Movie Review: Shame

We went and saw Shame at our local art house theater early this evening to kick off New Year’s Eve. Glad we did- we practically had the place to ourselves.

One Line Synopsis

A sex addict cannot have intimate, personal relationships with women.

Director

Steve McQueen

Standout Actors

Michael Fassbender, Lucy Walters

Best Bit Part

Robert Montano as the annoying waiter.

Michael Fassbender is a controlled and courageous actor. The guy’s just spectacular in this movie. I can’t think of anyone else who could make this character more true to life. The only negatives are the movie dragged a little, and if I had to sit through one more verse and chorus of his sister singing New York New York I would have probably left the theatre.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Grade:  A-

Movies I’m Looking Forward To in 2012

Django Unchained

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Starring: Christopher Waltz, Samuel L. Jackson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jamie Foxx

Plot: Django, a freed slave turned bounty hunter searches for his wife, still a slave on a plantation.

Why I want to see it: QT and a great cast. Too bad we have to wait until Christmas Day, 2012 to see it.

Trailer: not yet available.

 

Prometheus

Director: Ridley Scott

Starring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron

Plot: A group of explorers search for the origin of man.

Why I want to see it: As far as I’m concerned, nobody does space-base science fiction better than Ridley Scott. I also like the A-list cast.

 Trailer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1446714/

 

The Grey

Director: Joe Carnahan

Starring: Liam Neeson

Plot: A plane crashes and the survivors are hunted by wolves.

Why I want to see it: 1) It looks like a good B grade action movie. 2) I’m a big Liam Neeson fan and I’ll usually watch whatever he’s in.

Trailer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1601913/

 

Contraband

Director: Baltasar Kormaur

Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Kate Beckinsale

Plot: A man who turned his back on a life of crime faces it again to save his family.

Why I want to see it: I like Mark Wahlberg and Kate Beckinsale, and it simply looks like a good and gritty crime drama.

 Trailer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1524137/

 

Red Dawn

Director: Dan Bradley

Starring: Chris Hemsworth

Plot: North Koreans (originally the Red Chinese) parachute in and take over.

Why I want to see it: For no other reason than it was shot in Detroit and we walked around the sets a lot for a couple of weeks.

 Trailer: couldn’t find one.

Supreme Haircut

You would think the new Supreme Leader dude running North Korea could at least get a decent haircut:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2011/12/kim-jong-un-great-leader-new-north-korean-vitriol-toward-south-korea.html

and

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/world/asia/north-korea-declares-kim-jong-un-as-supreme-leader.html

 

Good News for eBook Authors

Amazon announced that for each week in December, one million Kindles were sold, with the Kindle Fire on top. Gift purchases of Kindle books were up 175 percent during the holiday period. It’s estimated that 14 million Kindles will be sold by the end of the year.

Check it out here: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/kindle-amazon-sales-holiday-season-276707

More on Cheetah-Gate

Not to beat a dead horse (or monkey), but the Cheetah death controversy is heating up. Check this out:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cheetah-death-fake-tarzan-chimpanzee-276704

And this:

http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/12/29/doubts-surround-the-death-of-cheetah-1930s-tarzan-chimp/

The Suspicious Death of “Cheetah”

I read yesterday that Cheetah, Tarzan’s simian sidekick died at the age of eighty. An eighty year old chimp? Highly suspect. Here’s a quote from The New York Times attributed to Dr. Steve Ross from the Lester E. Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes in Chicago:

“To live into your seventies is really pushing the limits of chimp biology. Eighty is tough to swallow.”

That makes Cheetah just seven years younger than my mother.

A whole barrel of monkeys played Cheetah over the years, at least a dozen. The first Tarzan movie was the 1918 production starring Elmo Lincoln. I’m not sure if Cheetah was in that version and I’ll have to check it out. Tarzan hit the big time beginning in 1932 when Johnny Weissmuller swayed on the vines and wrestled with crocodiles (with Cheetah running along the shore, acting up). Are there any definitive records proving that this particular incarnation of Cheetah signed a contract to act in the 1932 production? Is his agent still alive to verify this?

Maybe it’s all a big conspiracy and better left alone. Beyond all that, the Tarzan movies were cool, especially the later ones where Tarzan had a beer gut and Tarzan and Jane’s treehouse looked like a studio apartment. In any event, RIP Cheetah, no matter which one you were.

To learn more, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarzan#Film

and here:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cheetah-death-fake-tarzan-chimpanzee-276510

Movie Review: Midnight in Paris

Despite the off-putting trailer and my better judgement, we decided to watch Midnight in Paris last night. I’m glad we did.

One Line Synopsis

Gil, a frustrated Hollywood screenwriter, engaged to the materialistic shrew Inez, wanders the streets of Paris and after midnight travels back in time to encounter artists and literary figures from the 1920’s Paris Cafe Society.

Standout Actors

Michael Sheen as Paul, Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein, Corey Stoll as Ernest Hemingway.

Best Bit Part

Adrian Brody as Salvador Dali.

Why is the trailer so lame and deceptive? There’s no indication that Gil goes back in time to meet these well acted personas- Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Pablo Picasso, Degas, Gauguin, et. al. The trailer implies the movie is a self-indulgent Woody Allen romantic comedy. But it isn’t! The sets are great, the dialog isn’t as stilted as in most recent Allen movies, and the characters are lively and original. This movie is well worth watching.

Grade

A-

Characters and Meyer-Briggs Assessments

I live in Detroit, and whenever I start a new book I feel like I’m walking from here to California in the snow. The finished book is thousands of miles away, and if I think about it too hard I get discouraged. I also know that the new book will be harder to write than the last one, but that’s okay. All that means is that I’m learning more about writing and applying what I’ve learned to future work.

Here’s something I learned to do before writing Reckoning in Escobara. I apply a Meyer-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI to each of my characters. The MBTI measures sixteen personality types based on eight preferences. The preferences are:

E – Extroversion

I – Introversion

S – Sensing

N – iNtuition

T – Thinking

F – Feeling

J – Judging

P – Perceiving

These preferences are grouped into sixteen categories. I’ll provide the link to the Meyer-Briggs Foundation for useful and detailed information. Here are some of the categories:

ISTJ – Introverted, Sensing, Thinking Judging

INTP – Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Perceiving

ESTP – Extroverted, Sensing, Thinking, Perceiving

ENTJ – Extroverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Judging

You get the idea. There are dozens of websites that go into detail for each of these classifications, and you can take an assessment test yourself to see where you land. I did, and I fall in the INTJ category.

When I first develop characters I make a template using these classifications along with other character background data. When I write the book I make sure that each of the characters follow their MBTI type for the most part. If they react to a particular situation, I make sure they react with the proper behavior. If a character is a laid back, ESFJ type I’ll make sure their reaction falls into that classification’s predictive behavior. Same goes for an uptight INTP type. This lends consistency and credibility to the characters and guides me, as the writer, with a personality roadmap. I working on this right now for Thomas Edison: RESURRECTOR, developing MBTI profiles for Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and the fictional characters.

Here’s the link to the Meyer-Briggs Foundation: www.myersbriggs.org/

I read something in one of William C. Martell’s screenwriting bluebooks that really stuck with me. He said you should be able to cover the names in a screenplay and still know exactly who is talking. I believe that applying MBTI analysis to characters and using the classifications with consistency helps to achieve just that.

The System and Objectivism

I work in downtown Detroit and have so for years. Detroit’s small downtown core, running from the Renaissance Center along Jefferson, down Woodward and up to Campus Martius resembles a small town. People are in the streets, parks and stores and you get to know them by name. Go into a restaurant and the girl behind the counter already knows what you’re going to order and calls our your name when it’s ready.

Bands and street musicians play, even in winter. The same beggars beg (give them a dollar and they hound you forever), street vendors sell hotdogs, people stroll along the boulevards and kids ride the carousel at the edge of the RiverWalk. Some people haul in catfish and walleye two at a time and watch thousand foot freighters lumber down the Detroit River. Others sun themselves on the grass near Hart Plaza and eat lunch with their shoes off at Campus Martius.

Inside the Renaissance Center, the largest building complex at the base of the city, an old, well dressed gentleman sits outside a coffee shop every afternoon listening to John, Miles and Ornette stream from his small transistor radio. He’s a fixture and everyone knows him. There isn’t a person that goes by he doesn’t politely greet. This is civilized life at its best.

Walk a few blocks in any direction and it all changes. Walk a few blocks in any direction and you’re in the midst of eighty thousand abandoned houses. Eighty thousand. Walk a few blocks in any direction and you’re surrounded by unthinkable violence, lawlessness and brutality, where human beings are no more than street dogs to be put down if they get in your way. I could cite hundreds of horrific examples, even as recent as this morning, but there isn’t enough room here to post them.

News stories showing the dark side of Detroit are everywhere, as with the positive stories. Blurbs that pledge “we can rebuild Detroit together”.

Sorry, there is no “together”.

After close of business on any give day the Detroit work force heads for city limits. Fast. So have the residents. Detroit’s population, once two million strong, is now roughly 714,000 people and declining. What’s left is a no-man’s land of abandoned neighborhoods where the principles of urban Darwinism prevail and human life has profoundly little value. It’s a wasteland where bodies are dumped in empty fields, wash up on the shores of the Detroit River and even rolled out of vans on major freeways.

I used to ride a bus downtown everyday and listened to the driver talk. He once said, “You can get anything in Detroit, you just gotta know where to look.” Simple supply and demand, and Detroit supplies one thing in excess- profound hopelessness, along with a “what’s in it for me?” attitude. “What’s in it for me?” Isn’t that the theme of Objectivism?

The System – A Detroit Story – is a violent, shocking book, but it’s written to be hopeful and inadvertently anti-objectivist. Here’s a quote from Ayn Rand circa 1962:

Man – every man – is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.

The hero of The System chose otherwise. Why? And why in Detroit? Through the tidal wave of corruption, lawlessness and incompetence, fierce racism (white and black), blind self-interest, con men (and women) politicians, murders and addiction, some people choose to sacrifice themselves for others. They let go of their dreams of escaping to a better, easier life and act in someone else’s self-interest. That’s what makes us human. That’s what gives us hope and provides us with the strength to wake up in the morning and face another day. Is Detroit hopeless? Probably. But what isn’t hopeless is human nobility rising in the midst of a cold, dark place.

That’s why I wrote The System.

Movie Review: The Debt

One Line Synopsis

Three Mossad agents hunt down a Nazi war criminal, he escapes, they claim they killed him, he resurfaces 30 years later and one of them tracks him down in a nursing home to finish him off.

Director: John Madden

Screenplay: Matthew Vaughn, Jane Goldman, Peter Straughan

Standout Actors: Jessica Chastain, Helen Mirren

Best Bit Part: The Nazi doctor’s wife, Brigiette Kren

Good suspense. The gynecological exams are creepy, and so were the green East German vans that were so pervasive throughout the film. The vans drove home the sparse and bleak existence of everyday life under a harsh communist regime. The soundtrack by Thomas Newman is great- how can it not be? We watched the original, Ha Hov a couple of nights later. Much less slick, had a much better beginning and ending but contained a certain schmaltz factor that was absent in the remake.

Grade: B+