Tag Archives: Hollywood

The Curious Case of James Franco

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James Franco dropped out of UCLA in the late 1990s to pursue an acting career. Although his career has been very successful, most recently earning him $7 million for starring in Oz the Great and Powerful, it strikes me that—in the same way Michael Jackson’s lost childhood continued to haunt him throughout his adult life—Franco’s lost college days are continuing to torment him.

My evidence? In 2006, Franco reenrolled in UCLA as an English major with a creative writing minor. After he graduated, he went wild on the liberal arts by—get this, now!—enrolling in Columbia University’s MFA writing program, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for filmmaking, Brooklyn College for fiction writing, and North Carolina’s Warren Wilson College for poetry.

According to Wikipedia, Franco graduated from Columbia in 2010 and is currently a PhD student in English at Yale University. Wikipedia notes he “will also attend the Rhode Island School of Design.”

All this sounds a little insane. It sounds like James Franco is a fraud just like the “wonderful wizard” he portrayed in Oz. Unless James Franco is a genius. Is he a genius?

Why don’t you be the judge and check out his poem “Obama in Asheville” commissioned by Yahoo! to honor President Obama’s second term.

In the video, Franco wears a Warren Wilson College shirt to presumably show how much he’s learned about poetry while receiving (another) MFA.

Or, how about you just read a few representative comments that appear under the video instead:

There’s old fashioned rhyming poetry, there’s Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter, there are the free verse geniuses like Wallace Stevens, and then there is . . . well, this #$%$. It is poetry only in the mind of the pretender who wrote it.

James you owe me 3 minutes. That “poem” sucks. Stick to acting.

Wow…I read this to laugh at how bad it would be…but it is so bad I can’t even laugh. I am all about art, and understand that different people have different opinions on it but…this is just terrible.

If you’d prefer to read the poem (though I would suggest to you that there are many better things you could do with your time) you can go here.

What I don’t understand is why James Franco doesn’t just use all his money to hire a ghostwriter. Someone who’s actually good. Why would you spend your time writing when you can just hire someone and take all the credit for it?

Oz the Cliche and Misogynist

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Oz the Great and Powerful is about a lying womanizer (James Franco) who finds himself caught in a tornado, leading him to pray for salvation and promise God that he’ll “change.” He does not die, but is subsequently transported to a magical kingdom where a beautiful woman says that she’s been waiting for him to arrive. Oz seduces the woman easily on the first night they are together. He clearly hasn’t changed, but everyone in the kingdom rejoices at his arrival anyway, including the beautiful woman’s two attractive sisters. The attractive sisters (pictured in the movie poster below) proceed to fight over Oz, with the first one so mortally hurt by his philandering that she has no recourse but to turn into a heartless wicked witch forever more.

“Sure, I’ll change my philandering ways… just as soon as I hook up with these three women who all want me, naturally.”

Despite overwhelming evidence that Oz is a cowardly womanizer with no magical abilities, one of the three sisters (Glinda the Good) believes in Oz so completely that she inspires him to become an even bigger shyster than he was before. His skill at deception and illusion ends up being the key talent Oz needs to overthrow the wicked witch, allowing our hero to become the great miracle-worker he always imagined himself to be in his mind. In the end, our shyster gives extraordinarily trivial gifts to the people who helped him succeed, including to Glinda, who is apparently satisfied with a romantic romp behind the wizard’s curtain. All thoughts of change have gone out the window.

I really hate to say it, but this Disney movie is one great big stinking male wish-fulfillment fantasy, a monument to narcissism and misogyny.

Only in a man’s world does a kiss behind a curtain serve as equitable payment for invaluable assistance.

Only in a man’s world can a woman be so hurt that their heart withers and dies, preventing them from ever taking another lover.

Perhaps in director Sam Raimi’s calculus, Oz the Great and Powerful is meant to lead unambiguously to this exact interpretation, to provoke exactly this reaction. But there’s no added subtext, no undermining current, that communicates this awareness and invites its viewers—most of them little kids, presumably—to think differently or more complexly about the gender roles, stereotypes, and general tone of the film.

To boys, the movie says: Be an asshole. Fake it until you make it.

To girls, the movie says: Even when your man is an asshole and a fake, require nothing from him and keep believing. Maybe he’ll change.

How sadly ironic that—in attempting to update a franchise from the 1930s—Hollywood/Disney produced a thematically vapid film that would have fit right in back in the bad “good old days” of depression-era America.

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Christian Marclay’s Amazing Art Installation “The Clock”

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In 2010, Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay went from peripheral avant-garde folk hero to international artistic sensation with his 24-long clip video “The Clock.”

It took a staff of professional movie-watchers many months to comb through tens of thousands of films, ultimately delivering to Marclay selected clips which feature—ready for this?—images of things that tell the time, whether they be wrist-watches, wall clocks, church-steeple clocks, or sundials.

Marclay then edited together all of these clips to make a 24-hour-long video which is synched to the local time in the museum or gallery where it’s shown. The video is composed of thousands of short clips in which actors—some recognizable, like Tom Cruise or Robin Williams, others unknown—move through spaces in which the presence of clocks and time is featured prominently. It turns out that Hollywood has committed to celluloid almost every minute of every hour, however, In a brief video interview I saw with Marclay, he admitted to having difficulty locating a few images to fill the early morning hours. (Apparently, not even decades of horror films provide enough material in which clocks display times like 4:08 a.m. or 5:12 a.m.) I saw the piece myself, and although I didn’t stay that late, I can tell you that around 2:00 a.m. there’s a lot of people suffering from insomnia, along with late-night telephone calls in which people wake up, answer the phone, and look at the clock in dismay.

Like many of the best works of art, it seems that no end of interpretations are able to follow from this work—critics and viewers, including novelist Zadie Smith, have all had very smart and very different things to say, whether it’s about Hollywood or the importance of time or the experience of being a viewer.

If you’re finding it hard to conceptualize, or just think it sounds really interesting, here’s a good clip of “The Clock” that I found on YouTube. The clip begins at 2:18 p.m. and then skips forward via fade to 2:47 p.m.:

Unfortunately, you may have to wait awhile to see “The Clock” depending on where you live; it’s typically only shown in high-end museums in cities like Boston, London, and Sydney.

“The Hobbit”: More Complicated than Some Critics Have Acknowledged

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I’m going to spend some time on this post because I think The Hobbit is a great bellwether. But I need to get this out of the way first and foremost: doesn’t Peter Jackson know that having a character scream out “NOOOOOO!!!” at the height of a dramatic moment in which some negative outcome has occurred (e.g., somebody dying) is a cheese-ball and long-ago-played-out move? Because that happens in The Hobbit, and it ruined my enjoyment of an otherwise well-done sequence.

With that off my chest, then, it’s time to move on to the multimillion-dollar question: is The Hobbit a good movie?

My answer: it depends on what you go to the theater hoping to see; it depends on the analytical lens you use when evaluating the film.

Does The Hobbit square with the history of Middle Earth and the mythology of Tolkien?  Most certainly.

Is The Hobbit faithful to the original book? No.

Will The Hobbit meet the expectations of fans who enjoyed the original trilogy but who have never read the book? Very likely yes.

Does Peter Jackson need three movies to tell this story? Probably not.

According to rottentomatoes.com, there’s a wide gap between critics and movie-goers regarding The Hobbit: the film currently has a 65 percent critical approval rating as opposed to an 81 percent audience approval rating. So while filmgoing audiences are generally satisfied with The Hobbit, the critics are unimpressed.

Negative criticism has focused on the film’s length and the liberty that The Hobbit took with the plot of the original book.

Christopher Orr, of The Atlantic: “It frequently seems as though Jackson was less interested in making The Hobbit than in remaking his own fabulously successful Lord of the Rings series.”

Richard Roper: “There’s no denying the majesty in Peter Jackson’s visuals but he’s taken a relatively slim children’s book and stretched it beyond the limits.”

Garth Franklin: “Repetitive and pointless action scenes fill out an already bloated runtime.”

This large gap between critical reviews and audience reception—and the fact that audiences are seeing the film more favorably than critics—highlights, for me, the changing nature of the film industry and the naivete of critics.

I want to tell the nay-saying critics, “Listen. Jackson was in an absolute bind over this film. How could he possibly follow the epic Lord of the Rings trilogy by making the sort of quiet movie that you seem to have been looking for?”

Doubtless many more critics—not to mention a global film-going audience, many of them never having even read the books—would have taken Jackson to task over a quieter, smaller, single film.

As I suggest above, I think the critical response to The Hobbit says more about what critics were hoping to see than what Peter Jackson showed them, quite frankly. The critics naively assumed that Jackson made this film for their white middle-class American selves who fondly remember reading The Hobbit under a tree on the playground during recess. But a film like that wouldn’t do well in the box office at all and would have been likely savaged by critics and audience members just as much, if not more. Critics should know by now that these franchise films are global events, and that Jackson had multiple interest groups (or “stakeholders” in business parlance) to satisfy. He played it smart: delivering the big-budget spectacle that film-going fans of the first three movies were expecting while simultaneously staying generally true to the mythology of Middle Earth.

No, The Hobbit is not a great film. But as cultural event taking place in a negotiated space, Jackson found a solid middle road between box-office disaster on the one hand and outraged Tolkien fans on the other: he didn’t let the book dictate his movie, nor did he let the movie stray far from the mythology. His focus on the story and the integrity of the franchise came first, and I admire that. Critics who are applying their own analytical lenses to the film without trying to understand the challenges that Jackson faced with this project will hopefully be a bit more understanding with the next installment, slated for release around the same time next year.

History of the Zombie War = History of a Troubled Film

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The recent release of the trailer for World War Z has faithful fans up in arms.

The postmodern zombie apocalypse novel by Max Brooks was the subject of a high-six-figure bidding war between Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B Entertainment, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s company, Appian Way, in the summer of 2006 before the book even hit the shelves.

Now fans are complaining that the movie’s trailer—released over 5 years after the original screenwriter, J. Michael Straczynski, turned in his first draft of the script—appears to be the standard “find the cure for the zombie epidemic while there’s still time” movie. This makes the movie seem like just another zombie film only with even more expensive special effects. Meanwhile the book is more complicated and concerned with the political and social nuances of governments at war.

Based on some quick research I did, it appears that J. Michael Straczynski (or JMS as he is known to his fans, including myself) stayed faithful to the book in his original script.

He adopted a flashback approach to the zombie war and, in this interview, states that the ending of the film has a sort of postmodern ending in which the book itself—as an “oral history of the zombie war”—is published.

Based on this Hollywood Reporter article, however, the producers were not satisfied with the script (particularly the ending) and brought on Damon Lindelof, the scribe for Prometheus, to do the revision.

Right. Because Prometheus is clear evidence that Lindelof knows how to write a movie that makes sense.

Anyhow, Lindelof apparently wasn’t up to the task of World War Z, and the script was handed off like a hot potato to Matthew Michael Carnahan, screenwriter for The Kingdom. According to the Internet Movie Database, JMS isn’t even being given credit for the script anymore and Carnahan is the only writer listed on the World War Z official website.

According to this 2009 blog post by Max Brooks, JMS’s first draft of the script was a “genuine masterpiece.” But this knowledgable fan of the book had a negative reaction to the JMS script, including the accusation that it was too focused on Bush-era politics.

I have a hunch about what went wrong with this storyline. But I can’t pass judgment on the mess until I’ve read the draft scripts JMS turned in for myself.

Here’s the trailer.

Book: “The Loved One”

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I’d never read anything by English writer Evelyn Waugh (a man, not a woman), but The Loved One was a good place to start.

It’s an easy, ironic read—a one trick pony that fortunately canters out of the ring before its trick gets boring.

I won’t give much about the book away. What I will, say, however, is that the story of how The Loved One came about is an interesting context for the book.

Basically, Waugh paid a visit to Los Angeles to discuss the film adaptation of his most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited. Although the project was never completed, Waugh enjoyed the lavish lifestyle the studios furnished for him and spent some time exploring the City of Angels. This is how he discovered the ridiculously elaborate Forest Lawn Memorial Park and hit upon the idea for the bitterly ironic The Loved One, which features a love triangle among cemetery employees.

As with Love Medicine, which I wrote about yesterday, The Loved One employs shifts in point of view. They’re very artfully done, growing organically out of the story. In one fantastic move, Waugh shifts point of view from the female lead character to the advice columnist that she is writing letters to. It doesn’t feel forced, either—and that’s hard to do.

If you don’t want to read the book, you can apparently watch the movie version. It stars Milton Berle, Liberace, and Roddy McDowall, among others. Bet it’s pretty good.

“F for Fake” by Orson Welles

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F for Fake by Orson Welles—his last feature movie, released in 1973—seems to be, first and foremost, an excuse to film his hot young Croatian girlfriend Oja Kodar walking around and wiggling her ass. I’m totally serious about this.

As film critic Peter Bogdanovich helpfully notes in the film commentary, F for Fake is more of a personal visual essay than a documentary.

Welles addresses issues of authenticity, good taste, and the illusion of expertise in a nolinear, fragmented narrative that merges real footage of famous art fraud Elmyr de Hory with fictional footage that he shot with his girlfriend.

The film—if you can follow it, and I admit that I struggled at certain points—does raise important issues, and Orson Welles is in a unique place to comment on them. He admits that he owes his career to a bold move in Dublin, Ireland, where he supposedly walked into an audition and claimed that he was a big star on Broadway. The theater manager was impressed and cast young Welles, which allowed him to return to America on the wings of his fame. (This reminds me of the admission Neil Gaiman made in a recent speech: that he lied in order to get his first big writing break.)

In summary, although F for Fake provides a rewarding, experimental viewing experience, you have to really pay attention and meet Wells on his terms; jumpy (though sometimes innovative) editing, a lack of attention to historical context, and random narrative moves make the film incredibly hard to follow at some points.

To decide whether this is something you’d like to watch, I recommend checking out the super-long trailer on YouTube that was apparently never run anywhere. Why, you ask? Perhaps because it’s just as confusing, schizophrenic, and drug-fueled as the film it’s based on:

“Save the Cat!” A Screenwriter’s (Somewhat Silly) Battlecry

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There’s a book on screenwriting by Blake Snyder called Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. I haven’t read it and I don’t intend to. It’s gotten good reviews on amazon.com, although given recent disclosures regarding the massive fraud involved with fake online accounts (an article from Forbes is here), I don’t think you can put a whole lot of stock in that.

In Snyder’s book, the title Save the Cat! comes from the idea that you’re always supposed to show the protagonist doing something “good” toward the beginning of the film so that the character can seem endearing to the audience. This is an old theory, and it goes back to the era of silent films and the cliche about how you always knew who the villain was because they randomly kicked a dog.

Apparently Synder tries to make this sound like some bold, revolutionary theory in his book even though it’s been around since the early 20th century.

Anyhow, as ridiculously formulaic as this approach sounds, you can see “save the cat!” scenes in movies all the time. It’s even been parodied, such as in this Mountain Dew commercial:

People have literally started looking at their scripts and going, “Oh, wait. I don’t have a ‘save the cat’ scene. I need to have a ‘save the cat’ scene.”

The post-apocalyptic film Book of Eli, which I trashed in a previous update, is a great example of how silly this stuff is when taken to an extreme.

About five minutes into the film, the Denzel Washington character is hanging out in an abandoned house when suddenly a mouse appears. Denzel Washington throws the mouse a piece of food.

Now in my mind what I’m thinking about this scene is that, a few minutes earlier, we saw Denzel Washington slaughter a skinny, starving cat with a crossbow for food. He carried the dead cat in a bag through the wilderness. He roasted the dead cat in the abandoned house, and in fact the little morsel of food he threw to the mouse was part of the dead cat.

“Oh, this is a dark movie,” I’m thinking. “He’s going to tempt the mouse closer and then KILL IT because Denzel Washington is living in a post-apocalyptic world and he just hid in some leaves wearing a gas mask so that he could kill a poor, skinny little cat, and he definitely would have no compunction about killing a mouse and then eating that, too.”

But no.

Denzel Washington just watches the mouse eat the morsel of food, gives the mouse a “hey little guy” sort of smile, and pulls out his iPod to listen to some music.

What. The. Hell.

Okay, so perhaps it’s a little ironic that Denzel Washington threw Jerry a piece of roasted Tom cat. And maybe—just maybe!—this scene was the screenwriter’s clever response to some kind of “Save the Cat!” dictum imposed on him by the producers. (“Ha ha,” he thought. “I’m going to KILL THE CAT and save the MOUSE.”)

Whatever the case, it’s there on-screen for you to see—and there are similar scenes like this in films all the time, scenes where in the first ten minutes or so the protagonist randomly does something nice so that we can see what a great person the protagonist is.

Does this have anything to do with character or setting? Not usually.

Is it something that audiences recognize, something that seems to be an age-old trick to get people rooting for our protagonist? Yes, it does.

So sure, have your “Save the Cat” scene. Sell your Hollywood screenplay. Why not? Just think about what you’re doing and try to have the sequence fit in more naturally, more effortlessly, than some of the more ridiculous ones out there.

Film: “Prometheus”

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About halfway through Prometheus, I got this terrible sinking feeling in my gut.

“There is no way the film is going to answer half the questions it asks,” I thought to myself.

And I was right.

After leaving the theater, I turned to my friend. “What the hell did I just watch for two hours?” I asked.

Before she could answer, someone behind us chimed in.

“Yeah, what was the deal with the aliens? So they created humans, but then they wanted to destroy them. Then they were destroyed, except that one of the aliens survived….”

I’m still thinking about the movie, but only because it made me so mad.

According to the Wikipedia entry, Director Ridley Scott said that the film “does leave you with some nice open questions.”

This is part of what makes me so mad.

Reviewers might praise the film for its beautiful imagery, the interesting performance of one of its characters, etc., but whatever happened to just making a solid all-around good movie that ties up loose ends?

Maybe I’m “old fashioned.”

Maybe I just don’t “get it.”

But seriously, the plot of the movie didn’t make any sense.

I didn’t understand why the characters behaved the way they did, I didn’t understand the various types of aliens or what their motivations were, and I didn’t appreciate the ridiculous jumping-running-climbing adventure the Noomi Rapace character goes on after getting her abdomen surgically stapled shut.

I’m all for big explosions, epic themes, aliens, heroic feats, etc. And yet in trying to present all of these things to the viewer, I feel that Hollywood frequently ignores something important: a well-crafted story about interesting characters.

Prometheus is my new case study in this unfortunate phenomenon. Good thing it only cost $1.75 at the dollar theater; it was barely worth even that.

Does Your Story Pass “The Bechdel Test”?

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So this is a thing—a thing that you, as a writer, should know about. According to Wikipedia:

The Bechdel Test, credited to Liz Wallace, was introduced in Alison Bechdel’s comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. In a 1985 strip titled “The Rule,” an unnamed female character says that she only watches a movie if it satisfies the following requirements: (1) It has to have at least two women in it, (2) who talk to each other, (3) about something besides a man.

People thought this was funny because it was sort of a true critique of Hollywood.

Then they thought, “Wow. If this is true critique, that’s pretty messed up.”

Thus the “Bechdel Test” was born as a sort of litmus test to find out how much Hollywood directors really cared about their female characters.

To pass the Bechdel Test, a movie:

  1. Has to have at least two women
  2. Who talk to each other
  3. About something besides a man

It seems simple, and yet it’s surprisingly difficult for Hollywood films to pass this test.

In fact, a whole web site has been set up to track which Hollywood films pass the test. Some vbloggers have also picked up on the test, such as this excellent “Feminist Frequency” episode.

In my humble opinion, all writers—screenwriters, novelists, short story writers—should be aware of the Bechdel Test and its implications… not because we shouldn’t have scenes where two women talk about a man, but because holding the test and its implications in mind can possibly free up more dramatic potential for scenes and avoid cliche.

Think about the opening scene for Swingers, for example, which is dramatic gold. The reason? It’s the opposite of the trope the Bechdel Test critiques, i.e., it’s unusual for two men to be portrayed as talking about a woman, which is why the film and its characters struck such a chord for people right from the opening sequence.