On the Quality of Things, #22
Forget it, Jake. It's Hollywood.

by Wade Stuckwisch
illustration by Jacob Chabot

A couple weeks ago Noah Baumbach's first film Kicking and Screaming made its way to the top of my ever-expanding Netflix queue. Watching the film by myself on a quiet Sunday night, I was quickly overcome by a powerful, nostalgic, impracticable desire to be in a dark, clamorous bar full of good, working class people, country music and a table full of my friends debating the minutia of popular culture. Here I am, one year out of college again, and the aimless post-collegiate confusion and the struggle for direction are exactly the same - except that now some unkind hussy named Sallie Mae keeps taking all my drinkin' money. The knowledge that I've been through all this before is little comfort. If anything, it brings about a feeling that the last six years were only a coda - a momentary diversion before the inevitable consequences of lofty aspirations and compound interest come home to roost. And now I can't even afford to go to a bar. Fie on you, blithe youths of Kicking and Screaming, for your indiscriminate coupling and carefree ways! "Ding" this, fuckwads!

It's been a mere eight months since I graduated from Film School, packed all my shit in my forest green 1993 Aerostar minivan and left Tallahassee for the bright lights of Los Angeles. I will thusly confess that the rant I am about to deliver about making it in the film business, considering the brief amount of time I've been here, vacillates from precocious to absurd to dangerously ill-informed. Nevertheless, in the same way that many dictators feel the need to collect their thoughts on the world's minutia in book form and force the schoolchildren of their nation to study these uninformed tomes, I feel that my experience as one of the nation's legion of Underemployed Masters of the Fine Art of Film Production compels me to share my thoughts on "making it" in the film industry. So please, enjoy the following with a grain of salt, and understand that my conceit far outweighs my experience or knowledge of the subject.

The truly mind-boggling thing about the film industry is that, as far as I can tell, very few people seem to actually know how to get a film made. I have even met a few people who have directed independent films, or written the screenplays for Hollywood pictures that enjoyed wide release, and many of them, when asked how they got to where they are today, are just as mystified as us outsiders. This is really quite amazing when you consider what America's "film students" are borrowing and paying to universities to pursue advanced degrees in filmmaking. After all, a degree in medicine or a state bar certificate offers an established path to a fairly lucrative career. The only thing offered by the film school degree is the knowledge that the recipient has advanced training in a craft that he or she will probably never get to practice professionally. Of course, those three letters "MFA" do tend to get the recipient's résumé advanced to the top of the pile in many situations, but in almost as many cases they are likely to convince the interviewer that the candidate is "overqualified" for the grueling, menial entry level job being offered, and will quit with great indignation in three months or less.

Still, from the great unwashed of Middle America comes an endless stream or fresh-faced youngsters, all arriving in LA reciting the same mantra: "I want to write and direct." The experienced greet them with a nod and wistful smile, as their sentiment is so direly familiar. Soon these ambitious young storytellers are shunted into soul-crushing labors as office assistants and personal assistants and production assistants of all sorts, and asked to work draconian hours at menial tasks that could mostly be performed better by actual trained professionals in the courier or secretarial fields. The fortunate will survive to become mid-level managers, and those with a knack for the job might become agents or line producers or assistant chief lighting technicians or some such thing. And many of them will be happy in these roles. But few of these people will get any closer to their original stated desire: to write and/or direct. Some will enjoy the comforts of lucrative employment and never reflect on their original aspirations, but for others the unfulfilled creative juices will gather and coagulate in random parts of the psyche, waiting for the day when the unfortunate artist experiences a fatal blockage and wakes up saying, "Wait a second… what the fuck am I doing here?"

I've thought in the past that the best comparison to the effort to "break into the business" I've seen is Franz Kafka's short novel, The Castle. Now I see that for many, the guard eventually opens the first door, and the poor supplicant crawls into an antechamber with another guard and another door and, after a few years, the supplicant forgets his or her initial complaint and decides, "Maybe this place isn't so bad after all." Then again, maybe the antechamber isn't so bad - that door at the center of the castle might open up to a producer holding your beloved script and saying, "You know who would be great to star in the project? Larry the Cable Guy!"

For the aspiring director or writer, there are precious few actual routes to "work your way in." In a majority of available work opportunities, the applicant's ability to competently answer a telephone or remember a complicated list of coffee orders will always trump his or her creativity and eloquence. This is bad news for the creative savant lacking in social skills looking for an "in", but it's old news in the deadline driven, high stakes world of entertainment. (I'm honestly surprised that so many people in Hollywood still bother hiring film students instead of experienced business types. Maybe they do it out of a sense of camaraderie; maybe they just know that no one else would tolerate the hours, the abuse or the pay rate.) There are plenty of opportunities in Los Angeles for the affable, organized and fanatically dedicated, but if you want to write and direct and you are not all of these things, you are probably going to struggle. And of course if you are coming from outside southern California and/or you're not independently wealthy, you're going to be competing at the entry level against a lot of people willing to do a lot more for a lot less money. And those of us arriving with a graduate degree and a bevy of student loans to repay, while better prepared to take on the big challenges, are far more burdened to sweat out all the low-paying and unpaid jobs that invariably come first.

But this is Hollywood, and if you really want to make a living in the film business, this is the place to be. And working in the entertainment business does usually feel a lot more rewarding than filing insurance policies. So, if you're planning to come to Hollywood to give the business a try, I wish to offer you the following wholly unqualified advice:
1) Make a lot of money first. Earn it, steal it, inherit it, prostitute yourself for it, whatever. (Just don't borrow it, or you'll have to pay it back eventually.) Once you have money, you can do whatever you want.
2) Study business. Learn how to answer a telephone and manage an executive's schedule. Laugh at all the MFAs who don't know how to make coffee or run a copier.
3) Move to LA, forget about the entertainment biz, get established, get married, breed. Then, encourage your progeny to succeed in carrying out your aspirations and take vicarious pleasure in their accomplishments.
4) Stay where you are, do whatever you have to do to put food on the table, and WRITE. Any idiot can direct; not everyone can write. Also, hope that one of your film school friends becomes a high-powered agent.
As for me, several years ago I had the brilliant idea that I should learn a discernable, rarified skill - namely, cinematography - and then I would be able to at least work in the industry in that capacity. Unfortunately, what I did not fully consider is that success in the various crafts of filmmaking is almost as elusive and demanding and the quest to write and direct. Well, duh. Check the credits of any given motion picture - one director, one or two (credited) writers, one director of photography (and occasionally a couple of second unit DPs), one editor, one production designer. There's not a lot of room at the top. Even as I try to work my way up from the bottom as a grip or a camera assistant, I find myself at the end of a long line of people willing to work for free just to meet the people who might be able to get them paying jobs at a later date. There's just no easy way for a working class kid from Buffalo to get a break. I should have known.

So now I find myself seeking whatever sort of full-time employment will help me pay back student loans and credit cards, with the dual goals of survival and being in a better financial position to take on all those unpaid door-opening jobs in a couple of years. Of course now that I am virtually back at square one, that nagging question has returned: "Wait a second, didn't I always want to write and direct?" After all, writing is the one thing one can do best while holding down a full-time job. I hate to ponder giving up on cinematography, a craft that I love and that I've dedicated the last two years of my life to studying, but mastering one discipline takes so much dedication of time and spirit that attempting to master two simultaneously would be folly. It appears that I've come to a crossroads.

But fuck all this introspection - let's review some movies!

Children of Men: Wow, that was some sweet camera work! At times watching the virtuosic cinematography in Children of Men is like watching a magic show or a Tony Jaa martial arts flick - your first reaction is to stand up, cheer, and ask, "How the fuck did they pull that off?" There's a point, of course, to all that fancy footwork. The long takes, subjective handheld shots, and even the taller aspect ratio of the frame give the viewer of Children of Men a terrifyingly intense sensation of being right in the middle of the film's apocalyptic world with the actors and the unseen crew. Sadly, though, I never felt that the characters or the story ever caught up with the camera work. There's never a really detailed examination as to why the apparent coming extinction of man has created so much political and social upheaval - it's just assumed that the audience will accept the premise without any sort of deeper inquiry. The film instead portrays a cross-section of reactions to inevitable doom, ranging from intellectual whimsy to middle-class disinterest to full-scale revolt by the poor and disenfranchised. It's an interesting thesis on class struggle in the face of impending doom - and very apropos, considering current debates surrounding climate and environmental degradation - but the static nature of the characters who drearily plod through the sociopolitical muck makes Children of Men a symphony comprised of one dissonant drone. By all means, see it - cineastes are sure to be discussing the style of the film for years to come. For me, however, Children of Men is a tantalizing outline of what could have been a truly great film, rather than just a fascinating look at what is and what may be yet to come.

Pan's Labyrinth: Anyone who has revisited the fairy tales of their youth has probably come to appreciate how macabre many of these stories are, with witches thrown into ovens and innocent grannies eaten by wolves and such. In Pan's Labyrinth, the threat is no mere witch of wolf, but the specter of fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Pan's Labyrinth includes a lot of very graphic, literal violence, which may surprise audience members who were prepared for a children's fairy tale (although it will probably not surprise anyone familiar with the body of director Guillermo Del Toro's work). But it's the real threat of fascism, along with the very real sadism of the film's antagonist, Capitan Vidal (Sergi Lopez), which demands much of the gruesome excess of the film's violence. Behind all that maiming and bloodshed, Pan's Labyrinth is an exquisitely designed, beautifully acted fairy story that successfully strips away innocent fancy and addresses a very scary world of reality. The discovery of magical doors and mystical fairy creatures by Ofelia, the film's heroine (Ivana Baquero), does not offset the loss of innocence experienced as she learns of her adopted father Capitan Vidal's capacity for cruelty, but rather mirrors it. Every wonder Ofelia discovers is just as likely to yield a new horror or disgusting monster as it is to reveal a method of escape from her cruel reality. However, the real power of Pan's Labyrinth is the suggestion that there is a mythical kingdom beyond the cruelty of man and nature, and even if it is fraught with peril, it also offers peace and justice for those brave enough to seek it out. It's an interesting counterpoint to C.S. Lewis's recently adapted book The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, which used a fantasy world to play out the struggles of World War II in a safer space. There's quite a distance, though, between Narnia's suggestion that "Jesus fixes everything, eventually" and where Pan's Labyrinth is coming from, I suspect. A wonderful film, one of the past year's best.

Curse of the Golden Flower: If there's one thing Zhang Yimou has mastered in his recent historical epics, it's color. In Hero it was a bold slate of monochrome primaries. In House of Flying Daggers it was an eternally shifting palette of every tertiary shade and hue, ending with a blank canvas of stark snowy white. If there's a word for the color scheme in Curse of the Golden Flower, that word is "bling." The overwhelming opulence of Curse of the Golden Flower's design, where every surface seems to be gilded in gold or comprised of luminous red, gold and green glass, is rivaled only by the excesses of the royals depicted in the film. Lies and betrayals abound, from concealed lineages to incestuous love affairs to myriad plots to avenge past wrongs and ascend to power. In this movie, everybody is screwing everybody else in one way or another. It's beautiful, operatic excess of epic proportions. If some reviewers chose to balk at the lack of subtlety in Curse of the Golden Flower, I think they were missing the point. Also, there's flying assassins, cleavage, and a battle scene with like fifty thousand soldiers in one palace courtyard. (How did that many soldiers get into one courtyard, anyway? Were they all waiting in the wings? Where did they fit? Didn't anybody hear that many people shuffling around and breathing before they appeared?) But picayune plot questions be damned - nothing succeeds like excess. If any of you out there are considering the purchase of a large, expensive HD-compatible television in the near future, the first film you should rent or buy is Curse of the Golden Flower.

The Astronaut Farmer: It's been a long time since I've seen a smart, touching family-friendly film like the Polish Brothers' (Twin Falls Idaho, Northfork) loving tribute to American individualism and the quest for scientific discovery, especially one that doesn't depend on toilet humor, talking animals or a heavy-handed message about Jesus. It's a film heavy with nostalgia, especially considering how the nobler missions of the American drive for freedom and discovery have been overshadowed by the imperialist and capitalist impulses that drove the space race. But forget that shit! This is a movie about a guy who wants to go to SPACE, and the bank and the goddamn government won't let him! The Astronaut Farmer has a wonderful script, combining Mark and Michael Polish's fascination with the unusual with their intimate understanding of the delicate fabric of small-town America. Even if the dialogue occasionally feels like it's been through a few too many Hollywood polishes, it's the kind of story that would have made Frank Capra proud, and a rarity in the current world of guns-farts-and-boobies Hollywood filmmaking. Unfortunately, in an apparent attempt to make the movie more kid-friendly, the hand of the almighty studio is very evident in the film. It's rare that I criticize a film for being too short (usually the opposite is the case), but it's obvious that this film was cut to placate short attention spans, rather than giving the dramatic moments of the film space to breathe in the wide-open spaces of the Texas prairie (played deftly, in a casting coup, by the state of New Mexico). The film's score, which telegraphs every emotional beat like a schoolteacher reminding her students to pay attention, also belies a lack of respect for the perspective audience's ear for subtlety. The Astronaut Farmer is a noble attempt to adapt the unusual talents of the Polish Brothers to a commercially-viable product, and not altogether in vain. I don't envy the studio executive that had to try to make this film box office-friendly, but even from my omniscient critic's chair I can't condemn him either - hey, maybe the film didn't work as a long, ponderous drama. Personally I would have rather seen The Astronaut Farmer as a more personal film aimed at the festival circuit, but I don't have kids to feed (or a few million dollars to hand over to Mark and Michael Polish).

Ghost Rider: I've probably previously discussed the tendency of cinema jocks to avidly study weekend grosses and national box office receipts in the same way that sports fans endlessly pour over player statistics for their fantasy sports leagues. It's always a little disappointing when a movie you like fares poorly at the box office, but it's also a little frustrating when a movie that is an unqualified piece of shit goes over huge. (For recent examples, see Norbit and Wild Hogs. The box office numbers, not the films.) I will admit that I was looking forward to seeing "Ghost Rider." Everybody needs a good loony Nicholas Cage performance and some loud, dumb action now and again, and in terms of fun fare it was a long cold winter at the movies. Caged in those terms (terrible pun not intended), Ghost Rider was not a complete failure, but not a complete success either. Cage is pretty good as the slightly spacey stuntman, and any movie with Sam Elliot as a cowboy with magic powers can't be a complete waste of time. On the other hand, there were gaping holes in the script, the action sequences were mostly flaccid, the bad guys looked like the Backstreet Boys, Peter Fonda didn't seem to care to be there and Eva Mendes just looked lost. (There was one scene were Mendes got stood up on a date with Cage that was kind of unintentionally brilliant, but that was it. Paring her with Nicholas Cage was like tossing a kitten to a rabid cougar.) You know, the whole point of the Faustian gambit is supposed to be the dichotomy of sacrificing one's eternal spirit for personal material gain. If your dad has cancer and you selflessly sell your soul to make him better, and then (minor spoiler) the Devil takes his life anyway, you're basically just getting screwed. Also, when your hero is nigh invincible as compared to his foes, it makes for some very boring, predictable fights. My real point is, Ghost Rider wasn't completely awful, but… a $52 million opening weekend? And $115.8 million domestic gross? People, please. This does not bode well for the continuing quality of the superhero epic. After all, why waste time and money pursuing quality when a shitty movie makes just as much bank?

Black Snake Moan: You gotta give it up for Christina Ricci. I don't know how many other actresses would and leave it all on the field like Ricci does, in a job that involved being half-naked and/or chained to a radiator for a substantial portion of the film. (That chain sure looked real, too.) I kind of miss her awkward post-pubescent curviness from when we were both ten years younger and she was doing material like The Opposite of Sex, but maybe from now on I should pay more attention to her acting than her measurements. Black Snake Moan wades into some very treacherous territory (it's the first movie I can remember watching and thinking, "Oh thank God that character didn't just get raped AGAIN") but does so with a wicked sense of humor and without getting bogged down in exploitation or melodrama. It's a light-hearted but poignant character drama, and also offers the eternal pleasure of hearing Samuel L. Jackson say "motherfucker" several times. Oh, and that bit with the chain and the radiator only really lasts just as long as it has to, it's not like the whole movie is some sort of interracial bondage fantasy. I can't say I'm enamored with Justin Timberlake as an actor, but everyone else in the film (especially John Cothran, Jr. as the parish preacher and Michael Raymond-James as Timberlake's cohort) is a pleasure to watch. It's dirty and raw like an old blues standard, but in the end it's got a good heart, and it sings a sweet tune.

Zodiac: My main problem with this movie is that, by my standards, it wasn't really a movie. David Fincher's retelling of cartoonist Robert Graysmith's amateur investigation into the case of the Zodiac serial killer is so exhaustive in detail that, in the end, it fails to tell a story. Zodiac plays a little more like an America's Most Wanted reenactment of the investigation, albeit a meticulously detailed one with much better actors and cinematography. Some of the murder scenes early in the film are quite terrifying in their cold detachment - since you know where the scene is inevitably leading, the unwitting calm on the part of the victims is more off-putting than the violence. Altogether, Zodiac offers a certain grim fascination but gives no answers, few thrills and little insight into the killer or the men on his trail. Am I missing something?

The Lives of Others: I can't be sure how much the costume design and set decoration in The Lives of Others is art imitating life in East Germany under the Communists, but either way, I'm amazed how many shades of gray the filmmakers managed to discover. Light gray, green-gray, slate gray, off-gray… it's luscious. The rainbow of grays mirrors the bold attempt by the filmmakers to search for an intimate human face in the instruments of totalitarianism. Movies about state control usually paint in such broad strokes that they lose, if not a degree of realism, at least a sense of audience identification. East Germany as depicted in The Lives of Others is not so much a state of draconian horrors that we can't imagine being there; the eyes of the state and the lack of freedom are elements of everyday life, tolerable to an extent but destroying the soul that longs for liberty with an excruciatingly slow grind. It doesn't hurt that the agent of the secret police depicted in the film is not so much a fanatic as a dedicated perfectionist, and (major spoilers coming) his undoing comes from his eventual surrender to his human empathy. The Lives of Others is also moving in the fact that it is a tribute to every cog that chose to slip in the machine of East German state control and faced terrible consequences. One leaves the theater with the sensation of how much bigger the individuals represented in the film are than the film itself. It's definitely a film worth seeing, if only as tribute to those who have chosen to stand up for individual freedom in the face of crushing adversity.

The Host: Yeah, I mean, "The Host" had its moments, in a very Spielberg, Jurassic Park suspenseful action kind of way, but wasn't enamored with it or anything. It's always fun to see a movie where the trigger-happy Americans are unapologetically cast as the bad guys (in the rest of the world we must surely be the easiest targets for this sort of thing). The Host had a funny family and some nice moments, and it's a decently entertaining monster movie, but I wouldn't run out to force all my friends to see it.

El Topo/The Holy Mountain: The first glimpse I ever got of Alejandro Jodorowsky's work was in a bar in Chicago, and it left an indelible impression in the form of the question, "What the fuck was that?" Unfortulately, Jodorowsky's work is largely unavailable in the US except in the form of static-y bootlegged VHS tapes. Imagine my surprise, then, when I learned that my local art house theater was showing three Jodorowsky films, including brand new, pristine 35mm prints El Topo and The Holy Mountain! I lost a lot of sleep that week going to midnight movie screenings, but luckily I didn't miss a possibly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see these cult classics on the big screen. (Unfortunately I had to skip the Friday midnight showing of Santa Sangre to be at a shoot that Saturday morning, but them's the breaks.) Jodorowsky is probably known more widely as a cult filmmaker than a respected director, and his far-reaching endeavors to combine social commentary, epic symbolism and religious philosophy come of as a little over the top. Still, one has to respect how Jodorowsky manages to breathe life into the dry, self-reflexive political critique practiced at the time by filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Glauber Rocha with his bold, surreal acid-trip nightmare imagery. And who else could come up with some of these images? El Topo's black leather against the white and blue of the blank desert, a naked youth at his side? An entire town flowing with rivers of the blood of the slaughtered? That crazy sex-machine thing in The Holy Mountain? Christ lying prone among hundreds of life-sized, papier-mâché replicas of himself? Jodorowsky's films brim with life and raw sexuality in a manner that shocks with awe-inspiring honesty, even if they do occasionally stray into the realm of the ridiculous. I'm hoping that the very limited release of these prints means that El Topo and The Holy Mountain are headed for a domestic DVD release, but if not, do what I did and buy a region-free DVD player so that you can experience Jodorowsky for yourself. With movies like this, why even bother using drugs?

300: So here's what ya got: Spartans, fighting, decapitations, blood splatters animated to look like ink splatters, more fighting Spartans, and finally, GLORY! I'm sure there's the possibility of an intelligent, insightful movie floating around in the ether somewhere about the Spartans' martial spin on the concept of civilization, but you didn't seriously think it would be this movie, did you? The bevy of half-naked he-men does come off a little campy, and the half-hearted attempt to diffuse the film's homoeroticism with a couple anti-gay quips is more than a little futile. (Although one Spartan makes an aside about the fey Athenians, I'm fairly certain it was actually the Spartans who are believed to have commonly practiced man-boy love.) But never mind that - in the middle there's decapitation and in the end there's GLORY! Here's what really blew me away about 300: when I went to see the movie, I was sandwiched between two rows of high school-aged males, and I was certain that there would be talking and calling back to the screen for most of the film. Instead: stunned silence. Any movie that can get teens to shut up and pay attention for 90 minutes has got something going on.

Blades of Glory: And speaking of homoeroticism, there's men's figure skating - possibly the only organization less willing to talk about homosexuality than the Spartans in 300. Blades of Glory doesn't dwell on that topic, even though the idea of two men skating together seems to beg for a plot about the bedroom corollaries for such a coupling. Actually, it's impressive that Blades of Glory doesn't take the easy way out and become a 90-minute running joke about closeted homosexuals - we've all seen that one done before, and badly more often than not. Instead, Blades of Glory uses Will Ferrell's cartoonish uber-manhood and Jon Heder's pretty-boy timidity to successfully tell a story about how two straight men can learn to perform together, in the rink and as friends, without feeling all queer. There's plenty of funny comic banter in the movie, but as the straight man (we're back to comedy terms now, people) to Ferrell's comic performance, Heder seems to lack the confidence to hold his own, and Blades of Glory lacks the spontaneity of a movie like Talladega Nights or Old School. Still, Will Arnett and Amy Poehler chip in with an amusing brother-and-sister pairs team that manages to be even more creepy and unnatural than Ferrell and Heder's "fire and ice" pairing. Also, Jenna Fischer (you know her as the shrinking violet Pam on the US "The Office") is very convincingly uncomfortable in lingerie, although she seems to be starting to relish her role as geek-chic goddess in the media. Blades of Glory is definitely a serviceable comedy, if not the best thing in either Ferrell or Heder's filmography. (I noticed that Jon Heder's picture on his IMDB page is still Napoleon Dynamite; I hope it doesn't stay that way for his entire career.)

Grindhouse: Quentin Tarantino was nice enough to lend out some of his 35mm print collection for a "Grindhouse Film Festival" at a local LA theater that included some low budget classics like Brotherhood of Death and Rolling Thunder, so I had the chance to get pretty well-versed in the actual world of scratchy, faded prints and "regional" films before attending Grindhouse. When I did see the premiere of Grindhouse, however, it was a digital projection at one of LA's premiere theaters. Now there's some irony for ya. With the current sea change in the industry towards digital acquisition and presentation, my kids (if I ever get around to having any) will probably never know what an emulsion scratch or a splice actually look like. I mean, I remember seeing The Jungle Book as a kid when the film really did snag in the projector and melt, just as it's digitally simulated in Planet Terror. These things really happened, kids, believe me! So in a way, Grindhouse is as much a well-timed historical preservation of the world of sticky floors, broken seats and nasty, scratchy film prints as it is a loving tribute. The two parts of Grindhouse take to distinctly different spins on low budget cinema: Robert Rodriguez, in Planet Terror concentrates on the excessive exploitation of violence, gore, and good old-fashioned gross-outs, while Tarantino's half, Death Proof, is much more of a loving homage to the 1970s existential road movie and the rare genius of the little-known un-canonized classic. As with most past Rodriguez/Tarantino collaborations, I enjoyed the lighthearted Robert Rodriguez half best. While Rodriguez departs from the grindhouse shoestring budget aesthetic with his effects-heavy gore-fest, the result is certainly a hoot, and Rodriguez's use of the flaws of old film prints (scratches, jump cuts, faded colors) serves the rhythm and emotions of the story rather than simply emulating eras gone by. Most critics have latched onto Tarantino's tribute to films like Two Lane Blacktop and Vanishing Point (which, after being name-checked several times in the film, leapt from "Available Now" to "Very Long Wait" on Netflix almost overnight) as the highlight of the double bill, but the film's great moments (which are pretty spectacular, to be honest) fail to make up for tedious sequences of dialogue with little significance to the story. Films like the original Gone In 60 Seconds that Death Proof is paying tribute to, that began with sixty minutes of boring exposition and ended with a forty-minute car chase, did so mostly because of budget and running time constraints more than artistic technique. Presumably the only thing handcuffing Tarantino, on the other hand, was his adoration for his own dialogue. Death Proof definitely felt like it wanted to be a serious character study that had an eye-catching exploitation title spliced onto the head of the print, but nothing really becomes of all the talk. Maybe there's some wonderfully nuanced aspect to all that babble that I'm just not seeing, but I have my doubts. And besides, for these prices, who wouldn't rather see exploding zombies?

One of my co-workers recently discovered Great Hoboes online (fucking Google…) and accused me of maintaining a movie "blog." At the time I didn't really see the necessity of explaining the difference between a blog and a small press "little magazine" publishing exclusively on the web (the difference is that Tyler has to check my spelling and grammar), but I will admit that my column has been perhaps getting a bit too "bloggish" lately. But seriously, why should I burden my friends and family with my problems when I can pester some anonymous folks on the Internet with them instead? As the column and my professional life evolve, though, I do hope to include a little less personal confession and a little more substance. Maybe the column wouldn't read like a fourteen-year-old girl's Livejournal page if I didn't suck so much. Also, maybe then people would like me and I could actually get dates. But I can't help it if I'm ugly, and I need to lose fifteen pounds, and my parents never loved me… I better stop now. More substance, less bitching coming soon - I promise.

-Published on The Great Hoboes of New York on May 12, 2007.