It occurred to me, when I remembered I had a blog and tried to figure out what I ought to write about, that that's what this place has really been to me: a place to prove to anyone who will listen that I'm smarter, funnier, more talented, and more worthwhile than everyone else. That hasn't exactly paid dividends, although I took some solace in the implied knowledge that Diablo Cody did not like what I wrote about her stupid movies.

J.J. Abrams didn't invent the cliché, but he certainly did perfect it. You know how every other episode of Alias opened in medias res, and Syd seemed like she was about to get taken down for good. Smash cut to: Credit Dauphine, 48 hours earlier, and the first half of the episode builds to that moment, while the second half expands on it. Abrams shows frequently overuse this device--he even used it, albeit effectively, in Mission: Impossible III--and their popularity (among creative types, moreso than "the masses") led to widespread abuse of a flawed narrative device.

Nowhere have I seen it more poorly used than in Safe, an unmitigated disaster brought to you by the same writer as the equally sloppy Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Boaz Yakin, whose name is more entertaining than much of his career output (low blow, sorry), managed to craft an in medias res opening, a "how they got here" flashback, and the resolution to the opening in the space of the first ten pages. You might think, "Wow! Breathless action!" If you read it, you'll think, "Wow! Where's the suspense?" Isn't the basic narrative premise of this type of opening to keep the audience in suspense? At the start, we get to see the metaphorical bomb, which should leave us guessing at every turn. Is that bagboy at the grocery store the guy who's going to stick him with a paralyzing drug and dump him off at the shady Chinese chemist's dirty lab?

After a dizzying opening that barely makes sense even after the flashbacks, Safe rewinds a year to show Luke's (Jason Statham) motivation: for unclear reasons (until later), the Russian mob kills his entire family in front of him and hopes the subsequent guilt and despair will cause him to commit suicide. They're all surprised when Luke--who, by the way, is a master assassin--decides to take revenge instead of taking his own life.

This should be a great dumb-action-movie twist. You know me: I love dumb action movies. However, I find it personally offensive when a dumb action movie doesn't know what it is and unsuccessfully sets its aspirations higher than its genre will allow. Such is the case with Safe, which shackles psychopathic loner Luke with adorable Chinese moppet Mei (Catherine Chan), whom he needs to keep safe (get it?) from the Chinese Triad, the Russian Mob, and corrupt New York cops and politicos. Yakin wants us to believe a sort of father-daughter relationship exists between these two characters, and that Luke changes for the better over the course of the script. It uses the line "I didn't save you--you saved me" without irony.

About a year ago, I had a hankering to see Punch-Drunk Love again. It's taken me this long to get to it, and the results will in no way surprise you: it remains a big, ramshackle mess, almost anchored by a career-best performance from Sandler and beautiful, artsy-fartsy cinematography by Anderson's go-to cinematographer, Robert Elswit.

Let's get this out of the way first thing: Drive is a terrible script. I don't usually pay much attention to news and gossip, but it's hard to avoid when Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman, and my beloved Albert Brooks sign on to a script that ranks near the very bottom of the shit heap I've read (keep in mind, I read Law-Abiding Citizen, so that's saying something). "Maybe," I speculated, "the script has dramatically changed to make it appealing to competent actors."

It hasn't, but--get this--I actually liked the movie. They changed the absolute worst thing about the script--a serious, debilitating plot hole--But did I like the movie for what it was, or what it imitated? Because, you see, Drive's greatest liability and second-greatest asset (the greatest being the quality of the actors, elevating material far beyond the cheap, B-movie schlock it should have been) is director Nicolas Winding Refn's self-conscious aping of early Michael Mann. Drive rehashes Thief, both in style and in content (swap out safe-cracking for stunt driving, and it's basically the same movie), right down to the cursive, hot-pink credits and abuse of low-rent synth-pop.

The thing about Mann, for me, is that he knows how to blend the superficial gloss of contemporary coolness with the grit that permeates...pretty much everything in modern society. The Tangerine Dream score of Thief was not a self-conscious throwback or an attempt to emulate earlier directors. Tangerine Dream was just a few years past its peak popularity, and I'd make the argument that synth-pop evolved naturally from disco by amping up the experimental digital sounds and eliminating actual instruments. Synth-based pop was quickly becoming the Next Big Thing, but Mann heard the darkness and the coldness underneath the peppy veneer and exploited that to create Thief's mood. Mann has always used music expertly in his films, but it comes across as both derivative and self-conscious to simply ape choices he made 30 years ago rather than looking at the underlying reasons for those choices and finding a modern equivalent.

That said, the overwhelming majority of Mann's movies--especially his crime epics--are so fucking good, pilfering his style can only help a bad script. One could argue that makes Drive style over substance, but Refn steals Mann's style expertly. Ignoring all the self-consciousness (like the dingy, '80s aesthetic of "Driver"'s apartment), Refn creates the cinematic equivalent of highway hypnosis through the motion (or lack thereof) of his camera and expert sound design, lulling us into a false sense of calm until the relentlessly--almost comically--violent second half.

I'll be honest: I haven't really kept up on movies this year. I think, after the end of The Parallax Review, the only new releases I've seen have been Source Code, Bridesmaids, and The Tree of Life. Oh, and Super, the movie of the year. After hearing some positive buzz, I did decide to check out Ceremony to see if it amounted to more than its terrible script. I made it through about fifteen minutes before my Z'Dar-esque face flushed with rage and I shut it off in disgust.

Below, I'll be reviewing scripts for two more movies I'll probably never see. I may check out Conan solely because the love of my life, Rachel Nichols, is in it. As she knows from the thousands of fan letters I've sent, I will watch anything she's in from P2 to blurry secret recordings of the outside of her house recorded by a crappy cell phone. Not my crappy cell phone. A totally different one that I also own.

To my great pleasure, The Ultimate Solution of Grace Quigley--Zweiback's cut--is, indeed, the great film I wished Grace Quigley could have been.]]> http://www.theparallaxreview.com/columns/cannon_corner/the_ultimate_solution_of_grace_quigley.html http://www.theparallaxreview.com/columns/cannon_corner/the_ultimate_solution_of_grace_quigley.html Cannon Corner Columns Mon, 11 Jul 2011 13:25:21 -0600 As those of you who rate enough to be a Facebook friend, I've been working on at least one new song (actually, a slew of them) called "The Zimbalist Thing," an ode to Stephanie Zimbalist that gradually becomes a paranoid rant about my fear of her tough-as-nails FBI agent father. I had hoped to have a demo up today, but I find it excruciatingly difficult to write song lyrics unless they're pornographic disasters, so I got nothing. The music is done, the melody's done, and I have one and a half verses and the first line of the chorus. I won't share anything in such an embryonic state, so deal with it.

I came to a very important conclusion after Tarini dared me to watch All About Steve: Sandra Bullock is either slyly demented or batshit crazy. I'm not usually one to dish on celebs or speculate on the mental well being of Hollywood actors, but this... This is different. I'm not some paparazzo hiding in her bushes, trying to find out if she feasts on the flesh of the recently deceased. This is simply an outside observer looking at her oeuvre and coming to the only obvious conclusion.

The last two Bullock movies I saw--All About Steve and The Proposal (both of which Tarini dared me to watch, because she hates me, and I watched because I hate myself)--are the sorts of films where every single scene prompts the most vital question in all of cinema: "Why?" When the closing credits finally scroll up, it prompts the second most vital question in all of cinema: "What the fuck did I just watch?"

So, over the weekend, I spent some time going through all the scripts I've covered to compile this list (which, in its current state, is out of hand--I need to pare my choices down), and I discovered I passed on a script called Cover Girl by Gren Wells. This shocked me, because although it's not without its problems, I have nothing but fond memories of the script. I really enjoyed it--so why did I pass on it? Well: "Without extremely good casting, it's more likely to end up as a bland, forgettable romantic comedy."

That's the problem, right? I read for a company involved in distribution. It's too late to solve story problems, so I had it repeatedly drilled into my head that if the script won't make money, I should pass, no matter what. A more optimistic version of myself--not the soulless husk you see before you--would make the argument that a good script trumps everything else. But I've seen enough good scripts go bad to know that isn't true. I've also seen enough terrible scripts receive inexplicable praise (Black Swan!) to know that script quality isn't the only factor at play. It's probably not even in the top 10.

"Now, Henry Winkler--there's a father. Listen to what he told a close friend. 'I don't always keep my cool like the Fonz, but my love for my kids has given me plenty of happy days.'" -- The Simpsons, "Saturdays of Thunder"

Ceremony confines its setting to a weekend-long bacchanal, and that decision is where it goes wrong. It's not the single setting in and of itself. Plenty of films, many of them set at weddings (Robert Altman's A Wedding leaps to mind, and though I'm generally not a big Altman fan, his film pretty much does everything right that Ceremony does wrong), have utilized this type of single-setting technique in effective ways. From claustrophobia (Das Boot, Lifeboat--which manages to generate claustrophobia on the open goddamn sea) to farce (Death at a Funeral) to all those filmed plays where disparate characters share intense experiences and find out new things about themselves and each other (A Raisin in the Sun and The Big Kahuna among the zillions out there), use of one setting over a short period of time can amp up tension more than just about anything else. In fact, my favorite film of last year, Lebanon, utilizes this technique masterfully.

I wonder if this style of storytelling stems from the days when large family systems had the misfortune of sharing a single, cramped dwelling (those days aren't as long ago as one might imagine, and in many non-American cultures it's still quite common). That's just an idle thought that has little to do with anything.

The problem with Ceremony has less to do with its setting than with the story told within that setting. In every film mentioned above (and plenty more), the story and characters are inextricably linked to the choice of setting. Those stories would not be more compelling if things were expanded. This might sound like a violation of the "show, don't tell" rule, especially in the case of the filmed plays. The rules say that it's a movie--you can show anything, so why would you have a character tell a story to his friends instead of showing the story to the audience?