Allen Holt

Serving The Story

Posted by Allen on May 30, 2005 under Pop Culture, TV, Writing | Read the First Comment

Okay, any of you who haven’t seen Serenity yet — and that’s probably most of you, honestly — stay the hell away from this post if you have any intention of seeing the movie. I mean it. Don’t read any further. Well, OK, you can go a little further, but when you come to the SPOILER WARNING, know that I’m serious about that and you should move along to whatever’s next on your daily reading list. I’m going to talk about things you really, really shouldn’t know about in advance of seeing the movie.

Have I made myself clear? Good.

I’ve been thinking about Serenity pretty much round the clock since seeing it last Thursday night, and I’ve been thinking about the fundamental difference in the nature of storytelling between episodic television and movies. As much as I love movies, I’m more drawn to well-done TV shows. There’s a depth of characterization that episodic TV can attain that’s difficult for movies to reach…well, I think breadth of characterization might be more a accurate term.

I’ve always been more interested in watching a character’s growth (or deterioration) over time and movies just aren’t the ideal format for that kind of thing. They can do it, sure, but it’s rarely done all that well. Most movie series that have recurring characters tend to be action flicks, and yeah you can get some growth there, but there’s simply not enough time in a movie to get that into a character’s head. Further complicating my personal preferences: I like ensembles, and movie series (serii? serieses?) that track a group of characters and can give each of them the screen time necessary are rare.

Which brings me back around to Serenity, which springs forth in September from the torched TV series “Firefly.” This combo provides me the perfect opportunity for thinking about the modes of storytelling because, unlike most other TV-show-to-movie transitions (say, The X-Files), this one I actually care about.

Right here is that Big Damn Spoiler Warning, by the way.

Read more of this article »

Monday Photo: Wishflower

Posted by Allen on under Photography | Be the First to Comment

Laurel picking dandelions in Marblehead last weekend. We don’t know for sure what she wished for, but I’d bet it had something to do with food.

Review: Serenity

Posted by Allen on May 29, 2005 under Movies, Pop Culture, Reviews | Be the First to Comment

I found myself experiencing the same problem trying to decide on an approach for this review that I’d imagine the creators of Serenity faced: how to gear the movie/review so that it pleases both the rabid fanbase of the “Firefly” TV series from which the movie spawned and people who’ve never seen the show. It’s a difficult line to walk, for true. Considering the movie doesn’t come out for four months yet, I think what I have to say will be of most interest to fans of the show, so I’ll write on accordingly–though I’ll be spoiler-free, don’t you fret. Believe me, I don’t want to ruin the impact of this movie for anybody.

The good news for “Firefly” fans: the property translates to the big screen quite well. There’s not an awful lot of introductory exposition about the hows and the whys of the “Firefly” ‘verse; Joss Whedon and company seem to figure you know the setup already or you’ll figure it out on the way. The emphasis on “space western” here falls fully on the “space,” which I found a little disappointing (very little) but completely understand: people coming into this universe fresh, people who’ve only seen the trailers, will be expecting more of the spaceships than the six-shooters.

But if that translation of concept from television to movie is good news, then here’s better: the cast more than lives up to the challenges before them…especially Nathan Fillion. Fillion’s Captain Mal Reynolds anchors not only the crew of Serenity but also the emotional center of the film. Mal runs a shade darker here than he did on the show (the final episode of which takes place six months before the movie begins), especially in the film’s second half. Mal’s in nearly every scene and it’s his character arc we follow–and Fillion does a fantatsic job of holding the screen and the audience’s interests with Mal’s intense internal conflict.

It’s not just Fillion, though: almost none of these actors would be considered “movie actors,” yet each is more than capable of playing their roles large. Both the characters and the actors who play them prove plenty substantial enough to drive a film. And though I believe all of the cast did fine jobs, I hav to give special commendation to Summer Glau for her spectacular work as River. For someone who’s still almost a complete newcomer to the industry, she brings some impressive stuff to the movie, both emotionally (River probably has the widest range of emotions to manage) and physically (the balletic grace during River’s scenes of mayhem belie her…well, her ballet training).

Serenity’s villain, too, is pure Whedon: “The Operative” (the only name he’s given) can execute the most brutal, terrible acts of violence and destruction, yet does so in such a way that it’s hard not to like him, at least a little. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays the man with smooth charm, eloquence, intelligence and his own strange sense of honor. He knows that he’s a monster, that his actions can be pure evil–but he sincerely believes that those horrific actions are in service to a greater good.

And speaking of bad guys, I can’t not discuss the Reavers, the very epitome of evil in the Firefly ‘verse. The Reavers play an enormously important role here, both in terms of what they mean to this movie and the future of the franchise–yet we still never get a good look at one. What we do see, though, is scary as hell, all the more terrifying because of what’s left to our imaginations. These Reavers and their final confrontation with our Big Damn Heroes produce what had to be the most nail-biting, stomach-churning thirty minutes I’ve seen in any movie in ages.

And a lot of that tension, of course, comes because I’ve grown to care about these characters so damn much…which brings me around at last to discussing Mr. Whedon himself. The skills of Whedon the writer still outpace those of Whedon the director, though not by as much as I might have thought. His fantastic screenplay had every bit of what I expected: the humor, the character development, the moments of inspiration, the shocking punches to the gut. Whedon had nine characters from the show to carry over and introduce, explain and advance in a two-hour action flick, and he served all of his characters well.

Whedon’s direction was surprisingly solid–and I say “suprisingly” not because I don’t think he’s a good director but because the process of directing a film differs so much from directing a TV show. The fact that he did such a good job for his first feature was impressive. Though there were still moments that felt a little too much like an episode of a TV show, shot selections that betrayed his beginnings, they were few. And the man undoubtedly knows how to build tension (see for reference that anguishing last thirty minutes). I also have to give him a smile and a nod for his opening, a five-minute single shot that introduces the entire crew of Serenity and introduces the entirety of the ship itself–Robert Altman would be proud.

I still have some small concerns about how well the movie will play to the uninitiated. It’s hard for me to tell how well audiences not already familiar with the property will take to it–I can’t watch it through the eyes of someone not already in love with these characters. And I’m a little afraid of the reactions if people go into the theater expecting Lucas-level visual effects from a movie with a $30-million budget. The effects were solid and professional, but they’re certainly not Star Wars-ian.

But Serenity’s not about the special effects, it’s about the characters–and those characters create special effects, indeed.

Review: Star Wars, Episode III – Revenge of the Sith

Posted by Allen on under Movies, Pop Culture, Reviews | Be the First to Comment

So at least we’ve seen the whole story; the ends of the circle finally meet in the middle. We’ve seen how innocence (well, angry and whiny frustrated innocence, anyway) finds itself corrupted by absolute (and a bit melodramatic) evil and becomes the face of the devil for a generation of consumers. We’ve seen enough poor acting, worse directing and execrable dialogue to last me another thirty years.

But all snarkiness aside, did I like Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith? Yeah, actually…yeah I did.

For all of the problems the movie has–and though they’re numerable, I’m not going to go into too much detail here because honestly it’s the same things that were wrong with The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones–the good for me in ROTS solidly outweighed the bad.

To begin with, we have the single best performance found in any of the six Star Wars movies: Ewan McGregor must have betrayed George Lucas’ direction (or lack thereof) much the way Anakin Skywalker betrayed the Jedi. (I’m sorry, that was too geeky even for me.) I find it impossible to believe at this point that Lucas could draw that kind of performance out of an actor. Not only has McGregor’s Sir Alec Guinness impersonation continued to improve, but A} he actually seems to be having fun with the part early on in the movie, and B} flying in the face of everything Lucas’ direction aspires to, he conveys real honest-to-God emotion after Anakin turns to the dark side of the Force. I’m surprised Lucas didn’t just CGI all of the emotion right on out of there in post-production.

Hayden Christensen manages to be far less whiny in his second go-round as Anakin Skywalker, though it doesn’t make him any more likable–he’s still too quick to damn perceived slights against him and blames others for his own shortcomings…a perfect recipe for being manipulated toward embracing the dark side. Anakin also confirms in ROTS what’s been strongly suggested ever since The Empire Strikes Back: face of the devil or no, Darth Vader’s never been any more than a glorified flunky. Vader may be the public face of the Empire, but Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) is its black heart.

Anakin might very well be the most powerful Jedi Knight there is, but he doesn’t have any balls: he can’t even stand up for himself when the Jedi Council thinks he’s a stooge for Palpatine and he can’t do it even when he knows Palpatine is manipulating him. Poor Anakin just never seems all that bright–he’s a do-what-I’m-told instead of a do-what-I-say.

His story boils down to two absolutely pivotal moments. In the first, he makes the decision to turn to the dark side (and make no mistake, it was a conscious decision, whether he was manipulated into making it or not). And in the second, he seals his path and forever robs himself of any chance at redemption–even to the point of revoking whatever redemption he might have found in his son’s eyes at the end of Return of the Jedi. Some deeds simply can never be undone, and the acts performed by the newly-minted Lord Vader are absolutely unforgivable.

And I believe that Obi-Wan Kenobi would agree with me. The revelation of that moment, that horrific act of young Vader’s, kills something inside Obi-Wan and his anguish is palpable during the final lightsaber duel between the two. This battle between two men who had been close as brothers produces the most emotionally-packed moments of any of the series–and it casts the duel between these same two characters in the original Star Wars in an entirely new light. All of the passion missing from Episodes I and II surfaces in this battle that actually lives up to thirty years worth of buildup. Impressive.

I wish I could take this paragraph to talk about Natalie Portman and her final journey as Padme; I wish I could tell you that she eloquently expressed the tragedy of her character in a tear-inducing performace. But I can’t, because she was reduced to a prop in this movie. R2-D2 displayed more personality than she did. But we love Natalie, so we blame that on Lucas.

What I will talk about, though, are the visuals. Can I get an “OMFG,” people? All of the spectacular eye-candy of the first two prequels was as motes of dust compared to the visual feast to the opening starship battle over Coruscant–the single most incredible such sequence yet committed to celluloid. The production design and visual effects were, unsurprisingly, top-flight across the board. If Lucas could have restrained himself to directing the CGI scenes and let someone like Joss Whedon handle anything having to do with real human actors, I think its possible this movie might have gone down as one of the best science fiction movies ever made.

But he didn’t, so Revenge of the Sith will have to content itself with being the third-best of the Star Wars movies (behind Empire and Star Wars, ahead of Jedi, Clones and the loathsome Menace).

Invested

Posted by Allen on May 27, 2005 under Pop Culture, Writing | Be the First to Comment

I don’t want to say too much about it yet, because I have other articles coming later and I don’t want to blow my wad too early, but seeing the sneak preview of Serenity four months early in a theater with 700 other people who worship Joss Whedon as I do and care about those characters as much as I do…that was a pretty amazing experience, I’ve gotta say. The entire audience was emotionally invested in what happened from the outset, and their reactions to both the good and to the very, very bad were heartfelt.

That’s the power of strong writing and honest characterization, and that’s a major reason why those we Whedon fans love him the way we do–it’s the major reason for me, and it’s one of the qualities I most want to achieve with my own writing. More to come on the subject later, both here and in my official review at Moviegeekz (hopefully coming Friday night).

Brain spasms

Posted by Allen on May 26, 2005 under Books, Writing | Be the First to Comment

John Irving’s Until I Find You finally comes out in July, and I swear it feels like it’s been years that I’ve been hearing about this book. CNN has a rambling mini-article about Irving (my favorite novelist, incidentally) and the new novel discussing how his issues with not knowing his father have informed the book. (And really, if you’ve read much of Irving’s other work, those issues shouldn’t really come as much of a shock.)

But the thing that really jumped out at me in the article: Irving’s original manuscript for the book was 345,000 words. THREE-HUNDRED-FORTY-FIVE-THOUSAND FRIGGIN’ WORDS. His final manuscript–which he completely rewrote, by the by–was still 315,000. Even with the elevated quantity of output I’ve had lately, I feel pretty proud of myself when I write something’s that one thousand coherent, cohesive words. The thought of writing one thing that’s more than 300,000 words gives my brain spasms.

Maybe it’s time I start working on some longer pieces…

Not quite what they usually mean by “ghostwriting”

Posted by Allen on under Music | Be the First to Comment

(I’m experimenting a bit here with some quick-hit posts as the impulse strikes. Bear with me as we see if works out.)

Listenting to Hole’s “Violet” from their Live Through This album, the one released the week after Kurt Cobain put a gun in his mouth–Is there any way Cobain didn’t ghostwrite this song? The rage simmers right on the surface just as it did in the best of Nirvana’s work, anger radiating less from the meaty hooks of the guitar riffs (muffled back somewhat in the mix) than from the aggression of Patty Schemel’s drums and Courtney Love’s throaty yell…this song would have fit nicely on In Utero, methinks.

Does it count as prostitution if she doesn’t have to sleep with him?

Posted by Allen on May 25, 2005 under Pop Culture | Read the First Comment

So I’ve found myself wondering: just how long will Katie Holmes be contractually bound to date Tom Cruise?

By now you’ve all heard taht they’re “dating,” a “couple,” “partnered in a mutually beneficial business arrangement.” I’d imagine she’s got the standard Tom Cruise Girlfriend Contract. She gets to have her public profile raised exponentially, hopefully from mid-list celebrity to A-list, and he gets to continue to convince the readers of People and the viewers of “Entertainment Tonight” that’s he’s heterosexual. Everybody wins.

Something’s different with Katie, though–Tom’s publicists altered the routine since the failures of the last two girlfriend hires. It’s become obvious that just announcing to the world that Mr. Short-N-Sexy has found “love” with whichever actress they’ve signed isn’t enough, either for Tom or for the contractee. Penelope Cruz rarely got any public face time with her homonymic mega-beau during their two-year deal; consequently, her star wattage failed to increase and Tom still had to sue some guy for daring to claim he and Tom had had a thing. (And by “thing,” I mean “sex.”)

And Tom, to the best of my knowledge, never one actually appeared out with Sofia Vergara–and that “who?” you just mouthed silently to yourself shows how well that arrangement worked out for her.

But Penelope and Sofia both had short-term contracts, so maybe they didn’t have the time to get themselves exploited to their full potential. Nicole Kidman, of course, had a ten-year deal and that one paid off very well for the both of them. When she signed on after meeting Cruise on the Days of Thunder shoot, she was just starting out in America. Ten years of legally-enforced marriage later and she was one of the biggest stars in the world, thanks in no small part to her time served as Mrs. Tom Cruise. (Makes you wonder just how badly Mimi Rogers fucked up to get herself fired after three years.)

Nicole’s contract was for so long, and right in the middle of her prime child-bearing years, that they had to allow her to adopt her two children during that time. Not like Tom was going to touch her, right? And have you seen even a mention of him hanging with the kids since Nicole’s deal expired? No, you have not.

Back to the handling of Katie Holmes (and man, what I wouldn’t give to handle her myself!) Team Tom knows they have to publicize this new relationship more, so the “happy couple” debuts at a photogenic film festival in Italy–perfect for those photo ops for the American press. Katie’s a big enough name already that this story instantly hits the covers of all of the celebrity mags.

But that’s not enough. Tom then has to go visit his buddy Oprah and not just fawn and gush over Katie but stage an obnoxious, embarrassing, borderline-psychotic proclamation of his adoration for the new woman on his payroll. She’s conveniently backstage, of course, so she gets pulled out to let Desperate Housewife America get a good look at them together. Pretty savvy–that should do the trick, don’t you think?

Now interest in Miss Holmes will skyrocket, both from the Oprah crowd and from the studio executives looking to cash in on her newfound marketability. And Tom…well, surely Tom can’t bat for the other team if he’s dating a woman as gorgeous and wholesome as Katie Holmes, right?

Right?

Review: A Love Song for Bobby Long

Posted by Allen on under Movies, Pop Culture, Reviews | Be the First to Comment

The New Orleans found in A Love Song for Bobby Long doesn’t map to the real New Orleans: it’s a romantic impression of a mythical New Orleans, all hot jazz and cool rain, a city imagined by writers for generations as a safe haven for broken creatives. This New Orleans can’t help, of course, but be narrated with florid turns of phrase by tortured alcoholic once-geniuses trying to prove they haven’t yet totally drowned their talent.

The “talent” in this case comes in the person of Lawson Pines (Gabriel Macht), a former student of one-time English professor Bobby Long (John Travolta) who escaped with Bobby from Alabama to New Orleans nine years before the story here begins. They’ve dedicated their lives to staying as inebriated as possible and assumed squatter’s rights on the house of a friend of theirs, a jazz singer. But when that friend dies, her teenage daughter (Scarlett Johansson) comes for the funeral and ends up moving in with them–they convince her the house is one-third hers when in reality it’s three-thirds hers. They have to try to learn to live together, have things to teach each other, yadda yadda yadda…really, it became difficult to care much about what happened because Travolta’s performance was so obnoxious.

John Travolta has been doing this acting thing professionally and successfully for more than thirty years now. He’s got a couple of Academy Award nominations under his belt. Don’t you think that by now he might have learned a little bit of the art of subtlety? Admittedly, Bobby Long is just the kind of hambone part many actors, especially ones with penchants for chewing scenery, love to latch onto: Bobby’s a man whose many weaknesses overtake and overwhelm the rest of his character. Travolta, unsurprisingly, grabs Bobby and holds on a little too hard. Every scene feels like he’s hoping that’s the one they’ll show during his Oscar nomination vignette. Even his physical performance goes too far. He plays Bobby less like a worn-down fifty-year-old alcoholic than an arthritic eighty-year-old who never got that hip replacement he so desperately needed. Travolta created Bobby Long by dusting off his Bill Clinton impersonation from Primary Colors and removing all of the charm.

If Travolta needs some acting lessons to refresh his craft, he could do far worse than to call up his co-star Scarlett Johansson, who’s been alive less time than Travolta’s been famous yet still bests his acting in this movie at every turn. Everywhere that he’s off-key, she’s perfecly in tune; for every exaggerated facial contortion of his, she responds with a delicate expression–even her faux Southern accent trumps his. (Travolta makes the common non-Southerner’s mistake of overselling the eccentricities of the accent, but Johansson knows that a lighter touch comes off more believably.) Johannson’s performance as the ridiculously-named Purslane Hominy Will is rarely less than superb. Unfortunately, it’s also subtle and so gets squashed by the leviathan that is John Travolta’s overacting.

(”Hominy?” Really? Girl, your mother named you after grits? Exactly the kind of thing only someone not from the South would think a Southerner would do.)

Much of what bugged me about A Love Song for Bobby Long was exactly that feeling, that it was a movie about Southerners made by people with no knowledge of the South. It felt like a South imagined by someone who’s only familiar with the region from listenting to old blues music and watching reruns of “In the Heat of the Night.” I don’t know how much of that problem can be blamed on writer/director Shainee Gabel (from Philly) and how much on Ronald Evertt Capps, who wrote the novel Off Magazine Street on which this movie was somewhat loosely based, but almost nothing about how the South was presented felt true to me (and I’m a Southerner, current New England residence aside). I can’t say for certain that no one in New Orleans lives the way Bobby Long and Lawson Pines and their friends do, but I just didn’t buy it for a second.