Famous Flops: The Room

 
This is the latest in my monthly series Famous Flops, in which I watch one absolutely terrible movie and tell you what I think of it.

By all rights, my first post after arriving to Australia (almost a full week ago) should be some kind of "welcome to Australia, Vance!" post. However, I have deadlines to keep, and only a precious few days remaining in August in order to serve up my monthly installment of Famous Flops.

It seems like forever ago that I saw The Room, since so much has happened in the interim. In fact, I still had a few days remaining at my job when I took to the theater on the night of Saturday, July 27th (technically cheating since the screening should have fallen within the month of August) to watch a movie so famously bad, they now show it at midnights on Saturdays in cities around the country, including North Hollywood, CA. I feel like I haven't worked in forever, so this tells you how long ago it was -- it was forever ago plus a few days.

This movie is terrible, of course.

But first a little history, personal history, about it.

I was living in Los Angeles when Tommy Wiseau's craptastically wonderful film was first released back in 2003. I remember thinking of it as some kind of Los Angeles institution akin to that ageless (i.e. very old now) pink Corvette-driving "beauty" Angelyne. One look at the billboard and you could tell that it was not a reputable production. Yet that billboard stayed up there on Highland, I think it was, for years, meaning that it did indeed have some kind of dollars or marketing muscle or something behind it. My fascination increased.

Sometime last year I learned that it was playing at the Laemmle in North Hollywood at midnight on the last Saturday of every month. I tried to get a crew to go on Thanksgiving weekend when a friend was in town, but you'd be surprised about how people ultimately react to a midnight movie when their backs are against the wall. They passed.

About three days before the last Saturday night in July of this year -- in other words, the last Saturday I'd be eligible to see The Room in Los Angeles before leaving for Australia -- the scarcity of my remaining opportunity struck me. I knew I needed to move now if I wanted to make The Room -- the full-on live experience of watching The Room, not just a DVD viewing -- happen. I emailed a couple friends and one bit. We set it up for that Saturday.

There's a great story that goes with this viewing, but I'll save it until after I give you my impressions.

First I should probably set the scene. There's an idea that The Room is a cultural heir apparent to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and seeing the live screening did nothing to disabuse me of that notion. For starters, it was packed. Not sold out, but populous enough for a midnight screening to earn the description "packed." The next thing I noticed was that people were bringing props, a la Rocky Horror. Plastic spoons were one particular prop. A football was another, though to the great consternation of many audience members, this football was lost/misplaced early on, never to be recovered. Lastly, the audience was buzzing with electricity. When the movie inexplicably started about five minutes early, disappointed audience members still filing in loudly exclaimed "It's not midnight yet!" To no avail, of course.

Okay, the movie.

Yeah, it's awful. Here are some overall comments/impressions:

1) There are about four sex scenes within the first half-hour. However, these are not lurid sex scenes designed to titillate. They are "romantic" sex scenes, involving cheesy music, rose petals, and both participants with expressions on their faces like you might see in an ad for an erection pill. What's most comical about these scenes is that they are ALL romantic, even though the same woman appears in all four, but has two different partners. The movie means for us to believe that she has an equally romantic relationship -- in other words, a relationship that the movie itself supports her having -- with both men.

2) Tommy Wiseau. He is probably the worst actor who has ever lived. He looks a bit like Gabriel Byrne, but there's no comparison between their abilities as thespians. Wiseau's unplaceable European accent probably contributes to his poor line readings, but only so much. You're not just picking on him because he has a funny accent. You're picking on him because he is a truly terrible performer.

3) The football. About five different times in this movie, characters engage in carefree sessions of football tossing. This is regardless of what's going on in the plot (plot? what plot?) and seemingly without reason. None of these characters seem athletically inclined, generally (although there's also an extensive jogging scene), nor would they seem interested in football, in particular.

4) The plot. What plot? As far as I can tell it's about a guy (Wiseau) who is losing his wife (Juliette Danielle) to his best friend (Greg Sestero). However, it is frequently very indirectly about this. There's also a part where their teenage neighbor gets involved in some kind of drug deal gone bad, but it's handled so non-specifically (we never learn what kind of drugs, or how he got involved) that it becomes just another one of the film's laughable elements.

5) The technique. Just awful. Establishing shots of San Francisco -- and there are many, usually involving the Golden Gate Bridge -- linger on for 10-15 seconds longer than they should. The dialogue is Z grade. Characters appear mysteriously and become important without being introduced or contextualized. Characters also sometimes look at the camera or make inexplicable gestures/glances.

6) I could go on.

7) But what I really want to say is that the participation of the audience, while active and in many ways quite fun, sometimes served as a distraction for me. Knowing how terrible everything about this movie was, I sometimes regretted having real howlers in the dialogue drowned out by their rejoinders. I don't suppose there's anything I could have done about that except for see the movie first at home, and then come to the theater. However, I think seeing this stuff for the first time on a big screen is key to your enjoyment of it, so my complaint about losing some of the priceless craptasticity is only a minor one.

Okay, so, the story.

When The Room ended and we got up to leave, I patted myself down and realized I did not have my keys. As it was nearly 1:45 a.m. and I had to get home, panic set in almost immediately. Sorry, I should tweak that last statement a little bit. As it was nearly 1:45 a.m. and I had to get home, and my wife was already in Australia, panic set in almost immediately.

I first examined the area around where I was sitting, since the most likely explanation was that I'd lost my keys between the seats. It's happened before. But they were not there. I then thought that perhaps I had left them atop the urinal in the men's room, since I had indeed relieved myself before the movie started. They weren't there either.

Panic really started to set in when I couldn't find anyone who worked at the theater still there. I assumed there must be someone in "the back room," an area behind the concession stand where it seemed most likely they'd be. But leaning over the concession stand and repeatedly saying "Hello? Hello? Excuse me?" yielded no results. This was starting to get truly frightening.

Actually forging back behind the concession stand finally prompted a woman in the lobby to identify herself as a member of the staff. Pretty dick move on her part not to say anything before then with a very obviously agitated customer desperately trying to identify her, so I guess it was a good move on my part to breach the employee area. I asked if any keys had been turned in to the lost and found. She said no, but I was welcome to look. Meanwhile, my friend was doing a much more thorough search of the theater.

Suddenly I knew where they were, and where they almost certainly would no longer be:

On the roof of my car.

My car, which was parked on a side street off a main thoroughfare, on a Saturday night in North Hollywood.

I started running at full sprint, sure that they would be gone, sure that my car would be gone, sure that I would be out the amount of money I hoped to make on my car when I sold it in a few weeks, sure that I would have lost all the personal items in the car as well. I felt a cold sweat break out on my forehead and ran faster.

It took only about 20 seconds to reach the car, where I immediately saw a shimmering object on its roof, right where I expected it to be.

I scooped up those keys, breathed a massive sigh of relief, and somehow ran back to the theater even faster than I'd run to get to my car. It took another 30 seconds for my friend to emerge from the screening room (and I was now locked out so I couldn't get to him), but when he did, there I was, dangling the thought-to-be-lost item in glorious victory.

When I told him where they, in fact, were, he laughed in disbelief and ecstatic joy.

Here's what happened: I arrived a few minutes earlier than he did, and while waiting for him, I stood outside my car and smartphoned for a few minutes. When I do this, I usually just toss my keys on top of my car, then grab them before I go. In this case, I expected him to call me when he arrived and I'd go meet him at the theater. Instead, he was walking toward me and talking to me on the phone, so I naturally started to walk toward him when I saw him turn the corner and come into my view. No thought was given as to whether the car was locked or I even had my keys.

So my keys sat on top of my car for nearly two hours, from 11:45 to 1:45, in what used to be a kind of seedy neighborhood but has now improved slightly, and my car was not stolen.

I'll just have to thank my lucky stars for that one.

Okay, on to September. As I'm still getting my bearings and I don't know what my new methods of acquiring movies will be (we can still watch Netflix streaming using a special plug-in, but I don't know yet know how I'll get DVDs and BluRays), I'm going to leave my next month's choice open-ended. Let's face it -- you weren't going to watch it beforehand anyway. No reason more than one of us has to subject ourselves to this crap.

Transporting my whole movie collection

Just a short one today, probably my last in the country. And you get no picture. Sorry.

So when you're considering how much space you have to bring things with you in a move to, say, Australia, and you're a movie buff, one of the first things that occurs to you is that you can probably only afford to take a dozen of your favorite movies at most. You'll probably have a half-dozen must-haves, then the rest would be movies you love but haven't seen recently. Anything you have seen recently probably stays behind.

Uh uh.

The other choice is that you leave the cases behind, and throw all the DVDs and BluRays themselves into one of those Case Logic folders you once used to carry around your CDs.

As luck would have it, I had one of those folders. And, as even greater luck would have it, I had a package of fresh new sleeves to replace the broken ones that had been in there from the time it actually carried those CDs. I don't even remember getting those replacement sleeves.

So last night, in front of the Red Sox-Yankees game (probably the last baseball game I'll see on regular TV for awhile), I sat in my mostly bare living room and systematically loaded that baby up.

Even funnier was that I had a steak knife next to me to open a good 20-30 packages I had never even opened before. A DVD/BluRay is meant to be opened, and now, finally, all mine have seen the light of day.

I was getting brash. I took multiple copies of Raising Arizona, just to be sure. I took both the DVD and the BluRay of Donnie Darko, because I think the BluRay is the director's cut only. I was even taking marginal movies with me. That's how compact the thing is.

One small way Australia will feel more like home, sooner. 

The Interrupters, with interruptions

On Thursday I told you about a movie I watched at home without a single pause. Straight through, two hours and five minutes, start to finish. (It was Philadelphia.)

Today I watched another sad movie with hard truths about a different big city, which I also gave a five (out of five)-star rating.

The difference was, I had to pause The Interrupters about 37 times.

Didn't seem to make a difference in how much I loved it, though.

See, I've got quite the challenge these last ten days in the United States before moving to Australia. I have to keep up with my movies, especially since I write a weekly series for another blog that involves one real-time viewing per week. Yet I also have to keep up with, you know, going through every single thing that I own and moving out of my house.

So The Interrupters, the movie I'm watching this week for that other blog series, was what I watched as I rolled my coins into coin sleeves, went through the mail, sorted through our recipes, and prepared my son's crib to be bought by someone from Craigslist (whose arrival I am awaiting as I type this).

You might wonder how a person could properly absorb a movie while doing all these other things.

Well, for one, documentaries are a bit easier than fiction films. In your typical documentary, there's a lot of talking. The images are certainly important as well, but I think it's most important to hear what they're talking about than to see every little thing. And don't worry, I saw plenty of the images of The Interrupters. Some of which I wouldn't have liked to have seen. (How about a shot gang member whose feces are easily visible through his colostomy bag?)

Secondly, well ... I had no choice.

But it didn't make a difference in what I took away from Steve James' documentary about violence on the south side of Chicago, and the former gang members (called violence interrupters, or interrupters for short) who try to intervene at a crisis point to prevent tempers from boiling over into actions that can't be taken back.

Wow, what a movie. James' commitment to documenting this stuff, intimate and unfettered, is nothing short of spectacular, as is the access he's able to get. I can imagine the last thing many of the people who appear in this movie want is a camera in their face, yet that camera was allowed to look at them without blinking. And what a clear-eyed vision he captured of this problem, and the people who are trying to solve it. There are successes, there are failures, their are deaths, there are new leases on life. And it's all there for us to consume, floored as we watch.

Even if I did have to pause it an average of once every three minutes.

Philadelphia with Dad

By now you may be wondering if I'm still here.

The simple answer to that question is "Yes, of course I'm still here, because 'here' is defined as wherever you are at any given time."

But what you really mean is "Are you still living in the United States, and are you still writing this blog?"

I sure am, for 12 more days on the first question, and indefinitely on the second. But I have been super busy. Since I wrote my last post, I've wrapped up my last three days of my job, spent 4+ days in Chicago with Don Handsome, and hosted my dad here at my house for 3+ days of odd jobs around our house that will help prepare it to be rented. I haven't prioritized blogging in those 11+ days of inactivity.

However, how long can I really leave The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure at the top of my blog, before you decide to write me off altogether?

So I decided to tell you about a movie bonding experience I had last night with my dad -- one that I had the first time with him nearly 20 years ago.

Let's start 20 years ago. Or, nearly 20 years ago.

Philadelphia hit theaters on December 24, 1993 -- which may have been the last time I can remember a movie being released on Christmas Eve. I saw it in theaters, and was so enthralled that I watched it again on VHS within a year or two. In fact, it was likely on one of my breaks from college (I was in college until the spring of 1995) that I was sitting in my basement, taking in Jonathan Demme's movie for the second time.

My dad walked through the basement, probably on the way to his shop. He frequently walked through when I was watching something, and might linger for a moment to see what it was. However, he'd always move on within a minute or so, either to give me my privacy, or because the thing I was watching wasn't really worth more than a momentary linger.

Except not Philadelphia. With Philadelphia, my dad sat there and watched. For about 15 minutes.

I was at the age that this should have annoyed me, but it didn't.

In fact, I dug that he dug Philadelphia. "Dug" might be a bit of a frivolous word here, in both instances of its usage in the previous sentence. I was thrilled that he was as emotionally stricken by this movie as I was. There, that's a bit better.

I remember that after the scene where Denzel Washington's Joe Miller returns home to his sleeping family, after hearing Tom Hanks' Andy Beckett deconstruct the greatness of a Maria Callis aria (which he can still hear in his head as he ponders the great personal epiphanies of that evening), my dad turned to me and said "This is a really good movie." His voice was choked with emotion and enthusiasm.

My dad is not a huge movie fan, so I don't have a significant number of movie bonding moments with him. But that was one. And he didn't even see the whole thing. After that scene ended, he left me alone to watch the rest of the movie myself.

Flash forward about 18 years, and it's funny how things work out.

I'd been thinking recently about how it had been too long since I'd seen Philadelphia, and I wanted to see if the movie still left me an emotional wreck. So I ordered it from Netflix ... and then immediately became incredibly busy. So busy that I didn't know when I'd get a chance to watch it, especially facing three straight nights with my dad in town.

I figured, it's time for my dad to watch the rest of Philadelphia.

When I first made the suggestion last night, I'm sure it seemed out of left field to him. It was clear he didn't remember much about having watched the part of it he watched with me. In fact, he even misremembered the title as The Philadelphia Story, which, as you know, is an entirely different movie, one that came out the year after he was born.

Because he's not usually one to turn down a suggestion made earnestly, he quickly accepted the idea, and after dinner ended we started watching. As the opening credits played, I was second-guessing myself all over the place. "How random is it to be showing my dad a seemingly random movie from 1993? What if he doesn't like it? What if he wonders why I've chosen to show him a movie about AIDS and homosexuality? Does he expect me to follow the screening with an admission that I'm leaving my wife because I, too, am a homosexual?" (My dad is strongly in favor of gay rights, so this random fear had nothing to do with him.)

It didn't take long to realize I hadn't miscalculated. In fact, about 45 minutes in, I asked him if he wanted me to stop the movie to get us ice cream. My dad is always interested in ice cream. But he didn't want me to stop. He described himself as so invested that he couldn't pause for even a moment. I can't remember the last time I watched a two-hour movie at home without pausing once.

The movie slayed me again, as it did the other two times I watched it. This time, I noticed just how much Demme uses the technique of having the characters talk straight to the camera, and just how effective that is. Overtly, the characters are not talking to the audience -- they're just talking to another character who happens to be occupying the same physical space on the set where the camera's set up. But it has the covert function of having the actors address us, of confronting us directly with the powerful and invaluable issues at the movie's core.

And yes, I did cry again, at all the expected spots. I tried to keep it as subtle as possible, even though my dad is unusually receptive to that kind of display of emotion.

After it was finished, he unwittingly offered almost an identical assessment to the one he'd given back in '94 or '95:

"That was really, really good."

The funny thing was that he didn't remember having seen the scene where Joe Miller lies in bed with his sleeping wife, staring straight ahead as Maria Callis hits all the high notes in his head. He claimed to have only remembered the scene where Andy and his boyfriend Miguel (Antonio Banderas) visit the Beckett house and sit around with the family, warning them about revelations that may come out in a trial.

I know better. He's 73, so I'll allow him so faults in his memory.

I gave him my own little post-movie comment, one that was also attempting to offer an explanation for my fixation on a pastime that doesn't pay my bills, a pastime he probably can't fully understand himself. After finishing Philadelphia, he may have understood that fixaxtion just a little bit better.

"That is why I love movies" is what I said.

Famous Flops: The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure

 
This is the latest in my monthly series Famous Flops, in which I watch one movie per month that is noted for how terrible or how unsuccessful it was, then write about it here.

Okay. Whew.

Having reached an undignified low last month when I actually sorta liked The Hottie and the Nottie, I grabbed hold of The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure for dear life, hoping beyond hope that I would not like it.

Indeed, I didn't like it. Whew.

However, I do have to say one thing about it: If The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure were just a dumb television show, it would hardly warrant a mention outside the children's TV circuit. By having the gall to release itself theatrically -- and thereby accruing the lowest U.S. box office opening weekend for a movie opening on more than 2,000 screens, just $448,000 and change -- The Oogieloves reached for a place in movie infamy history.

Yes, this movie is bad, but it's probably not sufficiently ridiculous to be far worse than some other entertainment aimed at very young children. It's the fact that it thinks so much more of itself that makes it such a misfire. You can really tell that the creators of The Oogieloves thought they were launching a phenomenon, and they simply weren't.

One of the pieces of hubris of which they are guilty is that they thought they were going to create an interactive movie experience that would become addictive to children. This nominal "adventure," carried out by three Barney-like creatures named Goobie, Zoozie and Toofie, is punctuated by a series of songs and dances that are supposed to bring children in the audience to their feet. At the start of the movie, the Oogieloves explain that any time the butterflies fly across the screen (and there's a message they may not be able to read that says "It's time to get out of your seats!"), they should stand up to sing and dance with the Oogieloves. When a handful of turtles cross the screen ("It's okay to sit down now"), the song and dance portion is over for now.

I guess you can't blame them for trying, yet we do anyway. It takes a certain amount of ego to say that you're going to love what we're offering you so much, you'll want to get up out of your seats and dance. Things like that tend to spring up organically -- say, The Rocky Horror Picture Show -- so when someone tries to make them happen artificially, that person seems a bit too proud of him/herself. However, you'd be right to ask how they're supposed to create this interactive experience, if not by weaving it into the fabric of the movie. Guess it's kind of a catch-22.

Anyway, kids didn't go for it. If they had, their parents would have told other parents, and the movie would have made more than $206 per screen.

The deck was stacked against this movie with parents from the start. After all, with their felt costumes and their dopey eyes, the characters do resemble Barney more than they resemble anything else in the children's landscape. Barney is an oddity -- he's a smashing success, despite the fact that almost any adult you talk to will say they hate him. That kind of thing doesn't come along every day, and one look at the Oogieloves made most parents say "Uh uh. Not again."

So far I've been talking mostly about things I could have gleaned without even watching the movie. So, how about some actual stuff from the plot?

It's goofy as hell from the start, but "goofy" is too amiable a word, not nearly insulting enough. It appears that the Oogieloves are throwing a birthday party for their friend, Schluufy, who is a very sleepy pillow. In fact, Schluufy spends almost the entire movie sleeping, which doesn't do much to make us worried whether his pals can reclaim five lost golden balloons that they mean to bring to his party. The Oogies leave Oogie headquarters (or whatever it is) to go find the balloons. Staying back home is their friend, a vacuum cleaner named J. Edgar. (Hoover, get it?) J. Edgar watches what's going on because the window in their HQ, called Windy Window, can magically show him what the Oogies are doing at any given time. Windy Window is a human face looking not unlike the Wizard of Oz, except she's a woman with a Southern accent.

Still with me?

So the Oogies go out and meet a variety of human characters played by the likes of Chazz Palminteri, Cloris Leachman, Cary Elwes, Toni Braxton, Jaime Pressly and Christopher Lloyd. Each character they meet (Pressly and Lloyd are in the same scene) must help them get back one of the balloons, which have followed a particularly unusual diaspora for having all presumably been released from the same person's hands. (Or the same vacuum cleaner's hands -- I believe it was J. Edgar who lost them.) Each time they must engage in a song and dance, before ultimately doing what they need to do to collect the balloon. There are also dance routines that recur, like the Oogies' special Oogielove chant whenever they have a success, and the little song they sing to the belt-less Toofie every time he drops his pants, which is a lot.

Still with me?

The human actors are perhaps the only thing to even remotely recommend this movie, and only a couple of them. It would be fair to say that each actor pours his or her all into the various roles, so that's one thing. Braxton gets some laughs as a loopy songstress, Palminteri is sort of sublime as a man in a diner serving milkshakes with animatronic cows, and Pressly and Lloyd do their best as Mexican dancers. The most annoying human character is Elwes as a cowboy named Bobbly Wobbly, whose thing is that he wobbles when he walks. While many of the others seem like they might be winking at the camera, Elwes is just mugging, and it grates in no time.

There were a few times when I was watching when I wondered if there weren't something subversive going on here, if this weren't the biggest parody ever pulled off with a completely straight face. Ultimately, though, I decided that really terrible movies have a way of seeming like they were intentional, simply because the decisions are so bad that you have to wonder how someone with money approved them. So I dropped the theory that The Oogieloves might be a massive joke, and just settled on the most obvious interpretation of its quality.  

This is about all anyone needs to write about this movie, so I will stop now.

I'm cheating in August. Oh, it's a big flop alright, enough of a flop to have become sort of a success: It's Tommy Wiseau's The Room, which has become sort of the heir apparent to the aforementioned Rocky Horror Picture Show. The cheating part? I've already seen it. I just watched it at a midnight show last night, meaning a couple days before the beginning of August. But they, I'm moving to Australia in just over three weeks, so you'll forgive me if I have to engage in a little bit of cheating.

So many ghosts, such a small state

Watching the trailer for R.I.P.D., I thought two things:

1) Aren't police departments typically named after cities, not states? You know, LAPD, NYPD, etc.

2) I lived in Rhode Island for almost two years, and I had no idea there were this many spirits and other creepy crawlies flying around on a regular basis.

Australian Audient

G'day, mate.

That's what I'll be saying to you soon. Not on August 18th, no. But on September 18th? Yes indeed.

Now that I've gone public on Facebook about it, you, dear Audient readers, are the last to know:

I'm moving to Australia.

Soon, I'll be able to tell you what is and isn't a knife. Soon, I'll be eating Vegemite sandwiches with Kangaroo Jack. Soon, I'll know if the dingo really did eat her baby. 

But Vance, how could this happen?

If you don't already know, you do now: My wife was born in Australia. Her mother is American by birth, so she got my wife a dual citizenship when she was a teenager.

For years we have been talking about living in Australia at some point, at least for a couple years. But we never knew what event would come along that would finally tell us it was time.

Well, that event came along maybe five weeks ago, when my wife was informed by a former colleague about a job opening in Film Victoria, the government body that oversees funding for films made in the province of Victoria (which is home to Melbourne, where my wife grew up and where the job is actually located). My wife's colleague asked if she knew of anyone who would be interested in the job. She did: herself. In fact, she had previously described this job to me as her "dream job," the kind of job she hoped she'd be able to get to eventually continue her career in Australia. She had a Skype interview, and they offered her the job the very next day.

This despite my second piece of news: She's pregnant. Yep, we're going to have our second child in early January. When she told them of her condition, they had to think about the offer for a couple days. And then returned to her telling her they still wanted to make it. She'll just go on maternity leave for four months, then pick back up where she left off.

This is not at all how we expected moving to Australia to go. We expected a light bulb to go off over our heads one day, and we would suddenly know it was the perfect time to uproot ourselves from the U.S. We certainly did not expect that day to come only 14 months after buying our first home here in Los Angeles, nor to occur while my wife was actively pregnant. 

But life has its own odd, mysterious plans. Truth is, if we'd been waiting for that "magic moment" to arrive, it may never have come.

This is kind of the perfect scenario, actually. Because it's happening so suddenly, no thought has been given to selling our house. We will just rent it out. Her contract runs for two years, with a mutual option to extend it. So after two years we may just come back. In fact, we are telling people we definitely will come back after two years, which makes our imminent departure all the more palatable. So we're keeping our footprint here in Los Angeles.

The fact of her pregnancy may seem inconvenient, but this is actually sort of great as well. Right now, we don't have any family where we live. That will all change when we immediately begin living in the same city as my wife's sister and father, with her mother only an hour's plane ride away. Plus there are all my wife's extremely helpful friends from high school, who are a great crowd indeed. All these people will give us a ton of help in figuring out how to add a second child to our family.

Meanwhile, I get to rethink my own career. I've been working in IT for 11 years now, and I'm not sure if it's where my future lies. I won't be able to work for a couple months after I get to Australia as we get me a visa, and during that time, I can scout around and figure out if I can start making a living as a writer again. Now that my wife will be doing the bulk of the bread-winning, I can take a job that actually satisfies my original career goals, without worrying whether it pays all the bills.

And what about this blog?

Well, if anything, I expect to update it more frequently. I will definitely have more time on my hands, as my son looks likely to spend at least three days a week in daycare or preschool. Plus, now I will have a hundred new observations about how a person watches movies down under. I can tell you now to be ready for my first post on the $20 movie ticket.

So what's my timeline? Glad you asked. My wife and son ship out at the end of next week, as she has to get to work. (Her predecessor's last day on the job is tomorrow.) Me, I'm still in L.A. until August 20th. That's the date we had originally planned to fly to Oz for a vacation, so I'm just keeping my original ticket. This will give me plenty of time to say goodbye to friends, sell our cars and prepare the house to be rented.

And plenty of time to watch movies. I will soon be receiving a nearly four-week break from childcare duties, and I plan to revel in it. Oh, I will miss my wife and son so much that it will cause me physical distress at times. But I will also get to watch movies until I'm blue in the face, and you have to take those opportunities when life presents them to you.

Okay! That's the news.

I'm looking forward to having you along with me on this adventure.

Building a better Transformers movie

Most people I know have been pretty excited about the release of Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim. With some of those people, "excited" is an understatement.

For those who haven't been excited, though, it usually comes down to this:

"It looks like just another Transformers movie."

I can see their point. The essence of Pacific Rim and of a Transformers movie are the same thing: giant robots fighting each other and causing lots of property damage. 

Oh yeah, the robots in Transformers turn into cars and trucks and planes and microwave ovens. The robots in Pacific Rim presumably don't do that. But that's not really an essential part of what the Transformers are. In fact, you could almost say that we look past the parts where they're driving around or flying or cooking a TV dinner in two minutes, because we've seen that stuff before. It's the robots leveling buildings that we paid for.

Which means not only is Pacific Rim like a Transformers movie, they are both really like a Godzilla movie. In fact, since Pacific Rim features large reptilian aliens as its villains, you might say it's a bit like a mashup of a Transformers movie and a Godzilla movie. As ever, there's nothing new under the sun.

The thing is, even though the Transformers movies have been phenomenally successful, and Michael Bay is making at least one more, they have exactly zero artistic credibility. That kind of thing won't stand for a genuine artist like del Toro, who made such innovative genre movies as Mimic and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and is even capable of exquisite Oscar bait like Pan's Labyrinth. It won't stand even though he has to answer to "the money guys," who aren't going to give him the funds to do something like this unless he can promise a commercially successful movie. (Promises, promises.)

So, having considered the ways Pacific Rim is like a Transformers movie, here are five ways that I hope and expect it to be different:

1) No stultifying jingoism. It very much helps that del Toro is a Mexican, not an American like Bay, meaning there's a much lower chance of the rah-rah patriotism that suffocates the Transformers movies. Even if he thought it was a good idea for the story, del Toro's nationality would likely preclude including such nonsense. My guess is that the battles between robots and aliens will be fought equally on the soils of many different countries ... and most of the characters will just happen to speak English.

2) Fight scenes you can actually follow. The most deafening regular criticism of the Transformers movies is that you can't tell what the hell is going on. The fight scenes are shot/animated in such a way that they come off as indistinct masses of whirring metal grinding up against each other. Bay has tried to address those criticisms within his movies -- I actually thought the fight scenes were significantly clearer in Revenge of the Fallen -- but that criticism has still dogged the franchise throughout. You can bet del Toro is not going to give anyone the chance to say the same thing about Pacific Rim.

3) No ridiculously beautiful actresses who stink at acting. One of the other regular criticisms of Bay in the Transformers franchise is the way his camera hungrily takes in the curves of his female stars. Ever since he photographed Megan Fox's motor oil-smudged body leaning over a car engine in the first Transformers, we've known just what Bay thought of putting eye candy on screen. When he and Fox had a falling out (that has since been patched up), he cast an even more blatantly hot replacement, model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, for the third movie. (Fox is hotter, but at least she technically already had an acting career, whereas Huntington-Whiteley didn't.) Rinko Kikuchi and Heather Doerksen are both attractive women, but 10-to-1 you're not going to see them sprawling their glistening bodies over any kind of engine in Pacific Rim.

4) A lot less comic relief. I'm not going to say that Guillermo del Toro has no sense of humor, but I can almost guarantee you that no part of Pacific Rim will feature John Turturro in thong underwear.

5) The music won't be all up in your face. One of the most distracting things I noticed in the execrable Transformers: Dark of the Moon was how much Bay's music choices were getting all up in my grill. Whether we're talking about grating pop songs, uplifting orchestration or shallowly melancholy guitar riffs, Bay infuses all of his music choices with his singular Bay-ness. There will be music in Pacific Rim, I'm sure, but it will surely blend more seamlessly into the fabric of the movie than Bay's choices.

Because of these five factors and maybe a sixth or seventh (Charlie Hunnam is a significantly less famous lead than Shia LaBeouf), I also expect Pacific Rim not to do as well at the box office as a Transformers movie. Sad but true.

My hope is that it will at least do well enough to give other visionary directors the chance to put their own distinct spin on other familiar genres or movie types. Only this way can we continue to keep future Transformers movies, or the equivalent thereof, at bay -- so to speak.

Finishing Shotgun Stories

Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter ended up being my third favorite movie of 2011, and I saw it just a couple days before my ranking deadline in late January of 2012.

About two weeks later, I was watching his debut feature, Shotgun Stories.

A couple days after that, I returned the disc to Netflix having watched only 15 minutes.

This happens sometimes. Not often. In fact, extremely rarely. But sometimes.

The quality of Shotgun Stories had nothing to do with my decision not to finish watching it. In fact, up until a few minutes ago, I couldn't remember why I made the extremely unusual decision to return it unwatched.

Then I checked my handy dandy Netflix shipping history and discovered that the movie whose shipping was enabled by the return of Nichols' film was Bright Star, the first movie in the Lady's Choice Movie Night series my wife and I tried to make happen starting in February of '12. Not only was it her first selection, and I wanted to do everything possible to encourage her interest in this new movie series (which involved us alternating picks of movies to watch every second Tuesday), but her first selection was going to coincide with Valentine's Day.

So Shotgun Stories lost out to the other film I had at home on disc, Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai, and a movie night was born. A movie night that lived a healthy life of about three months.

Given how much I loved Take Shelter, it felt like an especially gaping hole in my filmography. Yesterday, I finally filled that hole.

Apparently, having returned the disc already, I didn't feel like I could rent another disc, possibly out of some superstitious fear of the same thing happening again, a superstitious fear I'm only just acknowledging now. More likely, I just didn't get around to it.

But a few weeks ago I noticed that Shotgun Stories was available for streaming from Netflix, and yesterday I took it down at a coffee shop, after an early release from work but before I needed to pick up my son from daycare. Ninety minute movies are good like that.

I don't hand out 4.5-star ratings lightly, but Shotgun Stories makes my second Nichols film to earn that rating. The story of a blood feud between sets of half brothers who have the same no-good (recently deceased) father but different mothers, it's a damn fine redneck drama of mounting vengeance and mounting consequences. It also reminds me of the Michael Shannon I wish I'd seen in Man of Steel. 

Now, I can't wait to see Nichols' latest film, this year's Mud. It's got an August 6th release date on BluRay/DVD, and I'll make sure I've cleared out my schedule to be able to watch it in full.

Bling things

It's a pretty big tribute to Sofia Coppola that I have loved exactly one of her movies that I've seen in the theater, yet I still view the release of one of her movies as a major theatrical event.

That movie I loved was Lost in Translation, and it was nearly ten years ago that I had this transformative visit to the movies. Lost in Translation was my #1 movie of 2003.

Yet somehow that did not translate to a theatrical screening of her 2006 follow-up, Marie Antoinette. I guess I believed the negative hype and stayed away. When I later caught it on video, I was mesmerized. Not to the same extent as when I saw Lost in Translation, but enough that I felt like I should never doubt Sofia again.

Then came Somewhere.

But I was still excited enough by Coppola's potential that I prioritized seeing The Bling Ring in the theater, which is what I did on Monday night. A couple different thoughts occurred to me while watching it, so I thought I'd break them up, subheading style.

Hilton week

Who would have guessed that I would see two movies within one week that featured Paris Hilton?

Although I hate to draw attention to it if you missed it, last Saturday I wrote about how The Hottie & the Nottie was not nearly as bad as I expected ... and possibly better than that. I went on to explain that Hilton showed enough shrewdness to subtly undercut herself here and there, which flies in the face of this image we have of her as an unapologetic narcissist.

Well, consider it 2-for-2 after The Bling Ring.

Hilton is a character here to the extent that the mischievous teenagers at the story's center break into her house a half-dozen times over the course of the narrative. She actually appears on screen once as well, seen across the room at a club.

The thing that interested me is how she again walks that fine line between glorifying herself and poking fun at herself.

Over the course of the film there's a good ten minutes of footage that purportedly takes place inside Paris' house, though it seems very unlikely that her actual house was used as a set. What's notable is how close this probably is to what the inside of her real house looks like, with entire rooms devoted to her jewelry and other types of excess that should seem to be the kind of thing that qualifies as the "secret shame of the rich." (This is, of course, assuming that Paris has any shame, which she may not.)

However, what really caught my eye was that the walls are adorned with pictures of Paris -- framed magazine covers, vanity portraits, you name it. The characters even comment on it. "Look at me, I'm obsessed with myself" the place screams. And Paris signed off on that.

There's also a moment when the characters find Polaroid pictures of Hilton doing ... well, you don't know what, but they ask "What's that all over her body?"

As much as I tend to read this in Paris' favor, perhaps it's really just that she's so into self-promotion that she doesn't even see it as something to feel embarrassed about. Modesty has never been her strong suit.

A less extreme Spring Breakers

I knew going in that the movie would share something in common with Spring Breakers, one of my favorite movies so far this year.

Both movies feature young (high school vs. college-aged) girls getting in way over their heads in the partying lifestyle. Both movies feature characters who seem blind to the mounting consequences of their actions. (I guess that's kind of the same thing.) And both movies feature actresses breaking away from the clean-cut entertainment properties (Disney, Harry Potter) that previously defined them.

Only, The Bling Ring is the movie you make if you aren't entirely ready to go for it.

As much as I did really like The Bling Ring, it feels pretty "safe" compared to the rawness of Breakers. That movie is kind of like The Bling Ring turned up to 11, exploitative, sexual and violent where Bling Ring is comparatively elegant and tasteful.

However, both films are clearly tapping into something that interests us right now: the criminal aspirations of clean-cut, and sometimes wealthy, young women. The thing that struck me is that in both films, the young girls either listen to or sing along with hardcore gangsta rap. Part of being a 21st century post-teenage girl, apparently, is wanting to be an early 1990s black man in Compton.

Where credit is due?

One of the first things you notice when watching The Bling Ring is that it is dedicated to Harris Savides, the DP who was working on his second project with Coppola when he died last October.

However, in reading a review of the movie afterward, I wondered if one particular shot that was credited to his great eye was more a feat of photography or a feat of staging.

It's definitely one of the most arresting moments of the movie. Two of the main characters break into Audrina Patridge's house -- again, probably not actually her house -- and their B&E is captured from about the view of a helicopter hovering in place maybe 150 feet up, at angle of 45 degrees from the house. The shot goes on for two minutes as the two characters rummage through, turning off lights in one room, turning them on in another, filling up their bags with trinkets and treasures and eventually meeting again on the ground floor to exit.

It's breathtaking filmmaking, but is it a greatness that should really be ascribed to Savides? Or was that just a way for this critic to honor the dead?

It's not a rhetorical question I'm asking -- I'm really curious. It's a similar question to whether you credit the cinematographer in an unbroken take like the kinds you get in Before Midnight. And my answer is: it depends on whether the camera is moving. An unbroken take is a feat of both acting and cinematography in a movie like Children of Men, where the camera must move in addition to the actors saying all their lines and hitting all their marks. But in something like Before Midnight or 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the camera is just still, taking it all in. In fact, the DP could have set up on a tripod and just walked away.

The unique thing about the shot in The Bling Ring is that it's not something you're getting from a tripod. Well, most likely is that the camera is on a tripod somewhere on the side of the Hollywood Hills, a spot that has the desired angle on the house below. It only looks like it's taken from the world's most stationary helicopter because there are no other landmarks in the camera's peripheral vision to suggest it's on the ground.

So does Savides get credit for thinking up this shot? Or just for executing it? And in a way, aren't we most impressed that the actors did the things they were supposed to do while the camera was running?

Maybe he's getting credit for the slight "ebb" effect the camera seems to have -- it's still, for sure, but is it moving in or out ever so slightly? I can't say for sure. It could just be an optical illusion.

Ultimately, though, I think you can credit Savides in the same way you can credit the director for things you're not sure if he (or she!) did. Film is the ultimate collaborative medium, which means that no one person ever takes full credit or full blame for anything. And if Savides contributed anything at all to one of the most interesting shots I've seen in a film this year, then he deserves credit.

My continuing hatred of minions

Last week I posted the following on Facebook:

"Message seen on bus: 'Honk if you love minions.' Question: Is there such a thing as un-honking?"

Yes, I really, really hate the minions of the Despicable Me franchise. And naming them doesn't help anything. In fact, it makes things worse. 

In fact, I'm going to take things one step further:

The minions of Despicable Me and Despicable Me 2 (which hits theaters today) are symbolic of everything that's wrong with children's movies.

Whoa whoa, Vance. They're harmless yellow jelly beans with arms and legs. They're cute.

That's your opinion, and I disagree with it. Okay, I can't technically disagree with the fact that they are "cute" on some objective level that does not at all tug at my heart strings the way things that are cute are supposed to tug at my heart strings. But they are ten times more annoying than they are cute, and they are pernicious in a way that seems completely out of sync with their overt appearance.

Pernicious, as in, detrimental to children?

No, as in detrimental to movie fans.

One of the reasons I have stopped being as interested in movies aimed at children is that these days, all such movies have to have minions. If you don't have minions, you aren't viable with really young children.

Take the movie Epic, for example. I was really looking forward to Epic. It seemed "mature" in the way that movies aimed at children often are not. Of course, I didn't expect to see anything on screen that would offend the sensibilities of young children or the parents who brought them to the theater. But I didn't expect them to be pandered to in the form of minions, either, or this movie's equivalent of minions.

Then I saw this poster for Epic, and felt deflated by it:

Damn, those things are such minions it's not even funny. 

Of course, the minions themselves did not create "minions," they are only a response to the need for "minions." But here's why they seem so pernicious to me: They have risen so prominently on the list of "reasons we are making a sequel to Despicable Me" that they have basically become the sum total of the advertising for this film. I have to believe that Steve Carell is returning as the supervillain Gru, but I wouldn't know it from the posters, which focus only on Carl and Stuart and Kevin and Tim and

I know that after Despicable Me 2, the minions are spinning off into their own 2014 film that will presumably do what this movie wanted to do and just excise Carell and any other human characters entirely. If you can't imagine a movie consisting entirely of minions speaking to each other in objectively cute bleeps and blurps, welcome to today's America.

To answer the other question you are probably sort of asking, I became such a grumpy Gru about the minions by watching and not liking Despicable Me two years ago. The minions were actually one of the things that bothered me least about that movie. Gru himself and his archnemesis, Vector, were far more annoying to me. 

But the minions are the ongoing face of all things Despicable Me, and it indeed looks like they will be ongoing for quite some time now. And they are despicable alright.

Now I've annoyed myself. I should have just written a post about The Lone Ranger.

Stick to the movie screens

The last time I made a complaint about Redbox, they responded. Let's see if it happens again.

I was at a Redbox terminal yesterday afternoon doing the usual song and dance of picking out a movie. (We ended up with No, starring Gael Garcia Bernal, which we liked.) There's no literal song, but there is a literal dance because of an inescapable feature of the Redbox kiosk with which you must grapple whether you like it or not:

The sunscreen.

The sunscreen is a red flap of material that hangs from just above the screen, that allows you to see what's on the screen if it's a sunny day. Which happens, you know, a couple times a year in Los Angeles.

Good feature, right?

No.

In fact, it's just something I have to push out of the way every time I rent a movie from Redbox. And because the kiosk has nothing that will allow a hands-free pinning of the sunscreen against the kiosk, it requires the use of one of your hands ... throughout the duration of your rental experience.

Annoying.

It was especially annoying yesterday, as I used my one available hand to dig my wallet out of my pocket, dig my debit card out of my wallet, and also negotiate the piece of paper on which I'd written the code that would give me 50 cents off No.

It was the guy waiting behind me, though, that prompted the writing of this post.

"Pretty annoying that you have to hold that thing the entire time, isn't it?" he said.

"So annoying," I responded.

And it is. I'm not sure what my experience of looking at a Redbox video screen would be like without the sunscreen, but I'm not even sure it's doing what it's supposed to be doing right now, anyway. Clearly, by lifting it entirely out of the way, I'm getting no protection from it at all. But what am I supposed to do to utilize it correctly? Am I supposed to hold it out at a 90 degree angle from the machine, so it's parallel to the ground? Am I supposed to be a foot shorter so I can stick my face absurdly close to the machine and have the sunscreen come to rest against the back of my head? I honestly don't know.

I do know that it's a major nuisance. I get so that I'm stacking things on top of the kiosk to assist in the logistics, like my cell phone and keys. Things I would not want to leave behind. It'd be pretty hard to leave my keys behind, if I'd driven there, but I could easily leave my cell phone behind. And since my company just rolled out iPhones to us, with the price being that we have to pay for them if they are lost or stolen, that would make the cheap movie-renting experience that brings us to Redbox considerably more expensive. In fact, just last week I left my phone atop one of those kiosks at the post office that allows the buying of stamps and the shipping of packages. Fortunately, I did the pocket slap looking for my phone before pulling out of my parking space, and scurried back inside to find it before someone walked off with it.

I suppose I could let the sunscreen flop down over the video monitor while I'm doing activities like rifling through my pockets, activities that generally benefit from a second hand. But it's not ideal. Besides, the fact that you have the sunscreen pulled up is what lets the person behind you know that you're in the middle of a transaction. With it down, you could just be some fool standing in the wrong place while rifling through his pockets.

Don't worry, Redbox. I still love you. I'm just trying to make you a more perfect version of what you are.

It worked last time. Maybe it will again.