Movies That Matter

 

I’m dreaming up stories of spaceships and monsters, but these guys are doing work that matters.

Gregg Helvey directed the Academy-Award nominated short film Kavi, the story of a hopeful young boy living in modern day slavery in India. This was Gregg’s senior thesis for film school, and though he was an L.A. newcomer, he got several big names to wear blue slavery-awareness ribbons at the Oscar ceremonies. You can hear his story and learn about ways to help the cause on the Battleship Pretension podcast, episode #166.

Listen to it here, or find it in iTunes.

You can buy the short film Kavi for only $1.99 in iTunes, too. Two bucks gets you a really good film and helps support a worthy artist.

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Here in St. Louis, Dan Parris, Rob Lehr, and David Peterka are hammering through the editing phase of their documentary Give a Damn, which chronicles their journey through Africa living on $1.25 a day. They need money to finish, and they’ve entered the Pepsi Refresh Project in hopes of winning the $50,000 grand prize.

Go here, now, and vote for them. Then watch the trailer, and come back and vote again every day. When I first started, they were in 74th place. They’re in the high 50s now. Help get them higher.

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Luke 6:30

“Give to everyone who begs from you…” (ESV)

 

Most Inspirational Movie Speeches Video

Because I caught the end of Independence Day this weekend, and because everyone can always use some motivation, here’s one of the awesomest movie-clip videos ever.

I caught this one day a couple years back when I was in a bad mood, and then I forgot what I was upset about.

 

The Hipsters of South Jude??

When I got my first consultation on Wanderlings, the question I had the hardest time answering was what kind of audience it was directed at. I fumbled around and came up with something about hipsters. Which, considering the state the script was in at the time, with angry youths and a reality-bending phenomenon that many compared to Donnie Darko, kinda worked.

Afterwards, I realized I don’t really like hipsters, yet was slowly becoming one. I re-evaluated myself and my script, and made a lot of changes.

But so help me if I don’t love the heck out of Arcade Fire. Their song “Rebellion (Lies)” is pretty much the theme for Wanderlings. A friend of mine who’s shooting a music video linked me up with “Take Away Shows” as an example of the style he’s going for, and this one is really sublime.

 

MacGuffins, McGuffins, M’Guffins–whatever…

(Spoilers, though light, are ahead if you haven’t seen a handful of the following famous films—Pulp Fiction, Citizen Kane, etc. But why haven’t you?)

I visited a theater in KC with my twin sister that lets you order and eat dinner during the movie. The “Fork and Screen,” they called it. Weird experience, actually being allowed to talk—albeit lightly—to order another drink from your waiter.

The bar inside the theater was called MacGuffins, and along the hall between it and the box office were dioramas of famous movie scenes: The Staff of Ra pointing to the burial spot of the Ark of the Covenant, from Raiders of the Lost Ark. The glowing briefcase sitting on a diner table from Pulp Fiction. The One Ring floating in lava from The Lord of The Rings. They were very well done and cool to look at.

Now, most of you are probably ahead of me on this one, but it wasn’t till after the movie as we walked back down the hall that I had a “Eureka!” moment like Hercule Poirot in the last chapter of an Agatha Christie novel.

 

More LOST Thoughts–But Not From Me

You’ve got to check this Alex kid out. He has a hilarious and scathing chapter-by-chapter series of commentaries on Twilight (with apologies to my sisters), and now he helps us understand LOST.

One thing that’s been said many times about LOST is that it’s a story about storytelling. The creators broke their story into bunches of tiny shards and rearranged them in all different directions. Because of this, some bits showed up in certain parts of the story looking very important, whereas if we’d known the whole story all along, we’d have known they were just background. Or red herrings. Or sometimes, answers to questions we’d have later.

If you were to watch this video before watching the entire series, I really don’t think it would spoil anything for you. You’d just have a better idea of what the puzzle was supposed to look like before putting it together.  I’m still not in love with the vague “Light-of-the-Island” concept, but having Alex tell it the way he does restores some of the mythic grandeur.

Enjoy.

 

“The End” of LOST Ambivalence

Two sides. One is emotional. One is logical.

If you held LOST’s characters close to your heart—like I did—then Sunday’s finale felt perfect.

If you hoped for resolutions to at least a handful of the mysteries that might illuminate the story—like I did—then you felt disappointed.

It’s not an understatement to say that I feel of two minds about it, much like last year’s BSG finale. It’s hard to end a story well, and if I had a pile of character threads in one hand, and a pile of plot mysteries on the other, I think I’d choose to resolve the character threads, too. I think Darlton made the right choice, then, but I also think they could have been a little more careful to not let themselves get to a point where they had to make such a choice.

Again and again, they told us that this was first and foremost a story about characters, and that we shouldn’t obsess so much about getting answers to every mystery. But they also said many times that this was a mystery show, and if they weren’t supplying new mysteries, they weren’t doing their jobs.

So even Damon and Carlton seem of two minds about it.

I know that in the few minutes after the final image, I quickly switched off the TV, cleaned up, and went to bed, because I didn’t want to over-analyze the sweet sense of closure I felt. I had been prepared for many questions not to be answered, partly because telling a story on the fly over six years is going to leave some loose threads, but also because I’d seen “Across the Sea” a couple weeks before, and I think that clued me in to just what Darlton felt was and was not important enough to resolve.

So when Jack closed his eyes for the last time, it felt right, even if I didn’t agree with the way they handled all their story mechanics. And that’s good enough for now. Time to move on.

Check out these blogs for some really good reviews with thoughts I wish I’d have written first:

Maureen “Mo” Ryan, The Watcher, at the Chicago Tribune Online

Ryan McGee at Zap2It’s LOST Blog

Alan Sepinwall at HitFlix.com

Noel Murray at the AV Club

Image — photo from my cell phone, my hand holding a couple of rocks I swiped from some restaurant’s landscaping…

 

Wednesday Randomness: Jesus Jokes

I get it. I have a beard. I have long curly hair. I’m vaguely ethnic-looking, in that I have dark eyes and a slightly olive complexion (and now this sounds like a personals ad).

But how do you know I look like Jesus?

The gospels record that he had a beard, so there’s that. And since he was Jewish, he probably had dark eyes, etc. We don’t know that he had long hair; that was a condition of a Nazarite vow, and he never took that. John the Baptist did, so he probably looked more like the pictures of Jesus we imagine than Jesus did.

There’s gotta be an art historian out there who can tell me when we started representing Jesus as a long-haired, pink-faced, blue-eyed European. Granted, I had a good friend as a kid who was Jewish while sporting blonde hair and blue eyes, but that’s the exception that proves the rule.

But anyway, we watched this video remix of S.M. Lockridge’s famous sermon in my community group last night. It incorporates footage from The Passion of the Christ, which isn’t my favorite movie, but the music and old-school preacher fire more than overcome that.

Right after the video ended, though, someone had to make the smart-alek comment that “Jesus looks like David.”

So I guess I’m looking forward to the big hair-cutting in a couple of weeks in more ways than one. Aside from the fact that Jim Caviezel has blue eyes (thanks for reinforcing another stereotype, Mel), I’d rather people say I’m like Jesus in reference to my character, rather than my appearance.

 

Wednesday Randomness: The Tall is the Small?

Just so we’re clear…

Once upon a time, there were two coffee drink sizes. They were called Short and Tall. And they were 8 oz., and they were 12 oz. And it was good.

Then the people wanted more. And so was made the Grande. And it was the large, at 16 oz. And it was good.

Then The Powers That Be realized they could sell a larger size to their addicts. And thus the Venti was born. Venti means 20 in Latin, although the Venti cold drink cup is, in actuality, 24 oz. And it was good, but no one could pronounce it correctly (it’s not VAHN-tee or VEN-tay; just VEN-tee, like it looks).

Eventually, everyone forgot about the Short, except for the snobs who like to get Short Lattes because they have less milk and more flavor. Thus, we were basically left with Tall, Grande, and Venti. (And, it’s GRAN-day, not GRAN-dee.)

And that’s how the Tall became the Small. Stop asking me. Stop snickering when you order it for the first time or get confused. It didn’t make this up. I just work here.

(And, Lord help us, they’ve introduced the Trenta size in some pilot stores in Arizona. Yes, it means 30. And the cups are actually 31 oz.)

Image – Three mushrooms © Ruslan Kudrin, Fotolia.com

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In case you were checking—no, there was no Iron Man 2 post. I did, however, get a cracking lot of work done on my Wanderlings rewrite. With the Pitch Fest coming soon, my screenwriting has to take priority over blogging.

There should be plenty of Randomness (there’s always room for Randomness), as well as News updates, but the posts I like to take my time to craft, like the Monday Movies and Introvert series, might be irregular until I find my rhythm.

Bear with.

 

Wednesday Randomness: Writer-ly Quotes

Creative Screenwriting‘s email newsletter always has amazing quotes at the top:

“The drudgery of being a professional writer comes in trying to make good days out of bad days and in squeezing out the words when they won’t just flow.”  - Benjamin Cavell

“No one is asking, let alone demanding, that you write. The world is not waiting with bated breath for your article or book. Whether or not you get a single word on paper, the sun will rise, the earth will spin, the universe will expand. Writing is forever and always a choice — your choice.” - Beth Mende Conny

“Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.”  - John Updike

“Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”  - Neil Gaiman

“Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more effective your writing. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.” - PD James

“Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man’s life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.”  - Leo Tolstoy

“A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.”  - Edith Wharton

“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.” - Ernest Hemingway

“Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.” - Winston Churchill

And this one I found myself. I just got a new library card yesterday, and my first check-out was Curtain, the last Hercule Poirot novel.

“The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.”  - Agatha Christie

Wise lady. I do much of my thinking while cleaning up.

 

Wednesday Randomness: Top 10 Reasons I Should Win a Ticket to the Jay & Jack LOST Finale Party

I love LOST. I love it beyond reason. David Bax, in his Previously On podcast, describes again and again how it’s the one thing he doesn’t care to critique analytically, because he loves it unconditionally.

And I’m kind of the same way. Even during the times when we get weak episodes, I don’t care. The transcendent moments this show has pulled off over the years put to shame most anything else anyone else is even bothering to try on television.