I saw The Grand Budapest Hotel, the latest Wes Andserson flick, last night.  I don’t like watching movies like that on opening weekend, because they draw the baby boomer intelligentsia Berkeley crowd, the ones that never see movies and then laugh at the wrong places at the stupid pre-trailer ads that I’ve seen a thousand times and hiss at trailers for blockbuster summer tent-pole movies and generally drive me insane. But, we’re in the dead period of films, post-Oscars, when all of the turds are released until the next holiday weekend, so I’ll go see almost anything that isn’t some Jesus freak epic (which is about everything right now.)

Anyway, just a few short notes on this, not a review.  This film has incredible production design, absolutely flawless stuff.  It was shot in Germany at some abandoned gothic department store, and then supplemented with models — not CGI, not stock footage, but little scale models that have that quirky, awkward look like a bizarre story book.  The whole thing had that Wes Anderson absurdity to its look, like even the warning sign in the back of the decrepit 1920s spa talking about electrical treatments for liver toxins made you laugh out loud.  That was great.

The script had an interesting bookend shell game: a girl goes to a statue in tribute of a famous author; cut to the old author reading from his book; cut to the young author staying at this hotel as it is in decline and talking to the old proprietor, who has dinner with him and tells the tale of his youth and the hotel in its heyday.  I liked that quirky twisting of the plot.

Unfortunately, I thought the actual plot itself was a bit too Wes Anderson, too cookie-cutter.  No strong b-story, and just plodding along on this stock adventure.  There were lots of twists and turns and some good humor.  But the 99 minutes seemed to drag a bit in the middle, and the whole thing was a fluffy cake, pure sugar without a lot of weight at the bottom of it.

Acting was great, an absolutely solid Ralph Fiennes as the lead, with Tony Revolori (relatively unknown?) as the young hotel owner, F. Murray Abraham as the older version. But one of Anderson’s key tropes is to have the usual gang pop in with minor roles.  It always gets a laugh to see Owen Wilson or Bill Murray show up with a single line or two, but the cameos have gotten to the point where they almost annoy me.  Marching on Jason Schwartzman in a funny hat (or whatever) does not make a film.  It’s a chuckle, but it’s getting predictable.

Overall though, a pretty good one, especially if you’re into his stuff.  It’s no Life Aquatic, but the design though, is worth the price of admission.

I go to the movies every damn weekend, and I see some occasional good movies, a lot of okay ones, and a fair number of bad ones.  I never write this shit down, and maybe I should.  I just don’t want to turn into a movie reviewer and have to remember how many stars I gave what; I just want to remember that I saw a movie in the theater so I don’t rent it six months later and then find out ten minutes and six dollars later that I already saw and hated the damn thing.

Here’s the last couple of weeks:

Flight

Denzel Washington is an alcoholic airline pilot who manages to land a crashing plane without killing every person on board, antics ensue.  This movie was a straight down the middle C for me, because it had some suspense, but it was so goddamn formulaic, it was ridiculous.  Also, it made me go home and fall into a deep k-hole reading NTSB incident reports, which probably wasted a week of my time.

Denzel is a good actor, but I wouldn’t call this performance mind-blowing.  The theater was crowded as hell though, the temperature was 96 degrees, and they must have shown 90 minutes of trailers.

I heard little about this movie going into it, and expected more involving the plane crash, but that part of the movie ends quickly, and you go into this long-form alcoholic denial trip, which was okay, but I’ve already seen that after-school special.  I’d give this a strong three and a half stars out of five, and it’s a good rental, but you probably won’t catch this one on the plane.

End of Watch

There was nothing to watch this weekend, so we went and saw this.  I hate to harp on a movie for being plotless, since I basically write plotless books, but this was a plotless movie.  It’s basically a character study about these two cops driving around south central LA, with a lot of detail about their respective wife/girlfriends, a small amount of detail on inter-office politics at a police station, and a largely wooden story about Mexican cartels.  The whole thing is shot to look like it was taped on video cameras as part of a school project, like a “found footage” thing.  But this combined with the generic suspense of the story made me feel like I was doing tape tracking of raw footage for COPS episodes.  Seriously, about an hour into it, I got this weird disassociated feeling, and thought “am I still watching a movie?”  It sort of felt like I was sitting through a TV show I had no interest in.

Takeaways to this: Jake Gyllenhaal could totally play Paul Ryan in a biopic if he got the right hairpiece.  Anna Kendrick looks suspiciously like Adam Scott (Ben on Parks and Rec) and that always bothers me.  I won’t spoil the ending, but it’s stupid.  2/5.

I watched an hour-long documentary with Richard Linklater a week or two ago, an interview that was done on some Austin cable TV show, which looked like one of those public access deals that they always had in Seattle in the mid-90s when I first got a TV, with a guest and a host or two sitting in front of a curtain, a grainy VHS-quality video feed with one of those title generators that did the blocky Amiga 500 looking graphics in a stripe across the bottom. Production quality non-withstanding, this was a pretty incredible interview, probably done in around 1994, mostly about his work ethic and the movie Slacker.

It talked a lot about his first film, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, which was the Stanley Kubrick film school experiment: he bought a camera and a couple of thousand dollars of film stock and started shooting, collecting footage for a year and then spending another year editing it down. And it wasn’t done as a calling card movie, which is what everyone does now: make a film like Clerks, and then shop it to studios and either get it distributed on the Sundance/indie circuit, and/or get a deal to make a real-budget picture. He did neither, except he got the experience to get ready to do Slacker. And that wasn’t a calling card movie either, although the fact that he made money on it made him instant fodder for the suits, and he parlayed it into Dazed and Confused.

Side note: I was obsessed with public access and the idea of making a film back when I was in Seattle in the mid-90s. I would tape almost anything interesting on the public access channel, and make these “cable hell” tapes which I then sent to Larry in Chicago and he would watch them in the background while studying for law school. My apartment also had a thing where you could go to a certain channel on your TV and you would see the security camera feed for the front door, so I would tape that, and then run downstairs with a sign and flash the devil horns and make a face or whatever, then run back up seven floors and stop the tape. That got old fast, but we used to love this strange chick that was on, a chubby nude model who was obsessed with Tori Amos and thought she was a painter, poet, ARTIST, whatever, and would paint her face or body with tempra paint and mime these bizarro dance numbers to obscure Kate Bush b-sides and then go on these babbling monologues about some personal drama. I did buy a video camera, but I never made a film, because I realized that filmmaking involves the herding of people and the scouting of places and the work of direction, which is probably one of my weakest abilities. That’s what I love about writing, especially now with self-publishing, because I can create entire universes on my own, and even as an extreme introvert, I don’t need to interact with other people to get shit done. (Selling books, that’s another story…)

One of the things that resonated with me about Linklater was his discussion about Slacker as a “kitchen sink” movie, how he was able to throw in absolutely anything that was in his head during that summer, any old stories or lost memes or friends of friends he found interesting. He’d read a short story by a friend and then ask to borrow one of the characters, and drop them in some other situation on the college campus town of Austin. He had this form he had to stick with, this idea of an entire day, moving from reality to reality, jumping into these individual movies of different peoples’ lives, but he could get almost anything to work within that. I like that a lot.

I think when I wrote Rumored, it became my “kitchen sink” book, because when I look back at it, there are so many little thoughts and notions that came out of email conversations and episodes in real life and stories that knocked around in my head since childhood. I had this framework, a specific form or scaffolding that I hung all of these things off of, and I struggled a lot with whether or not to stick to this format or try to remix everything into a conventional narrative. And I didn’t, although there’s a very subtle plot to the book if you read all 201 things in order, but I wanted to break that construct, and I did. But when I go back and re-read bits of it, ten years later, I notice where the pieces originated. I see a road trip I took in 1999 or a conference I attended for work or an episode where I got stuck in an airport or a recurring nightmare I had as a kid.

I don’t feel like books have to have plot, and I don’t feel like plotless books have to be unreadable. I know when people talk about plotless movies or books, first of all, that’s seen as an insult, a problem. I think people either relate it to a book that has a weak or bad plot, that plods along with no development. Or they think of the art film where a group of children with Down’s Syndrome throw ape feces at a wall covered with blank 1040 tax returns for six hours, and think, “what the fuck does this mean?” and it has to be some kind of artistic statement that you have to hypothesize that it’s a representation of the latent developmental problems of our capitalist society inflicting oppression on African countries crippled by IMF debt. Or whatever.

I think life itself is plotless, and when we transpose a segment of life (or fictional life) from the meatspace non-linear world to a linear, flat book, we use plot as a set of expectations, a contract with the reader to guarantee that we the author will provide certain events that unravel in a specific way that will make the reader continue the journey. When we write an act 1, we foreshadow what will happen in the act 2 and 3 to tell the reader that they should stick with it. There are only 29 plots or 17 plots or 3 plots or one plot, and by telling the reader that your book is going to follow a plot that they already know, you are giving them expectations on how things will unfold. There will be twists and turns, and that’s what makes things (slightly) different, but plot is what pulls a reader through the story.

I guess my problem with this is that eventually, every book will become the same book, and instead of becoming an experiment to challenge the form, you ultimately fall down this hole where your contract with the reader becomes so rigid, any deviation from it is blasphemy. And if you fall into the realm of genre writing (more on that some other time) you MUST adhere to these standards, and the more you do, the more the reader feels “rewarded”, which is asinine.

The hard part is coming up with the framework or system to write the plotless book, because you need to figure out some way to glue together all of those pieces in your kitchen sink to get to your few hundred pages of book.  And that part’s hard to explain.

Man, I need to go re-watch Slacker.

I watched Pulp Fiction for the millionth time last night. We’re trying to get through that AFI 100 films thing, starting with all of the ones I have on DVD at the house. I haven’t seen Pulp Fiction in maybe ten years though, so it was interesting to see it with some distance. I think the big thing I realized is how much of a big chunk of my past has to do with that movie, and how much it influenced my writing.

When Pulp Fiction came out in the fall of 1994, I was living with Simms, and that movie wrapped around his brain in a big way.  I don’t remember if I was with him the first time I saw it, but it absolutely obsessed him.  I think a big part of it was the soundtrack, which was all of this old surf music, a big thing with Simms at that point.  He had this band, a rotating cast of characters, called The Surfing Richards, and they were essentially this ever-changing group of music theory PhDs obsessed with Frank Zappa.  Their music was a mashup of Dick Dale, Devo, and Zappa.  So the Tarantino soundtrack really clicked with him, and our house was filled with it for months.

Simms became this prophet of Tarantino.  We’d be record shopping or walking around Bloomington, and he’d run into someone at the store he hadn’t seen in a semester or two, and ask them if they’d seen the movie.  If not, he’d immediately drag all of us out to the mall to see the next showing.  I think I saw the movie at least a dozen times because of this, and he really got off on seeing people’s reaction to the film.  We pretty much memorized the film, and it got worse when I got a tape of it.  Back then, there was usually a year between a theatrical release and the home video release.  But I found some guy on usenet that made a pirated copy; he worked in a theater, and set up a camcorder in the booth to record the whole thing, with the audio jacked into the booth sound.  I think I traded him something for it, and got a VHS copy months before it was available in stores.  This meant we watched the movie constantly, even running it in the background while doing other stuff. So in the back of my head, I’ve still got the film memorized.

This was the first time I’d seen the film since I lived in LA.  I remember when I first visited Los Angeles in 1997, the Tarantino-verse very much molded my preconceptions of the city, and the feel that I had for the city reminded me of what he caught in his films.  When I lived in LA in 2008, I worked from home and spent most of my time in Playa Del Rey, which is not really LA, but I’d have to wander around Hollywood or Culver City or El Segundo on various errands and doctor’s appointments.  And I also remember the week or so I spent driving all over the city trying to find us an apartment, going to all of these little places during the day to meet with realtors that never showed up for their appointments.

There’s one scene that really captured a specific feeling for me, and that was when Butch went back to his apartment to get his watch.  The scene is very quiet, nothing but ambient noise of the North Hollywood neighborhood, as he cuts through an apartment complex and then a vacant lot on the way to his apartment building.  That eerie silence, aside from the Mexican families cooking or babysitting kids in the background, and the sight of those old Bukowski-looking walled compound apartments captures a certain LA that I always felt when I was driving through side streets or walking from my car to various doctor’s appointments or whatever else I was doing back then.  The film itself is not an LA film in many ways; he captures bits and pieces in the background, but a crime film could be filmed almost anywhere.  What he does is use those background pieces to fill out the film and give it a vibrancy that transcends what a typical TV crime drama usually is.

I also found that there was a lot of dialogue that I picked up on that bled into some of my early writing.  When I was hacking out Summer Rain, there were so many exchanges and bumpers and pieces of wording that came out of Pulp Fiction without even thinking about it.  Tarantino’s dialogue can be corny, and tries too hard to be hip, and I think that rubbed off on me a bit.  One of the advantages of spending so many years rewriting that book is that I had many opportunities to kill my darlings, and beat the hell out of the dialogue until it shook any of those references.  But while I was watching the movie, little lines would jump out at me, things that I know got morphed into my character’s words at some point, and then cut.

Tarantino also relies heavily on cross-references through his work, little things like Fruit Brute cereal or Jackrabbit Slim’s (which also appears in an almost inaudible radio commercial in the background during the aforementioned scene with Butch.)  Simms, being a Zappa nut, was really big on conceptual continuity, which I assumed, being a literary idiot with about six credits of literary theory that I barely passed at that point, was some kind of common term, although now I find out that it’s something only used in the context of Zappa.  But Tarantino has all of these little recurring things that appear in all of his films, like Red Apple cigarettes.  And I never thought about it in the context of his influence, but I constantly do the same thing.

I think the biggest influence of Pulp Fiction to me was the idea of a non-linear narrative.  I spent a lot of time in my first couple of years of writing trying to figure out plot, trying to think of how to twist together a huge, linear story, and Tarantino’s films were one of the first things that really sent me sideways on that, and challenged me to think in other terms.  Rumored to Exist started at the end of 1995 because of a perfect storm of a few things swimming in my mind, all of which were consumed over a long and boring holiday break: the book Catch-22, and the movies Naked Lunch, Pulp Fiction, and Slacker. Put those in a blender, give me too much free time without an internet connection, and that’s what happens.

I’m almost done with my next book, and I’ve got a todo list a million things long.  But now I really want to watch Jackie Brown.  Let’s see which one wins.

I have watched so many damn movies in the last few days, it’s uncanny.  I watch TV every night, but for whatever reason, our lowest common denominator has been all of these cooking shows, like Chopped and Restaurant Impossible.  We haven’t been able to lock into any good dramas in a while, probably since Lost ended.  And it seems like reality shows are the only thing available now, but that’s another rant for another day.

We tend to see every movie in the theater that’s within our wheelhouse, but that’s limiting because I hate superhero/comic book movies, and don’t get into the animated stuff, and that’s about 90% of what came out this summer.  But I will sometimes catch up on this stuff when I can do it for $2 on amazon, as opposed to $20 in a theater.

So, here’s a bunch of stuff I saw in the last week:

Captain America

The reason I don’t like comic book movies, especially Marvel ones, is that they’re all basically “hey, Spiderman made a shit-ton of money, so let’s use the same exact script except do a search and replace and pour in another superhero.”  So it’s always the same exact origin story, with a bunch of references to other Marvel properties to appease the comic book geeks.

I wanted to see this movie because it takes place during World War 2, and has all of this Nazi secret labs stuff like giant flying wing bombers.  The movie did okay with the vintage setting, showing New York during the war, but it had a certain glossiness to it, and I’m not sure if that was intentionally some directorial decision, or if it was because they used so much CGI, that’s the best you can do.

The origin story was okay, but like I said, they use the same damn one for all of these ones, and you can practically set your watch to when the twelve points of the Joseph Campbell hero’s journey happens.  Once the origin was over and you got into the fighting, it all became a hokey blur of CGI.  Maybe if I was in an IMAX theater, this would have been more engaging, but it was a bit too video gamey for me.

I would give this one a slight bump up in points because the hero is a bit grittier here - Captain America is a touch more Indiana Jones than Iron Man, if that makes any sense.  And the ending, which is of course a blatant hook for them to make more movies, was interesting.  But it was mostly a “meh” for me.

Monsters, Inc and Wall-E

I never, ever watch Pixar stuff, which is ironic because I think I could walk to the main gates of their studio in less time than it will take me to write this post, and to the fanatic Pixar fan, that’s like Jerry Sandusky living next to a Justin Bieber-themed boy’s grade school.  But I never got into Pixar movies, and never got into animation, and I don’t know why.  So I don’t know why the hell I watched both of these movies back-to-back on Thanksgiving night, but it may have been from a diabetic coma and an inability to change channels.

I’m mentioning both of these at once because every Pixar movie is essentially the same movie.  They follow the same plot curve religiously; Sulley meets Boo at probably the same exact frame of film as where Wall-E meets Eve.  What I found both interesting and disturbing is how emotionally manipulative Pixar movies can be.  I mean, it’s like just short of “here’s a cute purry kitty.  I’ve never loved anything as much as this kitty, and it completes me.  Now, here’s a bad man that will take the kitty and put it in a bag and hit it with a hammer and throw it in the river.  But if I try hard and fail two times, on the third try, I will get back the kitty unharmed and it will love me forever.”  And every person in the theater is crying like a little bitch.  And this WORKS but it disturbs me.

Also, there’s something strange about Wall-E (or WALL-E or WaLl-EEE or whatever the fuck it is) in that the writer, Andrew Stanton, is a bit of a Jesus freak, and the whole movie is filled with religious symbolism.  But it has a heavily environmental message, which means the Right automatically has to hate it.  But it doesn’t absolutely say either, so both sides fight over who the film supports.  It’s like when the film Juno came out, and everyone argued over whether or not it was a pro-life or pro-choice movie.  I guess that ultimately works, in that you get two different teams fighting to support the same movie.  You can’t make a film like Brokeback Mountain in such a way that everyone on the Right will rush to see it because it’s a good dude-on-dude movie BUT it’s a good cowboy movie.

These were both middle-of-road for me.  You’re basically paying for a commercial for all of the Pixar toys you’ll be forced to buy if you have kids (or all of the Pixar collectibles you will be forced to buy if you don’t.)  It was an okay way to pass the time, but I didn’t drink the Kool-Aid.

Super 8

I don’t know why I didn’t see this in the theater; either I thought it was some kind of kid’s movie from the trailer, or I kept getting it confused with that horrible Nick Cage movie 8mm.  But we rented this, and I’m glad, because it’s one of the best movies I’ve seen this year, except for the end, which was somewhat stupid.  So it’s basically like Lost.  J.J. Abrams creates a magic box, and you spend 90 minutes thinking “what the hell is in that box?” and then he opens it and you feel totally ripped off.

My first reaction to the movie was that Abrams filmed this gigantic homage to ET and Close Encounters in so many ways that it was goddamn genius.  The way he set up the world of the involved kids and the oblivious adults was so much like something I could identify with as a child of the 80s.  I mean, it’s not that our parents were oblivious, it’s that they were far too involved with their grown-up world, but we had a certain distance from it, because we were so consumed with our own world of horror movies and model building and science fiction.  This was done so well in the movie, that I loved it.

And it wasn’t just the perfectly sculpted plot that showed this - it was something with the production values, the set dressing, the cinematography.  If you told me that Abrams hunted down the same DP or the same kind of film stock or cameras as Close Encounters, or he obsessively duplicated camera angles or shot tracking from Goonies, I would believe it.  If you don’t pay attention to the story at all and just LOOK at the movie, it reminds you so much of those iconic 80s movies.  The thing is, the story - the love interest, and that goddamn magic box he’s assembling before your eyes - you can’t escape it.

I can’t say why the ending is stupid without major spoilers, but it was stupid.  If Abrams had shot this as 26 episodes at an hour each, and pulled back the kimono a little more slowly, maybe.  But it was still an incredible film.

Limitless

This was a huge “meh”, an interesting premise with some seriously phoned-in acting, and an overall film that was trying to rip off Fight Club, Pi, and maybe Flowers for Algernon simultaneously in such a way that you couldn’t tell what was what.

Basically, Bradley Cooper is this blocked writer who discovers a wonder drug that unlocks 100% of your brain (the “we only use 20% of your brain” thing is a myth), antics ensue.  The plot has a lot of switcharoo action that makes it interesting, but it’s got so much poorly glossed-over technology, it takes some effort to get through it.  Like there’s a lot of stuff having to do with day-trading and financial markets that’s absolutely mumbo-jumboed in the same way as when you’re watching one of those CSI things and they show the pseudo-details of some technical thing involving web sites or phone phreaking.

Of course the real bitch of the movie is that it’s based on a pill you can take and then crank out a masterpiece novel in four days, and it’s not available at the local Rite-Aid.  All I can find there is this gingko stuff that does nothing but horribly affect my bowel output.

Okay, that’s it.  I now remember why I hate reviewing anything, and I’m horribly bored of this, and I already know the only comments I will get is unending shit about my inability to bow down and lick the asshole of Stan Lee.