Sing it with me now. “Mish Mash Monday…. Mish Maasssh Muuunnnnday!”
There were no major releases this weekend that contained see-ocity and therefore no big movies to write about. Unless you’re Team Smurf (hey, Hank Azaria was genius as Gargamel in Smurfs 1 – not that I’ve, um, seen it). As for the other major release, 2 Guns, I thought it was pretty original when I read it, but once I saw the trailer, it dropped on the priority list to somewhere between a kitten funeral and sign flipping. It was like all the originality was sucked out of whatever I read. It looked Generic City, like Safe House in the desert.
I was discussing this the other day. Everyone starts off making a movie with these great intentions of creating something unique, but as the development process (and the production process) goes on, everybody starts freaking out that people aren’t going to “get it” and therefore tip toe closer and closer to the most generic version of whatever they’re doing. I understand this phenomenon because it’s scary to go off and be different. But I wish more production teams (and studios) would trust themselves with what they originally bought and stick to that vision.
My movie-going experience was not totally deprived of optimism, however. Miss SS and I went to see The Spectacular Now and both really liked it. Let me just offer some words of wisdom though for those in the LA area. Do NOT go see any movies at the West LA landmark unless you a) wear adult diapers, b) sport life alert or c) smell like a hospital. The median age of the showing we were at (about a high school couple, ironically) was 87 at least. The 106 year old woman next to me wore one of those audio assist headphones and it was BLASTING static louder than a freaking Kanye West concert. It didn’t help that her husband had to go to the bathroom 9 times during the first 45 minutes. And you know the annoying person at a theater who always asks their date/friend, “What did they just say?” Imagine if there were FIFTY of them in a single theater. There was more talking going on OUTSIDE the movie than inside it. I don’t know if we accidentally stumbled in on a special hospice showing or Landmark was allowing Civil War vets to use their facilities, but you won’t see me at the Landmark again for another 60 years at least.
Anyway, from what I was able to hear, the performances of the two leads (Miles “No, I’m not going to be in Fantastic Four” Teller and Shailene “I got cut out of Spiderman 2 because Andrew Garfield wants a male love interest” Woodley) lived up to the hype. They have wonderful chemistry that elevated a script which was already good to begin with. And I loved that director James Ponsoldt used long takes with his leads, which made the dialogue even more natural than it already was. That decision is what’s making this film play so well in my opinion. We don’t get any of those hard artificial dialogue cuts where you can tell the editor is fishing for the best line reading. The actors were allowed to just let go, and the film feels like real life as a result.
The only thing I didn’t like about The Spectacular Now was the last twenty minutes as it reminded me of a problem a lot of screenplays (especially character-driven screenplays) face: RRSS (“Relationship Resolution Stacking Syndrome”). Whenever you write a character piece that has your main character embedded in multiple relationships that need resolving, the last 20 pages of the script becomes a chore of stacking all those resolution scenes on top of each other.
That happened big time in Spectacular Now. Obviously, our main character was going to need to resolve stuff with his absent dad. That was fine. But then we have the scene where he wraps up his issues with his sister. Then the scene where he wraps up issues with his boss. Then the scene where he wraps up issues with his mom. Finally the scene where he wraps up things with Aimee. It just went on and on and on. I feel like there’s a more delicate way to handle this, where you don’t feel the scenes climbing up on top of each other.
Then again, if you try and create space between them, the third act can go on forever, which is a whole other problem to deal with. I think the key may be to resolve some of these relationships earlier. Maybe at the end of the second act. And also ask yourself if you really need to resolve every relationship. Like did we really care about his three-scene boss enough to resolve that? I know the writers might say, “Well yeah, but the boss is the one who makes it clear that he’s not fooling anyone with his drinking. So that scene was needed.” True, but remember, this is writing. There are a million ways to solve a problem. Why not give one of the other characters he’s resolving issues with that observation?
Another idea is to create devices where you can resolve a relationship quickly, as opposed to with endless melodramatic conversations. Good Will Hunting did this famously. Damon and Affleck set up the whole Chuckie, “I’m hoping that one day I show up for work and you aren’t there” moment early on. That way, at the end, they could quickly show Chuckie going to Will’s door and Will isn’t there, and that’s it. Relationship resolved. And now that I think about it, they resolved the relationship with Robin Williams quickly too. Will leaves him a note that says, “I’m going to see about a girl.” (another payoff of a setup). So maybe the lesson here is to set something up earlier so you don’t have RRSS problems in your final act.
Moving on to a completely different genre, I finally saw Evil Dead (the remake) this weekend on iTunes. I have to say that I was really disappointed. When I read the script, I thought it was kind of clever that they created this whole “heroin-addicted woman takes her friends out to the middle of nowhere to help her beat her addiction” storyline. I’d never seen that as a way to start one of these middle-of-nowhere horror movies before.
But when I watched how this played out onscreen, something felt off and I couldn’t figure out what it was. Everybody seemed so… bummed out. I’m talking right from the beginning. Nobody really liked each other. They all seemed to be in a pissy mood. And that’s when it hit me. The detox storyline was all wrong. It meant that the characters were already starting in a dark place. So there was no shift when the horror hit. Everybody was pissed off and upset beforehand and everyone was pissed off and upset after.
There’s a reason the classic formula of a bunch of happy college kids going out to a secluded cabin works. Because we start from a high place. We start with a positive charge, with hope. That way, it’s more jarring when bad shit starts happening to them. There’s an arc in the emotion. And we never experienced any arc in Evil Dead. I mean, it was a well-made movie, but it was such a fucking downer. As silly as it sounds, we like to ENJOY being scared. This film made being scared sad.
Moving on, I couldn’t help but notice this story about George Clooney and Daniel Loeb. The short of it is that this guy, Daniel Loeb, is one of the biggest investors in Sony, and he got really pissed when two of Sony’s big blockbusters bombed this summer (After Earth and White House Down). So he publicly bitches and moans that Amy Pascal and the Sony folk have no idea what they’re doing and that Sony, to protect people like him, needs to sell off the entertainment division to another company (or something like that – I don’t understand all this financial terminology). In other words, he’s trying to strike fear in Hollywood so that they become even MORE risk-averse than they already are. And we all know what risk-averse gets us.
Well George Clooney to the fucking rescue. Clooney basically told Loeb to go fuck himself. That Loeb doesn’t know jack shit about how the entertainment industry works and that he was part of the financial culture that almost bankrupted the U.S., so why the fuck should he have anything to say about how to run the movie business. I mean he really handed it to him. And when you think about it, that was a dangerous thing to do. Clooney is a movie star, but money crushes everything, and this Loeb guy is loaded. You just don’t hear guys of this stature taking each other on in the public like this. Props to Clooney for speaking his mind and defending this business we’re all dying to get into.
Look, I didn’t think After Earth was very good. And the trailers for White House Down made it look like they cared more about Channing Tatum’s muscle definition than, you know, a story. But that doesn’t mean Sony won’t make good movies in the future. There will always be duds. I can only imagine how difficult it is to be a studio head and come up with a slate of films for the entire year. There are so many variables at play and you don’t always get the movie you thought you signed up for. But this business is predicated on taking risks and if you, as an investor, don’t know that’s what you signed up for, take your money elsewhere. This business is mega-profitable and we’ll find the money somewhere else.
Finally, I wanted to congratulate writer Mickey Fisher. He did well in a small pilot contest, which got him repped by Brooklyn Weaver, and now he finds the pilot he entered in that contest (Extant – about an android boy) as the hottest TV pilot in town. Every network wants it. This guy is about to become very rich, very fast, and probably get a guarantee that his show will be on the air. That never happens. And it definitely never happens for a nobody.
I read the pilot (the 2013 version that went out to the networks) and while it starts slow, it really gets good at the end. In addition to the android boy storyline, his mother has just gotten back from an 18 month solo-trip on the space station where she’s inexplicably pregnant. We have hints that aliens could be involved. There are mysterious Japanese men coming out of hyper-jello sleep. And probably, most interestingly, the pilot poses questions about a future society WITHOUT the famed “3 robot rules.” In other words, the robots can do whatever they want. They’re not bound by directives like “never hurt humans.” And the more I think about that, the more I’m starting to see the reason why everyone wants this show. I mean it has the possibility of going on for 30 seasons if approached right. We could watch as these robots integrate deeper and deeper into society and explore the issues and philosophical questions that come with that integration. What the humans want. What the robots want. If robots should have the same rights as humans. What happens if a robot kills someone? They’re still the same person after an 80 year jail sentence. Do they just get out again? The show would be able to explore issues extensively that movies like Bi-Centenial Man and A.I. and 2001 and I-Robot were only briefly able to touch on because of their 2 hour format. That sounds like it could be pretty awesome to me.
That’s all for Mish-Mash Monday. I had this epiphany about clichés that I wanted to get into but I’ll save that for another time. See you tomorrow when I give you 10 screenwriting mistakes to avoid via Southland Tales.
