, & rape with total impunity, and the drama comes from watching a total wuss find his true self by getting in touch with his evil side - but still recognizing that, even among bad people, there's such a thing as loyalty, duty, even love.

So, when I heard it was being adapted for the screen, with James MacAvoy, currently starring opposite Forest Whitaker in the incredibly powerful film about Idi Amin, The Last King of Scotland, cast in the lead role, I was VERY excited.

Until today.

When I read the official synopsis of the movie adaptation. See it for yourself here at this link for
SuperHero Hype.

"Mythological Fates"? WTF?!??!?!?!!

Who's brilliant idea was THAT?!

I'll reserve final judgement until I see a trailer, but, suffice it to say, I'm not pleased.

I suppose, once you go beyond a certain budget threshold for a film, the suits assume that no one will pay to see bad people do bad things.

And, to those folks, I have only one word for them:

Eminem.

Who was the inspiration for the visual look for the main character in the comic in the first place!

But I imagine Mark Millar himself has the best attitude about the whole thing:

One thing you WON'T see me doing is bitching. JG and I own this and had the right to keep it from ever being a movie, but we decided to take the plunge and hope for the best. They paid us well and we can only hope they do a good job. Like I said, I'm hopeful. Even if it's nothing like the book in the end (I have no idea), The Shining was nothing like the book and was still great. I wish them nothing but the best.

Anyway, read the comic. It's excellent.

Race Snapshot

Just in case anyone's keeping score, here's my current rankings of the summer blockbusters, so far, starting from the least interesting and working our way up in quality & enjoyment:

4.
The Chronicles of Riddick

Surprised? So am I. I had such high hopes for Riddick, but, in the end, it was alot of sound & fury, signifying nothing. That fabulous cast and the absolutely amazing production design and, honestly, a story I really like. But there's a big difference between a good story and a good screenplay. Lord knows this movie could have been a lot slimmer, and a lot punchier. I also think the action scenes are overdirected (two much camera movement and fast cutting), so that you can't actually get a sense of just how much danger the characters you care about are in. I'm actually pretty tired of movies that say that their main character is evil, but they're really just kind of bad-ass (i.e. Mel Gibson in "Payback"). Riddick would have been so much better if he really was a stone-cold sociopathic mass murderer, who just happens to be such a monster that he actually brings down an empire. So much more interesting, although it does have an extremely cool ending.

3. The Day After Tomorrow

This only gets a higher notch because of the sheer absence of suck-i-tude. But the absence of wackness does NOT equal goodness. It's definitely fun, but thin as paper. And pretty contrived. It's a nice little piece of speculative sci-fi, but the science is EXTREMELY suspect. But, in my continuing quest to elevate B list actors that I love, I'm totally digging Kenneth Welsh's transformation from homicidal ex-FBI occultist Windom Earle in Twin Peaks to a thinly veiled knock-off of Dick Cheney in this movie. Plus, the effects are awesome. And the killer cold snap is pretty f'n cool. And, as a fan of Dennis Quaid's since Dreamscape, I'm glad to see him finally cashing in as a leading man.

2. Troy

LOVED the costume design (somebody PLEASE give Bob Ringwood an Oscar for this!). Loved the battle scenes. LOVED the fact that this movie really captures just how much of a punk-ass bi-otch Orlando Bloom's Paris is. LOVED the Hector/Achilles duel. And Peter O'Toole made my day. But, alas, they do muck with the history a bit much for my tastes, and they really overplayed their hand with the whole "quest for immortality" thing. Pretty good, but not as good as...

1.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Surpised? Me too. I only really got interested in it based off the the great reviews and my love of Alfonso Cuaron's work on Y Tu Mama Tambien. But I'm SO glad I saw this film. So much fun. Even when the action was a little slow, there was always something interesting on screen that kept me riveted. It's amazing the difference a director can make. He had such a granular sense of detail in his depiction of Hogwarts, it felt like a real place, and not just a special effect on display. I usually hate scenes like the one where Harry rides the Hippogiff (kind of an eagle-horse) over a vast forest and nearby lake, but it was absolutely (dare I say it) magical. I'm so bummed they're getting a new director. Hopefully, he'll be back for the 5th film.

Shrek 2? Not my cup o' joe. Van Helsing? Not worth my time or money.

Hot on my list for the rest of the summer?
Spider-Man 2
The Bourne Supremacy
The Manchurian Candidate
Fahrenheit 9/11

Out Of The Shadows
In this corner: a horde of intergalactic vandals who rape and pillage entire planets, leaving the charred corpses of whole worlds in their murderous wake.

And, in the the other corner: a triple-jointed guy with a knife who can see in the dark.

Amidsts all the well-deserved Spider-hype, disaster epics, and the freakin' Illiad on film, don't overlook "The Chronicles of Riddick", the sequel to Vin Diesel's "bogeyman in space" movie, "Pitch Black".

For the life of me, I cannot remember the last, honest-to-God, space opera that I've seen on film that was actually good and original, from top to bottom. But this sounds like it.

Check the trailer.

Head to Head
Now that the weekend is over, I'd just like to state, for the record, that, despite better actors, a bigger budget, and a major studio release, the 1989 Dolph Lundgren "Punisher" movie is still waaaaaay more fun than this year's version of "The Punisher" with Thomas Jane & John Travolta. While the two principles are pretty good and Laura Herring is quite bootylicious, but, there simply wasn't enough action in this movie for my tastes. Clearly, I'm a degenerate product of Reaganomics, but I like my action movies to have, well, you know, ACTION.

Somebody, anybody, please tell me why is it so hard to make an action movie that actually has action? I'm begging somebody. ANYBODY.

This gets back to my larger complaints about movies today. Now that everybody in this town has read McKee's Story a billion times, they're all so obsessed with character arc & development and seem to have completely forgotten the purpose of these movies. Who gives a crap if the characters are sympathetic, or even realistic, if the movie made me want to gouge my eyes out with a straw because I was so goddamn bored?

It's very simple. I don't care about how great a dad Hugh Jackman is in Swordfish. I don't care if The Rock is going to get to open his dream restaurant after The Rundown. If I go see an action movie, I want to see people running, people fighting, people shooting, and things blowing up. And I want to see them frequently and at regularly scheduled intervals.

Is that to much to ask, for fourteen dollars?!?!?


You tell me.