swordplay and acid trip

Thanks to the NYAFF, I’ve been bingeing on Asian films, and am again reminded how Director Lee Myung-Se is greatly underappreciated.

One reason is because you can’t really find his films in the states. To be honest, I’ve only seen two of his films, but he blew me away. The first film I saw was Duelist. I went to see it almost exactly a year ago with MWS. The premise seemed interesting. Korean historical martial arts detective vs. assassin film. I can dig that. 111 mins later, MWS and I walked out the theater in a complete daze.

After a long discussion, MWS and I figured this is what happened: 3 days into Duelist’s shoot, aliens planning on destroying earth by screwing with people’s minds steal every single copy of the script. The cast and crew had to choose between continue to film, or be publicly beheaded with swords made by the tears of their children and shame of their ancestors. So everyone went into improv over-drive. Occasionally, someone would shout, “Wait! I...I think I remember a scene from the script!” and they’d shoot that. And so a movie filled with “wait, what??” scenes was born.

And yet the first thing I said coming out of the movie was “I got to own that fucking thing”. It is by far the most beautiful martial art movie I’ve seen, easily topping Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, House of Flying Daggers, Hero, etc. Of the protagonists, one comes off a bit nuts and the other autistic. But when they fight, they are beautiful together. It’s as if a veil has been lifted, and they can fully express themselves clearly. They’re completely in love with each other, and they want to kill one another. At one point, a character describe seeing a battle: “Don’t know whether I was possessed by the moonlight or the snow.... a man and a woman were fighting like crazy with some sharp swords. But they also looked like they were dancing. It was like they were making love under the moonlight as well.” When a writer writes lines like that, he can only pray that that scene look kinda sorta that good. But the fight in Duelist looked exactly like that. So rarely is a movie simultaneously serious, cheesy, beautiful, heartbreaking, funny, and incredibly sexy. It made so little sense, but you can’t look away.

M, despite not having its script taken by extraterrestrials, is a psychedelic movie that a NYAFF rep described as an acid trip. It’s about 3 characters: A novelist battling writer’s block finds himself haunted by nightmares, unable to recall parts of his days and feeling someone is following him. A girl follows her favorite novelist around with both a sweet first-crush shyness and a creepy stalkerish undertone, but soon she finds herself being chased by a shadow in the dark herself. A rich businessman’s daughter finds her boyfriend drifting away from her, but is what’s come between them another woman, his mysterious new novel, madness, or a ghost?

While Duelist has great color and light/shadow play, in M there is all that and smoke and glass and mirrors, ghosts and insanity, dripping water and phones that don’t stop ringing. So rarely does a director take so much care in every shot. Each scene drifts into one other. Not only can you not tell if you’re looking at a dream or memory or reality, sometimes you don’t even know whose is it. The next moment has equal chance being sweet or creepy, and it kept my attention the whole film.

(This is a music video, but I find it depicts the movie better than the trailers I've found.)

There are a lot of criticism against both movies, and I can see exactly why. But even with those flaws, I am personally extremely impressed by Lee Myung-Se’s craftsmanship, and wish that more people can see his movies.

War Drums

It’s The League versus 3,860 other writers. We’re like the 300 Spartans, only in real time and not quite as ripped.

The PAGE International Screenwriting Awards (www.internationalscreenwritingawards.com) has posted a “Map Of Submissions” –or something to that effect—on its website, a world map complete with a little flag planted in every country that a submission came from this year. Onyx and DOA have been the two who most explored the competition circuits in the past, and the last one Onyx entered saw something like 976 submissions. According to PAGE, that’s how many came from California alone this time.

I did the math (because I'm a nerd), and we comprise roughly .136% of the applicants. This is it. One month from now, we’ll get the first round of results. From there, it’s another two months of waiting for the final winners list. The line is drawn. Five versus 3,860.

Who will be left standing?

Wanted - Ridiculous Doesn't Do It Justice

Onyx and I saw Wanted last night (free screening a friend let me know about). For what it was – a mindless, suspend your disbelief at the door action flick – it was fun. It was fun in a way that made me laugh out loud at just how ridiculous some of it was. Don’t get me wrong, I love a “good” ridiculous movie every now and then (I will argue to praise for Shoot ‘Em Up any day of the week; when the first death in the movie is death by carrot, how can you not get on board?). Unlike Die Hard 4, Shoot ‘Em Up and Wanted didn’t seem to want to be anything more than an over the top action movie. (Bruce Willis could have played John McClane with a bit more camp this last time; it would have suited the over the top film better – though I know that’s not the McClane we all love.)

Going in knowing that Wanted was going to be full of impossible shots, head splitting action (literally), and a plot most likely held together with Elmer’s glue, I still couldn’t help but take issue with the movie at times. My biggest problem, actually, was the setting. I could have sworn the movie was taking place in New York, and after the screening, Onyx said the same thing. But the cops were definitely not NYPD – they looked European. Then, we were in a different city all together. The movie was taking place in the same city, but it certainly didn’t look like it was shot in the same place we’d been spending time. It got to the point where I was devoting as much time to trying to place the action as I was to watching it. This just goes to show something that Zombie usually brings up first—place your movie, ground us somewhere, even if the “where” is not integral to the plot. It just plain helps.

There were a couple of inconsistencies in the picture, too, which I learned to get past, but stuck with me after the screening nonetheless. At one point, a character runs at above normal speed through an office hallway and jumps across a wide city street, crashing through the opposite building’s window. In the meantime, he shoots three assassins. (This was a laugh at the ridiculousness moment.) Though a feat such as that was explained by a heightened adrenaline rush, no one else really did anything comparable throughout the entire film. If one man is superman, shouldn’t others be, too, if they’re all equals?

I guess I have to stop dissecting it now, though, or I’ll go nuts. One thing I can say the movie did well was to establish its rule: there are no rules. No physics. No pain. No impossible shot. Cars can just about fly. As can people. And bullets can be trained to fly like model airplanes, over, around, and under anything in their way. Will this movie become a classic to air on AMC twenty years from now? I doubt it. But, at least I wanted to watch it the through to the end.

Vote for Billy!

Let’s forget about Obama and McCain for a second and talk about a man that we need to rise in our government. Sonny Landham, better known to me as Billy from the 1987 action flick Predator, is making a bid for the Kentucky senate. You can read more about it at the CNN link below.

Tough guy actor eyes Senate seat

So why should anybody vote for Billy? And believe me, it is Billy you’re voting for. I’ll go ahead and give you four reasons.

Reason #1- Great laugh. If you haven’t seen Predator yet, check it out. He’s got (or at least had in 1987) a great booming chuckle that says “I’m a jovial giant, but if you cross me I’ll tear your heart out.”

Reason #2- Billy is the only known American commando to face a predator with a knife while having the option of a gun. The video would suggest that this decision didn’t go so well for him, but I’d like to think he made a scratch or two.

Reason #3- He’s Native American, and as we know from Hollywood, all Native Americans have a sixth sense when it comes to danger. The terrorists lose their element of surprise.

Reason #4- If Billy wins a seat in the senate that would mean that three members of the 1987 commando team will have gone on to notable political posts. Arnold Schwarzenegger (Dutch) is the governor of California, and Jessie Ventura (Blain) is a former governor of Minnesota. How awesome is that?

Come on people, we have to make this happen. So get a hold of all your Kentuckinite buddies and let them know about Billy if they don’t already. Joe! If you cast one vote this year, you know what to do with it.

Alfred Hitchcock presents...

... the Hitchcock Barbie doll, new from Mattel.



















Cake Man has his on pre-order already.

The Writing Week part 26

Twenty six. That's half of fifty two, by my ever decreasing math skills. That means we're halfway through 2008. Halfway. Halfway...

Hmm.

I suppose it's fitting to do some kind of mid-year recap at this point. (But first, let’s get that weekly blabbering out of the way.)

This week was, in fact, a writing week. I wrote. I did. I wrote a page of a play that I had no idea about. I wrote the first two pages to a script just for the hell of it, a script that won’t go anywhere. I wrote a lot of notes about ideas that I didn’t follow up on. I wrote general ideas down here and there. I may have written a poem somewhere in there. I just wrote and wrote and wrote, with little to no direction at all. Which is why, now, I have an extra half dozen project folders on my computer. I’m trying to zone in, to focus my writing, but I’m still in this place where I’m just not feeling lit by anything at the time being. I even had a brief “wow, I gotta write this right now” moment last week, but that passed by the time I had dinner that night.

The goal, though, is to do a rewrite (more like rewriting the first half of a script and writing the rest from scratch), while working on something original. With competition results coming up in a month and a half (we just found out that the five leaguers who submitted to PAGE International Screenwriting Awards are up against 3,860 other writers), I know that I need to have as much polished material by the end of August as possible. Just in case something happens, something good, like someone interested in my submission.

As for the year recap… let’s see. Two scripts (first drafts) written in the first four months of the year, followed by a lull and some minor re-write activity the last two month of the period. (I did get some good notes this week, though, from a few Leaguers regarding my post-Apocalyptic spec. The consensus is that it’s on the right track. There’s a lot of work I have to do, but I think I can see the horizon, and, after letting it sit and build on itself for about a month, I’ll get back to it and hopefully finish it in a fury of re-writing during the month of August.)

The one thing I will say for the year, though, is that, probably two months ago, I wrote about not wanting to just sit and wait for these competitions to happen. I wanted to make something happen. Well, I’m doing more sitting than I would have liked. But, it’s a tricky situation. I don’t really want to push forward without competition results, and I need to do rewrites until then. But, I also have another month and a half of “inactivity” when it comes to trying to get my material seen. What do I do? Do I push ahead and send out query letters, before receiving the competition results? I think it’s a better plan to make sure I have as many scripts in my arsenal for after the results come in, rather than try to sell one thing and not be able to back it up with anything else. So then how do I shake this inactive, waiting feeling?

Sifting through the wreckage...

Last night I got a round of feedback from the League on a recently-completed first draft.

It was easily the most interesting round of notes I've ever been given. People touched on things I'd never thought of, and things I *knew* people would have a problem with going in weren't even touched by anyone. What was most interesting that I got different notes from practically everyone - each Leaguer had different things they like and different things that bothered them. There were things that everyone picked up on, but there were also lots of points where Leaguer's feedback contradicted each other.

The barrage of suggestions and opinions coming from every direction was a bit dizzying. You know when Sonny Corleone gets gunned down in the toll plaza? It kinda felt like that. (I think.)

Despite being left a bit of a bloody mess, I feel a lot more confident about the script coming out of that meeting than going in. When I sent out the pages to the readers, I was afraid I was sending a self-indulgent, clustfucked, unsalvageable mess. But now I feel like I can confidently say I sent a first draft.

And despite the many problems, I *think* people liked it. (Except maybe Onyx. He probably won't talk to me again.)

I've got a lot to think about and a lot to work with. I was never entertaining the thought to myself that this could be close to a final draft - but knowing that there are things in there that connected with people other than myself.

I'd known this would due for a long road filled with re-writes. But now I can rest more assured that it's WORTH re-writing.

All said, it feels pretty awesome.