One blog. Two opinions. One zillion films.

Tam, the International Film Academy kindly invited me to sit in on one of their sessions. In a typical town moment, I was assigned to photograph the very building where they meet. The White Buffalo Club’s meeting room is sleek and somber, a movie set of a room I’d like to use if we write a scene into Killpecker! of high level intrigue and cunning.

I took a few shots, stood there listening to Prof. Gail Segal, and in 10 minutes learned so much I fell into a deep funk because I could have used some of that knowledge thus far in building Killpecker.

So I’m going to try to fly-on-wall Wednesday (yeah, sure: I’ll work overtime failing to keep my yap shut). Gail will be cuing up portions of 70s classics, working toward an examination of Michael Mann’s Collateral, which eased my mind. I feared I was being fabulist by regarding Collateral as one of the most mesmerizing American films ever.

More later.

Dav-

Hanging with the prequel crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise made me wonder, “Is this what it’s like to be back stage with your favorite rock group?”

Star Trek is great. A romping ride, start to finish.  The exceptionally well chosen ensemble of newbies was genius casting.  Every major character is engaging.  Enticing and entertaining blends of the original television series personalities with hip new psyches.   Somewhere I saw the movie and its cast described as a cosmic “90210.”

These space cadets have much more class.

As a kid, I watched Star Trek and had fun doing so; the Tribble episode (you must watch!), perhaps the series’ best-known, is the one I remember most clearly.   As a pre-teen I was caught up in the crew’s chemistry, all the sexy clothes, Kirk’s handsome command of his ship, and the Barbie hairdos.  I never became a Trekkie, but I could become a Neo Trekkie.

It would help to be familiar with the original series before seeing this movie, but it’s not necessary.

The movie is the story of James T. Kirk’s rites of passage, and early on I was a bit worried I wasn’t going to like this arrogant, self-absorbed hot rod Kirk.   That all faded away, however.  He grows to become the rightful occupant of the captain’s chair…and one of my favorite quips from the film is Spock’s early warning to Kirk: “Out of the chair.”

Spock in love.  Love that Spock is in love.  This is a fabulous Spock.

I mentioned to you that one of the film’s most notable effects was seeing those gigantic, lurking structures through the Midwest’s agricultural mist.   Very cool, but also very suggestive of monster oil derricks.   A warning, of sorts.

Quick take on aesthetics: Loved ‘em, but I can’t shake the weird look of the baddie Romulan space ship.  It looks like the drek I pulled out of my bathtub drain last week.   It looks like my hairdryer exploded.   A messy, black tangled metallic mess. Like a shredded tarantula.

Probably just what the filmmakers were shooting for.

I’m just enough of a tomboy to really get off on well-written male jousting camaraderie barbs.   Sequel, sequel!

Tammy. Are you ready to sit still for a while?

Big fun, this Star Trek moving picture item. In fact, I bet that the less of a Trekkie you are, the more fun you’ll have. Early on, the movie’s less-than-sacrosanct intentions are clear when one of the franchise’s catchphrases, “live long and prosper,” is delivered not as a bromide but as a dis.

For my money, the best of all the Star Trek movies is Galaxy Quest, a hat-trick of a movie. It’s a parody, it’s a valentine, and it has its own air-tight perfection. This new Star Trek nearly matches Galaxy Quest in sheer self-awareness. For a while there I thought the Requisite Cosmic Thingamabob — “Red Matter” — was going to be a cheeky homage to GQ’s RCT, “Omega 13.”

The secret to Star Trek’s entertainment showed up the big screen before the feature even started. Half of the trailers concerned the destruction of Earth. (Fingers crossed for a Barbie cameo in that headache-inducing G.I. Joe contraption.) Michael Bay is squeezing out another Transformers doohickey. Mention Bay and I think of one thing, that beautiful, poignant and all-too-true love song from Team America: World Police:

Why does Michael Bay get to keep on making movies?
I guess Pearl Harbor sucked
Just a little bit more than I miss you.

Michael Bay makes movies for saps, poor self-deluded males who need to indulge in two hours of surreptitious violent prowess. J.J. Abrams, who directed Star Trek, is Bay’s direct opposite. Abrams came to the project after making TV a somewhat smarter place. He likes graceful puzzle-stories and he likes the way humans interlock — as opposed to being exploded — when they grapple for position. Star Trek is so good that you forget that no matter where Abrams takes us in space, it’s always sea-level Earth gravity; and that although Romulans can destroy entire planets in jiffy, their henchman prefer to go mano-a-mano armed with giant can openers.

Tammy, are you ever coming back? Is your Floridan-baked self suddenly too good for our continually dank Spring weather? Are you mocking your fellow J-holers?

Anyway, back to work. There is impetus. We finished an edit of Killpecker! to submit to Wyoming Tourism’s short film contest. We decided to keep the funniest clips under wraps for now, hawking the more Wyo-centric stuff. If we don’t win the 25 grand, it may be because of we imply that women from Savageton and Pleasantdale (real Wyoming towns a few miles apart) got into fistfights over who was the center of Wyoming’s huge hasps industry (probably not true).

We named this cut Killpecker: Origins. Because we are nothing if not with-it.

Just checked Google Analytics. Our yappy blog is growing, hit-wise. Gone are the days when the bulk of the hits came from either of us trying to post. Now to pepper sites like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB with our very existence.

Oh. A movie. Surely you’ve seen State of Play by now. I mean, you’re a writer. This movie is about how a dogged journalist works hard to throw the light of day onto corruption involving a United States senator and billions in defense monies. To quote Stephen Colbert, “You know. Fiction.”

It’s actually a pretty good movie. Credit a decidely un-vain Russell Crowe and a most intelligent director, Kevin Macdonald. He directed the finest mountaineering feature yet, Touching the Void, and the extraordinary Last King of Scotland. Macdonald keeps the movie’s many moving plot parts in sync, and I must admit the swan-song tone — is investigative journalism dead? — got to me. Doubt if David Gregory’s tweets will make up for the loss.

If I made ads for State of Play, I’d place a yellow starburst in the upper right corner reading: 25% MORE DECEPTION THAN MOST LEADING THRILLERS! It’s, um, layered. Not that it’s bad; it just starts to sag toward the end. Luckily, Jason Bateman shows up as a greasy fixer and shocks the thing back to life. I’m still laughing at his “garage” line (I won’t give it away, it’s worth the price of admission.) Wonder if the line was ad-libbed. A movie journalist should investigate that.

David and Tammy are on their respective long, langourous, hang-loose Spring Breaks.   Re-entering, re-bounding, re-winding when we feel like it.   Happy Break, all!

Not sure if you’re in the mood for this gem, Tammy. Maybe later? More later.

Synecdoche, New York is probably a masterpiece.* It’s the sort of film we politely call “challenging.” Then again, I watched the first 20 minutes and started it over so K could join in. I was flabbergasted at how much more information was apparent on the second lap. Maybe it’s like my gold standard film, Brazil. I’ve seen it at least 20 times. It still pays fresh dividends.

No sense in trying to go into details. SNY is both too exhilarating and too exhausting for mere . . . language. Instead I’ll try to outline what I think Charlie Kaufmann is trying to do here. (Kaufmann has written the sharpest and most original screenplays of the past decade: Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation. Synecdoche, New York is his first big directing job and if turns out there are problems with the movie . . . well, there’s your problem.)

1. Kaufman takes a few of well-worn 20th-century dramatic tropes — life speeding by, middle-aged man fearing death, “life is a stage,” loving and longing — and thrashes them mercilessly. Hilariously, bizarrely, tragically, touchingly.

2. Kaufman is the world’s leading meta-trickster. For Adaptation, the movie version of Susan Orleans’ non-fiction book on exotic orchids, Kaufman added a fictional character, a blocked screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman. He struggles; Orleans’ reportage keeps morphing into some fancy sex-and-action script. While Charlie becomes a wreck, his identical-twin brother Donald, a dim-witted boor, becomes a sensation at hack screenplays. It sounds crazy. The movie works, gloriously. It still teaches us something about exotic orchids, part of which is adapting, which of course the characters do too.

In SNY, Phillip Seymour Hoffman is a play director who answers his own mortality by recreating his own life as a theater piece. By the end of the movie his play, in rehearsal for over 40 years, has not managed to open. The stage he has build has literally grown larger than New York itself, and by definition most of new York has to be in the play anyway. Crazy. It works.

3. The movie woozes gently, sometimes trippily, the way ephmeral dream states wooze. Outlandish jokes, like the woman whose house burns for 40 years, actually make sense by the end. Movies today typically jump around in time. In SYN, time passes more like we’re surfing and bobbing on three different time ripples at once. The story, highly detailed, only needs geologic time to make sense anyway.

4. All of this may sound precious. It’s anything but. K and I both drifted off toward the end — Kaufman may have dragged out the last 30 minutes, we’ll know better after another viewing or three — but then we’ll spend a week reading a novel that coughs up a similar experience. I’m looking forward to having a few people over who have already seen it. Then we’ll figure out just how good Synecdoche, New York is.

5. No matter what you think of the movie, nearly every moment shimmers with dedicated performances from a very game cast. Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Hope Davis, Catherine Keener, Jennifer Jason Leigh. Tammy, I really regret getting so involved in the Oscars this year. The movie is tricky to evaluate but there’s no denying that all of these roles are stark-bonkers-excellent, and overlooked.

* Until further review I’ll call it “masterpiece (with an asterisk).”

My therapeutic vent re: movie trailers felt pretty good (see this comment) but, you know, negative people suck. Here’s my idea of a good trailer. Check these features:

1. Snappy selection of tunes. 

2. Two of the finest (and perhaps the smartest) young actors today, Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

3. Not a single promise that we can look forward to an assortment of eviscerations and slo-mo gunshot exit wounds.

4. Those two magic words: Sun! Dance!

5. A chance to utilize my mad YouTube-embedding skillz.

Tam, Turner Classic Movies (channel 57 locally) just emailed me their schedule for April. A quick scan shows some real highlights.

• April 3, 6:30 AM: Brando. TCM’s original two-hour documentary on the guy who pretty much established modern acting. I’ve been waiting for this; I caught only the first half of it last year. There’s a lot of fascinating rare footage, including a strange TV interview of Marlon Brando with his father — who was a real a-hole.

• April 4: A Mockumentary Four-Fer!: Gotta make room on the TiVo for four consecutive very funny movies. Oh wait, I already own the Christopher Guest movies.

- 6:00 PM Take The Money And Run. Let’s review how funny Woody Allen really was.

- 7:30 PM Real Life. Albert Brooks’ satire on TV “real life” documentaries. That’s the great Harry Shearer wearing one of those helmet-cams.

- 9:15 PM Best in Show

- 11:00 PM This Is Spinal Tap Two classics, to say the least, and Spinal Tap was the movie that started it all.

• April 5, noon: The President’s Analyst. James Coburn in the hippest Bond spoof ever. A quintessential 60’s films. Been a while. Does it hold up?

. . . Lordy, there’s just too much this month. The Good, The Bad and the Ugly; Shane (pandering to locals, are we?), Modern Times, Butch Cassidy et al, The Horse Soldiers (a family classic because my Uncle Johnny, an extra, gets shot in the eye!), Gone With the Wind !!!11!, Double Indemnity (K finds Fred MacMurray sexy, which further adds to her charm) — that’s all too much, leaving no time for stoner classics like I Married A Monster From Outer Space.

I got work today. You finish logging the schedule.

Well, David, I finally saw Duplicity last week, and I was pleasantly surprised.  I was also confused. I’m a bit scared of telling you how I was confused because you weren’t confused.

Although the movie is a romantic spy-romp, with a lot of camera time spent making love to plush hotels  it kept me interested.  Sometimes these simple formulas backfire; the chemistry doesn’t work between the stars, the story dumps off prematurely, ends with a whimper.   I did not see the ending coming until just before it happened.

Why do trailers take the low road?   Duplicity’s trailers were so uninteresting, and really didn’t give enough of a peek into the multiple layers of the story.  It looked like Roberts and Owen played spies who may or may not have cheated on each other romantically.  And that was boring.  If they’d included some teasers about Wilkinson’s and Giamatti’s roles, a few look-sees into the spy laboratory, I’d have gotten to the theater sooner than I did.

That slow-mo corporate rumble on the airport tarmac was great.  Loved it!  Should have made the trailer.

I’ve come to appreciate Julia Roberts’ acting.  She wasn’t in a stretch situation here, but she has a great earthy presence now that she’s had children.   She’s put some weight on too, and is comfortable in that skin.  A great step forward for female actresses.  There really isn’t another actress “like” Roberts, she’s unique.  Most of the time these days, actresses are interchangeable; they look like each other, talk like each other, and they all date Owen Wilson.

Roberts was great in Charlie Wilson’s War.

Owen was fine, too.  He seemed a bit dumb at times; he’s the softie and Roberts is the more hard-bitten of the two.

Of course, it ends up that neither is in charge.

Ok, I was confused at the flashbacks and the whole deal with the script Owens and Roberts rehearse.