The Stinky Ratatouille Script: One Reader Speaks Out!

I’m expecting some dissent under this blog.  Everyone loved this movie when it came out. Everyone. It got 96% on rotten tomatoes and nobody said it wasn’t wonderful.  And I know I’m a stick in the mud so I held my tongue at the time, but it’s been a while now and I’ve got to denigrate a national treasure and finally speak the words that have been caught in my throat for a year: Best Original Screenplay Nominee? Areyouforreal??

I will give you best animated feature. I will maybe even give you best written animated feature. I will also give you that Patton Oswald and many other voice actors are great. And, of course, I will give you that it looks amazing.  But the screenplay? The way it’s written? Is kind of dumb.  Isn’t it?  Do we have enough distance to admit this?  To find out, let your mind take a fantastical trip to the olden days of 2007, when change and the depression hadn’t come to America and we were all still able to cream our jeans over silly stuff like sophisticated animation.  Are you there yet?  Ok, let’s discuss:

So, I get and understand the part of this movie story where Remy the Foodie Rat is running from people and dodging obstacles in order to avoid their knives and clubs and other instruments of death, necessitating fast-moving visuals that will allow animators to show off.

However, I would like to have the other 7 minutes and 30 seconds of this film explained to me.

What I mean is, other than a rat wanting to cook, which was ably explained by the movie poster, can you who would defend this script (or one of your easygoing friends) explain what this movie is about, i.e. what it’s message or theme is?  After the rat dodges lots of obstacles and knives and moves to the city, then becomes a chef (by dodging lots of obstacles and knives) it becomes confusing to me. Because we have a human and a rat, both of whom seem to have personal struggles (in addition to the Rat’s continued, physical struggle of obstacle/knife evasion), and both of whose personal struggles seem to have about 10 competing morals or messages. Here are some of the morals and messages presented at different key moments in the movie, all of which seem like they are central and important at the time, only to be forgotten about moments later:

• Anyone can cook.
• (slightly modified) Anyone can cook so long as they don’t cook TV dinners, which are for jerks and poor people and non-chef rats.
• Anyone can do anything? (except in this movie world only the rat can really cook)
• Don’t steal, even if you’re a rat.
• Rats are people, too?
• It’s ok to steal if you’re stealing for your art.
• People are rat-killers and deserve to be stolen from.
• People are actually ok.
• Prejudice against both rats and people is wrong.
• Don’t hate stuff that isn’t you, whether it’s rats, people, food or France.  Except hate frozen food, though. It sucks.
• It’s wrong to kill rats, but it’s ok for rats to cook other animals so long as the result is delicious.
• Be yourself.
• Be yourself if by being yourself you will be a great chef.  If being yourself means being a janitor, then you should pretend to be someone else for a while.
• After you’re done lying about being a chef, tell the truth and even though you’ve got zero culinary talent, if you come out as yourself, your chef girlfriend who fell for you in part for your culinary talent will still love you because you’re being your honest self, even though she has no idea what that honest self is since you have been pretending to be someone else who had everything in common with her until now.
• If you want to be a great chef (or any other kind of artist), you may have to devote your life to that and as a result not really be a rat or a person, but some sort of culinary ‘tweener. Food knows no species. Food wants you to be an outcast and live down by the docks.
• Following your dreams is more important than anything. (provided your dream is in the arts. if you like accounting you should probably watch this movie about a rat who can cook a few more times).
• Per the Peter O’Toole character: Not anyone can cook, but great cooks can come from anywhere.
• Rats who claimed to love garbage and family really just want and deserve to eat in restaurants like humans and will learn good taste if given the opportunity.
• Can’t we all just get along?
• France and Paris are whimsical and pretty enough for anything to be possible.
• OMG that meat cleaver is coming right for you! Duck!

That’s what I wrote down during a second viewing of Ratatouille.  And it’s confusing.  I honestly can’t tell which of these is the real central theme or message and which is just something I’m supposed to ignore once it has passed because it was only there to give motivation for that one scene’s fleeing from objects and/or showing off of dazzling, sparkly flatwear. It’s convenient for the film that there is actually a federal law that any movie geared at people under 18 must have “Be Yourself” as its overriding moral, since that’s sprinkled liberally everywhere, conflicting directly with some character arcs and muddying the waters enough that I can’t really point to anything more specific at the heart of the script. And I keep asking you to provide evidence to the contrary because, since I can’t find any, I would like to submit that there is none.

This means that, while the movie is entertaining and cool to look at and I can enjoy it for reasons other than its screenplay, the screenplay itself shouldn’t have been singled out for praise because it didn’t do its job -telling a coherent story- exceptionally well.  It did the bare minimum, in fact, and spent most of its pages creating opportunities for animators.

Good job on the shiny, photorealistic kitchen surfaces, though.

 

 

What You’re Doing for Thanksgiving (if you live in a movie script)

1.) Playing touch football more happily and with more shenanigans and stripey sweaters and scarves than you’ve ever played touch football before.

2.) Sleeping with the mysterious, movie-star attractive, single, same-age-as-you guest your brother/sister brought home, whom they’ve never mentioned to you even though they’re best friends.

3.) Announcing your engagement/pregnancy/terminal illnes at the dinner table.

4.) Getting cursed out by your foul-mouthed, racist grandma.

5.) Getting a new perspective on your midlife crisis/divorce/smack addiction from your wise, worldly, young-at-heart grandpa.

6.) Arguing with your mom while doing dishes about either having too many babies to leave town and make something of yourself or having no babies because you left and made something of yourself (ladies only!).

7.)  Realizing you’re a big city asshole and that you should move back to the small town where you grew up and handcraft some furniture in order to achieve true happiness.

Note: if you don’t live in a movie or screenplay, numbers 1-7 will probably have a lot more to do with eating, watching television, napping and, if we’re being really honest here, some farting.

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Scriptreader Investigates: Nic Cage…Fucking With Me?

Up until about five years ago, i felt like I could at least partly understand what Nic Cage was doing. First (1981-1986) he was doing the parts he could get–movies that needed handsome young kids, movies his uncle made, etc . Then (1987-1992) he was doing weird shit he liked –usually because it allowed him to do a weird voice or accent. Then (1992-1995), he was trying to be a capital A Actor, either through lead roles in potential hit films, or through roles in movies that would allow him to finally win an Oscar.  Then (1995-2002) he had accomplished both of those things and so realized he’d like to be rich and look cool and handsome and young and hairy-headed in movies and did only movies that could give him those things (it’s easy to feel this way when you’ve just fallen madly in love with handsome, persuasive Jerry Bruckheimer…he is such a DREAMBOAT!). Then (2002-2004)  he was like, “Fuck. I better do a few good movies in between these bad blockbuster movies so that I don’t wind up in strictly treasure hunter kid movies someday.”

But lately, even though ostensibly he’s still running that pattern, I have no idea what is going through his head because the quality of the scripts he’s picking has gone to total opposite extremes. It’s either really good or godawful with very little of the middle ground that often is the intimate friend of the blockbuster actor who still wants respect. I’ve become aware of this at this late stage mostly because I just saw Ghost Rider and I can’t believe anybody famous would ever consent to do that to themselves any more than I would consent to be sold into a prostitution ring so dastardly that all my previous romances would retroactively be tainted and declared prostitution even if they were beautiful and pure.  But even with that ridiculous movie and Bangkok Dangerous and National Treasure 2, and even despite the craziness that is going on with his hair and teeth and face which are now colluding to make him look, basically, like a skeleton with a coonskin cap on its head and even with the fact that his new “acting” is often just a caricature of old, good acting that he’s done, he still gets offered very good projects all the time.  I have read three of the scripts he’s slated to star in or has just finished shooting, and they range from Wibberleys bad to very good.

So I guess, yes, my confusion arises partly from the fact that really good people keep hiring him, which is more about them than it is about what he’s thinking.  But on the other hand he will show up for a good movie and often do a good job.  So that tells me that a) he is still able to act and b) he can distinguish between the good movies, where he actually acts, and the bad, bad movies where he is simply a parody of his former self, making the Nic Cage of Wild At Heart and Raising Arizona cry out of embarrassment at seeing the same style applied to a Disney movie about finding a solid golden Mayan temple inside of Mt. Rushmore in order to prove one’s great great grandfather didn’t help kill Lincoln(<–actually a movie plot. no shitting!).

So my question is, is he actually smart enough to take crappy B material that is, because of the way Hollywood is run right now, being produced as blockbuster A films, and, through talent and smarts, still managing to get himself hired onto real movies?  Or does he simply say yes to anyone who meets his quote and some of the people who do happen to  be making good movies?

My feeling is that he’s doing all of this to fuck with me. Because unlike, say, Eddie Murphy, I really can’t ever write him off. I watched him scream and turn into a flaming skeleton for five minutes  and thought “How is this guy still working in anything but B Disney movies?” all the while knowing that he’s about to be in knowing a script i’ve read a few times and liked (i hear the movie isn’t perfect, but still, it’s a good project that many people would love to be on). Basically, the lower he sinks, and the more bad movies I see him in, the more certain I feel that I will still be forced to take him seriously in good movies and give the fact that he’s attached to scripts I read some kind of positive weight, even if they’re really good and all I can see when I imagine him in them is a flaming, screaming skull with weird plugs.

I want answers.  Nicholas Cage: Are you fucking with me? If so, is it because of that thing that happened at Luques? Because I didn’t mean it and i believe i apologized at the time and it really did look like a ladies room.  Please let me know.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do you know why the Cage’d hair clings?

What you must do in order to “make it” in Hollywood:

 

 

VOTE!

 

If that’s not enough incentive, here’s a picture of someone else who would be made very happy if you exercised your most important right as an American:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Back with an actual blog next week, I hope.)

I like movies about politics and Emile Hirsch (still) sucks.

I can’t really think of a script reading blog today.  I have election fever and it is blocking my brain from other activities.  But here’s something:

With a week left until the big day, I have noticed a lot of people listing movies about elections and presidential politics, but, surprisingly, i have not yet seen a list that has all five of my favorite movies on the subject.  So here they are, listed (in my opinion) from the least to the most cynical:

1.) Dave (1993)

2.) Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)

3.) All the President’s Men (1976)

4.) Primary Colors (1998)

5.) Bob Roberts(1992)

I am kind of embarassed to admit that if I had to pick a president from among the politicians in these movies, I would go with Dave Kovick…the everyman who knows nothing about the office.  Jack Stanton (thinly veiled Bill Clinton) of Primary Colors is my second choice and Jimmy Stewart’s Jeff Smith is third.  He should probably be first but I have an ambivalent relationship with naivete.  Even his. I would not vote for Nixon or Bob Roberts, but if I were a member of the academy of crazy eyes arts and sciences, I would vote for Jack Black’s Bob Roberts character for craziest eyes EVER.

In related news, Emile Hirsch (aka the man of zero faces),  has succeeded in making the only celebrity voting PSA that has ever made me want to not vote out of spite.

Scary Blog: Your Barbarella Costume’s Days Are Numbered

Just wanted to let you know that if you, like me, have been thinking about being Barbarella for the past 2 Halloweens only to settle on something easier because finding metal capes and black body stockings that aren’t super porny is too much work, get your mofo shit together TODAY.   This is our year.  The last year.

I’m saying this not because Barbarella costumes could provide a groovy feminist counterpoint to Sarah Palin costumes, perhaps dispensing sex pills like candy at adult parties while Sarah Palin hoards all the chocolate coins and morning after pills so as to save you from yourself. They could, but I’m really saying this because I have read the Robert Rodriguez Barbarella and it is slated to come out next year (it’s possible this project is dead, but i have had it come through my company again recently and there are counter-rumors and i’m not taking any chances).

If you enjoyed the tone and spirit of the original film, I can tell you that this Barbarella is going to disappoint you.  On the other hand, it will delight teenage boys who have never seen the ‘68 version but who have recently learned to masturbate, and who will likely make it a success and talk it up, which will in turn cause teenage girls to dress up on subsequent Halloweens as Rose McGowan or whoever replaces her in the title role, thus draining the steamy, jacuzzi-sized tub of fun that was the orignal/the idea of dressing like Jane Fonda in it, down to a few tepid inches.

Look, in terms of structure and dialog and such, this script wasn’t terrible or anything. And I don’t begrudge a guy wanting to remake this movie and neither does Dino de Laurentis, who produced the original and is producing this new version.  But I do think that 79 year-old de Laurentis’s judgement is less sound than that of 39 year-old de Laurentis.  And I do think that it’s a huge mistake to make Barbarella into a big budget, exploitation-action hybrid with so much girl on girl action, topless lady fighting and other such straight-up, male-only fantasy material in it.  This version -to me at least- read like a space-themed issue of the Fredericks of Hollywood catalog, with none of the playfully strange sexiness  –exciting and appealing to both men and women–of the original, unless you consider it playful to be hit in the head with a two-by-four of Sin City-style f-ing.  I would prefer to just cut out the middle man and watch Showtime after dark than this remake, and I wish Rodriguez would look elsewhere for a presold property.  Like maybe in Russ Meyer’s catalog, which was booby, but honestly so.  Camp and the sexual ambiguity and strange power dynamics represented by a dude with angel wings are not bad, stupid things to be cast off because we’re so modern and this ain’t your grandaddy’s sexy movie.  Far more retrograde is only showing me women named Jessica riding electric bulls all the time.

So I’ve got my chainmail bodice and as I have mentioned on previous occasions, my hair is already awesome (and in Barbarella style).  I advise those of you who want to enact this fantasy while it’s still tinged with empowerment and not strictly pandering*, get on the stick.  Except if you know me personally and we are going to be hanging out on Halloween and you is stealing my idea.  Because then i will fucking cut you.  Or take a picture with you.  Whichever.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Obviously a little pandering will be involved.  I’m not made of stone.

An Open Letter to the Makers of “Quarantine”

To Whom It May Concern:

What will it take to convince you that I have been reached by your ad campaign and know that you have a film that came out this weekend?  I have seen banner ads on practically every website I visit, all my social networking sites, the billboards on sunset and everywhere else, my radio and, i believe, the bottom of some friends’ hotmail emails. I don’t even really watch commercials because I have a DVR, but you have saturated the shows i watch with ads to such an extent that the few times in recent memory that i’ve left the room or taken a call or started talking to the person sitting next to me when a show went to commercial, your ad has always been the first thing to come up.

Let me tell you which of the ads i’m referring to: The Ad. The only ad you seem to run with the only footage you seem to have. She’s in a dark room, she doesn’t know what’s happening and there’s something scary behind her that grabs her. I get it.  Mocku-Docu-creature-Blair-Cloverfield-”i’m really scared” Project.  I understand your product, what it does and how i can obtain it. You have earned your money today. Now, when was the last time you treated yourself to a long lunch? What’s that? You’re not hungry? Rats.

Let me just throw this idea out: What if I signed a waiver that guaranteed you that I knew what your movie was called and when it was opening?  Would that absolve me of my obligation to think about your movie when doing work, in my car, relaxing, trying to compose a thought, etc?

Not biting? Ok…what if I promised to bring in two other people to sign the form, and then they promised to bring two in and so on and so on? Would that make the offer more attractive to you?

No, huh? OK, final offer: I get a tattoo of the name of your movie and 10/10/08 on the thumb and forefinger of my right hand, so that every time i shake hands with someone they are made aware that you have a movie that you would like us all to see. In exchange I get to live in a world that doesn’t revolve around the girl in the room talking to the camera and then getting yanked away from the camera. Deal? Let me know.

Respectfully,

Cecelia Script Reader, President, Consumers Against Faulty Eyewear*

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Bonus Reader Quiz! For those few of you reading this who aren’t part of the thousands-strong marketing team for Quarantine, this consumer group name was taken from a movie about summer fun.  Can you name this move?  The only prize as of right now is my respect, but if i can cut a deal with the Quarantine people i might be able to get you out of your ad watching responsibilities as well, so send in those answers!

 

 

 

DeforMALity in Horror: One More Thing that Skeeves me Out.

Read a script today in which the terrifying killer is fought off by his would-be victims, who know he is a neat freak and cleverly upset his porcelain knickknack collection so as to make him lose his shit.

This is not the first time that OCD or other hospital-corners fixations have been attached to bad people in movies to make them seem creepier.  Actually, by my count it’s the 7001st time.  Far fewer are the times that the homicidal maniac is a big old slob, which would seem more likely since homocide is such a big job it would seem to preclude thorough housekeeping.

In the same family for me are scripts in which the killers have some physical deformity.  I read Wrong Turn back when it was looking for funding, and remember distinctly that the mountain men in it were described as being huge and hideous because of generations of inbreeding.  Kind of taking a page from Deliverance’s backwoodsy book without actually reading that book, which is about some tiny, feeble banjo-playing people.

And it’s not just inbreeding. I’ve read lots of other stories involving a mentally or physcially disordered killer, including a script where the killer is afflicted with albinism and I was supposed to be scared by him touching the the creamy white skin of some kidnapped girl with his own…creamy white skin.

I guess it’s possible that being afflicted with a physical deformity could make you more likely to want to kill other people in ridiculous ways. And i definitely agree that people with mental disorders lend themselves to horror since there have been killers with such disorders in real life.

Still, I don’t like it. Unless it’s done very well, this sort of thing makes me go all cringey.

When you present a killer as having some sort of deformity or impairment, once i get past your lingering shots of their stump hand or pink eyes, lovingly grotesqued up by Rick Baker if you’re lucky, I still find them way less terrifying than other, less deformo characters. Possibly this is because I have hospital corners tendencies myself, but mostly I think it’s because it’s so easy and convenient to distance ourselves from the scary stuff by lumping it under the heading of “different,” or “not like anyone i know,” and there’s no heading that says that better than a physical or mental deformity.  On the other hand, Ted Bundy has me practically peeing my pants when I hear his name because he looks like everyone and his smile only looks creepy when you know he used it to kill.

So unless a writer creates a very specific psychosis for their villain based on his or her deformity, i’m almost always going to respond better to a story with a good-looking killer with all his fingers and toes.   And anyway, do albinos and inbreeders and *sharp intake of breath* very neat people really need yet another reason for people to look at them like they have the plague?

I should close with the caveat that all of the above doesn’t apply to the mentally retarded.  I think they are aching to be stood next to the albinos and the OCD-havers as the next slasher to do some crazy, evil crimes. Am I right?  I mean, these people have been confined to a portrait of innocent and good-temperedness for long enough! Probably because the people who make movies about mentally retarded characters are Oscar hounds and they know that horror movies with non-retarded physical or mentally disordered characters is a thankless labor of love, not a fucking accolade party.  Case in point, where’s this guy’s oscar?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He acted his inbred heart out for you for NOTHING!

(It’s a sin to shoot a mockingbird, you know.)

The Dog Ate My Blog.

Back next week.  In the meantime, anyone wanna discuss Spike Lee? Specifically, his reaction to Italians getting angry about Miracle At St. Anna’s revisionist history take on a massacre of Italian civilians in WWII, which the film blames on partisan collaboration with the Nazis, which in real life probably didn’t happen.

I read this script and thought that the reaction of James McBride, who wrote the movie, was about right. It is shitty to have your story told by other people. However, what he wrote was a fictionalized version of events that was more like a 40’s war movie about group soldier dynamics than it was a factually accurate docudrama, so he took some liberties.

But Spike Lee had to be all Fuck You, I am not apologizing and you should get used to the fact that you guys don’t know everything and this could have happened in Italy during the war. This is too bad in my opinion. Missed opportunity. To not be the Spike Lee who sues Spike TV and to instead be the Spike Lee who tells great stories.  Like some magical, mystical, thread-spinning black man.

The Worst Script I Ever Read

It had everything you want a bad script to have to be the kind of bad that at least entertains (since you have to read it either way). It was wonderful in its awfulness, and reading it, I could feel the universe opening in front of me with infinite possibilities for badness and goodness since, if someone could think of something this ridiculous, someone out there on the other end of the bad/good spectrum probably has the capacity to think of a peace bomb or a racism vaccine or something else wondrous.  Infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters.  One of them made Shakespeare’s plays and now one of them has made a screenplay with this logline:

Alien monsters (I won’t specify further since, though bad, this is nonetheless someone’s intellectual property, but picture something all big and overblown like you’re supposed to get in creature horror) invade a Nazi concentration camp and the prisoners and guards have to put aside their differences and fight the REAL enemy. 

You realize, of course, that this means that there are people out there who think there’s something scarier than the fucking holocaust.

 

“I can haz Obersturmbannführer?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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