Before Spider-Man Fades into Oblivion....

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Spider-Man: M(ust)B(e)N(ice), and Other Musings

Spider-Man 3 dropped off 60% at the box office this weekend but still grossed $60 million dollars and made about $50 million more than it's closest competition, 28 Weeks Later.

Yawn.

Talk to me on Monday after Shrek the Third actually offers Sony some kind of challenge.

(and then, of course, Pirates 3 is just around the corner...)

It's a little disappointing that Hollywood is releasing all of its heavy-hitters in the earlier part of summer. Don't get me wrong, I'm stupidly excited about Harry Potter (both the movie and the final book), but is there any real reason to cram three of the four biggest movies of the summer into its first month (if we can even call May summer)? Can I possibly use the word "summer" any more in this paragraph? No.

In other news NBC has released its Fall lineup, with few surprises. Friday Night Lights is coming back, but into a dreaded Friday night time slot (kiss of death, anyone?). Studio 60 is gone, and The Office is taking over the holy grail of comedy television: Thursday at 9. In its old spot will be 30 Rock. After Sunday Night Football ends in January, some show called Lipstick Jungle will air Sundays at 10, and based on nothing but the title, let's just pencil that in to be gone by March.

I'm more curious to see what ABC looks like next season, specifically when they're going to start the criminally short 16-episode season of Lost.

***

I was in one hell of a funk last week, watching some of my better friends go through graduation, something I did 2 years ago. While I can logically talk myself down from the ledge, the immediate feeling was something along the lines of "holy crap what have I accomplished?" If that's not bad enough, I turn 25 in December. I don't think I've written a more frightening sentence.

In an attempt to snap myself out of it and get some work done, I dove head-first into a collaboration with a friend of mine from my glory days at NYU. Up to this point, we were both feeling uneasy about the beginning of the script, particularly that our protagonist wasn't pursuing anything. It's a recipe for disaster if your first act consists of a character sitting around, waiting for an inciting incident, and at least it's clear now that he's doing something. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, the relationships between he and his wife and kids has become a lot more three dimensional, if only because his concern over his goal is causing everything else to unravel.

Meanwhile, I've been thinking about writing a play about a man who kidnaps a fitness celebrity, which gets more interesting to me the more I see those godawful Fitness Made Simple commercials on ESPN. John Basedow even has a Myspace page. Isn't that music great?!

Here's John Basedow
He's gonna show you how
To meet your potential
And turn your whole life arouuuuuuuund, yeah!

It's Fitness Made Simple!
Made for real people!
It's Fitness Made Simple!
It's changing real lives!

He's really just asking for it. I mean, look at this guy:

Consider your life changed!



***

Anyway, Zach hit the nail on the head: writing is for writers what heroin is for junkies. Sometimes a fix is all you need.

(so he didn't word it like that, but still....)

Write on...

And on it Goes

I had had a job interview last week that I thought went well. Not only was I happy with just having an interview, but having one that I thought went well and was for a job I could actually care about was a much needed breath of fresh air. But the problem with fresh air is that stale, polluted air always tastes that much worse afterward. I didn't get the job.

So the job search goes on. When I told my mother that the company had gone with someone else, she just shrugged her shoulders and said, "Oh, ok." Either, she already knew, because my aunt had most likely told her. Or, she knows that it is never easy. I had made the mistake of putting more faith in getting the job than I probably should have, but doing that lifted my spirits in what sometimes seems like a soul-crushing job hunt. In a way, the near miss, while pissing me off, also gave me a temporary reprieve from sending out resumes to recharge my batteries and jump back on the proverbial horse. In an odd way, not getting the job gave me the boost to keep applying (though, obviously, had I gotten the job, that would have been better).

Also, the writing goes on. The League is about to have its first meeting, in about a week. One of the things that will be read there, I hope, will be the first draft of the first act of my play. I'm not going to kid myself into thinking that it is very good, but first drafts aren't usually. LoKor wrote earlier about needing to finish a draft he knew he wasn't going to use in order to lay the foundation. That's what I'm doing. I'm hoping to be able to use more of my first draft than LoKor does, but it's the same thing. Foundation.

It took me a long time to realize that aiming for perfection is not always wise. Yes, in the end, the point of writing dozens of drafts is to have the best possible screenplay, play, novel, comic book, or porn script possible. But none of us are going to hit gold the first go around. And even if we seem to, we can't think we will. Or nothing will ever get written. I used to spend so much time trying to one up each line, getting cleverer and smarter and deeper with each next sentence that I'd write myself out. I would burn out two pages in because I was not bothering to just write; I was trying to do the impossible. I was sacrificing the plot for words that, in a film at least, would get twisted by the actors anyway. So now I aim lower. If people understand the action, get what I'm trying to say, don't feel I've wasted the past four years, and stay awake through the whole thing, then I think that I've gotten the first draft to do what it basically needed to do.

It took me even longer to realize that I need to write every day. Not everyone does. I think that most of us do, however. But for me, it's more than a discipline. It's more than just getting work done. I actually feel better when I write every day. The sun seems a bit brighter, the sky is a bit bluer, and I notice an extra bounce in my step. When I don't write every day, as I haven't yesterday or today, I tend to feel... dark inside. Like there's black tar slowing me down, pulling me down, trying to drown out the life. It's surprising what a difference a day can make for me, but I really do feel as if something is wrong when I don't write. I feel like the day's been wasted and I'm heading down a spiraling path, which I know is not going to be a fun ride.

So I try to write. Every day. To keep the sun bright and the sky blue and the storm at bay. And it usually helps. Especially if I'm letting the writing come without trying to be perfect.

The Worst Movies Ever

Because awful movies never get old...

Congrats Grads

To all League members who graduated this year, a big congrats. It seems to have taken my entire college career, but I now finally feel that I've found the long-term college friends that everyone seems to hold on to, no matter how old they are.

And to everyone else who is graduating school this spring, congrats and best of luck.

World, be ready. It's our turn now.

I Think Spring Is Usually Like This...

As the vertical cursor blinks against the plain white screen of whatever word-processing program I happen to have open at the time, the same thought keeps coming to me as I stare into the abyss of possibility that is a blank document. I like to type out it out, just to see how it looks. There is something about the physicality of words that gives thought a sense of legitimacy. To me anyway.

I usually put it in quotes and precede it with an ellipsis. It has a quality of being being spoken after a long, full pause.

"...so where do we go from here?"

I don't really know what it means. Who is "we?" Where is "here?" I have no idea, but it's become reflective a crossroads, a blank state, a sense of disarray. There's a short story in my head, one that begins with a young man waking up and smoking a cigarette out the window of his Parisian hotel room while a beautiful, naked woman steals a few more moments of rest. There is one major decision about my protagonist's backstory that's holding me back from diving into a second draft of my screenplay. There's another one that I've been wanting to begin since January, but haven't quite worked out the details. None of this includes a few collaborations, and while I don't think there's too much on my plate, I do suspect that it's all so damn distracting.

With so many directions, can things be said about me when I make a choice to commit the time to one or another or all? Can I afford to put things on the back burner, perhaps to never resurface for months? Where does it go, indeed.

There may be something deeper, as there usually is, but in going through this plenty of times, it almost always works out that when I'm writing, everything else feels infinitely better.

***

I guess I should throw in my two-cents about Spider-Man 3, although what hasn't been said? I could certainly pinpoint why, but suffice it to say that while I had a great time seeing the first two installments of the franchise, I actually did not enjoy myself watching Spider-Man 3. Maybe the assholes sitting behind me that didn't stop talking/snickering the entire film played a part in it. Maybe it was because I had to go to the bathroom for the first half of the film (the minute Peter Parker sat down at the piano, I literally clapped my hands, turned to Megan and said, "Well, I'm going to the bathroom."). I just wasn't engaged. The pacing was off, the writing was to coincidental and formulaic, and I was really surprised to see Tobey Maguire give what must have been his worst acting performance in years. He's too talented to sit back and rely on his big baby-blues and readily accessible tears. It came off as showy, a mailed-in performance, totally lacking the true emotional depth that he's showed before.

It didn't suck, but I do have to take back just about everything I said on Friday about the NY Times review. It turned out to be pretty dead-on.

(I won't, however, forgive Manohla Dargis for her Superman Returns review. Ever.)

Write on....


P.S. With Cake Man graduating this week, don't hold your breath waiting on a comic. We'll be back up and running at full speed next week.

Web of Tears

I saw Spider-Man 3 last night after building up my excitement for the picture over the past few weeks. The film had a lot of promise, going by, if nothing else, the track records of the previous two films in the franchise. The villains were some of Spider-Man's oldest and most interesting, there were a lot of unresolved issues between Harry and Peter, and the whole MJ thing just started going well for Peter. (I'll refrain from spoilers as best I can. Suffice it to say, if I feel like I'm about to give something away, I'll warn you, but that shouldn't be the case.) So what was my take on the third installment?

"Oh... Huh."

I was not impressed. I'm a fan of comic books, so it's annoying that there's little way I can phrase my following thought without seemingly coming down on comic books, but within the first ten minutes of the film, I kept thinking to myself, "This is just so much more comic-booky than the other two, in a bad way." By that, I think I mean that where I felt the first two films tried not only to be good superhero/comic book movies, but also good movie movies, this one was just going for comic book film success. The script seemed nowhere near as strong as did the ones for the first two movies. Every plot point was so driven by the writer, it was as if I could sense that, well, "it's time for a plot point, so here comes the incredibly ridiculous coincidence."

I acknowledge the fact that a lot of what happened in the film, well, some of it at least, occurred as it did in comic books. Coincidences are comic books. Things don't really happen to normal people in comic books. By that, I mean that once a normal person becomes a super person for whatever reason, every other cosmic event or random happening seems to happen to him or her only. And that's ok. But in Spider-Man 3, everything just seemed too easy.

I remember writing a scene for my own comic book movie where the love interest of the protagonist is kidnapped by a villain, without the villain's knowledge that she had anything to do with the hero. In fact, the hero's rescuing her was the impetus for the relationship. I got a note form a classmate (and fellow Leaguer) that he could see that coming from a mile away. While the teacher agreed it was somewhat predictable, he conceded that I had done my job well, and that it didn't read as though I had twisted fate within my script to create an impossible situation for the benefit of my plot.

But in Spider-Man 3, that's exactly how I felt. A few times. If I had brought that script into class, my teacher would have smacked me across the face with it. Everything was so driven by the writers that nothing seemed to flow naturally from the story. That was my biggest problem with the film.

But not my only one. Problem 2) the crying. So much crying. I don't know why Spider-Man didn't just cry on Sandman to kill him, it would have been more effective than anything else he was doing. Everyone was crying in the movie. Peter. MJ. Harry sort of. Aunt May. Uncle Ben (in flashback). The Sandman... somehow. Gwen Stacey. A bunch of extras. The usher in the theater, because apparently in Spider-Man world, crying is contagious.

Problem 3) Venom... er, the lack of Venom. Venom, who I understand to be Spider-Man's foil and arch-nemesis, the anti-Spider-Man, was barely in the film. He was introduced just to be defeated about ten minutes later. He was like Bane in Batman and Robin, completely under used and kind of dumb looking, a great villain turned into a temporary, fleeting threat. Way to go, Marvel.

Problem 4) -and this is where you might want to skip if you're concerned about spoilers- The Sandman/Uncle Ben stuff. Sandman was cool, but he was completely gratuitous. Unnecessary. The only reason Sandman was in there was so that there could be a double team fight at the end, which could have been done any number of ways sans Sandman, albeit not as a two-on-two brawl. Sandman looked cool, but there was no way, in the film, that Spider-Man was going to be able to beat him, and his presence added about a half hour of useless plot. What irked me the most was how, because of Sandman and the need to tie him personally to Peter, the filmmakers decided to change Uncle Ben's death to put it on Sandman's hands. (Um... remember those really coincidental coincidences I was talking about?) So most of Sandman's screen time was dedicated to rewriting how Uncle Ben died, which we didn't need. If they still wanted to make a 2 and a half hour movie, Avi Arad and co. should have cut Sandman and decided to focus more on Venom, who was almost lost in the picture.

Problem 5) Emo Peter. Um... yeah. I wonder if we'll get an Emo Spider-Man action figure that cries when you squeeze it. Or at least dances really badly.

Bruce Campbell was good in the film, but that's because, well, when is he not? But other than him, I was actually pretty disappointed. Marvel seems to have a habit of making lukewarm first installments of a trilogy, nailing the second completely, and just crapping out on the third. That's how the X-Men films went. That's how many people feel about the Blade series. That's certainly what happened in Spider-Man's case. And, if trailers for the second Fantastic Four are any indication, that's how that trilogy is going, as well. (Of course, with FF, there's been no real talk about the third yet, but the first wasn't great, and the second looks better, so we'll see.) I really wish that someone had stepped in and done something about Spider-Man 3. But, then again, when you're guaranteed to make almost 150 million your first weekend, if not more (just a ballpark figure I threw out) why even bother trying? So, yeah, I'm glad I eagerly waited for that one.

Oh, and P.S. In response to LoKor's post about the absence of any word about Venom in the NY Times review, I think I know why that was. He was barely in the film.