W2 - Wendy to the Second Power

We had 13 women for the Austin Writergrrls lunch today, Halloween. Ooooh, spooky! At the Ironworks BBQ downtown, where they have huge beef ribs to gnaw on. Scary!

But they're all central Texas women who are creative, smart and funny. So, not so spooky unless you're a de-evolved man who's scared by smart females. If so, may you piss your pants and run the other way. Smart women rule!

Update: Dr. Marjorie (she's a psychologist who drives up all the way from San Antonio) made this animated photo album of it! http://gallery.me.com/marjoriebrody#100366.

It was very cool to have so many wonderful things to celebrate, too! One friend's mystery novel, her first book, has an editor asking to buy it. Another friend's fantasy novel, a past WLT novel contest winner, was just completed and she's sent it to a couple of writing contests. I had my good fortune at the Hawaii Writers Conference to talk about. One friend is in a well-deserved new relationship with a wonderful guy who doesn't have "danger" associated with his name in any way (that's the story of another friend).

But the biggest news is that one friend who released her "How To" family relationships book this year has been filmed by the Dr. Phil Show and is scheduled to appear there in the studios in an upcoming episode! WOOOOOOOOOT! More on that, with links and names, as it becomes a real, contract-signed event.

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!

Out of the more than 100 scripts I read for Austin Film Festival, not a single one made it to the semifinals.

The list is short; only 17. But still.

And I did read some (what I considered) winners this year.

I think this has happened only once before in my 8+ years of reading contest scripts for the contest. BJ told me they'd had some final judges that were very opinionated was the reason, and he commisserated with me that time. This year, I've got to assume the new contest coordinator might've have something to do with it -- he and I didn't agree on stuff. And he brought in his own stable of readers, I'm assuming, who read/judged for the same stuff he liked.

No wonder I didn't get to 2nd Round myself. I had no chance!

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!

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 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

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 paid 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!

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 always liked TRON. Admired it when it came out for the way it created a compelling, tense plot around a "portal story." Liked how they stylized the visuals inside the computer game with the very low tech system they had back in those days. Impressed with how those circuit board cycles were filmed with a real sense of chase / danger / movement.

Now they're got Jeff Bridges, old craggy guy that he is now, starring in TRON LEGACY. With today's CGI they seem to be making the old 27-year-old look of the past one more snazzy. Intriguing!

Go check out Disney's flim clip.

Saw the movie that Zowie Bowie (aka Duncan Jones, son of David Bowie and his first wife Angela) thought up and directed, MOON. Not many actors, as it's totally set on a remote station on the far side of the moon where Lunar Industries Inc. is crushing moon rocks for hydrogen and shooting the element back to earth to create pollution-free energy. Astronaut Sam Bell, played by Sam Rockwell, is coming to the end of his three-year contract and he is ITCHING to get back home. He's so exhausted, been there so long, that he starts seeing things... The low-rent station robot, GERTY, voiced by Kevin Spacey in full-on creepy mode, is supposed to be taking care of him. Or is it? It gets weird and tense, and there are a couple of really good reveals in the story.

It's well done, with good and appropriate music by Clint Mansell, who impressed me so much I looked him up and discovered he's also worked on all of Darren Aronovsky's movies so far (Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain). Not going to give away spoilers, but one of the things that impressed me was how it was a scifi movie through-and-through. Not a horror movie set on the moon. Not a detective noir set in the future. Not a boy's adventure set in a galaxy far, far away. The premise, the problems, the plot twists, the solutions -- all driven by future science stuff as extrapolated by the writers.

A friend just told me it doesn't use CGI for the moonscape mining scenes. They built miniatures in a lunar-like environment and filmed them, then slowed down the film.

It's indie and won't be here long. Highly recommended!