So, I want to talk about this profile of Worldwide Motion Picture Group, and their scientific process (“scientific” process) of evaluating the statistical likelihood of success for a screenplay. Here is an AVClub article about them, and about their founder, Vincent Bruzzesse.
This is actually very exciting for me! I like the idea of behavioral psychology, and you know, simple machines that are designed to churn out plots and stories have been around in Hollywood for half a century at least.
Yesterday, I saw “Future Fest”, which is a Luna Theater production of short “science fiction plays”, themed around time travel (I guess, kind of?), which whole thing is part of the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts. I haven’t been doing a lot of reviews of theater lately, for a lot of reasons, but I saw these plays and because they are plays performed in a theater, and because Luna Theater is selling tickets to them, and because it is a part of a cultural even that I, as a Philadelphian, am ostensibly meant to be interested in (“The Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts”, which, I don’t know if that’s a festival of international arts? Or is the festival itself international? Whatever. The point is, it’s not a couple skits some cats were doing in their backyard just for the heck of it), I have decided to write about this.
We need to talk about these plays, guys.
A while ago, somebody sent me a link to this article on Cracked that was something like “Five Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person.” I didn’t really care for it, and I’m not really sure how anybody looks at Alec Baldwin’s speech in the beginning of Glengarry, Glen Ross in its context and comes away thinking that the only reason you’d think his character was horrible was if you were a narcissist. He is literally arguing that you don’t matter unless you sell the most houses! That is an awful thing to believe, and also drives people to cheat Jonathon Pryce out of his life savings!
Anyway, those are actually five harsh truths that will make you an asshole. I have been meaning to write a response to it for a while, and I guess this is it. Five harsh truths that will ACTUALLY make you a better person, as opposed to a shitty, self-absorbed punk.
I was going to write a big screed about this Veronica Mars kickstarter project, and about how ultimately destructive it is for people to base their cultural identity on products provided from an utterly amoral (all corporations are by their nature fundamentally amoral) industry that actually literally is not capable of caring less about them (the market dynamic of “paying for product” means that a corporation is going to care exactly as much about you as your money is representative of a share of their income, that is what “free market” is – if you can spend ten dollars on a movie, then Warner Brothers cares ten dollars about you; if their global revenue for a movie is three hundred million dollars, then they care one thirty-millionth about you). Then I decided NOT to write about it, because I actually don’t even care about 1) Veronica Mars or 2) people who like Veronica Mars. Nothing against you/those guys, it’s just that “the creation of Veronica Mars projects” is not a field of human endeavour that I happen to be interested in.
Making art is a field that I’m interested in, though, so maybe I should talk about this.
This is a very long essay, and it probably constitutes the end of my interest in NBC’s SMASH. I know that most of you will be happy to hear that.
The second season of Smash begins with Karen Cartwright (Katherine McPhee), dressed as Marilyn Monroe, onstage and singing a song called “Cut, Print… Moving On.” Like all the songs on Smash, it is utterly devoid of context; like all the songs on Smash, it seems impossible that there’s any way to combine it with any of the other songs to form something even resembling a comprehensible musical. All pretense that the in-story show, Bombshell, is really a play that people might actually want to watch is abandoned. The song could have easily been called “Here Is the Beginning of the Second Season, We Have a New Creative Team, We Noticed It Too; Aren’t We All Very Clever?”
James Bond is a character who can teach us many lessons about how to survive this cold, cruel, confusing world, and so I like to try and extract what lessons are available for my edification. The following are a few notes that I picked up from Skyfall:
1. Bitches can’t shoot straight.
2. Get those black ladies out of the field and behind a desk, pronto.
3. If MI-6 is fucking up, it’s probably because you just need to put a dude in charge.
4. Preferably one who cut his teeth shooting Irishmen.
5. If you go to a casino in Macau, and there is a giant komodo dragon slithering around in a pit, then someone is going to get eaten by that komodo dragon. (This rule is called “Chekhov’s Komodo Dragon”.)
6. If you see a naked lady in a shower, the best practice is to take off all your clothes and just get right in the shower with her, even if you have only talked to her for two minutes an hour ago and she doesn’t know you’re there and her boat is full of armed guards. (This only works if you are James Bond, I guess.)
7. James Bond is hell of ready to let suckers die before he kicks everyone’s ass. This is called “professional courtesy,” you should learn it.
8. Dame Judi Dench made grenades out of shotgun shells, glass, and nails, which she used to murder some mercenaries. That means that Dame Judi Dench is ten thousand percent more rad than you or your mom.
9. Albert Finney is impossible not to like.
10. Times are tough for white people these days, what with all the computers and minorities, but as long as we’ve got our invincible murder-machine ready to cap suckers and maybe take a couple names if he remembers to (he probably won’t remember), we will be all right.
Now I will write about this article by Andrew O’Hehir over at Salon, which is a discussion of several movies (Zero Dark Thirty, Lincoln, and The Gatekeepers), because it is actually pretty appalling. Let’s just set aside the headline (“Is Feminism Worth Defending with Torture”) as being race-baiting hokum (it carries the attendent implication that 1) the War on Terror is being prosecuted in order to improve the lives of women, and 2) all “enemy combatants” in that war must be misogynist because they are Muslim), and talk just about the torture bit that he brings up. Here, I will quote the relevant material.
Does a society that produces female CIA agents (and reelects a black president) gain the right to commit atrocities in its own defense? Is torture justified if the torturer is a university-educated woman, and the tortured a bigoted Muslim fundamentalist?
I think those are excellent questions for us to ask ourselves, arguably defining questions of the age, and I think the longer you look at them the thornier they get. I certainly incline toward the predictable left-libertarian response that torture and other illegal and unconstitutional actions (like, say, the government assassination of United States citizens on secret evidence) are immoral and unjustifiable in almost every instance. But you’ll notice that I’ve left myself a little wiggle room, and if we’re honest we recognize that morality is always relative, and only available in shades of gray.
So.
My goodness, I am ready to be done with all this. Here’s the thing: James Gunn, tapped to direct Marvel/Disney’s (Marsney’s) upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy movie did this poll about the superheroes that folks would most like to engage in the intercourse with, and then he followed up all these votes with some pretty awful misogynistic and homophobic junk.
This was a year or so ago, I think, and someone just noticed it recently, so people started talking about it, and James Gunn immediately took it down but look! It’s here on Google cache. The internet — like an elephant, or a quiet iorich — never forgets.
So, the Republican Theater Festival occurred, and all in all, it was really not that big a deal. No fights broke out; I was not required to do karate on disruptively rowdy patrons; I was not asked to use the power of my atomic intellect to rhetorically break a man down into his component parts. So, some disappointments, obviously. But for what had ostensibly seemed like it was going to be a pretty controversial event — one that filled up listservs and email inboxes with hatemail and poorly-worded screeds — it turned out to be a surprisingly non-controversial night on the town.
I am now going to write some things about the plays, and you may consider that, unless I say otherwise, I’m generally just not including the play that I worked on (“Running Amok,” by Quinn D. Eli) in my analysis, for no reason other than I don’t expect you to find my analysis of it objective. Good or bad or what, it’s pretty much off the table. So.
