Thoughts on the film: Now You See Me

Last night I attended a screening with a live Q&A of Now You See Me. I was jazzed about this, because who is not excited about the concept? Come on. The first time I heard about this movie I was all DAMMIT! because why didn't I think of that? Magicians pulling a heist? Dude.

The panel consisted of the composer (Brian Tyler), The director (Louis LeTerrier), producers Alex Kurtzman and Bobby Cohen, and Jesse Eisenberg and Isla Fisher. They raved about how great the script was - made several mentions to its brilliance, even told us that it barely changed from the day LeTerrier first read it to the day it was locked - and yet not once in the entire panel did anyone mention the names of the writers: Boaz Yakin and Edward Ricourt.

At the very least, Kurtzman should have known better.

But on to the film. This will be spoiler free, so soldier on with no fear.

The movie is about magic, so it opens with a magic trick on the audience. Jesse Eisenberg's character, Michael Atlas, asks a girl to pick a card. As he does, he aims the deck at the camera, and we as audience members instinctively also pick a card. Despite being shown the whole deck, most of the audience picks the same card the girl does, although most of us don't know why. So when he reveals it, we're in on the trick. Right from the jump, we're part of the game.

The four magicians are brought together to form their own show as a group - The Four Horsemen, and during these shows they steal money using magic. But the movie is less about them than it is Mark Ruffalo's Dylan Rhodes, an FBI agent who is determined to bring these guys down after Atlas makes him feel like an idiot. Throughout the entire film, Rhodes is always one step behind, so he turns to professional magic debunker Thaddeus Bradley, played by Morgan Freeman, to help him predict the gang's next move.

This brings me to something that was so fascinating about this film - the structure. The story is Rhodes. He's the protagonist, and for all intents and purposes, The Four Horsemen are the antagonists. But we like them and we want to see them succeed. The whole way through the film, though you really like Rhodes, you kind of hope he doesn't catch these guys. And it works. I found myself rooting for both sides at the same time.

When's the last time you saw that happen?

But the most masterful thing about this film was the way it roped you into the game. Like The Prestige, there is a mystery in front of us. We know that somebody is not who they claim to be, but we don't know who. We spend the whole movie guessing.

I figured it out about halfway through the film, but I was never 100% sure. I constantly decided I was wrong, then right again, then completely wrong again, then probably right... Then I tried to give up guessing, but I just couldn't stop. I had to figure it out.

And the fight scene - oh, the glorious fight scene. Remember when I posted an essay on how to write a fight scene?  I mentioned that each fight scene has to have its own identity. Well here, they do something absolutely brilliant to make that happen. The magician in question fights using magic tricks. I've never seen that before in my life, and it is very, very cool. It's a combination of brains and quickness and physical skill all on display, and I was all giggly over it.

This film worked for me on all levels. My only complaint is Morgan Freeman. He's great, as he always is, but the problem is that we've seen him be the kind old man too many times. He's a bit of an asshole in this movie, but it's tough to feel anything but warm affection for him. I had a hard time not trusting him the way I was supposed to.

Overall, this was really fun. I found myself smiling throughout the movie, despite the annoying bitch next to me who showed up half an hour late, sat on my foot, texted, talked, took like five thousand pictures of Jesse Eisenberg as he told funny jokes to his entourage in the wings before the interview, and said things like "This is better than the Chelsea Handler Show" and "Hey they must have straightened Jesse Eisenberg's hair for the movie" during the Q&A.

I would gladly go see this again, knowing what I know now, just so I can look for clues. But it's well worth seeing at least once. I'm kind of glad I didn't come up with this idea now, because I don't think I would have done such a great job with it. The film truly lives up to its concept.

My love letter to The Raid

People have been telling me for months that I need to see The Raid, so last night after catching The Terminator at the Hollywood Cemetery, the Beefcake and I headed to The New Beverly to catch a midnight screening of The Raid. Two action-packed movies in one night - sounds good to me.

I like seeing movies at The New Bev. If you don't know what that is, it's a movie theater in Hollywood that screens all kinds of 35mm prints from The Birds to '70s 3-d soft core porn to Pulp Fiction like 30 times a month to movies that just came out. Tourists don't go to this theater - movie lovers do. So when you see a film at The New Bev you're already in an audience of friends. And at a midnight screening, it's an even more devoted crowd. It was the perfect way to see this film.

After about 20 minutes a guy in the front shouted out "I FUCKING LOVE THIS MOVIE!" and we all laughed because that's how we all collectively felt. There was clapping, profanity, gasping - it was great fun. I probably said "Holy shit!" about eight times.

About halfway in the audio fucked up and they had to stop the movie to fix it. In that brief time, everybody turned to whoever they came with and discussed this brilliant piece of film we were all watching. "Holy crap, did you see that?"

So as you can tell, I loved this movie. In fact, "love" seems too tame a word. I want to bend this movie over the kitchen counter and fuck it so hard.

You know how some people consider themselves artists when it comes to film? Like, there are film fans who lose their shit over Malick's cinematography or Coppola's intense visuals or whatever the fuck it is that David Lynch does. Those people often celebrate film as an artform and look down on the more commercial fare that rules my world.

Well, I love fight scenes more than anything in the movie world, so to me, The Raid was fucking art. It was a beautiful piece of filmmaking - so elegant. It was like a masterful painting where violence is the brush.

I've never seen fighting so fast and brutal and still graceful all at once. I was in awe.

The plot was razor thin and there were no twists, really, but it didn't need a fancy complex plot or big fancy twists. It had great characters and surprisingly great dialogue. I cared about these characters. I got scared for some, sad when some died, relieved when a bad guy bit the dust. Your plot doesn't have to be complex if the characters are well drawn enough to make me invested in their well being.

And shot composition was fantastic. The angles, the use of light - it was all there.

When this movie ended, I wanted to kick everyone in the face.

On the way home I saw a few posters for movies I had been excited about mere hours before. Now I looked at those posters and realized they would not be as good as what I just watched. Everything sucks now.

I want to rewrite the treatment for my current spec because it's not good enough. The last time I had that reaction to a film in the theater, it was In Bruges.

So all those people who told me I needed to see The Raid - you called it. It was bananas. BANANAS. I'm in love.

You should see this movie

Many years ago, a roommate rented a movie called Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human, and I fell in love. You probably have not seen this movie, which is why I have a copy of it; so that anyone I know who has the least inclination to watch it can always borrow it from me, as long as they give it back promptly. It's become my go-to suggestion whenever a friend asks for a recommendation for an obscure comedy.

The film stars Mackenzie Astin (brother of Sean, son of Patty Duke, fully adorable) and Carmen Electra as a mismatched couple that meets, falls in love, and experiences various forms of birth control until they finally make a baby. It's a faux documentary, narrated by David Hyde Pierce. Lucy Liu and Marc Blucas are also in this movie.

Okay so Carmen Electra, who works in some kind of office setting but wears the sluttiest fucking clothes to work since Shannen Doherty on Charmed, goes out to a bar wearing what appears to be a wash rag over her gigantic fake boobs. Mackenzie Astin mans up and hits on her, and the dating ritual begins. David Hyde Pierce tells us all about it.

After some basic datey type events, they get it on, and that's when the fun stuff happens. During their sex scenes, we cut to a track where men dressed as giant sperm act out the fertilization process. When the gun shot goes off, they all race for the zygote at the end of the track, later represented by an X mark on a tiny trampoline. But at this time they do not reach the X, because Mackenzie Astin has put on a condom. All the sperm men SLAM into a giant gym mat put in their way.

Later she puts on a diaphragm, and uses birth control, and there's a scene where he either masturbates or pulls out - I can't remember which - but the sperm guys just keep running and running and running until they sort of stop and look around and realize the zygote is nowhere to be found. They're very disappointed.

Basically, this movie is hilarious. Carmen Electra wears slutty clothes and gets naked with Mackenzie Astin, and David Hyde Pierce narrates it all in his Niles Crane voice, and there's giant dudes in sperm costumes racing each other to babyland. And somewhere in there is a romantic comedy and some dialogue and shit. So you should see this movie if you enjoy awesome things. There are no explosions in it, but there are some magnificent fake boobs and a dude dressed as Arnold shoots a machine gun at some point, so there's something for everyone. Look it up: Making Habits of the Earthbound Human. It's available on Netflix.

Thought on the film: John Carter

Saturday I decided to see John Carter out of curiosity. I left Hollywood after choosing my wedding invitations and drove to Burbank, where if you miss the showing it's okay because you can walk to two other theaters. I had to walk to all three because the last theater on the walk was the one showing it soonest.

This walk involved a trip through the mall where two dudes in bunny costumes were murdering people entertaining kids or something. I don't know how anyone enjoys that. Also, some woman in the mall was singing "America the Beautiful" but to a completely different melody. I know Whitney Houston made a splash when she did all those crazy things to the National Anthem way back when, but that does not mean you can just completely change a melody and keep the words to songs about America. Somebody worked really hard to come up with the best melody for the song and you, mall singer lady, do not get to overrule them just because you have an army of creepy bunny men behind you.

I digress.

Anyway, I ended up at a 3-D showing, and even thought I still hate 3-D it no longer gives me headaches since I got Lasik, and I figured the studio can use all the dollars it can get on this one, so in I went.

It was 2pm on a Saturday in a theater next to a mall and an Ikea. There were maybe two dozen people in there - and none of us under 25. That cannot be good.

They gave me a coupon for a dollar off a Coke float, and I considered it but knew I'd have to pee halfway through the movie. Then in front of me sat a dude so obese he had difficulty walking with his mountain of popcorn and his bucket of soda, and I was glad I had not ordered the float. When it takes you three whole minutes to sit down in a theater seat, you might want to consider switching to diet popcorn.

I digress again.

Anyway, there were previews. This is what I learned.

The Avengers: This movie has explosions!
Battleship: This movie has explosions!
Men in Black 3: This movie has jokes!

There were like 40 other previews, and then there was a movie.


John Carter was entertaining. There were some really great scenes. I especially loved all the intercutting between his past with his wife and kid and what he was going through in the present. I liked some of the relationships and the characters and the chemistry between the leads and whatnot. But I also felt like just when I started enjoying the story, it was podrace time.

I feel bad saying this, because it's not the movie's fault. Star Wars owes a lot to the novel this film was based on, so even though a lot of scenes in this movie reminded me of the prequels, that's hardly fair.

But remind me it did. The scene in the gladiator ring reminded me of Attack of the Clones. The flying bike thingee reminded me of a podrace. Pretty much every other action scene reminded me of how much the prequels sucked. I tried to shake it off, but I couldn't. And I'm sure it unfairly clouded my ability to properly appreciate what I was watching.

Also, James Purefoy was underused, but I think James Purefoy is ALWAYS underused.

I don't mean to imply that it's a bad movie. It's not. It's a solid film. I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with it. I just didn't think it blew my mind either. When the movie was over I marveled at the amount of names in the credits, watched the obese guy struggle out of his seat, then left, got in my car and drove home and didn't really spend a lot of time thinking about it.

So I dunno. What did you think? Did you see it?

Thoughts on the film: This Means War

Lots of people have been asking me what I thought of This Means War, so I will post about it for all to see.

Overall, it was okay. There were some really cool action sequences - the opening scene and the paintball bit, specifically - and a neat one-shot that was cool to watch even if it was a ludicrous premise because it was like a little dance with the principles. In fact, there were a lot of really beautiful shots; McG knows how to do a good one shot for sure. There were some funny jokes and some great chemistry between the guys. And you can't ignore how damn pretty everybody is.

Fortunately  I read the reviews and knew to go in with lowered expectations, so I wasn't disappointed. The movie was exactly what I expected it to be - fun, but kinda fluffy.

There were two main things I would have changed.

THERE BE SPOILERS AHEAD


First of all, there's this bad guy who's barely in the movie, and it turns out that he's been watching our guys date this girl for some time. Know what would have not only kept him more relevant in the film, but added a bit of extra absurd comedy? If we had seen him occasionally tracking down our guys. He would have been witness to these guys both violating  her privacy and competing for one woman. It would have been a great opportunity for some laughs as the bad guy says what we're all thinking.

Second, this is a MAJOR violation of this woman's privacy. She gets mad when she finds out they knew each other, but fuck that. She's not perfect; she was dating two guys at once and didn't tell either one, so she doesn't really get the right to be indignant about that. What she does have the right to get indignant about is the fact that these guys bugged her house and an entire surveillance team watched her have sex.

But it never comes up. She never finds out what they did. The one element of your story that would cause the most conflict, and it's completely ignored. Imagine what these guys would have had to do to win her back if she found out what they did. So I guess what I'm saying is, I would have focused more of the script on the privacy violation. I think it was the elephant in the theater for me. You could have kept the competition between the guys, but added another element that would have given the film more depth.

There's no reason pretty people can't fight and love and laugh and still be about something substantial. There were missed opportunities here.

Thoughts on the film: Haywire

I liked Haywire, and here's why:

It was refreshing to see the camera lay back and let the star do all the work during action scenes. We've come to expect our action scenes to have a zillion cuts, largely so we don't notice the big stunt double who's doing all the tough stuff in between close-ups of the beautiful star's face looking intense. In this movie, there was no need for the star to have a stunt double do all the work, so we got to watch the pure action scene without cutting in and out and back and forth and shaky-cammed to death.

She looked like she could kick ass, she acted like she could kick ass. I felt like Gina Carano's acting was just fine as long as she had something to do, although the scenes when she was sitting still and talking were not so good. Anything that took place inside a car was cringe-worthy.

BUT-

The MOS stuff in Barcelona was terrific, and for once I actually liked Channing Tatum, and you just can't beat those action scenes. I'm jealous of how well that woman can move her body to kick major ass.


Is it a perfect movie? Definitely not. I barely understood the plot, and the parts I did understand had some serious holes, but it was shot beautifully and clean. No extra bullshit. I wish more action movies were shot that way, because sometimes I feel like the constant movement of the camera is trying to make me think there's more going on here than there is. I loved that in one scene, Carano was just running after a guy. Just running, trying to catch him, doing what a woman like that would actually do. It wasn't super fancy. It was just straight up, old school running.

The problem is, the marketing made you think this was a Bourne movie with a chick. It's not. The premise is similar, but the shooting style is vastly different, and if you went in expecting Bourne you'd be angry at what you got. That's probably why audiences responded so poorly.

I'm sad about the audience response, but at least nobody can blame the weekend on a strong female protagonist. Thank you, Underworld 4. And Haywire will make its investment back because of its low budget. Hopefully this was a great introduction to Carano and we will see more of her soon. I'd write something for her in a heart beat if the job came up.

Thoughts on the film: Battle Los Angeles; How this film could have been great

I've spoken many times to anyone who will listen about how much I love Pitch Black. The reason I love Pitch Black so much is that you think you're going to watch a silly B horror movie about some people fighting off monsters on another planet, but what you get is a philosophical treatise on what it means to be human and the nature of sacrifice. I love when a film surprises me by being way better than it needs to be.

Most horror movies are about the scare, and Pitch Black had some scary moments, but the story was a delivery system for an intelligent conversation, not just scares.

So flash forward a number of years and here I am, on Christmas Eve Day, watching Battle Los Angeles. This looks like it will be a pretty generic action movie, mostly about effects. The majority of action movies released these days seem to be delivery systems for explosions.

And this one was no different. It paid some lip service to character development. (The black guy is not a stereotype because he wears glasses! And his nickname is Specs!) It tried to get me to care, but it didn't take advantage of opportunities to elevate the material into something to make me think.

Minor Spoilers Ahead.

There's a scene on a roof top where that hot redneck from True Blood tells another soldier how he wonders if these aliens get scared. What if they're just like us? Then Aaron Eckhart observed that the aliens have their weapons welded onto their bodies or something, as if they are 24/7 soldiers. Okay, we're getting somewhere. We can run with that. We're fighting these creatures, but we're just like them. Could we become them? Were they like us once? Is there a way we can get to them and talk this out?

No, they didn't really go that way.

There's your now cliche scene where the humans find an alien and drag him into the base to examine him so we can learn how to fight the enemy. They decide to stab it in lots of places to find out what kills it.

Now, here's what I was thinking. Hey, aren't they basically torturing that thing? And nobody there has a problem with it?

There's a veterinarian in the room. She offers to help by staring at them enthusiastically as they stab the creature with various pointy tools. It would have been neat if she had spoken up. Maybe, instead of torturing it, we can find a way to communicate with it? I'm not saying she'd be right, but she'd be on theme. There would have been some interpersonal conflict. There would have been a moment for our characters to argue about strategy, about what defines us, separates us from the enemy. They're the bad guys, but we're torturing a prisoner. Is that okay?

I'd love to have had that conversation with this film, but that's not what happened. They stabbed the thing until they finally found its weakness, then went on blowing shit up, restricting the interpersonal conflict to cliched gripes about who's in command. Michelle Rodriguez is tough. The black guy wears his glasses. The guy with the pregnant wife.... well just that, there's a guy with a pregnant wife. Have you ever seen a movie about a bunch of soldiers at war and one of them DIDN'T have a pregnant wife?

I guess this was supposed to be about Eckhart's journey as a leader, but then the rest of the movie should have been about the nature of leadership or something. Let's see the aliens have chain of command issues. Let's see the civilians question the leadership decisions. Maybe Eckhart's character questions the decisions of the higher ups.

The film really did give us some character arcs, but the main reason Eckhart's didn't work for me is because I didn't buy it. This guy's men think he's a douchebag, that he left some guys behind and is a horrible leader. From the second he steps onscreen, I know that isn't true. So I don't feel any real conflict, just a misunderstanding that will get cleared up eventually.

But I digress.

The point is, the script needed to pick a thesis and stick to it.

I tell the kids all the time: Once you pick your thesis, the entire essay revolves around it. So if you say a hero is someone who  likes to wear purple underwear, then every paragraph needs to go back to that purple underwear. It doesn't need to veer off and talk about spikey hair, it needs to be about purple fucking underwear. Your theme is your thesis. If your thesis is the nature of humanity, then by god, every choice you make in your story should reflect that theme.

That's how you go from just okay to great. Don't let your script be nothing more than a delivery system for explosions/scares/sex/laughs. Let those elements help your story be a delivery system for a question we can think about when we leave at the end.

Thoughts on the film: A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas

So Harold and Kumar was fucking great. The third one was better than the first. Yeah, I said it. I loved that Christmas 3D movie. Best comedy I've seen all year.

Here's why.

1) It was funny. Jokes galore. Self-referential stuff, 3D absurdity, general absurdity, and the glorious Neil Patrick Harris. Neil Patrick Harris was fucking hysterical. I can't imagine anyone having a better time playing a drugged up lunatic, except maybe that kid who played the baby. I laughed from the opening scene all the way to the end. This morning the Beefcake and I were freely quoting from the film, particularly when I started preparing our pancake breakfast.

2) This movie was about stuff. Friendship, growing up, accepting responsibility, waffles vs pancakes. There was deep emotional stuff. So while on one end you have NPH trying to sexually molest a dancer and a penis getting stuck to a pole, on the other end you have a story about two friends who have grown apart - one because he's too much of a grown up, and one because he's too much of a child. All that theme stuff was perfectly executed. The story was more than just a delivery system for jokes.

3) I related to this one far more than the other two. There's a scene where our boys find themselves a party full of silly kids. The kids make fun of them for being old and washed up, and they have to remember when they used to be cool, way cooler than these little punks today. As a grown-up who spends all day around teenagers, I could 100% get with that. The kids I teach often declare that they hope they never turn 30 because it's SO OLD. And I just smile and think of all I've learned and accomplished since I was that age. I could have been Harold in that scene with the kids at the party. I never was a pothead, but I was young, and I have worried sometimes that this house and the dogs and the suburbs have made me a chode.

So what I'm trying to say is, A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas made me feel better about life.

Thoughts on the film: Colombiana

Tomorrow we have a guy coming over to start some renovating at the house, so for the next few days I have to hang out and observe the proceedings. Then school starts again. So today was my last day of real vacation freedom where I can drive around town on a week day and do stuff.

Every vacation I like to take myself on a daytime date. I dress nice and go see a movie alone, then apparently I take myself grocery shopping because I am a practical date. I almost got through the whole summer without seeing a movie alone, so I rectified that this morning.

There's a theater in North Hollywood - Century 8 - where there is plenty of parking, it never sells out, and tickets are cheap. The line is rarely longer than 4 people and the first showing of the day is $5.25.

This morning I got dressed in nice clothes and went to the 11am screening of Colombiana. There were 3 men scattered throughout the theater, so I sat in the prime spot in the middle.

The up side of seeing a movie at 11 on a Tuesday morning - you sit wherever you want. The down side - the other people in the theater may be crazy. Then again, they may think I'm crazy since I switched seats like eight times. I feel that if you've got the entire theater to choose from, you have every right to demand perfection in your seats. You also have every right to take off your high heels and put your feet on the seat in front of you.

Anyhow, there was a movie.

This was pretty obviously a Luc Besson film. He cowrote and produced it, and even though he didn't direct it, his stamp was all over it. Great action scenes - particularly the big bathroom fight at the end, although I wish there were fewer cuts - some great character moments from the protagonist, a fun story. BUT there are ridiculous plot holes.

MILD SPOILERS

Young Zoe Saldana's dad gives her a Maguffin chip that the bad guys want.  This chip is supposed to be her passport to America, and when the Americans see what's on it they flip out. We don't know what it is, but clearly it means the bad guys are fucked. They almost killed lil Zoe for it, and they did kill her dad for it, and it's cool enough to get her into America and lots of cash on the US government, so man, it must be really heavy.

Except when we see the bad guys again the chip seems to have affected them not at all. In fact, their lives are better since they chased that kid out of Colombia. So what the fuck was all that fuss over the goddamn chip?

And when Michael Vartan finds out his sex buddy is actually a badass assassin, he's like "You're super!" How about "What the fuck, you kill people? That's pretty fucked up!" You were fucking a professional assassin, Michael Vartan! You should be pissed she didn't tell you! She could have gotten your white ass killed! I'd be pissed, anyway. I'd get a really good security system installed in my house. And a dragon.

END SPOILERS

Overall I did enjoy the film. One of its best features is that her actions as a warrior made complete sense. She's a slim woman, and she used that to her advantage. She didn't run around getting in a bunch of fistfights with large men and win. And when she did finally fight a guy hand to hand, it made complete sense.

Past revenge movies about women have seemed ridiculous; I don't really identify with the lead or believe her actions, but Zoe Saldana pulled it off perfectly. She pulled off some beautiful moments here where I really felt sympathy for her, and that ain't easy. I'm telling you guys, she is the next big thing.

Thoughts for the weekend

I'm going on a brief vacation out of town. You gotta get out of town at least once a year, I say.

I got to page 60 in my script, which was my goal. I didn't want to leave town until I had at least 60 pages. I also enjoyed these last few pages more than the rest, which hopefully means I can go back to the beginning and rewrite those pages to make them even stronger now that I have a clearer sense of the script's identity.

Things that have annoyed me on television lately:

I hate that Hughes Net commercial. I don't know if you guys get it where you are, but it comes on ALL THE TIME on my TV. Hughes Net is some kind of internet service provider, and their whole schtick is this idea that you may be in the middle of nowhere, but that doesn't mean you have to settle for dial-up internet! But I'm not in the middle of nowhere. I'm in the greater Los Angeles area. Nobody here is getting back to nature. Where do they think they're advertising? Drives me an unreasonable amount of bonkers.

Dear Colby on Top Shot, please stop smiling like the Joker. It creeps me out. You don't actually have to talk through your teeth.

I wish high school kids were played by people who look remotely like high school kids. When your high school junior has forehead wrinkles he is not believable as a teenager. I'm looking at you, tough slutty guy on Glee.

A thing that made me happy recently:

Fright Night was fun. The lead had forehead wrinkles and the high school scenes were a bit silly, but once things got going it was quite enjoyable. But by far the most joy to be had in that film was.....

VERY SLIGHT SPOILER THAT YOU COULD DEDUCE FROM LOOKING AT THE CAST LIST, WHICH I DID NOT

...When David Tennant showed up. I was looking at this magic guy thinking, this dude is basically Russel Brand, so why didn't they just hire Russel Brand? Why hire this random actor guy? Who is this guy anyway? Seems familiar. And then he pulls off his wig and his facial hair and I squealed. I ADORE David Tennant in all forms. And he wasn't just a cameo, either. He was a liquored up leather-clad badass with a filthy mouth. He made that film way better than I expected it to be. I just wish I hadn't been tricked into watching it in 3D because the 3D was completely unecessary.

Have a good weekend, everybody.

Cowboys and Aliens and all the plants

I finally got out to see Cowboys and Aliens this weekend. I enjoyed it. It wasn't great, but it was fun and action-packed and had all the major tropes of a good Western.

I had one major issue that jumped out as to why this was not a great movie: PLANTS.

A plant, in case any of you don't know the term, is when someone introduces an idea or object that will return in a later scene at an important moment. For example, if a character looks at an orange and take the time to put it in his pocket, that's a plant. Later in the, let's say, television episode, it will most likely come back into play.

Cowboys vs Aliens is loaded with plants. Way too many.


SPOILERS TO FOLLOW

Although, one could say that all of these examples are spoiled the minute they're planted.


Plant #1: Doc shoots his gun
Sam Rockwell, the local doctor/bar owner, has never shot a gun. A preacher suggests he learn. He gets a hold of a rifle and shoots at some bottles but hits nary a one. In a later scene he tries to shoot some bottles again and still hits nary a one. Guess what happens in the final battle scene? Did you guess? Correct! He shoots an alien right on the button in a lovely moment of deus ex machina. It's so predictable, I just sort of shrugged when it happened.

Here's how that could be fixed. Let's say he's got this gun and he shoots the bottles, doesn't hit them. Okay, we've been introduced to the idea that he can't shoot, and now we expect him to learn. Instead of showing him shoot at bottles again to remind us of the plant, let's show him shooting at a person in a battle, maybe that final battle. Maybe he misses and misses, and finally he sets up that perfect shot and he just knows this one will hit and the music swells and - he misses. Aw, hell. then, he flips around and BAM! He hits! hooray! It's his big moment, but it's not so damn contrived.

Plant #2: The kid with the knife
Early on, Harrison Ford's character, Dolarhyde, sits around with this kid and makes a HUGE deal of giving the kid his knife. Then, in a later scene, Dolarhyde takes the knife back, explains its significance, then hands it back to the kid. So during the big battle scene, an alien chases the kid, backs him into a corner, and we're sitting there waiting.... and waiting.... and waiting for the kid to remember that he has the knife. We know he has the knife because we were reminded of it, and because we keep seeing it poke out from his belt. So it's a boring scene because we're just sitting around twirling our thumbs while we wait for the kid to figure out what we already know.

Remember that example with the orange I mentioned up top? Well, in David Tennant's first full episode as The Doctor, he woke up in a bathrobe and found an orange in his pocket. He made an offhand comment about it and shoved it back in his pocket. Then he did some stuff. At the end of the episode, an Alien came at him. He had no weapon, and his back was turned to the alien. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the orange, and threw it at a switch that made the alien fall off a cliff. THAT is how you do a plant. You mention it, let us forget about it, then pull it out just in time, so we go "Oh hell yeah I forgot about that!"

If Dolarhyde had loaned the kid the knife in a casual way, or the kid had stolen it, or found it, or we at least weren't reminded of its existence, we might have had a chance to forget about it.

Plant #3: Resolved arcs
Every single character in Cowboys and Aliens gets a resolved arc. They all have something to learn, and without exception, every single character learns it. Not everybody needs to have closure, and after a while it feels too contrived when each person gets their learning moment.

In the end, I felt like a lot worked in this film. Like I said, I enjoyed it, but I also felt like it was a little too neat, particularly for a Western.

Aborted plans and X Men

Took my niece to Camarillo Outlet Mall yesterday. I planned to spend all kinds of money on her, because isn't that what aunts are for? But she didn't want much until we hit Forever 21. Good thing she didn't buy anything else all day except a Glee button, because she nearly cleaned out my bank account in that place.

Anyhow, we ended up spending quite a bit of time there, and of course we had to introduce the girl to In and Out because she thinks McDonald's is good food, so we found ourselves racing to get home. We had tickets to see Clueless followed by a Q&A at the Aero in Santa Monica.

It took me a while to find the Clueless screening. I knew I wanted to take her to see something she couldn't get back home, something that would give her real exposure to the movie industry, and Clueless was the perfect PG-13 film. It was to be followed by Fast Times, but we weren't staying for that. I can just see myself trying to explain to my sister why her daughter watched Judge Reinholdt masturbate in a bathroom. We kind of hoped she'd fall asleep after the Q&A so we could stay and watch guilt free, but the girl does not sleep. It's ridiculous.

So I bought the tickets ahead of time because these things usually sell out. There we were, racing to get home in time to let the dogs out, change into our about-town clothes we just bought, and hop back in the car.

I live in the Valley, and as I said, the Aero is in Santa Monica. Know what that means? The 405. Know what time it was? 6:50pm. Movie started at 7:30. So if you live in LA, you see my problem.

We were just merging from the 101 to the 405 and it was 7:28. We finally had to admit it was not going to happen. We could make the Q&A, maybe the last half of the movie, but that was it. So I sighed away $30 in tickets and we took the next exit, which happened to bring us past the Sherman Oaks Arclight.

So it wasn't exactly a Q&A, but at least we introduced the girl to a quality theater. We looked at what was showing, and even though she really wanted to see Horrible Bosses and swore up and down that her mom lets her see R rated movies all the time, we gave her a choice between Transformers 2D or X Men First Class. Thank God she chose X Men.

In the end we spent $73 to see one movie. You're welcome, Hollywood.

By the by, they had Bridesmaids showing there. They also have Bridesmaids showing down the street from me at the $3 theater. Just thought people should know. Arclight is expensive.

If you don't know the Arclight theaters, they don't have commercials, just previews, and they have assigned seating so you don't have to do the mad rush to claim and save seats.

So we get in there and take our proper seats, and this dude comes in with his lady. He sits down right in front of my niece, but there's no empty seat next to him. The girl plops down in his lap and whips out her cell phone, texting away as the lights go down. There are empty seats in the theater, even two together, just not good ones.

So I say to her "Do you have a seat?" She insists she does. I say "And you're going to sit there texting?"

She put the phone away, and to her credit, we didn't hear a peep out of her or see her phone at all. I guess I scared her. The men on either side of that seat were too polite to complain about her all up in their personal space as she sat and watched the entire film in that dude's lap.

I really enjoyed the film overall. I had a few slightly spoilerish logistical issues - how did Mystique know Kevin Bacon had a helmet on? and why didn't Magneto make that Azreal or whatever dude take Charles to the hospital before he zapped away? I mean if they really are friends and all - but by and large I thought it was solid as hell. Loved all the cameos. It was like the movie gave us a game to play as we watched.

A whole bunch of people stayed to the end to watch the extra scene that didn't exist. There was a lot of grumbling when it did not appear.

Thoughts on the film: Pom Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

Saturday afternoon the Beefcake and I headed off to the Arclight Hollywood, one of the few theaters in the country that screened Morgan Spurlock's new Film, Pom Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.

We got swag. As we handed the guy our tickets and he handed us two coupons ("The Greatest Coupon Ever Printed"), a sample packet of Seventh Generation laundry detergent and a full stick of Ban deodorant. Sweet. Now we don't have to go to the drug store after the movie.

I do love the Arclight when it's not packed, because you don't have to do the mad rush to get a good seat and you don't have to watch commercials, which is a bit ironic given the nature of the film we are about to watch.

If you haven't heard about this film yet, it's about Spurlock trying to get product placement in his movie about product placement. There are scenes in the movie where he talks about how those scenes will be in the movie.

The film itself is pretty funny. Morgan Spurlock's greatest gift is turning the camera on absurdity and laughing at it. The man had more fun with the idea of Main and Tail shampoo than I've ever seen anyone have with hair care products, and it made what could have been really dry material a blast to watch.

We all knew McDonald's wasn't healthy, but when we saw just how much damage an all-McDonald's diet did to Spurlock's body, I think we were all kind of amazed. That's a bit of what's missing here. We all know product placement exists, and we all know advertising is all around us. I didn't come out of this film feeling blown away by a new experience.

That's not to say there was nothing to learn here. Spurlock goes through the process from beginning to end - how you get those products in your film, the kind of sacrifices you have to make, the kind of ridiculous requests corporations make of the filmmakers. And it was horrifying to hear the story of the guy who bullied a director into product placement by threatening to cripple his production. There was a lot of really good stuff here, and again, it was fun to watch. Spurlock is nothing if not fun.

In the end, I'm not sure what we were supposed to learn, and maybe that's the point. Some documentaries are more about asking questions than drawing conclusions. This could be one of them. Beefcake and I came out debating what the point was. Everyone's a sell-out? Product placement is just a part of life that we should get used to? Horse shampoo is hilarious?

I don't know. Maybe I'm not supposed to.

So if Spurlock's goal was to make me have fun, laugh, and ponder product placement in the films I see, he has succeeded.

John and the Terminator with Arnold's head

HBO is some shiesty little tricksters. They gave me HBO for free long enough to watch the pilot for Game of Thrones, which was really good, and reminded me that they also have True Blood and Entourage. So now I have HBO.

So I'm waiting until it's time to take my new puppy to meet the doctor for the first time and I turn on HBO, and they're showing Terminator Salvation. Now I posted about this movie when I saw it in the theater, but I neglected to mention one scene that to me epitomizes the flaws in this film.

At the end of the movie, when they're running around in the Terminator factory, John Connor gets knocked back by a door flying open, and behind that door stands Arnold (or a facsimile thereof), the original Terminator, the machine who once tried to kill John's mom. But all John ever knew of him was as a friend. The Arnold Terminator saved his life countless times and sacrificed himself for the greater good. If you pretend number 3 didn't exist, which is my preferred way of thinking, then the last time John saw his buddy he was giving the thumbs up on the way to his death. All for John.

So it's years later and John's in the middle of this big battle and he's very stressed out trying to find his dad who's not his dad yet, and suddenly there he is, the only father figure John ever knew. Hey, there would have been a cool theme to pursue given the whole John's about to be a dad and he's looking for his dad and then his dad is kind of fostering a little girl, but somehow that didn't seem like a theme.

Anyway, so John sees, for the first time in a decade or more, his best childhood friend. And John doesn't even take a fucking second to react. He just starts fighting.

What an opportunity that was. You've got this Terminator who hasn't even experienced all these things that John has, he doesn't know his fate, doesn't know this man he will save in the past, and here's someone who does know all the good and bad things he will do, all this history and yet not history between them, and not even a tiny fraction of it is explored.

Why'd they go through the trouble and expense of putting Arnold on that dude's body? Because it was cool. Because in his big moment, audiences would go Ooooooh cool! Not because it matter to the story AT ALL.

It could have mattered to the story. John would have known it wasn't his friend of course, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't need a second to process it, or have doubts, or think he should run instead of fight, because what if he kills the Terminator? The past will never happen. He will never be born, or maybe they'll send a different one that succeed in killing his mother. Maybe some part of this Terminator IS the hero he knew. After all, he never met the bad guy version. Maybe he thinks he can talk the Terminator into doing the right thing. Maybe....

But nope. All they do is fight. Then we move on.

Squandered potential.

The problem with the A Team

Remember the show The A-Team? Remember what it was about? It was about a unit of men who helped people even though every time they helped someone it put them at risk of being discovered by the government that wants to put them back in prison.

So what was the movie about? Some dudes who coincidentally met in the desert and blow a lot of shit up while trying to find some plates that will prove... what, exactly? That they didn't steal them? How does finding them prove they didn't steal them?

So let's look at that difference. The show was about helping people at great risk to themselves. In this movie they help ONLY themselves. The show was about life after the prison break. In the movie the prison break - if you can call it a prison break - happens almost halfway through the film.

This is, I think, where the problems with this film started. The A-Team's mission statement is completely wrong.

It feels like someone made a list of cool sounding explosions and ways to defy physics and strung them together loosely with some poorly-thought out plot.

Piloting a tank through the sky? Really? And here's the thing. While they're piloting this tank they're having the time of their lives. Whoa, cool! We're piloting a tank! Except only Murdoch should be acting like that because he's crazy. Everyone else should be having a fucking panic attack. They should be arguing about what to do. B.A grumbles, but he's tied up so it's not really an issue.

Or Face. He's a womanizer, never wants to settle down. It's what he's known for. But when he finally comes into contact with the woman who changed all that, he's already long since fallen for her. We don't even get to watch him change or struggle against that change. It's like every single opportunity for genuine conflict was sucked right out of the story and replaced with a goddamn flying tank.

This movie is never about being a unit, because there's never any question about whether or not they are one. It takes conflict to bring out theme.

So, Emily, put your money where your mouth is. How would you have done it?

Here's how. Start with the prison break. They're trying to run from the law, but they end up running into some people who need their help. One member of the group wants to help, but everybody else thinks it's not their problem. After coming to blows, they end up helping these people. They almost get caught, but get away at the last minute, whatever means they had to clear their names destroyed forever. That would have been my take. And I would not have flown anyone through the sky in a fucking tank.

Lessons Armored could learn from Tropic Thunder

Saturday night The Beefcake and I made big plans to stay in and watch movies. We started with Armored, then moved on to Tropic Thunder, and finished things up with a little Die Hard.

And that is how I realized why Tropic Thunder is a much better movie than Armored.

But Emily, you may say, Tropic Thunder is an action movie parody film filled with silliness and Robert Downey Jr in blackface, while Armored is a serious contained thriller. How can you possibly compare two films that have nothing in common besides their complete lack of female characters? Well I shall tell you.

Tropic Thunder is supposed to be a silly movie while Armored is supposed to be this serious character piece, but that ridiculous parody film has way more heart.
I have not read the screenplay; this is based only on seeing the film.

Spoilers for both films to follow.

I now present to you Two Reasons why Tropic Thunder is a Better Film than Armored, by Emily Blake

1) All the actors have something to do.

In Armored, almost every line worth having went to Matt Dillon. A few of them went to Columbus Short who played the guard trapped in the truck, and every now and then they threw a bone to Milo Ventimiglia as he lay on the floor bleeding to death. Laurence Fishburne sneered, Skeet Urich whimpered, Amaury Nolasco tried to look Muslim, and Jean Reno did.... um.... stood around..... made faces? Is that what he did? You honestly could have removed his entire character from the story and it would have made no difference at all to the film. With the exception of Jean Reno, every character got a five minute scene to do some acting, I guess to make up for the fact that they spent the rest of the movie watching Matt Dillon talk. Why bother getting good actors if you're going to make them stand around and say nothing the whole movie?

Now let's look at Tropic Thunder. What's Jack Black's story? He's a heroin addict, and by the end of the film he has faced his addiction and attempted to conquer it. Brandon Jackson has to admit that under all that bravado was a gay man who likes to sew. Robert Downey Jr has to acknowledge that he's a white Australian man who may have to drop character in order to find himself. Ben Stiller has to stop worrying about whether or not he is an "actor" and do the job at hand. Each of these characters needs to admit the truth about the world they live in, and they all get an opportunity to explore that theme. Heck, even Danny McBryde's character gets to deal with the fact that his hero let him down. Everybody has something cool to do.

2) A character struggles with betrayal

Matt Dillon's character in Armored practically helped raise Columbus Short's character. He got him into the armored car business and considers himself a mentor to the kid because Short's dad mentored him back in the day. The film spends a lot of time making sure we know this through on-the-nose dialogue. But when the new guy locks himself in the armored car and refuses to go along with the con now that it's gone off the rails, it takes Dillon's character about three seconds to decide they should force him out and shoot him. There's absolutely no conflict there. Don't you think he would have tried to find another solution? Let's imagine it's Fishburne's character who wants to kill the kid. Dillon would be opposed to that, and they'd argue, so not only do we get more conflict but we give Fishburne something to do, which addresses problem number 1. And Skeet. Poor Skeet Ulrich. We've never even seen these two characters talk before, and all the sudden we're expected to believe that Skeet is going to go against Dillon the bully to save this new guy. It's conflict slapped onto a scene, not drawn out of the natural reactions of the characters.

And somehow in that final confrontation we get this meaningful look between two guys who used to be friends. Why? They stopped being friends a long time ago as soon as Matt Dillon decided he wasn't conflicted about murder. That deep look between men moment means nothing now.

So now let's look at Tropic Thunder. Matthew McConaughey's character, Peck, LOVES Ben Stiller's Tugg Speedman. Like, LOVE loves. We know this because he has a Scorcher VI poster HUGE on the wall behind him, and because when Tugg calls, his phone plays "Sometimes When We Touch." Now that ring tone is played for a laugh, but it's also very telling about the way Peck feels about his client. So when Tom Cruise offers him the opportunity to forget about Tugg in exchange for a jet. And for a second you don't know what he's going to do. The look on his face says he's considering betraying his friend. Then, when he decides to fight for Tugg, he does everything within his power to convince the studio mogul to change his mind. It creates great conflict, and again - it gives the character something cool to do other than watch one guy make decisions.

I've heard the screenplay for Armored was amazing, so I assume this is a result of an unfortunate trip through the production machine, but whatever the cause, it failed to engage me as much as Ben Stiller's comic masterpiece.

Thoughts on the film: Monsters

I spent five whole days with no Internet save one daily email check. That was weird, yet somehow freeing. I did not go through the amount of withdrawal I expected, probably because I was distracted by snow.

And Monsters. Stepdad got Monsters on Demand Sunday night.

Monsters is an independent film about a man and woman who must cross an infected zone on the Mexico/USA border filled with giant alien creatures in order to get home.

This film was listed as a horror movie, which it 100% is NOT. If anything it's a drama with suspense elements, which makes it a bit of a challenge. It doesn't fit any particular category. The closest thing I could think of was a low budget Close Encounters, but even that doesn't seem right.

I'd seen enough articles about this film that I wasn't really surprised when it wasn't scary, but Stepdad was disappointed. He liked the film, but it wasn't what he intended to watch. He thought he was going to see a horror film, when in fact it was...

SLIGHT SPOILER

...a quiet metaphor for the illegal immigration issue symbolized by peaceful, misunderstood invading aliens who are attacked by military forces.

END SLIGHT SPOILER

It was a terrific film. Only the two leads were played by actors - everybody else was a local Mexican, allowed to ad lib the dialogue. And according to Boxoffice Mojo it cost $500,000 to make.

Let me repeat that. $500,000. With big giant beautiful aliens.

So I find this film fascinating. It's called Monsters, and Monsters is the perfect title from an artistic perspective, but if you consider the marketing it's a terrible title. Monsters implies a scary movie, and it's listed under Horror, but someone who loves a movie like Hostel would throw spitballs at the screen if they picked this up thinking those two films belonged anywhere near each other.

It's a film that could only be made outside the studio system because it does not fit neatly into a box. Good thing it was so cheap to make or it would have disappeared into oblivion. As it is, it had trouble in the states finding an audience, and that's a shame. Apparently it got a lot of love in Russia.

Make Undercovers better

I really want to like Undercovers. The pilot was okay - not great, not even remotely as good as the Alias and Lost pilots - but good enough that I liked its potential. But now....

These two people were spies for years before they met. They traveled around the world lying to everyone they met, doing lord knows how many morally questionable things to get the job done. Yet they don't appear to have any secrets from each other.  Their "fights" are more like cute little foreplay. They just love each other so much that they know each other sooooo well and just want to protect each other, but not at the risk of sacrificing professional respect. It's like the fucking Cleavers with guns.

And the other spy guy, the hot white guy, he used to date the wife. Now he works with the wife and husband and they all get along. He doesn't really want the wife back - he jokes about it, but he's got a lot of other irons in the fire. The husband isn't particularly jealous, sort of mildly annoyed.

Speaking of jealousy, nobody's a better spy than anybody else. There's no real competition between them.

I don't tune into shows like this to watch the mission. I don't give a shit about the mission. I tune in to watch how the mission affects the relationship of a married couple, but so far the mission doesn't seem to affect them much at all.

Give one of them a horrible secret. Make one member of the group HATE another member of the group they're forced to work with. Make one of them kick so much ass on a mission while the other one ends up looking like an idiot. For heaven's sake, give us some genuine conflict, not this surfacy cute shit we've been getting. I'd say Undercovers does not need to be Chuck, but even Chuck has constant relationship conflict. So instead I say, Undercovers, be the edgy Chuck. Please.

Snow White and the Huntsman

There's been a lot of talk this week on all the boards about Snow White and the Huntsman and the $3 million sale. And wow, that's a hell of a sale, and I'm happy as hell for writer Evan Daugherty. The pacing of the script is terrific and he's obviously a gifted writer.

But I'm not sure what made this script worth so much money. My best guess is the PG rating. Most of the retold fairy tales out now seem to have R ratings.

In Snow White, there are evil fairies who are kind of mean although not in any memorable way, which would seem kind of edgy, I guess, had Killing on Carnival Row not been about fairy prostitutes.

It's retelling of a fairy tale, but it seems like every ten minutes a new fairy tale pops up with some kind of modern take. It's so trendy to retell fairy tales that I looked on Project Gutenberg a month ago to see what kind of cool Grimm tales I had overlooked. Do you know most of them are like three paragraphs long?

The consensus among those of us who've never actually made any money writing screenplays is, we don't get it. The script has some major dialogue issues and overall is kind of predictable except in places where the characters defy logic. On the one hand, it was easy to read. I had no trouble making it to the end, and I'm somebody who regularly gives up when shit gets boring. On the other hand, I just didn't get the wow factor.

I wish I understood. Does anybody get why this script made so much money? Is it the PG thing? I'd like to understand so I too can make that much money.

A lesson from Raising Hope

I like to catch the pilots every season, so I just watched Raising Hope.
First of all, I love Garret Dillahunt. I love his voice, I love his clever redneck personality, I love his bone structure, I love that he can whip in and out of comedy and drama at the drop of a hat.

Now that that's out of the way, watching this show felt like swimming in floaties.

These people are supposed to be poor white trash rednecks.  I did not believe for one goddamn second that anyone ever involved in this show actually spent any time in a white trash home. Poor people are depressing; the only show that ever made that shit funny was Roseanne, and that's only because those people were so horrible you laughed at how glad you were that you weren't them. And no, Married With Children doesn't count because that was a fantasy white trash home.

Anyway, on this show they say some white trashy things, but they do it with complete enunciation and verb agreement and their clothes are clean.

I'm all for defying stereotypes, but first you have to embrace them. There's a moment on this show where the white trash dad and the white trash mom share a moment where you get that they love each other. They've been together since high school, but they seem to be a perfect match. Now, this would be a nice twist on the stereotype except it's not surprising in the least since these people don't really seem all that white trashy.

And while we're at it, speaking with a Southern accent does not automatically make you white trash. And fuck off with the assumption that it does.
Is it wrong to hope that show gets canceled so Garret Dillahunt can spend more time doing things I like? That seems wrong, but still kind of correct.