Constantine

My expectations had been thoroughly trashed for this one, and then some other blogs reviewed it saying essentially that if you had low expectations you won't think it's too bad.

So I'm going in expecting something I'll enjoy as much as, say, Van Helsing, AvP, or maybe Hellboy (2004 was the year of reasonably satisfying but not particularly good action horror films).

Instead I got a film that will probably go in with Resident Evil and Mission: Impossible (1) on enjoyment level -- in other words, I give it a 4 out of 5, will buy the DVD quickly then watch it fairly often.

I'll list out some stuff [SPOILERS BELOW]:




Yeah, I missed the accent but Keanu is always fun to watch, and he managed to capture the dark sarcasm of the character. I think they should have pushed him more towards angry and bitter at the world instead of brooding though.

L.A. works fine in the film; gives it a nice connection with the Chandler novels.

This is one of those movies where they tried to fit too much in -- but this time it doesn't hurt the film so much. The filmmakers drag you kicking and screaming over the bumps and plot holes between the sequences at such a high pace that they aren't too bothersome -- much the same as The Maltese Falcon.

There are a number of very cool scenes. The tiny little fight against the demons on the street in front of the religious icon is terrific -- I don't understand it, but it's memorable.

My spider sense felt the hand of a powerful, but easily confused, member of the production team. You can see signs of this when a sequence plays out as follows: Constantine and sidekick enter building to fight demons -- sidekick runs upstairs to a big water tank, then drops a cross in tank and some vials of water from the River Jordan -- Constantine faces down a gang of demons in a large room, then holds up his cigarette lighter to the sprinkler system -- sprinklers go off and the water melts the skin off the demons ****** then, because the powerful but easily confused member of production team didn't quite figure it out and was worried the audience wouldn't either, we have some demon actually say "HOLY WATER". BTW, that's an iconic example of "on the nose" dialogue, and something typically not present in early drafts, but only after notes come down from on high.

Tilda Swinton was terrific as the androgynous Gabriel. I particularly liked the ending, where she plays a rather unique form of crazy, causing all this suffering in order to make humans worthy of God's love -- she really pulls it off at the end, being like this supportive, sweet-natured aunt who just happens to have a bunch of hoboes buried in the basement. This is a fresh take on an antagonist and I hope she gets some major play in the sequels, if there are any.

Gavin Rossdale pulled some nice scenes as the lesser antagonist, Balthazar. There's not a lot for him to do, but there's one early scene where he chats with Constantine and reveals the sadism and corruption hidden under his power suit and nice manicure. It reminded me of the characters in In the Company of Men, a film so unpleasant I couldn't watch it all the way through, despite being terrifically done.

Peter Stormare pulled off a great vision of Lucifer/Satan. I much prefer this kind of portrayal to the regal sort such as in The Devil's Advocate or Angel Heart. Constantine's Satan owes more to Doestoyevsky's devil in clownish rags -- you might fear him but there won't be any respect in it. Underneath his expensive white suit black slime runs constantly down his feet, leaving a filthy trail everywhere. And the mannerisms, Stormare gets this really right since he comes off not as Darth Vader, the cool force of darkness, but as a pedophiliac uncle -- something sick and scary and just a little pathetic.

For a time the producers were thinking of getting Peter Stormare to play the role of the older guy in The Sound. I'm not sure if that will still work out (timing matters a lot for a small production) -- but I'd be very happy with him in the part.

Triple Post (3 of 3): Online Games

I've wound up actually playing two online games, City of Heroes and World of Warcraft.

I'd probably let one of them drop but, since I subscribed in large blocks in order to pay a bit less, I'm in this zone where I can still play both of them before making a decision which way to go. And, given that "The Sound" is supposed to start filming before either of those subscriptions run out, I'll possibly not feel the pressing need to save the monthly fee afterwards.

They're both great games. I slightly prefer the game play in World of Warcraft. There's an awful lot to do -- quests pay off well and you can have up to twenty at a time (I often have a stack of 15 or so, many of which are grouped in a similar location), crafting skills have you out scrounging herbs and making potions and trying to get the craft skill up, and the auction house brings Adam Smith's invisible hand to the land of make believe.

City of Heroes has a great hero building system -- complete with a wide variety of costumes. The game play feels a little more repetitive than WoW, but you get little benefits every level. Also, after not too long playing you can pick up some nice and fast movement powers; WoW feels sort of slow getting around after CoH. The chat features are also just a little more convenient. However, if you die you do get experience debt, which can make playing feel a bit more like a grind.

The best thing about City of Heroes, though, is that another of my old friends, Sung, is playing it -- along with his brother, George, and George's wife, Jessica. It's vastly more enjoyable to play these games with friends, particularly when we've all spread out since this way I get to catch up with them a bit. Sung is actively recruiting the members of our old gaming group -- so, Scott, there's just something seriously wrong with a long time Champions player like you not getting online with us.

If you happen to be picking up, or already playing either game, I'll put the server names and character names (in order of who I usually play) I use here:

City of Heroes
Liberty Server

Heroes:
Recursive
Vesuvius


World of Warcraft
Feathermoon Server

Characters:
Umbranic
Leucauge
Gipper

Triple Post (2 of 3): Fair and Balanced

Yeah, yeah, not really, I've only added two links -- but probably as fair and balanced as any of the other media outlets.

I added a link to one of my oldests friends' blogs in the friends section, Scott Eiland. He can go a bit over the top when provoked to anger by lefties -- so my more liberal friends might want to take a valium or smoke some herbal remedy prior to looking at his blog -- but he also includes some terrific bi-partisan comments on the great sport of baseball (the only sport you don't actually ever have to watch in order to thoroughly enjoy, perhaps not watching is even a benefit).

I've also added a link to The Conservative Philosopher. There's no shortage of web sources for conservative thought, but it's nice to see what some academic philosophers have to say (and find out who they are). One worrying trend on that site is the tendency toward posts that make general claims about The Left and other posts that extrapolate general claims about The Left, based on the ravings of a few radicals.

There is no The Left just as there is no The Right -- and they should know this because one of the more interesting posts on their site is a conservative defense of animal rights, what I imagine most people associate with The Left. It'd be nice if there was a little more focusing on specific arguments, or claims, or even individuals, instead of trying to detail the characteristics of abstract categories that only loosely, and poorly, map onto reality.

One question I have, is why do so many of the people, both lefty and righty, reserve their greatest hatred and vitriol for, you know, people who are slightly to the right or left of them, respectively? I suppose Pol Pot and Idi Amin are dead, so there's not much point in despising them any longer -- but surely there are worse people in the world than Bill Clinton or George W. Bush.

Triple Post (1 of 3): The Movie

I was considering writing one long entry but, since this will cover a bunch of unrelated things, I'll break it up into three posts. I figure that'll be easier to read.

Earlier this week one of the producers sent me a list of the nine actors they're considering for various parts and who have expressed interest. I definitely knew a lot more names on the list than I expected for a film with a purportedly $2 million budget, which made we rather curious as to how you can get these people. My guess is they can get relatively known people for two reasons: A) the actual shooting time will be brief, less than a month; so it's not a lot of time out of the actor's schedule. And B) the better known actors might get a chunk of the profits.

Last night the producer emailed me again and said that they had sent offers to two of the people (the actors who'd play the main younger characters). That reduced my nervousness (they're actually spending real money!) but increased my anxiousness, and so I couldn't sleep for a few hours -- which gave me an excuse to play City of Heroes for a while (see above post 3).

Anyway, it's enlightening as to how much one actually can do with a limited budget. Sorry about being so vague about who's on the list. Like W's handlers prior to the debates, I'm working overtime to manage expectations.

Why Does Anyone Live Outside L.A.?

--probably because a three bedroom house costs around 500,000 dollars there (as opposed to approximately 140k here in San Antonio, TX). But it sure does seem worth it.

I went back to LA just after the rains stopped -- so the sky was sharp blue and, as the plane descended past the San Bernardino mountains for landing, one could see a thick cap of snow on the peaks. Of course, in the lowlands the temperature was in the mid-seventies.

Jaru's mother (my mother-in-law) is visiting for a few months. She also visited this summer when we were in Florida so she's now seen California, Texas, and Florida -- and will visit New Jersey in March when Jaru goes back for Sasshin. I sort of think she should visit New Jersey now, so she can gain a proper appreciation for why Jaru and I are doing our best to not live anywhere north of Berkeley.

I didn't get a chance to meet up with the producers or director this trip. Apparently they're busy, which I think translates as "fighting a lot" (the shooting start date might be delayed until April but that's one of the fighting points). The director seems to have some nice connections on the FX front and if they get things moving smoothly they can score a bargain and get some very talented people to do the work.

Last Thursday they were supposed to have a casting meeting, but that got cancelled. I'm looking forward to hearing what actors they might bring on board. It's all low budget stuff so I'm not counting on anyone famous but they might get a good character actor to play the part of the older professor in the film. Note though, that one of the selling points of a horror film is that they don't really need name actors to find an audience, and horror films that have mostly young characters, like this one, have the added advantage that young actors are hungry and cheap.

It's a Wonder That Movies Get Made At All

The above title is something I've heard multiple times from screenwriters and producers -- and now I'm getting to experience it first hand! Essentially, it all comes down to contracts. The fights over contracts, money, credit, back-end, and so on, get rather crazy. I imagine this is true in any business but there is one complicating factor in Hollywood: people don't have a standard payscale.

When you're starting out, frankly you'll agree to practically anything in order to get a produced credit, and the companies cutting the check know that. However, most people also have a thorny sense of justice that rears up when they feel like they're getting shafted. I have no complaints about my contract; I didn't expect much and actually got a bit better deal than I anticipated. But I know there have been some fights elsewhere.

Another way the no-standard-payscale comes out is that established actors, directors, and writers, charge based on the kind of movie being made. They don't have a standard salary. So, even though Tom Cruise might typically make 25 million per picture -- that doesn't apply if it's one of those prestige roles with Oscar aspirations. You can get actors for scale on those. So that means that arguments also arise over whether or not the movie is commercial or prestige.

Anyway, I received my first check yesterday, really just a deposit (i.e. an option payment) -- but already more than I made combined doing RPG writing. So tonight I'll fulfill my promise to myself and go out and buy the Stanley Kubrick Collection -- that's something I held off on since I wanted to purchase it with screenwriting cash.

Do Bats Eat Cats?

Oddly, now that I no longer need to feel guilty about not reading enough philosophy, I find myself reading some philosophy -- albeit in that cheesy-ass, just glance over something on the internet, way.

This week or so Judge Richard Posner is filling in for Brian Leiter in his blog, the Leiter Reports. My memory being the Nerf-like trap it is, I'm pretty sure I read some articles by Posner back when, but can't remember what. At any rate, Posner has already made some interesting and controversial points, and provided some of his thoughts on both how the law works, and how he believes it should work. It's fascinating stuff whether or not one agrees with it, so I recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest.

In Point 4 of this post, Posner suggests that academic philosiphizing neither is, nor should be, consequential -- by which I assume he means influential on public policies. I think this is an interesting issue. I'd definitely agree that it has no immediate effect; in fact, any effect might take years to percolate out into the public consciousness. However, it definitely does seem like I hear echoes of Theory of Justice in much of modern liberal thought, and echoes of Anarchy, State, and Utopia in much of conservative thought (and definitely Libertarian thought). Moreover, it feels like John Locke and J.S. Mill had a pretty heavy impact on 18th and 19th century politics.

What makes me unsure of my own belief that political philosophizing slowly works its way into public thought is that I don't really know the causal order of these things. Were the liberal policies promoted by Mill already floating around and he just invented a theoretical justification for them? Likewise for the others. One thing that always made me nervous about moral and political philosophy was the suspicion that I already knew the outcomes of my theories and I was just massaging the theory to fit the answers. Of course, science has to do that too -- gotta fix your theory if it says that Pluto doesn't exist -- so that's not necessarily a crippling problem.


I've also added a link to the Left2Right blog in my links section. That makes the whole thing pretty lefty but eventually I'll add a link to one of my oldest friend's arch-conservative blogs to balance it out a bit.

I'm a bit put off by stated goal of the forum. The picture that the right is some kind of monolithic entity that one needs a special language to speak to seems awfully similar to the picture that the left is some kind of monolithic entity that one needs a special language to speak to. People vote for different candidates for all kinds of different reasons. Greens find allies in card-carrying NRA members. Those on the left opposed to the death penalty find themselves allied with (some) people in the pro-life movement.

The forum seems to have veered away from that goal, however, probably because people have gotten over the fact that about half the time your preferred candidate loses, even when you really dislike the other guy. Regardless, the sheer number of impressive thinkers posting there makes it worth checking out.

Director's Comments

Last Thursday, Friday, and Saturday I spent the mornings in conference call with the director and a couple producers. This is the first chance the director had to provide feedback so there was naturally a fair bit of it -- though I didn't have to wholly scrap some 20 pages and rewrite them like the most recent draft.

One thing directors bring with them is a better understanding of what they can accomplish given the budget. Since they've also worked with some effects companies, they have a better understanding of which effects are affordable. For example, I had an early scene depicting a relatively low-tech version of a lab, thinking that would be cheap, but the director's going to make it look much more spiffy. I was also under the impression that makeup effects would be more affordable than CGI -- and that's not always the case since makeup eats up a lot of shooting time.

Another factor to keep in mind is lighting setups. A movie occurs at a number of locations and one of the real time killers is setting up the lights in each location. In this case a location means a room, or hallway, or closet. So being able to shoot in the same room a few times can really save some time.

Because no-one wanted to sit on the phone for 9 to 10 hours we split the discussion up over three days. This helped because I could then spend the rest of the day doing the editing -- most of which went quickly. From what I understand the following rule is true of a large number of things but it struck me as even more true in writing (probably because that's what I'm doing): 95% of the work takes 50% of the time and the other 5% takes the remaining 50% of the time.

A fair bit of the rewriting is just going in there and figuring out the logical consquences of a change, or modifying the tone of a section. Moreover, after talking with others, one typically has a burst of new ideas, and those all flow pretty quickly. But there are some parts of writing that just need inspiration -- you can help this along by continually turning over the problem in your mind and engaging in different activities, but it still takes time. My technique is to make sure I've gotten all the parts that don't need inspiration out of the way, sometimes getting a few bits of inspiration while I'm doing that, then going back to the difficult bits. The last 5% isn't hard work -- I get a lot of walking done in that phase -- but it is time consuming.

On Collaborating

Call me Vichy but collaborating is cool.

I had my first conversation with the director this morning (my first ever with any director). He called mainly to say hello and introduce himself -- then mentioned a few brief ideas about what areas he'd like to focus on during the next rewrite. I'll get the extended version of those notes on Monday morning or so.

He seems very excited about the project and quite energetic -- which spills back over to me and I'm already excited about it.

Over the past year and a half or so I've found myself increasingly perferring the screenwriting format to the prose format. I had made a few, frankly, non-tries at screenwiritng several years ago; basically firing up an old version of Final Draft (screenwriting software) then looking at the page and not having any idea of what to do with it. However, last year when I had a story idea, outline, and started writing -- after a bit of research on how to write a screenplay -- I found it went quite smoothly. Moreover, I liked the structure of the screenplay itself: sparse prosy bits, a focus on action, and having some fun with dialogue. I'm not particularly one for flourishing descriptive passages or playing with language and screenplays fit that model well. Also, I really like to imagine and describe action scenes -- that's where I do get a bit detailed. But I suspect action plays poorly on the page and in novels, whereas it plays exceedingly well on the screen.

So one aspect of screenwriting I like is the core process itself. However, there's an added benefit once you get a chance to talk with others about actually making the thing. Writing itself is a solitary activity and you normally don't get much in the way of feedback until your monster is published. Screenwriting, though, grows into this group project where a bunch of people all have their own ideas about what way things should go -- and so you get a lot of discussion and a chance to talk with others. For me the balance works well, since I'm sort of solitary and sort of social.

I know that some screenwriters get frustrated at the lack of control over the final film. And, yes, there's a distinct lack of screenwriter control over the final film -- sometimes others will have ideas you don't agree with regarding a scene or bit of dialogue. However, I suspect producers, directors, actors, editors, foley artists, and a slew of other people also feel frustrated about their lack of control over the film -- and that's because in a group project it's pretty much tautological that you're not going to get total control of the film.

Also, when the producers, directors, and so on come on board and start wanting their ideas added to the mix this is because they are excited about your project. A fun idea inspires a bunch more fun ideas -- think of the last film you really enjoyed and how many ways you could see to expand bits of it or explore different directions. And, yes, they're also adding in their bits because you've made some mistakes. I've written quite a bit with little to no editorial oversight so it's rather pleasant to finally have a thorough error-checking process in place -- and, of course, as a team we'll still make mistakes.

Sooner or later some actors will come on board and I'm particularly interested to find out their perspective. The producers, director, and myself all look at the movie as a whole -- but the actors will look at it primarily from the perspective of their one character. Since, essentially, I'm thinking for every character, having some people who can make their entire work about just one of the characters should add some valuable new perspectives.

Screenwriting Update

Apparently pre-production on The Sound is thrrpping along -- I'm not sure what word to use because I'm not sure if it's racing speedily toward a Bruckheimeresque explosive extravaganza or clunking and clattering along like most of my cars.

Shooting starts, theoretically, at the end of February. Which still seems awfully quick but I think smaller films are less lethargic. It looks like the producers have decided on a director; I figure once he's in place a lot more pieces will settle into place as well. I'm working with two companies: Fast Carrier Pictures and Velvet Steamroller Productions. The Fast Carrier site has a smallish blurb about the film -- you'll have to dig a little for it, I'm afraid.

Producers are very cagey about the information that leaks out regarding their projects, so I'll let them be the source of public info on what the film's about and so on. Like the army, movie-making seems to be a lot of hurry-up-and-wait; but that gives me a chance to work on some other screenplays. Sorry, Mom, still nothing you could watch though Jaru came up with another suggestion that I probably won't get to until I'm about 50.

Bats and Cats

Having kept up with my friend, Dan's blog, for a while, I liked the way his blog allowed me to follow what was going on in his life. And with more and more friends and family (including me) seeming to scatter over the planet I thought I'd give it a try as well. If nothing else, this way you can find my email address if you've lost it.

Titles are pretty tough, at least in movies I know the formula -- painfully simple and descriptive (eg. Jaws is about a shark) -- but for the nonsense I'll drivel out here I'm rather more stumped. The theme of nonsense helps inspire a title, though; even better, it's in the public domain. So I chose the above snippet from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The full quote is below:

"Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?" and sometimes "Do bats eat cats?" for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which way she put it.

I swear that line is one of the reasons I went into philosophy for a bit longer than was probably necessary. Seems oddly consistent of me too since Apocalypse Now was one of the reasons I joined the army.

Since I want to test out how this looks I'll finish up for now and try to post more later.