Face to Face
‘Tis the season of giving, so I feel like an asshole trashing kids’ cartoons about Santa Claus. Who wouldn’t? I didn’t even rip it a new one like that torture porn script — nothing’s that bad, but when you combine painful mediocrity with words like “forgettable” and phrases like “sporadically amusing,” it ends up sounding like a big-time pan. My guesstimation? If these writer/producers are lucky, they’ll hit the 5-9 age range. They’ll be lucky to get kids as old as nine to enjoy the movie, but I tried to be nice and give it a wider bracket. Adults will hate it. It’s too creepy for kids under five. Anyone old enough to stop believing in Santa Claus will outgrow it. So that’s it.
I feel terrible, though. When you read a script, there’s a barely tangible, inexpressible difference between stories written from a place of passion and love and those written to maximize demo saturation by appealing to the lowest common denominator. This Santa Claus story had all the signs of a passion project — whether I think it sucks or not, the people making it have loads of obvious, misguided faith in it. This intrigued me, so before I started writing the notes, I made the mistake of Googling the writers.
Here’s a note to any readers out there: never do this. I learned my lesson the hard way — twice. The first time was several months ago, when I read the bad, quirky comedy. The title page noted that it was based on a book
I don’t want it to sound like I wish Jessica Alba any ill will; I just don’t think she’s a very good actor, and like fellow sci-fi-TV-star-turned-mediocre-movie-star Sarah Michelle Gellar, she started out super-hot and then lost about 20 pounds too many and just looks emaciated and awful. (She looks maybe 10% better after having the baby, but I’m sure the healthy weight gain and the enormous breasts will disappear soon enough.) I point this out because I’m much more willing to accept mediocre acting from somebody who makes my man-parts go sproing. Dark Angel-era Alba had that effect; Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer just makes me shrug. The franchise-required bad blonde dye job doesn’t help, either.
Where was I going with this? Right, Jessica Alba isn’t very good. As I mentioned, the script paints the character as so creepy and crazy, you’d need a great actress to add the appropriate level of warmth and vulnerability — none of which exists in the script, as text or subtext — and they get Jessica Alba, whose vacant-eyed stare makes her seem creepy and crazy even when the screenplay repeatedly points out what an absolute dreamy sweetheart she’s supposed to be. Not a good sign, and although I want to say this didn’t color my judgment of the script, I read every scene picturing Alba in the role… It had an impact.
Consequently, I made the decision to stop looking up writers and titles before doing the coverage. Afterward, anything goes. Lucky for me, I’ve only recognized a few writers and projects from the title page alone. It’s easier to read scripts and trash them without the burden of even more badness hanging over my head.
This Santa Claus script was sort of the opposite scenario. I Googled the writers and the production company and found a group of warm, optimistic folks who spent literally decades working on many of the popular Saturday-morning cartoons of my youth. Even though I Googled them after I’d already read (and disliked) the script, I immediately felt worse. This was compounded by the production company website’s adorably upbeat blog laden with pictures of smiling folks (and their dogs) having a ball working together.
I was torn: look, this is a script that has a romantic subplot involving Santa and the woman who raised him from birth. Not his mother technically, but still… Just because the Oedipal ickiness will sail right over the heads of the target audience doesn’t mean it’s not there. All the good things the script does is plagued by uncomfortable moments of weirdness like that, so I felt like simply calling it “mediocre” and “cute but forgettable” had already overtaxed my generosity.
Seeing all those smiling faces made me want to submit a scan of a Crayola drawing of Santa Claus surrounded by hearts and smiling flowers in lieu of actual criticism. I’m sure I’ll feel guilty about my — shudder! — honesty for weeks or months. I learned a lesson: don’t be nicer about shit that doesn’t deserve it… Just stop Googling the people involved with these scripts.
Posted by Stan on December 10, 2008 4:00 PM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | How Not to Write a Screenplay | Digg It
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