Category: Film

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Letting Go

I first started drafting this post way back in November 2006:

There’s a point in every writer’s career where they have to let go of their baby.

I got no further than that. I think my now is not the best time to think aloud alarm went off, and it collected virtual dust on the hard-drive.

Not that long ago, the insufferably unstoppable Amit (previously referred to as Mr T but I’ve since regained my manners) asked me to have a look over the locked cut of Five. That DVD sat on my desk. Then it went onto a shelf. Then back onto my desk.

Every day for a month I saw that disc and thought, I must watch that. I must.

But I couldn’t.

Of course, I did watch it. I made some notes and fired off an email that included:

you may have surmised from the extreme delay […] some reluctance on my part to sit down and watch it. i plead guilty. i can intellectualise that the transfer from paper to screen involves a loss of ownership and is How It Is. but the actual experience was quite a lot harder that i expected. but i’m okay now. (i think putting the dvd in the player, handcuffing myself to the couch and tossing the key across the room helped. it was… cathartic.) (having to wait several hours for someone to come home to release me wasn’t so cathartic but that’s the price of personal development.)

of course, if you thought the delay was because i [am a] lazy slackarse, then forget the previous paragraph.

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Die Hard 4.0

Over at Roger Ebert’s, Time reviewer Richard Corliss has a sweet guest-post on the upcoming Live Free or Die Hard.

Jee-zus, has it really been almost twenty years?

I remember when the wham-bam style of films like Raw Deal, Cobra and their ilk were comforting in their predictability of character and story. The good guys were long on jaw-lines and short on dialogue. The bad guys had five-o’clock shadow and wore aviator sunglasses 24-7. The side-kick – pick your minority of spunky woman, jive-ass black guy or Mensa-IQ Asian geek – always died by the second or third reel. And how ’bout them bookends: the hero who’s shown at the beginning to struggle with something (like, say, flying a small plane) will, by the film’s climax, be forced to master that same something BUT ON A MUCH LARGER SCALE (like, say, flying a passenger jet).

What distinguished Die Hard from its predecessors – more so than even Lethal Weapon‘s spec-ops-grade tactics, hardware and action – was the human vulnerability that drove the story, and the attention to detail (like sparing a thought for your stock villain). (This aspect has been covered endlessly and much more intelligently elsewhere so I’ll keep it brief.) In Die Hard, Bruce Willis‘ John McClane isn’t cleaning out the Nakatomi Plaza just because he’s the hero – his wife‘s in there. But even that goal isn’t clearcut: he’s in Los Angeles to save his marriage. And his relationship skills border on, shall we say, the prehistoric.

Let’s not forget the baddies – they were a revelation: trained, armed and motivated, these were no strawmen waiting for the FX supervisor to blow their squibs. Each mano-a-mano clinch McClane goes into, he’s trapped, outgunned and outnumbered: sometimes luck helps but otherwise he has absolutely nothing to lose. Sure the baddies die one by one, but they get some good kickin’ into our hero before their demise. And Alan Rickman‘s urbane, sophisticated and meticulous villain has rarely been equalled since.

Nowadays, film baddies seem to have reverted to the Commando school of baddies where although you can outnumber the hero, you’re just there die in swathes of automatic gunfire. And if you’re the villain, ‘s like all you need is to be able to laugh maniacally or grit your teeth enough to have a vein throb on your forehead.

Meanwhile, the de rigueur hero is like Jack Bauer – always ready to save the world in spite of a rocky marriage, a flighty daughter, extra-marital affairs and/or office politics.

It’s been a long time since I’ve felt as immersed in a character’s situation as McClane’s first escapade. I was there with him, goddammit. I identified. The Die Hard 4.0 reboot mayn’t take me anyplace new or even exciting – but at least I’ll always have the memories.

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Needs Must and All That

Danny Stack‘s latest Story Vault about dramatic need, along with Jane Espenson‘s post on the need for story/character stakes, got me thinking.

My path to film analysis was as follows:

    • blind acceptance –

Okay. She has to go back into the house for the cat because she loves widdle Ferdie.

    • followed by a curious questioning –

But why would the previously right-thinking Bindy go back into the house she’s just escaped from? Shaka the left-handed half-blind machete surgeon IS STILL IN THERE!

    • until I realised that there was a correlation between the VCR counter and such out-of-character behaviour –

[With 0:62:25 elapsed and 0:28:42 remaining] Bindy has yet to run Shaka through the bandsaw, detonate the C4 in the basement, and have a topless clinch with Chad the newspaper boy*.

It was likely after a three-hour-long (subjective) ninety-minute film that I had my I could’ve done better’n that moment and, still in that bubble of complete and utter naivete, started plotting my ideal action film:

    • Draft one:

The Hero’s dog is killed. Vengeance is sought. A helpful dog joins our Hero as the Sidekick on his journey. The Baddies are vanquished. The Sidekick is adopted.

    • Hm. Draft three:

The Hero’s family is massacred. Vengeance is sought. A helpful Waif joins our Hero in his quest. The Waif is kidnapped by the Baddies but not killed. The Baddies are pulped. One. By. One. The Hero rescues the Waif and they kiss.

    • Meh. Draft fifteen:

The Hero’s family is threatened – there’s a close call involving the Baby. The Hero and his Plucky Family hit the road but the Baddies are always a step behind. The Hero’s Dog is revealed to be a mole. The Hero is conflicted but is interrupted by an extended Woo-drenched firefight, at the end of which the Hero sacrifices himself for his Plucky Family – but is saved by a last-minute, redemptive and fatal act by his Dog.

I learnt an important lesson during those rewrites**: if I don’t make the reader care it’s just another exciting-but-quickly-forgotten carnival ride (or an excruciatingly interminable cuppa with your parents’ friends).

 

* How do I know all this? Because these scenes are in the trailer I’ve seen a dozen times already and they haven’t happened yet (although in this instance I’m going to be short-changed by Chad and Bindy sharing a chaste kiss before an abrupt end-credit-roll).

** I also learnt that reusing elements from earlier, discarded drafts is Writing Smarter.

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International Film Fest Time

he 39th Auckland International Film Festival programme arrived in the mail a couple of days back. It’s that time of year. (A bittersweet moment: Amit Tripuraneni‘s Five wasn’t selected but there’s Francis Glenday‘s Tumanako Springs to catch.)

A perusal of its 152 glossy pages brings back familiar behaviours, namely:

  • excitedly dog-ear-ing a third of the programme because they’re ones that I must see, until –
  • a reality check of limited funds means some serious whittling – I hope I can still live with myself with a new list of twenty or so, and then –
  • I’m gripped by the realisation that family commitments make the idea of leaving either the Goddess and children, or just the children with a babysitter, for even just ten films (or just over thirty hours in total*) is just asking for trouble, until finally –
  • somewhere between three and six sessions are selected and booked.

C’est la vie.

Friend and festival veteran Stevo once sagely advised: use the fest to see something that’s unlikely to return ’cause the big and/or popular productions are bound get general release – and failing that, they’ll eventually make it onto video.

Excellent advice for those with limited funds and/or time.

 

*     Maths in a Minute: based on an average movie running time of 105 minutes, with an additional 90 minutes return-travel and park-finding time – just ten films is a 32.5-hour commitment over the festival’s sixteen-day run.

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Brad McGann, 1964-2007

Brad McGann died today.

When I went to see In My Father’s Den, I expected another jumped-up self-conscious piece of homegrown cinema. I was disappointed. In My Father’s Den deserved every award and every bit of praise it got. And my disappointment soon gave way to looking forward to his next project.

Alas, no project to look forward to – but what a great piece of work to be proud of and to leave behind.

Journey well, Mr McGann.

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Love is a Hot Clutch

A recent re-watching of Ronin may not have helped what I’m currently writing but it was inspiring nonetheless.

The Goddess gets places quicker than I do. It’s a fact of life that She’s a faster, more aggressive assertive and experienced driver than I. (I have the odd daydream that I can beat Her in an Auckland point-to-point race – except that sweet victory would be tempered with my vehicle being written off by race’s end.)

My driver education was pretty boring compared to The Goddess. I didn’t get my licence until I was in my twenties – I lived in central Wellington which has an integrated, efficient and reliable public transport (unlike, say, Auckland’s). Then my circumstances changed. I had driving lessons. I drove under supervision. And then I got my licence.

The Goddess’s driver education, in contrast, was not so much ‘how to control your vehicle’ but ‘how to wring the best performance and handling out of your car’. This was due to her Mini-Mad Uncle and her Speed-Demon Gran.

At age fifteen, she got behind the wheel of her uncle’s 1969 Mini 850 and was advised to put it in a ‘hard lock left’ and, once in gear, to plant her foot down on the accelerator. I will always envy her very first driving experience of doing what modern-day anti-boy-racer legislators refer to as ‘doughnuts’.

Her grandmother’s orange Austin 1100 was made available for on-road driving experience. The Goddess has never forgotten being confronted with a Big Yellow bus pulling out ahead of her and her gran telling her to “just put your foot down, dear”.

Yep. Hard to beat formative experiences like that.

We may be different in our approach – it’s her canny skills of vehicular control versus my cold application of speed and momentum – but we both enjoy driving.

I’d be lying if I said that The Goddess’s quicker driving doesn’t pinch some small, dark, obdurate corner of my male ego. But at least I know that if I want to get places double-quick and The Goddess is available, not only will there be no question who’ll be behind the wheel, I’ll arrive at my destination on time, fresh and unruffled.

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Point and Click

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