On Habit Forming

It was really rainy and shitty outside when I woke up this morning, even moreso than yesterday. Despite the bleak exterior, I was still able to get work done, thanks to my RoboCoffee 109 and some '80s metal.

The weather got worse. Lightning! Hail!

Now... since getting back to LA, I've been hitting the gym almost every day. I've been doing this not only as holiday bounce-back (literally and figuratively) but, thanks to my father's health issues, I've become very aware of that whole scene. I'd rather spend time in a gym now than a hospital later.

My energy typically dips in the middle of the afternoon. In the past, I'd try to make up the difference with caffeine. These days, I go to the gym, and the shot of energy sends me working late into the night. Now that I'm self-employed, I work even longer hours than ever, even including the writing. But that gym time makes it possible in a painless way.

My point is, noon came and went. The weather got even worse. Not worse by the standards of the real world, mind you, but LA-worse. Still, though... the idea of getting on the bike in a lightning storm was a little daunting. I considered skipped the gym today.

The idea filled me with a severe depression.

Then I thought... what? Huh? After only three weeks, I'm already so deep into this habit that not going to the gym is sad-making?

Apparently. And, as if the world REALLY DID revolve around me, the rain petered out, and the sun came up. I went to the gym.

But my boots and jacket were on already, anyway. Shit, I'm from Chicago. A little rain ain't gonna stop me.

You've Got Another Thing Comin'

Song lyrics are nothing but poetry in another form.

I've been catching up on '80 metal in a big way lately, and I've tripped over some songs that are actually about something real.

For example, Judas Priest's "You've Got Another Thing Comin'."

I've lived my life my this ideas contained within this song for the past seven years without knowing it. Or DID I...?

I Picked Up My Bass Again

For years, my Fender J sat in the corner collecting dust. I picked it up every once in a while, mostly just to run scales and goof around. It was an exercise in pain, for both my fingers and my ears. I'd gotten rusty. I was never exactly a virtuoso in the first place -- I think at my high point, I was what you might call "pretty good." These days? I just fucking suck.

But between starting my own business and this whole thing with my dad, I've been looking to reboot core aspects of my life, get back to roots, set aside the bullshit and just focus on what I came to LA to do: sell books and scripts, make movies and work.

That part of my mental game was coming together. But there was something missing... I couldn't put my finger on it. Until, completely at random, I picked up my bass. I ran scales again. This time, though, I wasn't just going through the motions. I worked to hit the notes, shore up my basics, actually play the music.

Tonight I ran E major one hundred times. It sounds small, and it is, but I haven't put in that kind of woodshed work on the bass since... shit, forever. I used to practice for hours every day after school. I played electric and upright in college. And now to go back and do that kind of practice again... It felt strange at first, but familiar. It was visiting the block you grew up on. It felt good.

I'm going to take it slow, just a little bit every night. I've found it's better to own one scale than to rent eight. Tomorrow I'll work up F major, the night after F#, and so on until I get to the minors. Rinse and repeat.

Though it doesn't have as direct an application as, say, journalism school, the lessons I learned in music have been endlessly applicable to writing, developing and producing. How could I spend so much time concentrating on the tree, while forgetting the roots?

For a long time, I ignored my bass, because I thought I had to devote every waking second of my life on the film career to get things going. But I've found that sometimes you have to go all the way around the world to come home, literally and figuratively.

Mr. Coffee

I got a new coffee maker from my parents for my birthday. Unfortunately, it's sat in its box the whole time since I got it about a month ago.

Until today.

I got back into town last week and, before I could go gallivanting around buying coffee, I had to nail down work-type stuff. Then on Sunday morning, I hit the Hollywood farmer's market and scored a bag of beans (the non-magical variety) from the coffee stand guys. I've been scoring cups of this coffee every weekend I go there to stock up on veggies, and I've fallen in love.

Point being, today I finally had it all: the machine, the beans, the will and the time to make this coffee happen. Long/short: it was a damn good cup o' joe. But I think it could be better if I used filtered water...

Back in LA, and the Wonders of Technology

It was hard to leave my parents with so much still unresolved. But I've started a company, and I have a job to do. I stopped in at the acute care facility to see my dad on the way out of town. He's finally out of ICU, and he was with a physical therapist when I showed up. Still not exactly playing eighteen yet, but the arrow's pointed in the right direction.

I landed in Burbank and wandered out to the longterm lot where I'd parked my bike. It was dusty, but otherwise fine. I jumped on, flipped the ignition, and... nothing. Not even a click. It was dead.

Even when a vehicle is off, there's a slight drain on the battery. Since my bike has a smaller battery, just two weeks was all it took to kill it. And I knew all of this, but remember when I pulled into the lot two weeks ago, I was racing to AZ to see if my dad was going to live or not. I was distracted. Battery cables weren't on my mind.

I asked a shuttle driver if they could send someone out to give me a jump. He came back and said they didn't have the right cables for a motorcycle. Huh?

I knew I could call a tow truck. But then I'd be sitting there for a million years waiting for him, and I'd get raped for money I didn't want to spend on somethig that would take the driver all of ten seconds. Shit, nothing could be easy, could it?

Then I thought... Wait, isn't there a way to push start a bike? I'm not exactly Mr. Mechanic, I didn't have the first idea how.

So I pulled out my iPhone and googled "how to push start a motorcycle." This led me to an instructional video on YouTube. I sat in the bike and watched the video. It seemed really easy. I put the bike into second, ran it down the parking lot for a dozen yards or so, hit the starter and... Voilà! It started!

I shifted it into neutral, got my stuff together and rode it around the lot a few times to charge it. Then I went home. Amazing.

At any other point of time in my life, this would have been a massive, expensive pain in the ass. But I was able to reach into the air and pull down the little piece of knowledge I needed to help myself in this situation.

My script IMPLANT is about this kinda thing, the ability to download whatever skills or knowledge you need into your head. There's even a scene in which the protagonist downloads a mechanics program so he can hot wire a car and escape. And here, I'd just done something very, very similar (pull down information so I could start a vehicle and leave a parking lot) in real life. We've reached the stage at which story elements that are considered "sci-fi" have a shorter and shorter shelf life.

I think that's pretty cool.

An Update, Blockbuster and Jennifer's Body

My father is getting moved to an acute care facility today. It wasn't clear if we'd be able to make this happen while I was still in AZ. But luckily he's stable, and a recent procedure went well, so we can. He's still in critical condition, but I'm taking any little victory we can get.

He's under heavy sedation at night. I bring my laptop along and work while I'm at the hospital all day, so at night I've been taking the opportunity to catch up on movies.

I rerouted my Netflix to my parents' house. But the holidays have played havok with the post office, so I'm only intermittently getting envelopes. (I watched season two of DEXTER). Red Box is cheap and convenient, but NEVER has anything I actually want to see in stock. And then we got a coupon in the mail, with an offer for a month of rentals at Blockbuster for two bucks each, instead of the usual five.

Despite the hard time I often give Blockbuster, both of the reds failed me, so I went with blue.

Blockbuster always seems to have a billion copies of new releases, which is what I wanted. And two bucks is obviously more than a dollar, but I'd rather pay two bucks to watch a movie I want to see than one dollar to settle for something else. Good job, Blockbuster. Now THIS is a business model that actually makes some sense. But I also think it's a temporary measure. The wiser course in the long run may be to push the well-established Blockbuster brand into a VOD delivery system. If they could put a box in the home that delivers any movie or TV episode at any time -- the direction in which we're headed -- before their competition, they'll have a shot at longer-term survival. Netflix is already way ahead of them in some ways, and Blockbuster is reacting instead of innovating. But shit... if they don't at least try, within ten years they're going to be like typewriter salesmen in 1980.

I rented JENNIFER'S BODY.

JENNIFER'S BODY is a mystery to me. It has Megan Fox on the cover, the marketing promised nudity, gore and a lesbian make-out scene, writing by Diablo Cody, and was an R-rated horror-comedy.

Despite all of this, it underperformed rather badly.

Now... horror-comedy is REALLY fucking hard to sell, almost on par with drama. I know this because I love horror-comedies. EVIL DEAD II, DEAD ALIVE, RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD... these are some of my favorite movies of all time. I'll let the grad school guys sit around and talk about how brilliant CITIZEN KANE is... I'll be over here watching ARMY OF DARKNESS. When I first moved out from Chicago, it was my sincere goal to get some horror-comedies made. I wanted to add to the pantheon. But I soon found out that it's extraordinarily difficult to get one of these things set up.

And by "found out," I mean I tried for fucking years, without success. The problem is they're very difficult to market. And, if you can't convince people your horror-comedy is the movie they should see on Friday/Saturday night over something that's easy to understand (for instance, a high concept comedy with an A-list star), then they don't.

With that in mind, JENNIFER'S BODY's performance should come as no surprise. But it opened very close to ZOMBIELAND, which fucking killed. This also is an R-rated horror-comedy. So the question becomes... why did ZOMBIELAND perform above expectations, and JENNIFER'S BODY below? Is it just a whim of fate? Or is there a factor we're not considering?

I digress: I'd read a bunch of reviews of JENNIFER'S BODY online. They were overwhelmingly negative. They must have watched a different movie... I'm not saying it's perfect, but I was entertained.

Megan Fox is primarily known for her role in the TRANSFORMER franchise. If you really look at those movies, though, she barely has any screen time. It's hard to get a handle on her at all. (Besides Michael Bay's famously simple direction, "Just look hot.") I thought she was great in the title role. Playing a bitchy high school girl is something she can pull off.

And I really liked Amanda Seyfriend. Between MEAN GIRLS, MAMA MIA! and this, she's played three vastly different characters, and I bought her in all three movies. She's beautiful and talented. I didn't think all of Diablo's lines stuck the landing, the narration was unnecessary and I don't believe the framing device added anything. But this is a movie in which a crappy indie emo band sacrifices a girl to Satan in exchange for stardom, and they sing "867-5309" while committing the murder.

That's a fun night at the movies.

Transformers 2, and Red Box

Last night, after visiting hours were over, I wanted to grab a couple of more movies. I'd been doing some low-level bitching about Blockbuster, so my mom said, "Why don't you go to that Red Box thing? Your dad likes it a lot."


Sure, what the hell? We've got 'em in LA, of course, but there I typically just rely on Netflix.

I went to Albertson's. There was a Red Box. It had a large board showing mini posters of the available movies next to it. The Red Box has a touch screen interface. It was easy to understand, but I was still dicking with it minutes later. I couldn't understand why I wasn't able to find the touch screens for the movies I wanted, until the obvious dawned on me - they were out. Every one. Okay, score one for Blockbuster, which I knew had a bajillion copies of every recent release.

So thus did I get TRANSFORMERS 2, a difficult title to type on the iPhone.

Red Box charged me a buck for this rental, plus tax. It should be noted that Blockbuster is in the same strip mall, about four doors down. They would have charged me five bucks, plus tax, for the exact same movie. In their defense, I would have gotten the movie for five days whereas Red Box wants it back within 24 hours. It's still a buck a day. But if you're the type to sometimes have movies sitting on your counter for a few days before you watch them (which I very much am), there's Netflix.

This is why Blockbuster is fucking doomed. Their core business model is no longer competitive. They're getting their asses kicked by a combination of red boxes and red envelopes. I suppose if I had to watch a non-new release RIGHT NOW, they would fill that gap. But how often does that occur? For me, a couple of times a year, and even then I usually hit a local place like Rocket. It's simple supply and demand. And, once VOD becomes ubiquitous, they're going to be in the horse and buggy business. Blockbuster is a brontosaurus wondering why it's gotten so cold lately.

Anyway, T. (I'm not gonna keep thumb-typing it out). I liked it about the same as the first one, in similar ways.

Bay's considered to be a guy who's an action maestro, and not much good at anything else. My experience with both T movies is the exact opposite. With each, I kinda enjoyed the hyper goofy first acts, with unexpected moments of actual comedy. In the second act of each, we get one really cool Optimus Prime fight. And the third acts are non-stop action, which I ironically found dull.

In the first one, the climactic fight was so fast cut and weirdly staged I had trouble tracking what was going on. For me, it was a lot of shots of something punching somebody, and then something else (maybe?) blowing up. It was hard for me to connect, and so I just watched the images flash by like I was in the summer popcorn version of the CLOCKWORK ORANGE treatment, sans vomit.

In the sequel, the climactic fight involves Shia trying to run a half mile across a battlefield to revive Optimus Prime. It's the longest half mile run in cinematic history. Bay pulled way back on the cutting, so I was able to track the sequence. I just didn't care. It's one long series of booms, like a fireworks show that goes on for four hours. I started watching Phantom Menace videos on YouTube, and glancing at the movie from the corner of my eye. A giant robot is trying to blow up the sun. How do you make that scene boring? Watch this movie and find out.

It also has a weird, shifting tone. The humor is very, very broad, almost infantile at times. And yet we get some salty language, and an overtly sexual come-on scene and drug references. I wasn't offended, just confused as to how those pieces fit with the nosepicker sense of humor. Who was this movie for?

I realized that Bay makes movies without theme. They aren't talking about anything, beyond yelling short sentences at the audience. "Sexy!" "Gross!" "Boom!" "Uh-oh!" He has an admirable respect of the military, but even that's very surface level, like a long Go Army commercial from the '90s. For instance, we're given a government bureaucrat who has no function except to make the military guys look cooler and smarter than in juxtaposition. Is our military so insecure that we need to give them straw men to beat up in summer franchise movies?

But critiquing Michael Bay films is an exercise in futility. The guy gets movies made, and those movies make billions, so apparently he's giving the general audience what they want.

I expect a third movie to come along, I expect it'll be more of the same, and I expect civilization will continue unaffected.