I’m finding the WGA strike really interesting, for reasons above and beyond the obvious fact that it affects a lot of my entertainment. (Equal link doctrine: here’s the AMPTP home page so you can read up on the other side’s viewpoint.) Perhaps predictably, screenwriters like to write, and that means there’re a lot of screenwriters with blogs, and that means this is going to be a heavily blogged strike. This is only appropriate given that the major sticking point is residual income for Internet-distributed television and film.

Worthwhile blogs on the strike include United Hollywood (a strike-specific blog), John August, The Artful Writer, Kung Fu Monkey, Jane Espenson, and I’m sure there are dozens more. Nikki Finke is not a screenwriter but what else is a Hollywood blogger going to be writing about?

It’s not just that they’re being pretty candid and frank about their opinions on the whole thing; it’s the arguments getting underway in various comment sections. The effect of this strike on non-writers will be significant — set dressers, location scouts, etc., etc are all gonna be out of work if this goes on very long. Those people aren’t shy about expressing their opinions by any means.

So what I’m seeing is evolving labor relations in the field of intellectual property, weighted towards the question of Internet rights, with a hefty dose of class consciousness included on the side. And it’s playing out in real time where I can see it. Yeah, interesting.

Looks like Pixar may be doing a John Carter of Mars trilogy. That has some promise.

For available texts, go here.

Noted:

The Zombie Marathon, at the Somerville Theate. Movies include Shaun of the Dead, Fido, I Walked With A Zombie, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Zombie, and Dead Alive. I suspect that’s the full list, since it’s a 12 hour marathon and that’s 7 movies. No Romero? Shocking, but perhaps Diary of the Dead will sneak onto the program or something.

Second, the Brattle Theater’s Boston Fantastic Film Festival is coming soon, like weekend after next. Announced movies: Trapped Ashes (review), The District (review), The Signal (review), Murder Party (review), The Devil Dared Me To (review, read down a bit), and yay Zebraman (review).

I really want to catch Zebraman; Miike’s kaiju work has been way cool in the past. The District also seems really intriguing, and perhaps The Signal. The others I could take or leave, excepting Trapped Ashes, which from all the reviews looks intolerable.

Oh, yay, the Weinsteins are investing money in Asian film…

“Titles slated for the fund include… a remake of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s 1950’s epic The Seven Samurai.”

What the hell?

The TIFF Midnight Madness film list is out. It’s always interesting comparing their movies to Fantasia; you don’t generally see movies at both, because (as I understand it) there’s a mild rivalry.

As is generally the case, Toronto got the big names — Romero and Gordon this year. Naturally, Fantasia has more depth in the fantastic film category, given that they screen rather more fantastic films. And, of course, Toronto has a lot of other movies to offer. In my ideal life of the idle rich world, I go to both.

We’re sadly not going to Fantasia this year, but next year with any luck, and it’s not like it doesn’t just keep getting better. I need to remember to call someone about ordering the program this year.

Chris said something insane about a shortage of must-see movies this year. Naaaah.
(more…)

Spoilers ahead.

I’m unclear as to whether Stranger Than Fiction is a comedy or a tragedy. I guess strictly speaking it’s a romantic comedy, but really, that’s not the story of the movie; the story of the movie is about how something dies. Does a great person have a downfall? Yep. So I think I have to read it as a bittersweet tragedy, albeit one with an ending which could be seen as rather happy.

Then again, it perhaps betrays my bibliophiliac nature that I think the death of a novel is a tragedy. But — no, I think I’m on target. A classic tragedy is inevitable. In Stranger Than Fiction, everyone makes the right decisions; ethics prevail throughout. It just so happens that the result of these decisions is that Karen Eiffel doesn’t complete her greatest novel.

But the alternative would have been worse. It’s to the movie’s credit that there’s a bit of uncertainty there, though. Around fifteen minutes before the end, I thought Harold was going to die, and that would have been an impressive choice. Then I thought we were going to have a saccharine ending; then it was redeemed, because it was clear that the choice made was a painful one. Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson pretty much pulled this off with their final scene; perfect portrayal of two people who know a sacrifice has been made.

The two of them more or less made the movie work all along, actually. Will Ferrell was good; the role wasn’t deeply demanding, but he did avoid hamming it up and he was perfectly decent as a mostly blank cipher. I’m guessing he’ll do one of these every few years to maintain cred, and if he’s this good every time he’ll deserve whatever cred he gets. But really, it was Thompson and Hoffman deserve the credit for creating the context in which he could work.

So I liked it. As elliptical Wes Andersonesque movies go, it was no Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but it beat the crap out of I Heart Huckabees.

A while ago, I wrote about Stephen Soderberg’s desire to see movies hit theaters, DVD, and cable on the same day. I was wrong about him not making Ocean’s 13, but I was right about it being a trend.

$30-$50 is pretty ambitious pricing even for a first run movie, but (and I’m sure this is how the price point was set) it’s cheaper than taking a family of four to the movies, if you figure in popcorn and drinks.

I don’t really care about the Oscars anymore, thanks to Forrest Gump. However, I’m still capable of getting curious about the winners, and if Best Foreign Picture didn’t go to Pan’s Labyrinth, a small part of me wants to know why.

In this case, The Lives of Others just happened to be a better movie. Not by a huge margin, but I have no complaints about the Academy’s decision in this case.

It’s about two intertwining lives; that of Gerd Wiesler, a Stasi agent, and that of Georg Dreyman, a playwright. One watches the other; the other performs, unknowingly, for the one. The third actor in the drama, Christa-Maria Sieland, is a pivot point for everyone else in the movie. Her choices create the context in which the others…

Fail to meet, because they don’t ever really. But it’s her actions which bring Wiesler to reconsider his life as a watcher, and which bring Dreyman to idealism and subversion.

Despite the humanistic, nearly redemptive ending, I have to think of this movie as a tragedy. You have — well, five interlocking wheels of motivation, albeit the three mentioned are the major ones, which drive inevitably towards a tragic ending. There’s a coda, after the Wall falls, but it isn’t anything other than bittersweet.

I’m mildly addicted to Hard Case Crime books. (Parenthetical trivia: Charles Ardai, the editor and founder of Hard Case Crime, is married to Naomi Novik, who writes the Temeraire series. Fantasy Napoleonic dragons vs. noir thrillers. Small world.)

Anyway, mildly addicted. The new books are in the style of the old books, and the old books are a fun read. Slick, completely stuck in the preconceptions and prejudice of their day, but fun. Tough guys slouch around dealing with rotten people in seedy situations, and there’s a bad idea for every gin mill and a gin mill for every chapter. There’s something charming about a milieu in which the world isn’t measured by the time it takes for an email to get to you — I suspect that one of the key dividing lines of modern fiction is the point at which cell phones became so common that you had to assume them. It’s a fundamental change in the difficulty of interactions.

The view of organized crime is a really interesting difference between these books and modern mysteries slash thrillers. Blame the trinity of Puzo, Coppola, and Scorsese, I suppose. All these old books have an organized crime that’s almost completely a corporate matter. The Organization (or Outfit, or Family, but not Mafia) has lawyers. It wears three-piece suits and does business in a fairly chilly, austere kind of a way.

In Point Blank, the money quote goes like this: “Let me tell you something about corporations, Walker. This is a corporation, I’m an officer of a corporation, and we deal in millions, we never see cash. I’ve got about eleven dollars in my pocket.” That’s the size of it. You see hints of Sicilian heritage here and there, but they get shoved into the background a lot. Sometimes you don’t really see organized crime as much as you see a big businessman whose pursuits lead him across the legal limit now and again.

I figure this reflects the corporate mindset of the fifties. It wasn’t till 1969 that Puzo blew it apart with The Godfather, and Coppola and Scorsese nailed the coffin shut, or some such suitably violent metaphor. This is about a ten year lag from the point at which the Mafia as we think of it today first really hit the American consciousness, but that sounds about right for pop culture.

This primary realization, along with a week or two spent swimming in 50s-60s noir, was the clue that unlocked Edge of Midnight for me. You want to pull back a notch and go for that chilly, corporate feel or the world doesn’t quite make sense. At least, not for me.

This leads to my one-shot idea, which is an Edge of Midnight game set in the aftermath of one of those failed jobs you got all the time. I think I’d want to kill off the protagonist, or rather, the person who’d be the protagonist in the book. I could do worse than lift Max Allan Collins’ first Nolan novel, with a dead Nolan; that leaves us with the older guy who plans jobs, his eager but wet behind the ears nephew, his nephew’s friend the driver… I’d have to rework the girlfriend, who is in no way a playable character, but I’ll think of something.