Tom's Media Round-up, Part Two...

V for Vendetta-INT. JOEL SILVER'S OFFICE. IT IS A VAST SPACE, DEFINED BY EXPENSIVE WOOD AND CHROME FURNISHINGS. IF WE CARE TO MAKE A FILM REFERENCE, IT COULD BE COMPARED TO ELDON TYRELL'S OFFICE IN 'BLADE RUNNER' JOEL SILVER IS SITTING AT HIS DESK, MUTTERING INTO A BLUETOOTH PHONE PARKED IN HIS EAR WHILE SHOVELING HALVAH INTO HIS FAT FACE WITH HIS FINGERS.

JOEL SILVER: -and get me more halvah! (The phone beeps.) What? Who is this?

SECRETARY (V.O.) Mr. Silver, sir, it's the Wachowski brothers. They're here to pitch another script to you-

JOEL SILVER: Well, why didn't you say so, you stupid bitch! Send 'em in!

FROM STAGE LEFT ENTER THE WACHOWSKI BROTHERS, LARRY AND ANDY. BOTH MEN ARE DRESSED LIKE A HOUSE PAINTERS.

JOEL SILVER:(getting up from his desk, arms open) Guys! How ya doin! Good to see ya! Got another hit for me?

LARRY AND ANDY SIT DOWN ON THE MONSTROUS LEATHER CONTRAPTIONS WHICH WE ARE TO ASSUME ARE CHAIRS IN FRONT OF MR. SILVER'S DESK.

LARRY AND ANDY:(simultaneously) We're fine, Mr. Silver, sir. Thanks for asking!

JOEL SILVER:(nodding happily, sitting down) Good, good. You fellas hungry? Thirsty?

LARRY AND ANDY: Nope, nope.

ANDY: So anyway, Mr. Silver-

JOEL SILVER:(making supplicating gestures with his hands) Please, please! For you, today, I'm just Joel!

LARRY: Alrighty, then. Joel. So, Joel, The Andinator and me were in my game room playing 'grand theft auto:san andreas' and we were thinking-

JOEL SILVER:(interrupting)You wanna make a movie of the game! So it is written, so it is done! (scribbles on a check on his desk) I'm making out a check for you boychiks! How's fifty million dollars sound?

ANDY: Um, hold on, Joel. While we were driving C.J. through the desert, we got to talking about that graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd? You know, 'V for Vendetta'?

JOEL: Mmnooo... but take the check anyway! Hell, It's not my money, right?

THEY ALL LAUGH, THEN FALL SILENT FOR A MOMENT.

LARRY: So, like, it's this really cool comic book-

ANDY:(interrupting)Graphic novel.

LARRY:Right. Did I say 'comic book'?

ANDY: Yeparoonie!

LARRY: Oh. Anyway, it's this really neat-o graphic novel about a futuristic England where Fascists have taken over and this guy who was the victim of government experiments escapes, dresses up as Guy Fawlks-

JOEL: Who?

ANDY: Guy Faulks. He tried to blow up the British Parliment a couple hundred years ago. So this guy, called "V" dresses up as him and brings down the Fascist regime with the help of a plucky sixteen year old girl named Eve.

JOEL:(rooting around in his desk for a bottle of water) Keep talkin'!

LARRY:So we were thinkin',and it gave us the idea about doing a screenplay about this guy who escapes from a medical laboratory in the future in this like, totally totalitarian American government in the future.

ANDY: Yeah, yeah,and the experiments give this guy like, super-speed and strength, and he dresses up as Paul Revere-

LARRY:(interrupting)-and brings down the like, totally, crypto-fascist future American Government from the future with the help of this plucky sixteen year old girl named Karen.

LARRY AND ANDY SIMULTANEOUSLY: We wanna call it "The Midnight Rider".

JOEL:(opening his water bottle and taking a swig) Hmm.. (suddenly he does a spit take, looks at the water bottle, and angrily throws it at a nearby underling) THIS IS 'EVIAN', YOU STUPID SHIT! GET ME A PELLEGRINO!!(The underling rushes off.)

ANDY: See, not only is it a cool action thriller, but we figure we can take a dig at the Bush administration in a kinda oblique way!

JOEL:(scratching the bottom of his third chin) Ookaaay... Boys, are there any lesbians in this movie of yours?

LARRY: Joel! It's us!!

ANDY:(giggling and snickering under his hand) Lesbians are awesome!

JOEL:(leaning back in his chair, arms under his head, pausing to angrily snatch a bottle of Pellegrino proffered by the aforementioned underling) See, fellas. I like where you're going with this treatment. Just one thing, though...

LARRY AND ANDY SIMULTANEOUSLY AS THEY LEAN FORWARD: What?

JOEL:(takes a sip of his water before speaking as the wise voice of experience)My people tell me that 'graphic novels'(he makes the quotemarks with his fingers) are super hot right now. Hell, even girls read 'em, or so I'm told. I figure we can all just cut to the chase and do "V for Vendetta" as a movie! These 'graphic novels"(he makes the quotemarks with his fingers again) have a built-in audience! That always means mucho dinero at the box office, boys! You see?

LARRY: Mmm. I dunno, Joel. See, those Limeys Moore and Lloyd wanted it as a parable against Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government and I'm not so sure it would really translate to an American audience. Ya know?

ANDY: Besides-(pause. He looks at Larry. Larry looks at him.)

JOEL: What?

LARRY: Alan Moore's comic books have always come out bad when they translate to film. Remember "From Hell"?

ANDY: Or 'League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?"

LARRY: Or 'Constantine'?

LARRY: Moore's pretty much washed his hands of us movie types. Getting him to sign over the rights would be impossible!

JOEL:Heh,heh,heh. You two are so cute, you know that? Who published "V for Vendetta"?

ANDY: Um, DC comics, I think?

JOEL: And who owns DC?

LARRY:(realization dawns over him) Hey! That's right! Warner Brothers!

JOEL:(slaps the desk) So we don't even have to negotiate with him! We already own it!

ANDY: You rock, Joel!

JOEL:(chuckles)So all you scamps have to do is fit your little stab at Bush into your "V for Vendetta" screenplay and we're off to the races, as they say!

LARRY:(excitedly bouncing in his seat) Oh, man! This is gonna be great!

JOEL:(raising up one stubby finger) Just one thing, fellas. Were there any lesbians in "V for Vendetta"?

LARRY AND ANDY SIMULTANEOUSLY: You betcha!

JOEL:(standing up) Then why are we all sitting around here, then! We've got a movie to make! (Joel signs another check) Here's another check for fifty million! Now, shoo, you scalawags!

ANDY AND LARRY BOTH SPRING UP FROM THEIR SEATS, EAGER TO GET STARTED. LARRY SNATCHES THE CHECK FROM JOEL'S OUTSTRETCHED HAND.

ANDY:(hesitating) Uh, Joel. You do realize that Alan Moore will never forgive us.

JOEL:(making a dismissive gesture)Pfft. When has a writer had any power in Hollywood? You guys hear about the dumb blonde who tried to break into the movie business? She slept with the writer! I'll make up some bullshit press release about him being totally excited and send him a couple a t-shirts and maybe a check. That always shuts 'em up.

LARRY: But Joel? Doesn't our behaving like a pack of amoral rats devouring a sheep carcass sort of undermine the 'V' story of personal integrity against government oppression? In shoehorning other media into the lowest common denominator of the mainstream movie industry, aren't we in effect reducing 'graphic novel's into the 'feeder' media that intelligent comics have tried to escape from? For all but a few, "V for Vendetta" will be this overblown, effects-laden potboiler with the escapist mentality of every other movie based on a comic book that's out there. Given Hollywood's pervasive influence on the media, aren't we dissuading genuine talent from exploring the comic book as a legitimate vehicle of expression? Those selfsame people will migrate into real books, if not movies and television. In the end, aren't we ultimately doing more harm than good to our culture?

JOEL: Wh-what are you saying, Larry?

LARRY: I'm saying we want another fifty million.

JOEL: (sighs, signs another check)Fine, here you are.

LARRY AND ANDY EXIT STAGE LEFT.
FADE TO BLACK

Tom's Media Roundup, Part one:

I thought I'd take a tip from Robert Fiore's piece in the latest (#275) Comics Journal and do a bit where I touch on most of the stuff that I've seen since last November and give you a short(ish) bit on each of them. Obviously, I've had a lot more stuff floating through my perception than this, but this list is pretty indicative of what I've been up to recently...

Movies-

X-Men 3: -Consider the plight of the poor movie studio doing an adaptation of a comic-book franchise. On one hand, they have to keep the fans of the original series happy, or at least not displease them. On the other hand, they've only got ninety minutes or so to tell a story, so for a large cast of characters, (like x-men) some of the primary characters get what amounts to a cameo appearance. A lot's been made about Brent Ratner taking over Bryan Singer on the directing chores, mostly bad. However, I don't think anyone could've made a good movie out of this franchise anymore, to be honest.

A 'cure' for the mutant gene is discovered, Magneto(Ian McKellar) calls up an army of mutants to storm the lab where the 'cure'(a little boy whose proximity turns mutants normal), and it's up to the x-men sans Dr. Xavier(Patrick Stewart) to save the day. As I said, they're stuck trying to shoehorn too many subplots into the movie, and it just becomes a drudge to sit through. It looks like it's going to be the last in the series, fortunately. Here's the odd thing: It's come pretty close to breaking some box-office records. I'd like to attribute that mostly to it's being released on the Memorial day weekend, but I suspect a lot of that is momentum from the first two movies. Studios, do me a favor- please stop digitally removing the wrinkles of older characters in flashback sequences. Made McKellar and Stewart look like embalmed corpses; creepy and distracting...

War of the Worlds -not too bad, considering that it's a foregone conclusion how it's going to end. (The Martians get the cold, don't have Sudafed, Deux ex Machina strikes again) What's notable is how Spielberg keeps all the big FX in the background, pumping up the sense of dread. I suppose you could view a subtext about how it's a metaphor for helplessness in the face of the New Terrorism, or the impotence of the left in facing the Republican Hordes, but I choose to see it as a straightforward thriller. Not really a counterpoint to "close encounters" as some suggested, (It's not really among Spielberg's best) but quite watchable. If you dislike Tom Cruise, like me, it's fun to watch him get knocked about. He's kind of a Mel Gibson-lite.
Cruise feels making his character suffer (Eyes Wide Shut, Minority Report, the new MI:3) makes him a 'deeper actor', but he's not fooling any one...

Munich- Manages to get that 'John LeCarre' feel of a heavy 70's thriller directed by Sidney Pollack. Spielberg reins in the melodrama he showed in 'Schindler's list'(except for that pointless sex scene near the end. What? Why?) He keeps the story moving at a brisk pace, and unlike X-Men 3, the characters get enough screen time to put themselves in your head without confusing you. Tony Kushner and Eric Roth's script is articulate and even-handed.

It puts us in a time when it was not unreasonable to believe that 'an eye for an eye' was an acceptable solution to combating terrorism. You can look at the Golda Meir regime now and think, aww. How naive; They think they can stay on top of it. About the only thing you can do now is realize that the instant terrorism is at its most effective, it becomes least effective. I doubt we're going to see anything like 9/11 again, but (especially in the west) we're going to have to accept that the world is a lot smaller than we think, and we haven't even begun to see the fallout from George the Younger's folly into Iraq...

Capote- A confident first film from Bennet Miller. I was surprised to see his previous effort was a slight documentary and had assumed he was stuck in television all this time. It helps that he's got Philip Seymour Hoffman on board, Hoffman's Oscar was a given. You can see why Capote was such a presence in the intelligentsia of the 60's-he wins over the taciturn Midwestern inhabitants of the town where the murders were committed (an accompanying documentary has Capote claiming after a couple of weeks, 'they wanted to make me
Mayor!)-while charming William Shawn, New Yorker editor into turning his proposed magazine series into a genre-changing 'non-fiction' novel. The price he pays, however, essentially destroys his subsequent writing career. (In the mid-70's, parts of his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers, came out in the New Yorker, and the thinly-veiled back-stabbing caricatures of his colleagues finished him. He drank himself to death later on.)

I've now got 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' and 'In Cold Blood' on order at Amazon.

Crash- I haven't seen 'Brokeback Mountain', and I don't know if I ever will-I'm not a homophobe, mind you, I just get the impression that the whole movie is a turgid downer. That having been said, I think it should've got the Oscar over Crash by default. When insulated Hollywood types make preachy- 'love good, racism bad' tripe like this, I just wanna smack 'em in the head. A bunch of stock characters gallivant around Los Angeles, Paul Figgis hits you over the head with his pat moralizing just like in 'million dollar baby', and I die a little inside.

A History of Violence- Cronenburg seems to be letting up on repressing his lead characters a bit, and it's not as unsettling as I'd expected. However, (and this might be telling you more about me as a person than I should) isn't the movie being a little hard on the Tom/Joey character? He doesn't take any pride (even a craftsmans' pride) in the killings, and he's put in a kill or be killed situation against truly reprehensible people every time. I suspect Cronenburg was asking us, 'is Joey or Tom the real person? Which is the made-up persona, and who's the real man? There's a dream motif running through the whole movie. (note the short order
cook's tale about his first wife stabbing him in her sleep) I did like it, but maybe Cronenburg's forgotten that violence in a narrative can be a catharsis. (I didn't feel any disgust at any of Tom/Joey's actions, and even his son's kicking the high school bully in the nuts seemed perfectly acceptable. Like I said, maybe I'm the one with the problem...)

Hostel- Standard gross-out grind-house fare from Eli Roth. I wasn't offended by this, mainly'cause I know what I'm getting into in this type of exploitation thriller. For what it's worth, Roth refrains from the type of misogyny you usually find in these movies. (A little gratuitous nudity never hurt anyone,though) If there's a 'how-to' manual on making this type of movie, Roth's copy must be pretty worn-through. Quentin Tarantino's the executive producer and he's responsible for the only real surprises in the movie. (the hero turns out to be the smug jock and not the nerdy writer wanna-be, the 'bad guy's' get their comeuppance in satisfying ways)

The thing I don't get is Roth's and Tarantino's reverence for this genre. If you were to babble to the original makers of this type of stuff how 'groundbreaking' and 'exciting' their 'oveure' was, they'd try and sell you the Brooklyn Bridge. This stuff is art in reverse. Still, I look forward to Eli Roth's next one. (Hostel 2)I'm a sucker for this stuff...

Howl's Moving Castle- It's a tribute to Studio Ghibli's high standard of craftmanship that the worst movie I've seen come out of their studio is still heads and shoulders above anything by Dreamworks. It loses it's narrative about a third of the way in, so by the time the scarecrow turns out to be the missing prince who can avert the war, you feel relieved that the movie's over, and kinda ripped off by the sloppy resolution. Also, can we please stop using B and C-level movie stars for voice overs? It's really distracting-moreso in this movie than others. (Hey, isn't that the American Psycho/Batman guy? and is that.. Billy Crystal? Huh.)

Layer Cake- speaking of following the 'how-to' manual comes Matthew Vaughn's debut. He was Guy Ritchie's producer on his first two films and he's got the 'bri-ish gangstaw' sub-genre down pat. Colorful characters? Check. Twists out of left field? Check. A lead digging himself in deeper the more he tries to extricate himself from a situation he was thrown into? Check-a-roonie. No surprises here, though after this movie, I'm looking forward to Daniel Craig's turn as the new James Bond. Don't get me wrong, I quite enjoyed myself. (like in Hostel, it's the type of movie where I know where it's going, but I'm enjoying the ride) Also, is Dexter Fletcher required by law to appear in all these type of movies? Couldn't they get Ewan Bremmer?

The Constant Gardner- Understated piece by Fernando Meirelles. Well, duh. Understatement is Meirelles' stock in trade, isn't it? The best part is Finnes' title character rediscovering his late wife through investigating her suspicious death. It's like a morbid honeymoon. Unlike every other 'fight-the-powers-that-be' plot, the characters show doubt, unease, and almost (but not quite) give up on their quests. When we (and Ralph Finnes) first meet his wife (Rachel Weisz), she's berating his party's callousness (he's a minor foreign minister giving a lecture at a polytechical institute), then realizing she's making an ass of herself. It's a moving
moment, and Finnes' attempt to comfort her after her outburst lets us understand why this gentle man (and us) loves this firebrand.

It's funny, but by keeping his point of view as dispassionate as possible (in both this and City of God), Meirelles is making some of the most emotional work I've ever seen. (I'm not sure, but I think he's a fan of Jean Renoir.) The callous testing of unproven drugs in third-world countries (still going on, by the way) hits you like a thud in the gut when you see it's effects. Once we see what's at stake for activists in the third world, even a libertarian-leaner like me can't help but be moved. Only one complaint (and I really have to stretch for this one)-the condescending British Lord getting his comeuppance at Weisz' memorial service. It seemed a little too neat, I guess we needed it for some closure.

Now if I could track down Meirelles' TV series, 'City of Men'...

Jarhead-The only Sam Mendes film I've liked so far. I don't know if it works as a parallel to the current situation in Iraq. The lead trains and trains to become an elite sniper, and his only chance to actually do his job and kill an enemy officer is thwarted by a low-level Marine officer. It's hard to do a movie where the enemy is boredom, not the Iraqi Republican Guards (dunno if you remember, but in the beginning of the Kuwait conflict, the Republican Guard was sold to the American public as an awesome fighting force of death. Turns out they surrendered as quickly to the Americans as the lowest Iraqi Army conscript. Oh well..) Mendes could've gone
for the same black humor as Altman's "M.A.S.H", but in the end, we (and Jake Gyllenhaal's character) come away with "meh."

Part two coming soon...

Just adding my 'photo profile', folks. Move along.

Whiffers and Loogies and Cooties on Strings...

...and these are a few of my favorite things.

I decided to start up my own 'blog', such as it is, mainly to rave n' drool about media (comics, books, t.v.,movies, etc.). I now make the solemn vow, for you, Theoretical Reader:

:No whining about my love life or lack therof.

:No angsty poetry.

:No blathering on about my sexual obessions.

:No right-wing tirades based on wishful thinking or left-wing rants based on warm-fuzzy thinkings.

I realize these blog things are 'personal', but I'll spare you, gentle R., the mundane goings-on of 'MEEE'. (Hey, is that applause?)

Stay tuned.