December 2007 Archives
December 9, 2007
Slight Update
- Hate my job. “My” new girl (I forgot to mention I put that in the title only because every single person in the building started referring to her as “my” girl, as if she were a personal assistant or sex slave or something) ended up quitting not too long after I started, which was fine because I wanted her to go away as soon as humanly possible. Things were fine for about a month, when my boss decided he was going to hire the niece of an employee with more seniority…to be trained to do my job. After we had come to an agreement (built largely on lies I was finally prepared to tell) that I would stay, so he didn’t need to find a replacement. On top of which, he was going to move me to a different job I have even less interest in doing. And, as the weeks have gone on, “my” second new girl has revealed herself to be one of the biggest fucking idiots I’ve ever met. Ever. On the plus side, I’ve made her cry twice so far.
- Yeah, this whole entry was going to be a bulletpoint list of all the shit going on my life, but it turns out I’m already tapped out. Obviously, I haven’t found a good job, despite still looking (and harder than ever, since I have no interest in spending the next six months babysitting a retard), so there’s no news on that front. Even if I could afford a girlfriend, I’m not really in a place right now where that’d be a good idea. At all. Don’t have any scripts sold, and thanks to the strike, I won’t any time soon. I got nothing.
Oh, except a few updates on The Manager:
- Turns out, he embarrassed the shit out of himself, Internet-style, by appearing “in-person” on a well-known screenwriting message board, claiming to rep three of the six finalists on Steven Spielberg and Mark Burnett’s disastrous competitive reality show, On the Lot. When a cursory investigation of this claim led everyone to realize he was full of shit, the board turned on him. On top of this, he mentioned a goofy service he started, its reputable clients and success, but when asked for specifics, he ducked all the questions. Then, he elected to pick some small fights with the most vocal people in the thread, until the point that a moderator locked it. Since this is a public board, it’s now one of the top Google hits if you search his name. Not exactly a stellar way to make a name for yourself.
- His obsession with a certain 1980s Saturday-morning cartoon, and the fact that it is indeed making a comeback, have led him to petition. I intended to wonder, since this “Digg” was apparently dugg only 12 days ago, why it took him six months to gather this information. However, according to a (now-deleted — thanks, Google cache!) post on his defunct blog, The Manager has gone awesomely insane. Essentially, he tries to take credit for hyping up the franchise enough that they’d buy somebody else’s spec script, even though they either didn’t like his idea or didn’t even hear him out (it’s unclear which is the case). He’s trying to pass off his idea as better, even though he hasn’t read the spec script. He sent some insane e-mails to high-level people at the studio and somehow they didn’t just ignore him. A few days later, he started this “petition,” although it looks like he thought better of the whole mess since he deleted the posts from his blog.
My only response: strange things are afoot at the Circle K.
Posted by Stan on December 9, 2007 7:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Reviews
December 11, 2007
The Windy City Incident
What follows is the synopsis provided by Ariztical Entertainment, distributors of The Windy City Incident:
Chanel Puget resides in peaceful Olympia, Washington, and is frequently haunted by ghostly dreams. One evening, Chanel has a vivid dream and is “ordered” to travel to Chicago. Despite continual pressure from his boyfriend of two months (Randy), Chanel follows the message in his dreams and heads for Chicago, the “windy city.” Upon his arrival, Chanel wastes no time supporting his rent and daily expenses by hustling on the streets. One evening while visiting a drag bar, Chanel’s past history collides with the present. Mysteries begin to unravel as it becomes apparent that Chanel’s body and soul have become a vehicle for ghastly and vindictive apparitions. Only the viewer knows if Chanel will safely and sanely make it back to his home in Olympia, or be possessed forever in Chicago by the dreaded ghost, known as “Ant.”This description left me with the foolish belief that I would be reviewing a bizarre, offbeat comedy, the kind of movie that sneaks in under the radar and slowly develops a cult audience of devoted fans.
What I received, instead, was the worst movie I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a shitload of bad movies.
I’m going to be nice and start with the editing, because it’s a huge problem that is easily fixed, all things considered. This shit needs to be tightened up. I imagine the editing is so poor because, at 71 minutes, The Windy City Incident is barely feature-length. Yet, every single shot in this entire movie starts three seconds too soon and lingers at least three seconds too long. It gives the entire movie the pacing of a bad 1970s melodrama.
This problem is most noticeable in the dialogue scenes, where, for some reason that I can only assume is a private joke, an adult male coos like a baby on the soundtrack to punctuate jokes that probably wouldn’t be funny even if the editing were tightened. But let’s pretend this is a film that can be saved. Get rid of the cooing, obviously, and make it appear as if each character is interacting with one another. The goal is to create the illusion that something one person says inspires the next person to speak. Instead, we are treated to shot after shot of actors staring off into space for far too long before delivering their lines.
On the subject of acting, I don’t want to denigrate the cast too much, but it reaches a point where it’s difficult not to. In many scenes, it’s abundantly clear that actors are either reading from cue cards or having lines fed to them by somebody offscreen. You’re shooting on videotape, and these are the best performances that could be culled from these actors? It’d be one thing if this had been shot on film, where every single frame is precious and expensive, but video? You could keep that shit rolling for hours until you get it right. I have my doubts that shooting time was limited by usual factors like lighting, costuming, set decoration (seriously, every set in this movie looks like a dorm room, a boiler room in an abandoned warehouse, or the director’s parents’ house), and sound recording, so why not spend time letting actors rehearse their lines? Or learn them?
With great difficulty, I tried to remove the story/dialogue aspects from the atrocious performances and the goofy pacing. I tried to objectively say whether or not this story would fly if it had been created by a group of competent individuals. Perhaps if the film had been written by the marketing team at Ariztical, we could have had a winner on our hands. Unfortunately, the movie we have plays like a series of loosely connected sketches that aren’t funny, interspersed with sex scenes as awkward and dispassionate as HBO’s Tell Me You Love Me, only more random and less relevant to the skimpy plot.
So what is this? A chance for some friends to fuck around with a camera they bought for $99 at Circuit City and edited in Windows Movie Maker? An opportunity for a sleazy director to tape a variety of starving-actor erections under the guise of making a “comedy”? I tried looking to the audio commentary for answers. In the two minutes I watched before shutting it off in disgust, all I heard was the lip-smacking of two men impolitely eating fast-food and making limp inside-jokes and giggling without letting the audience in on their “creative process.”
Maybe a braver soul will find this DVD and unlock the mysteries of why anybody would make a film like The Windy City Incident, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
Posted by Stan on December 11, 2007 4:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Reviews
December 3, 2007
‘The Closer’/’Saving Grace’
Tonight, cable’s most popular show returns with a Christmas special. Riding hot on its coattails is cable’s somewhat-popular show, which begins a four-episode arc held back from its summer run for reasons I can’t explain.
Frankly, with both series I’m at a loss. I’ve never seen either show before, and neither takes the time to re-establish regular and recurring characters. I tried to leap into the fray but found both shows left me cold. Since I don’t exactly have the time to rush out and rent DVDs of The Closer or track down episodes of Saving Grace, I did the next best thing: I read episode synopses. Very unhelpful episode synopses.
I’d ignore all the stuff I didn’t understand about either show and try to concentrate on everything else, but the problem is that these shows stories are so tied into characters I’ve never met, all I can do is try to grope in the dark and hope I get some things right. If I don’t, you can blame the show’s writers for not giving even small hints of the characters’ relationships to one another.
I guess, at the end of the day, that qualifies as the major drawback of each show: the supporting actors in both shows don’t do much more than prop up Kyra Sedgwick and Holly Hunter. Even in their own subplots, none of these characters showed any real spark. The best thing I can compare it to is Monk, which very much exists as a vehicle for Tony Shalhoub, leaving even seasoned pros like Ted Levine in the background more often than not. It’s a disappointment that The Closer has J.K. Simmons and Jon Tenney and Saving Grace has Leon Rippy and Laura San Giacomo, but their roles feel nonexistent.
It becomes a more significant problem when the cop-show plots’ rote nature reveals itself. These should be shows about the characters above anything else—and by that, I don’t mean “main character.” Why have an ensemble if they only exist to further the plot? One-man shows are cheaper to produce.
Maybe The Closer served itself better by only offering one (two-hour) episode. Kyra Sedgwick’s Brenda Johnson may have the least convincing Southern accent in the history of television, made especially bad next to the vastly superior Barry Corbin and Frances Sternhagen (guest starring as her parents), but Sedgwick is solid enough as a lead. The storyline was a little humdrum—especially the machinations of getting her to fly to Georgia under dubious circumstances—but it does contain a few legitimate surprises. Above all, this is a story of Johnson’s strained relationship with her parents. Since guest stars are required by law to dive into heaping helpings of backstory and exposition, this journey was more palatable than the subplots in which Johnson’s unit…sat around until she got back.
Saving Grace, possibly because these shows were produced to run along with season one, suffers greatly in comparison. It tries to toe the line between dark comedy and brooding drama, with mixed results. Holly Hunter is a skilled actress, and she has (mostly) able support, but I was completely lost. Characters kept saying and doing inexplicable things. Episodes kept having subplots that, I assume, called back to previous episodes, but they made no sense to me. I usually like subtle writing, so I don’t want to complain, but I can say that what I did see hasn’t encouraged me to seek out reruns. Aside from self-conscious attempts to be risqué with language and sexual content, it’s a routine cop show.
Saving Grace’s season finale contains a cliffhanger, which I will not spoil, but the episode illustrates exactly why I have a problem catching a show like this in the middle of its season: it brings to us a story that—one assumes—has been mentioned on the show in the past and has Holly Hunter doing things I’d assume are out of character (based on spending three previous hours with her). Whether it’s out of character or not, the surprise ending felt like the writers were merely continuing their uneasy quest to make the show edgy.
Overall, the inclusion of Earl the Angel and Hunter’s deep-seated lapsed-Catholic rage, Saving Grace feels like it wants to tackle heavy theological and philosophical issues without saying anything new. At least The Closer, while nothing special, doesn’t have such pretentious ambitious.
Posted by Stan on December 3, 2007 9:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Reviews
