the last week of the month

or anything from my wishlist

Tuesday is my off day...

Oh, the bitter.

Firstly, let me say that the guy who wrote Oceans 11 wasn't bitter. He was happy. And cute. And Joe Eszterhas wasn't bitter. Which was slightly surprising. Joe Eszterhas was, in fact, AWESOME. Not only did he mock Showgirls without shame, he said the most, again, because I'm stuck on this word, awesome thing about it. He said, "I find it fantastic that the greatest failure of my career is a huge, money making film."

Joe Eszterhas, who also did not bother to button his shirt for this panel, and being that I was sitting quite near the front that means I am now intimately familiar with Joe's tan, meaty man-boobs. He also told this story that I loved:

"I wrote a fantastic, complex screenplay once about a widowed mother with two kids and her relationship with a convict. Then two other writers changed that into a Jean Claude Van Damme vehicle, and I had to threaten to sue the Writer's Guild to have my name removed from the writing credits so I wouldn't have to be associated with that."

And the final, you know, awesome comment from Joe Eszterhas? "If you want to be a writer, then read. Watch less movies and read so that you form your own images in your head."

A.Men.

So, two out of four panelist? Charming, despite the whole shirt unbutton thing. The other two? The two who talked through the whole thing? Meet the panel of the bitter.

First, there was the woman who wrote Indecent Proposal. She liked to talk, a lot, about how writers get shit all over and studios take their art and manipulate it into horrible things. For example, when Robert Redford was cast in Indecent Proposal (and by the way, she thinks both he and Woody Harrelson were horribly miscast), he brought in his own team of writers to overhaul the script because he was concerned that his character wasn't likeable enough. It changed the whole movie, because the movie was originally interesting because none of the characters were saints. But Robert Redford made the movie into a horrible thing by having his own team of writers hack up the script to make him more likeable.

Look, okay, I get you point. You spent a lot of time writing a script that you thought was high art, and Robert Redford and a Hollywood studio made it into something you hated. But let me remind you of a few things, in no particular order.

a. It wasn't even your story idea. The studio hired you and told you what story to write. It's not even your creative invention.

b. Robert Redford has a million dollar personal brand to protect. Do you?

c. The studio, whichever one it was, did what it did to your script and, huzzuh, that was one of the highest grossing films of the year that year. Did you not know that the studio was running a business? That your art is secondary to their business?

d. If you want to create art, then create art. If you want to make money as a Hollywood screenwriter, then do that. You, yourself, said, like, a dozen times in this panel that those were two different things. So if your heart is in your art, go get on it. If not, do your job like the rest of us and treat it like a job.

She also talked a lot about how you get fired more in Hollywood if you're a woman. I did sympathize with her there, but I was already agitated by her state of bitter (it wasn't limited to Indecent Proposal) and not taking her all that seriously.

The guy who created and writes Las Vegas? Same deal. Discussion upon discussion about how writers get treated badly and how he left feature films in order to do television because you have more control over things.

Which was probably a good idea since according to everybody on the panel, the feature film is dead. It's all about tv now.

Which, you know, is probably mostly true.

Anyway, I was so aggravated at their bitterness. To review, you are both working screen writers who have made a ton of money on some of the specs you've sold and have a flexible life that 99.9 percent of the population would love. And you are complaining why? Because your art is getting hacked up? PLEASE REALITY CHECK WITH ME. If you wanted to create your own art, you could do it. However, you are essentially a corporate employee like the rest of us, so deal with it.

Now I'm angry just thinking about it. Panel of the bitter. They couldn't stop talking about the rough road of a working Hollywood screenwriter. If you hate it so much, go get a job at the bank. I met tons of kids who would kill for your gig and be grateful for it.

I'm done. Onto the films.

Holiday Dreaming
This is a Taiwanese film, apparently, I'm told by Ho, filmed mostly on the east coast of Taiwan. The plot, in brief, is the story of four people: a military cadet, his goofy best friend, his insane old girlfriend whom he breaks out of a mental institution and another military private who goes insane and runs awol. The protagonist and his goofy sidekick are sent on a mission to retrieve the Crazy Private, a trip during which the protagonist also breaks his insane ex-girlfriend out of the mental institution. The four of them end up together and living on a beach, until in a series of tragic events, the Crazy Private is shot and killed. Sorry for the spoiler.

Score: 68

Firefly
This, thus far, has been my favorite film of the festival. The plot is a bit complex to describe, but I'll give it a shot. The film starts on Halloween when a violent crime is attempted/committed in the woods. Then we jump ahead to the week before Christmas and track the lives of the woman who was attacked in the woods, a sci-fi lover who's making his own amateur sci-fi film and an average-Joe who's in the process of uncovering that his about-to-be-fiancee is cheating on him. We gradually find out how all three of these people, unbeknownst to each other, played a role in the horrid event in the woods that night. Sound like Memento meets Night on Earth? Not quite, because involved in this whole puzzle is the presence of an actual alien who came to earth to do good things and ultimately impacted all of the events from that night forward.

I mean, let's be clear that this is a first film and therefore has some certain first film problems, but I was drawn in through the whole thing. I didn't figure out how it all fit together (except for the part about the alien). There was some weirdness with some of the shots, some "Okay, amateur actors" moments and the ending ... maybe a little too neat. You have to love the layering of one of the character being a sci-fi freak making a low-budget movie about aliens and the fact that this really is some guy's low budget, amateur sci-fi movie itself. The director cast himself in one of the roles and he's great onscreen. The writing is actually quite good and would have been much better in the hands of slightly more experienced actors. There's this totally delightful overlap between the seriousness of the brutal crime and its impact on the woman and the ugliness of the cheating girlfriend and the isolation of the artist (the sci-fi dude) counterbalanced by the, well, cuteness, of the alien subplot and all of its surreal aspects. Also, there's this element I LOVE wherein each of the days of the week for the timespan of the film is opened with a shot of the woman who was attacked waking up and telling herself "run" before she gets up and goes for a run. It works better on film than my explanation of it does. I don't think this film has a distributor, which is a shame since it's five hundred thousand times better than Little Athens (see below), but if you get a chance and it comes to a festival near you, you should see it.

Score: 72

Red Doors
This was lovely, and I adored it. It's all about experience, though, because since I loved the first two films on this day, I loved this one less than I might normally. Did that make sense? Anyway, plot. The inner struggles of an Asian family. The mother struggles with the lack of cultural care/awareness of her daughters. The father struggles with feelings of uselessness after retirement and the aging of his children. The oldest daughter struggles with coming to terms with her unsatisfying engangement and her abandonment of possible true love to satisfy standards of success set by her parents. The middle daughter struggles with her blossoming lesbianism. The youngest daughter struggles with, well, being a teenager. In the end, things are somewhat resolved, yet also not. But they're on the road to resolution.

Look, I read somebody comparing this to The Joy Luck Club, and that's not fair. It's an entirely different movie, and the only real similarity is the presence of Asian women. Anyway, I forgave the movie for my real problem with it when I heard that in the Q&A it was revealed that the producers made the director trim the movie from 110 minutes to 90 minutes. And suddenly it all made sense, because after the film I kept saying that it felt so fragmented and I had no sense of its consitency, but then I realized that twenty minutes were gone and that was why. The actresses were all not only fantastic but stunningly beautiful. There was great chemistry between the youngest daughter and the father, and I wish there had been at least one more scene with them. One interesting thing that both Kari and Ho mentioned afterwards was the complete lack of Asian men. Other than the father, all of the romantic interests were white (the lesbian interest was ethnic but not fully Asian, the youngest daughter was in love with a white boy and the oldest daughter was engaged to one white man and in love with a second one). There was lovely use of the color red throughout the movie, not just limited to the doors. Other than the fragmentation, there wasn't much not too love, except that some of the themes and such were in overkill. One too many scenes with the dog, with the youngest daughter and her game with her boyfriend, with the oldest daughter and her old boyfriend. That is all.

Score: 68

The Outsider
I'm the wrong person to ask about this. It was a documentary on James Tobak. I'm not horribly familiar with his catalog of work, so I was going in pretty blind. I mean, I've seen The Pick Up Artist and Black and White, but not everything. Anyway, the teasers made it seem like the thread of this documentary was going to be following James Tobak as he shot a sexual thriller with Neve Campbell over a super condensed, absurd shooting schedule of twelve days. That would have been interesting, but that was not what the film was. The first several minutes of the film made it seem like perhaps it was going to be a documentary about how James Tobak was a crazy, crazy, dude. That would have been entertaining, but there wasn't so much of that, either. What there was a lot of were random shots from James Toback movies interspersed with interviews with random people who have worked with James Toback interspersed with footage of James Toback shooting and selling When Will I Be Loved. Look, I'm sure if youfre a James Toback fan or whatnot, this is interesting. I wasn't interested. So if this goal of this film was in any way to get people who are not James Toback fans to be James Toback fans, it did not work because I left the movie less interested in seeing any of his other films than I was when I went in. Except for When Will I Be Loved, because Neve Campbell is hot.

Score: 50 (and I'm giving it this because if you are a fan of his, you will probably enjoy it.)

Little Athens
OHMYGOD I HATED THIS SO MUCH. This was the buzz movie of the festival. It was a world premier. The entire cast was there. It had a million plus dollar budget and a distribution deal. Every other poster or flyer was all about Little Athens. OHMYGOD. If I hadn't been there with other people, I would have left after forty minutes. AND THIS FILM GOT A BUDGET AND DISTRIBUTION.

Firstly, plot. It's supposed to capture a day in the life of slacker loser high school graduates who didn't go to college and live in the small town of Athens, Arizona. I don't know. Maybe my high school friends who didn't go to college and hung around my small town are different than these kids, but their days aren't an awful lot like the one described here. There are four storylines. We have the kid who is trying to sell a bundle of drugs that he stole from another drug dealer who overdosed and killed himself. The reason he needs to sell these drugs is because he got into gambling debt and needs to pay off his gay bookie before he gets anally raped. Just like my friends. Then there is the story line about the two guys who get evicted from their house for not paying rent while also seemingly for no reason hauling around one of their younger sisters and then steal a car to pay the rent. God, these are just like my friends. Thirdly, there are the two best friends who work as EMTs together and end up hating each other because one ends up sleeping with the other (crazy) one's boyfriend. Okay, maybe some similarity there. The fourth storyline is about a girl who may or may not have cheated on her boyfriend while neglecting a child she's supposed to be taking care of and giving the boyfriend a disease, and then they beat the shit out of each other. I TOTALLY FEEL LIKE I KNOW THESE PEOPLE.

And when I lay it out like that, doesn't it seem like it might end up being an engaging, neat film about how these storylines all converge at a party at the end of the night? Except ... NOT. OHMYGOD. I got so excited during the first fifteen minutes. It looked like this was going to be a nifty little film. Then it spent an hour meandering at the pace of tar to its inevitably unsatisfying destination, all the while suffering from slightly pretentious camera angles, too little information about characters and stories and TOTAL confusion about who the characters were since EVERY SINGLE FEMALE CHARACTER LOOKED EXACTLY ALIKE. Apparently Athens, Arizona is a small town with nothing but stunningly beautiful blond women who are all tall and thin with small breasts and straight, shoulder length hair. I'm not kidding. Single men head there now. Multiple people afterwards said they got confused about which girl was which. And then, and then, the last ten minutes of the film were great. Except I couldn't even care because the hour of film before the last ten minutes reached a point where it was so physically painful that I couldn.not.care at ALL about the last ten minutes. All I could think about during the last ten minutes was how much I wanted to get out of the theater.

Score: 10