Cecelia has worked as a story analyst in the film industry since practically the day she arrived in Los Angeles almost eight years ago, and in that time has worked for a number of LA-based companies and read an estimated 4-5000 scripts, books and plays. So she’s not sweating it, either.
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May 27, 2009
I am aware that it’s been a while between blogs here. Just wanted to say that it’s going to be a little longer. I’m too busy with more pressing stuff. However, next month, when summer is in full swing, I may be able to come back and blog more frequently.
I feel bad about the fact that I don’t have anything film industry related in this post, so:
1) Boy, that Terminator movie looks bad, huh?
2) I believe that in order to innovate in the heist genre, you can’t just tack a 3rd or 4th reversal on after the other act 3 reversals. You have to think of a new kind of heist.
3) From what I could tell from their first 30 minutes, Righteous Kill is not about a righteous kill and Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show contained little comedy and no wild west elements.
April 20, 2009
I like nothing better/worse than a hard ‘R’ from a British person pretending to be an American person. Linus Roach, the new ADA on Law and Order has been pleasing me no end this year. So in case we like-a both the same, here’s a list of my favorite masters of the bad, film-overshadowing accent. For simplicity’s sake I’ll confine this list the the last few decades. If we go further into the past we have to discuss what kind of accent Tony Curtis should have been attempting in Spartacus, an English-language movie about Romans and bring in all of the violence that has been done to Native American and Puerto Rican accents by white people, which would take all day.
5. Robert Redford in Out of Africa. “He didn’t do an accent,” you say? Correct. Because he decided his British accent wasn’t ready or was bad and so they started shooting with him just doing his regular accent, planning to fix it somewhere down the road (I presume by starting to shoot with the British accent at some point when he felt confident and going back and ADRing the early stuff). But he just never got it. So a guy named Denis Finch-Hatton with very specific ideas about Britain’s place in World War I became an American guy who came over from Britain with his British best friend that he met in British school.
4. Julia Roberts in Mary Reilly (and Michael Collins). Sounds like a two-hour, whispered Lucky Charms commercial.
3. Kevin Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Man oh Mando. So delicious. Especially when all attempts at Britishness break right in the middle of a sentence, usually during some very emotional scenes, for example, standing over Brian Blessed’s grave: “I swear my father will be aveeeeahnged. ”
2. Anthony Hopkins in Nixon, Legends of the Fall and anything else where he plays an American. God love him, he’s one of the greatest actors around, but these accents, which shift regions and jump oceans frequently, sometimes in a single word, are a big, amorphous weak spot. Maybe he’s not as bad as Costner. I can’t tell if I’m judging him too harshly because he’s a good, British actor who should be able to pull it off, or not harshly enough. In any case, he can’t go higher on this countdown than number 2, since there’s only one guy who I could ever put in the top spot. Only one guy who’s really earned it. I think you know who I’m talking about.
1. Brad Pitt in Interview with the Vampire, Seven Years in Tibet, The Devil’s Own and Meet Joe Black. I don’t think the word “virtuoso” is inappropriate here. Where accents are concerned, he never met one he couldn’t fuck up. Kind of like in Good Will Hunting how Will Hunting is not only good at math but also at English, History, and basically any other subject he tries his hand at. Brad Pitt would proably even be bad at an Australian accent, which my cat could pull off (at least to the satisfaction of an American audience) with few hitches. And it’s not just that he’s bad. It’s how he’s bad. How he’s indescribably bad. How he’s bad in a way that changes constantly and never simply fades into the background. You can have your Leo DiCaprios and their Gangs of New York Irish accents. They’re just thin, not extending to each word. But Brad Pitt is taking you to another place when he does his French and German and Irish and Death accents, and one thing’s for damn sure: that place ain’t France, Germany, Ireland or Death, respectively. Alas, much like Jim Carey and funny movies, Brad Pitt has stopped doing bad accent movies. I guess when you are at the top/bottom of your game, you need to hang ‘em up and dominate some other game so that there’s room for newcomers. I admire that, but it nonetheless seems like a shame.
Honorable Mention: Nic Cage in any movie where he tries to scam someone by doing a British or other accent. This is not to say that, when he actually feels like working, he can’t credibly put on an accent (see: Raising Arizona) or make up a credible one of his own (see: Peggy Sue Got Married). Rather, I’m saying that his one-scene-only accents in films that he’s clearly just doing for a paycheck are incredibly worth your time if you haven’t seen them. I can’t remember where they are off the top of my head, but I’d say a good place to start looking is Gone in 60 Seconds and the National Treasure movies.
Also, in case you’re wondering why I didn’t bring up movies like JFK and Benjamin Button above, Americans doing bad regional American accents are not included here. They need to be on a separate, thoroughly considered list, because that’s a very competetive field, since every lightweight actress attempts to give the impression of range by taking a movie where she wants to do one. So i feel like the only real way to get to the bottom of who is the worst/best at it is to form a panel of independent experts. However, I will say that I believe Rob Morrow’s Dick Goodwin from Quiz Show should and would finish rather high (or low, depending on how you see it) in the rankings. Chahlie. Tell me you didn’t get the ansa’s Chahlie.
March 24, 2009
(WARNING: My choices in these days when i am actually busy are between writing clean, well-edited blogs never, and writing blogs with the occasional typo sometimes. I chose the latter. Apologies in advance.)
In addition to making 17 Again, I heard that Zac Efron is going to star in a Footloose remake. I can only assume this is a remake of the movie and an adaptation of the broadway musical (that is an adaptation of the movie). I welcome 17 Again again because that thing can only be improved by new input in my opinion, but wish they’d leave Footloose alone, or at least get a star with a more spikey, less bowley haircut (and the inevitable dimpley, saccarine love interest that is bound to accompany said bowley star/haircut). But since I am not in charge, all i can do is hope that it doesn’t do too much violence to the tone of the original. Because what gets lost in remakes of these older, rougher-around-the-edges 80’s movies in the 2000’s, is authenticity. And Efron and the director of high school musical (and now Footloose 2010) are nothing if not authenticity vacuums. Here’s what I think will happen in the new version that I hope does not:
1.) It will look at first like a shot-for-shot remake, but it won’t feel that way, and once we get to the introduction of the Ren character, that will fall by the wayside in favor of making the biggest deal ever over the first shot Zac Efron. If we were in the 90’s, I’d predict a tilt up his entire body, but today? I don’t know. Maybe a mirror spot and a gauzy filter (scoff if you like, but to me, Zac Efron has always been his generation’s Lillian Gish) as he gets off of an powder blue motorcycle? That’s going too far into the realm my paranoid fantasies for this film but the real thing’ll be closer to that than you think. Like, the motorcycle might be black.
2.) I notice a lot of straightedge protagonists in current teen movies: even when their friends are drinkers they are not. The reason for this trend, I assume, is that American children can’t be trusted to choose thier own paths through a field of options of varying degrees of moral peril. So unlike the 1984 film, where the teens drink and fornicate, as their parents are afraid they will, and turn out ok anyway, in the remake they’ll love dancing, but not partying in general. So, they may go across state lines to dance, but I don’t think I’m gonna see any beers in their manicured hands.
3.) Ariel (who will not be allowed to look like a scarecrow anymore but will instead still be thin and willowy, but also shorter, with boobs and a butt) will reveal at some point late in the film that she’s actually a virgin and didn’t go all the way with bad boyfriend Chuck–and that’s if the Ariel badgirl element is still even in the movie. Because slutty badgirl heroines in current teen movies only appear that way until the middle of act two when they reveal they’ve been pretending to be bad for the most part (ie, when you think they’re skipping class to screw they’re actually feeding homeless people to protest dissecting pigs in bio) and “saving it” for true love (and for after the movie ends) because they are romantics. What was most moving about the 1984 Footloose last time I watched was how Ariel gets to come back to her old self from being the town slut and, somehow, is still allowed to be just a teenager without being revirginized by a plot twist. There’s one scene in particular where Ren picks her up for the prom and tells her she’s beautiful and she acts shy…really shy and like she doesn’t believe him, and pretends like she didn’t hear what he said so that he’ll say it again. Not because she’s secretly a virgin who is inexperienced with men, but because she’s not a virgin and nonetheless hasn’t had the experience of feeling special yet because she’s just a kid who is figuring things, including sex, out, with varying degrees of success. This leads me to another prediction:
4) In this movie, when Ren picks Ariel up to go to the prom, he’ll come into her house and she’ll walk down the stairs in a ridiculous dress and look perfect (and like her hair and makeup were done by professional movie make-up and hair people), and she will know she looks perfect and his adoring look up at her will be expected. Because real feelings of vulnerability about real imperfections have been jettisoned in current teen movies in favor of the kind of gloss and glamour that used to be reserved for MGM musicals about rich, perfect people, not 16 year-old country bumpkins. Sure, today’s teen protagonists all have to figure out how to be themselves (because as of about 1999 it has been required by LAW that that is the moral of every movie that is made for primarily under-25 consumption), but the process of doing so feels perfunctory, like it’s just an excuse for dancing and set pieces. In other words, characers are constructed as perfect, then imbued with one technicality that has only to be removed for true perfection to be attained.
5.) Everyone will be extremely good looking and wear VERY trendy clothes. The kids in the old Footloose looked like kids. Their clothes looked cool but worn in and cheap. I predict not so, the remake.
4.) The religious aspects of the story will be a total mess. The original was able to take parse the religious ideology, finding a way for everyone to be a human being AND make up their own minds about what God would want them to do, without taking a stand on religion itself. Since no one is allowed to get near the church one way or another in current tweener and teen films without the films being deemed more “adult,” (again, teens aren’t allowed make up their own minds and need a clean, clear message delivered to them), I have no idea what will happen with this. Except that it probably won’t be terribly coherent.
5.) Whereas Kevin Bacon was the kind of biscuit that women of all ages and stripes could sink their teeth into, Zac Efron will only be attractive to girls who are younger than he is.
6.) All of the kids will be far more jaded, knowing, etc. than high-class hookers. Again, they won’t have ever done anything REALLY wrong (because that would make them unredeemable). But they will know it all, because kids in movies aren’t allowed to be naive anymore, like Willard was back in 1984 (RIP Chris Penn). They have too many blackberries and pop songs to sell. So that great scene where the kids don’t know what to do at the prom that they have been fighting for once they finally get there will be pretty hollow. I can’t picture any trendy teens in trendy clothes who have been likely using trendy lingo for the first hour and a half of the film standing against the wall, picking their noses and needing someone to run in and scream “Let’s DANCE!” to give them their cues.
I feel sad writing this list. I really do believe that movies come in cycles and that cycles fit within historical periods, so I’m not making the argument that all movies from Before are good and all movies from Now are bad and that movies in The Future will be worse, so much as I’m saying that I don’t like this historical period, just like i wouldn’t have liked the 1960’s musical epics and beach blanket films.
The 2000’s have wound up being kind of a mixed bag, where cool, smart, original movies that challenge a lot of the stuff discussed above come out frequently, but are clearly marked and marketed as such to smaller audiences who are credited with more irony and taste but also with less power to drive the market, while mass entertainment is not allowed to deviate from formulas that ensure not only plot and structural sameness, but also ideological containment. If the 80’s was the decade of great popcorn movies and the 90’s was the decade of the indie, maybe the 2000’s are a decade of efficiency: giving people the quickest path to the genre of their choice, and showing them films that adhere so closely to that genre as defined by its most successful entries that there is no time or opportunity to movie the genre forward (as most of the old successes -1984’s Footloose included– actually did when they came out). I don’t like it. We need another American New Wave. Somebody start one.
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March 8, 2009
Saw: The Watchmen. Who watches the Watchmen? People who love backstory and exposition, apparently. Some possible alternate titles - I Showed You This Already but Now Let Me Tell it to You As Well, My Blue Weiner (and Butt!), and Before We Can Fight Crime I Have Some Anxieties That I Would Like to Discuss.
Rented: Australia. Hugh Jackman is obviously handsome and talented, Nicole Kidman has obviously been punishing free radicals and wearing a lot of sun hats, and Baz Luhrman has obviously seen Out of Africa, Pearl Harbor and Far and Away, among others, but hopes that you haven’t, or at least that you won’t recognize their plotting now that it has been given a tan and a twangier accent.
Read: A script I can’t tell you the title of that is the supposed “true story” of some people fighting off demons. Any guesses as to what all of the action sequences with the fighting off of the demons consist of? Praying. As David Cross might say, these folks pray the shit out of their fucking prayers. Only not like Max Von Sydow in The Exorcist, apparently, because the only thing I wanted to get behind me at the end was any memory of it. Satan? Not so much. Afterward I still didn’t believe he existed in the form of a red, ugly beast who wants to poke me in the behind with a pitchfork or put coal in my stocking on Christmas or whatever it is he’s meant to do. I can only imagine the buzz for this film if it were ever made. “Did you guys see that fourth praying scene? The one where they pray for nothing bad to happen to them and nothing bad happens? Oh man was that hair-raising!”
“Hey, my eyes are up here, Jerks.”
February 24, 2009
I got to go to the Oscars. It was fun.
The best part of the night, aside from watching the my date’s stuff in the show, and aside from sitting next to Alfred Maysles, was the dessert that was served at the governor’s ball. it was a box that opened into three separate compartments containing cookies, ice cream and chocolates respectively. The box was colored red and pink and had an oscar statue standing on top of it. It looked good enough to eat, and I thought that in this strange world in which i was watching Mike Leigh and Tilda Swinton wolfing down salad next to one another, anything should be possible, and so i took a bite of the box and the people sitting around me thought i was acting screwey until i chewed and swallowed it. White chocolate.
Willy Woscars!
There. Done.
