W2 - Wendy to the Second Power

One thing about Ron Howard (good old Opie!) is that he can direct a movie well, where the plot moves along in a snappy pace, the POV is not too arty but adds a little extra to the visuals, and everybody turns in a solid performance. That's pretty much my opinion of ANGELS AND DEMONS, the Part II of the DA VINCI CODE series. Even though it's from a book written by Dan Brown and set in character Robert Langdon's (Tom Hanks) life before the Da Vinci code stuff.

For that reason, I was a little, "Who is SHE?" about the Dr. Vittoria Vetra physicist character. Audrey Tautou was so memorable in the first movie, and surely Agent Sophie and Langdon began a long-term relationship from that adventure? But you only see her as a photo at Langdon's home...

Like many folks, I found Ewen McGregor in priest's robes as the Congomongo (or whatever; they took some Vatican term and made a fake position of power of it for the purposes of the story) to be somewhat erotically charged. Everytime he's used to play someone spiritual or sickly, nope, I don't buy it. He always seems lusty and earthy to me no matter what he plays. (Seeing him buck nekkid in THE PILLOW BOOK all those years ago imprinted me bad, maybe?)

The plot and its 4 deaths to prevent each an hour apart at certain mystical locations only sussed by doing a sort of geocaching, where the powers that be fight Langdon, but some secretly support him, all that is fine. There's a point when I realized that a character was being so purely sacrificial, and the background had been set up for that so it made sense, and I confess I leaked a few tears... It was dramatic, and the special effects were both metaphorical and fascinating.

But then it's a twisty who-done-it, and it twists so crazy much that by the end, I was like "Wait, how could that plan even work?" Meaning the whole logic underpinning the whole movie was rank suckage. It's still a fun ride! But at the end you wonder if Dan Brown and the screenwriters even knew what the underlying story was.

Saw this UP movie last week as a small break in my marathon of screenplay editing. Boy, it's delightful! Cranky old Ed Asner does a great job of voicing a sad, moribund 78-year-old man. But I REALLY loved the other voices. Jordan Nagai, a darling young Asian American actor (see him here uncomfortable next to the 3D costume of Russell) voiced Russell, and he was never false or even boring for one tiny second. Just precious! Wonderful energy, a wonderful obsessive POV (obsession is the greatest gift to humor, man), touching, and still with a recognizably Asian sound to his voice. I also loved Dug, the doofus dog, who was voiced by the co-director and co-screenwriter, Bob Peterson. Dug had a voice, thanks to a high-tech collar designed by his master. And what Dug said and how he said it was the same EXACT way I make up dog voices in my head.

At one point Dug looks up with round, hurt eyes and says, "I hid under the house because I love you, that's why, and I'm very sad that you might be mad at me." Another character named Kevin has no dialog, just squawking, but that's a wonderful creation of a character too. My cat Tucker has a vastly more dog-like personality (I love you all the time, hey is that food you're eating, wait a minute I'm coming too) than an aloof cat personality. I hear his voice somewhat like Dug's...

I really would love to find a place to buy the merit badges that Russell wears! Each one is a gorgeous design in embroidery, and several are clever with in-joke things. This Website on movie easter eggs tells some of the details.... I'd wear several of them on my coats and sweaters, were they marketed!

There's been some discussion on a list I'm on about how this movie just is not as charming / moving / engaging / whatever as WALL-EE. And that's true. But Wall-EE was an extremely stylized robot character who could only communicate through squeaks, beeps, a scant few "facial" gestures... when a character is so non-human, we humans watching invest a huge amount of brain magic to keep up with the story. That was the genius of the design of Wall-EE, and why they deserved their Oscars. Also, Wall-EE was a story about finding your true love and living with her forever. UP is about losing your true love and finding some small solace in other relationships until you can join her on The Other Side.

Very different underlying emotional message.

The new NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM is pretty fun, with some chuckles, and a lively Amy Adams as Amelia Earheart spouting spunky 30's phrases. Many of our favorites from the 2006 movie are there. Ben Stiller of course. The little diorama guys, Jedidiah and Octavius, who now are best buds, the cowboy and the centurian. Teddy Roosevelt has found love with Sacajawea. The cavemen and the monkey, the Easter Island "dum-dum head" head...

Now Ben Stiller has become a Ronco/Ginzu Knife type of inventor. Much like the TV show personalities in my comedy script I will finish polishing this weekend -- CAN'T SAY NO. Something makes him go back to the New York Museum of Natural History, where he learns the exhibits are being boxed up and sent to the Smithsonian. Including the magical Egyptian scroll that makes all the exhibits animate each night and have wild adventures. Somehow this is an event he needs to prevent... because...? The plot mechanism isn't really strong, obviously.

But there are some new characters brought to life, including Hank Azaria (I love him!) as evil Pharoah Kamenrah who does a wonderful toffee-nosed Boris Karloff English accent with a Castillian lisp. He's got some funny scenes where you know he's riffing ad libs, and they keep them in. Kamenrah plans to take over the world, and must be stopped! Oh, and since there are 15+ museums in the Smithsonian, they have lots of more contraptions and critters and people to play with. A feature in this movie is that the magic makes paintings and photos live and visitable. The physics of it all really doesn't work plausibly, but it has some funny stuff and a set-up that pays off at the very end.

It's doing well in the box office. I love visiting the Smithsonian, so hopefully this helps them get more traffic and sell more gift shop stuff. Every time I go visit Samily, we do the Smithsonian at least once. In fact, their condo is built on a hill that Wilbur Wright flew a plane to from Washington DC during a special demo on the use of flight for federal purposes. Planes are a big deal in this movie, as is the whole of Washington DC. Stuff like that is fun.

But the movie isn't great. It doesn't have much of an emotional arc or a heart at the center. And it, like the first one, cannot get the magic to work out logically. ( Spoilers Behind the Cut... )

Saw STAR TREK yesterday evening in Austin's only iMAX, so it was huge! A huge screen totally filled with those fights and space battles and ice you-know-whats. Man, blew my mind! I'd heard the visuals were good, and I really agree. The TV show, bless its corny heart, never did a single impressive effect. Goofy aliens, easily sussed tractor beaming, etc.

But this! Whoa Mama! The scary Romulan ship is actually scary! The space scenes are glorious. Even the dorky polyester costumes from the old days have been redone with better fitting, textured, comfy looking costumes still in the same style and colors.

The iMAX ticket is $14 ($12 + $2 service fee online, and you HAVE to buy in advance because the 400-person theater sells out every show, days in advance) compared to $8 for a regular theater. But it's totally worth it for big movies like this.

I liked lots of stuff about the movie. The origin tales could've been ho-hum, since we know so much about these characters. But they were fun, and the casting was fun. The Chekov kid didn't look like Walter Koenig, but he's truly of Russian descent and his accent was vicked gutt. (And I'd seen Anton Yelchin as a child actor and didn't realize he was Russian!) They made Uhara a real special character with top-notch hearing and linguistic abilities, which I liked, since she was so much like Kirk's executive secretary in the old TV show. Zoe Saldaba was fiery and I very much loved the sly covert relationship they put into this film that makes you look at the old TV show and think, hee, what could have been happening on the down-low!

Simon Pegg played Scotty as wild and briliant; though he didn't look like James Doohan, he was fun. "Capt'n, I'm givin' it all I got!" got cheers. Oh, they made Pegg wear dark contacts and dye his blond hair brown, but still... Chris Pine, the kid playing Kirk, was a big, arrogant, brawly mess, which fit pretty well with both the series and how William Shatner played the captain. Pine didn't... Pause! ... for... Dramatic!... effect in his speaking, and that was okay with me. Nobody can do that anymore ever without making it come off like a shout-out to Shatner. Loved Karl Urban (who I remember mostly as the main bad guy in CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK) getting the squint and dyspeptic dialogue of Dr. Leonard McCoy right.

And Zachary Quinto has that unusual face and dark hair, so he was a fun Spock in some ways. I'd heard he felt he was born to play the role, and indeed, they didn't consider anyone but him. Still, his performance was not as faithful as it needed to be. He didn't work very hard on the voice, I felt like. There's a clipped and dry way that Leonard Nimoy did his dialog, and Quinto was Vulcan-like but not Nimoy-like. And there were only two times he lifted one brow and it seemed like it strained him. Plus he's taller than Nimoy, and they weirdly let the two actors stand side-by-side in some scenes to show the discrepancy.

The origin plot was fun, but the contemporary menace was only so-so. We had a Romulan named Nero (?! too much baggage in human history!) who looked like the shave-headed tattooed bikers written up in INK magazine. He had a standard sort of sob story in his history that was driving him to do a series of obvious, even banal, acts in revenge for something he blamed unreasonably on one person, thus driving the plot. Plus there's a magical element used they don't even attempt to sci-fi up... Luckily for the fun of the movie, this stuff is secondary and you really get into how the characters interact to form the Enterprise we know and love.

The voice talent on MONSTERS VERSUS ALIENS is good. Lots of clever jokes for the characters, especially for Seth Rogen's Bob, a genial spineless creature with no brain but much empathy. The evil alien invading earth was voiced in a fun way by Rainn Wilson, who has awesome comedic timing. As Susan aka Ginormica, Reece Witherspoon is sweet and sympathetic, as you'd guess.

But the story is kinda obvious, once the premise is established. The arc of Susan, the main character, feels like a so-what? Where you got choked up in WALL-EE and THE INCREDIBLES and even an old animation, LILO AND STITCH, this didn't work the emotions much at all. ( I'll tell you why behind the cut (spoilers)... )

One (I'm in three!) of my screenwriting groups pressed me to join FaceBook since they created a discussion list over there. (sigh) Facebook doesn't play well with my mac Safari, so I have to launch ancient Netscape, and even then I get random scripts that won't run. But okay, I did join. BUT I consider LJ my blog/social site of choice, even though Russians own it now.

But now Facebook has undergone a Tsunami! I've had 12 friends find me just over the weekend, and another 3-4 people I don't recognize. I'm not a good candidate for those areas because I resent the amount of my life spent on the Web already, and how it sucks up time I need for writing and film-watching. And LJ is substantive usually, while Facebook stuff is often people just Tweeting. So I sign on, and interact, but feel like I've been absorbed by the social hive mind...

Reading this I feel chagrin. "Wah, wah, I'm popular!" Complainers never prosper.

So it's 5:30 pm and I haven't written yet, but I have been awesomely productive in Life this weekend:

• got groceries
  
• did laundry
  
• did a load of dishes
  
• worked out at the gym (hard, and don't feel sore!)
  
• bought yellow columbine (a shady flowering bush!) from the farmers market and planted them
  
• raked leaves in my backyard and bagged 4 bags (I'll do the rest another day)
  
• read the Sunday paper
  
• cooked a pot roast dinner in my crockpot (my first crockpot pot roast)
  
• made my reservation at the Outrigger Reef Hotel on Waikiki for the Hawaii Writers Conference (12 days at $158, yikes)
  
• met with my Austin Cats (Blake Snyder screenwriters group) for networking and analysis
  
• saw MONSTERS VERSUS ALIENS, in 3-D (cute but not great, and I will tell you why in a future post)
  
• scrubbed my shower stall with bleach
  
• redid my manicure and pedicure myself

I'm crusted with sweat and leaf mold and garden dirt right now, so the next activity is soaking in the whirlpool tub I was wise enough to add 4 months ago...

Ha, after I just posted about one of my favorite screenwriters and his wonderful adaptation of LITTLE DORRIT, a lesser-known Dickens work, I saw in the Chronicle Andrew Davies is coming to Austin!

It's a free speech this Thursday 4/30 at the UT Blanton Art museum. Starts at 7:30 p.m.

He's smart, he's entertaining. One of the best adapters of our times... The works of Jane Austen, Dickens, George Elliott, Evelyn Waugh, so many of the great works of literature he's turned into wonderful movies...! I am SO THERE!

Well, the weather people kept telling us it would rain today (Sunday) and the bad weather would start late Saturday night. But instead, it's great today! Sunny and warm -- so the Easter egg hunts went off just fine, I bet.

Yesterday I convinced a large number of people from Herdomain and WFND to drive south to an unpaved parking lot to have lunch at Flip-Happy Crepes. That's an airstream trailer run by a couple of ladies who trained in France. Now they make these wonderful savory and sweet crepes, oh man! I haven't been since the warmer weather last year, so they changed up my favorite one: pork and gruyere is now ham and gruyere. I really liked it better with the pulled pork because they had stewed it with many subtle seasonings. But it was still good! Plus their lemon curd and blueberry crepe for dessert.

The weather didn't cooperate, however. It began sprinkling rain at 1 pm. Nor did Austin's roads! There was a dog parade downtown. so they closed OFF a major road. Traffic was horrible, and many of us were late. By the time we got to Flip-Happy, the line was 20+ people long. And they move slow there. People kept turning to me and being mad about the traffic and the parking. Ain't my fault! Plus that was the first time I'd gone there on a Saturday...

J4 showed up to lunch with us, though she's not in any of the above groups. She knew a friend, Madelaine, well, plus chatted people up. Afterwards, she and I went to TOKYO!, an indie movie from France & Japan made up of three surreal films by three different directors. The Paris adventures of Monsieur Merde seemed to be a thinly veiled slap at white racists who go to other countries and behave badly. They were all interestingly done!

Plus yesterday I started the daunting yardwork I need to do to get my beds and yard back in order. I'm against watering grass in a drought (which we've been in for 2 years) so part of my lawn is sad looking. And the backyard is mostly stone pavement buried under leaves. I keep putting off non-essentials until I've finished my final draft of my CAN'T SAY NO script. It was supposed to be done by 3/31, but nope! I did however get the synopsis and first 10 pages polished and emailed to the Hawaii Writers Conference for the Masters in Screenwriting retreat.

And now I'm cooking up a mess o' cajun beans in my crockpot. 15 varieties of beans. I just add the sausage, garlic, onion and lemon.

Ha! The "old, legendary and lost until now film from 1957," ALIEN TRESPASS, was a special event this afternoon. The producer/ director was there himself. They chose Austin as a pre-release spot so people (like me) could blog about it and get word-of-mouth going. Free movie! And Austin Film Festival, the local sponsor, was smart enough to find FACT and me, the SlugTribe coordinator, and let us know people could see for free just for RSPVing.

The theater was almost full too! Lots of convention fans, others I knew, like Matthew, were there. My buddy Deb came with me* and she loved the film. I thought it was okay. It was filmed in a mere 15 days, y'all! That's amazingly fast for a feature. And it was period, with the right clothes, hair, vehicles. It had those highly colored stagey sets from the 50's, and it was done as a horror, drama. Not a satire, and the humor came out of the 50s corniness. I always find Eric McMormack appealing, and he's good as the nerdy astronomer and then later as Urp, the astronomer's body with an alien inhabiting it. The dialog is 50s-style schlocky, and the one-eyed bad alien is so awful he's good -- kinda like a Dalek.

So obviously it's not from 1957, but from 2008, but the Alien Trespass Website is cute with the funny fake story. Plus you can win things -- the posters they made to look like old posters, and even some iPods.

According to R.W. Goodwin who was co-exec-producer of the X-FILES for its first 5 years, the movie is a cross between WAR OF THE WORLDS, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL and ?IT CAME FROM SPACE?

Plus they had some aimless odd goth folks there who I think were supposed to be performers, but they just ambled nerdily -- or in the case of their large, bald leader in a cape, lumbered heavily -- around the audience giving out buttons and stickers and chatting people up. Live Evil is their group, and they are goofy folks trying to be bad-ass. I don't think they realize they're as funny as they are...!


*a free movie, perfect for a friend who's got almost nil income but is too proud to let people treat her -- we'd just had a conversation about that & my position is that people want to do special things for friends and family so they can spread the good energy (in this case, abundance, since my income is good). It's up to the treatee to accept it with grace and realize that when they are flush in the future, they can spread the good energy themselves... So I got Deb to come, then later "forced" her to get coffee and a danish, my treat.

Bromance, Judd Apatow style, shines through this movie, though he himself had nothing to do with I LOVE YOU MAN. It's so well cast, has such an interesting and likeable lead in Paul Rudd, that, while the overall plot is nothing so great, there are enough appealing moments that it's a fun movie. And it's a sort of modern thing to have a guy so sweet, so evolved, he doesn't really find fun hanging with the guys. It's never bothered the Paul Rudd character until the issue of a best man for his upcoming marriage makes him feel like a freak for having no guy friends. When he takes out personals for a best friend, goes out on man dates, and has his mom fix him up, the scenes play like classic boy/girl romance frustrations, which is fun. The guy who's whacked out on sports. The guy whose photo in his ad is 40 years out of date. The guy who moves too fast, etc. But just like in real life, when you give up on planning and scheming, the perfect person walks in and starts eating your sandwich.

The meeting scene between Rudd and Segal is fun too; insightful for Segal's character, and ingratiating and sweet for Rudd's character. Even though it's classic guy body-noises humor, it works well for bonding.

Paul Rudd really works his adorableness in this. People have written how adorable he can be no matter what, but I disagree. He can play cynical and douchebaggy pretty well (KNOCKED UP, 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN). I also saw Judd Apatow's personal outtakes clip at AFF one year where Rudd looked into the camera and said some of the most godawful crass stuff a man has ever spoken. Luckily, Apatow pays his editors well and that stuff never makes it on the screen, but he does encourage it in his movies, and Rudd can match him and surpass him for grossness. What this movie does is establish that Rudd expertise as his unexplored macho side. Rudd, the sensitive metrosexual guy, says these crass things and flinches. Or butchers the totally dude-ness of the made-up retort or nickname. And flinches. He's just such a good and cute flincher! It's what makes the movie. There's an arc to it because at the very end, he says several goofy dude-ish things with no grimace. And we cheer!

Jason Segal, at 6'4", can be somewhat intimidating when he shows testosterone-y rage (which is why his Marshmallow/Marshall character on HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER is such a schlubby, soft guy), so he maybe overdoes it a little on this movie. He's yelling, chest thumping men on the Venice boardwalk... But how do you balance a huge, barrel-chested guy like Segal out? With a bit part for hulking (!) Lou Ferrigno, playing himself. Just to whittle Segal down some more, you add a scene where Ferrigno (politely!) puts Segal in a sleeper hold.

Did you know that Rashida Jones is the daughter of music mogul Quincy Jones and Peggy Lipton? Her mom was the MOD SQUAD babe! Her dad must also be biracial, because Rashida appears much more Jewish than black... Poor Rashida isn't given much to do in this movie, but she makes her character as Rudd's new fiancee sweet and supportive enough that we root for the marriage even when it appears to be breaking up the bromance that we are much more invested in. And since the story wisely identifies being immature and afraid of commitment as a personality failure, we want Rudd to choose the marriage over the new friendship.