W2 - Wendy to the Second Power

Got a ticket at the Bob Bullock 3D iMAX theater for next weekend for AVATAR! I've been hearing about this film from various sources for the past 5 years. One Hollywood friend saw a rough cut more than a year ago and pronounced "industry changing." And now I'll see it on that huge, surrounding screen! It's bound to be mind-blowing. Even at $14.50 a ticket, I'm still jazzed.

I like that it's got such a good SciFi premise (travel to a distant planet with blue-skinned aliens) and a good character problem (paraplegic soldier who can get a fully functioning body again by immersing in an avatar) and a good message (we must develop a conscience to make white men stop exploiting and destroying other cultures).

Austin Film Festival had the regional premier of the well-produced biopic THE YOUNG VICTORIA this Wednesday at the Paramount. I enjoy watching Emily Blunt, who has charisma to burn no matter what part she's in. She was the snotty, highly strung assistant in THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA. She played a self-destructive American in SUNSHINE CLEANING. But my favorite part for her was as Prudy in THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB, where, in a large ensemble cast of excellent actors, she created the most memorable and quirky performance with a wonderful emotional arc.

So she's a good choice to play the young Queen Victoria, in her time from the to-be queen, and then her coronation. Followed by her choosing the best suitor for her husband, then figuring out how to make him feel worthwhile to the kingdom. She does a good "calm face" showing emotion underneath. And she passes for young Victoria pretty well from the paintings of the time. The other good choice is totally British actor Rupert Friend as a dead ringer for Albert. The foo-foo hair, the extremely sweet smile, the really good German accent. He was a babe, and Victoria liked him best from the first. Miranda Richardson was also good, and she's making a latter-day career of playing women of the British royal line, it seems. Paul Bettany could've been good, but the script gave him hardly anything to work with, see below.

The costumes and sets were so so gorgeous! And authentic -- they go into Buckingham Palace, the real joint, for a key scene. That's one of the benefits of getting Sarah Ferguson, her royal something, as a producer. But I fear that also made the story tamer than what was needed...

The problems? The script is lame indeed. A few high points, but no real dramatic arc to keep us invested. It's that thing about history: we know the result. She married Albert, had 300 kids and ruled for 900 years. I'm really surprised at how little was done to educate us about the political and historical facts about her taking the crown in a way that had emotional resonance. This was a script by Julian Fellowes (loved GOSFORD PARK) too! They resorted to white words on a black screen to set up how awful was the Order of Regency. Only we never did get a clear idea why the Parliament wanted and the royalty feared it. How would it have been so different from how it was already?

Much of the dialog was unremarkable. Yes, there was the famous rant by King William, her ailing uncle, where he fawned on Victoria but spat at her controlling mother. But other dialog, especially the love connection with her and Albert, not so great. And the direction was flat as could be. In something like this, you must focus on inanimate objects sometimes to support the story telling. You have to vary close-ups, medium shots, and some full shots. The director in this movie did almost everything medium shot. Very static, and with the lack of arc in the scripts, made the movie even more bogged down.

First, saw a very weird (and the screenwriter had to identify what a character "was" to us afterwards) movie at the Alamo Lakecreek tonight, LITTLE FISH, STRANGE POND. One of the main characters was played, with an American accent, by Callum Blue. And Callum was there in person, and I talked to him! He did a really good, soulful job with an erratic story.

Callum Blue was the drug-addled dead Brit Mason in DEAD LIKE ME. Now he's joined SMALLVILLE as Commander Zod. Because of that, he's bulked up some in muscle -- not the scrawny punk he was. In odd timing, I was just talking to my brother who loves Callum Blue.... hehe

About his movie: it had Matthew Modine as an ambiguously supernatural person. I confess I was watching the whole time to figure out who was real and who people didn't see or hear. There were some quirky and fascinating parts, but mostly it seemed gratutiously weird. And it did that thing Hollywood guys do now that makes me urp -- use serial killing for pure shock value and never give us any depth from such a horrific topic with awful blood-filled scenes. Men! But it had shown once at AFF already, and this night, out in the boonies, the theater was oversold & they had to turn people away. So it's definitely got buzz. Glad I saw it; don't know if it'll get much distribution because it has that wacky plot thing going on.

Saturday I saw a good panel at AFF with Damon Lindelof, co-creator of LOST and producer of the recent STAR TREK movie. And he's just finishing up a movie COWBOYS AND ALIENS. Also on the panel was Roberto Orci, screenwriter for STAR TREK, FRINGE, COWBOYS AND ALIENS, ALIAS, ... And David Hayter, who wrote the X-MEN movies and is also an actor and martial arts person -- and could make a living as a stand-up comedian, he's so quick on his feet. Some of the things they said were useful for SF/F writers, and just cool stuff to know.

• All the mysteries in LOST have an answer (the polar bear, the recorded message in French, the smoke monster, the dead who appear, ...) because Lindelof says the weird stuff doesn't go into the scripts unless they know the answer. What's sometimes in flux is how the reveal happens, but they're all meant to be answered. One exception: Mr. Eko was part of an answer but the actor wanted to leave so they had to kill off his character & then scramble for a new answer.
  
• Hayter changed the end of THE WATCHMEN because he was writing the adaptation the year after 9/11 and couldn't face putting a big squid in downtown NYC as an alien-terrorist act. Plus Alan Moore had his characters say such a horrible act would make the world stop fighting and work on peace, but we were too cynical to believe that now. He says the story arc Alan Moore did for Dr. Manhattan already set up the promise and premise of what he did -- he figures Moore would've ended the graphic novel series similarly if he'd had time (he was famously rushed at the end).
  
• They all agreed that you do NOT start a SF/F script with machines in space, robots doing something, fantasy world weirdness. You must start with the human story first, have something people can relate to. Then you expand out. Like in the new STAR TREK movie, where there's a birth happening before the ship is attacked.
  
• The strongest thing you can do with world-building, they all agreed, was put the SF/F stuff around something with emotional impact. Have it be integral to the character arcs. Like they downplayed the beam-me-down technology development because they couldn't make it important to the relationships.

Crappy photo from the balcony of the filmmakers and NASA retired personnel from the actual Apollo13 mission and movie. Left to Right: Clint Howard, the moderator woman, Jerry Bostick (ground crew), Bill Broyles (screenwriter), Jon Aaron (ground crew), Ron Howard, Captain Jim Lovell (astronaut, Tom Hanks played him), Sy Liebergot (ground crew), Mike Corenbluth (production design), and Al Reinert (screenwriter).

This was the Saturday show at the Paramount downtown for AFF, where we saw APOLLO13, which holds up amazingly well and rightly won all those Oscars years ago. They lined up all these chairs on the stage afterward and these awesome people came together to discuss and answer questions. Really a wonderful moment!

From the AFF program book:
Austin Film Festival and Ron Howard, in association with NASA, present a special screening of Apollo 13! Special guests in attendance include Director Ron Howard, Screenwriters Bill Broyles, Jr. and Al Reinert, Actor Clint Howard, Commander of the Apollo 13 mission Captain Jim Lovell, and retired NASA Mission Control advisors Jon Aaron, Sy Liebergot and Jerry Bostick, who each played important roles in the 1970 Apollo 13 crisis, as well as Production Designer Michael Corenblith.

Saw ZOMBIELAND. It doesn't have much of a plot, just a bunch of connected incidents, then it ends. But it's a lot of fun! Dark, bloody red humor. Suspense. Scenes that are lots of fun to watch (albeit, the plot doesn't make some stuff plausible so you wonder why the characters would do such a dufus thing). And the performances are deadpan funny and energetic.

Emma Stone is perfect as the hard-as-nails con woman protective of Abigail Breslin, her kid sister. Her massive amounts of eyeliner and bucktooth pout are classic for that type of girl.

And Woody Harrelson channels ?someone? to become a character opposite of himself. He's a pacifist, vegetarian, drives alternative energy cars in real life. In this, he's a black hole of zombie destruction. He just really enjoys it! My favorite line was uttered by him: "Thank God for rednecks!" He gets a bang even out of lines that are only so-so. Love it that he took 5 years off to be with his family, and now that he's returned to acting, he's gonzo-great!

Jesse Einsenberg isn't playing against his own character. He's a nerdy, withdrawn, germ-phobic guy. Since he's our point-of-view character, we get his rules to live by animated on the screen in funny ways. I liked them!

Plus the story arc, such as it is, involves him wishing for, nutting-up, and achieving something important to him. So there's an "awwwhhhh" moment at the end that makes him a lot more engaging.

Oh, and don't go read IMDB on this one. It'll give away the celebrity surprise that happens in the middle. It is a fun (and meta) surprise too!

Saw myself for the first time on the big screen -- woo hoo! In the roller derby movie, WHIP IT, by Austin screenwriter Shauna Cross, early in the movie, Ellen Page as Bliss sneaks away from her tiny Texas town Bodean to come to Austin on a beat-up white bus. You can totally see me sitting in the bus when she gets out! Ostensibly she's near the roller rink, but really, they unloaded her in front of Electric Ladyland, it being so wild and recognizably Austin.

The Austin touches ("Hi, how are you" froggie and Waterloo and etc.) are fun too! But actually, almost all the movie was filmed in/near Detroit. Though throughout it's claimed to be Austin, and Jimmy Fallon as the roller derby announcer used Austin in most of his spiels. he he!

Ellen Page came off as so endearing and sympathetic in the movie -- which just shows what a good actress she is. Because that is NOT her. When you're around her in person, she's got no personality, well, withdrawn and cold. At one point the bus driver asked me to call out to her about something, and she gave me a look like "you do NOT get to talk to ME!" Drew Barrymore, with many more years of celebrity behind her, is a warm and professional person. She made a point to thank all of us extras at the end of the day, very genuinely. It was Drew's first feature-length movie to direct, plus she played a Hurl Scout teammate.

The movie is a lot of fun, and impressive for how it draws dozens of supporting and secondary characters very strongly. The best friend of Bliss and the manager of the restaurant she works... the girls in the beauty pageants... especially the many girls on the roller derby teams! Bliss's parents, played by Oscar-winner Marcia Gay Harden and Daniel Stern, have a real dimension to them, as if they existed before the movie (before Bliss arrived, even) and are funny but warm too. Andrew Wilson, brother of Owen and Luke, finally gets to act in a movie, not just co-write or direct. He plays scraggly team manager Razor, and he's also really dimensional.

The downside of the movie is: roller derby is pretty hard to follow. Even with some of the diagrams, even with Bliss being a newbie, it's confusing. The movie is shot so that some of the play is quite dramatic! Which can also make it unclear. And they never explained that a jammer in the lead can end the round with a gesture that looks like your hands tapping around your waist. I went with J4 and her niece Helena, and they never did get the rules clear.

But there's lots of action, a love story, a parent/child dynamic, sisterhood within the derby, a 17 year old pretending to be 22 so she's over her head, the weirdness of some small town schticks, beauty pageants, and more. A very rich movie with a lot of heart!

New Zealander Jane Campion is one of the most intriguing women making movies. She's fought the male Hollywood bias to make independent films with fascinating topics. I don't love all of them -- like SWEETIE, which Russ liked and I found weird to the point of nauseating. But certainly THE PIANO and PORTRAIT OF A LADY (Campion does Henry James!).

It was fun to hear that her latest, BRIGHT STAR, was already such a hit at Cannes. It's on a topic interesting to me, mostly because it's an era that Tim Powers covers so well in his wonderfully researched fantasy books: the romantic poets. And it's told from the POV of the historical character most people consider a cipher, or a rampant siren, in the life of the much-more-famous John Keats.

There's a lot to like in BRIGHT STAR, and one big thing to love. The big thing to love: it's about a relationship that ends, one would think, with the death by tuberculosis of Keats, but Campion doesn't write towards that. I've gotten so tired of the movies lately who make a major character's long-expected death the big climax of the movie. That's lazy, built-in melodrama. But Campion has the characters last parting be the main climax, with all its pain and confusion, and bittersweet pretending of a future. And she has the actual announcement of Keats' death create a sort of shift in the relationship and respect of the two other major characters.

The period feels wonderfully real; the muddy back doors into the clotheslines, the rustic kitchens where people hang out when they're relaxing and the parlour is too prim. The dark, cold, awful, rented rooms people with little to no money must live in. What a huge burst of arterial blood coughed up onto sheets looks like. The compotes and other dishes of the day, especially on holidays. Fanny's costumes are both part of her characterization and an indication of the few channels for creativity allowed to a woman in that culture. Oh, they were gorgeous! Unusual and sometimes too idiosyncratic, which, yeah, a woman trying to carve her own niche would do.

Abby Cornish is wonderful as Fanny Brawne. She has to be smart and smart-aleck, pretty enough to have a dozen suitors. Descriptions of the historical person vary, but she was a fashionista for her time, designs and productions of her own hand, and she was considered a popular girl. By her own admission she did not enjoy or understand poetry, which was such a boys' club anyway, but she came to admire and understand it from her relationship with Keats. Cornish is not perfect; sometimes her stiff and clumsy way of moving made me think "21st century girl in a corset." She did too much tucking back of her severe hairdo's, which is a modern girl thing too. But she played the part with no makeup, and she was intelligent and plausibly emotional.

Ben Whishaw is a wonderful actor who is homelier than he needs to be. He's only mid-20's, but even in his teenage years looked like a gnome in making. He's craggy already, with his heavy Neanderthal brow, and he never gets to shave completely in this part. He's been convincing as the murderous savant peasant in PARFUME, then fragile and sad as Sebastian in BRIDESHEAD REVISITED.

He plays a poet just fine because he's such a smart guy (and, if his personal interviews are a clue, extremely soft spoken and probably gay), but is less convincing to me as the potential lover of the robust Cornish. He's so thin and short that once the dramatic challenge of his health arises, he plays a TB patient very convincingly, though. He's famous for an alternate Hamlet he did on the London stage while still only 19-20 years old, so his voice is wonderful for reciting Keats poetry.

In fact, the movie is worth the price of admission to hear both Whishaw and Cornish speak several stanzas of Keats verse; you don't think recitations could take your breath away, but Campion sets up every quoting as something emotion and special. The final credits are done over Whishaw speaking "Ode to a Nightingale" and what you might remember as purple prose from high school English is wonderful.

Paul Schneider as Charles Brown, Keats' friend and jealous protector, is amazing. Hate the guy, but have to empathize with him too. And I defy you to hear his good Scottish brogue and recall that he was born and bred in South Carolina! Kerry Fox as Fanny's quiet, mostly supportive mother really grounds the story, as does Thomas Sangster as Fanny's watchful teenage brother. And her little sister Toots is given several touching moments, and familiar sisterly fighting moments, that little round-eyed, red-haired Edie Martin makes indelible.

One of the best things about the new romcom from the boy's perspective, 500 DAYS OF SUMMER, is the charisma between the two leads. Can Joseph Gordon-Levitt get any cooler? He's just got the most excellent indie career going, and this is after he was the smartly but broadly played kid alien in 3RD ROCK FROM THE SUN. And then Zooey Deschanel has such a charming, stone-head 60's girl vibe. You see her and understand why Joseph's character swoons at first sight. She smiles and you see why he melts like he does. The two actors have announced they plan to do more films together, different types of relationships, throughout their working careers, because they have such a good spark! Starting with this sweet music video (check out Joseph's flips and cossack dancing!)

So their spark is one good thing. Seeing a romcom from a man's POV is an interesting if meta-creepy (spoilers behind the cut) experience. This one has fragmented chronology, which gets to be fun in a meta way (meta, meta, meta -- that's this film). It's even more fun because of the flpping counter that shows you which day(s) of the relationship are being shown. See, her name is Summer. He met, wooed, won, lost and got over her in 500 days. I'm not spoiling nothing because those are the parameters you learn in the first 3 minutes of the film. I especially liked a small detail of the flipping counters: you saw the day number, then went into the scene, and then came back to the same day number for half a second before it flipped to the next one. So you didn't have to wrack your brain "What day did I just see?", you had the two numbers juxtaposed within a second or two. It helped a LOT with the chronology!

And best of all: this had an inappropriate dance sequence! Hah! I love those; every film should have one. This one is also meta because Joseph's character is getting "you the man!" finger guns shot at him by dancing hardhat guys, and breaking into swirly waltzes with strange women on the street, and even getting cool and hip-hop with a whole neighborhood of folks. So cute!

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What's not to like? Well, for every quick, apt, funny scene, there's some overdone and belabored metaphor. Really didn't like his know-it-all 13-year-old sister and her soccer games. Some of those talks between the 25 year old and the 13 year old were queasily inappropriate. Plus it's part of the meta-creepiness. And the greeting card gig; how can somebody make writing 5 cards a week into a 40-hour job? It's in there purely for the metaphorical blurbs they can squeeze in. And by "they," I mean the two guys who wrote the script. Still, way more charming than it needs to be and Zooey Deschanel fully enlivens what is a 2D character.

( Spoilers Behind the Cut... )

I did it, I did it, I completed all the script reading and critiques for Austin Film Festival on Friday night before midnight! Yay!

Turned in my last checked-out and read scripts yesterday after the Austin Screenwriters Group meeting. And that's another big ol' burden off my back!

• Project #1: Complete rewrite of CAN'T SAY NO and submit to AFF and other script contests - DONE
  
• Project #2: Coordinate a one-day writers workshop with script guru Michael Hauge - DONE
  
• Project #3: Read/judge scripts for AFF and get the Producer's Pass - DONE
  
• Project #4: Write a first chapter and do a synopsis for the Hawaii Writers Conference contest of the supernatural mystery I thought of last year: PINKY BLACK AND THE BITERS.

Yes, I do these to myself, but it's in the arena where I am ambitious. Not so ambitious at my dayjob. I believe in giving value for my paycheck. I believe in learning new things and taking on challenges for personal growth. So I do find growth in my dayjobs.

The summer projects of 2009 were mostly about giving myself opportunities in where I hope to transition to full-time someday: being a writer / screenwriter / story developer.

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.