Friday, April 27, 2007

The "Now I've Seen Everything" Dept.--Stanley Kubrick

In which the author, having seen everything there is to see on the subject makes a capsule summary of each,* looking for trends and contributing what he calls an Ouvre-view.** --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Killer's Kiss (1955): Urban drama more of a photographer's exercise than a valid film. Boxer tries to keep girlfriend out of the clutches of a mobster. Stilted dialog. Amateurish acting. Interesting chase over New York roof-tops. Ending stand-off with axes in a mannequin storage facility (!!) Great work with natural and patterned light.





The Killing (1956): Film noir/caper movie of a racetrack heist notable for its fractured story-telling technique. First we see the planning. Then we see the plot's planner ensuring the pieces coming together. Then we see each participants part to completion, then roll back to another section. Robbery actually comes together, but despite all efforts, Fate spoils the plot. Stars Sterling Hayden and a great cast of B-movie actors. A large leap from the previous film. And one can see the beginning of Kubrick themes--its hero supervises the planning and execution of a brilliant robbery, but is ultimately undone by elements he has no control over. Kubrick would tell the same story many times.



Paths of Glory (1957): Kirk Douglas stars in this WWI drama of a french troop sent on a suicide mission, and when it fails, three of its surviving members are executed for cowardice. Lots of chess metaphors, lots of double-dealing, lots of cynical politics that allows for justice but still leaves dastardly deeds done. The war goes on. Contains a staggering battle sequence done in two tracking shots. The trench warfare makes very convenient something that would become a Kubrick staple--the reverse tracking shot. Ends with as close to a sentimental ending as any Kubrick film.




Spartacus (1960): Kirk Douglas kicked Anthony Mann off his "religious epic without Jesus" after a week of shooting, and hired Kubrick to take over. A bit like throwing Christians to the lions, the indie-minded Kubrick had to contend with entrenched studio personnel and bickering bitchy stars--not the least of whom was the producer who'd hired him. Still, Kubrick did right by his boss by off-setting the rebel-slave romanticism of Dalton Trumbo's script with the cold and ruthless efficiency of the Romans in action. The battles and training sequences are brutal (and would be echoed in "Barry Lyndon" and "Full Metal Jacket") and brilliantly realized, and Kubrick creates an indelible character in Woody Strode's Draba without a single line of dialog. But he couldn't touch Trumbo's script (Douglas wanted to make a point of staying faithful to the black-listed writer's script) and the experience left Kubrick convinced that Hollywood was not the place he wanted to work--and he'd only take on projects where he had complete autonomy. He would begin to take enormous risks, and his first project was designed to do exactly that.

Lolita (1962): There was no way Kubrick could get away with making "Lolita" in America--the book had a hard enough time being published here (and the ads exploited that fact). But he could in England and it proved fortuitous: it allowed him to look beyond the city-scapes which had dominated his early movies and it introduced him to Peter Sellers. "Lolita," in its outline could serve as the blue-print for many Kubrick films: a man well-schooled and competent in every way is undone by a fatal flaw that he is helpless to avoid. Here, Professor Humbert Humbert is obsessed with teenaged Charlotte Hayes. You know the story. Kubrick goes as far as he can with the perverse romance and Humbert's humiliating obsession, but in finding Sellers, Kubrick shifts more of "Lolita" his way, turning his Claire Quilty into a recurring character under different guises and using him as a cackling, drooling stand-in for Humbert's conscience. Sellers and the rest of the cast is uniformly brilliant (including a braying, wierdly sympathetic Shelley Winters as the mother of obsessions). Kubrick also makes interesting editing choices--starting the film with the murder of Quilty, which includes a comic tour de force for Sellers, shifting the focus of the film from "will he get the girl" to "why'd he kill Quilty." Some were disappointed with Kubrick's pussy-footing around the subject matter with "Lolita," but when Adrian Lyne made a more explicit version years later, that version wasn't nearly as deeply thought or as satisfying. That would happen again in Kubrick's career.

Dr. Strangelove: (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) (1964): In many way,s "Dr. Strangelove," Kubrick's black comedy about nuclear gamesmanship, is his most inspired film. Yes, it's funny (damned funny!), but it also maintains its dramatic intensity and factual integrity.*** After frustrating attempts to write a straight-ahead version of Peter George's "Fail-Safe" cousin "Red Alert," Kubrick, to avoid trying to make the ludicrous situations appear palatable,**** just went with the insanity and enlisted help from gonzo satirist Terry Southern and "Lolita" conspirator Peter Sellers (playing three parts) to tell a complicated cross-cutting story of an insane Air Force General playing nuclear "chicken" with the Soviets and stepping on the gas. In the course of the movie, every fail-safe device fails and the best deterrents devised by man only ensure his demise. There is a sub-genre of the caper film called the "Incredible Mess" - Kubrick combines it with the story of an Air Force crew determined to accomplish its mission by any means possible--thus making the unthinkable possible by an American "can-do" spirit. Everybody's doing their best but the result is the worst. And "Strangelove" ends with mankind resolutely facing its doom prepared to make exactly the same mistakes again. After accomplishing the near-impossible - making the world laugh at its proclivities for self-destruction, Kubrick wired Arthur C. Clarke about collaborating on "the proverbial good science-fiction film," a genre inhabited by scientists in lab-coats, anthropomorphized robots and scantily-clad maidens. In "2001: A Space Odyssey," none of those were apparent.









A Clockwork Orange (1971): Kubrick labored for years on a film-biography of Napoleon--another man of brilliance undone by his foibles--but the box-office failure of "Waterloo" torpedoed it. Kubrick turned instead to Anthony Burgess' tale written from trauma,***** "A Clockwork Orange." Kubrick was attracted to its out-sized characters, its themes of dehumanization, its experimental use of language, its perfect plan gone awry, and its humble narration. Doing a 180 from "2001," Kubrick used a skeleton crew and real locations to film "Clockwork" and found the perfect collaborator in actor Malcolm McDowell, who turned his vicious thug into the shiniest object in the room. McDowell's Alex is a cock-sure (um...yeah) monster/classclown, always "on" - always playing to the audience, be they enemies or victims, and it is only when his instincts are taken away from him that his violence ceases and society's violence takes over. In high school, I was enamored with "Clockwork" mostly because I loved "2001" (it is also a damned good movie). As I've grown older, "A Clockwork Orange" has become more repellant, and even the casual use of the word "rape" in the poster makes me wince. In making Alex a watchable character, Kubrick and McDowell risked making Alex an admirable character (and the film inspired some copy-cat crimes among mis-fits, causing Kubrick to request Warner Bros. to withdraw distribution in England, which, to stay in his favor, they did), but his point (and Burgess') was to show that even when applied to the worst person in the world, the elimination of a person's free-will is an abomination, however altruistic the intentions for doing so. What Kubrick did not know when adapting "Clockwork" was that Burgess had written a 21st chapter, in which Alex does make the choice, of his own volition, to give up his violent, hedonistic ways. The American publisher chose not to include it, and it was this version that Kubrick was given, read and became obsessed with.

Barry Lyndon (1975): At the time I saw it in the theaters, I felt it was a crashing bore. Now, I think it's a masterpiece. After the kinetic energy of "Clockwork," folks were expecting a "Tom Jones"-like romp from the Thackeray novel (Thackeray wrote both books). But instead of something like Tony Richardson's zesty little movie they got was a scrupulous recreation of 18th century life (right down to the pace) and a constant parade of painterly images (tied together with an all-knowing and rather louge narrator) as Redmond Barry wenches and duels his way into British aristocracy. "Barry Lyndon" was the perfect film for the avaricious 80's. Sadly, it came out during the disco-70's. There were complaints of Ryan O'Neal's performance being soulless, which is the right approach considering Barry didn't have a soul...or a conscience, and the only time he displays any strength of character...during his final duel with Lord Bullington...it destroys him. Heartless, maybe. But a just fate. Kubrick took his time filming "Lyndon" not only because of the elaborate preparation each scene necessitated, but also he was receiving death-threats from the IRA while filming in Ireland. Notable also for the lens-technology created to film scenes using only candle-light, "Barry Lyndon" offers a glimpse of what Kubrick's "Napoleon" would have been like if it had ever happened.


The Shining (1980): Desperate for a "hit" after "Barry Lyndon" tanked, Kubrick looked long and hard for a vehicle that could do well at the box-office...and one he could use Jack Nicholson for the lead. Kubrick seemed an odd choice for a horror-film or one written by Stephen King--the only previous King adapataion was Brian DePalma's hyper-version of "Carrie," but Kubrick was drawn to another story of an intelligent man unable to fight off his demons, in this case the ones inhabiting your proverbial haunted house. Nicholson's spit-spewing performance is straight out of EC comics, and Shelley Duvall had the thankless task of maintaining hysteria for the last half of the movie, but "The Shining" succeeds in provoking dread throughout its entire length. King and King-fans hate it, especially for one death-deviation from the book, but when King produced a TV-version years later that stuck scrupulously to his vision, it was a sappy mess that dragged and dragged. Kubrick boiled it down to essentials, and made the better film.


Full Metal Jacket (1987): Kubrick didn't want to make an anti-war film about Viet-nam. He wanted to make a war film about Viet-nam. The choices inflicted. The breaking down of boys (unformed men) into soldiers. The cohesion of a group and the trap of cameraderie. Oliver Stone had covered a lot of the same ground in "Platoon" (mixed in with his parental conflicts and delusions of grandeur), but Kubrick added more (with Gustav Hasford's slim novel "The Short-Timers" as guide, funneled through the sensibilities of John Milius and Michael Herr******), such as the sloganeering that stands in for values (in the film's finale, the remnants of the squad march through their "world of shit" to the cadence of "The Mickey Mouse Club" song), and though there's strength in numbers, it's every man for himself. Kubrick touches on many facets that made Viet Nam a unique war from others, and doesn't shy away from the atrocities or the exhilaration. Plus, it captures Hasford's loopy language for the phony-tough and the crazy-brave.


Eyes Wide Shut (1999): You wanna know what power is? Power is chaining two of the hottest stars of the time to an exclusive contract and keeping them beholden to you while you make a relationship movie FOR TWO YEARS. Two years of filming. But Kubrick's films had such skeleton crews, he could afford to do it, and still come out with a modestly budgeted film, despite the salaries of Cruise and Kidman (and Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh, who were bought off due to schedule conflicts). I have a hard time saying this is a finished Kubrick film. His first cut was done, shone to the studio and stars, then Kubrick, after three years putting it together, died. Had he lived, he would have cut it down, probably eliminating redundant dialog (there's a lot of it "Really? A Lot of it?") and generally trimming fat as he did with "Strangelove," "2001," "The Shining" and presumably "Full Metal Jacket." But what there is, is intriguing, if far less mysterious than he probably wanted. A casual argument turns into a wife's confession of wishful lust, and a too-complacent professional******* finds himself adrift and part of a world he never knew existed and avoids life-changing consequences--just barely. For once, Kubrick spares his competent man the humiliation or destruction. Cruise feels like an adult here, for once. Kidman is sphynx-like. But the emotions feel raw, and only a too-pat (and badly-scripted) ending destroys the denouement. Not as sexy as hyped, it is Kubrick dealing with relationships of everyday life that spin out of control and reality. It's still too early since its premiere to have cracked all its secrets. But, I just know one day I'll be walking down the street and a stray piece of dialogue or image will float into my consciousness and I'll go..."Wait a minute....he did that because..."


A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001): The Kubrick-Spielberg love-child that nobody loved. Kubrick called it his "Pinocchio" movie, and quite rightly decided after years of development to hand it to Spielberg, which, after Kubrick's death, he was eager to complete. But in the transition from Kubrick outline to Spielberg screenplay there's a lot of gear-grinding from cold fantasy to sentimentality. And unfortunately it suffers a fate that too many sci-fi movies suffer - it asks us to absorb too many concepts too fast, and the casual movie-goer has a hard time accepting global warming, robot love, and an ice-aged Earth inhabited by your PC's descendants. Throw in a Blue Fairy and a dying robot's last wish and the audience is in stitches. But...it dares to ask that question rarely asked (except by Hitchcock in "Vertigo") What is love, really?" And the answer was "Love is what audiences didn't feel about this movie." Still, there's some definite mind-stretching going on here. And it gave Jude Law a star-making turn, at last. Plus, the kid is simply amazing.

Ouvre-view: The Conventional Wisdom is that Stanley Kubrick was a hermetic, mysoginistic, deranged, misanthropic control freak--ask any of the New York fashionista.

Well, he was a control-freak. It's the chess-thing. You make preparations for all eventualitites.

But my view of Stanley Kubrick was that he built a career, a life, and a world that perfectly suited him and his family and saw little reason to venture out of that world, except when absolutely necessary. That's the advantage of getting everything you want.

I may be a bit of a depressive, but, curiously, after "Lolita," I've never found a Kubrick movie depressing. Shocking, yes. Disturbing, boy, howdy. But look at it from Kubrick's view. In "Dr. Strangelove," mankind (and unkind) will suvive (albeit to certainly commit the same mistakes as before). In "2001," man transcends (with a little help from our friends). In "Clockwork Orange" free will defeats fascism. In "Barry Lyndon," a title card (not the snarky narrator) informs us that "they are all equal now," Barry has achieved a equitable station in death. But the promise of life after death pervades "The Shining." The squad of "Full Metal Jacket" have survived the pincers of their impossible situation and live to march another day. Love triumphs over infidelity and indifference in "Eyes Wide Shut."

Yeah, but...

Yeah, but...despite all the perfect systems that can't fail (but do), and despite the clever, competent, supremely well-informed Masters of the Universe (in the Wolfe-ian sense) with the flaws they can't seem to recognize and are helpless to ignore, that Universe ticks inexorably on, mindless of the plight of its supposed "Masters." And the answers, if you're conscious enough to seek them) lie not in our stars, but our selves.

Leave it to a control freak to come up with something like that.


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* With any luck

**Ouvre: 1. the works of a writer, painter, or the like, taken as a whole.

*** Kubrick warned Production Designer Ken Adam to keep his resource materials, as there were government inquiries about the B-52 interiors.

**** Kubrick's breaking point was the scene where the President advises the Russian Premiere to shoot down the American bombers.

***** Burgess' past is murky at best and full of writer's invention, but his first wife was brutalized by sailors, and so Burgess made the damned subject of the Ludovico Technique for depriving one of free-will one of those men. Even one such of these, to Burgess, shouldn't be deprived of choice.

****** Herr wrote a sadly celebratory memoir of his dealings with Kubrick, in lieu of what Kubrick intended to be an extensive interview for "Eyes Wide Shut" in Vanity Fair. Herr then published an expanded version in book-form. It's a great read.

*******Named Harford,because, according to the screenplay writer, they were thinking of Harrison Ford for the part!

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Today's bumper-sticker: "One Nation...Under Surveillance"

Song in me head: None at this time...but hum a few bars...

Saturday, April 21, 2007

Running Hot and Cold

It hasn't been the busiest week, but I have managed to do some things in K.'s absence. We had some plumbing work done on the bathroom, so that "HOT" now means hot, not scalding, and "COLD" actually means cold, not non-existent. And the shower? It has a new knob that's actually threaded so that when you turn it, it turns on the shower. Nifty, huh? What will they come up with next, in this miraculous 21st Century? It's all done with copper tubing, too! Then we had the shower-head raised a foot and a half so that it's above my head, as opposed to spraying my chest. Well, this is what I suppose, anyway. I've now fixed the hole in the dry-wall, sealed and painted it, and it has yet to dry. All this to say, I haven't had a shower since Friday. But I'm sure it will be marvelous.*

The next step is to replace the sink and faucets, even though the steady drip-drip-drip has done wonders for my problems with rhythm. I'll just have to invest in that metronome, I guess.

What else? Well, the splinters in my hands that make me wince when I type remind me that I've been moving various parts of our fallen tree (Reference here) into our handy-dandy wood-crib that we put together Easter weekend. A work in progress, I've moved a bunch of wood-hunks from the lawn into it, for the purpose of, in the near-future, taking each hunk and hatcheting it into smaller hunks for the burning of in our wood stove. But I've filled it, and there's so much more tree to go. I will have to make another wood-pile, and tarp it for the large hunks that won't fit the crib. It's a process. But it's all wood. It's all good.

I have some free-lance this week. Job applications to send in. Some speculative sound-design to do. Might take in a movie, although there's nothing out there that floats my boat. In the mean-time, I'll be taking long walks with my short peers--they being the dog and cat-units. They've been entertaining in K's absence. Smokey had an extended frisbee session at low-tide yesterday. And he's been modeling his new anti-bark collar, getting used to it. No, it's not one of those shock-collars. It emits a distracting chirp when he barks.

Okay, "chirp" might not be the word.

"Irritating squeal" would be more accurate.

Yeah, that's more like it. "Irritating squeal."

We should see a drop in cardiac arrests in UPS delivery-men in the near-term. Watch for it.
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And there's something else that that I'm happy about--I had dinner with my former wife Alesandra. She's started reading this blog--and, in fact, holds the record for the most amount of time spent on the site at one time (02:05:00). We talked about this. We talked about that. It was really good seeing her again. She looks great. She's doing well, and she's actually planning to take some time off and vacation. It was a nice, long enjoyable meal with delightful company. I see her too seldom. We've promised to do better in the future.

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I wrote earlier this week about my association with Dan "The Man." I also wrote about him here (it has a nifty link to the short film he wrote and directed). Well, I've gotten a couple of nice e-notes from him. One in regards to this ad (http://www.cryocarepca.org/). When we worked on that before-mentioned comedy album one of the bits Dan wrote was for "Cryo-Care"--a cryonic day-care where busy adults could freezer their child to accomodate their schedules and not miss those all-important child development highlights. And now, here's "Cryo-Care," for real.

Well, this week, Dan sent me another link (http://blog.wired.com/defense/files/DESM-ProgramOri.pdf). You'll probably need Acrobat or some other program that can open PDF's, but its worth a look. It inspired me to write these new lyrics for an old song:

They call him Flipper, Flipper
Wired with Lazers
No one, you see
Is Com-bus-tion-free

And we know Flipper
Fights e-ne-mies of our na-tion
With Im-mo-la-tion
'til they're crispeeeey!
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I did rent a couple of really good movies this week:

"United 93" is Paul Greengrass' recreation (with non-actors) of the first counter-attack on the War on Terror (and, need I point out, one of the most successful?) You know the story. You know how it turns out. So its the considerable accomplishment of the director to still keep you on the edge of your seat, and do it in a way that feels real, and decidedly "un-Hollywood." There's no grand-standing. No commentary. No jingo-ism. No speeches. It's the story of desperate people in a desperate circumstance. And doing the right thing. It's an amazing piece of work and can't recommend it highly enough.





"Stranger Than Fiction" is the latest film by Marc Forster, or one of the Marc Forsters as he seems to be a different director with every film. This is the same guy who did "Monsters' Ball," and "Finding Neverland." And this, a sunny little black comedy, is nothing like either of those films. It's very nice to find a comedy that isn't an echo of something you've heard before, and although it carries the whiff of a Charlie Kaufman conceit, it has its own unique voice courtesy of writer Zach Helm. And it's performed to the hilt by Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, Queen Latifah, an almost unrecognizable Tom Hulce, and a wonderfully muted Will Farrell. Yeah, we all like the extrovert Will Farrell (well, maybe we don't), but there's something extraordinarily comic about this performance, where he's forever looking askance at the world and wondering why. It's very enjoyable. Highly recommended.
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Today's Seen Bumper Sticker: There's a Village in Texas Missing its Idiot

Song in me Head: "You Made Me So Very Happy" Blood, Sweat and Tears
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* And it was. You know something? I've gone a solid year without a decent experience taking a shower in this place. That can take a lot out of a person--not knowing if you were going to have hot water and how long it would last. Well, now the shower is high enough and I can regulate the temperature. I can't tell you how nice it is to be able to do that. Life's simple pleasures...

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Old Dogs Teaching New Tricks

Tuesday, Walaka hosannahed before the teaching gods for a job well-done. It inspired me to blow the dust off a theme of a similar sort that I wrote back when I was teaching, because I wanted to remember that day and what it felt like.


I’ve been a Sound Designer since 1980 and I love what I do. To me, there is no greater "high" than taking an audio track and by inserting a selected sound, make it appear that the sound had every right being there in the first place. To fool an audience into thinking that that sound belonged there and had, in fact, always been there. It’s a heady trick to play on people’s minds, and it can be used to influence and also manipulate the audience into an emotional response.

God help me, I do love it so.

So, I’ve had a few months of slow work, and I began teaching at Shoreline Community College. I had two “Beginning Sound Design” classes fold out from under me, due to “lack of interest” – in other words, only a few students signed up. Now, in the Spring of 2005, I’m co-teaching a class of Audio Post-Production that had so many students it required two sections. I’m teaching the Tuesday-Thursday section, but also hanging around for the Monday-Wednesday sessions to see how people are progressing.

The class assignment is simple: do all the required audio work to finish a movie in time to show it to the public June 8th. And not just one movie. Two movies. One is “The Great Escape,” the Hollywood-ized version of the audacious POW camp escape during World War II. You probably remember it for Steve McQueen and his leaping motorcycle. There are no women in this film, so to make sure the female students get some voices to impersonate (and to give the class a film to have fun with) the other film is TGE’s claymation progenitor, “Chicken Run.” Two more apt films for a class just about to graduate from an audio post-production sequence could not be found. And the students have thrown themselves at these two films with an enthusiasm that is thrilling.

For the past five weeks, the students have been dealing with ADR (Automated Dialog Replacement). We’ve stripped the audio from the two films, and the students have had to present a fully-typed out script and re-record the lines made famous by Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, James Garner, Donald Pleasance, et al. It has been exhausting work, and I’ve been watching nerves fray, and tired lines etch into people’s faces. Frankly, it’s made me worried.

The next phase of the project is foley, the peculiar artistry in motion pictures of recreating the sounds of people walking, fiddling with props and generally making the film’s world sound more real than it actually can be by being recorded with a simple microphone. This skill bears the name of a legendary practitioner of the art at Universal Studios (Jack Foley). I’ve had students approach me in the halls and say they’ll not get through all the foley work, but still they’ve plunged in, asking for donations of boots and building small stages of dirt, and wood to faux-walk on.

Friday I went up to campus to donate my brother’s Vietnam-vintage Army boots for the cause.

I’ve recently been reflecting on how teaching can’t possibly provide the thrill that doing my own sound design brings me. Emily Dickinson once wrote that she knew her poetry was good when it felt like her head might explode. I have known what that feels like doing sound design. But I doubted that teaching those skills would make me feel as good. Mind you, there have been joys: the original music the students have composed for “Chicken Run” is both fun and functional…and wholly their own. The Music Team for “The Great Escape” is working with a concurrent MIDI class to recreate Elmer Bernstein’s classic score. The first primitive MIDI sounds were primitive. Now, the team is working with an initially reluctant MIDI class to beef up their charts with better orchestral samples, the results of which have been magical for the music and enervating for the MIDI class, to the thrill of all concerned. And some of the performances improve on the originals, inspiring admiring smiles, a shake of the head in wonder, and barks of appreciative laughter.

I entered Studio “D” in the basement of the Music Building with my brother’s boots. Students John Nold and Tim Sage looked at me with eyes as wide as childrens’ on Christmas morning. “You gotta listen to this!” John said. “We’ve got the first four minutes of footsteps.” “Okay. Who’s in the booth?” “David.” They played the sequence of the prisoners first arriving at their camp, disembarking from the transport trucks and fanning out. And I got to watch David Villablanca, by himself, portray the various German soldiers, and the shuffling of some 250 Allied prisoners recorded over 4 tracks maximum. It worked like gangbusters, sounding as if it was always meant to be there. It was amazing work.

I felt like my brain would explode.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Bon Voyage

K. is rewarding herself and her splendid performance in the Island half-marathon (shaved 30 minutes off the time, with a fraction of the aches from last year) with a trip to Oahu with her friend Pat. By coincidence, her niece, who also did the halfer, will be there, too. She called last night...said the weather is faboo...but the flight (delayed an hour by the pin-balling repercussions of the East Coast weather confusion) was exhausting. She sounds good. She sounds happy.

Clear skies. Hawaii will do that for ya.
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I haven't made any comments about gas prices lately because, hey, what can you say? My check-points for comparison have gas at $3.17 a gallon for "Regular" (87 octane), which is very high. But one knows it will get higher. Crude oil is at $63.13 today, which is high but not as high as the last time we hit and exceeded the $3.00 mark.

Wait. How will we know it's going to go higher? On the radio the other day, an "industry expert" predicted that for the short term prices will remain high, and then start decreasing "around Memorial Day." Heh. Memorial Day. The traditional beginning of the Summer Season, where it's expected for vacationers to drive more...hence, gasoline prices will go up...not down.

Oh, that's so cynical, the "experts" will wag their fingers.

Yeah. Well, consistency will do that to ya.
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Today's Bumper sticker: "Politics -- Poli (Many) tics (Blood-sucking Creatures)"
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Song in me Head: "All Along the Watchtower" The Jimi Hendrix Experience

Monday, April 16, 2007

Grist for the Mill

32 dead. 26 injured.

"Virginia Tech" now means something else. Just as "Columbine" does.

On the radio, it's stated that its the worst "single-shooter" massacre in the nation's history.

And my jaw tightens.

Rewind to the first Bush administration (at the time, we didn't see it as a "golden age," but it looks more and more like it these days--"Bully Pulpit" meant something else then.). I was working on a comedy album with a bunch of local writers and actors. We called ourselves "The Synaptic Anarchy Playhouse" and the album would eventually be titled "Relish the Thought." I'm sure there's a copy of it collecting dust in a bargain bin somewhere in this country. I know of one "comedy DJ" who pretty regularly plays something from it every now and again. For the participants, however, we invested so much time in the thing that its relative worth in our eyes dropped precipitously over the years. But a critical listen not too long ago showed glimmers of merit even with an outlook encrusted with jade. It's not as bad as we think it is. It's not as clever as it should have been, either. It's a compromise.

I was writing with Dan "The Man" on it. Dan would show up with an over-arching theme. And we'd go from there: I'd free-associate in the car and he'd embellish and eventually we'd have a skit that we'd think was really funny and then fall out of love with after a week or so...until it was performed and then we'd marvel at what good actors can do with "stale" material.

One day, Dan walked in and announced this concept: "How the Media Celebrates and Immortalizes Psychosis." Ha! Yeah! Good one! I started free-associating. We'd do a news report of a postal worker shooting up a fast-food restaurant, building it up until its revealed that the shooter didn't kill quite as many people as was initially rumored and the story, in turn, falls off the headlines coverage. That set the situation up and the two of us started embellishing. The restaurant became "Big Boy Chucky's" after a ubiquitous burger chain not found in Washington State, with its cherubic statuary that we used for a bit where the newscasters seemed to be showing more concern for the damage inflicted on it than the victims. The postal worker was portrayed in a stand-off with police threatening to dunk his head in a deep-fat fryer unless his demands were met--one of which was to produce a tv-version of his life-story called "They Make us Wear These Shorts!" There were interviews with a representative of a firearms enthusiast's organization, who opined that the whole thing could have been avoided if all the customers were carrying. And a former teacher of the shooter--a nun, Sister Mary-Louise Evidentia Stigmata--remembered the postal worker being an "over-achiever." Then, as soon as its revealed that it's not "The Most Peace-Time Kills Caused with an Automatic Weapon in a Dining Area" the anchor loses interest and cuts away from the local reporter who is frantically trying to build up the story again...but to no avail. "How the Media Celebrates and Immortalizes Psychosis." Funny bit.

Except every time it happens.

And it happens regularly. Dan and I would mention it to each other the first five times there was an eerie parallel, and there was always an eerie parallel. It would be a postal worker some times. A disgruntled worker, certainly. And, of course, the media would milk it for all it was worth. Their coverage was consistent from incident to incident, we noticed, sometimes using phrasing we mockingly used in the skit. Time and again. We'd mention it bitterly. Then we just stopped talking about it. It was uncomfortable to talk about. There was an element of shame to it. The topic had been done...to death.

And so, today: "The Worst 'Single-Shooter' Massacre in the Nation's History." I get an e-mail about parallels from another member of the group. Yup. I noticed. My stomach, in knots, noticed. I also told him I thought it was easy and we had been a little obvious to mock the news media about their coverage of things like this. I said it was like calling a dog four-legged. Or Imus a boor.

And it'll happen again. But I'm left with the fervent wish that next time that one of these...people...would get their priorities straight and simply cut to the chase. The unfortunate thing about these incidents is they always end up shooting themselves last.

When it's where they should be starting.

It would save everybody a lot of grief.

Sunday, April 15, 2007

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K. did the half-marathon this week-end, and she and her niece and her niece's mom were positively blessed by a nice warm day to travel the fourteen island miles with a big fish-and-chips lunch as a reward for making it the whole way. They made great time, too--a full hour less than two years ago. They started training three months ago, and they were all in far-better shape this time around. Some blisters. Some protesting muscles. But everybody's happy and healthy and with nice little medals around their necks. But they're exhausted, and have gone to bed.

Me, I'm blogging.

K. takes off for a couple weeks in Hawaii, while I maintain vigil on my own Island with the pets. The two things I'm concentrating are 1) the on-going work search (I did a couple of mixes on industrials this past week--not much, but something, and one of my regular freelance gigs came in and was done, no hassle.), and 2) our tuner has crapped out, so I'll be shopping for one of those that will fit our little space under the television that's not too expensive and I can still use our speakers on. The technology has evolved so much that I don't think I'll have a problem finding something a) cheap and b) powerful for all the stuff we need it to do. Oh! and 3) I'll be moving wood. Lots of wood. Lots of wood into our brand-new wood crib that will keep said wood out of the elements so we can use for non-smokey fires in the future.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

The "Now I've Seen Everything" Dept.- Steven Spielberg, Freshman Year

In which the author, having seen everything there is to see on the subject makes a capsule summary of each,* looking for trends and contributing what he calls an Ouvre-view.**

Subject: The Films of Steven Spielberg , Freshman Year

Duel, 1971 Precocious with movie cameras and making his own features, Spielberg snuck onto the Universal lot and absconded his own office, then with hard work and mentoring got to direct his first television feature--an segment of the "Night Gallery" pilot starring the formidable Joan Crawford. It was the stuff of industry legend. But folks really stood up and took notice with this "ABC Movie of the Week" adaptation of Richard Matheson's bare-bones short story: a man in a car against...something... in an 18-wheeler, out in the desert. In a TV environment where budgets ruled all, Spielberg managed to give his minimalist film a movie feel, with elegant travelling shots, charging effects techniques, and, in moments calling for panic, almost-hallucinatory extreme close-ups. But there's more to it than technique. Spielberg also gives the demon-truck the supernatural quality it deserves, creating a seemingly unstoppable foe. He provides a rousing climax, then ends with a melancholy, existential coda, elevating the car-versus-truck story. He also had the benefit of an all-stops-out performance by the underutilized Dennis Weaver.


The Sugarland Express, 1974
With all that was to come after, folks forget that Spielberg's first film was this Goldie Hawn...er, "vehicle," featuring a long, slow car chase, an unsympathetic lead and a down-beat ending. Critics took notice, but nobody bought tickets. That wouldn't happen again for awhile. Goldie plays a mom who springs her husband out of prison, takes a guard hostage and leads a convoy of patrol cars on a quixotic trip to rescue her child from a foster home. Spielberg wouldn't attempt this level of crowd-no-pleaser 'til later in his career. He also populated his cast with a fair percentage of locals with no previous acting experience for color, a technique he'd also employ in his next little film.

Jaws, 1975 You'll find an early analysis here. There's not much to add, other than, with time and close inspection, the seams show a bit more in this roller-coaster crowd-teaser about an "eating machine" picking off citizens of a Massachusetts beach community during high-tourist season. The movie's bi-polar: On land, it's a Hitchcockian tease, but on open water, it's a bit like "Duel"--frenetically hyper-busy with bits of business and one crisis after another. But what could the kid do? He had a shark movie, but for 95% of filming he had no shark. Water and weather conditions changed from moment to moment, but John Williams' insistent score keeps you focused on the action. And he's helped immeasurably by an odd, brilliantly picked cast. Spielberg's lead was a character actor usually given sinister second-banana roles, and for the other denizens of the good ship Orca, chose two character actors who, in style and personality, were oil and water: the classically trained Welsh boozer/playwright Robert Shaw, and the pinched, hectoring Actor's Studio product Richard Dreyfuss. With a cast like this, the shark's almost superfluous for generating drama. Spielberg changed the book considerably and provided a "wowser" of a finish (in the book, the shark just...dies) that, over the original author's objections,*** pays off mightily. Over-time and over-budget, it became the first wide-opening Hollywood blockbuster, setting the stage for how films were presented, marketed and hyped for the next 30 years.


Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977 Flush with the success of "Jaws" and his name now a household word, Spielberg parlayed his clout to make a dream project that star Richard Dreyfuss announced on "The Mike Douglas Show" "will turn Columbia Pictures into a parking lot" if it wasn't a success. Based on a bit of one of his childhood 8mm movies, partially on a commissioned script by Paul Schrader ("Taxi Driver"), the evolving storyline started out as a film about a pesky alien attack, and turned into one about obsession, dissolution and ecstatic epiphany. "Everyman" contractor Roy Neary is touched by a light from beyond and the scorch-marks it leaves on his face dig deep into his brain leading to a compulsive scavenger hunt-like search for the answers. He's joined by other adrift souls (including a mother searching for her alien-abducted toddler) and, Job-like, is rewarded for his trials...and his faith.**** Released the same year as "Star Wars" and uncompleted to Spielberg's satisfaction at the time, it can now be seen as he intended (and without the unnecessary scenes inside the Mother-ship that bankrolled Spielberg's tinkering). The completed film shows Spielberg's willingness to broach dark material before making his way to the light at the end of the tunnel. It also shows his growing directorial skills with kids (as was briefly displayed in "Jaws") not only in the performance of the pre-verbal Cary Guffey, but also in the heart-breaking performances of the actors who portrayed the Neary children.

1941, 1979 After the "Jaws"/"CE3K" one-two-punch, Spielberg set his view-finder on a screwball/slapstick comedy--ala "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World"--the basis of which was a John Milius/Robert Zemeckis/Bob Gale script about California attack hysteria in the days following Pearl Harbor. What was a relatively clever, modest script balooned into an elaborate loud-mouthed farce with a star-studded cast headed by a coke-addled John Belushi and the likes of John Candy, Dan Ackroyd (of course), Slim Pickens, Warren Oates, and even Christopher Lee and Toshiro Mifune (playing it straight). "1941" is barnacle-encrusted with in- and out-house jokes, starting with the same skinny-dipping gal from the beginning of "Jaws" being hoisted into the air on the periscope of a surfacing Japanese submarine. It's all "Jerry Lewis"-subtle and the wanton destruction on several fronts is considerable and wearying and ultimately signifying...not much. But it could have been even more extreme: John Wayne was too miffed at what he considered the anti-Americanism in the script to play General Stilwell (Robert Stack stepped in), and the lookouts on the Ferris Wheel were originally to be "Honeymooners" Jackie Gleason and Art Carney (but became Murray Hamilton and...Eddie Deezen). "1941" bombed at the box-office and all the blame went to Spielberg for running over-budget and overboard. Hollywood dismissed him as an irresponsible flame-out. But he had friends in high places.


Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981 On a post-"Star Wars" vacation in Hawaii, George Lucas and Spielberg made plans for a series of films based on the old movie adventure serials, but amped up with modern story-telling techniques and special effects centered around a globe-trotting archaeologist named Indiana Jones (Tom Selleck was the front-runner to play him, but as he was tied up playing "Magnum, P.I." on tv, Harrison Ford slipped on the ever-present fedora).***** Based on a story by Lucas and Phillip Kaufman, Spielberg protege Larry Kasdan fashioned a taut, wise script winking at the genre and poking fun at the cliches while playing up the mysticism. With the overview of Lucas, Spielberg, for once, kept tight rein on the production and came in on time and under budget, allowing him to retrieve his industry cred--helped, no doubt, by the healthy receipts of a cracker-jack film. Spielberg's career was revitalized, and more importantly, his work with Lucas inspired him to form his own business model for film-making. he would stop being a studio work-for-hire and, within a year, would start directing and developing film projects under his own production masthead...Amblin Entertainment.

* With any luck

** Ouvre: 1.the works of a writer, painter, or the like, taken as a whole.

*** "Jaws" author Peter Benchley hated the movie's end, finding it unbelievable and embarrassingly "cowboy." Showing the film to a group of marine biologists, he was mortified to watch them cheer hysterically when the shark blows up.

**** James Lipton, when he interviewed Spielberg on "Inside the Actor's Studio" asked Spielberg the professions of his divorced parents. He was an inventor specializing in computers. She was a music teacher. Lipton then asked him if it had occurred to him that that was why a computerized synthesizer (that learned the language) was used to communicate with the aliens. "It just occurred to me now.." was Spielberg's flustered reply.

***** How it came up was Spielberg confessed to Lucas that he wanted to direct a James Bond film, to which Lucas replied, "I've got something better than Bond." Naturally, when it came time to cast the father of Indiana Jones, the first person they asked was original movie Bond, Sean Connery.