The Baroque Cycle

While visiting my family in AZ, I had the quietude to finally finish reading The Baroque Cycle, Neal Stephenson's eight-book, three volume massive chunk of fiction, just in time for the year to draw to an end.

If I tried describing these things, I'd get real hyperbolic real fast, so I'll keep it simple and just say this is one of the best things I've ever read. There is no way I can recommend this series too highly.

That said, this isn't a quick read. The volumes are not only long, but dense. Stephenson is an extremely intelligent guy who does enormous amounts of research and puts it all on the page. The plotting is intricate, and the dialogue is spoken by smart people who like wordplay and spend time discussing finance, politics, religion and science in detail. There were times my brain was too tired for me to get traction on the page, and I just had to go to bed.

At the same time... man, there are several chapters that I re-read and re-re-read, not just entertained, but awed by the writing. (Jack's escape from India in The Confusion floored me). It's a prix fixe literary meal.

In the same way that I spent most of 2008 working my way through Oblivion and then Fallout 3, The Baroque Cycle swallowed up a vast chunk of this past year's reading time. Definitely worth it on all counts, but I found they were less entertainments than mighty tasks. For a while, I'm gonna need to focus on shorter/quicker/lighter titles when it comes to books and video games. To that end, I'm playing Fable II and reading some Bukowski.

Dear Hello Kitty

New one here.

Sadly, I'm Still Shallow

For the past couple of years, but 2008 especially, I've been congratulating myself for finally being mature enough to enjoy '70s cinema.

I'm not talking about anything with a level of violence that was pertinent to my teenaged self - Taxi Driver I've been watching since junior high, for instance. I mean the movies that're about people and feelings and shit. Nothing could bore me faster.

Until recently...

One of the best things about Netflix is it offers a cheap and painless way to plug the more glaring holes in my viewing. So I'm finally catching up with titles like Last Tango in Paris, Serpico, Easy Rider (I know it's '69, close enough), etc. I watch them, the whole time sitting there thinking, "This movie's awesome! Why'd it take me so long to get around to it?" But I stopped the self-beratement... only to replace it with self-congratulation when I came to understand that before now I wouldn't have enjoyed them. Now, however, I have the requisite maturity. I am a man of the world who can watch a movie about people's emotions and shit. A time comes for all things.

Unfortunately, this blog posting thus far is nothing but a long-winded preamble to me saying that I shut off Five Easy Pieces fifteen minutes in so I could go back to shooting bandits in Fable II.

If I said something like that back in film school, everyone would've fallen outta their chairs like I'd released sarin into the room. "But it's Jack Nicholson's tour de force! He won the Oscar that year for Best Performance!"

Yeah, yeah...

The movie opens on a montage of oil workers in Texas doing their jobs. One of them is Jack Nicholson. He goes home and cracks a beer when he walks in the door like a man should, sits down and listens to his waitress girlfriend (Karen Black - and her legs) ask him to help her choose a song to perform. He begs off. They go bowling. She's a shitty bowler, and Jack gets pissy with her over it. But -- and here's where I started to check out -- it's not a fun Jack Nicholson flip-out, he's just a normal guy having a normal-guy-style temper tantrum over nothing, just being a dick. I guess that's Jack acting, but it wasn't fun to watch, just kinda... ugh.

Karen gets upset and goes out to wait in the car and cry. (There's a sense this is a normal Saturday night routine). While she's gone, Jack sits by himself and is sad... more acting. A couple of chicks from the next lane over throw Jack some game. He says nah and goes out to make up with Karen. They have a scene in the parking lot. She tries to get him to say he loves her, and Jack wiggles out of it. This is a long scene.

I shut off the movie.

From what I've read online, Jack is actually a brillaint pianist who's squandered his talent by running off to work in the oil fields. I'm sure this explains why Jack's a perfectionist, even when it comes to bowling, and the bitch-fest he weighs on Karen is probably the kinda thing he grew up with, and fled, even if it meant not using his musical ability. Apparently, he gets called home and has to face his past, etc.

The thought of watching this play out made my skin itch in a familiar way. It was the same itch I felt when I tried to watch Ordinary People when I was in high school. It was the same itch that bedeviled me the entire time I sat through Gosford Park, a movie I hated. Hated. HATED.

I knew Jacks' visit home would be a lotta long scenes of people being sad, and rooms full of actors just acting the living shit out of their sadness and each other.

It's difficult for me to wade through stories about people who have just kinda decided to be miserable. This isn't a 100% thing... I still love The Graduate, probably because I was able to get where Dustin Hoffman was coming from. And I think Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the great filmmakers of our generation. But the emotional travails of a pianist as told in long takes of bitch sessions? Not so much.

But... who knows? I'll check back in with Five Easy Pieces in ten years or so. Maybe by then I'll be able to enjoy it. And when that day comes, I'll take another crack at Altman and Cassavetes again, and my future, that-much-more-mature self will slap his forehead and yell, "Why did it take me so long to appreciate these awesome movies?"

I suppose I just have to take these things by degrees. You gotta walk before you can run, blah-blah.

And by the way, Last Tango in Paris is pretty fucking great.

Xmas 'n' Shit, Plus a Fable II Shout-Out

To the surprise of no one, I'm going to AZ to hang with the fam for Festivus.

It will be a "vacation" only in the sense that I won't be working at my day job for a few days. I got notes on the first draft of DEAD RIGHT THERE on Friday, and spent the weekend hacking at them. I'm developing another action franchise, and I'm hoping to crack out a first draft of FIGHT SCHOOL over the holidays. I'm planning to have at least two of these three projects done by the the first of the year. And I still need to rewrite DEMON.

So... besides a party or two, some basic cable and red wine, I'm basically taking the woodshed on the road.

Meanwhile, when I'm not writing, I've been watching John Adams (the amazing-AMAZING HBO miniseries) and playing Fable II. Boy howdy, do I loves me some Fable II.

I never played the first game. I got this one because it was very well-reviewed, and it was used and there was a deal involved. Game-wise, I've spent the majority of the past year on Oblivion and Fallout 3. Much as I love both games, I'm kinda burnt on 'em both. I needed something light and different, and Fable II is the antidote.

Fable II seems to be an effort to deliver on what you want and expect from a fantasy RPG (swords 'n' sorcery, monsters, etc.) while finding ways to turn around as many of the standard conventions of the genre as possible.

For example: the usual situation with games like this is you gear up your dude in weapons and armor, go out, kill monsters and steal their shit. You turn that shit into better weapons and armor, kill tougher monsters and steal their bigger piles of shit, wash, rinse and repeat.

In Fable II, you get a sword and a gun (!), but no armor. Your clothes affect how the NPCs react to you, and that's it. The monsters don't carry treasure. You still get experience for beating up bad guys, but the way to make money is by finding treasure chests and working at jobs, like blacksmithing (hard) and bartending (fun, but a bit monotonous). Then you take that cash and invest in real estate (!!!), which gives you a rent check every five minutes. The more shops and houses you buy, the bigger the bling.

You get a dog that tags along with you. You can name the dog. My dog's name is "Dawg," after the dog John Wayne had in The Sons of Katie Elder. It's weird that you can name your dog, but you can't name your character... you're called "Sparrow," no matter what. I guess that's so the dialogue makes sense, but I've seen other games -- Baldur's Gate comes to mind -- work around that.

This dog is fucking incredible. The animation is beyond belief. Not that it's photo real... it's in the performance. I had a couple of dogs when I was a kid, and man... they captured how dogs move and act. It feels like a real dog. You can teach the dog to find treasure for you. As you wander around, the dog'll start barking and sniff in a spot where you can dig up treasure, which you can use to buy a better sword/gun, or invest in more real estate.

There's also a real Sims influence. You can make your guy dance and sing, which makes all of the other characters gather around and watch. The more you fuck around, the more they like you. In the same way you can train your dog to sniff treasure, you can train your guy to have more options. I bought a lute, and he plays a little tune. If the villagers really like you, they offer a discount on stuff at the stores, and you can talk chicks into coming home with you.

Sex in video games isn't incredibly new... I put in some hours on Leisure Suit Larry when I was a kid. And there's a very cinematic love scene in Mass Effect. But this is the first game I've seen where sex is handled as a game mechanic instead of a cut scene. You can get married. You can have kids. You can cheat on your wife with hookers. What I'm trying to say is -- this ain't Ultima III.

The story and tone feels very Gilliam. It's fun and funny, it's wry, it's smart, it's light-hearted, it's veddy-veddy British. But, like the Gilliam stuff (or Caro/Jeunet) the game gets bleak as hell when that time comes. Without giving anything away... the trip to the Tattered Spire really creeped me out. The sequence does a great job of establishing just how bad the villain is.

On a side note, while playing this, I keep thinking this is Steve Townsend: The Video Game.

Blatant pimpin' for DRACULA: THE UN-DEAD

So the site is up, along with myspace and facebook pages.

Naturally, I'm friending across the board.

For all your Dracula needs...

Air Guitar Nation

I watched this documentary Air Guitar Nation, and it is amazing.

The filmmakers are just a couple of guys in New York who hear in passing about a world air guitar competition that's held in Denmark every year. It's one of those little News of the Weird things you see online or whatever, no big deal. But then they find out that America is not only unrepresented at this thing, but there has never been an American air guitar contestant. Though they couldn't give a shit about an air guitar competition - they laugh about the idea - still... America is the fucking birth place of rock, and there's no one to represent?! This cannot stand.

So they rent out a bar and put up fliers that they're gonna have the east coast air guitar contest. It's still just this funny little thing they're doing. Then Howard Stern talks about it... and hundreds of people show up.

Including a local actor whose stage name is C-Diddy. He's a Korean dude who dresses up in a Hello Kitty chest plate and a red cape. Just like the filmmakers, he treats the whole things as a joke, just something funny to do.

However, his closest competition doesn't think it's a joke. His stage name is Bjorn Turoque, and he feels that air guitar is an art form. He takes it very seriously. While C-Diddy is all about costumes and performance, Bjorn works from the inside-out... he creates a core rock star persona, and brings that out on stage.

C-Diddy is kind of our in to this world, because he shares the viewpoint of the filmmakers and the audience of laughing at air guitar. I mean, c'mon... air guitar?! But as he rises through the ranks, puts work into his act and meets people who don't laugh at it, he - and we - start to get it. By act three, I was watching this on the edge of my seat, rooting for America to step up and represent against Europe's best.

Like most of the best documentaries, there are twists to this true story that blow away anything in fiction. I won't ruin anything - I want you to watch this movie, and experience these bizarre situations for yourself. Because I think, also like the best docs, this is using something that's kinda silly on its face to discuss themes that are very honest and human.

While watching Air Guitar Nation, I was thinking of The King of Kong and Darkon. Taken together, I think these three movies offer perhaps the truest discussion I've seen of the congruence of dreams with reality.

Like Steve Wiebe and Donkey Kong in Kong, C-Diddy and Bjorn put a huge amount of time and effort into perfecting what's basically a useless skill. If you were trapped on a desert island, getting a high score in Donkey Kong or having an awesome air guitar performance won't help you survive, for example. And, even sans the desert island scenario, these are skills that are the ultimate of inside baseball, only appreciated by a very small society of like-minded individuals, and laughed at by the world at large. BUT -- both Steve and C-Diddy express a desire to be the best in the world at something, anything - it doesn't matter what it is.

This isn't a unique urge to these two. I subscribe to Game Informer, and they like do to interviews with people who get high scores in various games. And the response they get is very consistently a variation on: "I don't care if it's a video game, I'm the best in the world."

And it's not just games. How do you explain the people who do weird shit just to get into the Guinness Book of World Records? There's no direct reward. For instance, playing basketball won't help you on a desert island either, but if you're the best basketball player in the world, you'll be rewarded with money, women, status and fame. Not so for the guy who can eat the most Madagascar cockroaches inside of a minute.

It's a desire to be unique, to be special, to show that you were put here for a reason. It's a desire for Steve Wiebe to be able to say yes, there are many seventh-grade science teachers in the world, but I'm the only seventh-grade science teacher that has ever lived who's flipped the Donkey Kong kill screen. The only one ever.

How else do you explain American Idol? Dancing with the Stars? America's Got Talent? Any fucking game show or reality show, for that matter? "There are many truck drivers in the world, but only one of them has competed on Survivor, and that one is me."

The vast majority of the human race is okay with mediocrity. But there are a percentage who are not. Some of that percentage have special skills or intelligence that allow them to become rich and successful. But what if you're not a very special person, yet at the same time you want to be special, anyway?

There is something very true and uniquely human about this urge.

Also - like C-Diddy and the filmmakers, I stopped laughing after a while, and eventually came to understand what made air guitar special not only for the people who enjoyed it, but objectively, to see it as an art form.

Okay, walk with me, here...

You hear a band and like their music. You buy the CD or the iTune or whatever. You can listen to that music all you want, you own it. But then you hear the band is coming to town. So you go see them... Why?

They're just going to play the same songs you already own, and can listen to all day. What's the reasoning behind spending more time and money to hear the song played again?

I get that there's something cool about being able to go, "Hey, it's Metallica! Standing right there! Like... right there, man!" But I've listened to a lot of live albums, and it's a very, very rare song that sounds better live than when it's recorded in a pro studio with professional production. It begs the question: when you buy concert tickets, what exactly are you paying for?

The performance.

You want to see rock stars act like rock stars on a stage, and give a performance. I've seen this from both sides. I've gone to shows and dug what the band was doing on stage - they're the stories you tell your friends about the show the next day. And while playing in bands, I saw a lot of acts who were four or five petrified white kids just fucking standing there, staring straight ahead, playing the songs they'd practiced in their garage and shuffling off stage... to a deafening silence. If you play in a band, you gotta jump around and be a maniac. If people just want music, they buy a CD or mp3. If they want to see a band, they're paying for a performance.

Okay. Put a pin in that, and let's talk about eurhythmics, which are just body movements made in response to sound. If you're tapping your foot while listening to a song, that's a eurhythmic. Obviously, that extends to dance. And just as obviously, this applies to air guitar - the act of playing an imaginary guitar while listening to music.

Dance is considered an art form.

If you spend five hundred dollars to sit in the front row at a Russian ballet, you're dropping that money to watch people in costumes move their bodies in response to music. They are not playing the music - the music is being created by either an orchestra (unseen, in a pit) or a playback of something that's been pre-recorded. No one would argue whether or not ballet is art... not just an art, but high art.

Thus, it follows that any performance that involves a person putting on a costume, getting on a stage and moving in rhythm with music that they do not themselves play is a form of art. This could apply to ballet... or air guitar.

Now - couple the paying audience's desire for a rock star performance with the idea that eurhythmics presented in the context of a performance brings us to the conclusion that, when taken seriously, air guitar is art.

Air Guitar Nation was made before Rock Band and Guitar Hero became the massive entities they now are. These titles aren't just hit video games - they're cultural phenomena. For a while, I had a somewhat elitist view of these games. I thought, if people want to play AC/DC, why don't you pick up a real guitar, learn AC/DC songs and play them? But after watching Air Guitar Nation, I got over myself and realized it is like karaoke, a temporary fulfillment of a dream of being a rock star.

And that's what brought me to Darkon. In both Darkon and Air Guitar Nation, the people who are involved say variations of: "In real life, I'm this normal person. But when I'm doing XYZ, I'm special."

The game the people play in Darkon allows them to pretend they're fantasy heroes. The game people play in Air Guitar Nation allows them to pretend they're rock stars. In both cases, it's an arena of using imagination to engage in a waking dream.

And, as explained by the hero of Darkon, dreams are a way to find value in lives that would ordinarily not be considered valuable.

In Air Guitar Nation, we learn that the contestants are judged on a variety of factors: performance, costume, etc. The usual stuff. But there is an x-factor. One of the criteria is called: "airness." It is difficult to qualify in a hard-and-fast way, but is generally described by the people in the doc as the part of your performance that transcends air guitar, and becomes something else. C-Diddy learns that the greats in the air guitar world achieve their wins because they have mastered airness.

And I thought: what if you applied that concept to other things besides air guitar? What if you applied that to life? How can you approach normal life in such a way that it transcends that humdrum reality, and becomes something else?

Like airness, it's hard to qualify in a firm way. And that's because it's via imagination and dreams.

I have seen a lot of brilliant documentaries in the last couple of years. I think it's a cinematic form that is really coming into its own. And I always come away from the best docs with a thought that's affected me, some lesson learned. There's a value to these movies that is - directly or indirectly - applicable to life. Because they're the stories of human beings, and are thus relatable to anybody who can stop laughing at the weirdoes long enough to open their eyes and realize that we're all weirdoes, just in different ways.

Query of the Day

This one speaks for itself:

"Hey hows it hanging? Good glad to hear it. Lets cut the bullshit... Looking for next years big holiday blockbuster?

Well I got it. "[title removed]" aka "[other title removed]" Based on Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" WAIT!!! I know you have seen every version done know to man - from Muppets to the old west, outer-space and modern-day. Check out this twist with an hint of piss and vinegar for all those of us who are jaded and sick and tired of all the sweet sentimental sugary shit hollywood spoons out each year.

This holiday, the Demons of Christmas, with their desire to corrupt innocent souls, kidnap the only ones who can stop them, The Spirits of Christmas. Once out of the way, they target, Mr. SCRUMGE, all around nice guy and saint. Scrumge discovers charity fundraisers are a hoax, Bob Cratchit scams Tiny Tim as a cripple and his nephew Fred tries to kill him for his fortune. Scrumge's generosity fades to the Demons delight. By Christmas Eve his soul will belong to them. However the good spirits escape and in super hero style they battle the evil spirits to save Scrumge's soul and Christmas too!

Now for the kiss-ass part...
Should you be interested in a project like this please take the time to make your assistant read the script. Thanks for your time, and happy holidays.

Oh and if you pass this up, Santa's gonna kick your ass!!! "

Hey, I Got Interviewed

At www.gumbowriters.com... here's the direct link.

The Spindlies Revealed

Look upon the face of evil.

According to the Berkely site upon which I found this picture, they are CELLAR SPIDERS.

To wit:

Pholcus phalangioides
Family Pholcidae
"Daddy long-legs," "cellar spider"

The common synanthropic cellar spiders in California are European invasives, native pholcids are much smaller. Pholcus can be distinguished from Holocnemus by the grey/brown concolorous abdomen. Their webs are irregular tangles.

Hey, thanks Europe. We save your asses in two World Wars, and you dump your extra cellar spiders in our laps by way of gratitude.

I should also point out that, since I don't live in a cellar, these spiders have taken a collective wrong turn. I do notice them down in the laundry room. Perhaps the spindlies down there kicked out a group of them, and they've resettled elsewhere, a la Khan in Star Trek II, or Australians.

I've blown the lid off this mystery. Now that I know they're cellar spiders, they can no longer hide in the shadows under an assumed identity. (I mean really... "spindlies?" Who comes up with this shit?)

And, thanks to global warming, it hasn't gotten cold enough in LA for them to hibernate or die or whatever the fuck it is spiders do during the winter time. It's almost December, and I'm dealing with a spider plague. At least in Chicago, I could count on (snow on the ground) = (don't have to deal with spiders for the most part). Around here, it's all spiders, all the time. Oh, how I suffer for my art.

I have seen the depths of villainy, and it is in the face of the cellar spider.

Also... what the fuck do they eat? Microbes?

Return of the Spindlies

So... the other day, I bemoaned the fact that I was plagued by an unending swarm of the skinny spiders I've been calling "spindlies" for lack of a better, more official term.

I posted that blog, and... the spindlies disappeared. I didn't see a single spindly in the days that followed. This was odd. Were they like a dream creature, in that I just had to face them down to make them go away? Were they embarrassed by the publicity? Or was it mere coincidence? Who the fuck knows?

Naturally, I wasn't going to complain that there were fewer spiders in my life.

Little did I know, they hadn't gone away. They just stepped back to regroup, and plot their most daring raid yet.

Last night, I wrote until I ran outta juice and played some Fallout 3 until I got tired. I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth.

Brush-brush-brush... brush-brush-brush...

From the corner of my eye, I noticed a strange movement. I turned my head --

-- and there was a spindly on my arm!!!

I started screaming the f-word really loud. But since my mouth was full of toothpaste and the toothbrush was still hanging out, it sounded more like "Musshh-fuuuuuuh! Fuuuumin-fuuu-guuuugh!!!" I slapped at my arm like it was on fire.

I ran out of the bathroom, yanked off my shirt and stomped on it. I gave it a few seconds, and shook out said shirt. No spindly corpse fell out.

I went back in the bathroom and looked on the floor. Again - no corpse.

Unless I've failed in locating its body - and that's a possibility, since they're so, y'know, spindly - the fucker is still at large in my lair.

I know this wasn't some random thing. First they're all over the place, then they vanish, and then one lands on me, and I'm expected to take that as coincidence? I've got two words for that: bull and shit. I'm convinced the spindlies went to the kind of care in planning this operation that would rival the most top secret mission undertaken by the Allies in WWII.

I don't think I'm going out on a limb by saying I think a guy should be able to brush his damn teeth without worrying if spiders are gonna drop on him or not.

Fuck the spindlies. Fuck them up their spindly asses.

Very Intense Dreams

Last night, I wrote five pages and found myself getting sleepy really early. I'm always trying to catch up on sleep, so I figured, why fight it? I jumped in the sack, out like a light.

But then I woke up in the middle of the night. I'd gone to bed too early. I tried just lying there in the dark, but no dice. All that does is fill the void with thinking about the job, whatever script I'm working on, etc. So I read some Howard for about half an hour. His writing is so powerful I can't think of anything else; it's a great way to clear the clutter in my brain while waiting for sleep to return. I finally grew drowsy again.

When I shut off the light and closed my eyes, I'm instantly got pulled into slumber, a sensation so powerful it was almost like a drug. Here's the thing, though -- I wasn't totally asleep. I could hear the other people in my building, and I had the freedom to open my eyes and look around the room. When I closed my eyes, however, I was plunged into a very intense dreamscape. I was able to go back and forth between REM-level dreaming and looking-around-the room wakefulness, which I did several times. It was exactly like standing in a pool and being able to submerge your head or stand up in the air at will.

I'd never experienced anything like that before.

This went on for what seemed to be a long while. The dreams themselves had very little narrative, but were generally set around Hollywood and its environs. It was almost like a sandbox-style video game. It was a magnified version of Hollywood, taking place in a night so black it was subterranean... not to imply a nightmare, though. I went into buildings and met people and did stuff, but none of it was like... I'm fucking supermodels or battling ninjas. It was reality, in fast cuts, plus twenty percent, if that makes any sense.

I woke up again, this time as the first sun crept into the lair. I closed my eyes, and this time I was out for real. No shenanigans or weirdness - I just passed right the fuck out. And the dreams followed me. It was like an intense workout for my subconscious.

My alarm went off, and I got out of bed with a rare regret. Usually, I jump up, read Hagakure and go about attacking my day. A part of me longed to recapture this experience I'd had. Just as well, though - that way lies madness.

One would think that, from the work my brain was putting in and the stop'n' start nature of the sleep, I'd wake up all bedraggled and shit. But that's not the case... I feel rested in a very, very rare way, calm and balanced but alert and engaged. I wish I could experience this every night, but then again, it wouldn't make what happened to me last night special.

I have no idea where this came from, or what triggered it.

And, oh yeah, it's my birthday. Weird, huh?

Dracula: The Un-Dead Site

The official site is now up, here: www.draculathe-undead.com.

Not much there yet, but more to come between now and the novel's release in October '09.

Whoo-hoo!

I Got a Bad Case of the Spindlies

I fucking hate spiders, and I've gotten a ton of them in the lair, lately. As in, I'm killing three or four a night. And they're getting bolder.

Luckily, they're all "spindlies." I don't know what else to call them; the species designation escapes me. They're as skinny as daddy long legs but, instead of a round body, they have super-thin little bodies kinda perched at the top of these thread-like legs. They are 0-level spiders.

Spindlies don't really bother me. When I see one, I just kinda kill it and go on with my life. But man, I'm getting a LOT. In the shower, in my closet, on the wall, in the windows. Last night, I came home and there was one sitting on my laptop.

That crosses the line.

Maybe they're seasonal spiders, and now is their time of the year. Or maybe some eggs hatched somewhere. I don't care, I just want them gone. Like I said, I'm not exactly living in terror, and they sure beat the hell out of a plague of black widows or Peruvian bird-eating spiders or something. But I would prefer to live without spindlies, thank you very much.

Let the Right One In

I went to the Sunset Laemmle 5 last night and caught the 9:55 show of Let the Right One In.

There's been huge buzz in town and online for this movie, so I was jazzed to catch it. You don't get too many Swedish vampire movies these days.

Since Dracula: The Un-Dead has been a big part of my life for a while, and especially lately, I've given thought to what makes vampire stories/movies so enduring and multi-faceted. I think the core of it is the fact that you can add vampires to any given genre or sub-genre and create something new. Even Bram Stoker's Dracula is basically a Victorian romance... with vampires. I bring this up because Let the Right One In is probably the first "coming-of-age movie with vampires" movie I've seen. No, scratch that, you could throw Lost Boys in there, but it's still more of a teen movie than anything. Here, the kids are twelve.

The movie's about this wimpy kid named Oskar growing up in Stockholm in 1982. He gets picked on by evil bullies and has no friends, so he spends a lot of time hanging around by himself on a jungle gym in the courtyard of his apartment complex. He's gotten his hands on a hunting knife and, when we meet him, he's working up the courage to use it on the head bully.

One night, he's out there stabbing a tree and calling it names, practicing for the big day, when a 12-year-old girl named Eli asks him what he's doing. Oskar turns around, and she's standing on top of the jungle gym, wearing nothing but jeans and a shirt even though it's the dead of winter.

They become friends. And that's where the rubber of the story hits the road...

Let the Right One In was directed by Tomas Alfredson, and it is beautiful. Mad props to the DP Hoyte Van Hoytema. It's based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, a book I'm gonna read. He also wrote the screenplay and got sole credit, which is rare. (Well, rare in Hollywood).

This movie does a brilliant job of creating night in winter. It made me think of Chicago. There, dealing with darkness and cold is a fact of life for half the year. But I've only experienced that twice since moving to LA, once in Montana in December and once in New York in early March. I miss it and I don't. Let the Right One In nails it to such a degree that I was pulling up tons of memories of tromping through snow at midnight, and watching the movie became a very visceral experience.

In that regard, it reminds me of 30 Days of Night, which I liked a lot.

It also reminded me of Near Dark, in the very grungy and real-world way the story deals with vampirism. The word "vampire" is only used once, and at a key moment. Also like Near Dark, it touches on how fucking boring it is to be a vampire sometimes... we get a scene where Eli is just sitting around with her cards and puzzles, and earlier she cracks a Rubik's Cube in record time.

There's an aspect of Fright Night, in that both movies kinda have the same logline: A vampire moves in next door. Again, Fright Night is a teen movie.

It also plays like a gender-reversal of Twlight. But, again, teen movie -- one of the most original things about Let the Right One In is the age of the main characters. We've seen permutations of this story with high school-aged characters, but never pre-teens. Oskar is really still a kid. The closest analogy might be Cronos, though it's still not a direct match, as the girl in that movie is maybe eight, she's a little kid.

And while I was watching the film, I was thinking of Gun Crazy. Because to love a vampire is to love someone who is an addict and a serial killer, and is thus qualifiable as insane. Eli lives with an older guy. Like the other characters, you think he's her dad -- and he might be. As the story progressed, though, I started wondering if he just wasn't the "original Oskar," a kid who fell in love with a vampire, and just kinda hung around until he was worn out. So even though the relationship Oskar and Eli have is kinda sweet, there's also a back beat of sick dread in watching this kid get drawn into her orbit. There's a moment in act three when Eli saves his ass. I was glad she showed up, but at the same time I kinda sank in my seat, thinking: "Damn, now he owes her." And it isn't played as a heroic beat... after the shit hits the fan, they just sit there facing away from each other.

She is still a vampire, and this ain't a swoony teen romance like Twilight. I think this kid is fucking doomed.

On a cool side note: like I mentioned, Let the Right One In keeps it very real and pragmatic, but it does maintain the more fantasy-vampire rule that they can't come in unless invited, hence the title. We've seen that before, it's a trope. But this movie finally answers the question of, "What if a vampire went inside without being invited?" Oskar even teases her, asking if there's a force field or something. She's like, no, I can come in, but watch what happens when I try...

The movie's already been picked up for remake, with Matt Reeves (Cloverfield) directing. I really liked Cloverfield, so... while I'm not convinced the world needs a remake, it could be in worse hands.

Despite that, keep an eye out online. Watch the original first if at all possible. This is a great film.

Dead Right There

Worked on it all this past weekend, hit page 27 before I burned out yesterday.

This is some serious high-octane shit. It's feeling like another RUN.

Humongous: a Theory

Wouldn't it be cool if Fifi, Max's boss in Mad Max, turned out to be be the guy who would later call himself Humongous?

Think about it: they're both big, muscular, bald guys with raspy voices and a taste for leather who're used to giving orders.

It makes a lot of sense. After Goose's demise, and watching Max go off the deep end, Fifi might well have been feeling the strain. When civilization collapses and the gangs rule the roads, he decides if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, so he takes a page from Toecutter's play book and starts a gang of his own.

Remember how a couple of the gang members in Road Warrior drove cop cars and/or dressed like cops? I always figured it was happenstance, but who knows...?

Of course, there's no indication whatsoever that this is true. It's not like Humongous does a spit-take when he first sees Max. And they were played by two different actors: Roger Ward played Fifi Macaffee, and Kjell Nilsson played Lord Humongous, Ruler of the Wasteland, the Ayatollah of Rock'n'Rolla.

But it's not like the same character can't be played by different people, a la James Bond or Jason Vorhees.

And Max and Humongous never quite see each other, do they? While Humongous is menacing the tribe, Max is handcuffed and out of sight. Wez gets a good look at Max, he doesn't offer Humongous a detailed description. Later, when Max is driving the truck and Humongous shoots at him - think about it, the truck's far away, there's broken glass obscuring the cab, etc. And in act three, Humongous hangs back and lets his gang do most of the fighting. When the truck slams into Humongous's vehicle, it's from the back.

Speaking of that cool gun Humongous has... isn't that exactly the kind of thing you'd expect Fifi to have lying around that shitty little apartment of his? And it comes in a nice wooden box. Couldn't you see it as a gift for meritorious service?

Man, that would be so awesome if Humongous was Fifi.

Happy Halloween!

Samuel L. Jackson to Play the SHOGUN OF HARLEM!

Dude, read this article.

All I gotta say is... you can stick Citizen Kane up your ass, The Last Dragon is one of the best movies ever made by anybody, ever.

Done Part Two

I finished the screenplay adaptation of FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER.

It was harder than I thought it would be, and took a bit longer, and the first draft is this big, unwieldy animal. But it's done - always the first step - and now I have a draft I can hack at until it's semi-readable.

Writing an adaptation is its own sub-skill of screenwriting. I've only done one before... back in film school, I wrote an adaptation of THE MASTER AND MARGARITA as an exercise. I found it was mostly about cutting and cutting and cutting, stripping the words down to the core A-story, then building back up from there so the A-story is told well in a cinematic fashion.

I got cocky 'cause FRANK is an adaptation of a novel I wrote. But a novel is a novel, and a script is a script... the job is still the same. You get a lot of luxuries in terms of keeping characters and subplots if the underlying property is massive. For instance, every little character and bit of business from the Harry Potter series makes its way on screen. And if the book's too long, they just make two movies to fit it all. If you're not J.K. Rowling, however, some shit's gotta go out the window.

Meanwhile, I'm working on the fourth draft of the treatment for DEAD RIGHT THERE, which'll be the next script. Every incarnation of the treatment takes us one step closer, until it finally becomes the story we'd like to see play out on the screen. But I always find new stuff when I go to script - either new little problems I missed in the treatment stage, or just little "wouldn't this be kinda cool?" moments. You don't shut off your brain when you're writing, no matter what it is.

I ordinarily write a lot, but 2008's been a fuckin' year, man... I wrote DEMON and THE CASTLE -- both scripts -- then FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER the novel, just finished FRANK the script, and I'm hoping to have a first draft of DRT done by the first.

What can I say? I'm hungry as fuck. And I'm gonna keep writing and producing until some of this shit gets on the screens.

A Bird-Eating Spider

Dear God.

Back when I worked at Noah's Ark, we sometimes got a Peruvian Bird-Eating Spider. They looked like black tarantulas the size of a catcher's mitt.

This is way creepier, 'cause it looks like a huge, mutated version of a normal orb spider you might find in any garden.

Thanks to Jane Tara for sending me this.

I consider it just one more piece of evidence that Australia is a bizarre place just a step or two shy of Skull Island.

My only hope is the person who took this picture promptly put down the camera and got a flame-thrower.

More Ratner and Conan

According to this article on aintitcool, the rumors about Brett Ratner directing the new Conan movie are true.

A Picture Says a Thousand Words

A Spider in My Coffee

I have a Mets coffee cup. I'm not a particular fan of the Mets -- or of baseball, for that matter -- but it's a gift from a client (thanks Alan!), and I am a fan of gifts and clients.

While drinking from said coffee cup this morning, I noticed an odd smudge on the inside rim. Thinking at first it was just a patch of errant grounds, I stuck my finger in to get rid of it.

And stopped.

The smudge was a dead spider.

To make matters worse, it was on a part of the cup that was in a direct trajectory towards the part from which I was drinking. Which means that I spent who-knows-how-long within a millimeter of having a spider in my mouth.

The little fucker drowned in hot coffee, a painful way to go. Good. Though the coffee I was drinking passed across its dead, horrid body on its way into mine.

One might expect some jumping up and screaming on my part; or, at least, some shivers of deep, existential dread. But I just kinda washed it out and poured more coffee. Because this bizarre event was so huge, so horrible, my brain went all the way around the moon and came back again to calm acceptance that we live in a fucked-up world where spiders like to hide in coffee cups while people (in this case - ME) are just trying to get some work done. It was exactly what I might imagine it would be like to come home, get undressed and find a bullet hole in your hat... a close call moment to which you can only react with a curious, "How'd that get there?"

It wasn't a big spider. It was a yellow garden spider, the kind that, back in Chicago, we used to call banana spiders. (Real "banana spiders" are tarantulas). I'm sure there's a long Latin designation for this common species, but I don't give a shit. It's dead. How -- or why -- it got in there, only the spider gods shall know.

Hopefully this burns off my shitty karma for the day. Maybe the whole week. And I will say that, looking at the bright side, I got off a lot fucking luckier than I could've... There is an alternate universe version of this morning's events that involve me finding a live spider in my mouth while holding a steaming cup of coffee in hand, and the scene that would have unfolded from there.

Between shit like this, and getting attacked by birds of prey (which, thankfully, hasn't happened in a while), I think it's safe to say that the animal kingdom enjoys fucking with me. One of several reasons I stopped being a vegetarian.

Hardly Any Sleep

Someone in my building decided to blast their TV until four in the morning.

And I mean blast -- full volume, all bars on the screen.

Everyone in my building went berserk. The situation escalated from "Could you please turn down your TV?" to "Turn off your TV!" to "SHUT THE FUCK UP, ASSHOLE!!!" Someone ran outside and banged on the guy's window. But whoever it was either chose to ignore the violence, or had cranked up the tube and passed out.

Then someone's car alarm went off at seven this morning. It was one of those fun situations in which everyone thinks it's someone else's car going insane, so it takes a long time for the right person to a) realize it's their car, b) get their ass outta bed and shut it off.

So today's coffee day.

I Have a Demon in My Office

Or, to be accurate, a picture of a demon.

We got a promo poster from the German release of Demon Keeper. It's fucking huge over there. They retitled the novel to Daemliche Damonen, which apparently translates to "Stupid Demons." It has a new character on the cover. Rock 'n' roll.

On the movie side, we're looking at directors.

Robocop's Sweet Ride

Check this out.

I would've preferred a dragon or something, but whatever...

Robocop is like chocolate or explosions. Add him to almost anything, and it becomes that much more awesome.

Frankenscript and BLOW-UP

It hit page 35 last night in the screenplay adaptation of the novel.

Along the way, I'm finding cool bits of business, better and more visual ways to pull off some of the scenes. Which makes me think I should've done a rewrite of the script before I worked on the novel. But, then again, in that case, when I got around to the novel, I'd be fleshing out a bare-bones story, instead of finding new paths through a novel's worth of character and plot.

As I'm working on the script, I'm writing notes to myself on the novel. I'm gonna stick 'em in my back pocket for now, depending on the notes I get from the agent.

Last night, I watched BLOW-UP. Yeah, yeah, I know... I went to film school, how could I have never seen this famous classic, blah blah... By watching so many horror and martial arts movies, I have some weird holes in my film-watchin'. Thanks to the magic of Netflix, I'm plugging these holes, one-by-one.

I fuckin' loved it. What a great movie. It's like a French New Wave movie directed by an Italian neo-realist and set in '60s London. Very arty and stylistic without being show-offy in a way that you don't really see in movies anymore, and sexy as h-e-l-l, man. It's funny, because I could clearly see this movie's DNA was one of the several donors that created Austin Powers. There are looooong sequences without dialogue, in which the hero starts to solve a mystery by blowing up pictures he took in a park. The way Antonioni strings the photos together to create the scene is nothing short of masterful.

I dig that we never get into the hero's head... like everyone else in his life, we can only make guesses about this guy by what he says and does. There's no Hollywood bullshit like him sitting on the edge of his bed and staring at a photo of his dead wife with a tear running down his face or anything. He's just the grooviest cat in swingin' London, but he's not a shallow idiot, either. The movie unfolds as if we're seeing it through this guy's lens.

Watching this flick, I felt the same way as when I finally watched BREATHLESS and read some Bukowski... like, why the fuck did I wait so long? Was it really necessary for me to watch HALLOWEEN IV a full decade before I got around to BLOW-UP? Why've I spent so long with this weird reticense over certain movies, writers, whatever?

But... what the hell, I can't beat myself up over it, I fuckin' watched the thing. Though now I'm plagued my the thought of: what other brilliant, awesome movies have I skipped over the years while watching teenaged girls get their heads chopped off, instead?

I'm gonna have to check in with Uncle Ebert...

Got $15,000?

Then you can blow up a house in Louisiana.

I've been doing some legwork on an action-thriller we're planning on shooting in Louisiana. One of the scenes calls for blowing up a suburban house. But how much will that cost?

About fifteen grand, is what I'm hearing.

But most of that cost comes from the location. If we wanted to blow up a house that's away from everything, like in the swamp, it'd only cost about three grand.

Lemme tell ya something... there'll come a day when I have serious, ridiculous, Gomez Addams-level cash. And, when that day comes, I'm gonna be blowing up houses in Louisiana and filming it... just for fun.

Frankenstein's Monster: The Script

Last night, I started working on the script adaptation of my novel FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER.

I've lately spent so much time in novel-writing mode that getting back into screenwriting was a bit of a gear shift. I never thought I'd come to a moment when writing a script felt kinda weird, but there ya go. I got over it pretty quickly... I have a lotta screenwriting muscle memory built up by now.

It's doubly odd because the novel is a very loose adaptation of a script I wrote back in film school, so the basic idea/story has gone from a script to a novel and now back to a script again. I can definitely say it's improved along the way... the original was a big pile of jumbled craziness. Back in film school, I thought I was audacious. Now I realize I was just being a goof. But there are a couple of scenes that are almost completely unchanged - the inciting of Adam showing up at the yard sale, for instance, and Thunderfoot and his ninja attack.

The script should take me about a week if I don't fuck around.

Meanwhile, I'm working up treatments for the next thing. For a while, I thought it was gonna be DEAD RIGHT THERE. But the reps are looking for an action-comedy, and there's not much room for laffs in DRT, which is a straight-up action-thriller in the RUN mold.

I've got a couple of ideas. Just a matter of fleshing 'em out...

DRACULA: THE UN-DEAD in Publishers Weekly

They announced it! Here's the article.

Done.

I just turned in the edited first draft of FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER to the reps.

Hooray for me. Let the drinking begin.

I Might Finish, Anyway

Last night, I got home from work and edited 100-ppg of FRANK.

I was thinking about the post I put up yesterday, making excuses for not wrapping it up by 10/1. As I left work and headed home, I thought: fuck that.

I got back to the lair in a mood to wreck some shit. I threw on some old Metallica and dove straight in. At every juncture I could have kept working or stopped, I kept working. Counter to my concerns yesterday, it was good, clear work... I wasn't half-assing it just to get it done.

By the time I felt I was slowing down, I was within the last 50-ppg of the mss. Barring disaster, I'll likely edit through to the end tonight, and hand it in tomorrow.

On 10/1.

I left the ending wide open for a sequel, and my brain is already starting to go in that direction. But the peeps have been cool about me going off to bang out a novel, so I'll likely pay their patience back by writing car chase scripts for a while.

I'm a happy guy.

The Saga Continues

I spent all weekend editing FRANK.

I got up to pg. 250. The page count changes as I work, of course, but it usually hovers around the 400-pg mark... sometimes it's 395, other times it's 405, etc. Sometimes I'm killing entire pages because they suck, and other times I'm writing new beats or little bits of business to fill in a logic question, bring out a character thought, whatever.

I'd hoped to get up to pg. 300. But, by mid-afternoon on Sunday, I was burnt the fuck out. I knew that, if I kept moving forward, I wouldn't be sharp, I'd start making lazy choices and the end product would suck just a little (or a lot) more. So I decided to take a break instead of killing myself and doing a half-assed job just to make a self-imposed deadline. At my current rate, I'm pretty sure I'll have an edited draft in hand by Friday, which'll give me the opportunity to hand it in to the peeps for their weekend read.

So on Sunday, I did what I do every time I feel like I need to plug my brain in the wall and recharge: I watched movies.

I watched The Foot Fist Way and Redbelt, an interesting pair-up because they're both indie movies about an owner of a small martial arts dojo dealing with an attack on the little world they've created for themselves.

Foot Fist Way was funny, but definitely the lesser of the two. I'm not sure how this happened, but somewhere along the way Indie Movie became its own genre, like horror or broad comedy. In the same way that you can expect similar characters, situations, moods, shots and scenes from, say, a J-horror flick, Foot Fist Way felt like it was 50% actual movie, and 50% of the primordial ooze that's the concentrated residue of Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine, Wes Anderson, Coens, etc. In some ways, movies like this are just as cliche as popcorn movies, they're just taking their cues from a different set of sources.

Redbelt blew me away. It was written and directed by David Mamet. I always like his movies, but this is the first one I've loved since The Edge. I don't know if it's a particularly better movie than Spartan or State&Main or anything else he's done. But this one personally affected me in a real way. I was riveted to the screen during its entire running time. When the credits rolled, I immediately rewatched it with the commentary track, which was just okay, it didn't really illuminate anything that I didn't think wasn't already clear on the screen.

It's an expertly crafted film. I don't know if it'd hit other people like it hit me but, not to get wiggy or anything, I can say this picture spoke to me in a lotta ways. When I finally get around to buying a Blu-Ray player, Redbelt will be a purchase.

One Shot

According to this article in Variety, Josh Olson signed on to write the script adaptation of Lee Child's One Shot.

I'm a huge geek for Child's Reacher series. I met him at this past BEA, and got him to sign the latest, Bad Luck & Trouble. One Shot isn't my favorite -- that would be Without Fail, followed closely by Persuader -- but it's still a fucking awesome action/thriller. I can't recommend these titles enough.

Now... getting a screenwriter on a project doesn't automatically mean a movie's gonna happen, and it doesn't mean if a movie's gonna happen, it'll be anytime soon. But still, this is cool. The faster we get these books to screen, and in a kickass way, the better.

The one-line description in the article of what this book's about is so vague it's almost inaccurate. In brief: Reacher is a former MP. After spending his whole life traveling the world, when he gets out of the Army he decides to wander around America and check out the country he'd spent so many years protecting. Along the way, he runs across people who need his help, which inevitably leads to Reacher stepping in to offer a lot of strategic thinking and brutal violence.

These stories are on rails, the writing is supurb, the characters are great, the action's amazing. Even my least favorite titles in this series have more juice than 99% of the weak sauce "thrillers" on the shelves.

The climax of One Shot is pretty fuckin' killer, and I can't wait until I'm sitting in the Arclight or the Chinese watching it.

Query of the Day

Holy shit, two in one week!

Here goes:

"Using nanotechnologies professor William Wilson invents battery makes an electrocar more powerful, cheaper and easy to charge. Wilson feels somebody the same as Isaac Newton or Bill Gates. But he forgets about BIG GUYS who like oil... Escaping shadowing and death, releasing kidnapped family and fighting against black PR killing the public opinion...It`s not easy...even if your best friend helps you. Can two guys fight against oil world? Why not if this stupid world like oil so much...And unexpected outcome, with long track in audience."

Alex de la Iglesia Does TV

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Alex de la Iglesia is fucking brilliant.

Here's an article in fango about... his new TV series!

He's producing it in Spain, but here's hoping a DVD eventually floats our way.

If you haven't seen this dude's work, do yourself a favor and check out PERFECT CRIME.

Query of the Day

I haven't done one of these in a while, mostly because they haven't been very interesting lately. And then I got this one:

"When Kyle 6 or 7 arrives at his Uncle Glen's home outside Duluth, nobody there welcomes him. It's a house in turmoil. Glen is an addicted gambler and unless he can come up with $300.000 to pay Hank, a loan shark, Hank will move into his home come Spring. Laura, his wife has asked for a divorce. Debbie,12, says she is tired refereeing the fights. Nobody will take care of Kyle so Glen takes him to the race track with him. Glen soon is down to his last $20. Kyle is not shy in telling everyone he talks to God - and God talks back. How about asking that God of yours to give me a winner, Glen asks in desperation. Kyle obliges and then Glen wonders if he has found his golden goose. He has a nephew who talks to God and most important, God responds.

This is an entirely original story, there is no 'I've seen it before reaction'. The script concludes with a very exciting racing scene. It is a genuinely enjoyable childen's story that stands tall in today's movie market - with a few cute asides as an aperitif. It also tells us the power of the human spirit over apparently impossible odds - wrought by a modern world engrossed in it's own affairs not always adding to its own benefit."

I love the fact that the loan shark isn't gonna break the guy's legs, he plans to move into his house. Which makes me think - what if you took a loan, and used your life as collateral?

Editing FRANK

Last night, I returned to editing FRANK and got up to page 39. The current draft of the novel is 393-ppg, which means I'm slightly less than 10% done. If I keep a consistent pace, like this process is nothing but a filling tool bar while a program loads on Windows, I'll be done in nine days, or Oct. 2.

But I know I'm going to be able to get more work done on Saturday and Sunday than on the weekday nights, which makes my goal of handing in an edited first draft on or before the first of October realistic.

Barring disaster, of course - something I unfortunately have to factor into every endeavor. Some people are born with weird toes or big noses or genetic conditions. I was born with strange luck.

Naturally, the first few chapters are a lot cleaner than the last act is gonna be, since I've read those words a billion times. (Slight exaggeration, but not by much). I also decided to rename the love interest. Her name used to be Ana, but I thought that was too close on the page to Adam, one of our protagonists. So I switched her to her middle name, Rosa. I knew I was gonna do this a while ago and didn't think much of it... all I gotta do is a quick Find/Replace, right? Not quite, 'cause Find/Replace doesn't differentiate the sequence of the letters a-n-a between stand-alone appearances (i.e. Ana) and when it's integrated within larger words. So, for example, doing a Find/Replace to change Ana into Rosa would also change the word "banana" into "banRosa." My two-second job got a lot longer.

I'm going through this doc with a fine-toothed comb, anyway, so it's not that big of a deal. But I know character name changes are exactly the kinda thing that tends to breed ghosts. It would be wise to edit the full draft, leave it alone for a couple of days, go back and just read it to read.

Sunshine

I took a break from editing FRANK last night to sit down and watch Sunshine, directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland, who's Boyle's go-to writer guy.

The short version: holy fucking shit, did I love this movie.

Slightly longer version: I was kicking myself the whole time for not seeing it in the theater. I dunno why... the title didn't grab me, I didn't get a big impression off the trailers, etc. Like many people - it didn't perform very well in the domestic box office - I stayed away.

Well... I was a fucking idiot. This movie blew me away. There are visuals here that're jaw-dropping. The sound design is beyond comparison.

However, lemme state this in big, bold letters: THIS IS NOT A MOVIE FOR EVERYBODY.

In fact... I wanna say this is as close to hard sci-fi as I've seen on the screen in a long time. It's Alien meets 2001 by way Asimov. This is the kinda big-story, soul-searing sci-fi I used to read when I was a kid. There's no concession to the general audience whatsoever: no kooky guy lessening the tension with one-liners, no robots, no Hollywood bullshit. Just a crew of scientists on a mission to shoot a bomb into the sun as a last-ditch way to keep it from dying so Earth won't freeze.

It opens to tension, and get crazier by degrees from there. There isn't an ounce of fat on this story, no wasted movements or dumb subplots.

The movie also does zero lifting in terms of telling you how to feel about the characters. Cillian Murphy turns out to be our main protagonist but, beyond his star status, I wasn't sure until act three. All I knew from the trailers that someone on the mission goes insane. By the time the story starts, these people have already been on this suicide mission for seven years, and all of them have cracks. So I had no idea if it was gonna be Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Candlestick or what...

That aspect strongly reminded me of the first time I saw Alien, when I was but a wee lad. Since all of the characters are normal-type people - by that, I mean it's not like Bruce Willis is on the Nostromo - I had no idea who was good or bad, who would die or survive. At the time, I thought it would be a standard action-tough guy thing with Dallas kicking ass. Wrong. (Spoiler).

I can't say this is a movie I'm gonna watch again in the near future. This ain't a comfort food movie like Big Lebowski or RoboCop. It's fucking intense.

I should also point out that this is the second movie of Boyle's, besides 28 Days Later, where I had multiple people warning me about the third act. Once again, I loved the third act. I dunno, I don't seem to mind where Boyle takes these stories as much as some people. In fact, the last act of 28 was my favorite part -- the first two acts were fun and scary but, 'cause I like zombie movies and watch a lot of them, I felt like I'd already seen that movie elsewhere. It didn't have any surprises for me until they got to that house. Most people hated that part of the movie, I thought it truly took off for me in the last act. Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks.

It's strange that Danny Boyle doesn't get as much attention as some other directors out there. I think he's an amazing talent and, even if he's not shooting $100m summer popcorn movies, there'll come a day when he's "discovered" by the mainstream in a big way.

The First Draft of the Novel is DONE

After ten months of work, I typed "The End" in Frankenstein's Monster last Saturday night.

Now I have to edit it, which'll take about two weeks. Then I'll hand it into the peeps, wait for their read, rewrite based on whatever notes they may have, turn that in, etc etc...

Naturally, I'd love to go to the buyers as soon as possible. But I also very much understand the need to go in with the best possible version of this story in hand. So... it would be cool to go out during the autumn season but, if it turns into a lengthy notes thing, I'm cool with early-09.

I don't wanna mitigate the first draft milestone, though, which is a big'un. At the very least, I'm sure the reps'll be pleased I'm back on screenwriting full time (when I'm not rewriting Frank, that is).

And it looks like we'll be getting a director on IMPLANT, which went out wide to the town earlier this year, came within a hair of selling and didn't, so now we're going the indie route. Fine by me -- whatever gets the picture made.

I'll talk more about the director as things firm up...

Good times.

Minor Threat + Ben Kingsley

Some things in this world are just peanut butter and chocolate awesome, like this video of Sir Ben Kingsley lip-synching to Minor Threat.

It's a pretty rare week that I don't spin some Minor Threat -- it's great writing music, and I never get sick of 'em.

It would be cool if this thing launched a series of videos featuring semi-incongruous actors singing/synching to old punk and metal.

My first vote: Brendan Gleeson doing "Ace of Spades."

Ratner Directing Conan?

According to this article at dreadcentral, they're hearing Brett Ratner is up to direct CONAN.

I think this remains to be seen...

Penny Arcade

I'm a big fan of Penny Arcade. I check in during lunch every couple of days.

Here's a pretty classic piece from today's:

"If you would like to know why writing in games suffers, or is bad, or is not valued, know this: it is because in order to secure writing, one must deal with writers, something no-one in their right fucking mind should ever even contemplate."

And the rest of the article/comic here.

Spider-Man 2

Well well... we were just talking about Spider-Man the other day, and here's some news about the next two movies on Nikki Finke's blog, here.

I watched Spider-Man 2 yet again last night. I'm consistently moved by this powerful story. The writing is beyond excellent. It's a movie in which the hero is continually punished for being a good person, in every situation and at every turn. Even when he acts in a heroic manner, the world doesn't let up... until the very end, when the hero gets everything he's wanted.

It's a structure that reminds me of It's a Wonderful Life -- George Bailey does the right thing, and the world punishes him for it every time. Finally he decides to give up, and comes to realize that, even if he's denied his dreams and given still more burdens to carry, his good actions have meaningful repercussions in his life that are even more valuable than money and fame.

Which makes Spider-Man 3 more interesting in retrospect, because it asks the question: what if the world did reward this heroic character in the way he thought he should, and the sudden in-pouring of fame and love turned this long-suffering guy into an asshole? It would be like if we had an It's a Wonderful Life 2, in which George Bailey gets as powerful as Mr. Potter, and gradually turns into him.

Which is exactly what happens in Johnny To's Election and Triad Election. The hero of Election is the good guy who plays by the rules. By the time we catch back up with him a couple of years later in the sequel, the criminal life style has corrupted him, and now he's just like the villain he was fighting in Election. Pretty brilliant... and I'm counting the seconds for a third movie.

So... though I think Spider-Man 3 is kinda uneven, I'm excited as hell for two more movies. My hope is they look at the missteps taken in 3, and take a good long look at Iron Man and Dark Knight, apply those lessons and give us some awesome fucking flicks.

Rogue

Last night, I watched Rogue.

This is the second feature written and directed by Greg Mclean, who did Wolf Creek. I liked Wolf Creek without quite loving it. Rogue is a very similar movie in terms of set-up - a group of tourists wander into the Australian Outback and blunder into the territory of an aggressive alpha male; in Wolf Creek, it was a serial killer, here it's a giant crocodile. They serve the same function.

There are a lotta horror movies that follow the Alien/Aliens pattern of establishing a group of victims, each with their own little identifying characteristic or hangup. This is frequently handled in the most ham-fisted way possible, making for plenty of shitty horror movies.

Rogue follows the same pattern, and a lotta them fit standard horror stereotypes: the whiny woman, the good guy, the stand-up female protagonist, the squirrelly dude who fucks it up for everyone else, the funny guy, etc.

The difference is, Rogue does this stuff well. Thanks to a combination of good writing, acting and direction, though I could see the structure, it never felt forced or inorganic. The f/x on the croc are great. The situation is dire. Never for one second was I bored. I never rolled by eyes.

So... Rogue is a by-the-numbers creature feature siege/survival horror flick, but it's elevated by consistently great execution. I can easily say this is the best croc/gator movie I've ever seen. I'm excited to see what Greg Mclean's next project might be.

I Always Knew This Day Would Come

According to this article, a giant robot spider is gonna attack England.

Better them than us! Eat web, limeys!

Frank 'n' Sick

When I got home Thursday night, I felt like total shit. I was at 50% kung fu and dropping. This bug was kicking my ass, getting stronger from one day to the next. I was concerned that I'd spend the long weekend suffering and not getting much writing done.

Fuck that. It was time to beat this thing down. I decided to dedicate an entire day to doing nothing but getting better.

I went to bed at nine on Thursday, and woke up at noon on Friday. Fifteen hours of sleep. I went to the store and got three cartons of oj. I brought that home, drank a ton of it and used it to wash down vitamins, Tylenol and cold medication. I slept some more. Woke up, drank more oj, ate more vitamins. Slept.

I woke up Saturday morning at 95% kung fu. Not completely better - there was a shade of lingering sickness - but nothing that would get in my way. I got a bizarre bug up my ass to clean. So off I went back to the store, got a ton of cleaning supplies, and de-mung-ified my apartment. By noon, I was feeling great and standing in a pad that gleamed white and smelled like lemons. Sometimes you just gotta.

I wrote 35 pages on Saturday, bringing my page count to 276. I had to stop because my hands were literally starting to hurt.

I celebrated with a twelve pack and In Bruges. Yeah, yeah... I know drinking right after recovering from an illness isn't the smartest thing in the universe. But, you know what? You bust your ass and write 35 pages in a day, and tell me you don't feel like throwing a few back.

In Bruges is an amazing movie. I laughed my ass off watching this thing. The writing, acting, directing and shooting all come together. It doesn't change the world or anything, it's just a very good character-driven Brit gangster movie. But, man... my fave Brit gangster movie so far has been Snatch, and In Bruges replaces it. This is a great flick, I can't recommend it more highly.

On Sunday, I wrote another ten pages. I had to come into the office, and after that I went to the Hollywood Forever cemetery screening of Don't Look Now. It's more of a well-directed movie than a well-written movie, in my own humble, but that ending... It's one of the bigger WHAT THE FUCK?! endings in the genre. Watching it again, it occurred to me that Don't Look Now is the British version of a giallo movie - it has a lot of the same characteristics: Italian setting, weird psychics, painful dialogue, yuppie hero, a killer on the loose, crazy plot points.

But most people just like it for the famous sex scene, which got a lot of applause.

Yesterday, I wrote another ten. But, in the midst of all this writing, I figured out something that cracked act two, which had been giving me some trouble. I rolled a few scenes into each other, making what was left richer, more important to the characters, more dense with story, and more immediate. My page count dropped, but not nearly as much as I'd thought. I still have to go back and comb out the knots. But I'm gonna save that for later... solving the act two problem on the page gave me a clear vision of the rest of the story, all the way to THE END.

So I'm just gonna sprint ahead and get a first draft done.

When I started this project in January, my original goal was to finish it in six months. When it wasn't even close to being done in June, I stretched my deadline to finishing it by the end of summer. Now that we're in Sept, I'm shooting for wrapping it up by year's end.

I got cocky in terms of the time frame I thought I'd need, because I was thinking in the context of my screenplay output. I've been writing scripts since '98, and I've gotten to a point that slamming out a first draft no longer takes me a very long time. (Figuring out the story does... but that's a separate thing, as I typically overlap my projects; I'm thinking of one project while writing another and re-writing the one that came before, so on and so forth).

But I'm still relatively new to the novel form. It's not the length so much as my inexperience. With a script, there's a running counter in my head of page count, plot point, structure, etc. Little alarms go off, letting me know when the next beat has to happen. With novels, it's a longer and slightly less formalistic set-up. Scripts are just shy of haiku in terms of structure, whereas in a novel you really can have a couple of pages in which the characters just kinda talk to each other. It took me a while to get used to that, to know when to move the story, and when to dial down the action a bit.

I'm back in the office, and ready to rock. This is gonna be a big week, and I'm looking forward to diving into the mosh pit.

Fuckin' SICK

It's pretty rare that I get sick so, when I do, I'm not used to it and the whole thing lays me out. When I do stuff like breathe and swallow, I make a sound a lot like that weird grunting the Kid made in Road Warrior. I'm at about 50% kung fu at the moment.

My typical weapons against a cold are orange juice, vitamins and sleep. Which means I've gotten very little writing done the past three days -- I roll into the lair, write a paragraph and hit the sack.

I'm hoping to kick this thing square in the ass so I can hit the words hard during the coming long weekend. If not, it's gonna be just a lotta sneezin' and z's.

The Last Episode of The Sopranos

I know, I know... OMG this is like so totally 2007! But I finally got a chance to watch the last ep of The Sopranos.

I don't understand what all the fucking crying was about, I thought it was awesome.

Bearwatch Bulletin August 23, 2008

According to this article, bears are no longer content with murder -- they're now stealing hubcaps.

Spider-Man 3

The other day, I picked up the Spider-Man 3 game for the princely sum of seven dollars plus tax.

I got it because a) c'mon man, seven bucks for a 360 game, and b) I really dug the Spider-Man 2 game, and this seemed like more of the same. It is.

I'd gotten the Spider-Man 2 game for the PS2 back in the day because I fucking love the movie. I've seen it a couple of dozen times now, and it never gets old. That scene in the operating room is one of the most purely Raimi things I've seen on film since he took the step up to the A-list. LOVE IT.

And this from a guy (me) who's never bought a Spider-Man comic. Back in my hardcore comic days, I was way more about Doom Patrol and X-Men and Milk&Cheese.

But playing 3 reminded me of an odd fact - I've only seen the first and third movies once each, in the theater. I liked both but thought they were flawed, 3 moreso than 1.

It struck me as a jumble of cool ideas that are intermittently fun, but never quite come together to create a great movie. I place the blame squarely on the three villains. We've seen time and again in superhero movies that, when the cast bloats, the movie suffers. I loved the fact that the first two Spider-Man movies kept the focus on a single villain. By taking the screen time you'd ordinarily have to split between a couple of characters and putting it all on a single villain, you get a layered, interesting antagonist. When you have three villains, all you get are three actors in costumes skidding over a hasty backstory on their way to an action sequence. The Dark Knight obviously managed two villains, but I think that worked because it's a long movie -- and thus more screen time -- and Harvey Dent spends the majority of the movie in non-villain mode.

I hope we get a Spider-Man 4, and I hope the villain is the Lizard, and that's it... not the Lizard, Kraven, the Scorpion, Rhino, Carnage, etc.

Blackout

Man, I really like Dropkick Murphys.

Some bands peak early, and leave their best work behind them. But the more I listen to it, the more I'm thinking The Meanest of Times is their best yet.

But, for whatever reason, I'd never owned Blackout. I finally picked it up a few weeks ago at Amoeba. I gave it a listen and... I just wasn't crazy about it. The production sounded a little too slick, the songs didn't grab me. I thought it was to DKM what Digimortal is to Fear Factory.

I was in the (for me) odd position of setting aside a DKM disc.

I'm kinda glad I did. I went away for a week, came back, jumped right back into writing FRANK. A lot of the tunes I usually kick when I write were feeling a bit worn out. Just to have something new, I decided to give Blackout a spin.

And I really liked it. I've listened to it several times since, and I dig it more each time.

I'm not really sure where the lukewarm initial response came from. Maybe I wasn't in the mood, or perhaps I'd been listening to Times so much I wasn't ready for something from an earlier stage in their evolution.

Whatever, I don't care. Blackout's a good CD.

FRANK Stuff

I hit 205 ppg last night in FRANK.

I was originally aiming for an even 300-ppg first draft. Then I read Twilight while I was AZ. It's a big, fat book - these things are lit by the pound, man - but it's fast and breezy. I finished it in about a day.

FRANK isn't exactly Umberto Eco. It's supposed to be a quick, fun read. I try to punctuate each plot point with an action scene, never a dull moment. At the same time, I feel like there's more story to tell than 300 pages can hold.

So... I'm still determined to crack this thing out by the end of the year. And I think, at my present rate, I can get in a 325-400-ppg first draft in, anyway.

There are some aspects of this novel that are straight from the base of my brain, bubbling up from the primordial ooze much in the same way THE CASTLE formed out of nothingness. I'm writing fast and pushing myself hard on purpose - the less time I have to carefully think things over, the closer this story is to my soul, because I'm forcing myself to use half-remembered dream imagery.

Not to get all wiggy or anything. I'm referring to stuff like Adam's super-hearse that shoots piles of skulls out the back to confound pursuing cops.

I also increased the main protagonist's age to 15. There are several reasons for this, creative and commercial. I'm digging the change a lot -- a younger kid creates a gravitational pull, hauling the tone of the story towards that whimsical bullshit I was trying to avoid in the first place. Whereas I'm far closer to my 15-year-old self; I can get that voice in my head without getting drunk, first.

It's coming along. Good times.

More Conan

Check out this article in the Reporter.

None of this makes me particularly frightened or happy either way.

But I can't wait to see who they get to direct.

Darkon

Last night I watched a documentary called Darkon. It's about a community of fantasy LARPers.

We've been blessed with a ton of really wonderful documentaries the past few years -- Some Kind of Monster, Grizzly Man, The King of Kong, An Inconvenient Truth, Supersize Me -- and I'd put this one up in that category.

Mostly because I saw a part of myself in some of these people. If I had taken a few different turns in life, I know I'd be out there beating people with padded swords instead of working in Hollywood. Whether you're role-playing in Darkon, playing World of Warcraft, rolling dice, reading a novel or writing a screenplay, I think you're exercising the same set of muscles, and scratching the same kinda itch.

For example: there's a scene where the very young son of one of the players spends five minutes beating the crap out of an imaginary army of undead. That was me. And, given that I've spent the last five years working on getting a movie made that's called The Un-Dead, you could say the kid still is me.

(Especially given the fact that I watched this movie after writing ten pages in a novel about a boy who hangs around with Frankenstein's Monster).

I say this because the movie not only follows the lives of the people who play this game, but also the in-game dramatic arc. It comes down to a massive combat between an evil empire and an alliance. The camera follows the leader of the alliance against evil.

In one version of this reality, the alliance leader is a stay-at-home dad playing a character named Brannon. In the other version, the leader is a professional actor playing a character named Aragorn. Both real men are playing similar characters, doing and saying similar things in a similar scenario. The only thing that's different is who they are in real life.

One of the themes of the doc is that these people have kinda hum-drum lives, and playing characters in a game offers a release and escape -- they feel they can't change who they really are, but they can easily change who their fantasy selves are.

But if you look at the Brannon/Aragorn example, we see the exact opposite. Meaning: the fantasy is the constant, whereas the reality is what changes. Thus you could say that reality is more mallable than the fantasy, and thus should be the true thing about themselves people should focus on changing.

I discovered this idea in Hagakure when I first read it, and this movie expands on the concept.

There's a moment when Brannon is plotting out his fantasy battle plan, while in the background an Army general on television is discussing the U.S.'s battle plan in Iraq. I thought: is the movie saying, look at this one guy role-play a fantasy fight for freedom while other people fight and die for real? Or is it saying: no matter who you are, it's within our natures to find wars to fight? The doc doesn't comment either way -- it gives the image and moves on.

But later, we meet a couple of Darkon players who actually have fought in Iraq. One guy is describing a dangerous situation he faced, and he remembers thinking -- to paraphrase -- damn, I have to be careful, this isn't Darkon, anymore.

A third player describes his team as small and scrappy and given to guerilla warfare. By way of comparison in their fight against the evil empire, he says they're like Al-Qaeda versus the massive United States. Again: are we giving shame-shame fingers to this guy for putting his fantasy war in context with a real war? (His girlfriend rolls her eyes when he says this). Or, again, are we saying the the same compulsions exist in us all, and these guys have just found a safe outlet? Despite the eye-rolling girlfriend, the doc doesn't comment either way.

Still later, we watch the different teams negotiate, double-deal and backstab. I was instantly reminded of Survivor, or any number of other "reality" shows that involve team strategies necessary to win. Again: who's more "real?" Who's more "cool?"

At the very end of the movie, Brannon gives us a monologue that's one of the most cogent sets of thoughts I've ever heard regarding the value of imagination in everyday life. His viewpoint could equally apply to fantasy role-playing and Hollywood.

But I'll let you watch Darkon and find out for yourself what he has to say...