Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles

Once in a while, a film stirs you. It cuts right through the daily charade and reopens your heart to a sense of human goodness. I have just sat paralyzed through the entire credit reel of Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, trying to process the beauty of it. So much of how I gauge what I watch comes from aesthetics and technique, but the beauty of this piece is in its humanity.

I'll try to summarize without making it too technical. Mr. Takata's son, who has been estranged for ten years, is dying. All that's left to learn about him is in a tape of a masked opera in China. At the end, the son promises the singer to return in a year to film Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles. Mr. Takata makes the sudden decision to fulfill his son's promise.

This is truly a film of masks beyond just what is on stage. Mr. Takata is in an extraordinary amount of pain throughout, but he is too afraid to show it. He hides his tears when they show and envies the singer he has sought for breaking down in tears on stage and admitting he misses his own son. Though he is convinced this journey is the only thing that can heal his relationship with his son, he discovers that all he had to do was exactly that which he fears: taking off his stoic mask and showing his son how he feels.

To describe the ending would dull its poignancy. The feelings of love and loyalty are overwhelming and not in a disingenuous way. It is a film designed for feeling, for reassessing values, and for remembering how much we are blessed with the people in our lives. I give it five stars. To say more in print would cheapen it. It should be experienced before being read.

Y Tu Mamá También

There is a joke called "The Aristocrats." It reminds me of this film.

At the core of Y Tu Mamá También is the theme of freedom: sexual freedom, marital freedom, financial freedom, freedom to do with one's body whatever the hell one wants with whatever the hell one can find. It is the sexual odyssey of two privileged, crass, and hormonal teens, who see themselves as utterly free, yet know nothing of true freedom.

Tenoch and Julio come from wealthy families and have no problem affording all the women and marijuana they can consume. Their worlds are defined by their testosterone-laden bullshit. It allows them to drive right past the poverty, the corruption, and the culture surrounding them, keeping quiet about the truly important things. It required narration to interrupt their shallow prattle at unexpected moments to inform us of the truly important things happening in the lives of all involved (e.g. the doom of Chuy's home and career as a fisherman, the stories behind the crosses on the side of the road, etc.). The two friends do not connect on this sort of level, nor do they want to, having based their entire friendship on a mondegreen manifesto while screwing each other's girlfriends. They are the sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, the bread and circuses that the average moviegoer craves. They believe they are free, but they are hamstrung by their inability to connect over anything but sex, which is the lesson Luisa tries, with debatable success, to teach them.

I loved the mystery of Luisa's character. Already a fan of Maribel Verdú's performance in Pan's Labyrinth, I was engrossed by her role as the woman searching for her final freedom. She is the one who can appreciate the unmentionable, who can connect with the quiet. She sees herself in the little stuffed mice and the vast ocean where we finally lose her. These are the things she tries to share with her two young companions and her adulterous husband por teléfono, but her words seem to fall on earless heads, her experiences lost among the sheets.

By the end, we are left with the question of whether their journey with Luisa has changed Tenoch and Julio. They remain crass and appear to have continued their conquests, but they are subdued, turning ever so hesitantly toward their futures in Economics and Biology, Julio's small beard growth even indicating a certain visual maturity. However, without their former sexual energy, they no longer have anything to say. They admit their hollowness, and thus their bonds are broken.

To look at this film shallowly is to be offended by the human body itself. There are few mysteries to the character's bodies by the end, yet the sexual exchanges are done tastefully, even elegantly. That's all that really matters, right? Four stars for inciting wonder and reminding me that freedom is in expression, in interest, in celebration of life. It reminds me what is to be missed with eyes down and in rather than out and up.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

About a year and a half ago, I adopted two zebra finches named George and Martha. I did not really understand why they were so named other than a vague recollection of a play by Edward Albee with characters sharing nomenclature. It wasn't until I brought them home that first, Martha went after George, flying at him, pushing him out of their gourd home, pecking him, and generally being a harridan. They fought like cockerels and screwed like field mice, yet they never did produce an egg. One day, the tables turned, and George took ownership of the bird house. George began to rip out Martha's feathers. George banished Martha to the floor to pick her sustenance from among the shit-encrusted scraps on the cage floor. Then, one day, while I was away, Martha died of mysterious circumstances. I buried her under a cactus; within two days, something had dug her up and eaten her.

My only exposure to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? came from mentions and a high school performance of Martha's opening monologue: I thought it was a pure comedy. What I got were two hours of pure, inhuman nastiness, goaded on by razor-sharp tongues dripping with venom. True, there were laughs to be had, but as in the life of finches, the story of a crumbled and fruitless marriage is rife with tragedy and delusion that permeates every character. There is little room for sympathy with these characters, who fluctuate so readily from fondness to loathing and back again. Nonetheless, their exchanges, much wittier and allowing more time than most modern films (owing to the theatrical source material), keep the viewer engrossed and cringing.

The late, great Elizabeth Taylor very much deserved her Oscar for her role as Martha, a performance unlike any I'd expected from the queen of class, so elegant in her horridness, yet overflowing with emotional layers that may or may not have been real to the character. Martha is a truly sick woman who has built up an entire world of illusion that George has somehow tolerated for years. Yet, they feed off each other, enable each other, and are clearly meant for each other, as dysfunctional as their alcohol- and revenge-driven relationship is. Their example offers a warning to anyone on the brink of marriage: choose wisely, not for money or out of panic, or else become the monster or the monster's bitch.

I give Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? four stars for sheer cringe factor. Whether I would watch it again on screen or choose to see it on stage instead remains to be determined. In any case, it is an excellent film for any (would-be) actor looking to see how the pros can make the most of long conversations in few, select settings, as well as how to effectively make the audience squirm at every turn.

Man Bites Dog

I had a bit of trouble watching this film, and unfortunately, my only reason was technical. My internet sputtered and died about twenty minutes from the end of it, following the film's main motif of sputtering death. I have a problem with the Netflix classification of all genres of film made outside the country as "Foreign." When I think "Foreign," I think artsy, cultural, and tragic. In many ways, Man Bites Dog (or more appropriately, C'est Arrivé a Chez Vous) has elements of art, culture, and tragedy, considering it's shot documentary-style long before that became the hip thing to do for action movies. The premise is that a documentary film crew, having decided to film the life of a serial killer, gradually gets pulled into the murders themselves, but I would argue, they were more than willing participants from the beginning.

After watching this film, I'm reminded of a story my television instructor told the class during Sophomore year of high school, how when she worked at a local news station, there was an incident of a child drowning in the river. She recounted that the cameras arrived on scene and began thrusting their microphones into the face of the mother who was weeping over the body of her child. It was too much for her, and she recalled her crew. The crew featured in Man Bites Dog takes this kind of inhumanity a whole step further. They smile and congratulate the killer, Benoit, for his kills, and when one of their own goes down, they pick up his gear and keep filming. There is no love here. There is no humanity. That which is seen on the camera, even if it's happening inches away, is unreal and therefore entertaining.

I came into this film with a bias toward a very different serial killer, Dexter, who has a code of punishing much worse offenders who have slipped through the clutches of the law. I could attempt to understand a film crew being sympathetic toward someone with a code like that, but Benoit Patard is no Dexter Morgan. He kills for the pleasure of it and for the money. He is creative in his killings, rewatching them like a football coach reviews plays to see how he could improve it. What's especially shocking is how careless he is, murdering in public places in broad daylight, yelling, shooting, and making a scene. Yet, because he has a television crew following him everywhere, all the people he meets and murders trust him completely, letting him into their homes, letting him lead them away. He kills lots of people, elderly and children included, but the crew just keeps on following him, no matter how much he insults or berates them, doing everything he asks with big, goofy grins on their faces. It is the effect of stardom, of losing oneself in one's craft.

While I did wonder about the pervasive lack of suspicion or police presence, even the idea that a serial killer would want the kind of liability a film crew would present, my greater wonder came from what Man Bites Dog had to say about the rest of us. Do the horrible murders we witness affect us? Maybe, maybe not. Would they affect us more if we were there filming? Is life slowly becoming indistinguishable from the lens, or is there hope that if we should find ourselves witnessing real atrocity, that we would feel, question, resist? At what point do we go from being apathetic to condoning the actions we see on the tube, if not externally, then internally? Do we need violence to hold our attention anymore?

In terms of watchability, this was not as gruesome as I half expected, considering the last French crime film I started to watch (and did not get past five minutes) was Irreversible. Benoit started as a charming, humorous person, then decayed very quickly, really bringing the viewer's awareness to the ugliness that is now so ubiquitously entertaining. I have to give it four stars for innovation, entertainment, and the provocation of thought. It's worth a look.

A Single Man (The Screenplay)

I'm going to abandon technical analysis for a moment and talk about how I'm feeling. Yeah. Whoa. Reading A Single Man left me feeling sad and sentimental. How did it do that? I couldn't see any of the characters' faces. I couldn't hear their voices or their sniffles as they cried. How, then, were these written words able to produce such distinct emotions without these visible and audible stimuli? There is much to be learned from an Oscar-nominated screenplay.

We'll start with the basics. Lost love is universally relatable, whether directly or vicariously, and the death of a loved one is the epitome of this sort of loss. In this case, we enter the grieving process of a man, George, who has recently lost his partner of 16 years, Jim, to a car accident. We get this through flashbacks played in reverse from Jim's death to their first meeting, the increasing happiness of the memories a parallel to George's own improving mood, but this parallel is irrelevant here. It is the contrast of the happiness of these flashbacks to the quiet, somber world that George now inhabits that stirs the emotion inside as we realize the extent of what George has lost. Through this contrast, the reader cannot help but reflect on or speculate about one's own losses. Relating = feeling.

While loss of love can be experienced oneself or through others, the pain of alienation is something that attacks the very core of the social animal. Right off the bat, George gets a call from Jim's cousin, with news about the car accident and the upcoming funeral. The loss hurts, but the reiteration that the funeral is for "family only," is a much sharper sting. Throughout the story, George reflects on how he and Jim were invisible, cut off from the increasingly savage world embodied by his beastly neighbors. He teaches a class that does not care, watches a world of mediocrity sprouting around him, feels so out of place and out of touch. The drowning motif, while a bit heavy-handed, is fitting. It is only when he befriends his student, Kenny, that he is allowed to surface.

Finally, George's doom touches our hearts. We know from the beginning that he will ultimately die: he buys bullets for a gun, withdraws his possessions from the bank, and leaves his will out on the table for someone to find. We envision someone whose heart has been deeply cracked, who lacks the means or the understanding to repair it. Our sadness comes from seeing how his attempts have failed and how he has slipped into complete isolation and anonymity. It is when we trip in the pursuit of happiness that we fall into the character's sadness.

Through this wave of melancholy, we catch breaths of air in the memories and the happy moments. George recollects in his final words that he has "lived [his] life on these moments" even though they fade. Yet, it is his acknowledgment that everything must fade that ultimately sets him free. He is able to look at what has been and what can be. He can acknowledge that there may be more moments to anticipate. He has a few friends and at least one who understands him. It is a quiet way to end, satisfying without yelling or sobbing but a quiet gasp.

Metropolis

I'm not going to lie. It's really difficult for me to get into German expressionism, especially after a long day at the beach. When Metropolis opened with the disclaimer that large chunks of the film had been lost to the ages, I was afraid this was going to be one erratic, haphazard two hours of movie. There were two things that I felt specifically kept it from becoming so: the artistry and the performances. While I enjoyed parts of the score, there were times where even it became a bit too repetitive; therefore, I'll keep my focus on the other two.

The city design of Metropolis, though largely limited to artists' sketches and miniatures, encompassed a grandeur, the likes of which modern civilization has yet to attain. The comparison of the city to the Tower of Babel was a tight fit. The buildings towered above the streets below, each one seeking to outdo its neighbor in height and diameter. No space was spared between them and walkways connected them; in all actuality, in this world, there was no reason for any human to set foot outdoors at all, which lent itself to the closed-minded world of the characters.

Starting out, I really did not want to like our protagonist, Freder (played by Gustav Fröhlich), whose heavy makeup and hyperbolic reactions to everything contrasted gratingly with his father's more subtle appearance. However, our love interest, Maria (Brigitte Helm) and mad inventor, Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), both managed to outdo Freder in over-the-top expression. However, when she wasn't flailing her arms and crashing blindly into walls, Maria as the robot was a lot of fun to watch. Her bizarre erotic dance, her spiderlike hand gestures, and her sneering glances, all done with a mechanical rhythm, somehow managed to grasp perfectly the image of that which is twisted and evil in the world.

Metropolis comes from the days when a message could be hammered down the throats of the audience without receiving great scorn, but despite its continuous restating of its message, I really enjoyed the analogy of the head and hand needing to meet at the heart; it is an excellent message to take into account when working with dreamers and workers, because compassion and empathy, or at least the attempt at it, are essential to a working society, as demonstrated by the mob of workers racing from their city to destroy the machine that kept them alive, leaving their children to die. Thus, as befits truly classic science fiction, Metropolis leaves us with both a happy ending and a stern warning for the future: side with neither the hand nor the mind exclusively, but walk that delicate line between mobs or else become the problem. I give Metropolis three stars for artistry and the provoking of thought.

Minion

Wow, it's been a while since I posted here last. Still, there's a perfectly logical explanation, and it is that I really buckled down and wrote two drafts of this script in the last month. So yes, Minion is now done after two years, registered, submitted, and now I actually have some time available to catch up with the rest of projects.

I learned several really important lessons about writing during this time that would be useful to detail below:

• Writer's block is a good indicator that you've gone astray. Despite a deadline, it can be a good thing to go back and find that moment.
• If a detail takes so long to research that it takes away from your creative time, it's probably not worth keeping.
• Over-thinking is the death of creativity (and a lot of dating scenarios, but I digress).
• You don't need to detail every time the characters turn their heads or smile or sigh.
• A lot can be accomplished in only three hours.
• Get through a full draft. Then worry about page count.

So, with these in mind, I'm going to take maybe a week off from scripts to catch up on reading and my website, and then it's off to the next project. With one actually completed, it's really encouraging. Write on!

The Deadline

I received a follow-up E-mail from the script list. Someone still really wants to read M. That's friggin' cool, but I still have sixty pages to go and only twenty days to write 'em. *Does the math* Three pages a day? Bring it on!