Saalon Muyo

I was worried this was going to be a sad and weak month of Movie Education. Little did I know I’d have a short story to run from for the last week of October. Avoidance is motivation. Should have written the short story, though. Hrm. Anyway.

Rambo: First Blood

Interesting primarily for the fact that it spawned a franchise with which it shares almost nothing in common. It’s one of those slightly annoying action movies where everything hinges on closed-minded, mean-spirited small town folk doing closed-minded, mean-spirited things.  An unstable Vietnam War vet tries to walk through town, gets arrested, tormented and abused until he snaps, and then spends the rest of the movie killing people. It’s not terribly written or directed, but it never became more than an excuse for Stallone to look ripped and be tough. Viewed in context, it does touch interestingly upon the lingering trauma of Vietnam, but it’s not a good enough film to get that across out of its own time.

Hannah and her Sisters

If I let myself, I’d write an entire month of these things on nothing but Woody Allen movies. I’ve tried to hold onto a few of the movies viewed as his classics, and I fear I may have reached the end of them with Hannah and Her Sisters. What makes Allen such a wonderful director is the way his films work in aggregate.  One Woody Allen movie is good. Each successive film you see, though, is both a departure and an expansion upon his rhythms and themes.  Hannah itself is like his work in microcosm: a series of vignettes that add up to something more before you realize what the film is doing.  There’s a story near the end, involving a character’s attempted suicide, that’s a perfect encapsulation of Allen’s view of the world.  Also: Michael Caine is awesome in it.

Throne of Blood

How I purchased a Kurosawa adaptation of Macbeth and let it sit on my shelf, unwatched, for almost a year will forever remain a mystery to me. This is one of Kurosawa’s two takes on Shakespeare – the other being Ran, which is an amalgam of King Lear and a traditional Japanese work – and it’s as fantastic as I could have hoped. Toshiro Mifune is Washizu, a successful general who receives a prophecy from a forest spirit that leads first to his triumph, then his destruction.  If you know Macbeth, the story will be familiar, but what delights are the many ways Kurosawa integrates the story into its Feudal Japanese setting.  Kurosawa has so defined modern filmmaking that his style still feels fresh, but it never ceases to impress me just how polished his movies are. Throne of Blood (which is actually titled Spider Web Castle) isn’t his best film, but it’s very, very good.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Boy, this movie had to have created an awful lot of unrealistic fantasies for women. A very competently made films that was just not made for me. Holly Golightly is a terror to me; the perfect, Audrey Hepburn-clad apparition of a half-dozen women I pointlessly and foolishly coveted before learning my lesson. She’s selfish and vain, and if the movie didn’t force her to come around in the final minutes, she’d have been a realistic fantasy-girl monster. The girl throws a cat out into the rain mere minutes before the swooning final kiss! George Peppard is great, and Henry Mancini (native of my own home town) wrote a memorable and beautiful score.  I can see why people like this, but I was not its target audience. Also: Hoo boy, was that some racist caricature or what?

The Long Goodbye

Robert Altman’s adaptation and modernization of one of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe detective novels. It takes the post-war noir setting into the post-hippie 70′s. What’s amazing is the way the movie still feels sort-of authentically Chandler while feeling equally sort-of authentically Altman.  The film’s opening is worth the movie, as Marlowe wakes to find his hungry cat without its favorite brand of food and wanders into the night on behalf of his feline master.  The story was a touch thin, but Elliot Gould makes such a dry and witty Marlowe – and one very different than most other film adaptations – that the movie never stops being fun.  It’s hard to dislike an Altman film (says the guy who, just last month, crapped out a third of the way through Nashville), and this was definitely one of his good ones.

Closely Watched Trains

A Czechoslovakian film from the 60′s about the country’s Nazi occupation (ironically filmed during the subsequent Communist occupation), I chose this movie for one reason: It was assigned to me in a film class a decade ago, and I totally blew off watching it. I always felt badly about that. I liked my teacher and he picked good movies. Some movies I watch are definitely For Film Nerds Only, and this was one. There’s a roughness to the film, the kind you see in movies with a less developed film industry, and it’s mixed with the brand of melancholy you only find in post-WWII European cinema. This is not an era of filmmaking from which I take much enjoyment, but despite that, I found Trains to be an generally gentle and honest coming of age film, and am always fascinated by the art that slips through the cracks of an oppressive regime. Where else will you see the stamping of a woman’s butt with official Nazi rubber stamps used not only for sexual foreplay, but for a running subplot?

Two years ago, I shot a film for the 48 Hour Film Project. It was the last thing I shot, and the first time I’ve gone that long without shooting without the regret overpowering the relief of being free of it all.  My relationship with filmmaking has been troubled. I love writing the script, and I really love every single on-set moment. I love shooting, working with actors and the way everything is so unbelievably alive when a dozen people are bouncing off of each other and time and money are in far too limited supply.

Everything else sucks. Casting sucks. Scheduling sucks. Realizing you didn’t get the shot you thought was great because you shook the camera sucks. Listening to audio that got screwed up by an HVAC system, or realizing you forgot to hit the record button sucks.  Everything that isn’t writing and isn’t shooting is dealing with things you can’t control, and I hate things I can’t control.  Dealing with it over a handful of short films, only three of which are even worth watching at all, wore me out.

I’m starting to miss it again. We’ll see if missing it leads anywhere, but for now I’m thinking about what shooting again might feel like.  I’m watching movies and paying attention to editing and camera movement, I’m thinking about what I didn’t get right that I want to get right next time. And I’m apparently talking about it, because I got asked yesterday for a link to what I’ve shot and it was entirely because I was mouthing off.  You know I’ve been struggling with filmmaking when I’m not even mentioning it in front of people.

There are two (maybe three) films of mine online.  One I shot in 2005. “Tomorrow” is more interesting to me than good, and is possibly not much of either to anyone else.  I watched it for the first time in years last night, because I asked if I could qualify said films before showing them, and I needed to know what I was qualifying. I considered just sending Mels – who asked for the link – an e-mail, but thinking about the films made me contemplative. I thought that if I wrote about it, if I got into my troubles a bit more publicly, it would be better for me. I’m clearly a little fear-paralyzed by filmmaking, and if I’m ever going to do it again, I need to actually address those fears.

“Tomorrow” was an experiment; 12 minutes, shot in a continuous take in an apartment, dealing with a suicide and the moments prior to the arrival of emergency services.  About half of it I can still watch without cringing or just skimming past the awkward, too earnest writing. Amidst that half are some moments and stagings for which I still feel a bit proud.  It was a heck of a thing to shoot. My lead actress was deathly ill, and would power through each take, then collapse onto the floor while we reset.  In two days of rehearsal and a morning of shooting, we shot a not uncomplicated, single-take film.  It even got good (capsule) reviews from the Post Gazette and City Paper. But it was an experiment, and part of me wishes it wasn’t still out in the wild for people to see.

The other film was what I shot for the 48 Hour Film Project.  The way it works is pretty simple: You gather on Friday night, where everyone reaches into a hat and pulls a genre.  You then get a piece of paper that’s the same for everyone telling you a character name, a prop and a line of dialog that you have to use. 48 hours later, you have to turn the film you wrote, shot and edited within that time.  We pulled Surprise Ending as our genre, which is just an awful genre to pull when you didn’t even know it was a possibility.  (Actually we pulled Musical/Western, which is the Genre of Death, and handed it back in to take a wild card genre instead, because neither of those genres were an option for us).

Looking back on “co workers”, the film we produced, is not as hard.  If I had been able to sit on the script – or even the edit of the film – for a couple of days I’d have reduced and rewritten a lot of the first two minutes. It had been a while since I shot, so there’s an awkwardness to the opening I wish I could magic wand away.  After that, though? Well, unlike most things, I’ll let it speak for itself.  For something we wrote between 8PM and midnight, shot between 8AM and 6PM the next day and edited by that time the following evening, I’m still pleased.  Actually, I’m kind of pleased with it anyway.   The restrictions forced me to actually produce something, front to back, without being able to back out.  While I don’t have a lot positive to say about the 48 Hour Film Project competition itself, it was, I think, the experience I needed.

I don’t know where this will lead. Maybe I’m just flirting with this again but will shrink away from what’s an absolutely unpleasant set of challenges. I can always write without filming. Do I want to? Do I want fear and fatigue to be the reason I never film again? I don’t know. I’m still working through it.

I ask you this: Watch “co workers” first. If you think it’s crap, don’t go on to “Tomorrow”, because that film is – in most ways – a step back in quality. If you like “co workers” enough to want to watch the other, know that it is, to my eyes, a interesting experiment that serves as a troublesome artifact of an early writer-filmmaker Eric with whom I not entirely comfortable.  I considered not even posting it, but if I can’t look back at what I didn’t get right, I’ll never have the guts to go through with this again. I’d really like some of those guts back.

So, without further ado, I give you “co workers” and “Tomorrow”.

“co workers”

“Tomorrow”

I have three real posts in progress, and too much to do to focus on them, so in the meantime, listen to some really fantastic Josh Ritter music.

If it was math, it might have made sense.  Two negatives making a positive.

I hated seaQuest. My first review for my school’s newspaper was of the seaQuest pilot, and it was a fine example of youthful, hyperbolic vitriol. I tore the crap out of that pilot, and boy did I think I was funny as I did it.  Unlike Babylon 5, a show I came to truly love, I never warmed to seaQuest.  It had a stupid-voiced dolphin, an obnoxious Wesley Crusher wannabe and it looked like it took place in a jar of Welch’s Grape Jelly. Trash, people. Pure trash.

I never hated fan fiction like I did seaQuest, but I never had much interest in writing it. The problem is that wasn’t real. I never minded people writing it, I just couldn’t understand why they enjoyed it. For me to invest in what I’m writing, I have to buy into it. I have to believe it. These things, in this tiny bubble universe I’ve created in my mind, are actually happening and actually matter.  Without believing that real, irrevocable things are happening to the people under my control, I can’t possibly sell that lie to anyone else.  Fan fiction was a bridge too far.  These characters were on tv, doing other things and did not care what hell through which I was putting them.  Fiction is all about lying, but even lies about people fighting with monsters or flying deep spice freighters need to feel real. Fan fiction always felt like a facade with nothing underneath.

So there I am, writing seaQuest fanfic.

My life got tied up in seaQuest fandom almost as soon as I started hanging out on Scifi’s Icarus IRC server.  My wife? The one I met on IRC? Her username was LWQuestie. Lucas. Wolenczak. Questie. (Lucas being the aforementioned obnoxious – but apparently cute – Wesley Crusher ripoff.)  There were other Questies bouncing around on the server, so it was only a matter of time before I ended up in a chat room with one of the two head writers of a seaQuest fanfic “show” called seaQuest 2047.

Like most things, it started because I mouthed off.  Why I read any of 2047, I don’t know. A link someone sent to me, or perhaps out of pure trollery. Either way, I’d read some of 2047. I had things to say. Shockingly, I did not have nice things to say. More shockingly, Matt – the 2047 writer in that chat room – private messaged me, and not to tell me to please stop flaming the thing he was writing.

Instead, he asked, “What would you do to make it better?”

The fastest way to get me to do something against my better judgment is to appeal to my ego. I answered enthusiastically. What I said, I don’t remember, but it led inexorably to an offer to join the effort and write me some seaQuest fanfic.  Out of what I can only imagine was a desperate need to write something people would read, I accepted just as 2047‘s second season was ramping up.

This was just as I was graduating high school and heading into college. I was still sorting out whether or not I had any confidence in my writing. I was doing it, but it was just this thing that happened. I had no idea how it was supposed to fit into my life. Getting into 2047 was one of a couple things that cracked everything open. Sitting in chat rooms with the other writers, flaming back and forth on e-mail threads about future plot developments and obsessively reading reactions on message boards made the whole thing real to me.

The combination of not actually being a fan of seaQuest and the fact that the show featured primarily original characters – it was set 15 years after the end of the show proper – made it easier for me to buy into what I was doing. I dove into it enthusiastically; more so that I even remember, apparently, because I looked back at the episodes and my name is on more scripts than I’m ready to admit. For nearly two years, Eric Sipple was a seaQuest fanfiction writer, and he enjoyed it.

It ended badly, as these things do. People leaving, people you like less coming in.  It was a group effort and I wasn’t in charge, so when the person who’d taken over started getting flirty with someone with whom I did not get along, the writing was on the wall. We finished the second season and I went off on my own.  When I say “on my own” I mean, “I followed a friend to a spinoff of the fanfiction show I was writing,” but my shame level is getting a bit out of control, so let’s just pretend I rode into the sunset.  (To be fair, that spinoff fanfiction series was a great time, and I did a bit of not-embarrassing writing as a part of it, but please, dear God, let me stop talking about this.)

One of the two founders of 2047, Rachel, is still a close friend, and in retrospect it was the fact that she was a wonderful writer that made working on the show seem like a good idea.  There’s one particular script – the one I talked about co-writing – for which I have particular pride. The way that experience cemented my relationship with Rachel makes the fact that you can still find fan fiction bearing my name on the internet worth the embarrassment. I also met Adam, another friend and writer, and the one I spun off with before making my final exit from fanfic. You can’t argue with a year or two of your life that leaves you with two good friends.

It also gave me some perspective on fanfic, something I’m glad to have learned.  It confirmed the feeling that writing something that I can’t believe as real is a waste of time.  At the same time, it showed me another side of that coin.  In your early days of writing, you’re a geyser of crap.  Almost everything you write is trash, and the rest should have been incinerated on the spot.  There’s no way to get to being good at telling a story until you’ve seen every possible way you can do it badly.  Don’t underestimate how damaging those early days can be to your ego.  It sucks to suck, and it really sucks to be aware of how much suck you’re producing.  That feeling that you are simply a terrible writer is very, very difficult to overcome.

Fanfic, for me, worked as a set of training wheels. Or maybe a safety blanket. Safety wheels?  Anyway, it gave me an outlet to write an awful lot, to see my writing put in a public place and to react to it as finished work.  I learned a lot through those few years of writing fanfic. I produced a lot of terrible but finished stories that made me better, and did it under a structure that supported some of the burdon for me.  There’s something close to a dozen television length scripts I wrote or co-wrote in my time as a seaQuest fanfic writer, and whatever horror I feel in reading them now, they gave me a chance to write and to be read. Maybe I could have been spending that time on better pursuits, but it was what it was, and it came with more good than I expected when I got involved.

Sure, a lot of people use fanfic purely as fantasy fulfillment – sometimes as way kinky fantasy fulfillment – and many will write little else.  That’s fine, though I remain confused (but not dismissive) about what pleasure people take from it. Most people probably didn’t write fan fiction for a show they hated, either, so I’m not sure how useful an example my experience is.  The point, I think, is that there will come a time when you’ll need to start writing things all your own (it’s usually earlier into your work than you think), but that time spent in the attractive nuisance that is the world of fanfic can be helpful if you use it to your advantage.

Except for the part where you spend the rest of your life terrified of someone stumbling across it and asking, “So, what was seaQuest 2047?”  That part just plain sucks.

Thank you to whomever found my blog with this, my favorite search term of all time:

how the fuck do i using the mother fucking form_tag in fucking rails

I’ve been there. I hope my post helped. Truly and sincerely.

Here’s a question I wish we could all stop asking: Where are all the lady techies? I’m going to be hiring soon, and I have this sick feeling that I’m to get a couple dozen resumes and every one of them will have a Y chromosome lurking behind them.  It’s no secret or surprise that there’s a disturbing dearth of female developers. A lot of smarter and more tuned in people have spent time trying to understand why.  Societal problems, sure. Rampant, ingrained sexism in the industry, absolutely. Extra special denigration regarding a woman’s ability to do the job, without a doubt.

I shouldn’t be happy when I find a female developer on twitter who’s rocking an awesome position, or serving on an important standards committee.  It should be the norm. It’s not that there aren’t lady techs, and it’s definitely not that they’re inferior at the job.  I’ve worked with two female developers – at the same place, actually, which made the gender ratio only slightly nauseating – and I want to make something very clear.

The best developer I have ever worked with, hands down, was a woman. She wasn’t just the best developer I worked with. She was the very, very best.  I’ve worked with lead developers at huge consulting companies that couldn’t keep up with her on their best day. She’s not an aberration, or an exception to the rule.  She was just a person who put the time, effort and insanity of a double major in computer science and mathematics into her work.  I shouldn’t have to point out it was a woman from whom I learned the most, or for whom I have the most undying respect. I should just be able to talk about her as a great developer and be done with it. I can’t, though, because when the number of female applicants to the CS program at Harvard doubled, it brought the percentage to 25%. That’s an improvement!

The trend might be reversing. It can’t reverse fast enough.  What concerns me is that there are a lot of developers who have literally never worked with a female programmer and don’t think it’s a problem.  Those new computer science majors are walking into a gauntlet of quiet derision and casual disregard that no one should have to face. They’re going to slam into an industry that’s gotten used to thinking of women as peripherals to the development process. Quality Assurance or Project Management, maybe, but not coders.

I hope someone prepares them for it, too, because the last thing I want to see is disillusionment and frustration bleed most of them off. There are smart people who could make this field better, and we’re losing them because a lot of nerds cope with the humiliation of high school by using the field as a bulwark against the entire gender. Beyond the standard and terrible patriarchal notion that women and sciences don’t mix, is an uglier core of woman-fear.  One of the ways you insulate yourself from the bad days of school is deciding that you’re superior to the people picking on you.  For nerds who’ve entered a field where they deal with women only peripherally, that superiority complex festers and grows.

That’s what waits for that new surge of lady techs. That’s the wall they’ve got to bust through, Kool-Aid Man style, no matter what looks the anti-social geeks give as they pass by their cubicles. Bring your hammers, ladies. And send me your resumes.

I came into the Cultural Trust just as they were heading straight into a full rewrite of the Cultural District website. They’d hired a consulting company to handle development, and I’d be doing co-development with them for the duration of the project.  When the engagement ended, the website would be mine and the consultants would ride off into the sunset (so that you’d be blinded if you tried to follow them and blame them for all the bugs, of course).

There are a hundred reasons doing co-development with a consulting company can be a headache, but the one we’d chosen came bundled with Agile – a software development methodology that encourages speedy development by wiping away all the stupid manager-driven bureaucracy and replacing it with an insane process-driven bureaucracy.  Like so many Agile enthusiasts, they didn’t trust me to get into the game on my own without a little hand holding.  They sent out a developer to babysit me for a few weeks (actually a very nice and extremely talented developer) and teach me the ropes.

The ropes, in this case, being something called Pair Programming.  Here’s how it works: You find a desk. Stick one (1) computer on the desk, along with one (1) keyboard and one (1) mouse.  Find two (2) chairs, place them in front of the computer and sit the developers in them.  Demand that the developers work together, trading the keyboard and/or mouse between them.  While one is working, the other sits over his or her shoulder and, if the “driving” developer should pause or stop to think, they are encouraged to chirp ideas into their ear unbidden.  If this is insufficient, they may take the keyboard and/or mouse and interrupt their partner completely.  Continue forever.

I hated Pair Programming. It’s on a very short list of development practices that are cause to immediately reject a job, regardless of the bigger picture.  It’s not that sitting with another developer to work through a problem is bad.  It’s not. In the days before I was Solo Señor Web Developer, I regularly pulled people into a problem, or was pulled into a problem by another.  But in those days, I could always send them away when it was time again to start working. Pair Programming forces you to deal not only with the problem at hand, but with the impatient, fidgety reactions of someone wondering if you’ve gone quiet because you’re stumped or because you’re thinking.

It’s easy, after a few bad collaboration experiences like that, to get gun shy about collaborating with people at all.  Luckily, outside of the noxious environment of enforced Pair Programming, collaboration with other developers tends to be a fairly healthy process.  I’d kill for a few more developers in the room, just so long as they don’t try sitting at my desk and taking the keyboard when I’m in the middle of something.

My experiences co-writing have been more mixed.  This is, I’m sure, partly because co-writing is a far more finicky business than co-development.  In development, there are empirically verifiable outcomes.  You needed a button to open a window with these three fields, and the button does that.  There are plenty of religious wars to be had about programming, but by and large, most problems you have to solve can be stuck in front of someone, and that someone can say, “Yep, that’s what I wanted.”

Not so much with fiction. While certain types of bad are hard to argue – I can send you some objectively horrible stuff of mine if you need proof – it gets more subjective at the ‘good’ end of the scale.  That’s why every professional screenwriter has a litany of horror stories about the notes they get from executives and show runners.  Even the sane notes can pull a story towards a very different notion of good than what the writer had in mind.  Collaboration on anything artistic brings out the worst in a lot of people, as they try to get a story to not just be good, but as close to the platonic ideal that they had in mind when they came up with it.  Don’t believe me? Ask some people about the end of Battlestar Galactica.  And, since none of them actually wrote the thing, multiply their flame war by the heat of the sun. Most collaboration doesn’t get that bad, but falling out over how a story or play or movie should turn out has ended many friendships and professional relationships.

Having your work ripped apart by people can be rough.  It sucks. In development, there are things called code reviews that no one does like they should (though it would be in their best interest). One or more people pull down what you did over the last week and tell you all of the ways it should be better.  The outcomes of development are pretty empirical, but the methodology of how you got there can be just as subjective and religious as writing fiction.  But, like writing a collaborative project where you each get your own territory – an anthology, or being in a writer’s room on a show – you can take the beating from a position of safety.  You have a finished thing. You spent some time working out all the awful you could find before you gave it to them.  You have confidence in what they’re about to shred. That matters.  That really, really matters.

But like pair programming, co-writing something is having someone criticize you about things you don’t feel great about, either.  It’s someone watching you work and seeing all of the really crap ideas that would never see the light of day if there wasn’t someone at your desk with you, pointing out your indiscretions on the monitor.  That’s why collaboration can get so damned ugly. Your lack of confidence makes you turn nasty at criticism, even when it’s in the story’s best interest.  Someone telling you that sentence or block of code is trash stings.  You snap about how you know it’s bad, that you’re just trying to see how it looks before you keep going, how you just want them to shut up before you smash their stupid face into the keyboard to see if that makes the sentence better.  A story, an idea, a plan; they’re fragile at first, and even when criticism might be helpful, if it hits at the wrong angle it can shatter the confidence you need to be clear-eyed about how to make it work.

Co-writing – and, I suppose, pair programming – doesn’t just require the right amount of respect for each other. It demands the right kind of respect.  You have to trust that the person you’re about to hit with the ruler is smart enough to have chosen to do things a particular way for a reason.  You have to trust that the person criticizing you knows you’re not a screwup, that when they say that something kind of stinks that they’re seeing something you might have missed.  It’s not just that you respect their talent.  To let someone into the process that early, you have to trust that their judgment is sound. That they aren’t just seeing a good version of the story, but something close to your good version of it.

Otherwise, how do you let that person sit over your shoulder while you type some of the worse garbage you’ve ever put into pixels without feeling self conscious?  You don’t.  That’s why pair programming is so nasty a standard practice.  The number of people I would be able to collaborate with that closely is way smaller than the number of people with whom I’ll work in my life.  To make co-writing the norm – to make sitting at a desk with another human being while I expose myself to ridicule normal, to make that the standard – is lunacy.

Yet, I can understand the appeal.  When it works, when you do have someone you can respect that way, things fall together in fast andunexpected ways.  It’s lovely to have someone with whom that can work.  Earlier this year, I reconnected with my friend Rachel.  She’s the only person I was ever able to work with at that proximity, and a story I cowrote with her is one of the first really good things I helped produce. It would probably make me cringe to read it now (we wrote it years and years ago, when we were young and stupid), but it was an important piece of writing for me to finish.  Working with her again has brought that all back to me.  A really good co-writing partnership is magic.

Magic, though, isn’t reproducible.  It’s not predictable and it does not play by your rules.  I can’t say that, because the best early thing I wrote was the product of a collaboration, I will forever co-write everything, regardless of who my partner will be.  That’s insanity, just as saying that because the right programming pair can work faster than any two programmers alone, the same benefit will apply to any programming pair.  There are development houses where programmers have to rotate partners every few weeks.  Thinking about working that way makes me sick.  I’d lose my mind.

You aren’t going to produce most things alone. Your code will be tested and used by others. Your stories will be hacked at by publishers and executives.  Fellow developers and other writers will shred what you’ve done for your own good, and they’ll push you to make something far better than what was there to start.  You will collaborate.  But collaboration does not all happen at the same distance, and finding the right distance for you and your co-workers and co-writers will keep you from sharpening the knives when backs are turned.

I was in the back seat of a car, racing down a long, flat road toward Boulder. Brennen was driving, his sister was in the front passenger seat. This song was playing.

If I survive to see Halloween, someone pat me on the back, ok? A deadly gauntlet lies ahead. That little emotional breakdown in June is going to look like picnic time in comparison. Let’s break it down, shall we?

Let’s talk about the good thing first, yeah? The thing that’s all happy and vacation-y, that if it wasn’t taking place during the month of Apocalypse would be excellent. Next Thursday I go to Disney World for five days. It’s the Food and Wine Festival at Epcot. A long weekend of stuffing my face and drinking myself silly is great, sure, but it’s five days when I won’t be doing all the things that I already don’t have time for.  Don’t get me wrong. I’m excited. I need a vacation. Just the timing, is all.

Because the real Horseman of the Apocalypse is that I’m replacing this bad boy with a whole new website. Yes, that’s right, I’m going to be utterly, totally and completely rewriting the Cultural Trust’s website from scratch. In a month. In one month. By myself. With a vacation shoved into the middle of it. I’ve done a great job of pretending it isn’t coming, but now it’s here – like, it’s here today - and it’s time to start hacking. God help me.

Throw in that zombie 5k run the weekend after I get back from Disney (the one I didn’t bother to train for yesterday because I was too much of a mopey-face to want to do anything) plus the idiotic idea that I could host a Halloween party the weekend after that and the whole mess starts to look…unmanageable.

I’ve also got a short story I was supposed to have finished for a friend at the end of last month, and I had this fantasy where I start real work on my next novel (so I’d have more than one thing for which to get rejection letters, you see), but who the heck knows what’s going to happen there.  If I make it through the month without totally losing it, I’ll consider it a win.  Well, no. If I make it through the month, don’t get fired, don’t break down, survive the flights to and from Disney, don’t fracture an ankle at the Zombie 5k, and get my house cleaned for that stupid party I’m hosting, THEN I’ll consider it a win.

Easy, right?

Hey! We’re back with Movie Education posts! Let the bands play and the cheerleaders do whatever cheerleaders do (What? They cheer? That’s all?) because I’m going to awe and astonish you with classic and beloved films I waited until I was over 30 to see.

King Kong (1933)

Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong is one of the few times I’ve let myself see a remake before the original. By and large, I feel like whoever got there first deserves to get to my brain first, too. But Peter Jackson is a special case, and I made an exception.  I’ve finally looped back to the original and was surprised what a complete and fun film it was. I expected to have to make a lot of excuses for how dated it would be, but I stopped paying attention to when this was made long before I got to the impressive stop motion effects. This movie is what it is – a tragic adventure about a big ape – but for what it is, it’s pretty fantastic.

Fright Night

Once I was obligated to see the remake for David Tennant, I decided not to do what I’d done with King Kong and make every effort to see the original. Especially since I wasn’t so much interested in the remake as I was going to hang out with ladies drooling over Tennant. Here’s the thing with the original Fright Night: It’s ok. It’s got some truly awful performances, and some bizarre special effects choices. It’s also got a really compelling character for Roddy McDowell as Peter Vincent (a character that, in the remake, was so shallow even Tennant couldn’t do much more than make a few funny jokes) and a fun, apple-chomping villain played Chris Sarandon. It’s one of those movies I’d have liked a lot more as a teen, but isn’t the kind of trash heap you could only like at that age.

Nashville

I’m embarrassed to admit that this is the first Movie Education pick that I bombed out on a third of the way through. I love Altman, and I was pretty pumped up to finally see Nashville, but after an hour I still didn’t care about a single thing going on and couldn’t bear to drag through another 2 hours of it. Some day I’ll try again. I’m sure it was me, and not the movie, and I probably just picked the wrong time to give it a chance. I’m a little disappointed in myself.

The Wild Bunch

This movie once sat on my shelf for a year before I gave up and returned it to Netflix.  This time, I didn’t let it sit longer than few days. How did I wait this long to see this movie? It opens with an incredible action montage – not a montage like that Team America song, more like the one they make you watch in film class from Battleship Potemkin - before settling you into the doomed final mission of a group of  outlaws who’ve seen their glory days fade into memory.  The old west is no more, and the law is closing in on William Holden’s gang.  They’re forced into stealing guns for an unstable generalissimo, and step by step are backed into a corner by a world in which they no longer fit. Every performance is great, and if you like the kind of rough westerns Sergio Leone produced, Peckinpah’s classic will rub you just right.

The Graduate

Boy, this one influenced pretty much every director on the planet, didn’t it? Especially Wes Anderson. I bet his screen saver just plays The Graduate on infinite loop, even when he’s asleep.  It’s interesting, because The Graduate is a really good but not really awesome film. It’s funny and well constructed, but it’s also so much a piece of its time that it doesn’t get much father than that.  It’s not that the transition from college into adulthood isn’t still just as unsettling as it is for Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin. It just doesn’t feel like this, not exactly. You can tell it was made in the 1960′s because it’s obsessed with awkward zoom shots and the use of really long lenses pointed at people running toward the camera. I find the visual experimentation of late 60′s and early 70′s American film interesting, but I don’t always like it. The Graduate is well shot, though, and you’ll notice moment after moment from the dozens of films that’ve aped it since it came out.  It’s absolutely worth seeing, but it’s also one of those films that – as time passes – becomes more important than it is great.