Friday, August 26, 2011

Magicians Are Like Lying Wizards

This is not another attempt to talk crap about Christopher Nolan, I swear. I actually really liked his movie “The Prestige” when I saw it back in 2006. What was there not to like about this movie? Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale play two finely sculpted magicians in Victorian England AND David Bowie plays Nikola Tesla!!! Seriously, more famous musicians need to play famous inventors or scientists. I would now like to write the film where Tom Waits and Eddie Vedder play the Wright Brothers.

My point is, I liked “The Prestige.” It’s great. You should totally go rent it, or Netflix it, or however it is that people watch movies these days. “The Prestige” is an enjoyable movie. But do you know what was even MORE ENJOYABLE? The book.

Yup, it’s based off of a book, like almost every other movie in Hollywood right now. A fabulous book actually, written by a fellow named Christopher Priest. It reads sort of like if Jane Austen wrote a book about magicians trying to kill each other.

This is one of those stories that talking about it in too much detail kind of ruins the whole party, so I’ll try not to let slip too many spoilers. I think it’s safe to say that the book is a lot clearer on what the heck is happening than the movie. The movie is all mysterious and suspenseful, but the book relies more on possibly untrustworthy narratives and misinformation to hide its secret plot points. Still, I felt at the end I had reached a satisfactory conclusion, which is something Mr. Nolan seems hesitant to offer up in any of his films.

Wait, I promised not to talk crap about Christopher Nolan. Okay, back on topic. The book.

Priest’s “The Prestige” is far creepier than the movie. Again, it’s a matter of carefully revealing enough about… certain events… to make readers wonder what these characters are talking about, but never fully coming out or showing you until the very, very end.

Okay, enough of the vagueness. Now I’m just going to throw a bunch of buzz words at you so as not to ruin the experience but at least give you a little taste of what the story holds:

Racks of dead bodies.
Insane foreign inventors.
A ghost with a knife.
Dark family secrets.
Childhood electrocution.

If my memory serves me correctly, the movie only had two out of five, so my sheer math, the book should be better, right?

The book version also throws in a whole present day sub-story where the descendants of each magician meet up again to uncover their ancestors’ torrid past. At first it seemed like an annoying stutter step to the real action. But just when we think the magicians’ demises will never be explained, Priest snaps us back to the present, into a darkened cellar, for one final chapter. This chapter turns out to be one of the most intense, terrifying, parts of the whole book. Everything up to that is a character study, a mystery, but that last chapter is like a shot of adrenaline mixed with hillbilly moonshine: intense and crazy.

So this is why I like the book better, not because the director did a poor job, but simply because there wasn’t enough time to tell the full story. Nolan’s film runs two hours and ten minutes even after cutting out huge chunks of the book. But if you read it, you’ll see how readers are left with an entirely different feeling at the end of the book than at the end of the movie. The book is darker, more haunting, but in my opinion more satisfying in the end.

Friday, August 19, 2011

The 90s Were A Weird Time For Everyone

Over twenty years ago, a young Steinho got her own TV in her bedroom. This was partially due to wee Steinho having sleeping problems, which in turn was possibly due to dreams about man eating pigs and alien death worms, which is a story for a different day so back to the TV. It was an old TV without a remote, where you literally had to push buttons on the box to change the channel, and there were only eight buttons.

Some of the programs I liked to watch included “In Living Color,” “The Arsenio Hall Show,” and the home shopping network. I can’t explain these choices, other than that I thought Arsenio Hall was simply a newscaster, and then his opening monologue was not a series of jokes, but the same as watching someone like Peter Jennings. I remember after the whole Sinead O’Connor ripping up a picture of the pope situation, Arsenio had “the Pope” on his show to rip up a picture of her. I actually believed it was the pope, and was quite impressed that this holy man would take the time to amp up his cool image by visiting a late night talk show.

Anyway, in the grand scheme of evening television watching, I was exposed to a lot of weird programs in my battle with insomnia. Probably one of the strangest ones came in 1992, going on my tenth year on this planet. It was a post apocalyptical sitcom entitled “Woops!” It only aired I think nine or ten episodes, but the fact that it lasted even that long remains puzzling.

Here’s the logline of “Woops!” in a nutshell. Six crazy characters survive a nuclear holocaust and live on a farm. And it’s a comedy!

The show included such fascinating stories such as this golden nugget: the feminist plain jane discovers a magical crystal that makes her boobs grow bigger! See, that’s the good thing about starting with such a wacky concept for your show. Once you set the bar, things like magical crystals are totally acceptable! And how about this gem of an episode! The only black survivor happens to be a scientist, and the smartest one of the bunch. But when the former business man gets amnesia and believes he’s still living in a pre-apocalypse world, he thinks the sophisticated scientist is really his old black chauffeur! And he makes him sing Old Man River? Say whaaaat? These are the sort of wacky shenanigans you can only get on a one season failed sitcom. And on the Fox network no less!

Now, I don’t have a photographic memory, but I do have a pretty good one. I don’t know why “Woops!” stuck in my head. Yet, there it was. A shining beacon of bad TV. I can still picture the white dude being driven around on a tractor while poor scientist man sang Old Man River. I must’ve been only one of ten people to ever witness this scene, because I’ve been asking people for the last 20 years if they’d heard of the show, and no one ever said yes. And it was so crazy of an idea, no one could believe such a show could actually exist. I am not kidding when I say at some point, I wondered if I’d imagined it. After all, I’d been ten-years-old and prone to insane night hallucinations.

Then I read Phil Rosenthal’s book (blog post from March 23rd) and in a casual reference he mentioned the TV show. Oh, Phil Rosenthal, thank you! And not just for hugging me when I met you back in March. You gave me the gift of sanity.

You’re probably wondering, why the fizzle am I talking about a TV show that was canceled twenty years ago. Well, the honest answer is simply because it’s comical and I was thinking about it today. The intelligent answer, is that I’ve learned a lot about the television business in the last two years. The lesson of “Woops!” is how difficult it is to actually make a successful TV show. First you have to write an amazing pilot episode, and find a network/production company who wants to produce this pilot. Then if the pilot is good, maybe the network will pick it up for a certain number of episodes. And even then, if they don’t like the first ones you film, they can take those episodes back at any time. Twenty episodes can become thirteen can become six. If you look up “Woops!” on the internet, you‘ll see there were a few more they made that never aired. There are probably heaps and heaps of unaired shows, or shows that only ten people have seen before they were pulled. Most of these are terrible, but sadly some are really great, and were canceled simply because not enough people liked them. “Firefly” and “Freaks and Geeks” are two that I lamented the end of.

But there’s two sides to every coin. Yes, a lot of good shows get canceled too soon. Then, there are the shows like “Woops!” which lasted ten episodes. That’s ten more than a lot of scripts get and the fact that it got made at all just gives me hope. Because no matter how bad some of my ideas are, they’ve got to be better than “Woops!”

Friday, August 12, 2011

There Are Worse Imaginary Friends Than An Octopus Monster

I am very fortunate to work in a profession where my nerdliness is not only tolerated, but encouraged to grow like some kind of heinous, flesh eating monster plant. Such was the case this past week when the subject of conversation turned to H.P. Lovecraft, specifically the Cthulhu mythology. Much to my surprise, it would appear that far less people know about Cthulhu than I imagined. Shocking, I know! It’s sort of like that time my sister didn’t even know what a necromancer was! I thought doctors were supposed to be smart!

Anyway, who the heck is Cthulhu? Well, the simple answer is he’s a bad ass octopus-dragon-man being who’s trapped in a frozen underwater city, because if he wasn’t, he’d be busy taking over our dimension or at the very least, hanging out with his fleet of Cthulhu cult worshippers. Lovecraft first brought Cthulhu onto the literary scene in 1928 for the pulp magazine “Weird Tales.” A fairly appropriate title, I’d say.

I’ve always wondered, what exactly was going on in the brain of young Howard Phillips Lovecraft, considering just how weird his tales are. I mean how crazy does a man have to be to invent a maniacal squid alien monster living in an ice city? He certainly has an interesting history, riddled with despair and mental disease. With all that happened, I suppose the real wonder would be if Lovecraft had become a boring, stable investment banker instead.

The family madness goes all the way back to when little Lovecraft was only three years old, when his father, a traveling jewelry and precious metal salesman, was first institutionalized after going “acutely psychotic” in a Chicago hotel room. What on earth does that mean? Well, apparently it means he had syphilis and went mad from it. Sources are unsure if young Lovecraft ever knew the true nature of his father’s illness, though, so if you’re reading my blog, ghost of H.P. Lovecraft, sorry you had to read about your crazy father‘s STD on a web diary.

Thank goodness Lovecraft wasn’t completely alone after his father’s death. No, he had Whipple Van Buren Phillips to take care of him. Suddenly the name Cthulhu doesn’t seem all that weird. Seriously, I want to time travel back to this era just to meet Whipple Van Buren Phillips and say, “Hello Mr. Phillips,” and have him say, “Please! My friends call me Whipple!” Anyway, we science fiction/horror nerds should all say a little thank you to good old Whipple, for he was the first one to introduce young Lovecraft to the macabre and strange, telling the boy ghost stories he’d written himself, much to H.P.’s mother’s dismay. Well, dear old Ma had very little to say in the end. She ended up in the same mental institution as her dear husband did, though not necessarily from the same STD. And despite Lovecraft’s moderate success, he only continued to grow poorer and poorer the older he got, until finally dying of intestinal cancer, Bright’s disease, and malnutrition at the age of 47.

In conclusion, writers have horrible lives.

No, that’s not the point I’m trying to make. I would simply like to pose the question, was it the harsh circumstances of his life that lead Lovecraft’s mind to wander to these dark, disturbed worlds? Had he been wealthier and happier with more stable, less diseasy parents, would his lack of misery led to a lack in creativity as well? Or would his mastery of prose simply have churned out brighter stories and adventures? How fine is the line between genius and totally whackadoodle crazypants?

And if you have an answer to this question, I’d love to hear it. Because, I may or may not have written a story where some sort of demonic earth monster rips a bunch of gold prospectors to pieces before nailing their body parts to a tree, and I’d kind of like to know exactly how crazy that makes me.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Well, At Least The Title Wasn't A Lie

Listen, I know we all get old some day, but have you seen Harrison Ford in “Cowboys & Aliens?” He looks like King Triton after the sea witch turned him into one of those shrimp slug things. Seriously, he was two seconds away from yelling “Get off my lawn!” at Daniel Craig.

That film had a whole heap of potential. Cross genres are cool, and John Favreau is fresh off the success of two “Iron Man” hits. Though to be absolutely honest, “Iron Man 2” was a little bit of a shambles. Still, it had impressive action sequences and Mickey Rourke with a freaking bird. Made no sense, but it was entertaining. “Cowboys & Aliens,” however, was about as dull as a sixty-nine year old man who used to be in better shape riding a horse around the desert and yelling at people.

What a coincidence, that’s exactly what that film was! Oh, and just to warn you, if you’ve really got your heart set on seeing this film, it would probably be a good idea to stop reading now. From here on out, it’s all smack talk.

I didn’t have terribly high expectations going into “Cowboys & Aliens,” but I certainly expected more than what they offered, especially considering the cast and director. But as the film started, my gut instinct started gurgling up trouble when I noticed there were no less than six screenwriters credited to the film. For peeps not in the biz, this basically means it was passed back and forth between a multitude of creative people, which typically leads to one of two possible outcomes. 1. The script is overcomplicated and convoluted, with numerous plot holes and characters that come off as schizophrenic. Or, you get a film like “Cowboys & Aliens,” watered down, with possibly a clear plot, but no real depth, character or heart. As the movie progressed, I held out hope that at least Daniel Craig’s hotness could keep me entertained. Alas, no. Sorry Daniel, you are not quite hot enough for even that.

What makes it even worse is that “Cowboys & Aliens” started out so strong. It had one amazing action sequence when the aliens first attacked the town (most of what was featured in the trailer), and then after that it was chaos. Seriously, the final ultimate battle looked like they told a bunch of extras to just to ride their horses around in circles while screaming and firing their guns wildly into the air like Yosemite Sam.

The characters were stunted and vague. They went from apathetic to melodramatic with no build in between. And as for our leading lady, I never thought there would be a human being with bigger eyes than Elijah Wood in Lord of the Rings. Olivia Wilde seems to have him beat. I don’t remember her eyes being this gigantic when she was in “House” or “Tron,” but maybe they CGI’d them up a bit while they were working on the aliens.

And the aliens! Oh dear lord. Was there a sale on CGI aliens this summer? Please, someone who has seen both “Super 8” and “Cowboys & Aliens” this year tell me if I’m wrong. I won’t say they looked exactly the same, but they looked similar enough to me that my monkey brain made a subconscious note of it. Regardless if they look the same or not, the alien was not mind-blowingly original. I have not read the graphic novel this film is based on, (for inquiring minds, it's written by Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley) so possibly they were just copying what had already been established in the comic. Further research necessary.

“Cowboys & Aliens” is sadly another case of excellent premise and poor execution. They probably spent a lot of money on getting big budget stars and putting together flashy effects, without a whole lot of substance to glue it together. I am very quick to forgive films with lame plots as long as the effects and visuals rock off my proverbial socks. Heck, even if the effects aren’t good and the acting’s terrible and cheesy, a movie can still be fun! Instead I was left staring at Harrison Ford’s wrinkles and looking at my watch.