Writing and Blog

Monster Movie Absolution: Cloverfield

SPOILERS AHEAD

I’d love to meet and talk with a WWII-generation Japanese citizen who saw Gojira (aka Godzilla) for the first time in 1954.

It’s no secret that Japanese pop-culture – from Manga comics to big-robot/big-monster sci-fi – has acted as a pressure-release for the anger and anxiety built up from America’s bombing of Japan in World War II. (The great anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion explored another big theme – the conflict between eastern and western religions – but that’s another essay.)

Continue reading “Monster Movie Absolution: Cloverfield”

Echoes and Layers: A Look Back at The Wire, Seasons 3 and 4

In part two of a three-part series, I look back at The Wire’s strongest seasons.

Let’s talk about The Wire’s magnificent third and fourth seasons, which feature the most satisfying examples of thematic layering, echoing and character graduation. Season three introduces a theme so potentially boring it would have sounded death-knell for any other show: management.

Continue reading “Echoes and Layers: A Look Back at The Wire, Seasons 3 and 4”

A Look Back at The Expendables

Here’s my review for the original Expendables, which I sort of liked.

SPOILERS AHEAD! SPOILERS AHEAD! SPOILERS AHEAD!

I don’t want to think of Sylvester Stallone as a simpleton, but he keeps forcing me to with movies like The Expendables.

Here’s the thing: I like Stallone. He strikes me as an earnest movie-maker with decent storytelling instincts. I thought Rocky Balboa was great, and I could really sense his desire to get back to the roots of the character that made him famous.

But even in Rocky Balboa, I got a sense of Stallone the simpleton. The movie’s plot hinges on a video game that pits the aging Rocky against the current heavyweight champion — and you know what? I bet that’s where Stallone got the idea. A video game. By comparison, in the leadup to the release of Rambo (the fourth in the series that began with First Blood), Stallone (if memory serves) revealed that he got the idea for the fourth Rambo from a magazine article, as well as from the Saw movies, although the horror franchise only guided Stallone’s hand in pumping up the volume of the violence he depicted. (The splatter-gore aesthetic, while less intense in The Expendables, is still with Stallone.)

Continue reading “A Look Back at The Expendables”

Echoes and Layers: A Look Back at The Wire, Seasons 1 and 2

In the first of a three-part series, I look back at The Wire and try to figure out why season five is the weakest entry of this brilliant series.

I first watched The Wire, David Simon’s seminal portrait of the city of Baltimore in five acts, a few years ago. I recently plowed through the series again, this time with the foreknowledge that its final season was generally regarded as its weakest. When I first watched the show, I remembered admiring the newsroom scenes, and especially the performance of Clark Johnson as the Sun’s city editor. So did my rewatch confirm or disconfirm the inferiority of season five?

Sadly, it confirmed it. 

Continue reading “Echoes and Layers: A Look Back at The Wire, Seasons 1 and 2”

My Favorite Mad Scientists

In this article, originally written in conjunction with ScriptPhD.com, I pick my favorite eureka-bellowers of all time.

An astute cartoonist once observed that most so-called mad scientists are actually just mad engineers.

You can see the original comic here, but the gist is this: A mad scientist proclaims that he’s invented a death ray. A nameless troublemaker asks him if he’s testing any mad hypotheses with mad experiments and mad control groups. Good stuff. That comic served as the inspiration for this list, in which I assemble the best mad scientists from pop-culture who actually act like scientists. They conduct experiments. They record data. And they’re fucking bonkers.

Continue reading “My Favorite Mad Scientists”

A Dream Cast for The Stand

Despite all its inherent challenges, it appears that a big-screen version of Stephen King’s The Stand is still on its way. The latest news is that director Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars) will direct one gigantic three-hour movie. Here’s a look back at a piece of mine that originally appeared both on Geekscape and CC2K.

Before I offer my (totally preliminary) dream casting choices, let me also share my hopes for what the new film will be: I hope it’ll be The Lord of the Rings. Meaning, I hope that King’s sprawling struggle between good and evil will get the LOTR treatment in the form of three or four epic movies. It’s great material, and I think it’s worthy of that kind of production.

That said, let’s talk about the cast. I’m going to offer my first-string choices, as well as some backups if I think of any. And I am very open to suggestion and correction with any of these.

Continue reading “A Dream Cast for The Stand”

The Case For Nathan Fillion to Play Indiana Jones

Everyone thinks that Harrison Ford is the only man who can play Indiana Jones. I respectfully disagree.

In response to some talk that Harrison Ford wants Indy killed off in the next installment, I thought I’d repeat my argument: Either pass on the torch to Shia LeBeouf and have him play the new Indiana Jones, or cast someone else in the role, James Bond-style. My pick? Nathan Fillion.

Continue reading “The Case For Nathan Fillion to Play Indiana Jones”

Two TV Series That Weren’t: Serenity and Mulholland Drive

The networks axed Firefly and Mulholland Drive before they could find life. What might they have been like in the long run?

I’ve never seen the pilot to Twin Peaks.

Even though it’s one of my favorite shows ever, Twin Peaks is one of those programs I inhaled on video – VHS, of course, seeing as how they’ve yet to release its second season on DVD in the states. The only version of the pilot episode I’ve seen is a truncated version with a different ending that Lynch and company shot to make the pilot work as a movie, no doubt so they would have something to release in case ABC didn’t pick up the pilot. The Twin Peaks pilot-as-movie thingy works fine; it’s still much cooler than most movie thrillers out there. Furthermore, in Mulholland Drive, we got to see one of those rejected-TV-pilots-as-full-length-narrative onscreen without ever having seen the complete series to go with it, and like the abruptly ending non-pilot to Peaks, Mulholland Drive works fine as a movie, but I wonder what would have become of Robert Forster’s character, or the two guys in the Denny’s with the creepy homeless guy out back had Lynch been given a full TV series to work with. True, as a network series, we wouldn’t have received the mind-blowing lesbian sex scene, but just think how satisfying it would have been to go through, say, 30 or 32 episodes – well into the second season – before having Lynch reveal to us that the whole Nancy Drew/Hollywood starlet sequence was a pipe dream of Naomi Watts’ pissed-off lesbian character. Then we would have had the rest of season two to sort through that narrative wreckage before the season two finale, which would no doubt feature the second appearance of the Cowboy to deal with Justin Theroux, who by the end of the second season would be quite ready to fire his leading lady. And then in season three, would Lynch shuffle his deck of characters again? What would have happened?

Continue reading “Two TV Series That Weren’t: Serenity and Mulholland Drive”

Review: Julie Taymor’s The Tempest

Despite some excellent performances, Julie Taymor’s take on Shakespeare’s swan song doesn’t quite work.

SPOILERS AHEAD!!! SPOILERS AHEAD!!! SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

I love Julie Taymor. I don’t always love her movies.

Watching her lavish new adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest brought me back to a lot of things — my adoration of the play, my impatience with the play, my early days writing for CC2K. I also found myself reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses of film versus theater and how they challenge filmmakers who try to usher Shakespeare’s plays onto the screen.

I also found myself contemplating the role of special effects in moviemaking and how computer-generated effects still have the capacity to fail so utterly. I hate to shine so harsh a light on the special effects in a Shakespeare movie, but The Tempest is packed with some jaw-droppingly bad ones. They got in the way, when they should have helped the movie soar.

Continue reading “Review: Julie Taymor’s The Tempest”