The Intruder

THREE FILMS "BY" ROGER CORMAN

The, to me anyway, surprising release of four Roger Corman films via Buena Vista Home Entertainment, the DVD branch of Walt Disney's company, and the first of a whole series under the umbrella title ROGER CORMAN: EARLY FILMS, creates a predictable invitation to reassess Corman, yet again, as a filmmaker, producer, and independent voice, and to contemplate DVD film release patterns in general.

Of the three I got, the earliest chronologically was BIG BAD MAMA (Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 1974, $19.95, Tuesday, December 13, 2005). The first thing I thought was, This is early Corman?! For one thing, Corman has been directing since the mid-'50s, and earlier credits go back to THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS in 1954. Second, Corman may have produced BIG BAD MAMA, but he didn't direct it. The disc at least doesn't make it clear just how much Corman really had to do with this film beyond a supervisory role and coming up with the title (titles are very important to Corman, as an essentially exploitation barker). An array of "early Corman" films would include a surprising number of westerns (APACHE WOMAN, FIVE GUNS WEST, GUNSLINGER) and sci-fi horrors (IT CONQUERED THE WORLD, ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS). But then, these were made for American International and those films appear to be the exclusive domain of MGM on DVD. What BV is releasing (or re-releasing to be precise) are New World films from the second stage of Corman's career, when he formed his own company. If you flip the box over, a small text bullet reads, "Known for his keen eye in spotting new talent, the Roger Corman Early Films Collection [sic: whose the 'his' refer to?] features Hollywood's brightest talent beginning their journey on the walk of fame." So the "early films" refers not to Corman but to the directors he nurtured. Nevertheless, the overall title of the series is misleading, and nobody reads the box text, probably because it insists on being ungrammatical.

The third act of Corman's career is associated with Concorde, the company he formed after selling New World. With typical complexity, the rights to all these movies are scattered among god knows how many people or financial entities.

Which hasn't prevented at least these three from all being on DVD already. DEATH RACE came in a pan and scan edition early in the history of DVDs, and the others were also released, usually by a company called New Horizons. Based on the image quality and the extras, and what some other reviews have said, these discs are apparently mostly reprints of the earlier discs, using the same transfers. BIG BAD MAMA is full frame, and ROCK 'N' ROLL is not enhanced. Only DEATH RACE appears to be the most up to date version and even it looks old.

Meanwhile, the supplements are a blend of old and new. It's nice that BV has retained most of the old extras — there is nothing more irritating than having good supplements scattered over numerous discs or on inaccessible laser discs. BIG BAD MAMA's has DD 2.0 to accompany its full frame image, but also has the original trailer, a 20-minute making of, and a commentary track by Corman and star Angie Dickinson.

The retrospective making of is very good. Almost everyone came out to play, from the director, Steven Carver, to William Shatner. Even the two writers were still alive and willing to tell their tales. Even more interesting, the creators of the supplement leave in contradictory accounts of things, such as Dickinson's attitude to her two or three nude scenes. The retrospective making of on ROCK 'N' ROLL is very much like this one, fun to watch and occasionally laugh out loud funny, with almost full participation from the creators.

The commentary track is a different matter. Also new to disc, like the making of (I think), it is a low key affair, with Corman and Dickinson talking in a room intermittently over the image, adding very little, Corman telling the same stories he has told on other tracks in this same set, and Dickinson not knowing who Paul Bartel is (he did second unit and appeared in a ritzy party sequence). On the plus side, they are enthusiastic over the film and rate it an underappreciated piece of pop entertainment.

DEATH RACE 2000 (Buena Vista Home Entertainment pressing of a New World release, 1975, $19.95, Tuesday, December 13, 2005) was made about four years into the existence of New World and was its then biggest hit. Corman sold it in 1983, after 13 years of intense filmmaking and career spawning. New World appears to have chugged along up through the early 1990s. If it's the same New World, its address is in Texas. Anyone who doubts that Corman's films, both as director and producer, don't have a style need only compare the post Corman New Worlds to his.

I guess that wiseacre humor is the quality that Corman's films have, along with a certain zest, that don't exist in the plodding work of his imitators or successors. And that's the quality of Paul Bartel's effort here, a blend of distopian Dr. Strangelove social satire, cheap sex, hot cars, and essentially liberal political commentary. Bartel and the writers were working from a treatment by Corman himself, based on a story by Ib Melchoir (a fascinating figure in his own right and the subject of a hard to find biography), and it was Bartel's chance to get out of the second unit division. Though he was working from the foundations of others' ideas, it's easy to imagine that the sensibility that later made EATING RAOUL found something to latch onto in this tale of a futuristic car race in which drivers score points from fatalities.

The only anamorphic transfer (1.78:1), DR 2000 also has adequate DD 2.0 audio, and the shortest of the making ofs, a mere 10 minutes, probably because Paul Bartel died. His input would have been amusing. Instead, there is an audio commentary track by star Mary Woronov and Corman. Woronov is one of my idols but she comes across as crotchety and opinionated, though very supportive of Corman (Woronov makes generalizations such as, "Men like cars, they do!," that, to generalize, no man could get away with uttering).

Probably the biggest deal of the first batch of releases is ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL (Buena Vista Home Entertainment pressing of a New World release, 1979, $19.95, Tuesday, December 13, 2005). It's the most fun, the most likely to appeal to a broad audience, has good performances, an "everything but the kitchen sink" approach to jokes, and, of course, it has the Ramones, which instantly sends it into the stratosphere as far as potential cult status is concerned.

But is it really that good? It's not particularly well shot, and most of the jokes are lame. There is a subplot concerning a romance between a brainy girl (Dey Young) and a jock (Vincent Van Patten), is terribly undercooked. The anti-authoritarian hatred of high school stuff is for the most part weak and petty. Now, I'd never seen BIG BAD MAMA before, and as the film began I was put off by the terrible double entendres. I was embarrassed for the stars having to utter them. Here I was put off by the gross humor, which is mostly unsuccessful. The film was shot in 15 days and looks it.

However, Robin Wood has counseled us against judging a film by the standards of Hollywood's tradition of quality, that is, not holding a film's budge against it, and just as there are very interesting narrative turns and surprisingly tender and complex scenes in BBM, there is an irrepressible exuberance to RRHS, which resides mostly in the wonderful enthusiasm that P. J. Soles's character has for the Ramones.

One's enthusiasm for the film is heightened by the audio commentary track by director Allan Arkush along with producer Michael Finnell, and writer Richard Whitley. This is inherited from one of the earlier discs, and it is really informative although I can't remember all the things right now. A second track is new and features Dey Young and Corman, who start to tread down a dangerous path when they bring up, though not by name, Columbine and other incidents that are the logical outgrowth of the kind of hate that the film satirizes and that Arkush says he felt literally in high school. They don't really have anything either interesting or outrageous to say about the connection and have to orally back out of the conversation as quietly as possible.

But fun as it is to celebrate the film along with the filmmakers, the question remains, How good is it, really? For them it is nice to have a stepping stone into the world of directing ("Hollywood's brightest talent beginning their journey on the walk of fame") shows such as CROSSING JORDAN, but does RnRHS have a life beyond a niche market? And what is the real legacy of Corman. I have to confess that there is a real disconnect between the Corman "known" from his films and the comments of others and the avuncular, somewhat square and out-of-it guy who has turned his entire career into a series of anecdotes and whose sensibility seems been locked in the 1960s (hot rods, airplanes, teen girls at car hops). Corman reputation used to rest on his pragmatism, the efficiency with which he could title, shoot, edit, and distribute inespensive films, but I think in the future his reputation will expand as we look closer at movies such as THE INTRUDER, or THE RED BARON, or THE ST VALENTINE'S DAY MASSACRE, and assess the ideas contained in them. Filmmakers of a certain ilk or popularity seem loath to admit that they were ever thinking about issues or ideas when they plotted their movies, but with such films as THE INTRUDER, Corman was obviously attempting to say something that wasn't entirely composed of received wisdom and liberal pieties.

ROCK 'N' ROLL also has a new retrospective making of, the audio tracks of the Ramones' live performances for the film (also on previous discs), radio spots, and the trailer.

Of the three films, ROCK 'N' ROLL and DEATH RACE come in keep cases with box covers, and all three have cool disc labels, plus inserts

Concerning the title of the BV series, Arkush may have given something away. At the end of the retrospective making of Arkush turns to the camera and addresses Corman directly, in the form of a video open letter, alluding to the series as a "best of the '70s" set. Was the title or concept changed somewhere along the way?

Media Notes From All Over

Television Without Pity is, by the reckoning of many — from the NEW YORK TIMES to Jessica Stilwell, who wrote a doctoral thesis about it — the best written and funniest website on the Internet. And yet its premise is deceptively simple: a team of writers recapitulate the episodes of TV shows, in case you missed them.

The secret of working the site, however, is that you shouldn't miss the episode ! Because if you do, you won't fully appreciate the wit with which the recappers alternately eviscerate and celebrate the handful of active shows the site covers, among them VERONICA MARS, LOST, THE WEST WING, and most HBO series (but no sit-coms). Television Without Pity is also unusual among websites in that it actually pays its writers (there are some 60 contributors listed on the masthead but not all are currently active). Revenue appears to be generated by ads on the site's pages, TWP trinkets such as T-shirts and 'fridge magnets bearing the image of Tubey, the site's mascot, a Satanically angry TV box with horns and tail. And at some point in the recent past, Television Without Pity formed an alliance with Yahoo.

It seemed like a good time to try to interview someone from Television Without Pity, which I have been reading obsessively since first learning about it in 2002. Television Without Pity is co-edited by Sarah D. Bunting, based in Brooklyn, and Tara Ariano, who lives in Toronto. On the site, Ariano is known as "Wing Chun," while Bunting is known as "Sars," pronounced to rhyme with "cares," and which is Bunting's sui generis nickname for Sarah (also in the masthead is David T. Cole, with the titles Publisher and Tech Genius).

I'm sure that Wing Chun is just as fascinating as Sars, but I chose Bunting for no very good reason at all except randomness. The co-editrix hails originally from New Jersey, and in the past has held such jobs as church secretary and a proofreader at PENTHOUSE. Bunting has her own site, called Tomato Nation, with stories and pix, which she has been doing since 1997, which is also around the time when she first encountered Ariano on a bulletin board, soon becoming friends and colleagues. Together they started Dawson's Wrap, a website devoted exclusively to the exegesis and critique of the TV show; this evolved into the more ambitious website Mighty Big TV, the name later changed to Television Without Pity, with the motto, and guiding principle, "Spare the Snark, Spoil the Network."

Television Without Pity is very good at needling a show right where it lives. Like schoolyard bullies, if they don't like you, they rename you. One example among thousands is Gustave, the recapper for the second season of 24, renaming the sexually abusive man whom the hero's daughter Kim baby-sits for "DaddyStopTouchingMe." Kim is, of course, Spawn, as in Spawn of Kiefer, and the girl she baby-sits is, of course, JonBenet. Plunge into a middle-of-season recapping and you are unlikely to know what the hell is going on — unless, of course, you've seen the show. The recapper for 24 was also tireless in pointing out the makes of cars, since they were all product placements. But the needling is the kind born of obsessive love, or maybe just obsession, and the site is really using humor as a form of cultural criticism.

Though Bunting no longer recaps shows herself, she and Ariano still maintain tight supervision over Television Without Pity, editing the recaps (and often parenthetically inserting brief editorial comments, just as the editors of the British publication PRIVATE EYE are wont to do), and policing the forums, which are among the funniest, most passionate, and brainiest on the 'Net, rivaled by few others, including Mobius Home Video Forum and a few others.

MoviePoopShoot.com: A "TV year" runs from September to May; but as 2006 begins, do you have any thoughts about 2005, or perhaps the 2004-2005, and the start of 2005 - 2006? Was it a great, transitional time for episodic television? Or have prime time and, especially, cable actually been really good for a long time and only now is the media catching up with it? Or am I behind the times?

Sars:I don't know if I'd characterize 2005, or the 2004-5 season, as particularly noteworthy compared with seasons past; in fact, from where we were sitting, the 2005 fall slate was rather limp. We weren't seeing the breakout shows we saw in the fall of '04, like LOST and DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES; in the fall of '05, everyone was still talking about … LOST and DH. And ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT.

Not that there wasn't good new programming in the last year, because there was — ROME, EVERYBODY HATES CHRIS — and we saw some old franchises kind of come back to life (SURVIVOR), but I don't know that 2005 as a year is going to be one we look back on and say, "That was a turning point in TV."

Except for Kevin Smith appearing on DEGRASSI: TNG. Heh.

I am one living example of a newfound TV obsession. I almost like TV more than movies now, just as I did when I was a little kid. Personally, I trace it to getting obsessively into THE SOPRANOS and THE WIRE, but nationally it may have begun earlier. Now I am wholly given over to television most nights between 8 and 11 PM. Do you perceive a heightened, attention to, nay obsession with TV?

Well … first of all, it's sort of hard for me to generalize about TV in the culture, because the attention we see paid to TV on Television Without Pity is, of course, a self-selecting group of users who are usually "super-users" of TV in the way you describe yourself. Second of all, I'm not a sociologist or a reporter, so: grain of salt.

With that said … I would say that, since we started the site in 1999, I do sense a higher awareness in the population at large of what's happening on TV — not that everyone's watching more TV, but that everyone's more up to date on the "important" shows, that everyone's better able to be a part of the metaphorical "water-cooler" discussion.

Now, that could be the fact that the entertainment press is more pervasive than it was six or seven years ago; it could be that TV is better. I think shows like THE SOPRANOS are at least a small part of that — that you're seeing truly outstanding television that is "event programming" even though so many people have TiVos and DVRs, that they will make it a point to be home and turn the phone off on Sundays at 9 PM anyway. Nobody wants to be the last person in the office to know what happened on LOST last night.

So, as to why that's happening, I can't say, and whether it's really happening and it's not just my perception, I can't say either. But it used to be that when I told people what I did, at cocktail parties, they'd focus on the website aspect. Now, they immediately go to their favorite show and ask whether we cover it and what I think of it. I think more people are invested in TV now, even if we're not necessarily consuming more by volume.

Moving on to the technical side of television, these days how can we really measure TV viewership? Aren't the Nielsen ratings woefully out of date, still locked into the old, rigid prime time model, while the rest of the world often uses TiVo, Bittorrent, tape trading, and other methods of TV viewing outside normal tracking methodologies?

You've kind of hit on one of my pet … rants, I guess, here, which is that the Nielsens and the sweeps periods are a bit out of date vis-à-vis what they're trying to measure. I have heard that the Nielsen company doesn't like to give boxes to people with DVRs … which means that that entire demographic, which tends to be super-users like myself who watch scads of TV per week, is not being measured. And I watch a lot of off-brand reality TV and "vintage" reruns of FELICITY and stuff, so those channels aren't counting me because I would never get a box.

I also have limited time — only 24 hours in a day, some of them have to be spent sleeping and/or drinking beer — so I watch a lot of shows "behind." I just polished off S4 of ANGEL; I never watched that show live, except for the Muppet episode. I love it, it's a great show, I never missed a BUFFY, but for whatever reason, I came to it late. So, I'm an ANGEL watcher, of sorts, but it's been off the air for over a year.

Trouble is, I don't have an alternative suggestion for how to measure viewership that isn't live or recorded by a Nielsen box. Well, I do, but it's the kind of invasive sci-fi set-up that even our current administration would be like, "Whoa, too nosy." So, I think the next step for networks and producers is to put their heads together on a technology that lets the super-users have a vote — a voluntary "send my record list to a database" option on the DVR menu or something.

This is kind of a weird question, but in a way do you think that there is too much television right now? Or is the abundance of viewing options a noble example of democracy in action, of competitive capitalism at its purest?

I would say the latter. I mean, even back when we had three channels and UHF, they were still putting shit on like PINK LADY AND JEFF and I'M A BIG GIRL NOW. No matter how wide a range of choices you have, it seems like the proportion of good to worthless remains roughly stable — three channels, three hundred, three thousand, you're still going to see that 75-80% of TV is not worth your time.

Which sounds like a fairly bleak pronunciamento, but when TV is good, it's that much more satisfying. I mean, The WEST WING sounded ridiculous to us; we thought it would get sacked in a month's time. Rob Lowe? Now, sure, he's kind of an elder statesman of smart television, but then, it was like, ELMO'S FIRE guy in the White House? Pull the other one, Sorkie. But the show turned into a real force, and when that happens —when people really give a shit about telling a story well and entertaining people without pandering — it's fun, as a viewer and as a commentator on the medium.

How about the World Wide Web? Isn't there way too much to keep up with on the Internet. How do you keep up with everything? Just reading Television Without Pity itself can take up a lot of one's day … it seems as big as the NEW YORK TIMES.

Yeah, there's a lot out there — and actually, I wish I could read more of what's on the Web, because people are doing some great writing around here. But the Web is my "workplace," and in the interests of maintaining what used to pass for "my sanity," I do have to keep my reading list pretty trim or I'll just be at my desk all day in an adult diaper.

So, I don't do a lot of aimless surfing anymore. I have a reading list, I run down it, and then I try to get offline and interact with people, outside. Because it can take over.

What advice, if any, do you give your recappers about time management?

I don't tend to give them advice about their process (I'm sorry to use the word "process." It always feels like that scene in MANHATTAN where Woody Allen is like, "'Van Gocchhh'? Who talks like that?"), unless they ask me, because each of them has his or her own way of getting the work done, and if it's working for them and they're getting content in on time, I don't need to get involved in that.

If they do ask, I tell them to just … swing away, if that makes sense. You can get in a place as a recapper — and I used to be one — where you're really trying to hit every punchline over the wall in left field, and it's like, we'll take an infield single here, don't kill yourself. It's a very difficult job, it's a lot of content to process in a short time, so don't put a ton of pressure on yourself if you have a week where you're not feeling the funny.

So, what is it like to have so much media attention, even a Ph. D thesis written about you? Does it give you a big head? Or induce paralysis and indecision?

It's nice. The Ph.D thesis, I sort of felt like, you realize we're … just making jokes over here, right? That we're not curing cancer? But we were viewed as a serious, meaningful aspect of media culture, and that was nice. We've worked very hard, all of us, and when we, and especially the staff, gets that recognition, it's great.

But since we didn't go into the project hoping to get written up in academia, it's not like we thought we'd arrived or we were the shit now. We've still got to get up in the morning and post the recaplets and make the payroll. The media attention does signal that we're doing something right, for a lot of people, which means we can keep the site going, but I don't think it's really swayed us in the work one way or the other.

By way of contrast, is there an aspect of Television Without Pity that you think goes undervalued?

I think the users really appreciate every aspect of the site, but as I said above, it's an enormous time commitment from the staff, to write the recaps and to moderate the forums — and it's to their credit that they make it look so easy, but: it isn't. They work very hard, under tight time constraints, and I think that sometimes, that part of what they do, the effort that goes in, isn't seen.

I first learned of Television Without Pity from the NEW YORK TIMES magazine story in 2002. What, if anything, has changed since then, in television, in the Internet, and in the level of attention or heed that show manufacturers pay to the Internet?

Well, that story was sort of our coming-out party. I mean, the first word of that story was my name, so I had people I had not heard from since the eighth grade coming out of the woodwork to say hello, producers were turning up in my inbox … it was a huge deal. So that changed things for us in terms of visibility.

But in terms of what's changed generally on TV and on the Internet … that question is awfully broad. I think that it is a fact more universally acknowledged than it was three, four years ago that the Internet and TV have a dialogue with each other. And I don't mean that TV showrunners are taking cues directly from the Internet, although that may be true, I can't say. I mean that … well, the knock on TV, I think, for many years, was that it was going to be a divisive force in the culture, that people would be sitting at home, alone, staring at the TV instead of spending time with each other. Now, you see that TV is actually a uniting force when it comes to some shows — viewing parties, internet chat rooms, whatever, but I think more people are talking about TV with each other and using TV as a commonality with each other.

Again, I'm not a sociologist; I can't point you to statistics that state that the Internet had anything to do with this. But I think it did; I think the Internet brought TV-watchers together, not just our site but in general, and I think that's more of an "understood" thing than it was a few years ago.

I also think, just generally, that we're seeing an evolution of the perception of the Internet into a medium of genuine value and merit, and not just, you know, this Trekkies-and-pedophiles playground. I'm not one of those people who calls herself a "Webizen" and is all "the Internet, VOX POPULI," whatever, but when we started out, the Web was still a curiosity, and now it's a part of mainstream culture. So that's the biggest difference, I'd say, is that evolution.

What is one thing that took you by surprise about the world of websites and the information-infotainment-analysis highway? Something that you didn’t anticipate would be a problem or a fascinating facet?

Well … nothing really surprises me about it now, because I'm all callused after doing the job for umpteen years, but initially, I was a little taken aback by how intense people would get. Not necessarily rude or mean, although that happens, just … intense. Something about the fact that the interaction isn't face-to-face, I think it frees people up to just get really intense, which says something about … something. I don't know. That people are repressing these emotions, and then they're bursting out in these impassioned defenses of WONDERFALLS or furious protests that we took EVERWOOD off the site. Or … filk.

Not that I thought there wasn't a need for the Internet, as a medium; I guess I was just surprised that the need was that emotional for some people.

I know that at least one recapper has done an audio commentary track for an episode of a show that she covers. This is vague, but I wonder if you have any views on how podcasting and audio commentary tracks might be signaling a change in Internet use.

I … don't, because I think we're sort of in the middle of that transition right now, and … the crazy thing about the Internet is that the way it gets used is never a top-down thing, it's always a bottom-up thing. In other words, the users decide how the technology will work for them; the technology doesn't really dictate to them, although sometimes corporations try (remember Flooz, or whatever that Internet "currency" was? Yeah, nobody does, because it was an idea that wasn't organic, so it bombed). So, I think Internet users will decide how podcasting works for them and how they want to consume that — but it's still a relatively new element, so it's hard to say how far it's going to go or what changes the users are going to make, or want made, to the functionality. The video iPod is another example; we're going to have to see how that plays out in terms of whether that convenience is something people really want, and how they want it.

I will say that, as the Internet becomes more indispensable, it's also becoming much more reliably portable, and as that happens, we're going to be seeing a lot of Jetsons-y changes in how we consume media … but I was a poetry major, so don't ask me how that's going to play out. I was the last one of my friends to get a cell phone.

Finally, is there a Television Without Pity book in the future?

There is! Thanks for asking! My co-editor-in-chief, Tara Ariano, and I have written a book for the lovely peeps at Quirk Publishing, tentatively titled TELEVISION WITHOUT PITY: 752 THINGS YOU LOVE TO HATE (AND HATE TO LOVE) ABOUT TV, and you'll see it in stores in the autumn of '06.

D. K. Holm's 2006 Diary (Otherwise Known as a Blog)

Saturday, 31 December, 2005 Re-watched one of the year's best films for New Year's Eve, and beforehand sat through a host of trailers. Two of them I've already seen five times. The first was for FREEDOMLAND, director Joe Roth and credited writer Richard Price from his novel, about a white woman (Julianne Moore) whose kid goes missing in an African-American neighborhood. The second was INSIDE MAN, a seeming bank heist film starring Denzel Washington and Clive Owen and directed by Spike Lee. It suddenly occurred to me, "Shouldn't those directors be flipped?" That is, shouldn't FREEDOMLAND by Spike Lee (he already directed CLOCKERS). And shouldn't Joe Roth, a man who oscillates between the boardroom and the director's chair, be helming the thriller? He's the one with MOVING VIOLATIONS and a REVENGE-NERDS film on his vita. Without seeing them I will guess that FREEDOMLAND will be more thriller like, with a few producer style pretensions to social protest in the manner of Stanley Kramer and Dore Schary, while INSIDE MAN will either be another confused and internally incoherent political tract in line with recent Lee films, or by edited by the studio into conventional blandness.

Sunday, January 1, 2006 : Finally finished watching all the first half of season two of BATTLESTAR GALLACTICA. This is all very confusing. There was the mini series, and then season one. Then there is season 2.0, to be followed this Friday night by the rest of season two. What's curious is that episode nine of 2.0 feels like the great enveloping climax of season one. All stories are resolved, good happens, the human beings have a small triumph over the Cylons, and the human spirit is affirmed. The mini series, the 13 or so eps of season one, and the first half of season two indeed amount to about 23 shows, the usual length of a season these days. The last episode of 2.0, "Pegasus," struck me as the first episode of a real second season.

Thanks to a promo of the show I finally learned the riddle of how many prototypes there are: It's Six who tells Baltar that there are 12, in the scene in which she reveals her Cylon identity, way back in the mini series. In the course of 2.0, we meet two more, an African-American doctor type, and … Lucy Lawless. In any case, now six of the 12 prototypes have surfaced in the show.

Later that day, with a friend who hasn't seen it, I watch SYRIANA again. Afterwards GR and I discuss fell into a discussion of fathers, about how little we really know them. GR remembered that his father one day came home with the copy of PLAYBOY that had the Dee Dee Myers centerfold. His parents joked about it and carelessly stuck it in a drawer, and GR confessed that he often sneaked into the drawer to pay fealty to the image of the perky nude woman. This also sub-divided into a discussion of the longlastingness of visual versus textual pornography. The discussion of fathers was wholly appropriate in the aftermath of SYRIANA as, beneath the surface of its protest against the octopus of government and oil, it is about sons and fathers. I didn't understand a lot of SYRIANA the first time around, but this time it was much clearer and the horrible ironies of the last 15 minutes were much more tragic.

Monday, January 2, 2006 Surfing the Internet as a means of postponing work, I stumble across Josh Friedman's hilarious blog I FIND YOUR LACK OF FAITH DISTURBING. This is a must read. Pay particular attention to his account of SNAKES ON A PLANE, his arbitration over credit on WAR OF THE WORLDS, and his essay on what's wrong with Hollywood movies: i.e., too much violence and not enough sex. Here's a quote: "It's fascinating, really … In real life, very few of us want to be in a car chase or be shot at by alien invaders, and yet our movies are full of this stuff. On the other hand, all of us want to have sex — but you can't find it on film. Not good sex, anyway." Friedman goes on to describe a fight he had with a woman he calls Girlfriend Before Wife, who read a sexy scene he inserted into a rewrite of RETURN TO PARADISE. In hilarious dialogue, she grills him on who he had in mind when he wrote the scene. "But her point, however annoying to me at the time it was, is an interesting one. Because certainly when you sit down to write an action scene no one expects you to bring to the computer your vast experience as a victim of an alien invasion or your work as a ghostbuster. (I, for one, have taken my ghostbusting completely off my resume as it was an internship and I got asked too many questions about it.) But most of us have, at one time or another, alone or with a good friend we've paid forty dollars to, had sex. And it's this very sexing which CRIPPLES us when it comes to writing a good sex scene. Because even if it's not your girlfriend, boyfriend, spouse or parent, someone who reads that sex scene is gonna wonder how you thought it up. And whether it's subconscious or not, very few of us want to have this discussion." Here's what he says about violence: "Movies are too violent because violence in movies is easy to do and boring to watch. And by easy to do I don't mean easy to commit to film — the people who coordinate fights and car chases and plane crashes and alien attacks are absolute stone cold geniuses at what they do. The people who are fucking lazy are the writers. Honestly, what does an action scene do to move a story ahead? Nothing. What does it do for a characters' journey? Nothing. What does it do for the movie itself? Take up a chunk of time that now doesn't need to be filled with character and story. And you know why? Because character and story are hard things to write. And it's easy to write an action scene. I know. I've written hundreds of them. They bore the crap out of me. But at least I know they're gonna take up some pages in my screenplay without me having to figure out the hard stuff. Action sequences are the junk food in any writer's kitchen. "

And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might find my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK useful. It is now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.

Not only that, I've got a new book out on an aspect of film noir I call film soleil, titled simply FILM SOLEIL. It is sure to alter film criticism as we know it to its very core. Order it now!

And if you are interested in what I sound like, I can be heard on KBOO radio (90.7 FM) the second and the fourth Wednesday of the month, at 9 AM in the morning (Pacific Standard Time) on Ed Goldberg's show MOVIE TALK along with Dawn Taylor. It's available via streaming audio (in 20 Kbps Stereo). The next broadcast is Wednesday, January 11, at 9 AM, with the critics' ten best lists.

COMING SOON:A package of Hitchcock movies and TV shows, FLIGHTPLAN and REDEYE, DEAD AND BREAKFAST, REMINGTON STEEL and other TV mystery shows, many STAR TREKS, the third annual DVD Tray of Horror, and more!

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