Some photos I took of Sam's Star Wars toy collection.

Faced with headlines like this, the world is ready, I believe, for a story about a unicorn, and a little girl, and a hat, and a circus.

Dad is not the only storyteller in the Alcott family. This is by Kit (5). As difficult as it is for me to wrap my mind around the idea that my daughter, when, given the chance, thinks up stories about unicorns, little girls, and hats, and circuses, I cannot argue with the sweep and punch of the results.



Hollywood studio executives will no doubt note Kit's grasp of the surprise twist ending. Not content with one, she here supplies us with two.  Or three.  Take that, M. Night Shyamalan!

UPDATE: Fox has just called regarding the rights to The Wonder Unicorn.  They're thinking of Queen Latifah as a streetwise, sassy unicorn and Evan Rachel Wood as the little girl.

 

scooterjockey   writes:

"I understand this is a blog about the story of films - but for some reason with Spielberg movies, the movie can't be judged on story alone. Obviously visuals are the cornerstone to every film (otherwise, we'd be satisfied with simply reading the stories) and few can match the perfection that Spielberg brings visually."

The main body of Mr. Jockey's comment is about the importance of John Williams' music in Spielberg's movies, but his preamble set off a chain of reasoning in my head that became too complicated to be confined to the comments margin.

There is no mysterious "some reason" that Spielberg movies can't be judged on story alone. No movie can be judged by story alone. A screenplay is, as they like to say in story meetings, only a blueprint. The "meaning" of the movie may be consonant with the blueprint or it may comment on it, or contradict it. Visuals can compress, expand, redact, re-arrange, re-value, devalue and undermine whatever is in the script. The screenwriter is helpless before the primacy of the visual, and the smart screenwriter finds a director who more or less shares his vision and lets him do the job of bringing the screenplay to visual life -- which involves changing things. As John Logan said about writing The Aviator (I paraphrase) "I learned that a crease in Leonardo DiCaprio's brow says more than a page of description."

Movies are, of course, about the visual. Spielberg's movies, with their stunning images and masterfully choreographed action, tend to be more about the visual than others. (The reader will note that he is not putting his hand to his ear in the above photograph.) The visual fluency of Spielberg's movies is so abundant and seductive that I can easily get caught up in a compelling camera move, a bit of editing, a spectacular effort of production design, a dazzling piece of choreography, and lose track of the blueprint entirely. The purpose of this series is to track the protagonists of Spielberg's movies through the narratives of their respective movies, relying as much as possible on their simple actions, that is, "what they do" as opposed to "how they are shot" or "what is the cumulative impact."

(Or, for that matter, "how is the music." And let me just say right now that I'm sick and tired of people who are sick and tired of John Williams. What position for a composer to be in -- his talent and sensibility are so well-matched to his director that people take him as a given and pretend to disdain him -- "Ho hum, another score by John Williams." Where would Spielberg be without Williams? More to the point, where does Spielberg end and Williams begin? That's how closely married their sensibilities are, you can't imagine Spielberg's movies without Williams's music and you can't hear Williams's music without seeing the visuals they accompany.)

(One thing I've learned, for instance: the "three-act narrative" has become such a rule of Hollywood development that anything else is looked upon with suspicion or dread, yet few of Spielberg's movies have a three-act structure. His most popular movies have four, and some even have five.)

The purpose, for me, of this Spielberg series is specifically to examine the blueprints of his movies and figure out how they're designed and built -- before the dazzling visuals come into play. Since the dawn of my moviegoing days I've known that Spielberg's movies work, now I want to know why they work.

WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? Jim Graham is a boy living a pampered, sheltered life in a rather unusual circumstance -- he is the son of well-to-do Britons in the suburbs of Shanghai in the 1930s. When the Japanese invade Shanghai in 1941, he is separated from his wealth, his privilege, his nationality, and most important, his family. His identity stripped away and his sense of self shattered, Jim looks desperately for an authority figure who will take the place of his family -- in short, something to believe in, a leader to follow.

The structure of Empire of the Sun goes something like this:

My monologue "Television" continues to burrow its way into universe in strange and unpredictable ways.

My son Sam (6) is a natural-born movie buff, and that is a good thing. His younger sister, Kit (5), not so much. Sam wants to know how movies are made, how effects (both narrative and special) are achieved, how "they get it to look that way." Kit is attracted to characters.

I've tried to carefully manage my kids' exposure to movies, not so much to keep them ignorant of subversive material but to present a canon: Star Wars movies are good, Barbie movies are not. Justice League is good, The Wiggles is not. Pixar is exceptionally good, other studios require a more project-by-project assessment. The purposed end result of this cultural editing is that, when they become old enough to choose their own entertainment, they will be able to recognize quality over crap. I also want them to have an understanding of movie history and be able to appreciate older movies (like, you know, Raiders of the Lost Ark).

( Read more... )

Portishead has a new record out.

The reader will be forgiven for one of the following responses:

1. Portishead? What the hell is Portishead?
2. Portishead? They're still making records?
3. Portishead -- I think my Mom listens to them.
4. Portishead, yeah, I remember liking them -- when Bill Clinton was president.

Twelve years is a long time to go without putting out a record. But one of the things I've always liked about Portishead is that they don't seem to give a rat's ass about being successful. And it's one thing for bands to stay "indie" by downscaling their operations and staying closer to their (limited) audience, but it's something else again to simply refuse to play the game, to pack up ones samplers and go home. In a way it's kind of the ultimate cred move -- smooth move, Portishead, playing the "integrity card."

Anyway, Portishead has a new record out, and it's called Third, and it's wonderful.  It's quickly becoming my favorite record so far this year (step aside, Raconteurs, R.E.M., Rolling Stones, et alia).

A band that takes twelve years between albums would be forgiven for becoming irrelevant, dusty, twee or marginal in the lapse (I'm looking at you, XTC) but Portishead simply picks up where it left off and moves forward. The record everything one would want from a Portishead record, and then more. It is startling, eerie, moody, catchy. It is simultaneously more "live" than their first two records and more artificial, more contrived. (Am I the only one who prefers the live versions on their Roseland NYC album to the studio versions?) The arrangements are more adventurous (a mandolin even pops up on one tune, with Gene Autry-style cowboy harmonies), the tempos more diverse, and there are some stylistic experiments so surprising that I've had to stop several times to make sure that what I had heard was intentional and not some download glitch. The tension between the druggy electronic backgrounds and Beth Gibbons's keening vocals is as alive and disturbing as ever.  If popular music has moved on from where Portishead was in 1996, well, I was never too interested in popular music anyway.

Note: while this post is filed under "iTunes Catch of the Day," I actually downloaded Third from Amazon, where it was two dollars cheaper. This was my first time downloading from Amazon, and I am happy to report that the Amazon download program is fast, efficient and problem-free -- unlike eMusic, which is cheaper but is, frankly, is a pain in the ass.

After working on Astroboy and Wonder Woman, for many years I was "on the list" of writers consulted for every comic-book movie that came down the pike.

When the Iron Man people asked me for a take on their then-aborning project, I took a jaunt to my local comic-book store to look for source material. This was quite a few years ago now, and, as hard as it is to believe, there was almost no Iron Man material in the stores. The only readily-available collection was The Power of Iron Man, an important, ground-breaking story arc that dealt mainly with Tony Stark's alcoholism.

click to enlarge.

Who doesn't like chocolate? Not me! I love chocolate!

Who doesn't like bacon? Nobody, that's who! Everybody loves bacon! Pigs love bacon! If I was a pig I would regularly undergo belly surgery so that I could have an endless supply of bacon.

From the dawn of civilization, people have eaten chocolate, and also bacon. Why, oh why, has it taken from then 'til now to put the two together?

My wife brought home this curious artifact today, "Mo's Bacon Bar," described as containing "applewood smoked bacon, Alder wood smoked salt, and deep milk chocolate." My son Sam (6), who sees absolutely no reason why bacon and chocolate should not commingle, dove right in and rushed to be the first to try this new confection. I followed suit, and Mom, more out of curiosity than craving, took a small piece.

It's seems odd to say it, but it tastes exactly like bacon, and chocolate. As though you had, perhaps, a piece of bacon and then a little square of chocolate. Or perhaps a thin square of chocolate, then a thin slice of bacon, then another thin slice of chocolate on top, a little chocolate-and-bacon sandwich. Neither flavor overpowers the other -- you don't say "You can really taste the bacon!", it's actually rather subtle. And chocolatey, and bacony.

On the back of the package is an essay by the treat's inventor, explaining herself.  As well she should.*

For more information on chocolate and bacon, consult your local library. Or go here.


*Thanks to sheherazahde for pointing out that, although the name "Mo's Bacon Bar" led me to believe the inventor was a man named Mo, the inventor of this confection is, in fact, a woman.  Named Katrina.  Go figure.

It is 1995 and I have purchased my first PC.

A friend of mine tells me about this game Doom that is the wildest, scariest, freakiest, most addictive thing he has ever encountered. I happen across a free shareware version of the game at Staples and think "What the heck, I'll try it."

The next 24 hours or so are a blur. I'm aware afterward that my arms hurt from working the keys so frantically for such an extended period of time, but otherwise it's just me and the game.

WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? Celie, the impoverished, helpless protagonist of The Color Purple, begins the narrative by having her child is stolen from her by a cruel, oppressive man. By the end of Act I, her sister is driven away from her by a different cruel, oppressive man. Celie, like the protagonist of The Sugarland Express (and hardly alone in the Spielberg canon), wants her family reunited. Unlike the protagonist of The Sugarland Express, Celie is not only reactive, she is oppressed, beaten down, fearful. She can't even open her keeper's mail box, much less leave home in pursuit of her lost family.

The structure of The Color Purple goes something like this:

These have been showing up in Santa Monica. First it was just a few signs here and there, now they're everywhere.

My apologies to my readers who wait with bated breath for my analysis of The Color Purple.  My son Sam (6) had a day off from school, and my daughter Kit (5) has a school that consists primarily of her being out of the house for four hours, so my wife and I decided to take them to Disneyland.

As mcbrennan and The New York Times remind me, today is Record Store Day in the US.

I offer three anecdotes:

1. Back in the day, there used to be a whole district of radio-repair shops in lower Manhattan. It was a thriving district, but by the late 60s it was thriving with cranky old men who gathered in musty shops arguing about arcana. Then David Rockefeller got the idea to wipe the district off the face of the earth and put the World Trade Center there instead. Overnight, a dying, outmoded business disappeared, and the World Trade Center stood in that spot, triumphant and unmovable, 110 stories tall and proud, for, um, 28 years. Well, all things must pass, and pride goeth before a fall, and substitute "record stores" for "radio-repair" and "iTunes" for "World Trade Center" and maybe, perhaps, you won't feel so bad about the passing of this particular dusty institution.

2. I have spent more time in used record stores than probably any other kind of store in my life. I have, literally, thousands of used-record-store stories, of which only three or so are of interest to anyone but me. Suffice to say, when I was a teenager, living in an unheated trailer in southern Illinois in March of 1980, literally starving to death, living on a 25-cent can of store-brand spaghetti a day and a 33-cent frozen chicken-pot-pie on Sundays, a friend sent me 20 dollars in a letter. Fifteen dollars of that 20 dollars I spent on food, five I spent on a copy of Elvis Costello's Get Happy!!

3. When I moved to New York in the autumn of 1983, ground zero of my existence was Tower Records at Broadway and 4th St. Tower was a five-minute walk from St. Mark's Place, which held Sounds, St. Mark's Books, Venus Records and a few other choice used-record stores. My goal for being a New Yorker was to live within a block of Broadway and 4th St. I lived in New York for 22 years and by 1999 I achieved my goal, living in a loft at Broadway and Washington Place, finally within walking distance of all the places I considered the lifeblood of my creative imagination. Any given Tuesday afternoon I could be found making the trek from Tower to St. Mark's to the Strand and back. Including Tuesday, September 11, 2001, upon which morning I watched the World Trade Center burn on my TV, 1.5 miles away from the site, then walk downstairs and head over to Tower. The sidewalks were filled with refugees fleeing the financial district and Tower was filled with sobbing, distraught New Yorkers watching the TV monitors. I took all this in, and then bought Bob Dylan's "Love and Theft" and Leonard Cohen's Ten New Songs and went back home.

Support your local record store today! I will be at Amoeba in Hollywood this evening. (And let me just note that it was only a couple of years ago that the opening of Amoeba, which is a great store, forced the closing of several worthy Hollywood used record stores. Plus ca change.

The first thing you notice about the book Ralph Nader, Will You Marry Me? is that its title is Ralph Nader, Will You Marry Me? If that is not enough of a stimulus to pick up a book, I don't know what is.

The great interpretive singer Leonard Nimoy exploded upon the popular-music scene with his first album, the curiously-titled Mr. Spock's Music From Outer Space (1967). Still an unknown quantity, he nevertheless took a daring stance and adopted a distinct, recognizable "persona" for his performances, an alien space man named "Mr. Spock." This interpretive strategy, designed to create an air of mystique around the singer, was at the same time being adopted by The Beatles, who copied Nimoy for their groundbreaking work Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Much later, David Bowie would grab this idea and run with it all the way to the bank, but it should be noted that Nimoy did it first.

The song titles on Mr. Spock are intriguing and otherworldly: "Theme from Star Trek," "Music to Watch Space Girls By", "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Earth" and the immortal "Visit to a Sad Planet." The album caught the "space" craze of the mid-sixties, was a huge hit and Nimoy's label, Dot Records, was soon clamoring for more.

So. Moving on:

Like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom has four acts, each lasting about 30 minutes. Each of the acts has three distinct chapters, giving us a twelve-chapter serial drama.

What's different, structurally, is that Raiders has a restless spirit, jetting (well, prop-planing) about all over the globe, from Peru to the US to Nepal to Cairo to Secret Sub Base Island. Temple gets all the travel out of the way in the first 25 minutes and spends the rest of its time in more or less one place, and an hour of that in one location, underground in a cave. The result is a much differently-shaped narrative than Raiders, one that's spirited and frantic for the first act, then claustrophobic and inward for the rest of the movie, and dark, dark, dark. It gives us twenty minutes of breathless forward movement, seventy minutes of horror and torture, then thirty minutes of blasting escape.

The movie is often criticized for its unpleasantness and weirdness, as well as its generally heavy attitude, but I find it as compulsively watchable as any of the best of Spielberg and a much meatier experience than either Raiders or Crusade.

( Into the great unknown mystery, I go first. )

First, I'd like to thank Mr. Spielberg for giving the opportunity to create a journal entry that contains three colons in the subject heading.

Steven Spielberg's artistic development, in his first decade on movie screens, started softly with The Sugarland Express, exploded in the megaton blast of Jaws, soared to incredible heights with Close Encounters, stumbled momentarily with 1941, then finished up with an incredible one-two-three punch of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Poltergeist and E.T. That decade alone would have been enough career for just about anyone, but us Spielberg watchers knew that the best was yet to come. I remember seeing E.T. for the third or fourth time and thinking "Oh my God, when this guy is 50 years old he's going to be awesome." And I'm pleased to report that this came to pass.

Spielberg's first decade of phenomenal artistic development climaxed with a stunning culmination of style and intent -- the "Spielberg style" came to define commercial American moviemaking in the next decade and beyond. In his second decade, Spielberg stretched boundaries, investigated new areas of development, took some daring chances and made great strides as a storyteller.

But first he directed "Kick the Can," his contribution to the omnibus Twilight Zone: The Movie.

(For those interested in my earlier thoughts on Poltergeist, I direct you here.)

WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? Diane Freeling is a middle-class housewife and mother of three. Like many middle-class mothers, she is content to merely get through the day, negotiating the various comedies and headaches of middle-class American existence -- the fighting kids, the snotty neighbors, the promiscuous teenager.

There is, of course, an underlying fear to her life, the same fear that lies beneath just about everyone's life -- the fear of death. Diane does not feel death at her elbow, but she knows it's out there waiting somewhere, and while she may or may not be content with that knowledge, she very much wants to keep it from her children. This desire first expresses itself as Diane trying to soften the blow of the death of her preschooler's pet bird, but the stakes for Diane will eventually rise to the point where she will, literally, enter the gates of Hell in order to save her child from death.

( You can't choose between life and death when we're dealing with what is in between )