Posted by Stan on May 29, 2008 1:15 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em

May 26, 2008

Learning to Be a Writer

In the fall of 1997, I joined a creative writing club that I didn’t really want to join at the insistence of a teacher I spent far too much time trying to please. The English Department had given this teacher, Mr. Hart, the opportunity to take over their barely existent creative writing department, which consisted of one class and an after-school club. I didn’t want to join because I figured it’d be made up of a bunch of weirdos. I wasn’t wrong, although it turned out they were exactly the type of weirdos I wanted to hang around with.

By the spring of 1998, we had turned into the dorkiest group of friends imaginable. It was the first time anyone my age had ever read (or heard read) my stuff, and they were pretty encouraging. The only big problem: I’d been under the impression what I was writing was pretty serious and dramatic. It surprised me to learn they all thought it was hilarious and ironic. It’s just one of those things, I guess. This isn’t bragging because I honestly hate it and would change it if I could, but the only time I’m able to not be funny is when I’m trying to be funny, at which point I spew forth jokes so lame Fozzie Bear would grimace in disgust.

I rationalized that I have a skill most people don’t — and if they do, it’s not so effortless — but that didn’t make me feel as good as you might think. It did reach a point where I found myself able to merge legitimate, dramatic emotion with my comedic weirdness, but that’s the closest I’ve come to straight, unfunny work.

But in this story, the “funny” takes on some importance, so keep it in mind.

One morning in early March, Hart mentioned he’d been approached by a teacher who coordinated the annual Earth Day Jam, which is about as lame as it sounds. This teacher was kind of a touchy-feely hippie kinda guy who wanted every single club or activity in the school to be represented, if possible. To that end, he wondered if maybe the creative writing club would like to put together something for the Jam.

“What?” I asked. “Like a reading or something?”

“Well…” Mr. Hart said, taking that hushed, confidential tone that made idiots like me feel like we had a “friendly” rapport rather than just the normal student-teacher relationship. “Phoebe and I came up with this idea, and we’d like you to write it.”

Phoebe was another member of the club, someone I’d both befriend and developed a moderate crush on. In retrospect, I have no clue if she was involved in this or not. I know that he knew I had a crush on her (it was pretty obvious), so he might have figured I’d join up with anything that had Phoebe’s name attached to it. He wasn’t wrong.

The idea went like this: a group of stoners use Earth Day as an excuse to get high, but they discover the true meaning of Earth Day. It was edutainment: it teaches you while you learn. Hart wanted some kind of sketch-comedy from this premise, and it sounded like an idea I could work with.

Things went wrong almost immediately. Although I didn’t get a negative vibe from it at the start, I got annoyed with Mr. Hart’s insistence that this was my project, even though it wasn’t my idea and he’d impede what little I contributed. Sure, I wrote the script, but when I tried to cast it, Hart didn’t seem to care about anything…until I started bringing in my actor friends. He jumped in to tell me that I had to cast it using members of the writing club, none of whom had any acting experience. I forced a compromise because the script had two male parts, and the only other male in the club refused to participate, so I had to get one of my actor friends to do it.

He, in turn, palmed the script off on another friend, who was funny enough and nice enough, but it sort of blurred the line between truth and fiction because, basically, he didn’t have to act to play the part of lazy burnout. During our minimal rehearsal time, he start ad-libbing. A lot. And it was funny, so I went with it. I had some minor concerns that his ad-libs might cross a line between “good-natured pothead satire” and “saying things that a person can’t get up on a high school stage and say without getting suspended.” When I mentioned this to Mr. Hart, who insisted on being there for all rehearsals (despite the fact that this was my baby and he was just there to “observe”), he just shrugged and said, “Well, it’s not my sketch.”

Worst of all, saddled with non-actors for key roles, Phoebe opted to play the person who teaches them the meaning of Earth Day. The second half of the sketch turned into a direct spoof of A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Phoebe was Linus — with dimmed lights and everything, she steps up to explain the true meaning of Earth Day. The only problem: she wasn’t an actor, and our performance wasn’t going to be miked. My solution was to grab one of the mics for another performance and have her use that, but Phoebe and her friends all insisted that she “can be loud.”

Then, the day arrived. Here’s something you have to know about Earth Day and the Earth Day Jam: every single stoner at our school really did use this day, and this event, as an excuse to get high. As I recall, this was the year our school experimented with “modular scheduling” (an absolute disaster), which made the Earth Day Jam extra-long and may have accounted for why the coordinating teacher was hard up for acts. I remember it running during lunch periods for most years, but that year it ran all day. With the modular scheduling, students had open blocks at any time of the day. Since attendance was nearly impossible to enforce (the modules made hall passes irrelevant), stoners just holed up in the tiny theatre. The audience was more like a shitty concert than a shitty school event, with a thick haze of smoke drifting toward the ceiling at all times, the acrid sweetness of marijuana in the air. You’d think somebody would smell that and start tossing people out, but in my four years, it was the same thing every year and nobody seemed to give a shit that kids were smoking both cigarettes and joints during the festivities.

I’m writing this a decade later, knowing the hoary aftermath and just basically knowing the stupidity of everything leading to the Earth Day Jam performance. You have to understand the utter cluelessness I felt leading up to it. I had my reservations, but I had no clue it would turn into the disaster that it did. The worst part about it is, I realized how bad it’d be within the first 15 seconds of the sketch.

Because I found it funny at the time (and still find it funny) to portray and character on drugs as some kind of Maynard G. Krebs-style Beatnik, the sketch opened with a Dylan-mocking folk song. I remember nothing about it except that it ended with the line, “So let’s all get stoned!”

The entire theatre erupted in enthusiastic applause that lasted for what felt like five minutes (it was probably about 15 seconds, all told). I looked up from my guitar, trying to peer past the lights into the shadowy sea of faces, but I didn’t need to see the faces of the applauders to realize what would happen next. All the stoners looked to my ad-libbing friend, who stole the show. Phoebe went up to deliver her soliloquy, but she refused to take the provided mic. My sister and a couple of other friends, up in the lighting booth, later told me they couldn’t hear a word she said from the back of the house. I’m pretty sure they would have had the same complaint if she’d been in the front row. Phoebe is a quiet, mousy person who apparently thinks she’s louder than she is.

So the end result: kids lured in by the hilarity of drug-based humor, without grasping the underlying point because they couldn’t hear it.

The real lessons came from the aftermath. A week later, another teacher took me aside after class and explained to me that, during the most recent faculty meeting, the teacher gossip-mill was abuzz with the news that I’m a giant pothead. I was a dorky sophomore who, at that time, hadn’t felt anything better than a contact high. I didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t use drugs, yet they were branding me a Lot Troll* without basis. Okay, maybe the sketch served as basis enough, but what the fuck?

So I went to Mr. Hart and told him I’d heard a rumor that teachers are saying I’m a burnout because of that sketch. He shrugged and unconvincingly said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

And suddenly, the body language and evasiveness of the past month made total sense: he rammed this idea down my throat, but then he either had second thoughts or always knew that this would be something to distance himself from, and if he received any negative criticism about the sketch, he’d blame the writer.

Yes, this was the first moment in my life that I felt like a real, professional writer.

I didn’t have many options, so I did the best thing I could think of: I wrote a two-page letter discussing my intentions for the sketch, the flaws in the casting/rehearsal/performance process, and the gross misinterpretation both of what I’d written and the misperception of myself and my character. I attached a full copy of the sketch (pre-ad-libs) and made copies for every teacher in the school.

Not many people remarked on it. Mr. Hart was pissed off. Another teacher in the English Department seemed genuinely concerned until I explained to him that I didn’t want to go through two full years of new teachers with them all thinking I’m a burnout and treating me accordingly. I had a bad enough time with that in junior high — I didn’t want the trend to continue.

More impressively, two teachers to whom I’d been fairly indifferent (and who were equally indifferent toward me) thanked me for the explanation and honesty and kinda acted guilty for either believing or spreading the rumors.

So I learned another lesson from the experience: words have power, both good and bad.

*As in “smoking lot.”

Posted by Stan on May 26, 2008 11:03 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Career-Based Rambling

May 25, 2008

Gay Wedding

I had this whole big post planned about the cultural weirdness of my cousin’s gay marriage. I had been under the assumption that it’d be not only a flamboyant, bizarre event that would involve Elton John in some way, but that the disapproving, highly Catholic portion of my family would show up to throw stones and hurl obscenities.

But it turned out like every other wedding I’ve ever been to: boring as shit and endless. You non-Catholics may not understand the extent of trauma involved in attending a full-on Catholic wedding. Despite the papal stance on the subject, this was a Catholic ceremony, although an abbreviated one. But still fucking endless, dammit! Probably the only entertaining part was the confused non-priest pastor attempting to both fumble his way through the Catholic portions of the ceremony, then attempting to bridge Catholic ideals with a gay marriage.

Meanwhile, none of the vehement religious people in our family showed up, so the biggest drama was when my uncle turned around for the retarded handshake of peace and came face to face with two gay dudes making out.* His face twisted in horror, then he turned back around. Not exactly epic.

*And, seriously, I’d say the same of any straight couple: you don’t make out in church. Even I have enough respect to not do that.

Posted by Stan on May 25, 2008 10:52 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Family: The Horror…

May 24, 2008

Procedure…Deadly Procedure

Yesterday, I had an unexpected colonoscopy and upper-GI endoscopy. It was suspiciously uneventful, and I’ll spare you most of the gory details. Bottom line: I’ve been having gastrointestinal issues for a few months. My G.P. recommended a gastroenterologist who was ragingly useless, so I switched to a different doctor group full of men with alarming compassion. I’m not used to doctors who actually want to help people, so I didn’t know how to react when the doctor I saw said, “We just happened to have a cancellation for tomorrow.” Within an hour, I was scheduled for a Friday appointment and dropping off a prescription from this juice that clears the ol’ colon out.

I figured this would be good for me, because I would imagine my colon is full of all manner of disgusting former foodstuffs that no man, beast, or space alien can digest. I figured so, so wrong.

Here’s what happens: you drink this juice over the course of an hour, then drink a glass of water to get your bowels a-started. Then, you take a few reasonably normal (except for the fact that they come about 20 minutes apart) dumps. Then…you liquid-shit endlessly until it reaches a point where you’re shitting out piss, in defiance of all nature and humanity.

What the fuck?! Goddammit! And then I had to wake up at 5 a.m. to repeat the process.

And then, after all that, they didn’t find anything. I guess the plus side is that they ruled out a bunch of shit (literally!), but all it really means is I have to have more tests run. At least most of them won’t be as invasive…I hope.

Posted by Stan on May 24, 2008 10:11 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Stories of Pain and Humiliation

May 23, 2008

Inside Jokes for Outside Viewers

Have you ever watched a movie that just sucks a painful amount of ass, but it seems like the cast (and probably crew) had a whole lot of fun making it? If the movie’s mediocre enough, the high spirits of the cast can make it approach good. The recent Jeff Bridges vehicle The Amateurs has a shitload of flaws, and at the end of the day it’s a pretty terrible movie, but they’re all having such a visible amount of fun with each other and with the material (which isn’t even very good) that you want to like it.

Sometimes, though, a movie is so, so tragically awful that nothing can save them. In the case of comedies, I think a lot of this has to do with the inside-joke factor. Inside jokes can be problematic for material that’s intended for release to the public; you aren’t making a movie and writing a book for the benefit of yourself and your friends. While they might laugh hysterically at your joke — in part because they know you, in part because you’re making reference to something only you and a small group of friends truly understand — an independent judge might greet your hilarity with a stony, possibly angry face.

I recently had to review a no-budget indie called The Windy City Incident. I say “had,” even though I volunteered for the assignment, because when the DVD arrived, I felt completely duped. The distributor must have a fantastic marketing department, because they made the movie sound like a scream, a little diamond in the rough, rough world of shitty direct-to-video indies. I’ve never seen a worse, more ineptly made movie. Ever. Labored gags that aren’t funny to start, then repeat far beyond the patience of any sane person. Then you flip on the audio commentary and hear the writers/directors giggling at the hijinks. Until I listened to the commentary, I sincerely believed these two men made this movie solely to get emaciated young actors to strip and simulate sex acts while they filmed, but no, they seemed to sincerely think they were making a compelling, hilarious movie.

The problem, it turns out, is that the movie is wall-to-wall inside jokes. Some people have good enough comic instincts to understand the difference between a joke that’s as close to universally funny as a single joke can get and a joke that’s only funny to you and your best friend. If you aren’t sure, it’s easy enough to vet the quality by springing them on unsuspecting people unfamiliar with the outside joke, or to attempt stand-up comedy and understand the sound of 100-200 people not laughing.* But somebody just saying, “Hey, I’m gonna make a movie that’s nothing but a series of consecutive inside jokes” — that’s an idea so terrible I only attempted it once, and I never finished it.

Bottom line: if you want to write a comedy, make sure people you don’t know think it’s funny. If you’re taking a class or part of a writing group that doesn’t consist primarily of friends, force someone new to read your work. Try to find the person least like you, and don’t accuse them of “not getting it” if they don’t find it funny. If they don’t offer, ask them for an explanation of why the jokes didn’t click with them. Even better, find someone who isn’t even a writer — a peripheral friend of your second cousin or something — and tell them it doesn’t matter if they don’t know shit about structure or movies. You just want to know if it makes them laugh.

The hardest part in writing a comedy is making it funny, and in order to do that you have to not only understand your audience, you need to understand your audience doesn’t consist solely of your 12 closest friends.

*I paraphrased/stole that from one of the few truly funny and insightful moments of Aaron Sorkin’s dreadful flop, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

Posted by Stan on May 23, 2008 4:14 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Career-Based Rambling

May 21, 2008

It Was Symbolism; He Was Mad!

The more I read shitty scripts, the more it occurs to me that many screenwriters haven’t mastered intermediate elements of storytelling. They often have the basics — tedious goals, bland conflict, dunderheaded protagonist “growth,” revealing every single detail using expository dialogue rather than visual clues — but it creates a hollow reading experience that will translate to a hollow viewing experience. Say what you will about Steven Spielberg — and I’ll say many great things unless you try to talk to me about any of his recent work — fun “popcorn” flicks haven’t been the same since he stopped making them. You could say, “Well, he’s not really a writer,” but the man’s PRODUCED BY stamp is almost as firm as his DIRECTED BY stamp. You can watch The Goonies, Back to the Future, Gremlins, Poltergeist — even later stuff like Men in Black — and see the Spielbergosity of them. I mean, Gremlins and Poltergeist are pretty fucked up, the kind of thing you’d think he’d maybe get stuck with and then limit his involvement to “big name that gets the greenlight,” but no — they’re as full of Spielberg spirit as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Spielberg knows how to tell a story. He understands audience expectations and knows how to push them, sometimes defy them, but not go so far that the audience will rebel. His early movies show that he realizes kids aren’t fucking retards, that “family” movie means more than “kiddie horseshit,” but more than that, they show he understands character, tone, and subtle symbolism — three things these newer scripts lack. The first two, they trade worn-out stereotypes and ape the tonal beats of similar, successful movies; they very rarely have a bit of the latter.

What I mean when I write “subtle symbolism” is the kind of symbol that isn’t a symbol for the sake of symbolism — something that coheres with the story, characters, or setting without overwhelming them, pointing and saying, “SYMBOLISM!!!!” Here’s an example of the most egregious example of “symbol for the sake of symbolism” in the history of cinema: at the end of Jane Campion’s overrated shitstorm The Piano, Holly Hunter’s character (Ada?) wants her piano tossed overboard. When Harvey Keitel does it, she intentionally sticks her foot in the ropes and drops into the water with it, but then she decides to live and severs the connection with the piano and is “reborn” as she is pulled back into the boat. It’s the kind of dunderheaded, ham-fisted symbolism I can’t stand — the kind of thing that allows “art films” to break into the mainstream because idiots who watch it think it’s really deep and smart, when in fact it’s simple-minded and obvious. And this is coming from a guy who doesn’t particularly like symbol-heavy, nonsensical “art films.” I’d rather have them be batshit insane in a fascinating way than obvious and heavy-handed.

Although Spielberg’s symbolism has gotten a little more heavy-handed and, well…pointless over the years (the Blue Fairy in A.I.? the sex scene in Munich?), many of his earlier films feature the perfect kinds of symbols: first, their meanings are open to interpretation; second, you can watch the movies as pure entertainment, without consciously grasping the layering of symbols. For an example of both: E.T., on the surface, looks like the simple story of a stranded alien trying to get back home. Symbolically, there’s some deep shit happening: you have E.T. de-fracturing the broken home, turning Michael from asshole brother to sworn protector, even making Elliott himself into a father figure for the lost, confused alien. As for the “subtle” symbolism, think about the scene where Elliott flips out and releases all the frogs. Depending on how you interpret it, he’s either embracing a nonconformist, hippie spirit or just turning into your ordinary joe who will stand up for things he believes in, even if he gets in trouble. In the straight narrative, it’s merely “Elliott’s deep, psychic connection to E.T. causes him to flip out and spare the frogs.”

Symbolism and subtext like this form literature. Good writers — and good filmmakers — have the ability to utilize this without seeming to. Sometimes it goes too far into obvious territory. For instance, it’s clear very early in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom that Indy is the father figure to Short Round, and he goes too far when Short Round declares, “I love you!” to help break the goofy trance. I will admit, it’s still kind of a powerful moment, but it turns something that’s all about symbol and subtext and turns it into…well, text. But when it’s done well, this kind of thing will wash over a viewer (or a reader) and they’ll love the story even if they can’t pinpoint why. They’ll withstand the test of time because they’re about something universal and human, not about Richard Dreyfus building a giant Devil’s Tower in his living room.

I’ve started to call this “symbolic duct-taping,” a phrase that hasn’t exactly caught on. In my novel, Cedar Point, as relationships decay, there’s a recurring joke starting with one character who has the physical strength to tear a motel room door off its hinges. The main character keeps taping it back to the door frame, only to have it knocked down by another character who’s enraged with him. Even when I started writing it, I didn’t intend for the duct-taping to mean anything, but it occurred to me that it means everything: they knock down the door (representing the damage to the relationship!) and the main character is forced to fix it, and although it’s not the same having a door duct-taped to the frame rather than screwed to its hinges, it’s still basically a functional door (i.e., the relationships are never back to 100%, but there’s been enough repair for them to be functional).

For me, the accidental symbolism and subtext is the best kind, but it’s a pain in the ass. If you don’t recognize that it’s there, it’ll end up muddled and not meaning anything. If you do recognize it, you run the risk of overplaying your hand and turning it into a piano tied to your protagonist’s ankle.

Posted by Stan on May 21, 2008 9:07 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Career-Based Rambling

May 20, 2008

Tired of Rage

Do you think it takes the same amount of energy to pretend that everything’s fine and dandy as it does to recognize the fact that everything surrounding you sucks ass? I don’t know. I wish I did.

I came to a weird, malformed realization last night: I’m tired of hating everything. It’s not so much a softening worldview, an inability or disinterest in mocking anything, or the realization that expressing my rage (or mockery) doesn’t actually change anything. Venting makes me feel better, but the real source of the issue is: why can’t I just blithely accept the bullshit that’s spoonfed to me, like so many others do? The disparity comes from the two extremes mentioned above: both suggest that the people involved are aware of the problems with themselves and the world surrounding them, but each chooses a different way to deal.

But what about the middle of the bell curve — the people who don’t know anything and don’t give a shit? Why can’t I be like one of those people? I don’t run around learning new things to gain knowledge — my thirst for information comes almost solely from a place of rage. I want to learn as much as I can about a certain subject so I can spout anger and disappointment as knowledgeably as possible. That can’t be healthy, can it? Shouldn’t I just get pissed off about something, vent about it in ignorance, and move on? I’ve started to obsess about people and things that piss me off, dedicating my life to fueling the rage instead of dedicating it to more worthwhile pursuits like masturbation or steady employment.

Even though it isn’t true (yet), I feel like it’s affecting my creative pursuits. On the one hand, the government conspiracy in play in Dying Proof comes from a place of discontent and sarcasm, in which the agents chasing them are portrayed as little more than bored corporate drones with guns, but on the other, the brother-sister relationship in the script has received a surprising amount of praise because of its sincerity. There’s no irony, no sarcasm, no undercurrent of rage and disappointment (even if those are emotions I feel toward my real sister). Just a pair of siblings working through their issues, against a largely symbolic backdrop of gunplay.

That’s that, and the script is a departure for me in almost every conceivable way, with the only real through-line to the rest of my work being characters frustrated at their inability to change their lots in life. Unlike most of my characters, their inability to change isn’t caused by merely getting stuck in ruts (with their central conflict being breaking out of the rut). Everything they’ve ever known is obliterated, and they’re forced to adopt a new lifestyle as they go into hiding, unable to change for fear of getting caught. They’re characters who have desires but really can’t change, but they would if they could.

In On Deadly Ground, Forrest Taft asks, “What does it take to change the essence of a man?” and Big Mike answers, “Time.” It has to take more than that, though — I have the desire, Lord knows I have the time, but I don’t even know where to start. Stop obsessively checking Diablo Cody’s blog for the sole purpose of getting infuriated by her existence? That might be a good start, actually. But in order to start avoiding things that piss me off, I have to turn blinders on, which is counterintuitive to my nature. Could I start trying to teach myself about things I actually like and care about that don’t piss me off? I think it’s a little more than that. If I want to change the essence of a man, I need to break out of my own rut, just as I’ve encouraged my fictional characters to do, and alter my world until I’m surrounded by testaments to joy and happiness instead of anger and disappointment.

It’s a brave new world.

Posted by Stan on May 20, 2008 11:01 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Stories of Pain and Humiliation

May 19, 2008

The Folly of MySpace

Or, more accurately, a folly of MySpace…

So I’m doing this project that doesn’t quite necessitate the development of dozens of MySpace pages for fictional characters, but I swear to you it actually helps me with developing characters. There’s something very personal in the way people customize MySpace profile pages into eye-bleeding messes. I’ll never forget the guy I worked with, who seemed reasonably nice and good-humored. His MySpace page reminded me of trips into Vincent D’Onofrio’s mind in The Cell, and after that, being around him made me feel uncomfortable. Besides which, with all the questions and free surveys and shit, it forces you to answer questions about characters that Lajos Egrei would never think of. “Coke or Pepsi”? I mean, part of me says, “Who gives a shit?” but another part of me thinks, in some way, that is important. It’s like the cut scene from Pulp Fiction where Mia Wallace deconstructs the personality type of an Elvis man versus a Beatles man.

I ran into a little snafu with my latest creation. Admittedly, it’s my own fuck-up, but it speaks volumes about MySpace’s half-assedness. It goes like this: I created a new account, but I misspelled the e-mail address. I don’t do this often, but I guess it’s kind of difficult to spell “girthmcdurchstein,” which is why I should probably just use Gmail for all these fake addresses.

I figured: okay, not hard. I’ll just go to my account settings and change the e-mail address. It’ll send a confirmation e-mail to the new address, and that’ll be that. Right?

Wrong. MySpace sends the confirmation to the old e-mail address, which I’ll admit makes some sense — you could easily hijack someone’s account and change their address — but in the case of someone trying to change an e-mail address that doesn’t exist, it makes things a little more difficult. So I say, “Fuck it, I’ll just cancel the account and start from scratch.” Again, MySpace sends a confirmation e-mail and will not cancel the account unless you confirm it.

At this point, you might be wondering why I didn’t just abandon the profile. It’s a brand new, friendless, shapeless account. Well, I had stupidly already filled in the MySpace URL for it, and I wanted to keep it. Besides which, I figured it couldn’t be that difficult to change the e-mail address.

Wrong. They have a thing on their FAQ telling you how to change your e-mail address if you don’t have access to the old one. It was simple: fill out a form with your old e-mail, account password, new e-mail, and an explanatory note (if necessary). Not hard.

Wrong. When I clicked SEND, MySpace told me all further correspondence would be sent to the old, nonexistent e-mail address. Keep in mind that this form specifically exists to change your e-mail address when you don’t have access to the old one. So fine, I redid the exact same form, only this time I put the real e-mail address in for both, with an explanatory note giving them the old one but telling them why I didn’t use it.

Within an hour, they sent me an autogenerated e-mail re-explaining what I had just done and telling me to do the exact same thing again, only this time I just had to hit reply and type out all the info.

I didn’t hear a thing for five days. After Googling around, I found two good solutions:

1. Send them another e-mail saying something like “FIFTH ATTEMPT” in the subject line.
2. Post a pornographic image as a comment on Tom’s profile, which will ensured your account gets deleted within minutes.

What the hell kind of system do they have where it’s easier just to get banned than it is to legitimately cancel your account or change your e-mail address?

Anyway, I took the former option (saving for the latter if it doesn’t work) and decided to put FIFTH ATTEMPT, even though it wasn’t. It took another full day before I received a response, another autogenerated e-mail that elaborates on what the FAQ says, telling me to create a “salute” with MYSPACE.COM and my Friend ID written on it.

This makes no sense. In every defense of MySpace’s ass-backwards system I’ve read, they say MySpace makes you go through all this annoyance and bother for security purposes. Like I said, it’s pretty easy to hijack the account, change to a different e-mail address the person you hijacked won’t know, and fuck up their profile. So all you have to do is send in your parents’ brains or write BRAINS on a 3x5 index card, and they give you the keys to the kingdom? How is this secure? Obviously the person hijacking the account knows it’s a MySpace account, so they have one half of the “salute” covered. Even if they couldn’t figure out how to find the Friend ID, it explains to you how to do this right there in the e-mail.

This can’t be a “security feature.” A security feature is popping up a “secret question” when you want to change your e-mail address or password — something a little harder to know than somebody’s e-mail address and current password. It doesn’t even make sense when you say “you have to take a picture of yourself holding it,” because how the fuck does MySpace know what you look like? Especially, like in my case, when you’ve uploaded no photos.

Fuck, with all this hassle — and I still haven’t received an e-mail saying my “salute” is good enough — I might as well just porn-spam Tom.

Or, you know, stop making MySpace pages for every half-assed character I create. But hey, I spent too much time Photoshopping images and uploading videos to quit now! The only thing it’s taught me is to be more careful when I type in the e-mail address upon signing up. Or to not do the perma-URL until I’ve validated my e-mail address (which they shouldn’t let you do, anyway).

Posted by Stan on May 19, 2008 4:03 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Random Musings

May 16, 2008

Make It Good

Awhile back, I read an article that discussed loudness in music (specifically, the abuse of compression and limiting to make music — or, more noticeably, television commercials — appear louder). I am too lazy to dig it up, so I’m going to paraphrase one of the quotes from an engineer or producer or somebody, who said something like, “Making a song sound louder makes it seem more powerful. Music, in general, is getting louder, and we can turn back now.”

My immediate thought: why the fuck not? Isn’t it fair to say that if the music itself is good, listeners aren’t necessarily going to give a shit about it creating the illusion of extra loudness? Am I going to like “The Sweet Escape” more than 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?” because one is recent and much, much, much more compressed and “loud”-sounding, even though the two songs were played on a daily basis on the stupid radio station I used to have to listen to? One of those songs is qualitatively better — click the link and take a guess which one. If you guessed “the louder one,” you didn’t click the link.

Loudness doesn’t matter. It’s not a fluke when certain indie acts whose albums are recorded in somebody’s parents’ basement eclipse some overproduced (and over-compressed) pop shit. Besides which, some would argue (and I’d agree) that bringing back the mystical idea of dynamics into music makes things more interesting. I know they can create the illusion of dynamic shifts while compressing sounds into oblivion, but it’s an illusion, just like the theory that songs being louder will make them better. Or that I’ll pay attention to a TV commercial because it’s 10 times louder than the show itself. (That one backfires big-time — nothing makes me hit MUTE faster than an obscenely loud commercial.)

The misguided notion of tossing all the wrong eggs into the basket can also apply to movies. There’s a “bigger is better” mentality that’s become increasingly counterproductive. On the plus side, box-office receipts are starting to reflect a rebellion among moviegoers who seem to realize that if one gag worked in the first Meet the Parents movie, repeating it isn’t quite going to work in all the sequels and knockoffs. Throwing enormous budgets at a movie won’t ensure quality (look at the Pirates of the Caribbean movies). For every movie hyped as the “most expensive movie ever made,” which barely means anything anymore, more of them are Waterworlds than Titanics.*

I watched a crime drama yesterday that couldn’t have been made for more than $5000. That’s not a misprint. It’s rough around the edges, clearly shot on DV (not even HD), but it’s professional enough and has the only three things it needs: decent acting, a good (enough) story, and squib effects that aren’t laughable. It’s not exactly The Godfather, but then, it’s not American Gangster**, either. I’m not saying it’s perfect. Like many of these low-budget movies, the leads are pretty solid, but nearly every supporting role is stilted and amateurish. To paraphrase Mike Nelson, “Thanks, director’s college buddies who brought their own suits to the shoot.” It also tried a little too hard for a crazy twist ending that kinda starts up too soon and doesn’t make enough sense to bother. It felt like there were some scenes deleted, but with an 81-minute movie, I can’t imagine the harm in putting them back.

But the bulk of its story — and its main character, who has to own the movie and does a pretty good job with a difficult role — is solid and depressing. And, actually, the budget restrictions give the movie a slight charm in some ways; it’s a gangster movie that was shot in rural Virginia, with a cast of almost entirely native accents. Believe it or not, hearing that Virginia drawl enhances the movie, differentiating it from gritty, urban crime films. I’m sure if the writer/director had a budget, it would have been set deep in the heart of a city, but having it set elsewhere makes it feel fresh instead of derivative.

The movie got distribution — the only reason I saw it is because the distributor sent me a review screener — which is a minor miracle, considering it has nothing associated with the post-Pulp Fiction Studio-Co-Opted-Independent New Wave, which requires at least one D-list sitcom or teen-soap star trying to avoid getting pigeonholed. This movie has nothing but a good story, told better than you might expect considering the opening shots look like something you might find in a porno movie.

People like movies for all sorts of different reasons, but I hear “I didn’t like the story” or “I couldn’t relate to the characters” more often than I hear “the action sucked” (which I do hear) or complaints about special effects. Even then, it depends on the mood. It’s like with music: sometimes, you want something that’ll speak to you on an emotional level; other times, you want some candy-coated bullshit. But in both movies and music, it seems like you get much, much, much more of the latter than the former. That can’t be healthy, can it?

*So people let me off the hook: I’m not saying Titanic is a good movie. James Cameron does some things well in the movie, but he does many, many, many things badly. Speaking purely in terms of big-studio “throw more money at the problem” mentalities — Titanic was expensive and it made a shitload of money and it won a shitload of awards. That’s all a studio wants, and they can even do without the money.
**Spoiler alert: it sucked.

Posted by Stan on May 16, 2008 6:11 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Career-Based Rambling

May 15, 2008

Kar Komedy Klassics

I got a coupon from my mechanic for a “free 24-point inspection” that just happened to coincide with my oil light randomly popping on. The oil light popping on is typically seen as a bad sign, but I hadn’t experienced any trouble and couldn’t figure out what the stupid problem was. The only problem I noticed in my car was what I thought were failing shock absorbers, which I thought may have contributed to whatever problem my car was experienced.

So I took my car in for the inspection. My mechanic is a kindly old Italian guy who always says things like, “We gonna fix-a you up-a good, Mister Stan.” He usually does, and he’s pretty much the only mechanic I’ve dealt with who’s actually honest. I mean, the free inspection is an obvious “bring them in for free, then charge them an assload on unnecessary repairs” ruse, but he said, “The car’s-a fine, you just-a need a new oil pressure switch.” Since those are cheap and not labor-intensive, I had him do it.

When I got the car this morning, it turns out he did a little something extra. A bolt in the driver seat loosened at some point last year. I couldn’t figure out where the loose one was, so I never tightened it, but it basically caused my seat to flop around. It was at this point that I noticed the failing shocks — every little bump seemed tremendous, and I thought maybe the bad shocks caused the seat to loosen in the first place.

Here’s why I’m stupid. My mechanic tightened the seat, and mysteriously the shock problems went away. Yeah, I’m sure you’ve already done two and two on that one and realized I’m dumb as a fucking rock.

Posted by Stan on May 15, 2008 10:45 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Random Musings

May 14, 2008

“You Look Good…”

I don’t have what you’d call an “exercise regimen” because I am what you’d call “extremely lazy.” Despite my penchant for donuts and pizza, I kept in reasonably good shape (for me) by walking about five miles a day, plus walking up and down no fewer than 480,000 flights of stairs (per day) in various buildings, el stations, bookstores, libraries, etc. I actually did this intentionally: if a building had an elevator and wasn’t more than 10 floors, I’d take the stairs. If it had an escalator and immobile stairs, I’d choose the latter; if it had just an escalator, I’d try my damndest to not stand and let the moving stairs do their work for me. (Sometimes, during rush hour, it’s impossible to walk up an escalator.) There was also a brief period when I lifted weights, under the impression that it would help me play guitar better. (It actually kinda did, taking me from “sloe jam” to “Hammett-style tapsanity,” before I got lazy and went back to “sloe jam.” I like to tell people I’m feeling the music, but really I’m feeling the unwillingness to learn overcomplicated guitar solos.)

Since college, I’ve continued the trend of lazy-man exercise by walking anywhere from three to five miles a day. It’s not as arduous or as fun, nor does it have the additional stair-stepping challenge of the Loop, but at least it’s something. I used to go biking, but for some reason (likely fatness) my ass no longer cooperates with the seat. It creates a numbing sensation on my tender vittles, which isn’t a problem until the pins and needles set in. Just imagine that for a few seconds, you men out there, and you’ll know why I gave up biking (even though it’s the only non-sexual or -competitive-eating physical activity I enjoy).

At this point, the walking routine didn’t really do anything except keep me from gaining weight. I figured as long as I held steady at “slightly overweight,” I’d be cool.

Unfortunately, my lifetime of horrible eating habits and not-quite-lifetime of caffeine over-consumption (plus some bad karma thrown in for good measure) have left my gastrointestinal tract ravaged with an unknown disease that has baffled at least one discompassionate, House-like gastroenterologist. (It’s my belief that House has ruined all medical specialists because it allows them to put a doctor’s natural god complex into overdrive — he’s supposed to be an antihero, not a hero hero.) As a result, I’ve had little recourse but to enjoy a special diet that consists of:

• White rice
• White bread
• Egg whites* (sensing a theme?)
• Steamed vegetables that are green and leafy
• Unseasoned, boneless, fat-less chicken
• Applesauce
• Unsalted pretzels (in moderation)
• Honey graham crackers (also in moderation)

Those fascinated with bowel movements will want to check out what I’ve been producing lately.

It’s actually not as bad as one might think. There’s at least a little room for variety, I haven’t suffered the constant heartburn and lethargy associated with “eating three-fourths of an extra-large pizza by yourself in one sitting,” and I’ve lost about 35 pounds, taking me from “slightly overweight” to “still slightly overweight, but not as much.”

So while out on my morning walk, a plump, middle-aged woman stepped out on her front porch, then walked down to the end of her driveway. (I was walking in the street.) I didn’t pay her much mind, figuring she was just going to her mailbox. Then I realized there was no mailbox at the end of her driveway. Also that she was staring at me.

“You look good,” she said when I was within earshot.

I pointed at myself in confusion, despite nobody else being around.

“Yeah,” she said. “I seen you walking, and before you was real…” I guess she didn’t want to say “fat,” but she did the universal body-language for fat: ballooning her cheeks out and crooking her arms into a wide, semicircular silhouette of a huge body. This was actually kinda more insulting than if she’d just said it, but maybe she didn’t think it was so bad considering she’s way fatter than I’ve ever been. “But now, you look good.”

“Well, uh…thanks,” I said.

“So this is just from walking?”

I didn’t want to go into my digestive problems or the new diet, so I just said, “Yeah.”

“How far?”

“Eh, about three miles,” I said, referring to my regular route. I have alternate routes that spread it out to five or six, depending on if I have a particular destination.

“Wow,” she said, as if this was a truly amazing feat.

“Yeah,” I grunted.

“Well, I just wanted to tell you I been watching you, and it shows.”

Poorly phrased, but I assume/hope she meant “I’ve been watching you walk, and the weight-loss shows.” Otherwise, it takes on a disturbing, restraining-order-worthy connotation.

“Thanks,” I repeated. Then, she crossed the street to a Comcast truck that was, apparently, servicing her house. Or something. I don’t really know why she did that. I just kept walking.

* I mistakenly typed “Egg shites.” That about sums it up.

Posted by Stan on May 14, 2008 11:17 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Random Musings

May 13, 2008

Grand Theft Fun

I promise this’ll be my last post about Grand Theft Auto IV. Ever. And, by the way, the title doesn’t refer to a sudden change of heart after initially bashing it. I know explaining defeats the purpose of a joke, but it must be stated: Rockstar stole pretty much every element from their formerly fun games that made them worth playing.

I’ve about given up playing it. I don’t know how far along I am in terms of story (the game says I’m 60% complete; I’m guessing that refers to just the missions since I’ve barely done any of the side games), but I’m just not having fun. Just when the story’s drawing me in, it pushes me away with Bernie, the lamest character in the history of GTA’s extensive pantheon of stereotypes. Just when I’m willing to forgive the gameplay, I run into stuff that’s so poorly implemented, it’s almost unplayable (did anyone actually enjoy the missions that force you to use a motorcycle?). I guess they took the game’s limitations into account, because every time I stress that I’m going to lose a mission because I’m on a motorcycle and hit something that knocks me off, and I have to wait 400 years for Niko to get back on the bike, I’ve never failed (as I would have in previous GTA games). Getting frustrated doesn’t make it more fun, though. Neither does sapping the challenge because you know the gameplay itself is half-assed.

But the thing that’s really driving me nuts has more to do with the “realism.” Ordinarily, I wouldn’t give a shit about GTA and realism. The game’s are not, and never have been, realistic. It’s only the jackasses at Rockstar running around to the press saying it’s realistic, and reviewers somehow believing this, that drive me crazy. Because they strive for realism but, like everything else, come up half-assed.

The two things that are really bugging me now are the prevalence of Britishisms and the shitty A.I. I’ve bitched about both before, but they’ve reached levels of obnoxiousness that, when combined with the dreadful story, cardboard characters, and stilted gameplay…just kinda make me want to stop. I haven’t officially stopped yet, because I want to get to the end of the story so I can mock it properly, but more of this might just drive me crazy.

So I’m just going to leave you with a few illustrations of the bad A.I. and Britishisms I’ve noticed since my last post about GTA.

Bad A.I.

• I got bored with the game, so I shot this one dude on the street in cold blood. A policeman was standing on the corner, staring at me as I did this, and just…kept standing there. No police warning, no gun drawn.
• When you want to ride in a cab, if you find one that already has a passenger or two, you yank them out as you would when jacking the car. Rather than giving Niko new dialogue for this completely different action, he continues to say things like “I need this. Buy a new one” or “I’m stealing your car,” which make no sense considering what he’s doing.
• On the subject of cabs, the funniest/stupidest moment I’ve experienced in the game so far goes like this: I jacked a cab because they’re the only cars in the game that handle well enough to not irritate me, but there was a bit of a jam so I couldn’t get away from the driver before he pulled me out of the car to steal his own car back. That’s nice, and I like the randomness that some people do that while others run away. Fine. So I enter the same cab as a passenger, and there’s no reference to the fact that I jacked it not 30 seconds before. Maybe this doesn’t qualify as bad A.I., but it does seem sloppy that Rockstar — with the development time and budget — didn’t think of these contingencies and program/write accordingly.
• The enemies in shoot-and-cover missions — the only ones I’ve liked until now — have finally reached a point of predictability where they’re no longer fun. The shoot-‘em-up villains in previous games were equally predictable, but there weren’t nearly as many of them (or as many missions of that type).
• I accidentally nudged a parked car, which I intended to steal, with my (about-to-explode) car. A cop in a car was just sitting there, like, whatever, although in previous games they’d come after you for the car alarm going. He did literally nothing until Niko smashed the window, at which point I got the ol’ one-star.

Britishisms

• On a calendar in the office where you get missions from Phil, the word HOLIDAY is scrawled across an entire week’s worth of days. Since I’m unfamiliar with any week long holiday breaks for American companies, I assume this is the British use of the word (synonymous with a general vacation, not a special day of celebration), which is very infrequently used in the U.S., and highly unlikely to be used on the calendar in a grimy warehouse run by a shady mobster. I guess I could buy this in the office of an eastern European character because there’s at least a chance that they learned British English before arriving in the U.S.
• Playing darts with Kate: “You’re rubbish, Niko.”
• Now I’m annoyed, because I’m sure I noticed more, but I can’t think of them. I’ll edit this if I remember or spot them again.

This isn’t quite a Britishism, but it does further my annoyance with the subpar voice acting. In one of the McCreary missions, you stage a sham prison break by taking out a convoy under the “Booth Tunnel.” About five seconds of deep thinking makes you realize that it’s a “subtle” allusion to John Wilkes Booth (i.e., Lincoln Tunnel in NYC = Booth Tunnel in LC, har har har!). Yet, everyone in the dialogue stresses the name in a weird way, to make it sound like the prominent feature of this tunnel is that it contains some kind of gargantuan booth. It’s just shoddy as ever. The recording engineers or directors couldn’t coach more natural readings out of these people?

Posted by Stan on May 13, 2008 5:29 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Reviews

May 12, 2008

Ugh

My sister called me up tonight and gave me two suggestions:

1. Join the Peace Corps
2. Teach English abroad

I know she’s trying to help, but…seriously? Seriously?!

Posted by Stan on May 12, 2008 10:07 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Family: The Horror…

May 10, 2008

Where Do Babies Come From?

The genesis from idea to full-fledged screenplay (or novel, or short story) is nearly impossible to describe. It happens differently for every person — or, at least, people fall into different groupings in terms of what they do to take an idea from vague concept to finished work. My classic, unmarketable satire about a high school student who joins a Satanic cult when he can’t get a date for the prom came from remarkably simple circumstances: when I was in high school, I had no interest whatsoever in going to the prom, so I waited for the absolute last minute to ask a girl.

I kept seeing the girl I wanted to ask on the day I intended to ask her, but every single time, she was hanging around with one of our assistant principals, making it the epitome of bad timing (or, at least, embarrassing timing if she turned me down flat in front of an adult/authority figure). The third or fourth time I saw her, I started to think it would be funny if she turned me down because she was having an affair with the assistant principal. That’s where the story came from, and I worked my way backwards to how the guy would react upon discovering a girl he has a crush on is dating the dumpy, short, bald assistant principal: join a cult. Oscar, please.

Of course, it took me five years to finally write that thing. Not because it was so arduous or soul-crushing, but because it was one of those ideas that didn’t come out of a box fully-formed. I had to figure out why those two characters were having an affair, why it would crush the prom-asker-outer so much (because in my reality, I didn’t have much of a crush on the girl I intended to ask — we were just halfway decent friends who were single), and what the story is with the cult. It all came together, but it wasn’t like I thought about it every second of every day for five years. It’s one of the scripts where I had the broad strokes in five minutes, but the specific elements came slowly.

The more important thing for the moment is that initial second where the idea forms. Where I’m walking the track with a couple of friends (we had a gym program — apparently unusual — where you picked what you wanted to do, and you had to choose a cardiovascular activity on some days and a lazy, lazy activity, like walking the track at a snail’s pace, on other days), and I see the girl as we round the corner, and then next to her appears the assistant principal. It’s one of those moments where, if it had been a movie, this would have turned into a “jealous rage” scenario. See the girl: happy. Keep rounding the corner until the principal’s in view: WHAT THE FUCK MOTHERFUCKER?!! That’s the moment the seed planted itself in my stupid brain.

If you get an idea like that, the easiest way to handle it is to reverse-engineer: like I said above, you have an idea, so what’s the story? What are the circumstances? Who does it involve, why, and how does it affect them? Not always easy questions to answer, but if you have a germ of an idea that you think has potential, explore it. I took several fiction-writing classes in college, where they used an academic model to “force” us to come up with ideas, on the spot. For me, coming up with the idea was never the hard part — developing it gave me the most challenge, as did figuring out which ideas are worth developing and which aren’t, or combining multiple ideas into one coherent piece.

Pummeling an idea with questions right off the bat helps. If you can’t answer the questions and help yourself develop characters and a story to fit into the idea, chances are it isn’t worth developing. That doesn’t mean throw it away — you might think of something later — but that it shouldn’t take your immediate focus. It’s kind of an aggressive approach, but it works for me. And if it’s a good enough idea, it’ll stick with you until your mind starts shitting out more material to develop it. If it’s not, it’s the kind of thing you might find scrawl in a journal or idea notebook, come back to two years later, and find yourself developing it into a full outline within minutes. That’s the power of the unconscious mind — sometimes, it does the dirty work so you don’t have to.

This method might not work for everyone, but if you’re the type to have a germ of an idea without really knowing what to do with it, give it a try. Ask the journalistic six: who, what, where, when, why, and how?

Posted by Stan on May 10, 2008 11:58 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Career-Based Rambling

May 9, 2008

Lucy: Source of Unending Disappointment

So Lucy texted me yesterday to tell me she’d be coming into town for Mother’s Day weekend, so I was to clear some time to hang out. Fair enough.

Then she called me this morning — actually, she frantically sought me out by IM, text, and VoiceMail, although I was wandering around town and didn’t take my phone with me, so technically I called her (back) — to let me know she wouldn’t be coming into town. She does this often — any time there’s a light rain or something, she’ll cancel the trip because she doesn’t want to drive in it. I can relate, so it’s not a big deal, but it does get a little old.

Of course, I can’t say anything because it leads to the inevitable “Well, you can always visit me” conversation. It’s not that I mind the drive to Iowa, or that state’s delightful manure-caked-on-popcorn stench; it’s really a lot more personal and depressing. She keeps the most disgusting place I’ve ever seen. In my life. I shit you not. I’ve visited her at three separate apartments (and now she’s officially in a fourth), and each is more disgusting than the last. The last time I went out to see her, I refused to show. I had a hard enough time just sitting on her toilet. When I glanced into the shower and saw brown-black grime in the basin and soap-scum clotting the tile grout…all I gotta say is “yuck.” I’m not a dude known for thorough cleaning, but even I have my limits.

On a shallower note, I don’t like visiting her because, more often than not, when she comes out here, she’s officially on my turf. We do what I want to do. Not that I don’t mind giving her the option, but her option is almost always “let’s go to a bar so I can chain-smoke in your face and take the edge off your rambling with a few light beers.” At the very least, since Illinois is now delightfully smoke-free, even if we did go to a bar, she wouldn’t be inflicting that shit on me. (Hilariously, last summer she came into town with her boyfriend, and the three of us plus her brother went to a pool hall in Schaumburg that was actually really awesome, but I only thought it was awesome because it was, like, a real pool hall. Not a bar with a pool table. They were all freaking out about the “giant” pool tables, which meant I won despite seven years passing before I retired my hustling cue, and were so blindingly enraged by the lack of smoking — Schaumburg had already imposed a ban. They were so disappointed, we ended up going down the road to a shithole Hanover Park — with no pool table — because you could smoke there.)

Anyway, this cancellation had nothing to do with weather or laziness; it had everything to do with her brother acting like a dick. He recently separated from his wife. His grounds were that she’s an awful mother — in fact, his main goal is to fight for custody of their kid before she destroys his young life. Unfortunately, his wife comes from a well-off family who have both the financial and physical means to support the kid. He doesn’t have that luxury; plus, he’s a dude, and somehow that always hurts in custody battles. Oh, and also, the moment he got separated, he ditched the kid with the wife and started dating three women at once. And, yeah, Lucy’s pissed because he made a date even though he knew she was coming into town, and he wouldn’t cancel it when she said the only reason she was coming into town was to see him. (She omitted the part about seeing me, or maybe I’m not a reason. I’m just there.)

I feel kind of bad, because when I talked to him that night last summer, it sounded like he was really hurting over this stuff with his wife and son, but now…he’s just kind of acting douchey.

Also, this means I don’t get to hang with Lucy. She insists she’ll be coming into town “in two weeks.” She said that two weeks ago.

Posted by Stan on May 9, 2008 2:22 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em

May 8, 2008

Movies That Haven’t Aged Well: American Beauty

I’m going to start off the bat by saying many of the elements that contributed to American Beauty’s commercial and (limited) creative success still hold up: Kevin Spacey’s fantastic performance as Lester Burnham, Conrad Hall’s breathtaking cinematography, even Sam Mendes’s direction (though he has yet to repeat this with as much success). Really, the thing that sinks it when I recently plucked it off my DVD shelf to watch — for the first time since probably 2000 — is its Oscar-winning screenplay.

Granted, Alan Ball is no Diablo Cody, but there’s something so…I guess the politest way to put it is “obvious” about the characters, the satire, and each characters’ storyline. I really enjoyed this movie when it first hit theatres, so I can’t know if the problem is me getting older and more worldly (making me realize that the cardboard-cutout characters are more stereotype than archetype) or if it’s the prism of time reflecting a big brown blob of shit rather than a pretty rainbow.

To deal with the latter argument: many movies have come out since 1999 that have been pale imitations of American Beauty. The only one I can think of that comes close is The Secret Lives of Dentists, and even that’s not as good. So it’s not a problem of American Beauty being eclipsed by its own imitators and therefore losing relevance. Maybe it’s the problem of the transformation of the world (or, at the very least, this country) over the past (almost-)decade that makes American Beauty’s dysfunctional but optimistic message feel a little far-fetched. I can’t say.

The beginning of the end is the opening of the movie: Thora Birch, on video, asking…that dude who seemed to disappear off the face of the planet (unseen because he’s the videographer) to kill her dad. This moment is all but meaningless in the storyline: it’s not really a murder mystery, and call me crazy, but the instant we see that, you pretty much know she didn’t do it. So why’s it there? A remnant of the edited-out cliché of a courtroom framing device, in which (allegedly; I’ve never read the screenplay) Chris Cooper allows his son to take the blame for his own crime. I’ve gotta say, it definitely improved the movie that they cut it out, but why leave this one artifact that has very little to do with anything? Mendes doesn’t attempt to build any suspense out of the idea that Birch and her creepy boyfriend have any interest in really killing him; the movie’s not even a murder mystery of any kind. It’s a year-in-the-life where you know upfront that the year will end with Kevin Spacey’s death. (And you know that upfront from his introductory voiceover, making the goofy video-voyeur opening even more unnecessary.)

In many cases — Annette Bening’s shrill performance, which was even annoying and over-the-top in 1999, is a glaring exception — the strength of the performances masks the bland characterization and unimpressive story. Looking at it again, it’s hard to not notice how pat everything is: Chris Cooper as the southern-redneck ex-military homophobe who’s secretly struggling with, or at least trying to deny, his own sexuality (double-stereotype — score!); Annette Bening as the focused career gal whose resentment of her family and obsession with work manifests itself in the silliest affair in cinematic history; Thora Birch’s desperation to finance a boob job despite her most notable asset — in high school terms — being her gargantuan bazongas; Mena Suvari’s shallow teenager existing solely to occupy Spacey’s fantasies and undermine Birch’s confidence; Wes Bentley (yeah, I looked up his name) as the “outcast,” a voyeurism-obsessed neighborhood pot dealer; and Allison Janney as a distant, either-crazy-or-a-drunk wife trapped in a loveless marriage.

Is there anything here that hasn’t been seen before and done better elsewhere? I’ll toss out the random example of Parenthood, Ron Howard’s 1989 dramedy that utilized many of these ideas but in much more nuanced ways. Hell, pretty much every moment involving the teens was done better in any John Hughes movie you can think of (except maybe Uncle Buck). And it’s here where I kind of hit on the biggest problem with American Beauty: it’s a sign of the exact time in which it was made and nothing more. That’s why it doesn’t hold up nearly a decade later, while movies that are now between 20 and 25 years old do hold up.

In any given John Hughes movie you’re subjected to synth-pop, legwarmers, and goofy slang, but the core of the movies — the story and characters — still hold up, not just as nostalgia pieces or cynical reflections of the times, but as reflections of timeless teen themes. Sure, maybe nowadays all kids have cell phones and IMs, so they might not relate to tactics like throwing rocks at the window of a girl you like (which I don’t think ever actually happened in a John Hughes movie, but it does happen in the awesome Breaking Away, another great but old film about teen angst and small-town disaffection) when they could just “txt” them, but they can relate to the angst and fear involved in actions like that.

To double back to the adult characters, the only one whose journey is truly interesting is Burnham’s. Granted, we need the cheesy “confused” homophobe and the irritating wife (and even the stereotypical cheerleader-who-knows-she’s-hot-shit-and-wants-to-be-a-model) to lead to the cynical ending, but why can’t we get a little nuance? What do we ever learn about Cooper (and his wife, and his kid) that we don’t expect? Same question could be applied to every other “supporting” character. Doubling up on stereotypes and obvious traits doesn’t count as nuance or subtlety. I think the only unexpected thing is Birch’s obsession with the boob job, because it doesn’t seem like something she’d obsess over. Especially when the person undermining her confidence is boobless Mena Suvari; you’d think she’d be more obsessed with developing an even-more-clichéd eating disorder. So hey, they have that going for them.

I think the ending is still moderately interesting, in that it’s ambiguous (the “trial” framing device would have robbed it of this ambiguity). Burnham realizes his life is pretty awesome, and then — BLAM! So is that a cruel and unjust world, robbing him of life just as he’s starting to realize how good he has it, or is it a just world, allowing him to die in his first moment of true happiness since his youth, riding around in a bad-ass hot-rod? I think the original version, with Bentley going to jail, would have reenforced the “cruel and unjust world” side of things. Thematically, the ending of the actual movie supports the overall idea that everyone’s looking for happiness (or beauty, if you prefer) in the wrong places, which is a nice if unsubtle message.

When it was originally released, its endlessly-repeated tagline was LOOK CLOSER. Watching it again, looking closer only creates problems. It’s too bad, because I really did like this movie in 1999. Then again, full disclosure: back then, I wanted Being John Malkovich to win it all at the Oscars (even though it ended up only getting three nominations and won none of them), and I still think it should have. It’s much weirder on the surface, but it asks many of the same questions American Beauty does (notably about looking for happiness in the wrong places, i.e. in Malkovich’s portal), but it both asks and answers these questions in more interesting ways.

Posted by Stan on May 8, 2008 10:40 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Reviews

May 7, 2008

More Thoughts on ‘Grand Theft Auto IV’

Slightly more positive this time around!

Last time, I mentioned unhappiness that they removed some of my favorite minigames. Actually, my all-time favorite was the time-wasting, mind-numbing cab game — I couldn’t tell you why, but the idea of hustling to get all those people around town was a lot of fun for me. I also enjoyed rooting around town for the lists of desirable cars. Especially in GTA3, those crazy easter egg cars like the ice cream truck made finishing those lists an epic quest. Replacing them with Roman’s laaaame taxi missions and Brucie/Steve’s car-hunting expeditions just isn’t working for me.

However, I found myself quite enjoying the police submissions. So far, the only enjoyable missions in the game are the firefights, so I just login to the police computer until I find something along the lines of “gang activity,” then go have an enjoyable shootout. It’s even interesting because your running around shooting people gets you a police rating of your own, so there’s dual danger. That’s kind of fun. I’ve noticed several fire stations around but haven’t really bothered seeking out whether or not they have a game attached to them. I thought the firefighter missions were a waste of time before, but I’d imagine this game has much cooler fire effects than GTA3. (They were such a waste of time that I never bothered to find out if they had them in Vice City or San Andreas.)

I’m also finding the story a little more tolerable. It’s not great by any means, but it’s moved from “awful” to “almost serviceable.” Niko still doesn’t come close to being a compelling, unique character, but the farther along I get, the more interesting the missions become as a result of the story. So I guess it’s not so much the story getting better as it’s just allowing for better mission opportunities. To that end, another big complete — the near-total lack of challenge — is gone. One or two missions have required multiple attempts, and multiple approaches, before I could beat them. Even the ones I beat on the first try have some interesting challenges. The shootout when Roman gets kidnapped was a lot of fun, even though it was comically easy. I also haven’t fallen victim to quite so many annoying glitches, so that’s cool.

Finally, a friend of mine pointed out something jaw-droppingly obvious: I now have enough money to both take cabs everywhere and skip the endless ride. Since I started doing that, it’s made the game assloads more fun. I still hate the driving (except, ironically, when I’m driving the cab; even then, so much of the time it takes forfuckingever to get anywhere). I’m not exactly happy — I shouldn’t have to find alternate methods to workaround shitty game design — but I’m enjoying the experience a teensy bit more.

The cutscenes are still endless, though. Oh, and Packie just seems like a warmed-over version of Ziggy from The Wire (and since I’ve already compared this game unfavorably to that great television series, the reminder doesn’t exactly help GTA4’s case). And I’m noticing more Britishisms in this game than usual. The only one I can remember off the top of my head is the use of the extremely British “advert” (as opposed to “commercial” or just “ad”), and for those ready to cut me because Niko’s European, it was spoken by an American on one of the radio ads (the one for the electrolyte energy drink, itself a much shittier version of a great running gag from Idiocracy). Is this because they’re hiring unknowns so happy to have a voice-acting gig on a high-profile project, they don’t have the balls to say, “No American would ever talk like this”? Whatever the explanation, it’s not exactly bringing me over to the side that this is brilliant writing for any medium — it’s the little nitpicks that reveal how lazy and/or sloppy a piece of writing is. Trust me: I’m both lazy and sloppy.

Posted by Stan on May 7, 2008 4:14 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Reviews

May 6, 2008

MySpace Blog “Customization”

MySpace, a place for friends, is once again the bane of my existence. I’m going to try to stop making every other entry about my other blog, because I’m honestly not trying to pimp it here (if I was, there’d be endless links on the sidebar), but this is where I go to vent, and I need to vent right about now.

I spent most of the evening fighting to the death with MySpace’s “blog customization” panel. Until recently, the profile part of MySpace had no options for customization — it was only through “third-party” hacking that people were able to override MySpace’s bland, unattractive default settings. However, for as long as I’ve used it (since late 2005), the blog has had customization options: a list of options to specify font, size, color, alignment, with a little textarea at the bottom to paste in your own CSS code.

I had a new idea for the MySpace blog. Because, see, I have the other blog, but then I want to update the MySpace blog, as well, because — among other things — MySpace has implemented goofy status feeds (not unlike Facebook) that will tell MySpace users when I’ve posted a new blog. However, I’m lazy, and even as “customizable” as a MySpace blog can get, it’s still pretty fucking ugly. Besides which, I can’t pimp the site that way. So I figured the smartest thing to do would be to imitate the way the main page of the real blog is right now — the entry excerpt, followed by a link to the full blog post, which will take them to the site. It seemed like such an easy task.

My first plan had virtually nothing to do with CSS or anything. It seems like the most logical thing in the world for me to use MySpace as an syndicator for my blog. I post once, MovableType generates a special feed, pings MySpace, then MySpace posts it. That’d work really well if MySpace was set up that way! It’s…not. Not even close. If you’re asking why I, in my quest to ease laziness, don’t use MySpace’s RSS feed and syndicate that on my MovableType blog (which has the technology), the answer is simple: MySpace sucks ass. In the same way it can’t syndicate, it can’t utilize certain MovableType features that I want.

So I spent far too long working up a custom stylesheet. It shouldn’t have been difficult: specify the text, the link colors, the custom header/footer sizes/alignments that I use — so damn easy, right? Wrong.

Here’s how MySpace would work in a perfect world: you paste something — anything — into the CSS textarea, and it removes MySpace’s default CSS code. If you fuck everything up and it’s a total disaster, just delete your stylesheet and the old stuff comes back. Seems reasonable, right?! A little hot if->else action, and we know how much MySpace loves overscripting every little thing — they can’t lose.

Well, they don’t do it that way. You have to override every single fucking thing on their CSS, or else it gets confused. Even then, it gets a little hairy. All I wanted to specify for the links were colors; MySpace lists font-size. Why?! I have variable font-sizes, so the problem I ran into initially is that the colors worked fine, but every link — no matter what other specifications were there — appeared with the same font-size. I’m not an expert on web design, as anyone who has visited one of my many sites will attest, so I don’t know of any magical CSS command that will specify to override a set-in-stone font-size with a variable. I am pretty sure h3, it does nothing but the browser default. you type it in as its own p class, and it works fine. What the fuck?