Urban Justice and Writing Stuff

Last night I watched Urban Justice, starring Steven Seagal, who also produced.

There's a reason for this. I recently read Vern's book Seagalogy, which is amazing. He gave a glowing review of Out for Justice, and in doing so described a movie I very much wanted to see. I didn't catch Out for Justice until the mid-90s. By then, I was already into Hong Kong shit. Compared to The Killer and Hardboiled and Bodyguard from Beijing, Out for Justice came across as kinda slow, boring and small. It's a movie about one dude driving around one neighborhood in New York? C'mon. And why watch a lumbering dinosaur like Seagal when, for the same three-dollar rental, I could get Jackie Chan or Chow Yun Fat?

Long/short -- I Netflixed Out for Justice and FUCKING LOVED IT. This is an amazing movie. Yeah, it ain't The Killer. But that's not because it's not as good, it's just a different kind of action movie, something I didn't understand at the time. That and, thanks to the introduction of Hong Kong-level action via The Matrix and its adherents/immitators, I've gotten filled up on wire-fu and pistol opera. Lately, I've gotten into grittier, more realistic badass movies. At this stage in my movie-watching life, Point Blank is a lot more interesting to me than Wanted, if you get my drift. Beyond that, though, Out for Justice is a fucking brilliant piece of action cinema. If you haven't seen it, see it. Great stuff.

So... with that pleasant surprise in mind, I looked at other Seagal movies that Vern was recommending. I'd seen all the "good" ones. But he said Urban Justice was pretty good for a latter-day, direct-to-DVD Seagal flick. So I got it.

And -- lemme say this, if Urban Justice is the best Seagal movie to come along in a while, I'm really glad I've missed out on all the others. There is a vast gulf between the Seagal who starred in Out for Justice and the guy in Urban Justice. I didn't recognize him at first. When he shows up at a cop's funeral, I thought, "Who's this pudgy Mexican saxophone player?" But only significant characters watch funerals from afar. It had to have been Seagal. And it was, and I was shocked.

There are a few weird moments in the movie. For example, Seagal beats the shit outta four gangbangers. He kills one of them in the fight, and incapacitates the other three. Two of the three are wounded but lucid, the biggest guy is unconscious. Without any apparent reason or provocation, Seagal straddles the big guy (who's face-down), interlaces his fingers around the guy's jaw, and pulls back on the dude's head until his neck breaks. Was Seagal showing the other two that he wasn't a guy to fuck with? I'm not sure, because there's no matching reaction from the two guys (staring in shock or yelling "What the fuck!" or whatever -- the neck-breaking plays as a non-sequitur).

But it's mostly just kinda slow, cheap and small... exactly how I felt about Out for Justice when I first saw it. So maybe I'll come back to it ten years from now and find I've come to a place in life where I now love it, but I don't think so.

I also got Accion Mutante, Alex de la Iglesia's first movie. It also seems like his weirdest. I have no idea what to expect, but I've seen enough of Iglesia's movies that I'd be surprised if it wasn't awesome in some way. I'm planning to film school it over the weekend, along with The Ruins.

Oh, yeah... last night I hit page 32 on a script I started on Tuesday. I'm not bragging about my badass writing whatever so much as I'm surprised at how easily this one is flying outta me. It's strange... I've been working on a novel since January. In that time, I've written DEMON (a script) and now I'm writing this. DEMON just kinda came right out, too.

Also, over Memorial Day weekend, I slammed out 40-ppg of a script in one long marathon session. I'd seen the entire movie, and the writing was just transcription, along with finding fun new stuff to add as I wrote. I had to scrap those pages because there's already a very similar project in development (something I'd otherwise check on before writing, but in this case I just went with it anyway -- lesson learned).

But we're talking about three scripts in a seven-month period, about the same level of output for me without trying to write a novel at the same time. Which is happening because, instead of hacking out 2-3 pages a day over a longer period of time, with DEMON and these other things I'm cranking 10-15 pages a day over a short, intense period. Last night I only wrote seven and felt kinda bummed.

My theory is that, I've been writing scripts for a long enough time, one right after the other, that, even if I'm not focused on writing scripts, I'm still cooking them up in the back of my head. But, since my day-to-day writing has been on the novel, the scripts don't demand to come out until I've gotten them figured out, whether I know it and am trying to or not.

What I'm saying is, the thing I'm working on right now is following the same pattern of DEMON and the second script, in terms of flow. I'm kinda digging this whole thing. So... from now on I think I'll keep working on novels, and crack out scripts when they're ready to come out. It seems like I'm getting the same script output (three or four a year), while at the same time working in another writing form and getting those titles on the board.

Good times.