Tag: nostalgia

Another shot at the title (part ii)

Pablo and I made the journey to Trainwreck Studios in Burbank. What a god-forsaken place. I swore to myself that I would never return.

“We’re here to see Kathleen Kennedy,” Pablo told the receptionist.

“And you are?”

“I’m Pablo Dunbar, the agent of James…”

The receptionist’s eyes widened when she saw my face. “You mean, James…”

“Yes, THAT James,” I interjected. “Tell Kat we’re here so that we can get this over with.”

“I thought you were retired…” she began to say as she stumbled through her words. “Anyway, she’s waiting for you. Fourth floor. The only way up there is through the air ducts. Elevator’s broken.”

So we climbed up the ducts into Kathleen’s office. “Damn it Kat,” I said, “when are you going to get that fucking elevator fixed?”

She turned around and was wearing sunglasses. She appeared to be somber over something.

“Hello James,” she said.

“Hello Kat.”

“Can I offer you gentlemen a glass of scotch?”

“I’ll take the bottle please.”

Kat sat down behind her desk and began to shuffle through some paperwork. Pablo and I plopped down in the leather chairs.

“So, what did you think of Antonio’s script?” she asked.

“To be honest Kat,” I said, “it needs some work. Too much talk. Film is a visual medium. ‘Show, don’t tell’ as they say. If I can do a second draft and clean up the dialogue…”

“James,” Kat interrupted, “Fart in a Windstorm is a court drama, there’s going to be a lot of dialogue. Besides, I already promised Antonio that he would get final say in the script.”

“Fine, whatever. But I need to put my stamp on it if this is going to be a film by James…”

“Look, I get what you’re saying,” Kat said. “But in agreement with the writer’s guild, he must get sole screenwriting credit. That’s going to put a limit on what you can do.”

I just stared at her.

“You don’t want to relinquish creative control to me,” I said. Out of my periphery, I could see Pablo getting uncomfortable.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kat replied, “the studio is willing to put $1.5 billion into this project ONLY if YOU are signed on to direct. Once when this meeting is made public, Hollywood will be in a tizzy over the return of its most famous director.”

“Kat, you know I can’t make a small scale courtroom drama for anything less than $2 billion.”

She learned forward on her desk as she began rubbing her temples. She appeared as though she was about to be sick. I took a big gulp from the bottle of scotch.

“What’s with the sunglasses?” I asked her. “Did you have eye surgery? Did your husband beat you?”

Kat removed the glasses, revealing her puffy red eyes and makeup smeared from crying.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I said.

“We haven’t had a hit since This Taste Like Ass,” she said as tears rolled down her face. “The board wants me out. I’ve become the laughingstock of this town.”

“It’s no fun when the rabbit has the gun, eh?”

“James,” Pablo said. “Mrs. Kennedy, James and I are both in agreement that this script is doable. Sure, there are problems that need ironing out, but we are committed to making this work. Right James?”

I just shrugged.

“Really?” Kat said.

“Absolutely, the gang’s back together. Let’s have a drink on it!”

We all stood up and Pablo forced a group hug. Kat’s spirits seemed to have been lifted slightly.

As we were climbing back down the air ducts, I grabbed Pablo by the ankle. “You better not fuck me out of this contract like you did last time!” I told him.

TO BE CONTINUED

leadership

As you know, I have nothing but regrets.

I’m reaching that age where some of my superiors are younger than me. I don’t begrudge them. They all deserves their spots. Some older guys I work with don’t appreciate that they got passed over, but I think it’s our responsibility…as the “elders”…to bestow upon the younger generation what wisdom we have learned (in my case, what little wisdoms I have learned).

I don’t know if this is a regret I have, it’s more like a big “what if”. I spent some time in the military. Even did three years of ROTC in college. It’s laughable to think I could have been an officer now, but it almost happened (before I realized that I loved drinking WAY more than I loved the military). Despite the abysmal failure of that endeavor, a few lessons stuck with me.

“Just make a decision,” I’d always hear, “don’t worry about if it’s the correct one.” I thought that was stupid advice at the time, especially in a military situation where people’s lives might depend on it. But it seems to make a little more sense now.

Who are the three greatest military commanders of all time? It’s obvious: Captain Kirk, Captain Picard, and Captain Sisko.

The three guys in the middle

“But they aren’t real,” you might say.

So? Real life isn’t real.

I remember Mike Stoklasa praising Bill Shatner’s acting capabilities (in a video discussing Shatner’s hatred of Mike Stoklasa). You can laugh all you want, but it’s true: Shatner is an extraordinarily effective actor. And, for better or worse, Captain Kirk is Bill Shatner and Bill Shatner is Captain Kirk.

Kirk understands that he is playing a part as Captain of the Enterprise. He has to project confidence as its leader because the survival of his ship might depend on it. Shatner, I think, understands that Kirk himself is playing a part, which might explain some of the strange speech patterns he exhibits throughout the series and films.

That’s why I think it’s great that the handlers of Star Trek (at least back then) cast classically trained thespians for the role of the Captain. Just the ability to “play the role” is necessary for the crew to rally behind, even when the leader isn’t completely confident in his (or her) decisions.

Obviously Picard is the superior Captain. No disrespect to Shatner, but Patrick Stewart knows when to dial up the acting and when to hold back (even if, in my belief, Stewart didn’t completely understand the appeal of his character or Star Trek). But what Picard does better than anyone is embrace his mission: “explore strange new worlds”. He seeks out moral quandaries and mysteries because he understands that these hold the secrets of the universe. He’s an explorer but not in the usual sense of the term.

I think to be a leader, one has to be open to that sort of exploration.

Of course, Sisko was far more grounded than either Kirk or Picard. He had a life outside of Starfleet and his job was to navigate the political complexities of a particular section of the galaxy. While Kirk and Picard were explorers, Sisko’s mission was different: he was an ambassador attempting to bring together warring factions. But just like everyone else, he had to “play the part.”

“But those were actors that had scripts,” you might say. “Real life doesn’t have a script.”

True that, but if you understand the more technical aspects of your work, in a sense you kinda already do have a script. You can’t just willy nilly your way through a job, you are confined and in many aspects you have direction. It’s just making the best decision with the options you have.

So I think it’s interesting that the three best Captains in Star Trek history each explore the three most important aspects of leadership: confidence (or the projection of), eagerness to accept challenges, and being the middle man between conflicting parties. But most importantly, “just play the part.”

“blue thunder” and “backtrack” (aka Catchfire”)

I watched two movies back-to-back (unintentionally) that had helicopter chases.

The first was Blue Thunder, staring the greatest leading man of all time…Roy Scheider. It is also the greatest movie that Paul Verhoeven never made.

No disrespect to the highly competent John Badham, but Verhoeven would have crushed the shit out of this material. The film takes place in 1980s LA and is about a police pilot and Vietnam vet, played by Scheider, who gets introduced to a military-style helicopter that the city wants to use for patrol. The villain is Malcolm McDowell, a British man that somehow became a Lt. Colonel in the US Army, who for some contrived reason wants to kill Scheider. The fascistic overtones are right up Verhoeven’s alley, and even some of the story beats would be echoed in Robocop four years later.

But the movie looks incredible. John A. Alonzo is really an unsung hero in the field of cinematography. The handheld work is really ahead of its time, and masterfully done. After watching the first scene of Scheider walking out to his helicopter, I was shocked that this came out in 1983. It’s a natural look that even films today have trouble emulating.

And that final helicopter chase was incredible. All of the concerns that Scheider’s character had regarding public safety goes out the window once when he gets hunted by fighter jets and Malcolm McDowell. Chicken factories and buildings get blown up while debris falls on the people below. Meanwhile, Candy Clark drives like a bat out of hell down the streets of LA. As far as 80s action movies go, I’m not saying that it’s up there with the Schwarzenegger, Verhoeven, and John McTiernan classics, but it is very good. In fact, I would say it was a prototype for subsequent 80s flicks.

The other film was less of a banger but no less interesting (for various reasons). It was Dennis Hopper’s Backtrack (or Catchfire, idk). There are apparently two versions: theatrical cut and a directors cut. I guess I watched the director’s cut.

Hopper himself was apparently dissatisfied with the original version and had his “directed by” credit given to Alan Smithee. Honestly, he should have taken his name off the director’s cut as well.

What’s it about? Not sure.

I think Jodie Foster accidentally sees a mob hit by Joe Pesci and Pesci tries to track her down by hiring Hopper and Hopper falls in love with her (and she with him).

Now I’ll say this because I’ve said enough about dude’s bodies in this blog and it’s time women get their due: Jodie Foster is fiiiiiiiiiiiine as hell in this movie. You could say that I was “sexually attracted” to her. It made me uncomfortable (in my pants specifically). I could understand why Hopper didn’t want to kill her.

But the problem with this movie (one of many) is that Dennis Hopper is, I’m sorry to say, not fit for the role. Hopper is at least 25 years older than Foster. There’s nothing romantic about their scenes together. They’re downright creepy. It’s a role that someone like Nicholas Cage, Mickey Rourke, or Sean Penn could have aced at that time.

That being said, Hopper REALLY makes some decisions in this movie, both in front of and behind the camera. To be honest, I don’t even know what he’s trying to do. Is that accent New York or Cajun? Does he know his lines or is he just making shit up? Now no one on God’s green earth could have saved this screenplay, but Hopper’s visual flair and strange acting decisions steal the show…almost to the point where you forget that heavy hitters like Joe Pesci and Vincent Price are also in the movie.

RIP Dennis Hopper and Roy Scheider 😔

what dreams may come

I’m a hard sleeper.

Nothing can, nothing will, wake me up. Construction, gun shots, home invasions, house fires, nuclear holocausts…nothing.

So I get to have incredible dreams. Last night, for example, I dreamt that I was a football player buried deep down the depth chart. The team boarded a plane en route to a game with the pilot both coked up and drunk. The pilot thought it would be cool to do a barrel roll in a passenger plane which caused some concern. I brushed it off and took a nap. When I awoke, the plane had to make an emergency landing onto a road but ended up crashing into an apartment building. No one was killed,miraculously, and the people in the building didn’t think anything unusual about it because it was in Mississippi and apparently things like that happen all the time. Nevertheless, one player thought this was the perfect opportunity to exact revenge…for whatever reasons…on the head coach and a few other players. So it was up to me, some nobody, to save the team.

Once when that was done, I had to book a flight home but chose to fly to London, England instead. The price came to $20,000 and I didn’t have the money. Then the dream ended.

There were dreams on the periphery, one which includes me fighting a rabbit in Monument Valley and sending it to a highly mechanized version of hell.

I guess dreams are just a hodgepodge of shit stored in our heads and when we sleep, our brains randomly throw things together which we later attempt to make sense of (or in my case, project a story onto). Does it ever mean anything? Probably not.

At least not most of the time.

But I do have recurring dreams. Not dreams where the exact same things happen, but they share similar themes, people, places, etc. I suppose that there are shreds of truth in these kinds of dreams: a revelation of regret, dread, loss, and so on.

I find the subject of dreams fascinating. It reveals the chaos that exists in our own minds. Even the purest of people will experience a gruesome nightmare. Despite their outward practices in real life, even in their minds they will produce true horror. That emanates completely from them. We try to project some sense onto our dreams, but the fact is that there isn’t any whatsoever.

We do the same thing to our reality.

carnal Knowledge (1971)

I normally watch 42,000 movies a week. Few of them stick with me.

Carnal Knowledge, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel’s pubic hair, has.

It’s a movie I could’ve written back in my college days. Particularly the first act, about two college guys that know next to nothing about women who try to score with Candice Bergen. Of course, Mike Nichols aces the direction by presenting the two characters in all their pathetic glory. Bergen is also handled nicely as she plays a confused girl torn between these two dorks. Imagine watching a dramatized version of Beavis and Butthead in college, that’s the first act of the film.

Naturally, this romantic interaction has long term consequences, especially for Nicholson’s character. The second half explores his inability to connect with and emotionally abuse Ann-Margret.

Carnal Knowledge really makes you wonder why women love men at all.

Before Jack Nicholson became the Jack Nicholson we know and love today, he specialized in these character studies. Other notable examples are his collaborations with Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens) and The Passenger. He was (is) truly an unusual leading man.

Is Carnal Knowledge a great film? Not particularly. In it’s simplicity, it would probably work better on the stage than on the screen. But it is the highlight of Nicholson’s career from 1969 to 1974, a brief window from when he was still an actor, before he became better known as Jack Nicholson the film star.

conversations with dennis

Nothing to talk about today.

So I was thinking about a conversation I had with my narcissist coworker. For the sake of this post, I’ll call him Dennis. It’s probably in my top 10 favorite conversations I’ve ever had.

The topic: some woman, Jane, who was allegedly a hoe-bag that once worked with Dennis (and always claimed he never messed around with).

The place: the toilet factory where we work. We use a lot of PPE, especially rubber gloves.

Of course, most of the conversation is paraphrased. But the parts said verbatim are in bold.

****

Dennis: I never fucked Jane.

Me: Did she suck your pp?

Dennis: No, but she sucked Tex’s pp, and Bob Dutch’s pp.

Me: But I thought you two worked on the same shift.

Dennis: yeah and one night I came in and she was sleeping naked on a cot we had back there. I turned the lights on and quickly turned them off. She said (mimicking a female voice) “oh sweetie don’t be embarrassed.” Then she asked me if I wanted to lay down with her and but I told her hell no.

Me: So you didn’t even fool around?

Dennis: she kept asking me if I wanted a blowjob, but because she sucked every guy off, I kept telling her no. Then she started badgering me, telling me that I wouldn’t know how to please her anyway. So finally I told her “alright, let me put some gloves on” and I went back to her cot.

Me: (laughing uncontrollably)

***

So Dennis started the convo initially denying he had sex with Jane, then a few moments later admitted to finger blasting her.

Moral of the story: Dennis’ story is probably completely fabricated, Jane probably wasn’t a hoe. Because I was such a good audience for Dennis, he probably thought he could take the story in any direction he wanted, despite the blatant contradictions, and he thought I would believe all of it.

That’s what a conversation with a narcissist looks like.

That’s it. That’s the story. Bye ✋

bill friedkin

The career of William Friedkin is a reminder of how hard it is to make a good film.

He hit two films out of the fuckin park with The French Connection and The Exorcist then kinda floundered from there (he did have a few notable films afterwards, namely Sorcerer and To Live and Die in LA, the latter of which I haven’t seen).

Sure Friedkin won his accolades here and there, but he is truly the maestro of one specific thing: directing car chases.

Everyone remembers Gene Hackman just plowing through cars and walls while Friedkin neglected to obtain permits to film such a thing in the French Connection (and apparently there’s a good chase sequence in To Live and Die in LA), but Friedkin’s crowning achievement, in my view, is in Jade.

Before David Caruso was spitting out one liners while rocking a pair of sunglasses in CSI: Miami, he tried his hand at being a film star. Jade was the absolute highlight of this period.

In the film, after Angie Everhart gets totally destroyed by a Ford Thunderbird, Caruso pursuits the vehicle in his POS Ford during a delightful chase where vehicles fly through the air down the streets of San Francisco (and Caruso does his best Gene Hackman impersonation).

The best part is when the chase goes through some parade and pedestrians attack the vehicles using martial arts. I guess that would make sense if you learn about other cultures while binging on cocaine.

Take a look:

poop (and crap)

I’m glad that the films of Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan are still considered events. Auteurism is dying in Hollywood but there are still remnants.

I’m not a fan of their films, but it’s still nice.

I know it’s heresy for film buffs to dislike Tarantino, but like Alabama in college football, his movies get evaluated by a different standard for better or worse. Even when it’s obvious that he didn’t put his best foot forward, like every movie he’s made in the last 15 years, Tarantino’s films get praised as if the film industry is about to go under. If you remove his name from most of his movies, you’d probably be wondering what the fuck you just watched.

Mind you, Pulp Fiction will stand the test of time. Jackie Brown should be better appreciated. Kill Bill Vol. I and II are what they are. But go back and watch Reservoir Dogs. It didn’t age well. Could this be the fate for all his retrospective reviews once when Tarantino retires from the biz (after he allegedly makes his “10th film”)?

Probably not, but I can hope.

I admit, Tarantino just isn’t my flavor. A perfect film, for me, transcends the medium. It’s gotta stick with me…reveal something about myself, about the universe, that I never realized. Tarantino the man, as reflected in his films, lacks that insight. He’s a film geek. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but that’s all that he’s capable of being.

I expect more out of films, not constantly getting nudged throughout a viewing, being reminded of some shitty Italian film from 40 years ago. Now I love schlock as much as the next guy, but art and schlock do not…cannot…mix.

Tarantino however wants to have it both ways. And that is a pipe dream.

He made a cool film once 30 years ago, most directors will never achieve that. But that doesn’t mean everything he’s made since has been a home run.

Really the same thing is true for Nolan. I personally think his success rate is greater than Tarantino’s. But Nolan probably thinks of himself as the Stanley Kubrick of mainstream blockbusters. That also screams trying to have it both ways.

But whatever dude, at least Insomnia, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight…the only superhero film I’ve ever liked…were damn good.