Category: Cinematically Speaking…

Teddy Bear’s Picnic (2002): "Too little investment in character and story,even for a comedy, makes for too little a movie."

Notes: Based on the Bohemian Grove the story of which is twice as compelling as this fictional version.

Juno (2007): "I have a thing for movies that you can watch with the picture turned off because the dialog is so good."

Seen: With my woman on the first official day of our joint vacations.

Intolerance (1916): "A giant, audacious epic is meant to be seen on a giant screen, with an organ playing and your friend ohhhhhing along with you."

Seen: As a program of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

See Talk to Me. You must. A biography of Petey Greene (video, a genius disection of racial stereotypes), an ex-con, turned radio DJ in Washington DC in the 1960s and 1970s. Don Cheadle, well Don Cheadle goes Don Cheadle all over this part. His partner at the radio station, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, make this maybe the best male partnership in movies since Butch and Sundance.

Ejiofor you may recognize from Children of Men or Dirty, Pretty Things or Kinky Boots. But probably not. He’s probably the most underrated actor this side of Oliver Platt.

I loved this movie. Funny, smart, sad, with an incredible soundtrack. Wanted to watch it again the minute it was done.

See it see it see it.

Rob Long continues to be the smartest voice I’ve heard about the Hollywood writer’s strike. His latest commentary on KCRW’s Martini Shot takes a look at relationships between the various entertainment union and concludes that, at some stage of production, one union is benefiting at the expense of another.

Please read this.  It’s genius.

I remember a few years ago, during the last contract negotiation, one
of the big umbrella issues was something called "respect." The Writers
Guild –- correctly, in my view –- wanted to do away with something
called the Possessory Credit –- you know, the thing directors get -– "A
film by…" as if they wrote it, too. "A film by Rob Reiner," for
instance, when Rob Reiner didn’t write the script. We wanted to get rid
of that. "A film by" should only apply to a person who both wrote and
directed a movie. And we wanted some other "respect" stuff, too: we
wanted to be included in press junkets and allowed set visits and get
to walk on the red carpet.

The possessory credit, though, was really up to the Directors Guild.
And the Directors Guild said, essentially, forget it. You want to talk
about how little respect the writers get in the feature world? Fine.
But then let’s talk about how little respect directors get in the
television world, where it’s routine to talk of them as "traffic cops,"
and to deny them their first cut, among other things.

It’s hard to get something done in this business. By the time the film
is loaded -– or, in many cases, the hard drive is booted (a lot of
talented camera guys are out of work in this digital age; did we march
for them?) -– everyone is so exhausted and worn out from just getting
something going that they barely have energy to make the thing itself.
So when we are actually doing something, actually filming something,
actually doing the thing we all came here to do, rather than having
meetings and pitch sessions and budget calls and story arguments about
it, we tend to cut corners. Human corners.

So we should be careful –- all of us, writers who now claim membership
in a labor movement; studio heads who have the temerity to call someone
else greedy; all of us -– with the name calling and the posturing.
Because this strike is going to be over, someday. And when it is, will
everything go back to business as usual?

Hope not.

I hope I can meet Mr. Long someday. He’s my new hero.

What Would Jesus Buy? (2007): "What we buy and how we shop should require as much careful thought as what values we chose to teach our children."

Notes: Documentary about Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. Hilariously funny, smart and thoughtful. A great great film (seen with my awesome movie buddy Carla).

The Nanny Diaries (2007): "A charming romantic copy starring Scarlet Johansson and the Citicorp red umbrella logo."

The single best assessment I’ve seen of the current writer’s strike is Rob Long’s weekly commentary on KCRW, Martini Shot. He had this to say a few weeks ago.

The truth is, the web — that thing that brings us email and MySpace and cats playing the piano on YouTube
— has a kind of WalMart effect on the entertainment choices offered to
the audience: there’s a lot more to choose from, most of it’s pretty
awful, and all of it is going to be a lot cheaper. When you combine the
digitization of content with unlimited bandwidth, what you get is a
cheaper, more efficient system. And Brentwood was not built on cheap,
or efficient. This town — and all of us who work here — all of us,
writers, agents, actors, lawyers, studio executives, all of us here in
the second grade classroom called Hollywood — have a stake in
preserving this great big slushy inefficient mess of a system, that
makes pilots that never get aired, buys scripts that never get
produced, makes movies that no one sees, produces series that get
cancelled.

I feel like we’re all hanging out in the hardware store on Main
Street, bickering, while they’re building the SuperWalMart out where
the interstate meets the state highway. To the writers — to my
colleague — I say, the web is going to force us to radically alter our
expectations about residuals. We will probably end up getting less.
That’s what market efficiencies do. Let’s figure out how to adjust to
that.

To the studios, I say make a deal. Swallow it, and make a deal.
You may think you can kill the WGA, and you probably can, but it’ll be
the first part of a murder-suicide pact, and if you don’t believe me,
call up somebody in the record business. If you can find one. The web’s
been visiting with them, too. Those kids on YouTube and Facebook aren’t
going to make you rich; your box office is dwindling; your ratings are
dropping; Guitar Hero is not fattening Sumner Redstone’s wallet.

We’re all in the second grade together.  Let’s stop throwing up on each other.

That’s pretty damn smart.

Bee Movie (2007): "It was lovely to realize that Jerry Seinfeld is funnier as a cartoon insect than he ever was as a sitcom star."