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January 2, 2009

The Fake Fiancé 2: Fake Harder

When we last left off, more than a year ago, I was desperate for advice on how to solve the problems with my friend Kelly. None of you jackasses came through. I did try Lucy’s suggestion to grill Kelly hardcore about the wedding details, and she immediately changed the subject to her teaching job. The only thing I could think to do was just back off. I’ll be honest: we’ve only talked two or three times in the whole of 2008.

Why did this happen? The answer happened in December of 2007. I never blogged it because, at the time, I was embroiled in a bunch of job bullshit that prevented me from blogging as much as I would have liked. God, what a pain in the ass. I hate that I’m making no money, but I’m so fucking glad I got out of that goddamn sty, and I’m so glad that — even though it took a year — my “replacement” has fucked up so hardcore that she’s gotten the attention of the man who runs the entire corporation. That’s an epic level of retardation.

What was I saying? Oh right, December. I hadn’t talked to her for awhile because, she explained, she got busy teaching by day, pursuing a Masters at night. Combine that with the various after-school activities she was involved with, and she had zero time for me. Or to plan her made-up wedding or ensure her made-up relationship stayed healthy. Nonetheless, when I did talk to her, she mentioned something very, very confusing and important: she and her fiancé were moving to an apartment in Lombard. Now, for people who didn’t go back and read the original post, here’s the thing: she already told me she bought a house.

Now, let’s say she and the fiancé had bought a house. How would this conversation have gone?

Instead, the conversation was actually little more than a long tirade against her fiancé for going out of town at such a bad time (and she didn’t even make it sound like it had to do with business), leaving her to do all the packing and running around before the movers showed up. Instead of bringing up the house thing, I waited for her to mention it. It was yet another of my not-so-clever litmus tests — I figured, at a certain point, she had to bring it up. She brings it up or it never happened, I thought, and she never brought it up.

So I took my distance-keeping into overdrive. I remember two distinct times we communicated with each other: once, early in the year, when Jive’s father passed on, and we expressed mutual surprise and dismay before getting bogged down in whether or not we should coordinate a time to meet at the memorial service; and a second time, in July, when she e-mailed to tell me this jackass we went to high school with threw himself in front of an el train. I said “two or three” because I have to believe there’s at least one conversation I’m forgetting.

And then there was Christmas Eve, when I received an out-of-the-blue MySpace friend request…from Kelly.

To my knowledge, she had no MySpace profile. I discovered a mostly barren, hastily filled out profile that had only one friend — not, I’ll cautiously point out, her fiancé. I came to the logical conclusion that she had just created this profile, perhaps realizing that she’d lost touch with certain people and thought this would be an easy way to keep in contact.

After glancing at the information in the profile and finding nothing useful about the fiancé (other than “Engaged” set as her relationship status), I clicked on the pictures link. I figured I wouldn’t find anything useful, but holy shit did I ever! Four distinctly non-Photoshopped images of herself and the fiancé, one photo of him by himself, and several of Kelly alone, including one that showed her in tropical climes, wearing a tanktop, classily clutching a plastic cup filled with beer, captioned: “Just a few hours before [the fiancé] popped the question on the beach at midnight. I am totally clueless.”

Well, I guess that about wraps it up, right? She’s clearly with this guy, he clearly proposed, and they’re clearly getting —

Wait a minute.

Here’s where I correct a mistake: in the earlier post, I mentioned the too-cute scenario where he proposed to her on Christmas Eve, as if on a whim. That was actually the too-cute story of him asking her to move in with her, way back on Christmas Eve of 2005. The story of the proposal goes like this:

In early December of 2006, the fiancé took Kelly to a fancy restaurant downtown, got an elaborate dinner, and proposed like a proper gentleman.

Restaurant. Chicago. December.

Beach. Tropical. Tanktop.

Does not compute.

How can I let this go, goddammit? There may be photographic evidence suggesting a relationship between the two of them, but why is there still a barrage of inconsistencies? What the fuck is going on here? I feel like if I ask Kelly for clarification, she’s going to make me watch the test film from The Parallax View and make me assassinate her ex-best friend.

I had to know more, but I didn’t feel safe asking Kelly. I mean, I’d tip my hand if I provided a log of a two-year-old Instant Messenger conversation as evidence of her lies. How do I confront a situation like this?

To find out, I asked Lucy. She surveyed the photos and said, “I…don’t think they’re involved.”

“Um,” I replied.

“No, look at them!” she snapped. “There are only four pictures of them together. Three of them are on vacation, the fourth is at a wedding. The only picture of him alone, he was out of town [on a trip Kelly wasn’t on]. So…who’s taking these photos, and why don’t they have any pictures of just bumming around the house? There’s only one of Kelly on her birthday, and it looks like she’s alone and took it herself.”

I didn’t scrutinize the photos to this level, but when I looked again…she was right. More than that, in all the photos with Kelly, he’s not smiling. He doesn’t have an arm around her waist or shoulder. In fact, his uncomfortable, distant body language suggests he barely knows and doesn’t much like her. Meanwhile, she has a wide grin in every shot and is leaning in to suggest a closeness that he tries very hard to counteract.

What’s the story here? Going from the one kernel of truth I still recognize in this story — their initial meeting, down in St. Louis — Lucy speculated that maybe he hit it off with one of Kelly’s other friends, so Kelly has waited in the periphery this entire team. This group of friends has met up at random time for vacations or reunited at weddings, and she’s managed to snag a few photos, but they are most assuredly not together.

This seemed unwise, on a public profile on a popular website. If this guy is really involved with someone she knows, and he has a MySpace page, doesn’t it follow that he — or someone who knows better — will find her, will find these publicly available photos, and her jig will finally be up.

Right now, I’m clinging to the publicness of this profile as the only shred of legitimacy to this relationship. Kelly’s not an idiot — if this were really an elaborate work of fiction, she’d have privatized the profile or, at least, these particular photos… Right?

I want to believe, but I still have the fake engagement story and the fake home purchase leaning me hard to the side of “100% bullshit.” Combined with the myriad other inconsistencies and oddities involved in this drawn-out relationship, the only thing I can say is, “How could it be real?”

Kelly’s profile insists that they’ve finally set a date. I feel like my only option is to jump back into the fray to either score an invite or score a reason why I’m not invited.

I’ll keep you all posted, but I hope to God what I report is, “It’s all true.” I don’t have much left but hope.

Posted by Stan at 10:19 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em

January 5, 2009

Bad Twist

I just finished a script with one of the stupider twist endings I’ve seen. Leading up to the twist, the script told a serviceable but unexceptional story of a clever high school student tracking down an unusual serial killer. Also on the case is her father, the local sheriff. The killer has a strange M.O.: he goes to his victims and gives them a torturous choice, with either option generally resulting in the victim’s death. For instance, he offers a struggling pianist this choice: he can either never play music again (meaning he’ll chop off the pianist’s hands), or he can never hear music again (meaning he’ll deafen the pianist in some way).

I want to ridicule the script’s twist ending for undoing the goodness coming before it, but first of all, it wasn’t that good. Secondly, this M.O., and the father-daughter relationship that drives the rest of the script, both come into play in this twist. Here’s what it is: the killer turns out to be the protagonist’s BAD TWIN. No, really. The classic schlocky soap-opera twist becomes the stuff of 2009 horror-thriller denouements.

Surprisingly, that’s not even where the story goes wrong. The twist itself sort of works — the backstory revolves around the father, whose wife died during childbirth. They didn’t know she was pregnant with twins, and he was a newly single father who had no clue about raising one kid, much less two, so he had to choose one to give up to the foster-care system. The son was tortured and abused to the point of insanity, and now he’s out for revenge. It’s about in line with the script’s overall just-above-mediocrity quality.

No, it actually goes wrong when the killer tries to “prove” to the daughter that he’s a twin. Because the explanation needs to happen quickly, we can’t exactly have a DNA test to solve the problem. They’re standing in the middle of a cemetery (don’t ask), and she has to make a bunch of snap decisions after her newfound brother “proves” the truth. Except… He uses as his proof a peanut allergy and a birthmark they both share.

Is it not common knowledge that male/female twins are fraternal and, therefore, don’t usually share traits like allergies and pretty much never share the same birthmarks? The script goes off the rails into Stupidtown, never to return. The daughter is surprised by the reveal, then reacts with thundering indifference, electing to kill the killer to save her father. It’s not unreasonable, considering he is a killer and she shares no bond of any sort with him (other than genetics), and the adrenaline fueling the situation, but what about the emotional rollercoaster after this happens? She (a) kills a man, (b) finds out her father gave up a kid and lied to her for decades about how her mother died, and (c) her BAD TWIN brother turns out to be a deranged serial killer. This has no impact on her at all?

You might think, “It doesn’t matter, because the story ends, right?” Wrong. It keeps going, flashing forward three months, where things with the daughter are not only fine — they’re even better than they were before. Then, there’s a second twist, the old “the killer’s still alive” thing, which doesn’t so much set up a sequel as suggest no sequel possibilities (it’s implied that the killer has already gotten the dad, so who would he have to terrorize in the sequel?).

This script led me to ponder one of the many problems plaguing the movies: twists for the sake of twisting. The kind of twist where you get to the end of the movie and you wonder why you just wasted your time watching it. It changes everything (in a bad way) or it causes the story to not resolve or it’s just plain stupid.

Actually, plenty of these twists mix and match from the bargain bin of problems associated with twist endings. Probably the worst twist-ending I’ve ever read occurs in another just-above-mediocre script, an action story culled from the age-old “let’s throw a bunch of guys in a pit and make them fight to the death, against their wills.” You’ve seen it in gladiator movies, you’ve seen it in at least one episode of every sci-fi television series in history — soon, you’ll see it on the big screen.

The script is light on sci-fi — it has some “technogeek” crap involving a pseudo-pirate Internet pay-per-view structuring so these battles can be streamed worldwide, and it has these boots that, when “activated,” lock the fighter’s feet in place — but heavy on action and, to my surprise, character development. The villains are all aimless morons, but three of the main characters had surprisingly decent dimensionality…

…or so I thought. Here’s the problem with the twist: it’s both mind-numbingly stupid and it changes everything. Toward the end, convinced he’s going to die, the protagonist begs his shifty-eyed love interest to call his brother. Turns out, his “brother” is a CIA handler, and her call alerts the agency to the protagonist’s exact location. Before he can get killed in the ring, a bunch of well-armed agents burst into the secret compound and take down the whole operation, all because the protagonist was an undercover agent the whole time. Pretty cool, right? Wrong again!

In one way, this script has a clever conceit — we learn, in flashbacks, that the protagonist is haunted by the murder of his wife and daughter. We’re led to think, at first, that the protagonist is a disgraced doctor who accidentally killed several patients, and that his family was killed as revenge for his medical misdeeds. The cleverly ambiguous flashbacks hold up just as well when it turns out he’s an undercover CIA agent. The whole doctor thing was his cover, but his family really did die, they really were revenge killings (for his CIA good deeds), and the protagonist really does suffer.

However, in the present timeline, the protagonist does a wide variety of stupid things that the twist completely undermines. See, he’s “kidnapped” by this group, imprisoned, and forced to fight for his life. On one occasion, he nearly gets both himself and another man killed by screaming that he’s been kidnapped and is not a willing participant (in the middle of a match streaming live across the world). A perfectly (in)sane action from a man with nothing to lose — it makes no sense from a CIA agent infiltrating the organization. In general, the story would have us believe that no man — until the protagonist showed up! — has survived more than three fights. The protagonist kills 11 men. Eleven. All of them innocent kidnapping victims, not bloodthirsty animals. The love interest is shown as taking a shine to the protagonist immediately, so it would not have been unreasonable in any way for him to beg her to call the brother before, say, his third match — the one where he’s destined to die. Of course, then the movie would be about 20 minutes long. Without the twist, though, none of that narrative doubling back is necessary. I bought the pain, the nothing to lose, the idea that he fights these men because he wants to punish himself. It all goes away when the writer introduces the twist.

Worse than that, the protagonist “honorably” kills one of his cell buddies. He wants to spare the buddy from suffering the indignity of this hell. Except the protagonist knows he’s an undercover CIA agent, and he knows the guy only has a few more days to suffer. But he kills him anyway. Again, it’s sort of a reasonable action if this guy wasn’t a CIA operative all along, but he was.

So why have the twist? The whole script builds to this fight against the über-badass villain — the one man who is there to fight willingly — and the deal is, if the protagonist wins, he gets to go free. Why not just let him fight, win, and go free? Why have this twist that undermines some decent stuff earlier in the script? What’s the point? The audience will react with five seconds of “mind blown” wonder, followed by an eternity of rage and disappointment upon realizing they’ve been had. A straightforward ending would work better. Despite the cleverly devised flashbacks, the twist doesn’t work at all. The only way to make it work sacrifices better material.

A few weeks ago, I ranted about a horrible action/sci-fi script. I kept its big twist a secret because I knew I would eventually get around to writing this entry. So here it goes: the script is overloaded with voiceover narration and characters. If you’re too lazy to click the link, it also has this body-swapping conceit where people can swap their minds using a machine. I’m going to use the actual character names here, because it’s too confusing to give them generic descriptors:

You have Cray, a supposed master criminal who’s hired to lead a diamond heist. The script opens with Cray sitting at a diner with another guy (unidentified in the script) in a tense face-off. In voiceover, Cray gives a long Fight Club*-style monologue overloaded with pseudo-philosophical bullshit, and then it flashes back to the overly complicated story. Eventually, we come to find out that a man named Usagi was hired to retrieve a kidnapped little girl, and the diamond heist was just a cover to distract her kidnappers. In order to pull off the heist, Usagi and the little girl’s mother paid off Cray — who is famous in the criminal underworld — to swap bodies well in advance of the story. So basically, it’s been Usagi’s mind in Cray’s body since the beginning of the script. Meaning the thoughts in the narration are actually Usagi’s, not Cray’s.

It would spoil the twist to have Usagi narrating from the start, obviously, but shouldn’t that just be a sign that the twist doesn’t work? Or maybe that the framing device doesn’t work? Or the voiceover (really, really, for the love of all that’s holy) doesn’t work? I would even cut it some slack if Cray were the only narrator, but he isn’t. Several of the other characters narrate, and when they switch bodies, the narration still comes from their original characters’ voices. Ipso facto, Usagi should narrate. Or nobody should. Yeah, let’s stick with nobody.

Why can’t a story just be a story anymore? Why can’t it go from Point A to Point B, instead of a zigzag from Point A to Point Z, hitting all intermediate stops? How many of these twists actually work? One of the biggest — the one that arguably relaunched the “twist ending” craze — The Sixth Sense, doesn’t work at all if you bother to watch a second time. Once you know the ending, you’re like, “Wait, he’s been hanging around for six months and hasn’t figured out nobody talks to him, nobody sees him?” I could only buy that twist if Shyamalan explicitly stated that Willis’ character somehow fades in and out of existence without realizing it and only appears in the scenes dramatized within the movie. If you think about anything else — going grocery shopping or making a phone call or any of the things he’d have to do offscreen that involves interacting with people or objects — it doesn’t hold up at all. At least The Usual Suspects’ ending was gleefully nonsensical. It’s not a great movie, but they didn’t even try to make sense. (And for those of you thinking I’ve just hoisted myself on my own petard, after griping about people who think The Big Sleep makes no sense because they haven’t paid enough attention — trust me, I’ve seen The Usual Suspects more than once, I’ve paid careful attention, and it’s ending is just a twist for the sake of twisting. It makes no goddamn sense, and it’s only slightly different because nobody involved seems to care whether or not it makes sense. It’s almost a spoof of arbitrary twist endings.)

So why is Hollywood still twistin’? Well, aside from the fact that these movies still make money, I have to imagine it goes back to the belief that all stories have been told. The only way to keep going is to tell a familiar story with an unfamiliar ending. According to Hollywood.

According to me, applying a twist ending to a mediocre (or flat-out shitty) script just to give it a “gee-whiz” effect is as lazy as stealing jokes or masking your weaknesses with florid, hilarious-for-all-the-wrong reasons dialogue.

*Don’t even get me started on that movie’s twist. [Back]

Posted by Stan at 3:16 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)  | How Not to Write a Screenplay

January 9, 2009

Gift Giver

In the halcyon days of, let’s say, 1997, I didn’t mind that my sister got me terrible Christmas gifts. It didn’t thrill me, particularly, but it didn’t make me angry, either. We’ve never gotten along, we’ve never been close, so it didn’t surprise/upset/disappoint me that she was always so thoroughly off-base when it came to buying gifts for me. Most of my gifts, I’m sure, were equally bad and unsuited to her tastes. We could only solve this problem by having conversations and bonding, and we both knew that would never happen. It left us at a stalemate of mutually bad gifts, a nuisance neither of us wanted to acknowledge, except in the form of shoving each others’ gifts to the darkest, dankest corners of our respective closets.

As time passed and we both got credit cards and accounts at various online stores, it should have made life easier. Nearly all of them have wishlists and/or registry services. However, Tracey is resistant to this technology. When she registered for her wedding, buying gifts was a snap. Everything else has been a pain in the ass for me, made worse by the fact that she lives 2000 miles away (so I can’t even absorb her likes and dislikes through osmosis, and vice-versa). I, on the other hand, have had an Amazon wishlist for years. Every year, around the time of my birthday, she asks my mom for the wishlist link. My mom provides it, and… Inevitably, Tracey refuses to buy me an item I actually want in favor of something she thinks I want.

On a general level, I can understand the thought process at work here. Picking items off someone’s wishlist requires no thought or effort. Gifts become apathetic exercises in one-click shopping instead of bold, personal statements. The problem I have comes from my belief that she has opted for mulling over a personal statement about herself and her own tastes rather than what she thinks, knows, or assumes I’ll like. On one level, she sometimes tries to share things she loves that she wants to believe I’ll enjoy, too. Often, though, her gift selections just seem half-assed.

I’ll give you an example. My birthday gift for Tracey this year included a book on Chicago gangs and the album Volume One by She & Him. My thought process was straightforward: sometime in 2007, my sister spent months just raving about Zooey Deschanel. I can’t even remember the movie(s) she had seen her in, but she just went on and on and on and on and on about how great she was and how everything she had ever been in, even in a tiny capacity, was nothing short of brilliant. (Keep in mind, at this time neither The Happening nor Yes Man had come out.) To me, getting her the She & Him album just seemed like common sense. I figured it wouldn’t necessarily come up on her radar, but the worst case scenario would be that she didn’t have it. I knew she’d like it. As for the book on gangs, she’s always had an intense interest in urban sociology (ironically, she scoffed at The Wire because it was featured on that Stuff White People Like blog, which she reads unironically and tailors her likes and dislikes based on her desire to not seem like a stereotypical white yuppie; even more ironically, Juno was featured on that blog, but it didn’t stop her from loving it and making my birthday phone-call with her into a 90-minute argument about the movie — she started it!), so I figured this would appeal to her. Plus, it’s about Chicago, and she always bitches about how she misses home. I figured this would make her miss it…less.

Here’s what she got me for my birthday: The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell and a soundtrack CD of Flight of the Conchords. Not the worst gift ideas, I have to say. I’m a big fan of Spinal Tap and Tenacious D, so getting me a CD of another ironic/satirical comedy-band gets an A for effort. I have seen Sarah Vowell several times on The Daily Show, but it’s perhaps telling that I haven’t sought any of her books. She seems amusing, but I’d rather spend my days and nights reading Victorian epics and/or hardboiled detective stories. Not a lot of room for sarcastic history lessons. Nonetheless, there’s some logic there: she knows of my vague interest in history, and she knows of my boundless sarcasm. Airtight, right?

Here is her actual explanation for making these purchases, as explained to me over the phone: “I bought you that Sarah Vowell book because Jon Stewart seems to have a big crush on her.” ??? “And I heard Flight of the Conchords are good.”

“You mean you haven’t heard them?”

“No,” she said. “We don’t get HBO, but they’re supposed to be funny.”

A rousing personal endorsement. To be fair, at that point I had heard a grand total of one Flight of the Conchords song, from a YouTube video linked to me by a friend of mine. I laughed, but I never bothered to seek out the TV series out laziness.

Now, the second season is about to begin, and I finally broke down and downloaded the first season of the show. Part of this was general interest, but the main thing that sold me was the fact that NewsRadio creator and ex-Larry Sanders Show writer Paul Simms worked on the show. (Ironically, the CD has remained in the shrinkwrap since the start of November.)

I wouldn’t say a lot of hype surrounds this show in my mind. I know one person who watches and enjoys it, in addition to my sister’s pseudo-endorsement. So it’s not like I have people constantly raving and building up my anticipation. Keep that in mind when I say the following:

I didn’t really like it. At all.

More specifically, I found it sporadically amusing, but mostly just a massive rip-off of the short-lived Tenacious D TV series. Now, I’ve trolled the messageboards and have seen the “noway r thay a ripoff thay we’re around b4 the d!!!!” arguments, but let’s face it: both shows aired on HBO, and both shows feature heavy involvement from producer/director Troy Miller (most well-known for “destroying” the Mr. Show movie, Run Ronnie Run). It’s not like you can chalk up the similarities to coincidence. Granted, I can’t imagine too many plots for a two-man band aside from the basic “one guy gets a girlfriend, the other guy gets jealous” story, but shouldn’t that just challenge them to try harder? They even have the “one lonely, stalker-ish fan” thing going.

This might be a coincidence, but the only stuff I found truly funny involved Murray, their manager/New Zealand tourism board worker, and the running gag that their lone fan has a polite but unenthusiastic husband. You know, the only stuff that didn’t seem like it pilfered from the D. In some defense of Flight of the Conchords, their songs are nothing like Tenacious D’s, but I don’t necessarily qualify that as a good thing, except in the sense that they seem a little less like a rehash. (I did like that “It’s Busy Time” song, but everything I’ve seen on the show so far has left me a bit cold.)

Meanwhile, I tried reading the Sarah Vowell book. I figured it’d interest me, but it’s interesting. It manages to veer from amusing and irreverent to…the written-word equivalent of shrill and irritating. The layout/style looks basically like this: one paragraph of “this is how things were back then, possibly laced with some sort of modern pop-culture equivalent to make things relevant and a little bit sassy to the modern audience,” followed by one paragraph of “because of the way things were back then, HERE’S HOW COME SHIT SUCKS NOW!!!!!”

It’s a bit of the Piano/Pan’s Labyrinth syndrome. I would enjoy the book much more if she just laid everything out and let me come to my own realizations about how the sins of America’s past have contributed to its current problems. I don’t like shit that’s dumbed-down for me, especially when it has such a whiny tone to it.

To the extent that I can understand why someone who hardly knows me would see these as good gifts for me, I’m not angry or bitter or disappointed by them. It just frustrates me that I have long lists of books and CDs that I actually want that could prevent any sort of ill will. It turns out that I hated the new Dressy Bessy album, but I would have been happy if Tracey got that for me because I wanted it.

I’m trying hard not to sound ungrateful, but frankly, I’d rather receive nothing than a gift I don’t like. Nothing was worse than the Christmas she got me CDs by The Decemberists, Sufjan Stevens, and some random local Seattle band (which she only got because they recorded a fairly lame/cheesy song about The Legend of Zelda). I’d already heard the first two bands, and while I found The Decemberists just didn’t suit my tastes, I really hated the Sufjan Stevens Illinois album. This was a year that she and Jack actually came into town for Christmas, so I didn’t have a few hours/days to get past my disappointment/annoyance and think of something polite to say. I would have been much happier if she had just sighed and said, “Whoops, I forgot you this year!”

Okay, I’m wrong. One thing was worse. This year, for Christmas, I got tired of pretending to like the things she got me, and I just asked for cash. Actually, I asked for cash for my birthday, too. She just didn’t listen. Look, I don’t want to sound greedy, but I have bills to pay and an extremely unsteady source of income. You want to make me happy? Send money. That’s it.

To my surprise, she did send money for Christmas. Money and a t-shirt. I didn’t know what it was at first, but she and Jack just returned from an extended tour of Eastern European hovels, so I figured it was some sort of souvenir. (Here’s another example of a bad trip: after visiting Thailand and Tibet, they bought me a t-shirt advertising some kind of Thai beer. Apparently both of them forgot I don’t drink, so my sister came up with the exceedingly half-assed explanation that they bought it because of the tiny, tiny, tiny elephant graphics hovering near the bottom of the ornate logo. I have never in my life expressed any sort of affinity for elephants or elephant byproducts. They just forgot and tried to save face. Lucky for them, it’s an exceedingly comfortable t-shirt, so I wear it a lot. But I’m still a little pissed about the half-assedness of it.) The fact that it was a shirt bearing an illustration from Green Eggs and Ham, with text written in a foreign language, all but confirmed that…

Until I realized the language was Italian, and they hadn’t gone anywhere near Italy. When I removed the tag, I realized it came from well-known Eastern European clothiers Urban Outfitters. Look, this shirt retails for around $30, and the thing that pisses me off is the expectation that I would wear something like this. There was a time when I’d spend $30 on a t-shirt I like, but that was a time when I had money and no bills. Now, I have bills and no money, so it’s not the time to spend $30 on a t-shirt I will never, ever wear.

Again, I can understand the motivation for this gift: Green Eggs and Ham was, at one time, my favorite book. That one time? When I was four. I’m not a chick, and I’m not a teenager. If I saw me, at age 27, wearing a Green Eggs and Ham t-shirt, I’d kick my own ass. I’m actually surprised this shirt came in male sizes/styles. I can understand my sister, a woman with as much empathy as a bar rag, would not put herself into the position of me and realize I would never wear something like this. I can’t understand why Jack, who does the shopping with her, didn’t weigh in on this. Or, if he did, why he didn’t weigh in on the side of “don’t buy this”?

I want to be nice, I want to be grateful, I want to appreciate that some thought went into these gifts, but… I’d rather get nothing than something I don’t want. I’m sick of it. And on the chance that it’s some sort of petty revenge because she believes my gifts are as misguided and ill-conceived as hers are, I’m just going to get her gift cards. That’s it. That’s all she gets, from now until the end of time, unless she comes up with a wishlist. Screw it.

Posted by Stan at 8:19 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)  | Family: The Horror…

January 7, 2009

Bait and Shit

Fuck T-Mobile, man. Fuck them!

Here’s the skinny: I have a wireless router, and it’s a piece of shit. I’m also both cheap and poor, which works out, so I’ve mainly been bitching as much as humanly possible about what a flaming dog-pile off hairy shit this cocksucking router is. I periodically scan sales for good router prices, but nothing has hit my sweet $20 price range. There are some routers that periodically pop up on Frys’ for $15, but I always seem to miss them before they sell out.

Not too long ago, a friend alerted me to a deal T-Mobile was having — an upgraded version of the router I already have, with more RAM and an ability to support the third-party firmware that will supposedly rescue my router from its extreme suckitude, for $20, with additional money off if you use Microsoft’s retarded Live CashBack thing. That might not be what it’s called. I just abuse it for savings. I don’t commit it to memory.

It seemed like a fine deal, people on nerd forums suggested all was on the up and up, so I rolled with it. When I placed my order, it warned me the router would be backordered until after Christmas. I wasn’t ordering it for a holiday gift, so I didn’t care. I proceeded through, got a confirmation that, again, warned me of its “backorder” status. Again, I didn’t care.

Four days later, I received the following e-mail from T-Mobile:

Dear T-Mobile Customer,

Thank you for ordering the T-Mobile @Home® Linksys router. Due to high demand, this router is currently out of stock.

We will be upgrading your order and shipping you the T-Mobile @Home® HiPort™ router instead. You should receive your order on or before Tuesday, December 23. We’ll send you an e-mail once your order has shipped, so you’ll know it’s on its way.

We thank you for your patience and apologize for any inconvenience.

Sincerely,

T-Mobile Customer Care

The… Fuck?

I didn’t order this piece of shit to get it on or before Tuesday, December 23. It warned me twice of its backordered “will not arrive by Christmas” status, and I placed the order anyway.

I also didn’t order the router because I wanted any old piece-of-shit router. I want the specific piece-of-shit router I ordered. The goddamn T-Mobile @Home® HiPort™ router doesn’t even support the third-party firmware I so desperately desire.

I just have to ask: why? I’ve done a lot of online ordering and my day, even reaching back to the hoary days of mail-order, and I can’t recall a single instance of being “upgraded” against my will. I’ve had phone support people attempt to upsell me, but they’ve never done anything insane like, “Say, I know you said you want the cheap old Boss orange distortion pedal, but I’m going to go ahead and put you down for the Dallas-Arbiter Fuzzface pedal instead. It’s only $120 more, but you can get those good Hendrix and Billy Corgan* sounds.”

You might think this is an exaggeration. “They just upgraded you,” you’re saying. “It’s not like they illegally charged you more for something you didn’t order and didn’t want.” Don’t you ever get tired of being wrong?

The total cost of the router, after all my scheming, was around $18. That’s what they charged my credit card on December 13th. On December 17th, the date of this e-mail, I got an additional charge of $35 and change, which approximates the “upgraded” router’s usual $50 pricetag plus tax or maybe shipping. I have no idea since they never sent me a goddamn invoice, those jackal prick motherfuckers. Even when I got the fucking box with the router in it, the packing slip invoice didn’t include a total price. What kind of operation is this?

“What’s that?” you ask cautiously. “The box arrived. You didn’t call their customer service and cancel?”

Fair question, reader. I’ll tell you why: because the “upgrade” e-mail included an inexplicable (and unnecessary) image attachment, my mail program filed it as junk. I didn’t notice it in the junk folder until more than a day later, and it literally shipped while I was on hold waiting to talk to one of their douchenozzle, ass-faced CSRs. I figured there was no goddamn point in wasting my time. They couldn’t cancel it now that it’s shipped, and I’d end up having to call them again to get return authorization on the package.

It’s a moot point, anyway. While I waited on hold, I browsed those same mystical forums that alerted my friend to the sale. Everyone had been similarly baited and switched, and after waiting for hours on hold, the CSRs — and their supervisors — told every caller that, because of the holidays, they couldn’t possibly cancel an order! It’d ruin everything, especially their quarterly profit figures! As for the additional charge, the CSRs came up with the laughably convoluted explanation that they have to charge something in order to process the upgrade and ship the order. No explanation on why they couldn’t charge $0.00 or $0.01 instead of the exact balance of a non-sale router and shipping/tax — they just promised that the extra charge would be removed…someday.

None of this — except the additional charge — would bother me if they had asked. An e-mail saying, “Hey dude, we know the holidays are coming up, so we can upgrade you to X router for $Y if you want. Give us a call or respond to this e-mail and we’ll hook you up.” A phone call with similar patter would work, as well. I wouldn’t even mind a hard-sell approach. I’d say, “Blow me,” and hang up, but the point is to give me the option. I ordered what I ordered for several reasons, none of which include “Christmas.” It’s a steaming bowl of bullshit to just assume I need it for the holidays and switch the order up without asking, and then charge more for it, and then refuse to cancel the order. I don’t know the laws on this, but it feels illegal.

I considered trying to haggle with customer service to get the router I actually wanted, but after the business practices they’ve exhibited, I don’t want to do anything but kick every single shithead employed by T-Mobile in the nuts. And I know they employ a bunch of women, so I want them each to undergo the long, brutal process of gender-reassignment surgery, on T-Mobile’s dime. Then I want somebody to create some kind of sensory receptor that will approximate the feeling of getting kicked in the nuts (because I hope and assume their man-molded junk doesn’t have the exact physical properties that will give the same feel of beating on the spermatic plexus with a heavy wooden spoon).

I know nobody reads this blog, but maybe some T-Mobile employee will try to get ahead by Googling “how to fuck over more T-Mobile customers” and stumble across this post. I welcome comments from any and all T-Mobile employees. Explain your company’s justification of this sort of business practice. Don’t forget to leave your mailing address so I can kick you in the nuts.

*Back in the olden days, getting a Billy Corgan sound was considered a selling point, not an embarrassment. [Back]

Posted by Stan at 3:45 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Money Troubles, Stories of Hilarity and Humiliation

January 14, 2009

First Impressions

I’ll never forget the first time it really dawned on me what an impact the first ten pages could have on a script. I’d heard adages about the importance of those pages from the moment I developed an interest in screenwriting, and all the reasoning behind it made perfect sense. Maybe it’s just my learning style, but for me, no description of the pitfalls and problems of the first ten pages could compare to seeing good and bad examples in action; unfortunately, you can’t truly understand their effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) without reading more than just pages.

The best opening I’ve ever seen from a script was probably right out of Field or McKee or some other guru — it lasted for exactly ten pages, and it had a damn near perfect setup. A dorky “regular guy” makes googly-eyes at an attractive woman inside a diner. He watches as a different woman walks by and lifts her purse. Wanting to play hero, the dork gives chase, manages to catch the thief and get the purse back. When he returns, the attractive woman has gone, so he decides to “innocently” dig through her purse to find an ID with an address or some way to contact with her. Instead, he finds a gun, $10,000 in cash, a pair of airline tickets to Bangkok, some unlabeled CD-Rs, and dozens of vials of blood that obviously came from a a clinic of some kind.

The dork finally finds her address and seeks out her apartment. He finds it empty and freshly repainted, and uses the cash in her purse to bribe the landlord into letting him rent the vacant apartment on the spot.

This opening hooked me immediately. Forget the plausibility issues, forget the lack of motivation to rent this woman’s apartment — this is the opening, and it starts with a bang. It might not sound exciting, but the opening foot chase is very well laid out, almost Point Breakian in its scope. A 100% visual opening (there’s no dialogue at all), followed by this particular foot chase, following by the reveal of what’s in that purse and the rash decision to rent the mysterious apartment… Who wouldn’t want to find out what happened next?

Unfortunately, the writer followed this great opening with, no exaggeration, 60 pages of people yammering in circles. It could almost be a stageplay, considering he contains most of the action for the first and second act to the apartment. It’s all just characters explaining the plot instead of doing anything interesting, and the writer punctuates each dialogue scene with characters raising suspicious guns at one another. That’s it until the third act, which is little more than an extended car chase.

Don’t get me wrong — I like talky movies, and the “whiz-bang opening/lots of people talking/car chase ending” essentially follows the Rockford Files approach to drama. But even Rockford goes places during his investigation. He’ll go meet someone at a bar, then get his ass kicked; he’ll go spy on someone outside a drugstore, then get his ass kicked; he’ll visit Rocky or Becker and they’ll all get their asses kicked. Usually he gets arrested at some point, as well. There’s a little more variety than “Rockford hangs around his new apartment waiting for criminals to show up and solves the case by asking them to explain what happened.”

As a script, it didn’t work… But the opening did such a nice job of pulling me in, I didn’t realize that nothing had happened until around page 60. That’s both a good and a bad thing — you can only fool a reader for so long before they realize the story is totally inert from page 11 on, and it’ll probably frustrate them to discover you tried to hide your script’s problems in such a cheap, obvious (but, they’ll have to admit, effective) way.

More often, though, the first ten does show you what to expect. In general, if the first ten pages are pretty good, the script can range from mediocre to great; if they’re tedious/incoherent, the script will range from mediocre to terrible. I’ve never, ever read a script with an unbearable opening that works its way around to getting good. It’s really just a matter of how bad it’ll get before you’re done. And trust me, nothing is more crushing than reading a terrible ten pages and knowing you have 100 more where that came from.

There’s some tricky gray area in there, though. The first script I mentioned is a rarity — I have never read another script with such a fantastic opening with so little payoff. I have, however, seen quite a bit of openings that don’t exactly wow me. They can go either way, and although they usually tend to end badly, sometimes they turn out great.

On the other hand, I’ve seen a few openings that impress me at first, but they remain microcosms of the badness to follow. I don’t mean to keep ragging on that atrocious sci-fi/action script, but it’s hard not to. It has an opening that I considered flawed but pretty good — I hated the pompous narration from page one, and I wasn’t crazy about the framing device in the diner or the fetishistic obsession with Japanese culture. It was confusing as hell, which all things considered set the tone nicely, but it confused me in an intriguing way. I wanted to find out how it all connected, despite the glaring initial problems. Then I found out how it all connected and wondered why I wasted my time.

At any rate, I wouldn’t have necessarily guessed that the script’s first ten pages were a petri dish of the badness to come, but that’s how it turned out. Does that make me automatically red-flag scripts with openings that, while interesting, contain massive, possibly destructive problems? Maybe it should, but it doesn’t. I’m still willing to say, “Wow, I can’t even pretend to care about this love triangle, but the story about hunting for treasure on a deserted island could be fun!” Chances are, the love triangle will take down the entire story, but maybe on page 11 the characters will put aside their romantic problems for the rest of the story, or maybe the writers will get around to making us care. You can’t know, but certain laws of probability suggest that if it’s a problem on page nine, it’ll be a problem on page 86.

Not long ago, I made reference to a couple of scripts with terrible twist endings. The one about the kidnapped “doctor” (actually a CIA agent) forced to fight a series of deathmatches, is one of the more interesting cases. Its first ten pages make absolutely no sense — but not in a good way. It opens by cross-cutting between what we’re told is a Viking battle circa 1000 A.D. and a bunch of guys watching this deathmatch as the signal cuts in and out. It also cuts to some of the technical people who run the TV show, but no connections are made in the writing between all of this stuff, and then it inexplicably cuts to our hero, enjoying a picnic lunch.

I’ve read enough scripts to know this will somehow converge with the fights we saw earlier, but I had no clue what to expect. I’d read enough terrible mythological action-adventure and sci-fi scripts to assume it would involve time travel or parallel universes or some other chicanery. The writer doesn’t even try to make anything clear, so I was ready for yet another frustrating read.

What makes it interesting to me is that, I did like it for awhile, but ultimately it turned into a frustrating read. By the time I started to forget about the terrible opening, the awful ending kicked in and retroactively ruined the rest of the story. I guess the lesson there is that, even if you start to like a script after a rocky start, it’ll ultimately break your heart.

What about this script? I take notes while I read. Here’s what I jotted after reading the first scene: “Opening — ???” That about sums it up. It opens with a static five-page scene in which our hyperactive idiot “protagonist” discovers the woman he’s sleeping with has been married the whole time, then tries to argue with her about whether or not she’s lying. Then he goes home and, in a four-page scene, discovers his longtime roommate is moving out, then tries to argue with him about whether or not he’s lying.

Admittedly, by page ten he’s set up the two major story ideas that lead us on a collision course with wackiness, but we’re also introduced to reams of insufferable dialogue uttered by our insufferable main character. He’s passive, whiny, uninteresting, and — worst of all for a comedy — unfunny. I can’t express in words how much I loathed this screenplay, and I knew I’d hate it… I was going to say by “page ten,” but I knew it on page one. I knew it in the first moment of the script, the first word is the main character’s ridiculous first name, and I just knew it would be an uphill battle. By page 100, the writer didn’t even make it halfway up the hill. Good Christ, why would anyone write something like this? Even ignoring the idiots who bought it and nurtured it and produced it, why would somebody sit as his computer or typewriter or legal pad or whatever and say, “You know what’s funny? This guy’s name. You know what’s funny? Dudes who sleep with married chicks and then — wait for it — don’t believe they’re married”? And just keeps going on and on and on with these things that are barely funny conceptually, much less written down as actual “dramatic” “scenes”?

Where was I?

The point is, readers can tell a lot from an opening, and they won’t be charitable of the opening sucks. Look, it goes one of two ways: they have to read to page ten and decide whether or not it sucks before putting it aside, or they have to read the whole thing and dread it based on the craptacular opening. If they put it aside, things do not look good for you. If they have to read the whole thing, maybe it will get better. Maybe it won’t. I can count on one hand the number of scripts that have absolutely hooked me, so I can tell you the goal is not really to make my pants wet. The goal is to make me say, “Thank God, a script that seems less terrible than the usual shit.” If you can’t do that, you don’t get any slack. That’s it.

Posted by Stan at 6:30 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | How Not to Write a Screenplay

January 16, 2009

The War Room

Things went sideways on Monday night. You see, my old confusing pal Laurie crept out of the woodwork for her annual attempt to throw my life into upheaval. Technically, this time I invited the upheaval. I’m sure that doesn’t say anything good about me, but I just don’t know what the hell is going on anymore. I need to blog, because then maybe someone will drop a mocking comment explaining why I’m such an idiot.

Here’s how things went down: I’ve been on Facebook for awhile, and I’ve been “friends” with a few ex-professors for awhile. So I happened to notice, on Monday night, “[Laurie] and [two of Stan’s ex-professors] are now friends.” Now, I’d searched for her on Facebook before — around the time she added me on MySpace — but I didn’t find her. Now, she was very clearly there. I debated for a few minutes, then decided, “Okay, I’ll add her.” I figured, at best, she’d take a week or two to add me, maybe write something polite on my wall, and then I’d never hear from her again (true to the pattern).

Instead, there was a flurry of activity that, I shit you not, reminded me of that first-season episode of The Wire where they get the murder of Brandon (Omar’s love thang) via pager and pay phone intercepts. Probably not a good sign, but that’s how my mind works, I guess.

I don’t check Facebook much, so I just added her and clicked off the site. As I trolled the Internet for the freshest and finest pornography, I noticed two e-mails pop up instantly: first, a confirmation from Laurie, then a seemingly sincere, apologetic comment on my wall about how we used to be really good friends, and we should bury the hatchet and start over. I got back on Facebook and stated the obvious: okay. She invited me to do a Facebook chat, which I’d never done before (and was a little creeped out by, to be honest), and we ended up talking for over an hour.

Here’s something you should know: I’m 27 years old, and I’ve reached a point in my life where I can carry on conversations with my penis and we have a reasonably simpatico relationship. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I found Laurie extremely attractive, but when I asked her out and it went nowhere, I settled for friendship. In accordance with that, my penis and I have made the following arrangement (I need to give Li’l Stan some hope): if she’s relatively sober, and something happens, my penis has the all clear to move ahead (in more ways than one) with one regrettable night of passion. It’s a thought that lingered distantly in my mind while we were good friends and evaporated when Laurie disappeared off the face of the planet. Who needed an agreement like that when I’d moved on to more attractive, more readily available women with no interest in me?

It’s important to note that agreement when I describe our long bout of catch-up, arguably the longest I’ve talked to her since maybe February of 2006, maybe even as far back as August of 2005. At least she didn’t pretend to lose my cell phone number like Gina. Laurie did me the courtesy of not only dropping off my own radar screen, but she made me feel slightly better by dropping off the radar screens of everyone I know. She just vanished.

Then she was back, and after a brief back-and-forth, she launched right into the big news: she’s moving to L.A. at the end of January. I was appropriately enthusiastic but secretly bitter. For about five seconds, at which point I made a joking comment about her letting me crash on her floor, and she said, “You got it.”

One of the great things about Internet chatting is you can do a thing they do in movies and sitcoms that rarely happens in real life: keep running off at the mouth as if you’ve heard one answer, when in fact they’ve given another. She gave me a green light, and I continued to make self-deprecating but entirely true remarks about how rough it’d be to live with me.

This took things to an interesting new plane. Here’s what I have a tendency to do when women…basically say or do anything at any point in my immediate vicinity. I overthink everything. I have battle maps (i.e., blow-up dolls) that I cart out and pore over, laying out the best possible strategy with the help of tiny plastic Army men and an old back-scratcher to move them around.

I ruminated over whether or not she had officially accepted me as one of her “woman friends.” Maybe she had entered into some sort of unspoken agreement with me: here we would be, the two of us, together. Alone. In an apartment. In a new city. Full of limitless sexy possibilities. With my previous experience in Hollywood, I’d act as emissary and guide, exuding a surprising amount of charm and masculinity for somebody with such a spongy midsection and pliant ethical framework.

Yes, this was bound to be an interesting experience, and I’d take things as they’d come, so to speak, but I had high hopes that —

“Do you know [Mike]?”

“I’m aware of him,” I said.

“That’s who I’m moving with,” Laurie responded.

Oh.

And suddenly the strategy had to be completely reconstructed. At one point, I asked if they were dating. She said no and theoretically has no reason to lie. Her relationship status may say “In a relationship,” but that doesn’t mean anything; mine says the same thing.

If they are going out, why would she allow for this invitation? Sensing the badness, I attempted to back out, but — I shit you not — she wouldn’t back down, twisting it to the point that she insisted she invited me, even though I really invited myself and she agreed far too quickly. So what is that, if she’s dating this guy? Does she see so little possibility for a relationship that she’s deemed me harmless? So harmless that not even this guy whose name I’m only vaguely aware of will feel threatened?

Honestly… I wouldn’t mind that. As stated above, I would definitely take any sexual opportunities that may arise, but I mainly want to get back to L.A., and this is the cheapest ticket I’ve had offered to me. I can crash on their floor for a few months, no matter how awkward it is. And if I’m perceived as non-threatening, and my penis has agreed not to act without authorization in the form of a naked woman diving onto my lap, how awkward could it be?

The answer, I’m sure, is “pretty fucking awkward.” But like I said, unless he’s wielding knives in the middle of the night because I dared look at his woman askance, I think I can endure. Besides, I have maybe 18 inches (in more ways than one) and 80 pounds on him. A knife could do some damage, but any attempt to start shit that doesn’t involve weapons will end with him in a teary full nelson.

So, okay, let’s say they aren’t going out. What’s the deal here? I can think of two possibilities:

• He’s gay.
• He wants her but is too pathetic to make a move.

If he’s gay, fine. In fact, that’d make life easier — having a neutral third party would ease whatever awkwardness might exist between Laurie and me after several years.

Unfortunately, I got a “straight” vibe off of him, and I’m usually pretty good at reading people. If he’s straight, that’s when the knife-wielding trouble begins. I’m old and defeated at 27, able to reason with my ever-flaccid unit, but this guy is 22. Based on my very, very, very brief awareness of him, I got the immediate impression that he’s a pale, friendless virgin. Well, now he has a friend, at least, and maybe he’s not a virgin (or not anymore — I met him, briefly, more than a year ago), but if he’s not with Laurie, I’d bet the farm on him having lost his virginity with someone other than her. Still, based on my sizing-up and his current behavior, and Laurie’s insistence that they aren’t dating, here’s how I picture the scenario:

He wants her, and bad. About as badly as I wanted Laurie at the tender age of 22. Maybe he did defy the odds by asking her out, and she treated it the same way she did with me asking her out: a cheerful smile, followed by acceptance, followed by never following up. So now, their timing is synced up — he’s graduated and ready to go to L.A., she’s been out a few years but finally got the nest egg to go out there. He brought out his own battle map and Army men to engineer this cozy cohabitation plan. She bought into it out of a sincere, doubtlessly misguided belief that they are now just normal friends.

Meanwhile, his plan involves playing it cool for maybe a month, then making a move that will either bring them together forever or, more likely, cause her to flip out and spend an awkward 11 months with him until he lease runs out and she gets the fuck out. That’s actually the best case scenario for such a plan, but maybe he’ll get lucky. You never know. Whatever the case, Mike is not going to be happy with a guy like me sauntering into his perfect plan.

Once I put all this together, I began to realize that maybe — maybe, mind you — Laurie has an ulterior motive of her own. Nothing salacious, unfortunately, but something supremely safe — because, remember, I’m harmless. Eunuch’s Choice™. So maybe they are friends, maybe she does suspect the unsubtle machinations of a man four years her junior, and maybe, now, she wants me there to make sure things don’t get out of line. Maybe.

Lucy’s take was less optimistic: in her mind, they are going out, and Laurie wants me in the mix to reproduce…something. Based on the fact that I’m attracted to her, I can buy into the notion of chaos in Laurie’s life. I can buy into the idea that something — likely involving her parents, or maybe siblings or local friends — is causing some kind of endless, chaotic static that she senses will dissipate when she moves, so she’s stringing me along to make sure things remain chaotic to some extent.

What do I do when I lay out all the angles and find a big, fat battle map that tells me, no matter what I’m up against, all my troops will likely die, and I still want to go for it because of the possibility that I’ll get to plunder the king’s riches (in this case, the opportunity to stay in L.A. for an extended period, paying a very limited amount for rent)?

I mean, why not? I’ve lived with worse.

Posted by Stan at 6:11 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (5)  | Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em, Fumbling Attempts at Relationships

January 19, 2009

Spy vs. Spy

I’ve never been the biggest fan of espionage movies. In fact, I can think of only three that I really like: North by Northwest, Three Days of the Condor, and The Manchurian Candidate. However, if I were to shove everything into weird subgenres, then none of these would even qualify as espionage movies. True, they have all the usual craziness associated with spy movies — coded messages, shifty-eyed people in trenchcoats, elaborate conspiracies, possibly duplicitous love interests — but they don’t have what I typically associate with spy movies: the spy protagonist, or “spytagonist.” Okay, not spytagonist.

You know what I’m talking about: your James Bonds, your Ethan Hunts, your Jack Ryans, your… I dunno, does Jason Bourne count? They might get in over their heads and face dozens of double-crosses and explosions and inaccurate technobabble, but at the end of the day, they have the training and tradecraft to pull off the job. They almost rise to the level of “superhero” (especially Bond), performing extraordinary feats in order to save the planet.

With that in mind, it’s no surprise that I’d lump movies like North by Northwest and The Manchurian Candidate into the “conspiracy thriller” subgenre, not spy thrillers. Both focus on ordinary people trying to unravel elaborate conspiracies — both of which involve espionage — that are over their head. To some degree, the Bourne movies share this characteristic (especially the first one), but he still has that “spy superhero” quality, even if he can’t remember why. Either way, the “superhero” spy protagonist, in my mind, defines the distinction between the conspiracy thrillers I love and the espionage thrillers to which I’m fairly indifferent.

I can’t explain my indifference, except to say that these moves toe the razor-thin line between mind-blowing awesomeness and laughable excess. One wrong move, and I’m out. I can’t explain why I enjoyed Mission: Impossible 3 while merely tolerating the first two. I can’t explain why I can barely sit still during a James Bond movie but can watch slower paced movies like The Parallax View repeatedly. I don’t lose much sleep over it; my preferences don’t matter, as long as I can look at scripts from this subgenre and say, “I may not like this a whole lot, but I can recognize it’s well-written and somebody who does enjoy this kind of thing will love it.”

It helps that I spent much of my life unenthusiastically watching incredibly popular, well-regarded spy flicks. I’m assuming the recent glut of spy movies in production has to do with the unexpected success of the inexplicably beloved Casino Royale (seriously, it’s not bad, but it wears out its welcome about 30 minutes before it actually ends — maybe an homage to current Spielberg movies?) and maybe even the last Bourne movie (which made a metric shit-ton of money). It certainly doesn’t have to do with the unexpected “failure” of Mission: Impossible 3 or Mr. and Mrs. Smith (both of which were regarded as flops despite making decent money overseas and on DVD).

You know what intrigued me about this recent crop of spy scripts? Two of them spoofed Bond-type superspies, another involves an array of superspies but focuses on a clueless yuppie, and two more used a kind of cheesy “spies in suburbia” angle for their stories. None of them has a Bond type or a Bourne type. I don’t know how I feel about this. I actually preferred some of these scripts to most of the spy thrillers I’ve seen, but with superhero movies thriving and superspy movies making a comeback, why do so many of these scripts either shy away from or mock the archetypal superspy? I guess this is Hollywood’s version of originality.

It’s ironic, then, that three of the scripts that try so hard to avoid the tropes of spy thrillers share so many common elements:

• The weakest of the espionage scripts I’ve read tells the story of a vacationing couple whose relationship goes sour when the woman meets a Bond-esque superspy and falls for him, throwing the man into a jealous hissy-fit. So you have the James Bond spoof, but you have the “ordinary,” “relatable” conflict of a couple with relationship problems. Problems with the script arise when it becomes clear that the writers believe this extremely dysfunctional couple’s behavior is absolutely normal. A great vehicle for examining a problematic relationship is wasted as a result.
• The second script tells the more subdued story of an international assassin (not exactly a spy, but the beats of the story echo spy thrillers) who retires when he meets the woman of his dreams. They settle into a bland, suburban life; years later, a group of assassins — many of them neighbors planted nearby — are “activated,” so the couple races through various suburban set-pieces while trying to work through a relationship built on dishonesty. So here we have a minor variation on the spy archetype (he’s an assassin, not an intelligence-gatherer), but we retain the dysfunctional couple and roll in this idea of suburban-blandness-as-action-playground. It’s actually both a decent thriller and a decent comedy, and the couple is not nearly as problematic as the first script. The couple has problems and spend the script trying to find some common ground, as opposed to having significant problems that go largely unacknowledged.
• And then there’s the third script, which takes another Bond knockoff and drops him into suburbia. When his next-door neighbor discovers his not-very-well-hidden secret, the spy is forced to take him on as a partner. Yes, this is ridiculous; no, the writer doesn’t seem to have any awareness of this fact. Unfortunately, the script concentrates too much on an overly convoluted plot and doesn’t tap into the interesting notion of a debonair British spy/playboy/adventurer failing to conform to American suburbia. Pairing him up with the neighbor is the right idea, but they opt to turn the neighbor into the spy (which leads to reams of exposition instead of reams of hilarity), not the other way around. And let’s face it: when a random account makes you in less than 24 hours, can you really be considered the world’s best spy? At any rate, this has the Bond clone, the suburban setting, and even — to some extent — the relationship issues (he has some issues with his wife and family that are not explored satisfactorily).

This is a small sampling of the billions of spy scripts I keep reading, but I still have to comment on the lack of diversity here. Three movies, all in production, all with extremely similar themes, settings, and/or characters. It’s 1998 all over again. Should we see Deep Impact or Armageddon? Will this influx of spy movies — especially ones that are so similar to one another — burn audiences out? I have my suspicions, so consider this a warning, writers. Time to dust off that old spy thriller and try to sell it before there’s another decade-long dry spell.

Posted by Stan at 8:32 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (3)  | How Not to Write a Screenplay