Archive for the 'Film' Category

Quiet on the set! “Clove Smoke” in production.

Kevin Andrew Murphy November 13th, 2006

Well, last night was a first for me for a couple things, the second of which was a complete surprise: It was not only my screenwriting debut (actually story credit with script consultation, but most of the dialogue is right from my short story), but also my acting debut, a cameo with two brief lines of dialogue.

I also have the contract in hand now, so I can go ahead and broach radio (or actually blog) silence.  Last spring, I met up with Robert Mims, a new producer looking for material for a short film.  I sent him a copy of “Clove Smoke,” a short of mine that’s been well-received and even translated into Spanish.  Next thing I know, I’m looking at a screenplay adaptation by Robert’s writing partner, Justin Queen.

A thumbs up, and next thing we’re in the fast track.  Principal shooting finished yesterday at the House of Shields in San Francisco, where I’d gone both to get to see the actual production of the filming of my story, and to set myself up for a cameo as background.  Stephen Watts, the director, then surprised me by offering me the role of the bartender, since it gave me a speaking line and also offered some contrast visually since I’d known the color palette the production designer was going with and I’d dressed to match it, adding the red that the principal actors weren’t wearing for the scene.

I also got to meet the actors, Anissa and Jason, who are playing Aurora and Jimmy, a strange bit of serendipity giving them the same initials.  They were great, both in terms of acting and in looking the parts.  The second, in fact, even better than I’d pictured them, thanks to Anissa’s wardrobe (she’s also a model) and Kirsten Larsen’s skill as production designer.  Richard Cascio, the director of photography, was also getting some amazing shots, or at least from what I was getting to see literally looking over his shoulder–one shot was from the bardtender’s perspective, so I was standing right behind him so Jason could get the right line of sight to my eyes for when we later reversed the shot.

And I stepped on a light box one of the grips had left behind the bar, mistaking it for some sort of platform you’re supposed to step on.  However, one fluorescent bulb is not a disaster and it was fascinating to watch a full production up close.  The dolly shot curving around the bar was particularly amazing.

What was also amazing was the location.  The House of Shields is a hundred years old, literally, being built in 1906 and opened in 1908 (delays caused by the great quake and fire).  Edwardian lamps, the bar from the old Palace Hotel, coffered ceilings and so on.  Gorgeous. House of Shields interior

20 Reasons Why I Want to Live in a Cheesy SF Dome City

David Louis Edelman October 31st, 2006

It’s been way too long since I’ve posted anything here on DeepGenre, so pardon me if I indulge in something frivolous. I’ve always had a secret desire to live in one of those sci-fi domes you see in hopelessly dated ’60s and ’70s films. Logan’s Run. Sleeper. THX-1138. The Island. Yeah, I want to live there.

Scene from the film Logan's Run

Why?

  1. No insects. I hate insects. Haaaaaate them. If we could create an entirely indoor civilization where I’d never have to see an insect again, I’d sign up in a heartbeat.
  2. Simple fashion choices. I’ve never enjoyed clothes shopping. I’d much rather somebody deliver me a shiny new single-sex uniform every week. That way, I never have to worry about being out of fashion. I can just choose the vibrant pastel color I feel like wearing for the week, and away I go. (And of course, at the end of the day, I can just drop the thing in the big tube in my room for dry cleaning.)
  3. Meals in pill form. I’m not saying I’d always want to eat meals in pill form. But every once in a while, it would be nice to indulge in a nice hot apple pie without having to actually, you know, indulge in a nice hot apple pie.
  4. All other meals cafeteria-style. The meals you don’t pop into your mouth in pill form are all eaten in big, open cafeterias where you can hang out with all your friends, just like college.
  5. Large flat-screen TVs everywhere. Never again will you have to strain your eyes to see the picture on a tiny screen. Half of the walls around you will convert instantly into flat-screen TVs. (So half of the programming will be government-mandated propaganda. But is that really so different from what we have today?)

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The Wicker Man Re-make

Constance Ash September 2nd, 2006

Bad.

Very bad, They Say.

http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/09/02/movies/02wick.html?ref=arts

The first one wasn’t very good either, but lordessa, the location on the Summersisle was/is indescribably beautiful. (The new one is supposedly on an island in Puget Sound, and it’s all women, who are beekeepers.) The originals staging of the ancient sword dances and hobby horses and so on were thoroughly effective. The premise was almost plausible — except for the nude Britt Eklund writhing around the walls to the beat of a tambor to illustrate — what? the unrestrained female lust of a pagan woman? If so, the rigidly Catholic sacrifice never even got a taste ….

The 1973 film’s echos of John Fowles’s The Magus are of a certain literary historical interest, dimly caught from this many decades’ later perspective. So many college types at least, considered The Magus a ‘guide to life, along with The Lord of the Rings, Siddartha, Stranger in a Strange Land and Camus’s The Stranger. Doubtless the re-make never heard of The Magus….

Love, C.

Comicon International 2006 — The Movie Star, the Professor and the rest of the crew

Kevin Andrew Murphy July 27th, 2006

Last year, just in time for Comicon, my sister scheduled her wedding opposite the Masquerade, which I consequently missed.  This year?  Well, I missed the Masquerade again, but only because of other complications.

Where to start?  Where to end?  Egads, I’ve been going to this thing for twenty years now, saw it when it was small, saw it when it was dying, then saw it when it moved to the new convention center and doubled in size every year, even as they continued to enlarge the convention center.  I remember a couple years ago when I made the mistake of being on the main floor when the crowd capacity overtaxed the air conditioning and I nearly fainted on top of Guillermo Del Toro as he was slipping out the back of the Marvel booth and under my arm as I supported myself on a pillar.

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Read the book? No, but I loved the trailer

Constance Ash July 16th, 2006

“The days of judging a book by its cover are drawing to a close. Publishers have finally tapped into the MTV generation, and now it is possible to make your literary choices in advance online by watching a sequence of rapid-fire images accompanied by a thumping score, big flashing words and, if you’re lucky, a deep-voiced American talking about ‘one man’ and ‘his quest to find meaning in a world gone mad’. Yes: there are now trailers for books and soon, according to Steve Osgoode, director of online marketing at HarperCollins Canada, they will be everywhere.”

(6) Collecting Vampires

Constance Ash July 13th, 2006

 Deep Genre; Introduction; Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5;

Part 6

“Vampires” is a populous subgenre.  Perhaps you would like to create a work featuring a vampire or vampires, but, you wonder, being the professional genre writer that you are, “Will anybody be interested in another novel, another movie, another television program or a non-fiction study dealing with vampires? There have been so many since Stoker’s classic Dracula.“ 

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Wonder Woman is Back in the News

Constance Ash July 6th, 2006

No doubt coz Whedon’s next movie-to-be is Wonder Woman ….

A best-selling ‘woman’s author, Jodi Picoult, is going to do 5 issues of Wonder Woman for D.C.  Going by Picoult’s bibliography this seems an odd choice.  Unless there’s something that this bibliography left out?

Love, C.

 

Superman Returns, For the First Time

David Louis Edelman July 4th, 2006

My wife and I went to see Superman Returns last night. No, I don’t intend to write a full-blown review here. Suffice it to say that while the plot inconsistencies do seem to surface quicker than Lex Luthor’s proto-crystalline continent, Bryan Singer does an admirable job in resurrecting the Big Blue Guy. Quibble all you want about the details, but Brandon Routh was Superman, and that’s just about all that matters.

Brandon Routh as Superman in Superman ReturnsBut here’s what I really want to discuss.

About twenty minutes into the movie — right about at the point where Lex Luthor starts fingering those crystals he finds at Superman’s Fortress of Solitude — the couple next to me started a rather lengthy whispered conversation. After a minute, I realized that the woman simply didn’t understand what was going on. Where are they? What are they doing? What’s the deal with that crystal-powered CPU thing anyway?

It occurred to me that we take a lot of baggage in with us when we go to see a Superman movie. I’m not necessarily talking about the “can Brandon Routh fill Christopher Reeve’s shoes” kind of baggage, much less the “can Kevin Spacey fill Gene Hackman’s shoes” kind of baggage. (And for the record, the answers to those questions are “yes” and “no.”) I’m talking about the narrative baggage.

We all know that Superman disguises himself as mild-mannered Clark Kent. We all know that Superman has this icy fortress in the Arctic (or is it the Antarctic?) where he likes to retreat. We all know that green glowing meteorites mean trouble. Some of us even know how to get Mister Mxyzptlk banished back to the fifth dimension. And so on.

But what if Superman Returns was your first exposure to the Man of Steel? What if you were completely ignorant of the superhero genre? What if (to get all skiffy) the DVD of Superman Returns got buried in a time capsule and became the only record of the entire superhero milieu to survive? Or what if (to put it in more mundane terms) you grew up on a remote farm in China with only a vague idea of what a superhero is, and during a trip to America one of your hosts took you to see Superman Returns?

This brought home to me the fact that, while some genre conventions are universal, most of them are rooted to a particular time and culture. This goes for science fiction and fantasy as well as for superheroes (or mysteries or westerns or any other genre you can think of). When you put a laser-shootin’ space pirate or an axe-slingin’ dwarf or a gin-swiggin’ private detective in your work, you’re anchoring your story firmly to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Anyone picking up your novel, say, two hundred years from now simply won’t get the reference without copious footnotes. Likewise, there’s no guarantee that the remote farmer in China — or the woman sitting next to you in the movie theater — will have these genre conventions in her cultural lexicon.

Yes, it’s true that genre conventions change and evolve over time, and few of them exist in isolation. Superman takes his cues from iconic characters going back as far as Gilgamesh and Hercules, and J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t invent the dwarf. But I’m pretty certain that our idea of a dwarf won’t square up with our great-grandchildren’s idea of a dwarf — just as Tolkien’s would seem odd to the original Scandinavians who thought them up.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing at all. It just seems to me that we would be wise to know what parts of our stories speak to the universal human experience, and what parts speak to our unique human experience.

Why? Because cultural norms shift with the wind, while human nature doesn’t change. Much.

(1) Dracula: Pages From A Virgin’s Diary (2003):

Constance Ash June 27th, 2006

Deep Genre; Introduction Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6;

Part 1

This is an admirable addition to the canon of vampire films.

 

 

Virgin’s Diary is particularly intriquing because it combines 3 creative forms: novel, film and ballet. Additionally, Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and German director Murneau’s Nosferatu (1922), on which this film-ballet is based, are both progenitor works of vampire genre, making Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary a derivative work, that is also an original work. (The ballet was choreographed by Mark Godden for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet company in the late 1990’s.)

In this film Canadian director Guy Maddin employed the silent cinema conventions of superimposed images, irises, odd angles and title cards. From director Murnau he borrowed the signatures of expressionist cinema – distortion, exaggeration, and extreme metaphor, with an emphasis on composition and shadow play – perfect for filming a vampiric story ballet.  Murnau’s was the first way we saw vampires on film (there were stage productions of vampiric works even before Stoker’s novel was published).

 

 

Maddin added gouts of color here and there throughout the film: scarlet blood, glowing green and gold money, the dark, sticky crawl of the vampire’s trajectory out of the primitive east to civilized England. The soundtrack is Gustav Mahler, thickened with occasional source sound additions such as the penetration of fangs and stakes, the ugly whack of a beheading.

Maddin mated the film techniques of Murnau’s plague infestation theme with Bram Stoker’s delirious sexual confusions. The title card texts are direct quotes from the Stoker novel.  The characters are Stoker’s, played by dancers in the Royal Winnipeg Ballet Company.  Though there’s a veneer of  irony, it’s very thin, for this is a ballet based on a work from the era of melodrama theater, where Stoker spent much of his working life. Dracula was adapted to the stage almost immediately upon publication.  (An interesting aside: the same year Dracula was published,  Kipling wrote his poem, “The Vampire,” to accompany an exhibition of painting by Philip Burne-Jones.)

Many of the actors in the movies from the silent era received their training in the theater, a theater before microphones.  Their exaggerated gestures and expressions were meant to project from down stage to the back row of the house; they evolved out of pantomime and earlier public entertainment forms.  With certain refinements these are still used by ballet dancers, the best of whom are actors as well as dancers.  Their technique is a rigorously trained combination of controlled exaggeration and perceived delicacy.

This rhetoric of ballet technique is an informative mirror in which to reflect the Dracula text, while unpacking the erotic contradictions and cautions embedded in the text.  Stoker’s vampire novel is about the ever-shifting values of sex and gender.  What is womanhood? What is manhood? Is sex evil?  These questions are asked on nearly every page. Since these confusions and conflicts are present in any era, in any person’s life, it is unsurprising that Dracula has never been out of print since its publication.

The ballets in the film delineate in clear actions of the body these conflicts and confusions are.  The Blood Brotherhood of True Men, led by Van Helsing, are mirrored by the Vampiric Harem Trinity, submissive to Dracula. The medical examination of Lucy by Van Helsing is as invasive as Dracula’s fangs, equally lascivious but without the seductive glamor and pleasure of the Dark Kiss.  It is comic, but it is ugly, not fun.  Nor does Lucy respond to Van Helsing’s clumsy gropings – she lies unconscious, inert, whereas touched by the Dark Lover’s delicacy, she responded with every part of her body.   All actions are mirrored by their opposites, but their state is fluid.  It is ‘good’ for Van Helsing to examine Lucy, but it is demeaning.  It is bad for Dracula to bite Lucy, but it is breathtaking, and the bite lifts her out of herself.  What is good today tomorrow will be evil. We are lost in a hall of mirrors.  There are no final answers.
 

Intro: Deep Genre In Action - Bloody Ballet – Dracula

Constance Ash June 26th, 2006

(This is the first of about 6 installments that will be coming daily, reflecting the thoughts I’ve had around genre, using as a launching platform this film, vampires and Dracula.)

Introduction:

TO START WITH:  Confession. Vampires per se haven’t much interested me, as creatures or as a genre.  I have friends who have remained fascinated by vampires their whole lives, from childhood until now, way up in adulthood.  My first encounter with vampires was the movie Black Sunday, when I was a little girl, at a slumber party, on our local television station’s weekend Horror Theater.  All around the living room girls screamed, squealed and shrieked and hid their faces in quilts and sleeping bags and pillows.  I did not understand why.  The exotic setting with grand ruins, brooding skies, horse drawn coaches did appeal to me, but that was about it.

I did read Bram Stoker’s Dracula the first time I found a copy in my university library, and have re-read it 3 times since.  I did read Interview With a Vampire, and liked it enormously.  But it did not hold up to a second reading, and the subsequent volumes were of even less interest (to me, let me stress – obviously a lot of readers feel quite different about that!).

On occasion, at a friend’s home, I tried to watch Buffy The Vampire Slayer, since so many people I like and respect were mad about the show.  Couldn’t get anywhere with it, I’m so television-challenged (have lived without a television since I left high school).

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