W2 - Wendy to the Second Power

Wow, this not-quite-kids' movie and not-quite-adult movie WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE has made $65 million+ at the box office as of this week. And it's sure to be a monster hit on DVD too. So, good on Spike Jonz for taking a chance with such an odd property.

The lead, an 8-10 year old actor named Max Records (they started filming in 2005) is precocious and perfect. His face, his furious energy, all just wonderful. The grimy wolf costume, just perfect. You see him on talk shows (he's 12 now) showing eerie calmness and a very deliberate way of talking. He's already acting adult-y. But in ths movie, he's a wild boy with all his emotions showing in his face. It's stunning, and surely an award-winning performance. The stories about filming talk about how affectionate and supportive Jonz was to get Max to be in the moment. And it worked!

Catherine Keener was a great mom. Loved the voice talent. You don't often think of a voice actor being filmed huffing and snorting. But James Gandolfini as the biggest, roughest, most emotionally torn of the monsters, acts through his nose too! Lauren Ambrose, Catherine O'Hara, Paul Dano, Forrest Whittaker, Chris Cooper... They played their parts totally straight. Yes, the monsters are stand-ins for the emotions in Max's developing ego-self. But in this, they're given long-standing beefs and gripes and affinities that influence the plot. There's a bull monster who never seems to talk, or play, and he's played by some no-name actor. Was never quite sure what he was supposed to represent.

Because, yes, the script was full of Jungian analysis and metaphors, with plot developments that come right out of the pages of Bruno Bettelheim fairytale analysis. Jonz and Dave Eggerton were working from a kid's book with 8 lines, after all. They did fine at having a family life set-up that gave Max angst to trouble him, home behavior that made him wanting to stay as a wolf-boy king of monsters appealing, incidents and complications in the monster world that resonated with his psyche. The triggering event, that makes Max realize he needs to return home, was too freaking blatant, so lost the magical spell, but most of the rest of it was well done.

I'm not a fan of muppet movies. They don't give me the required suspension of disbelief because I'm always aware of the puppet assembly and the puppeteer working the gears. That happened here, so I'm not saying it's 100% great. But the voice talents were so strong, that I teared up many times over the monsters' heartbreaks. So there you go.

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.

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.

But in happier news, and readjusting my mood here, I found out a second friend from SlugTribe was also a semifinalist in the Austin Film Festival contest! I already knew Patrick Sullivan had made it to finals with his drama screenplay SAWDUST CEASARS, set in the London crime underground during the Mod era, culminating in the Brighton Riots where the Mods and Rockers had an all-out battle.

This was Patrick's first screenplay! And the first contest he entered it in! He made it to the top 5 out of 4500 or so screenplays. W0ot! He was funny today too; studying the pitching panels because he has to learn to talk about it. Even cooler, we watched a panel with Jeff Graup of Graup Entertainment*, a manager/producer. After, Patrick told Jeff he'd enjoyed his comments, and Jeff Graup totally remembered Patrick's script and started giving him life and career lessons! That's the kind of attention you KILL for at these things...

Then color me surprised when I saw that Matthew Bey was a semifinalist in the Science Fiction category. I had no idea he was writing screenplays. For him also it was his first script and first contest. Man! He described THE DORM as being about crazy dorm life, only with cyborgs.

Both guys will now get to be on special panels reserved only for the semifinalists, and also will be written up in the Producers' Book so will have several months of many people asking to read their scripts. Schmoozing will be so much easier and this contest makes them golden for Hollywood folks looking for new talent.

It'll be fun to watch how the rest of the conference works out for them... It goes until Sunday afternoon.


*Alvaro locked his sights on Jeff Graup and got him to agree to go to dinner with some of us! Jeff was on my shortlist, and Al took that seriously. Good on him!

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.

I watch TV. I don't watch all TV; I find the shows I enjoy that are also affecting the cultural zeitgeist, and those I try to keep up with. The Emmy Show was fun for me (except for the reality TV part) because I knew what was going on and who deserved to win what. But also frustrating because I refuse to buy more than basic cable, so I've never actually seen an episode of MAD MEN... So here are some comments about the new season.

F-Bomb on SNL
We heard just last month that Lorne Michaels fired, in what seemed to be a polite way, some of the women (only!) on Saturday Night Live. "Bitch, pleeeze" Micheala Watkins was one of them. But they got some new female talent, which begs the question of what the new women could have the old ones didn't. So I watched SNL last night, first show of the new season. Host Megan Fox was actually both beautiful and had good comedic timing. Yeah, they had way too many skits that required her to stand there and look sexy and vacant. But when she talked, each character was individuated, especially the Texas airline hostess. But now Kristen Wiig is getting way overused, and looks creepily skinny and twitchy from it. Then new girl Jenny Slate doing a new (annoying) biker chick character, totally forgot to use the right "fricking" "frigging" adjective, and then dropped character right after she blurted the F-bomb on live TV. Don't see that she's improved things.

GLEE Needs Better Story Logic
Yes, that first early episode of GLEE got me hooked on the characters, writing and performing (appears many people are downloading the emotion-filled musical scenes). Three episodes in to the season now, I'm finding that the creators are having a hard time balancing so many plotlines in this worthy, large ensemble cast with the musical acts that everyone expects. What's suffering is the logic in the character arcs. Like how lovable teacher Mr. Schuester, our #1 protagonist, gave up Glee practice for 6+ weeks to create his (old) boy band. His determination and obsession launched the show and is the core plotine; a discursion like that might happen in the middle of the season as the frustrations get him down, but to have him shrug off the kids and the club right away?? It messes with our sympathy for him and our commitment to the plot. And to have sassy singer Mercedes, the most street and tell-it-like-it-is character, get a crush on swishy fashion-plate Kurt and believe the airhead cheerleaders that he has a crush on her?!! Some of these developments feel like the episode is glopped together just to get Singer X with background Singers A, B, C for some number they want to produce. Story comes first! (An aside: the thuggish mohawk-wearing Puck is played by Mark Sailing from Dallas. That explains my weird feeling of frisson when he's in his football outfit talking; he's got the accent of the Texas jocks I grew up with.)

COUGAR TOWN Is Better Than You'd Think
They cheat somewhat, because Courtney Cox-Arquette may be in her 40s, but she is gorgeously preserved and lithe. When they want to show the effects of aging, they have to have stunt flab and wrinkles. She could totally get any legal, hetero male of any age she wanted. But for the purposes of the show, divorced for 6 months from a parasitic slime bag, she has troubles finding men to date. So she busts loose with college boys, and really enjoys it, when she's not having a guilt melt-down. But the writing is really funny with lots of sexy details. It'll become quotable soon, just wait.

VAMPIRE DIARIES Is Also Better Than You'd Think
It has the tortured vampire guy (Paul Wesley) trying to make it as a human high school kid. Of course, he's 160 years old and looks like a 28 year old man, but... He's got a full-on murderous vampire "brother" (the pretty Ian Somerhalder; hope he grows into acting smouldering and Jack-Nicholson-flippant) trying to screw things up. One of the plot twists is that you can survive on fake blood, but the mesmerizing vampire powers come from living on human blood, so Stefan can't best Damon with strength or undo his mind-warps. And it's set in that Hollywood High School world where everybody is a nubile, sexually expressive free-agent. The teenagers have only one annoying teacher/coach, and the rest of the adults seem to provide unlimited cars, stylish clothes, funds, party locations. Oh, and somehow a small community can have multiple people going to the hospital or morgue with their throats torn out and nobody gets torches and stakes together. So those are the silly tropes in this. I'd heard the L.J. Smith books are not well written, but the saving grace of this show is that the dialog is AWESOME. Again and again it's so underwritten, uses the deal of words that aren't spoken because of danger or conflict, but they hang in the air anyway and you totally know what they are. The kids are narcissistic and talk that way, but the sad Elena, now an orphan, has other concerns so her dialogue is different. Stefan has to not-say lots of things to keep his cover, so his dialogue is especially tense. Some good writers on that show!

AMERICA'S NEXT TOP MODEL Is Really Bugging
This is the one reality show I watch and my embarrassing confession. This season it's short girls -- 5'7" and under. Tyra Banks is going to change the fashion industry, y'all! Yeah, like she changed it for bitchy plus-sized Whitney, who won two seasons ago and has no high fashion career whatsoever. The designers make their runway clothes for size 0, six-foot-tall girls. Tyra ain't gonna change that! It's just not going to end well.

I liked this movie for the same things that make it significant in the movie biz... it was made for not much money, using no-name actors*, in a little-used setting**, and yet managed to get an action-filled, mythic-structured hero story out of an SF premise. And it was all the more powerful for working the shame of racial slums into a metaphor that people would accept more readily and be more moved thereby.

DISTRICT 9 came about when Peter Jackson (the awesome, eccentric Kiwi producer and director; I'd tracked his works long before LORD OF THE RINGS, in fact...) had some months unexpectedly free, only like 6-12 or something. So he knew this kid, Neill Blomkamp, who'd done a short film with the premise of aliens in S. Africa. They got a script outline done***, turned one of the special effects managers into the main actor, and filmed the thing! I love that they bypassed Hollywood, took it straight to Ain't It Cool and the geeks at San Diego ComiCon and now have fabulous box office from word of mouth. Yahoo!

You really do get into Wikus Vander Merwe's arc, from nebbishy public employee cluelessly leading a dangerous project to displace the "prawns" -- the mysterious aliens unloaded from the mysteriously stalled ship in the sky above Johannesburg -- to a guy realizing the white-man-conquering-the-lower-races-thing is evil to a true hero who integrates the new physical powers he's given to help, not just himself, but a whole sentient species. And did I say the action kicks ass? Lots of military excursions and chases and blowed-up things. Evil scientists with no conscience doing evil experiments. Father/son bonding in alien society. Big old transformer-type technology that only the Special can activate. Alien weaponry that's like a secret arsenal on a computer game. Cool stuff!

What it suffers from is some goofy implausibilities, but it moves so fast and suspends disbelief just enough it doesn't wreck the whole thing. And it starts like a documentary of Where's Wikus? but then abruptly turns into fictional filming interspersed with documentary footage. If they'd come up with a pattern of why one versus the other, it would've been more logical. And it has somewhat inane dialogue -- because they had it all be improv'd! As a screenwriter, I don't LIKE that. Especially when, as in this case, it leads to several groaning examples of "As you know, prawn." Y'all need to pay us to start the dialogue then edits can be made during production, with a writer there to keep it from being inane and repetitive.

It also has Russ's Eiffel Tower syndrome; it appears that from every angle, every shot of Johannesburg shows the looming, stalled-out spaceship! Ha!

But go see the movie for the uniqueness of its creation, and keep low expectations. You'll probaby enjoy it. And that way the big doofus movie production companies might learn a lesson.

* Sharlto Copley! Just a guy who helps animate CGI stuff, but he turned out to be great at showing emotion with his whole body

** Jo-Berg is what they call it

***Peter Jackson, his wife, and Blomkamp and his writing partner all collaborated on a story outline, but the dialogue is supposedly improvised by the actors

The Hawaii Writers Conference started early Friday morning, with incredible Hawaiian artists and scholars chanting, singing and dancing. Whoa! Very powerful, and I found that Kaumakaiwa and his family are from the Big Island and their chants and hulas are based on Pele and volcano-creation and lava, so are unusually visceral and powerful...!

Michael Arndt, screenwriter of LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, did an incredible two-part course on movie endings: The Good, the Bad, the Insanely Great. He had clips and a really good analysis of warring value systems on three levels.

Liked hearing from Steve Fischer, a literary and Hollywood agent, and his perspective about what's going on in publishing and the movie biz. Long story short: Hollywood is offering low-ball deals and not honoring the "rates" that writers have worked themselves up to. It's like taking a big cut in salary now. Yeah, greedy.

Also went to lunch with screenwriter Diane Lake (FRIDA) who took me to task about what I had done or finished or promoted since last August in Cape Cod. She's very generously taken me on as a mentee --! I'll report to her, get advice... I had 4 ideas in my head, 2 scripts (from Margaret South's replotting), the supernatural mystery I began to enter the HWC contest, and a novel I'd started 5 years ago that had Hawaiian Kahuna magic in it. That last thing has gotten re-invigorated by being here, and also makes me wonder... So many times I've written a piece of fiction with a key element in it, only to have that element show up in my life powerfully within a few years. Hmmmm. More on that as I ponder! But Diane said to write the supernatural mystery RIGHT NOW because it has such market potential. And not to tell my pitch to too many people because it's so good. Yay! And useful to have one of the four ideas prioritized based on market stuff she knows better than me. Again, yay!

Today, just a final half-day and then I plan to take a tour to the north island side, and see Dole pineapples in the field too. Then back to the mainland and then to Austin by crack of dawn tomorrow.

I got a lot of good workshopping and structure from Margaret South, who analyzes scripts and novels using her Art of Story system. We've met twice a day on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Today was our one-on-one sessions. I went to her with my need to structure a different love story for my HEAVEN & NELL screenplay. She helped me make some good streamlining decisions, move the conflict around so that my main character is Nell, not Lee the love interest or the town of Enoch. For Hollywood, simple is better, especially for a spec script from a beginner. (Even though I'm not a beginner because I've written 7 feature-length scripts already, but Hollywood will call me one because I don't have a job in the biz yet.)

Other people in the group are also getting good advice. Whether they're taking it or not remains to be seen. Seems like the indicator for how much insight someone will accept is how much testosterone runs through their brain. This stuff is gold, but some of these guys... And I hear from some of the group critiques (which we don't do) in other classes that mini-rebellions are breaking out. Seems to me the issue is that people spend $$ and time to get here, so they're typically mature and opinionated people who can carve 1.5 weeks out of their lives, so they're pretty powerful. And successful. Some seem to expect to show up and have people throw bouquets to them for their every page or thought. Not so!

The daily general sessions are also being interesting. I got insights on ways to pitch from Sam(antha) Horn. Learned about thrillers and plotting from Gary Braver and Karin Slaughter. Got story beginnings from multiple people, including Diane Lake, who J4 and I workshopped with last August in Cape Cod. It is being interesting and fun!

Then today, I also had the morning off so I took a WONDERFUL tour to the misty valley area and saw Queen Emma's summer palace, a Pali lookout point, drove through rainforests and found a hidden waterfall and ancient petroglyph -- just right off the highway! So lovely...! Go here for the photos.