A Hard Day’s Night

When I saw this on Netflix Instant, I knew I had to give it a watch. Not because I expected it to be a fantastic film, but because there are certain movies that basically create a subgenre on their own, and it’s always interesting to see what everyone has been stealing. A Hard Day’s Night is basically the quintessential tour film; a film built totally to market a band with the least amount of writing effort possible. There are tons of bad versions of this – hello, Spice World - but to be fair to A Hard Day’s Night, it’s actually a fun movie. It’s completely pointless, but it’s also odd and easy to watch and has lots of great music.

Amarcord

Nostalgia city! My crazy-man love of Fellini is well known at this point, right? It’s crazy. Totally insane. I love the man and the unique and particular rhythm and flow his movies have. Amarcord is a look back to the town of his youth. It’s less concerned with telling a story than with simply spending a year inside a town that exists only within the memories of Fellini himself. This is the first color Fellini film I’ve seen, and it’s as beautiful as you’d expect. Of his classics, this leaves me only with La Strada and Juliet of the Spirits, so I might need to pick up a few of his less acclaimed works before swinging into those. If they’re at all as wonderful as Amaracord, they’ll be worth the wait.

The Odd Couple

Comedies are tricky things to go back and watch. The humor is dated and strange as often as it stays funny, and I never know what I’m getting into when I pick one up. I really, truly expected The Odd Couple to be dated and stuffy, but I was way wrong. Walter Matthau was especially great, delivering a sardonic performance that was absolutely perfect. Jack Lemmon was great, too, but this was Matthau’s film through and through. His timing on every line? Nailed. Neil Simon’s play feels fresh and funny and, in its own way, kind of poignent. If you haven’t seen this, take a couple of hours and give it a go. You’ll be surprised how good it.s

The Collector

This one was recommended to me by a friend and pitched as a sort of early Silence of the Lambs. The Collector was a very strange and screwed up film.  A man (young Terrance Stamp!) obsessed with collecting butterflies begins stalking a woman. He kidnaps her, brings her to his home and demands she stay with him and get to know him. Impressively restrained and quiet, The Collector works because it stays so focused on the psychological battle between its characters instead of resorting to cheap thrills. Stamp is as awesome as you’d hope, while Samantha Eggard is…well, a little less so. If this (or at least the novel on which it was based) wasn’t in Stephen King’s subconscious when he wrote Misery, I’d be surprised.

Here’s how madness works.

A few months ago, I noticed an artist named Lights on rdio.com – a recommendation, probably due to some embarrassing pop I’d listened to at some point – and was desperate enough for something new to give it a try. I didn’t think much of it on the first listen. Or, at least, that’s what my conscious brain was thinking. Something in my subconscious clicked, I guess, because by the end of the day I’d listened to the album three times.  Then I bought it. And listened to it a bunch more times.  Eventually, my conscious mind got the hint and decided I was enjoying it.

The album, Siberia, was relatively new, and she’d just started a tour in Canada. I told Erin, “If she comes to Pittsburgh, we are so going to see her.” And, hallelujah, what do you know? She announced her U.S. tour dates, and Pittsburgh was on it. She was coming to Pittsburgh…

…two days after I flew out to California.  Ready for the madness part?

My brain, convinced it was going to see Lights in concert if she came to Pittsburgh, decided that the conditions necessary to see her had been met and that I would thusly be going to see her no matter that I would be thousands of miles away when she was here. Erin, game as always to play along with my crazy time, looked over the rest of her tour. She’d be in D.C. right at the end of our trip, but that would mean cutting Wine Time short. Ok, no good. How about in March, when she was in Tulsa or Nashville? Oof, have you seen those plane fares? No, absolutely…hey, wait! Boston?

And that’s how I built a weekend vacation around seeing a Canadian musician in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Speaking of which: Boy is Pawtucket an armpit. At least, everything except the venue itself and the cool artist’s village around it. Ok, ok, all I’m sure about is that all the detoured, cruddy streets we got lost on were armpit-ish. The Met, though? Really cool venue. Very nice.

Oh. You’re probably wondering if the concert any good, right? You aren’t? Why not? What am I doing wrong, here? Am I that bad at building tension? You guys are a tough crowd.

Lights was awesome. Absolutely awesome. One of the many great things about seeing an artist perform live is to see them between the songs. How they work the crowd  (if they work it; sometimes they barely talk) and how their onstage persona meshes with the voice you’ve been hearing through your headphones.  Lights – her name is Valerie Anne Poxleitner, hence the stage name – was funny, genuine and really into the night with her fans. She was also totally in charge of the stage; a few times, she was half-conducting the other musicians. She responded to tweets from fans, including taking a request from a couple who’d danced at their wedding to one of her songs.

Siberia is an interesting album, fusing pop with a dirtier, dubstepier spine. It’s not the kind of album where you hear one song and fall in love, but one where the effect of it builds on you. It’s not a transcendant album, or a really important album, but it’s good, and it gets lodged in your aural centers in a way that makes listening to it feel akin to satisfying a craving for chocolate peanut butter ice cream (or whatever it is you crave when you want something sweet and terrible for you).  Live with her stage band, the beats were heavier and dirtier and the energy of it just kept pressing you forward. Lights’ voice, which feels a bit produced on the album, doesn’t need help. At all. The girl can wail. Her producers should back off on the [technical thing sound people do to voices] and let her sing.

If it weren’t for the obnoxious college guys (and is there anything more obnoxious than the college male?) who showed up in the hopes that Lights would teleport them backstage for sexy time, it would have been a nearly perfect show. Did I mention that Pawtucket is an armpit? So are a lot of its concertgoers. Neanderthal armpits.

That’s irrelevant. I flew to Boston for a concert, and the concert was worth it. Check out Siberia. It’s a cool album. If you like it, and she’s coming through your town, consider checking her out.

I’m with Robert Rodriguez when it comes to being a director.  You need to learn how to do it all. You don’t always need to actually do it all on every movie, but not understanding how to light, or use the camera, or cut your film is opening a weakness someone will later exploit. They might not do it out of malice, but incompetence can ruin your film as quickly and decisively as intent.  Unless you have a budget at your disposal sufficient to hire the best, and the good sense to know what “the best” is supposed to mean, you’re going to be making uncomfortable decisions about who gets to muck with all the work you’re putting in.

At my level – that would be the level where you have no money and are paying people in sandwiches and beer – it’s even more dire.  There’s always someone around saying they know how to do sound, or light a shot, but most of them are affable amateurs at best. Even if you, too, are an amateur, there’s something you need to remember: they’re helping out on set for a few days and you’re sweating blood for something that’s going to bear your name. If you don’t think that makes a difference in how much effort and ability the average person will bring to bear, I understand.  You just haven’t had your sound ruined by someone who put in the time but not the heart.

It’s not their fault. This isn’t about anger. It’s about admitting that directing isn’t the kind of thing where you get to do one job and leave the rest to everyone else. You’re the center. The locus. The hub of wheel. And when the movie fails, it fails all over you. Even if you could hop into frame mid-film and blame the guy who forgot to turn on the digital recorder for the horrible sound in the scene, people would still wonder why you didn’t notice before you stuck this piece of crap in front of them. The point I’m making is that you feel a little feel better when you’re the guy who forgot to turn on the digital recorder.

True, if your career goes anywhere, you’re going to have to give that job up to someone else. In fact, I dream of the day when I can find someone better at some of these jobs than I am. Having made the mistakes myself, I’m better equipped to know if the person I’m bring on is better, and I’m also less likely to make their jobs more difficult.

So I was talking about stepping up my game. I’m proud of the fact that I can do it all. I can set up my sound. I can point lights. I can swing the camera about and I can hack the footage into something resembling a movie. I can, and have, done that, a couple of times. Now, I want to do it better.

A lot better.

Finding the right books is the trick. I’m not interested in how-to books, especially not ones focused on being a Do It Yourself Filmmaker. I don’t need an instruction manuel and I don’t want to be talked down to. I want theory. I want something I can internalize, something I can turn into a process, so that when I find someone to take a job from me, I still know how to think towards that job. The energy of filmmaking flows from the director to all other jobs and back again.  Knowing how to think about your shots, your setups, your camera moves and your acting directions in terms of those energies means you won’t be begging your editor to make something for which you did not give him the materials. I want something that gives me that. The knowledge of the how and why, the philosophy and the theory. I’ve got Google if I get confused in Final Cut.

I got lucky when someone on my Twitter feed mentioned In the Blink of an Eye. I hadn’t asked, and it wasn’t even directed at me, but as soon as it was mentioned as being one of the seminal works on film editing, I knew this was where to start. Editing is something through which I’ve fumbled; I’d have a sense of not liking the rhythm of a scene, but not a good idea why. That meant a lot of aimless trial and error (which is different from aimed trial and error, I swear), and chunks of scenes I wish I could go back and change.

In the Blink of an Eye is a wonderful read. It’s short (the main text is 70 pages, and the appendix on digital editing is the same), but it speaks eloquently about the way editing should feel, about the mindset of approaching it and of the way the human mind interprets cuts between different spacial points of view. It discusses different film editors not in terms of how to use them, but in how their different approaches change how you think about a film. The KVM, in which you take bits of film and splice, is more like sculpting out of clay, while the Moviola, with which you cut away from long runs of film, is more like carving out of marble. Insights like that speak to the way you should think about a thing, not to which button to flick and when.  If you have any interest in directing, I strongly recommend it.

As for me, it’s time to move on to the next area of pain and suffering: light.

I’ll leave sound for a really masochistic day.

Trying to do a Literary Education project like I’ve been doing for movies would be a fool’s errand. I’m a fast reader, but it would still take too much time for it to be a serious focus. Still, I’d like to get outside of the genres, books and authors with which I’m comfortable and to get out into a wider world. But where to start?

What I’m saying is I need some help.

My mom actually got me going with this, suggesting I pick up some Jane Austen, both because it’s a free download and because I’m apparently a neanderthal heathen for not having ever read anything she’s written.  She suggested I start with either Pride and Prejudice (shock!) or Persuasion.  Thoughts?

Whichever way I go, though, it’s a start in a direction I need to take.  My reading history is inconsistant. I’ve read piles of some stuff (Epic poetry! Greek drama! All the fantasy books!) and almost nothing in other areas (Anything you’d read in a Western Lit class! And shut up, I was a terrible student.).

So this is where I ask for some suggestions.  I can’t promise when I’ll get to anything suggested, but I will get there, and I’ll appreciate all of it.

Let me help to focus your mind. I mean, I’ll take any suggestions at all, but if you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the awesome books you’ve read, think, perhaps, about what was formative to you. Something that opened your mind to new genres, cultures or modes of thought. Maybe something that influenced your own style or interests, or that gave you an appreciation for something you used to hate.  It can be modern or ancient. Fiction or non. Verse or prose. Sky’s the limit.

Make me a better reader. I dare you.

That isn’t to say I don’t respect short fiction. The canon of modern science fiction is built on it. The best SF writers almost all did their best work writing shorts.  Some of the classic SF novels of the 50′s and 60′s are either a collection of shorter works or evolved out of a short.  In fact, I not only respect short fiction; when I can get myself into reading it, I almost always come away kicking myself for how little of it I do. It’s a deficit. A weakness.

It’s no surprise that, since I wasn’t much of a reader of short fiction, I was an even worse writer of it.  You can’t really write what you don’t read, unless you’re some kind of savant or lucky moron, and I’m neither a savant, nor lucky. Short fiction, outside of a few pathetic attempts, was simply outside of my ken. Until a few years ago, that wasn’t really a problem for me, but it was a deficiency I started to feel. I don’t like having weaknesses.

When I got my Kindle a few years ago, the first thing I did was buy a subscription to Asimov’s. It’s still probably the best thing I’ve done with that Kindle. I don’t read every issue, and I don’t always read everything inside. That doesn’t matter. Just getting myself into the rhythm of it has made reading them easier. I was even enjoying the ones I didn’t really enjoy. Better, I started wanting to give writing them another try.

It was well timed. Last fall, Rachel came to me and asked me to write something for an anthology she was putting together.

Like with reading, my spin up time on writing shorts is almost as bad as for something much longer.  Proportional to the word count, it’s probably worse.  I spent the better part of two months just trying to get the ideas to lock together, to overcome my biggest obstacle in writing short fiction: finding a story that fit. I feel comfortable in long form writing, because my ideas tend towards things that need space to build. In short fiction, I’d always struggled to find a story I could tell in 5,000 words that wasn’t so slight as to not be satisfying (and I hate how many short stories feel like cast-off, underdeveloped novel ideas) or so long as to turn it into a novella.  I’d given up hitting that roadblock in the past. This time, I kept at it. It took me a few months, but slowly, things fell into place.

Last night, I turned in the second draft of “She Says Goodbye Tomorrow” to Rachel.  I couldn’t be more excited about it.  And, yeah, I hate saying that out loud. It feels like asking for trouble when people actually read it. Who knows if the things that make the story work for me will work for anyone else. At present, I haven’t even heard from Rachel if she likes the new draft. But I’m saying it anyway, because I am really happy with it. Whatever comes, I’m proud of where I’ve gotten.

I mean, I wrote a short story I don’t want to burn on completion. That’s some success, right there.

I probably have at least one more draft of it to do, but finishing the second draft of “She Says Goodbye Tomorrow” basically means the last project from 2011, the last project not a part of The Plan, is done. Which isn’t to say that a ship won’t wreck into the plan and sink it tomorrow, but keeping on top of the short – and getting it done without hating it – means I’m at least starting things on track. This is good. This is very good.

As for the anthology, I don’t have a publication date, but when Rachel gets it out, I’ll let you know. Oh, who I am I kidding? I’ll be flogging the hell out of it for weeks before its release.  Until then, wish me happy re-writing.

Zelig - Woody Allen’s mockumentary on the strange case of a human chameleon is funny, odd and extraordinarily well done.  The modern mockumentary is essentially a riff on Spinal Tap, with scenes of people ad libbing their talks to the camera and awkward moments the camera just happened to catch. Zelig is something else, more a PBS documentary built of old photos and snips of research footage than a Christoper Guest film. It’s meticulous, and it’s also really, really funny.

Harakiri - Japanese movies not made by Akira Kurosawa or Yasujiro Ozu tend to feel like filmed adaptations of theater more than films, and for long stretches Harakiri is no different. Luckily, it happens to be a pretty great piece of theater. A disgraced ronin appears at a lord’s house and begs for the right to commit seppuku in their forecourt. It seems, in these early days of the Shoganate, this has become a common way for disgraced samurai to extort charity from lords who don’t want the mess of a dead samurai in their home. What follows is the story of one lord’s cruel solution to this problem, and the vengeance he’s brought down on himself as a result. If you can take a bit of stodginess, this is pretty good.

Sixteen Candles - Every time I admit I haven’t seen a John Hughes teen comedy there’s a wail across my Twitter feed like nothing else. Then I admit that, until I started the Education that I’d only seen Ferris Bueller and, frankly, never liked it that much. Hughes’ teen films exist in some kind of alien alternate reality version of high school that doesn’t click with me at all. Like all Hughes movies, I found Sixteen Candles watchable but not extraordinary. It did have some great moments of Ringwald’s character getting family harassment over her growth into a woman that was honest and great. I can see why people liked this one, but I can barely even remember the plot at this point, myself.

Persona - Yes, yes, this is only the second Bergman film I’ve seen. No, admitting that on Twitter gets nowhere near the reaction the Hughes thing does. I…ok, so I’m glad I saw this, but I’m honestly not sure if I understood it. It opens with a surreal montage right out of  Un Chien Andalou, then settles into following a nurse and her patient. Her patient, an actress, has suddenly stopped speaking. Is she faking? Does she have some sort of trauma? The movie plays out as a psychological power struggle between the two women, lapsing occasionally back into the surreal at critical points.  I need to make watching more of Bergman’s films as a priority. I feel like I don’t get his language, yet, and it’s holind me back.

Nights of Cabiria - Fellini! How I love thee. Though, to be fair, I prefer later career, fantasist Fellini to early career, neorealist Fellini. Nights of Cabriria falls into the space between the two, with a plot out of his neorealist days and a style stretching towards what he’d develop into. Cabriria follows its eponymous heroine, a prostitue who we meet being nearly drowned ny her pimp/boyfriend when he robs her, as she floats past tragedy after tragedy. People have compared her to Chaplin’s Little Tramp, and that’s as good a comparison as any. Cabiria is sweet and hopeful no matter how many times she’s betrayed or hurt. There isn’t a ton of plot – that’s the neorealist influence, sadly – but the final shot, of a crying Cabiria wandering into a parade of musicians and slowly breaking into a smile, is so beautiful that it’s worth the entire film.

Le Samourai - I was griping about French New Wave films on Twitter when a friend told me to stop complaining until I’d seen Le Samourai. I like a challenge, so I immediately put it on the list and gave it a try. And? What a film. Cool, slick and confident, you can feel dozens of assassin films being born from this one. The plot is simple. An assassin slips up, gets seen, and spends the movie evading the cops and his former employers. The success is in the details, in its presentation and style. Here’s the thing, though. I really don’t think Jean-Pierre Melville is a French New Wave director so much as a director working in France during the New Wave. There’s a distinct difference in the texture of this film to say, Breathless or The 400 Blows, and that difference is exactly what I felt those films were lacking. Le Samourai is distant but not detached, cool but not empty. Unfortunately, that means I still admire the New Wave more than I like it. But Le Samourai? That I liked. Lots.

Another Woman - I began and ended the month with Woody Allen. I don’t typically watch multiple films by one filmmaker – or even in one style – in a given month, but I was at my mom’s baking and she suggested we give Another Woman a watch. Absolutely not one of his funny ones, Another Woman is about infidelity and emotional detachment. The cast is superb – especially Gina Rowlands as the lead – and the script is a work of perfect, quiet honesty. Rowlands plays a writer in a marriage gone cold, a marriage both committed adultery to begin. When relationships are born out of infidelity, can anything other than infidelity be expected? My mom spent the early part of the movie afraid she’d misremembered it as a good  (it starts a bit slow) but we spent the rest of the day talking it over as we baked. Highly, highly recommended.

2012 is looking to be a fun year of film, and nothing has my little geek heart fluttering like The Raid. I love foreign action films – Ong Bak knocked my butt off – and seeing Indonesia getting in on the hard edged martial arts action scene excites the heck out of me. Just check this trailer out!

Warning: This is a red band trailer, which means it’s got some – ahem - violence. Like, some bloody, bullets and fists into heads kind of action. If it’s not your thing, be warned now. If it is, be warned that extreme awesome is afoot.

My favorite – and, ok, my favorite is different from year to year – is probably “Sister Winter”. There’s something about the way it moves through emotions; it starts morose, becomes hopeful, and finally breaks out into joy and celebration. Just like the season itself, “Sister Winter” is a mix of happiness and pain wrapped in the chill of winter.

Enjoy.

(And ignore the boring winter slideshow. There isn’t an official video. Just listen to the song.)

Rio Bravo - The most enjoyable John Wayne movie I’ve seen, and the only one I didn’t outright dislike him in. It helps that the awesome Leigh Brackett wrote the screenplay, and that Howard Hawks directed it. We’ve all seen at least one variation on this particular siege story. Law men have captured a dangerous criminal, and must hold out against his vengeful friends’ assault. For me, it was Assault on Precinct 13, but you might have seen Rio Lobo or El Dorado or Ghosts of Mars instead. I’ve never been the biggest fan of westerns, but this was a really solid film. Not great. Not one of the classic Leone or Eastwood films, but really good. The closing gunfight is really well staged, and isn’t that one of the reasons you watch a Western, anyway?

This Is Spinal Tap - It’s funny, right? Was I supposed to be surprised? I’ve seen most of the modern Christopher Guest mockumentaries, and at first glance I’d say that Spinal Tap isn’t quite as refined as Waiting For Guffman or Best In Show, but you can see why this stuck around. Like most comedies, it’s hard to say how good it is without seeing it a few more times. The good ones always get funnier and the bad ones decidedly do not. I’d guess this one gets funnier.

The Blues Brothers - Yeah, there are a lot of classic comedies I haven’t seen. This is one of the ones that got people really riled when I admitted to having not seen it. Some movies with that much hype just collapse under the weight of it all. The Blues Brothers was just awesome, though. John Landis is a director whose late career disappearance confuses me, since he seemed able to handle any genre thrown at him. He’s at the top of his game with this, and manages to make a two and a half hour comedy packed with cameos and musical numbers buzz along like it’s the simplest thing in the world to pull off. There isn’t a thing wrong with the movie. Not the jokes, or the music, or the direction. A perfectly cast, insane, musical romp. Man, did losing Belushi so early suck.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three - When the remake came out, I figured I’d get around to seeing the original eventually. My uncle started nudging me into it sooner than I expected, so when it showed up on Instant Watch I figured I’d take the opportunity to check it out. I’ve always had an affection for really simple, stripped down movies that can work their premises for everything they’re worth. It’s why Die Hard and The Warriors and Assault on Precinct 13 are such gems. They don’t mistake being complex with being compelling. Pelham is one of those movies, with a really simple premise that it uses just right. It’s not a classic, exactly, but it’s perfect at doing what it wants to do. Walter Matthau puts in a great performance, and the villains seems canny and competent enough to actually succeed. Like I said, this movie hits a sweet spot for me, so your mileage may vary.

Better Off Dead - A while back I watched Say Anything and figured I should see the other John Cusack teen film everyone goes on about. I wasn’t expecting how weird this movie turned out to be. When there’s a scene with a dancing claymation hamburger playing Van Halen on a guitar and it’s no stranger than anything else int he film, you’ve got yourself a doozy. I really wish there’d been more Cusack in this (he spends most of the movie looking vacant and depressed), but there were some great moments. The gold-jacketed Japanese kids giving Howard Cosell-esque commentary was particularly awesome. Plus, now I know what people are talking about when they shout about wanting their $2. Weird. But fun weird.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller  - One day I’m going to run out of Robert Altman movies to watch, and it’s going to suck. This is Roger Ebert’s favorite of his – he calls the movie perfect, in fact – and it’s easy to see why. It’s a quiet and sad film, a western with the trappings of the genre but an entirely different soul. Warren Beatty’s performance walks a perfect line between a competent businessman and conman in over his head. When things start to go wrong, it’s proper, classical tragedy; his failure is born out of his own failings, not because the creaking gears of the plot are rolling over him. This isn’t an easy movie to recommend, but I really loved this movie. No one shot group dialogue scenes as naturally as Altman, and few directors could shoot a world so bleak without making it uninviting.

I’m trying. I get that these were written for a younger audience. Younger, even, than I realized when I picked them up. I wasn’t expecting an eleven year old protagonist, which admittedly threw me off a bit. It’s a little out of my comfort zone for a book I didn’t first read closer to its target age. I could probably re-read The Mouse and the Motorcycle, because I know what it felt like to read it when I was a kid. I’m finding it difficult to project into something new, though.  That might be part of the problem.

But a lot of you really enjoy these books, and I’d like to know why. I’m about 40 pages from the end of the second book, The Dark is Rising. As it stands, I’m not sure if I’ll have the will to pick up Greenwitch. I don’t want to crap out. I want to see what those who recommended it are seeing, even if it turns out I don’t like them the way they do. I don’t want to just return the last three books to the library unless I’m sure I’m not going to enjoy this.

Right now, the series is feeling like a well written but dry object hunt. I’m not feeling any of the characters as people, just as relic hunters and puzzle solvers.  With a few exceptions (Simon being chased in Over Sea, Under Stone and the building cold in The Dark is Rising), the stakes are almost nonexistent. It’s just a sequence of problems solved immediately by external forces. I gave Over Sea, Under Stone the same pass I did the first Narnia book (The Magician’s Nephew, a book Over Sea, Under Stone unfortunately reminded me of), but I can’t take another 3 books of slogging.

So here’s my plea: Tell me, in the comments or on Twitter, what it is you love about the The Dark Is Rising sequence. Am I missing something? Are the problems I’m feeling just part of the early series? Does this get deeper, more emotionally involving or at least more complex than a series of puzzles leading to a series of powerful objects? If this is the series and it’s just not hitting me, maybe it’s time to call it quits. But if I’ve missed something, or if there are deeper waters to be found, I’m happy to stick around. I just need, at this point, a lifeline. I need to see this through your eyes before my eyes crust over and refuse to read another word.