Christmas Booty

I have to say, my family looks after me. For Christmas Ms Jonboywalton bought me the Special Edition release of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, as well as season one of perhaps the most consistantly funny show currently screening, Scrubs. And if that wasn't enough in itself, Mère Ms Jonboywalton bought me Trufault's classic Jules et Jim on DVD. I am surrounded by the most gracious and thoughtful women. Ms J made the stipulation as part of her generous gift, that I was never to even try to induce her to watch Sergio Leone's Italian-Western masterpiece under pain of death. For me this was a small price to pay, and I unquestionly agreed.

Some think that movies don't make for good gifts (music, too) - that to give a friend or loved one a DVD is somehow betraying a lack of thought on the part of the giver. Not so. To get the right movie as a gift shows that the giver truly cares for the receiver.

A favourite film can convey feelings that can't be readily put into words. To sit down with that special somebody and share the experience of watching that movie that means so much to them, to let them lean over and murmur a preemption or a side note, to have the opportunity to put an arm around them when it gets to an emotional climax - The experience is one of the most imtimate moments you can share with another person. A favourite movie - a story that really gets to you - is a window to your soul. The most extraordinary part of this is that something that probably took at least two hundred people to create can be made such a personal artifact, invested with so much of yourself. The best movies - like the best books - are the ones that challenge you each time you go back to them. They should be shared.

In Defence of Happy Endings

Oh, When Harry Met Sally? Hey, I always meant to get around to renting that,

until I REMEMBERED I'M HETEROSEXUAL!

Turk (Donald Faison)

Scrubs

OK, I know that some of my reading public (now up to four - if you don't count all those people trying to get me to promote their cheap viagra /online-dating /quicky divorce services (actually that kind of has a certain symetry to it)) are going to think that Jonboy's getting soft in his old age (or just soft in the head - or just soft), but I think it's high time somebody came to the defence of that staple of the Hollywood studio system, the romantic comedy. Defence?, you ask. Why would something as ubiquitous as the romantic comedy (I refuse to follow fashion and adopt the crass contraction, "rom-com") need defending?

Valid question. I'll tell you why. If you're reading this, chances are you're not a multiplex slob who habitually sees whatever has the biggest advertising budget that month. You probably laugh at Woody Allen's comedies. You might have a favourite Chinese or Spanish or Russian director. You might even sit around with your friends and talk about movies you've seen. This is where the danger creeps in. Peer pressure is a powerful thing, my friends - don't give in to it.

Well, usually it's guys that take issue with the romantic comedy; that is, guys who don't think romantic comedies - or really any kind of love story - are appropriate viewing for men. You see, it's just not cool to like romantic comedies. Men refer to them as chick-flicks (not all men, of course, and the ones that do tend to only like movies with car chases or fart jokes*, so their opinion doesn't count for much with anyone outside of test screenings in Burbank). These views are short-sighted and prematurely judgemental, and I am breaking ranks - I am a proud romantic comedy watcher. I cry at the end every time I see The Accidental Tourist. I cheer internally when Harry and Sally finally get their shit together. Hell, Julia Roberts and Richard Gere give hope to us all.

Romantic movies across the board get a bum rap. Critics say they're predictable, that they're formulaic, that they're emotionally manipulative. Well so is Lethal Weapon. So is The Castle. The romantic comedy has been a filmmaking staple for probably as long as public exhibition films have been around. Yes they tend to run to a formula, that's true. But no more that a horror flick, Western, action movie or thriller (all of which I am also a fan). Some of the best writing in movies these days is going into romantic comedies, along with some of the best talent. And you don't have to devote two-thirds of the films budget to CGI either. And this has always been true. The Razor's Edge, For Whom the Bell Tolls and Casablanca all operate at a significant level as romances.

And if nothing else, watching a romantic comedy with your significant other is equal in good-partner-points to at least five hours of shopping for shoes. Two hours of looking at Kate Beckinsale or five hours of looking at Delores from Footwear. I know how I'd rather spend my time.

* The first writer to successfully synthesise these two genres will be a very rich man, but won't live long enough to enjoy his good fortune after a visit by the Coalition for Reintroduction of Entertainment for Everybody into Picturehouses (CREEPs).

Voted Most Likely to Fail (on revisiting The Mask)

Ms. jonboywalton and I went on a little nostalgia trip on the weekend and watched our newly acquired copy of The Mask (1994). I remembered enjoying it immensely when I saw it on the big screen (Ms. J and I were still dating then), but apart from a couple of scenes (like Peggy's betrayal, and the "You gotta ask youself - do I feel lucky..." sequence) I couldn't really recall much of it at all.

According to the good folks at imdb.com The Mask was the eighth highest grossing movie of 1994 in the United States. Admittedly it was up against it with the likes of Forrest Gump and True Lies, but it was only pipped at the post by Speed (with roughly $2 million more in the pot) and grossed significantly higher than Pulp Fiction (earning about $12 million more at the Box Office).

The funniest thing is, all emperical evidence points to the movie never being intended to be such a hit. The entire cast was either unproven or considered second tier, the director - Chuck Russell - had just two features to his name, the schlock remake of The Blob, and the third installment of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, and the premise was cartoonish without actually being based on a comic book (or a video game). It just happened to tap into the zeitgeist - by 1994 society had come down hard from the giddy excesses of the eighties and everyone just wanted a little escapism. They didn't care if their heroes were unlikely (like Bruce Willis as Butch in Pulp Fiction or Arnold Schwartzenegger's Harry Tasker in True Lies) . The little-film-that-could just happened to capture the public imagination at a time when the public didn't want to think about interest rates and trade defecits.

The thing that struck me about the film, looking at it ten years on, was how pedestrian it felt. The lack of jump cuts and running scenes. The claustrophobic closeness of many of the interior sets (the interiors that weren't shot in existing buildings like the bank). The big crowd scenes where you only see about thrity people at a time. And, (I only mention this because of the obvious and rampant prejudice against them at the time) the number of "television" actors in crucial roles. None of this seemed that obvious when I saw it the first time. Has the movie-going audience grown so cynically sophisticated in the last decade that these thing stick out more glaringly than they once did? Have we become to au fait with movie making practice to ever lose ourselves in cinema ever again? If watching this again was any indication, then no. I laughed out loud and often, being surprised by how well the movie travelled, in spite of the hair styles and made-for-TV blockiness of some scenes. I think that a lot of the films timelessness can be attributed to the swing aesthetic that drenches the whole production, from Ha Nguyen's costuming to Randy Edelman's original soundtrack.

Also in it's defence (as if it needed defending) The Mask essentially launched two careers, and for this we should give thanks. 1994 was Carrey's year, with The Mask, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Dumb and Dumber all being released within ten months of each other. Since then, Carrey has gone on to do a stack of films, many good, some excellent. And, of course there's Cameron Diaz, who got an 'And introducing..." title in the opening credits. Admitedly, The Mask may not be her best work, but nobody could deny Diaz demonstrated a camera-friendliness this little black duck hadn't seen since Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. It's trendy to dump on pretty female actors, but how many would be prepared to make themselves dowdy to the point of unrecognisability for the sake of a role?

M.I.A.

The reason why I started this blog in the first place was because I had some free time and thought I'd be able to make the committment to it (I've been trying to put together enough short stories to shop a collection for a couple of years now - I find it generally easier to play to an audience). It's been over a week since my last post (now I feel like I'm in confession). I haven't been completely idle; I have written about half a typically long post about romantic comedies, prompted by going to see the very grown-up and extremely entertaining Must Love Dogs with two of my favourite actors, John Cusack and the incomparable Diane Lane. I'm a sucker for a romantic story and I love comedies (i.e. comedies by nature, not just by advertising). So I've been taking my time with it, trying to get the tone right, trying not to be too gushy. Not that you care, dear reader - I'm actually starting to wonder if you're even out there (barring a couple of loyal, patient, longsuffering friends).

Haven't got around to seeing The Shining that I bought the other week. Had a splurge and bought Amelie, A Room with a View, Blade III, and a couple of other DVDs. Summer viewing. Things are starting to wrap up in televisionland, so I'm sure they'll come in handy. I've also been reading some screenwriting books - more on that sometime in the future. All I really wnated to say this time was, I'm sorry for not keeping to the promise I made at the beginning - to get something thoughtful up at least once a week. If anyone does actually stop by to see what's new, leave a comment; that will goad me to keep true to my word.

Meanwhile, go see Must Love Dogs (you'll have to suspend your disbelief that somebody would actually leave Diane Lane for, well, anyone else), and if you got to the multiplex late and you just missed it, Curtis Hanson's In Her Shoes is definitely worth the price of the ticket and the popcorn.

Laugh? I nearly...

The always funny Ryan McGee has posted a list of DVD features he'd like to see but, alas probably never will. Have a read and complement him on his good taste in movies.

Also, I've added some links that I've been meaning to put up for a few weeks now. This is all to make up for the lack of recent content. But there's a couple of things in the works, I promise. Ms. jonboywalton and I have been to see a few movies lately, and the plastic film just came off my new copy of The Shining DVD (replacing my trusty VHS copy), so I'm going to be putting some stuff up soon. You'll just have to be patient.

Knee-Jerk Response or Sinister Marketing Ploy

When did the "Director's Cut" become a part of daily Hollywood movie-making life? What was once a concession made to a filmmaker at the top of his game by the film's owners (kind of like canine visitation rights after the divorce, or getting to tell your side of the story on Oprah), the opportunity to present the director's original vision of how a story should have been appreciated is now an entitlement as much as your own trailer and a nifty fold-up chair with your name stencilled on it (in much the same way that it seems anyone who opens their wallet on set is entitled to a producers's credit).

Once, and not that long ago either, seeing ": the director's cut" after the title on a video cover - or, if the gods were smiling on a certain someone's career that month, a poster for the cinematic re-release - really meant something. It meant another twenty minutes of Betty Blue or The Abyss - the reintroduction of the bit that helped all the rest to make sense (originally pulled because a test audience in Burbank couldn't collectively spell "narrative", let alone follow one), or - more rarely - the removal of some element(s), such as the voice-over and "let's leave the people in no doubt" ending in the original release of Ridley Scott's Kubrick-movie Blade Runner.

These days every third movie at the multiplex will come out with a alternative- or extended version on DVD, usually about six or eight weeks after the cinema release version hit the shelves (though, in these days of high market-compression, more and more often we're seeing parallel releases). Donnie Darko I can understand. I was scratching my head over that one for a week after I saw it - it begs for the director's-cut treatment. But King Arthur? (Or, for that matter, Armaggedon? Resident Evil? The Chronicles of Riddick? American Pie?) It all seems pretty straight forward. The need to use those extra couple of hundred feet of footage you shot does not, in itself, constitute a good reason for releasing a new version of a film. In fact it can actually make an already good film a little clumsey and long-winded (ladies and gentlemen of the jury, may I present Exibit A, Dances With Wolves).

There seems to be only two possible reasons for this sudden mushrooming of special edition popularity; one is organic, the other cynical, but they're both related to money and they aren't mutually exclusive. Firstly, there's the lemming principle. This can be summed up in four words: "Well, George did it..." Here "George" could be replaced with, "Stephen", "Ridley", "James", "Luc", or any number of successful directors' first names. Nobody ever went broke underestimating the humility of people working in the movie industry, and this is a case in point. When it gets out that Frank Coppola is making a vampire movie, every studio has to make their own vampire movie. Similarly, when someone like a Richard Kelly releases their own version of how a movie should have been seen, every director in town tries to remember how they envisaged the look of their last piece (before the producers and the coke showed up). The thing to remember is, Kelly did it because it made for a better movie. So did Scott; so did Cameron; so did Besson. George did it because he's George and because he could.

Secondly, the movies are first and foremost about making money. These days international DVD release rights are discussed in parallel with principal cast negotiations. With shorter cinema runs and the aforementioned compression of the market life-cycle of a movie from about eighteen or twenty months (premiere to VHS sell-through) down to about three, the marketers and promoters are looking for any angle they can find to squeeze a few more nickels out of their boss's $80 million investment. It's not personal, they tell us - it's just business. We're all just trying to make a living.

Intellectually I know this to be true. But for people like me, sitting outside of the industry looking in, it's just one more thing that takes some of the magic out of the movies. DVD technology has offered a unique gift to filmmakers - it, more than anything else, has halped to democratize the Special Edition treatment. The extended fight-scene toward the end of X-Men 2 (between Wolverine and Deathstrike) literally raises the scene to mythological proportions, eliciting comparisons (for me, at least) with Achilles and Penthesilia. But for every movie that benefits from additional footage or editorial tinkering, there seems to be a legion of Highlander II's.

It would be futile to ask for some discretion to be exersiced regarding who gets to do what to a movie; there's too much at stake and too many fingers in the pie. I suppose just because they make them, doesn't mean we have to watch them. And every so often you'll get The Big Blue or Blade Runner: Special Edition, and suddenly there's some of that magic again.

Mea culpa

Yeah, I know. It's been a week, nearly two. I never call, I never write. And I promised to keep in touch. Well, sometimes life gets in the way. Work's been piling up and I'm trying to do some things around the house, and...

OMG, I'm becoming that blogger. When I started this I told myself I wasn't going to bore my three-or-so readers with the sad minutiae of my life (and that I wouldn't use contractions like OMG - well, WTF).

I can teel you I have been considering the breadth of talent exibited by Harvey Keitel over his long and distinguished career, gathering my thoughts for a post in the not too distant future I hope. And I have also been thinking about revisionism in the Western genre. Kind of from Broken Arrrow to Unforgiven. More on that in a couple of weeks too, I think. More on these when I've got more than five minutes spare.

If you're that starved for some distraction, I've been posting pretty regularly to my other blog, though you won't find anything there as considered or erudite as what I try to offer here.

I Don't Get It?

How is it that some poeple, seemingly a lot of people, just don't get some movies. It's like, these days, unless something is flagged by the reviews as being quirky (Clerks, Raising Arizona, Truly Madly Deeply, Ill Fated), thoughtful* (The Myth of Fingerprints, Garden State), surreal (Donnie Darko, pretty much anything by Terry Gilliam), a "black comedy" (Very Bad Things, American Psycho, Barton Fink), or that most damning of all descriptions, "independent" (which could mean anything from Lost in Translation to Open Water to Shaun of the Dead to pretty much anything by the brilliant John Sayles), there is a real danger that the movie-going public will just straight-out not like a film because they don't know what to make of it.

When did this happen? When did distributors stop just advertising a film in a way they thought would sell it and start labelling movies like products in a supermarket. And when did audiences get so damn lazy that they won't even take the opportunity to make up their mind whether they like something they see, or take a chance on something they've heard nothing about simply because the poster in the lobby appeals to them?

One of my all-time favourite movies (not necessarily one of the best I've ever seen, but one of those I can go back to again and again and I still enjoy) is Milk and Money. This is a quirky, surreal, thoughtful independent comedy that came out in 1996. It never got a cinema release in Australia. I only chanced across a VHS copy in a bargain bin at a video store for $5.00. I thought it could be interesting, so I bought it and took it home, here it sat on a shelf for maybe three months. One night I was at a loose end, so I watched it. This would have been maybe '98. I laughed 'til my stomach hurt. It is ridiculous, silly, totally divorced from reality, and one the best low-budget comedies I have ever seen.

Since then I must have either watched it with or loaned it to half a dozen friends, and each one of them has claimed not to "get" it. This from people would each extol the virtues of some or all of the following: 2001: a Space Odyssey, Ghosts... of the Civil Dead, Drowning by Numbers, Eraserhead, Naked Lunch, Lost Highway. The list could go on. I mean, compared to some of these, Milk and Money is like an episode of My Three Sons in the wierd stakes.

I refuse to accept "I don't get it" as a legitimate criticism of a film. This is lazy, turgid, and about as far from considered as a comment can get. The first time I saw 2001, I didn't get it. I didn't consider this a failing of the film. I went away and I thought about it on and off for about two years, then it started to make sense, or rather, I started to make sense of it to my own satisfaction. And low and behold, when I watched it again with my wife about a year ago (maybe ten years after first seeing it) I really enjoyed it. If you only take one thing away fro this blog, don't be a lazy movie-watcher. Challenge yourself with a Von Trier or a Truffaut film. Rent Blow-up or Calendar. Go to the cinema and take a chance on something you know nothing about. A movie does it's best work when it makes you think about something differently.

* "Thoughtful" is often synonymous in promoters' and reviewers' minds with "gentle". Both of these words should be taken out of the lexicon for these "professions" - words like this in a review scream, "I didn't bother sitting through the whole movie - or even showing up to the premiere - as I knew with my special reviewer's prescience just what it would be like - and yes I get paid far, far more than I deserve".

Gratuitous, baseless plug No 1

I just wanted to express my glee to see that Steve Martin's novel, Shopgirl has been made into a movie. While I know he's far from perfect (HouseSitter?), I'm still a big Steve Martin fan, so I entreat you all to go along and see it.

Knowing nothing about the film beyond what I gleaned from the website, I can tell you that Martin wrote the script and plays a lead role in it, along side Claire Danes (one of the most underrated actors of her generation) and Jason Schwartzman (a man who has done it (relatively) hard in spite of his pedigree - I say, kudos to you, fellow Sloan fan).

Face Off (Part 1)

When Don Siegel began pre-production for The Shootist (1976), his casting guy hoped to be able to get Jimmy Stewart for the role of the Doctor. Siegal thought it would be a great idea, but didn't think they could get such a well-known actor for such a small role. Stewart said yes to the role, partly for the opportunity to work with his old friend and fellow screen legend, John Wayne.

The scene where Dr Hostetler (Stewart) tells J.B. Books (Wayne) that he has cancer the two actors play it straight (under Siegel's orders*), delivering their lines with an economy of emotion that would make Stanisavski proud. The potency of Scott Hale's dialogue comes through all the more powerfully without the jostling of egos vying for the audience's attention (more to come on this particular pet-hate).

Time and fate have added a level of poignancy to the scene; Rumours were rife around Hollywood before preproduction began on The Shootist regarding Wanye's health. He had a few years earlier had half a lung removed. He had bad turns on set during filming (at one stage nearly closing down the production). About two-and-a-half years after the theatrical release of the movie, Wayne succumbed to cancer of the stomach and lung. While - rightly or wrongly - some critics prefer to protray Wayne as a one-trick pony who either played himself in very movie he did or began early on to believe his own press releases, but I challenge anyone to watch The Shootist and tell me the guy couldn't act.

* Don Seigel. A Seigel Film: an autobiography. Faber & Faber 1996. I just started reading this last week. It's really a film biography - the kind of stuff moviebuffs wet their pants over. Think Hemmingway's A Movable Feast, if he'd grown up in Hollywood. Anyway, it's an entertaining read, and not as prissy as some filmmakers tend to get talking about their work (yes, I'm looking at you, Scott Hicks).

Star Wars, redux (Part 2)

When I was a kid seeing Star Wars for the first time, I didn't know about the whole 'hero archetype' thing. I'd never heard of Joseph Campbell or Akira Kurosawa, and while I'd seen The Bridges at Toko-Ri, I didn't make the connection between that and George Lucas's eponymous movie until I was much older.

Much of the additional material in Lucas's retrofitted Episode IV is window dressing. As I've said before, I don't have a problem with this - Lucas was given the opportunity to do what a lot of directors would like to do, and some actually get to eventually, to go back to a personally important project and to realise more fully the vision they had of how the movie should look, how it should be experienced. A lot of people say it's hubris, the actions of a multi-millionaire micro-manager (I really didn't mean that to come out so alliterative - sorry). I say, "Kudos to you, oh bearded one". Maybe we could have done without the cool "zapping into Mos Eisley on a floating Honda" thing. Maybe we got along alright for the better part of two decades without seeing Jabba until the third/sixth movie. Really, the only people who are going to get wound up about this sort of thing are the ones who are so anally retentive about the original version, they should by all rights have been Trekkers. Go back into your living room and watch your VHS tape of the 1977 release, little man, and take your Boba Fett doll with you.

What makes the film a more rewarding experience for me is the Death Star battle at the end. Or more accurately, the preparation for battle. There's maybe an extra forty seconds of footage there (no, I haven't timed it), but it helps to build a sense of despiration, urgency and resolve leading into the battle scene. You get to see these young guys preparing to fight and to probably die in what should statistically be a futile gesture, like the ronin sharpening their blades and preparing rudimetary fortifications in The Seven Samurai, or William Holden's gunfighters in preparing to go get Angel in The Wild Bunch. You see Porkins and Wedge and the others checking their avionics like real pilots do before a flight. And you get to see Luke and Biggs briefly catching up before the squadron flies out to meet their fate.

Much of the footage in the Special Edition was shot during filming, and for one reason or another it wasn't included in the original theatrical release (like the docking bay scene wiah Han Solo and a decidedly humanoid Jabba). What would have made the experience even more complete for me would have been to include a scene that has never made it into any of the cuts (though I think it appears in the novel - and I know it made the shooting script because I've seen the stills). Originally Luke was supposed to have been visited by Biggs Darklighter, freshly back from the Academy, with news that he was off to join the Rebellion. He invites Luke to come with him, but Luke demures, citing the closeness of the harvest, and how it's not really his fight anyway. Biggs leaves. All up, maybe another eighty seconds of film, two minutes tops. Why was it left out? I guess there were reasons. The pity of it is that it would have given more context to both Luke's emotional paralysis when Biggs fighter is destroyed, and his hysterical "You know about the rebellion against the Empire" yelp at a startled C3PO, which really seems to come out of nowhere. But you can't have everything you own way, can you, VHS boy?

The Book of the Movie of the Book...

Sergio Leone apparently said once that it was impossible to make a good film from a good book. “You can make a great film out of a bad book”, he added, or something to that effect*. So, according to Leone, the equation goes something as follows:

( a ) Good book = bad movie (every time)

( b ) Bad book = good movie (or, at least potential for a good one)

( c ) Bad book = bad movie (at least as much of a chance as b)

Was he right? There are many who would say – emphatically and repeatedly – YES. In the face of it, there is some compelling evidence of exceptionally good books forming the basis of exceedingly bad films (we all remember Less Than Zero - a film that used up two other movies quotas of bad as well as its own). But often one person's "bad" is someone else's "quite good" - off the top of my head To Kill a Mockingbird, A Room With a View, The Remains of the Day, Goodfellas, The Godfather, Once Upon a Time in America, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Voyager, Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, The Shining, LA Confidential, Wonderboys, not to mention this blog's namesake. All of these movies were based on books that are considered exemplary, at least within their genre, and each one of them is a damn fine film (or at least, I think they're damn fine films).

I think I understand what Sergio was getting at. When a filmmaker decides to make a film based on a popular book, there is a lot of baggage that comes with the project. People have expectations. The reading experience has become to a degree "cinematic" for many people. Probably since the Second World War (I'm guessing about the time-frame here, but stay with me) Western culture reached a tipping point where the number of people that read and go to the movies began to out-number those who just read or just went to the movies. And people started seeing what they read in terms of a filmic experience, as if it's being projected on a screen in the mind. I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing, but the result is that when we see someone else's visual interpretation of something we have already interpreted visually for ourselves, it seems at best jarring - at worst a travesty against the intentions of the author.

People get protective about the books they read because it's their experience. They complain that their favourite scene was dropped, or an ending changed, the leading lady miscast. The solution, apparently, is to read the book after you've seen the movie (tough with something like The Lord of the Rings or a Harry Potter story). Ironically, the biggest criticism levelled against Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was that is too closely followed the book. Just no pleasing some people, I guess.

So, the short answer is, if you're thinking about making a book into a movie, don't. But if you really want to, here's some survival tips:

1. Pick your material carefully. When I finally got around to reading Graham Greene's The Quiet American I got about half-way through and thought, This has to be made into a movie. It was cinematic in style and pace of narrative, and it was timely and topical. (Unfortunately for my film-career chances, Phillip Noyce thought so too.)

2. Stick to the story where you can. These days nobody is going to pay good money to see the plight of an outed adulteress in a Seventeenth-Century Puritan settlement, whether it has a happy ending or not. Keep it real.

3. Don't be afraid to leave stuff out. Tom Bombidil didn't make it into The Fellowship of the Ring. SFW. While his appearence in the book makes for an interesting interlude, Tom contributes nothing to the narrative thrust. The movie was already 178 minutes long. To add him would have jacked it up another seven or eight minutes and risked losing those members of the audience who hadn't read the books every year since they were ten like some holy pilgrimage.

4. Pick a screenwriter who can write adaptations. It takes a particular kind of talent and sensitivity to the material, as well as an understanding of film, to distill a two-hundred-and-forty page novel into a ninety-eight minute script. Lawrence Kasdan can do it. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala can do it too. Andrew Davies and Christopher Hampton can do it really well.

5. If possible, don't let the producers sell the novelization rights to the script, a la Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It's just embarassing.

* I think I remember reading this in Sight and Sound, around the time Leone died (1989).

Star Wars, redux (Part 1)

When I first saw it at age ten Star Wars (since renamed Episode IV: A New Hope) was a life-changing experience. This sounds like a typical hyperbolic fan screed, I know. Just bear with me for a minute. I personally went to see it three times in the initial release. Lots of kids who went to my school bragged about going to see it eight, ten, fifteen times. People didn’t get sick of it. We all loved it. Star Wars was a cultural phenomenon - the movie managed to capture the popular imagination, like Sherlock Holmes or Rubik's Cube.

Looking back nearly thirty years on, it’s easy to pull apart the paint-by-numbers storyline and the sometimes hokey dialogue, but at the time it was something new and different and it filled a gap that had been growing since the end of the sixties. On the back of it’s immediate antecedents, The Godfather (1972) and Jaws (1975), two really dark and (in different ways) somewhat disturbing “Summer blockbusters”, Star Wars gave the movie-going public permission to have fun at the cinema again, to cheer for the good guys (I saw the film twice within the first four or five months of its first cinema run, about two months apart, and both times the whole place broke into spontaneous applause when the credits began to roll – something I have never experienced in a regular session since). And as the public embraced Star Wars it become at some level public property. The movie has become so woven into the childhood memories of so many people, the public as become quite proprietorial regarding the film, something that has become even more obvious in the last few years.

When George Lucas announced his intention in 1997 to touch up the old films in an anniversary release, a whole generation suddenly decided that the new versions of these landmark films could be nothing but wrong, even before they got the chance to see them. It was as if a mild kind of mass hysteria had taken root. Lucas argued that the technology of the time prohibited him from truly realizing his vision for the original trilogy, and that the technology now existed to allow him to go back to his films and present them the way he envisaged. The shrillest of his critics argued that Star Wars was already a perfect movie, and that any tinkering would only take away from its sublime accomplishment (this has since subsided into a demand for the original release versions to be made available on DVD)

I was one of a handful of people who thought the re-mastered trilogy (Episodes IV, V and VI) were an improvement on the originals. But people tend to get precious about their childhood memories. Movies, like books and albums, can encourage this by their passive nature – they are inherently unchanging, so they offer something we can measure our own change against. Which raises an interesting point of debate: at what point, if ever, does an artist relinquish their proprietry ownership of their creation?

A story in Australian Art Collector magazine - about a year ago I think - mentioned how some artists are now requiring their clients to sign an agreement not to tamper with the work in any permanent way (such as resizing a painting to fit a location). Pablo Picasso suggested that a painting is never finished, only abandoned. Expressing the same sentiment, Marcel Duchamp, after nine years of work, declared his Large Glass "finally unfinished". Sometimes the "art" can take on a life of its own. Arthur Conan Doyle was so disturbed by the popularity of his literary creation, he made Holmes into a drug adict and eventually killed him off, only to be forced to resurrect him by public demand In an age when director's cuts and special editions are as much marketing ploys as serious attempts to relate an original vision, how much ownership can a director claim over his movie? Or rather, how propriety can an adoring public claim over their favourite piece of entertainment?

The case for television

Like most people I know, I grew up in the suburbs. I went to school, I did my homework. And like a lot of people I know, my parents were too busy doing whatever it is parents do to spend a lot of time raising me. I was the youngest in my family – my brother and sister had both left home while I still counted my years in single digits. And most of the people in my street were in their fifties, their kids having already left home. I grew up alone mostly, but I wasn’t a lonely kid. For an eleven year-old whose school friends all lived too far away to visit, TV became a good substitute for friends, and in a way, for parents.

These days people like to dump on television. In the Seventies it was a convenient babysitter – I probably watched five hours of TV a night after getting home from school, and I went to bed earlier than most of my friends. These days it’s an all-too convenient scapegoat for society’s woes. I don’t buy it – if people don’t want their kids watching 24, change the channel or send the brat to bed. That’s all I’m going to say on that one. I’m not here to soap-box. Not today, anyway.

Saturday afternoons saw a young JD grow on a steady diet of John Wayne, Gene Kelly and Elvis Presley. I feasted on Rio Bravo, The Longest Day, Funny Face and The Man Who Knew Too Much. It didn’t matter what it was; I ate it up.

I grew up hoping one day I’d be able to dance like Fred Astaire. Well, that didn’t happen. I can’t ride a horse like John Wayne or sing like Danny Kaye either. But looking back on my childhood, I would have to say that television had at least the same level of influence on the development of my personality, my values and beliefs as my folks did, maybe a little more.

My parents tried to bring me up to do the right thing. The motivating forces they brought to bear in their instruction were guilt and fear, both strong motivators. And I like to think that I turned out fairly OK. I’m no kind of saint, but I don’t think I’ve left too long a trail of destruction behind me either. But the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the lessons I took away from my childhood are the ones I learnt watching movies. My ethical foundations, my sense of right and wrong owe more to James Stewart in Broken Arrow, Mr Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life than any number admonitions that I should be nice to others.

The key is the story, the narrative structure that frames the message. Every film has a story to tell, and every story has something to teach you. Stories create situations involving characters. These characters make choices and spend the rest of the story dealing with the consequences of those choices. It's like life, only you get to see the outcomes in the abstract. This is why stories are the oldest and still the best form of teaching. My parents did their best, but they only ever told me what; George Baily and Tom Jeffords and a hundred other characters showed me why.

Hi, and welcome to the Accidental Ticket-Holder - my very own film-critique megaphone. This is unexplored territory for me - my first blog. The Accidental Ticket-Holder will be devoted to movie-minutiae, notes on films, directors, writers, performances, stuff like that. Basically I'm a frustrated film-critic who lacks the time and wherewithal to actually write film criticism. Hell, these days I barely get the time to go see a movie. So, what you'll get here won't be full-blown expositions about the latest big-budget Hollywood epic or slick thriller out of France. These days I'm more interested the lost bits - the fragments that fall through the cracks.

Blogs are often full of self-indulgent waffle, and this one is probably not going to stray too far from the formula. I can be as beligerant and opinionated at the next guy, and I just know you're out there itching to read what I have to say about any old thing that comes up. Promise I'll try to stay on topic, and I'll try to keep it more-or-less intelligent. And I'll try to keep the typos down to a minimum.

It's my intention to put up a post or two a week - around eight or ten times a month. Between work, study and relationship-maintenance, I figure I can probably keep to this schedule. If anyone wants to write to me, that would be just swell. I'll even try to write back (if it doen't conflict with my busy posting schedule).

So, to kick off - Manhattan. I was thinking about that wonderful scene at the very end between Isaac (Woody Allen) and Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), when Tracy has just told Isaac he has to learn to trust people, and the camera lingers for a few seconds (it seems longer) on Isacc, looking... well, I used to think penitent ("I screwed up - I'm sorry"), but now I'm leaning toward plain-old anxious ("Yes, yes, of course you're right - now can we get back to the part where thingsweretickingalongnicelythankyou). For a guy who professes to lead such an examined life, he seems to be a little cavalier about the important things. You have to wonder if Manhattan II wouldnt have been pretty much the same story, just with Mia Farrow in the Diane Keaton role. Though maybe Tracy wouldn't have stuck around for that long.