Friday, August 1, 2008

VICTORY!!!

I just got a new job starting Monday, and I really wanted this one too. It's back in the film industry, doing something I actually care about. Only one song will do:

Monday, July 28, 2008

MAKE IT HAPPEN TRAILER



Save the Last Dance, have you met Coyote Ugly? Coyote Ugly, Save the Last Dance? I mean, seriously, the try-outs sequence looks exactly like Save the Last Dance. It's spooky.

I love a good dance movie, although they're few and far between. One of the hardest elements in a dance movie trailer, however, is somehow making giving dancing dramatic weight beyond, well, getting freaky. This trailer tries twice, as near as I can tell. First, it emphasizes the difficulty of bookkeeping. "The other bookkeeper? Lasted about week." Damnnnnnnn... Sounds hard.

The second comes when Mary Elizabeth Winstead tries out a second time (!) for the big... dance... thing that she wants. Seriously, that guy's all like, "Bitch, make an appointment!" And she's all like, "I took three buses and a train to get here! I'm hijacking this motherfucking stage and by God you will watch my pelvic thrust!"

Here's hoping the movie ends with the snooty guy saying, "You have certainly learned a lot of new dance moves, but you are apparently a total diva so I'm afraid we will once again have to pass on your application and have your car towed." "But I don't have a car anymore!" "We'll wait."

Another recent favorite dance trailer was for Step it Up 2: The Streets, which for all its various degrees of popping and locking all boils down to one line of dialogue, 1:29 into the video:



"You realize with those competitions you are risking everything!"

Everything? I almost paid good, or at least unnecessary amounts of money just find out what exactly she's risking. Everything? Do the losers get shot in the head? If she dances for "urban" kids will she be kicked out of school? Will she forever lose the ability to become pregnant? Wow, everything. That's a lot.

Sunday, July 27, 2008

ODDS AND ENDS

1. Haven't blogged in approximately FOREVER and if anyone actually read this I might even apologize. Sigh...

2. Been spending a lot of time with my new girlfriend (GASP!), who is totally awesome and I adore her. So there's an excuse right there for ignoring my legions of non-existent readers.



3. Didn't go to Comic Con AGAIN this year. A friend of mine said he'd try to pick up some stuff for me. I asked him to pick up CHOCOLATE, the new action film from the guys who made ONG-BAK and TOM YUNG GOONG, and L, the spin-off film from DEATH NOTE. Hopefully I'll get them.



4. That said, I COMPLETELY forgot to ask him to pick up the new SCOTT PILGRIM merch they have available this year, and I don't have his number since he's a casual work friend so there's no way in hell I'm getting any. It's literally eating me up inside.

(I would have settled for these damned buttons. Oh well...)

5. THE DARK KNIGHT was built up pretty badly by the surprising number of people I know who got to see it early, so my expectations were pretty high. These expectations were thoroughly trounced when I finally saw the finished product. There may be a couple of loose ends here and there (Batman basically abandons the Joker in a room full of his friends and associates to rescue Rachel early on, which feels like a mistake to me), but these are the definition of nitpicks. One of the best movies I've seen in years, although WALL-E comes damned close.

6. Work is KILLING me, Smalls. Usually when I'm stuck at a job I find boring I spend most of the time coming up with screenplay ideas, but now I'm hitting 2 or 3 good ones a day, then talking myself out of writing them by the time I get home because I'm neurotic like that. That said, I've got a couple new reasonably low-budget horror ideas in the last few weeks that I may try to just pump out in the coming months to add to my portfolio.

(Expectations? Exceeded.)

7. Reading the new ZOT! trade paperback by Scott McCloud. UNDERSTANDING COMICS practically changed my life when I first read it back in high school, but despite that I always wondered who this Scott McCloud guy was and what made him so qualified to define comics for a generation. Now that I'm reading ZOT! I am convinced that he's the real deal... someone who can DO, not just teach. Check out the trade paperback if you can, it's worth the read. And if you can find it in a back issue bin, read the Superman mini-series he wrote a few years ago called SUPERMAN: STRENGTH. It stands alongside some of Grant Morrison's finer issues of ALL-STAR SUPERMAN as my favorite Supes stories of all time.

(Maybe he's an asshole, but at least in this one he's a likable asshole.)

8. Finally got around to watching PAYBACK: STRAIGHT UP, Brian Helgeland's director's cut of that Mel Gibson revenge movie from the late 90's, and it's a much better film. They undid that atrocious color-timing that took a well-shot movie and made it look, well, blue. REALLY blue. It was pretty oppressive and helped ruin my enjoyment of the film the first time around. Also, the score, the tone and the ending are vastly improved. I know I'm a little late on this, but if you hadn't heard of it or were simply uninterested before, I'd recommend checking it out.

(There's an entire book to be written about Erig Bogosian's performance in UNDER SIEGE 2, but I sure as hell don't want to write it...)

9. I've been reading Vern's SEAGALOGY, and it's a pretty entertaining examination of the action star's oeuvre. B-Movies are frequently disregarded in the critical community as being beneath their scholarly attention, and while Vern may not have proved them wrong, he does provide a nice counterpoint.

10. In related news, a critical studies book I myself have been ruminating for some time may finally start getting typed out in the next few months. I don't want to say too much about it on the off-chance it doesn't get written (as is likely to happen with me), but I've been pretty frustrated at my lack of output lately and trying something different like an actual BOOK-book may be just the ticket. I'm debating starting a new website to feature the material I come up with to help promote the book, but again, this is all probably a long way away.

11. A screenplay I beated out earlier this week went from being a fairly clever idea for a low-budget revenge movie and became this pretentious rumination on loss and redemption. As a result, all the fun got ripped out of the idea and I'm probably going to scrap it altogether, as there's no point in making an action movie that will depress an audience more than IN THE BEDROOM.

12. A similar project got stalled when a sexually charged horror movie born from my own frustration with the opposite sex lost all of its appeal to me when I finally found romance again with a member of the opposite sex. All that anger I had reserved for the page got smooched out of me, and while it's still a really good idea and I am likely to return to it someday, I'm just not in the mood anymore right now.

(Great book. Maybe I'll finish it one day.)

13. UNFINISHED BOOK #102398 - HOMICIDE: A YEAR ON THE KILLING STREETS by David Simon. I loved THE WIRE and almost meant to read this thing, so I picked it up from work and fell in love with it... then got distracted and forgot to read it for a while. I may not get back to it anytime soon, which bugs me. I also picked up Shirley Jackson's WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE, which I'm excited about because I love her work and it's short enough that I may actually finish this one.

(I have judged this book by it's cover, and it is very, very good.)

14. Had my first run-in with "image retention" on my plasma-screen TV. I just about had a heart attack. Luckily, the problem was relatively minor and I was actually able to fix it(!) using the "SCROLL BAR" function on the TV's menu screen. It took about an hour longer than it was supposed to, but at least I got it to work. Thanks for thinking up a solution to that little SNAFU, Panasonic.

(I approve.)

15. Loving the t-shirts coming out of the ASTROBASEGO website for the new VENTURE BROS. season on Adult Swim. Well, most of them. I ordered an ORDER OF THE TRIAD shirt and that ugly grey one with the brown letters that says DEAN! on it. Fans of the show may remember that shirt being mentioned on one of the commentary tracks for the DVD releases. I thought they were just spitballing, but I'm glad they remembered it because it was and still is a pretty funny idea. Now if they'd just arrive in the damned mail...

16. I figured MOTHER OF TEARS would be in theaters for more than a week, so I missed my opportunity to see it on the big screen. As an Argento fan who has never been able to see his work in the theater, I'm pretty danged bummed about it. I'm still hoping the New Beverly will have a double-feature with INFERNO or SUSPIRIA sometime soon so I can fix that problem, however.



17. Everyone's talking about the WATCHMEN trailer, and while it does look a lot like the book, I do have some reservations, but also some potential for forgiveness. My initial concern arose when I recognized the SMASHING PUMPKINS song from the trailer. Did anyone else catch that it's from the BATMAN & ROBIN soundtrack, and was used in pretty much every commercial for that film? Is that really what Zach Snyder wants to evoke here? And the Joel Schumacher-esque quality of Ozymandias' uniform is pretty disturbing, although almost thematically appropriate given that he's the hero who sold out and made himself into an action figure. If that's where they're going with it, I can cut them some slack.