Ramble On

Was turned away from another big, holiday, awards contender screening tonight, my second in a week. Apparently claiming you write for The House Next Door doesn’t mean much in L.A. So, an opening in my evening means lots of free form blogging. If I’d just get on the twitter bandwagon already something like this would be unnecessary.

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Turned 27 on Saturday which, as everyone knows, is the dead rockstar age. It’s telling that I received more congratulatory emails from the Pepsi Corporation, radio message boards and (TMI alert) porn sites I subscribed to in college than from actual friends. Still, I actually had a pretty good time playing cards with a big group of people till 1 in the morning. The beer was cold, the conversation was lively, they stuck candles in homemade congo bars and I ended up winning $25 with a 2-7 off-suit. I certainly hope I’m not looking back on the day 40 years from now as “one of the good ones” but all things considered it could have been a lot worse.

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I fly back to Boston on Wednesday and I’m not looking forward to it. Because of all sorts of logistic hoops I need to jump through for this trip, I was unable to book a direct flight from LAX to Logan, which means I’ll be heading to Atlanta first then flying up the eastern seaboard arriving in Boston sometime in the late evening. All in all, it’s looking to be an almost 10-hour travel day and that’s assuming the ice storms that have been pummeling New England for the best week don’t mess things up any further. It’s times like this I wish I had an iPod, particularly one of those kickass touch-screen ones where you can watch episodes of “The Office” that the writers aren’t getting royalties for. As is, I’ll be listening to something like fifteen hours worth of stockpiled O&A on my XM, although with battery life being what it is I’ll be lucky to hear a 1/3 of that. I haven’t been back for a year and yet I feel like it’s been way too recent for my liking. I really should phase this part of my life out already. After the initial buzz of seeing my family wears off, it really does come down to me watching my ass expand while I channel surf and bitch about how cold it is for ten days. On the upside I can finally watch a Pats game at a decent hour. Something about watching a game at 10:30 in the morning just isn’t right.

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One upside to going back to Boston: HBO on Demand. It’s like crack it is. And it’s absolutely the future of home entertainment. My impressive wall of dvd’s might make for a fun conversation piece but they’re about to go the way of the dodo. In the future, every movie you could possibly want to watch will be at your fingertips. Who’d ever bother with waiting on Netflix again? First point of business: the first episode of the fifth (and final) season of “The Wire” which is allegedly available early on Demand. I’d hoped to get the entire new season in advance as I’d done in the past in order to give a little closure to my anthology on the film’s credit sequences but my emails to my former editor went unreturned (no surprise there). Guess I’ll just have to be patient and download them as they air.

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Big winter movies still to see: There Will be Blood, Charlie Wilson’s War, Sweeny Todd and most importantly Alien vs. Predator 2. I kiiid.

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In anticipation of There Will be Blood I found myself rewatching Boogie Nights for the first time in ten years. Wow has that film aged badly. I’ve never been a big PT Anderson guy but Boogie Nights was the film of his I stomached the best, or at least I did when I was 17. Yet it really does lay out every horrific tendency as a filmmaker he possessed in the late 90’s. A “more is never enough” aesthetic that trickled down to everything from the soundtrack, which never met a cutesy 70’s staple it didn’t love and demand to be piped in over every scene (Anderson really is categorically terrified of letting scenes play out over silence), to the histrionic performances to the nascent adolescent dialogue to the dick-wagging (literally) steadicam shots which seem to exist only for their own amusement. Yeah it’s got style and energy, but so does City of God and who the hell wants to watch that again?

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Speaking of dick-wagging steadicam shots, how awful is Atonement? In the interest of staying up to date both with cinema trends and the Golden Globes (when will I learn?) I checked out a matinee at the new Arclight Sherman Oaks this weekend. I skipped Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice despite near universal acclaim because, frankly, I don’t do “corset movies” but this was promising to be a bitter little pill of a film not at all like prestige Oscar-bait such as The English Patient. Turns it it’s something far worse: it’s Wright’s attempt to remake Cold Mountain only without the colorful supporting characters or even a loosely defined narrative to hang itself off of. First half of the film (ie: the half everyone seems to love) is laughably over-plotted, relying on the same risible contrivances that sunk the long forgotten Reservation Road earlier in the fall. Allegedly the film is sexually charged but I couldn’t get over the fact that costumes not withstanding McAvoy and Knightly look like the same person. But the film doesn’t become truly insufferable until it enters the last Great War which consists of nary a single scene but rather an hour plus of elliptical moments in time which are comprised mostly of McAvoy walking through fields and leafing through postcards. Gotcha ending is neither cathartic nor subversive; simply one of a hundred literary conceits found within the film that just plain don’t translate to the screen.

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One upside of awards season? The now standard practice of making the screenplays of awards contenders free and available for download. Paramount Vantage, Focus Features and Fox Searchlight have all taken this approach which is what allowed me to read the script to Juno this afternoon while at work. All I can say is fuck the haters; this thing is too charming for words. Found myself both laughing aloud and tearing up. After today I’m convinced that anyone clinging to the “all the characters in the film speak the same way” modus of criticism are either tone deaf or just lazy and using a convenient party line to explain their inabilities to warm up to the film.

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Speaking of scripts, I am Legend was a bit of a full circle experience for me this weekend as it was the first screenplay I ever read back in the mid 90’s. This was when the film was supposed to be a vehicle for Ahhhhnuld and hued a lot more closely to Matheson’s original story. Over the years, I’d built the script up in my head as one of the great unproduced projects of the modern blockbuster era but going into the film I knew it’d been given the entire Akiva Goldsman treatment. The final result is a film that’s as devoid of humanity as the streets of New York City portend to be. Most of the original story’s more wicked ideas have been tossed aside (although it’s only recently dawned on me that they made their way into the first two Blade films) in favor of a big budget 28 Days Later knock-off only without the ingenuity, terror or (most importantly) the waking sadness of a world once familiar reduced to a monument to its former vitality. Smith’s widely hailed performance (which has earned comparisons to Hanks in Castaway? Really?) is, to be polite, uneven. Sufficiently screwy and vulnerable in places, far to often the actor falls into “Big Willy Style” mode, riffing as though he were auditioning for the last sitcom on earth. Lawrence has a knack for small-scale action but the big FX sequences feel like outtakes from The Mummy films.

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On a final note, I just received the new, uber-dorky Blade Runner 5-disk box set complete with origami unicorn and matchbox car in the shape of a spinner. If I were to point to something I own that could personify why I haven’t been laid in ages, I think this thing would have to be it. I doubt I’ll ever get through half of it, but the sheer volume of geektastic stuff thrown into this package zeroes right in on my completist tendencies. I love this thing so much I want to take it behind a middle school and get it pregnant.