Category Archives: Movies

The Delicate Balance of Character Death in Sequels

Over several nights this week, and I am still not finished I have been watching Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th. The documentary covers the entire span of the iconic slasher/horror film franchise and has a running time that is close the seven hours. I am a movie buff and while I have seen a few of the Friday the 13th  installments I am by far not an engaged fan of the series but I adore learning about films and their production.

Adrienne King who played final girl Alice in the initial film spoke about how many fans reacted badly to her characters quick and unceremonious death in the following sequel and my thoughts instantly flashed to Alien 3  and how the characters of Hicks and Newt were also cruelly dispatched simply to make way for the next batch of Purina Alien Chow.

Sequels are already tricky things to manage. People loved the first story and want more, deviate too wildly from the established tone and elements of that instigating tale and people will feel cheated, that they did not get what was promised on the tine, but hew too closely to the original plot and structure and people will be bored as you simply repeat the original with mere cosmetic changes. What Friday the 13th Part 2  and Alien 3 exemplify is the dangers of ignores the audiences emotional investment in the previous episodes. A story, prose or cinematic, succeeds when the audience become emotionally invested in the fate of the characters. This is particularly true in films where the conclusion presents few surviving characters of which horror films excel. Alice in Friday the 13th  is the ‘final girl’ and her survival is the emotional heartbeat of the movie, giving the audience its catharsis and exhilaration with the story climax. People are excited by her survival after attaching their fears to her for the run of the film. Alice matters. But her off-hand death at the start of the next film is an unintentional swipe at the audience. It is calling them suckers for caring about Alice, or Hicks and Newt for that matter, because all of that drama and tension and terror were meaningless. Those cruel and thoughtless character deaths invalidate all of the emotional toil and payoff of the previous franchise installments.

Does this mean you can’t kill surviving characters in the following sequels? No, of course not. What it means is that a sequel needs to be very careful in which characters fall and the manner in which they fall. Off-handedly removing character simply to make room for new ones is disrespectful to the audiences and their deep emotional attachments. If a character that survived an earlier episode must appear and die in a sequel then that death must be important to the plot and development of the story and it must be driven by the character’s choices. It need not be a ‘heroic’ death, though that is a clear option but it must not be a death that could have been filled by a stand in. Remember that sequel have a carry over emotional effect, the audience are in a heightened state filled with the memories of beloved characters in dramatic tension do not disrespect them.

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Scriptnotes and Thoughts on my Career Path

I adore HBO’s limited series Chernobyl  and its associated podcast of the same name with the writer and show runner Craig Mazin explores the crafting of the show and where it deviates from the historical record. That podcast led me to Mazin’s other Podcast Scriptnotes  where he co-hosts where fellow screen scribe John August about screen writing and things interesting to screenwriters.

There had been a time in my life where I really wanted to be a screenwriter and director. Movies are a passion of mine and I adore all the aspect of cinema. This weekend I will spend 13 hours watching a marathon of SF themed horror film as part of a local cinema group’s annual celebration. My novel coming out in March 2020 Vulcan’s Forge  is not only a celebration of film noir  in prose but stuffed to its hairline with references to some of my favorite films. However, listening to Scriptnotes  I think I have learned that being a professional screenwriter may not have been for me.

Where there are lots of books about how to write screenplays and what the form of the material is like there are few recourses that can give you a real look at what the life of a screenwriter is really like, Scriptnotes  is one of those rare resources. In addition to excellent advise on character, conflict, and constructing scenes, John and Craig climb down into the muddy trenches of dealing with contracts, producers, the Guild, studios, and set realistic expectations for aspiring talent just what the business is going to expect of them. What dismayed me was the amount of work a professional screenwriter does that is being a ‘gun for hire.’ How often a person will work on projects that they did not start, did not conceive, and are expected to create and polish into gem stones as glittering as their own projects. Certainly spec scripts, that is a project that was written without a contract and without the writer being hired to writer it, get produced but more often these scripts are used to open doors and gain employment as those hired guns and the films those scripts were written for never come into existence.

That has to be heartbreaking.

As a novelist I write a manuscript with every expectation that it will be a novel. For my preferences the ideal outcome is a traditionally published novel where a publisher pays me an advance and I get the benefit of their entire production, advertising, and distribution enterprise but if need be in this digital age I can publish the book myself. I do not need to produce well-polished dreams that are likely to be discarded so I can chase work on material I did not create.

Perhaps one of my novels will eventually be sold and made into a film and then I may writer the screenplay. I think I have a real talent for that form, but as a career, I think that screenwriter would have been a poor fit.

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Spider-Man, Macbeth, & Responsibilities

It is interesting to think about how characters are or are not responsible for the ills of their fictional world.

Central to Spider-Man’s character is the guilt he feels over the death of his beloved Uncle Ben. After Peter Parker had gained his powers that allow him to become a super hero but before he accepted to corresponding responsibilities, he sought enrichment and glory by using those magical abilities in entertainment. And when he stood by refusing to become involved in a robbery allowing the culprit to escape, he set into motion a chain of events that resulted in the same culprit robbing, shooting, and murdering Peter’s Uncle’s Ben. In the second motion picture directed by Sam Rami Peter confesses to his aunt that he, Peter, is responsible for Ben murder and that is something that has always rankled me.

Yes, Peter should have done something. Yes, Peter’s inaction set up the conditions that allowed the criminal to escape and thus the conditions that eventually allowed the criminal to be in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong motivations that resulted in Ben murder.

However, Peter is not responsible for that murder. Peter did not pull that trigger; Peter did not make the decision to shoot. Only the gunman is responsible  for shooting. My feelings on the matter have always been settled ground to me.

Yet, things feel different when I contemplate my favorite play Macbeth.

It is Macbeth’s hand to wields the dagger, it is Macbeth’s choice to murder his King and Kin, it is Macbeth uses the throne of Scotland to ignite a reign of terror that sparks open rebellion and invasion and still I can’t shake the sensation that responsibility somehow lies with the unnamed witches.

Without the supernatural meddling by the witches, making pronouncement of the future that are accurate of ultimately misleading, would have Macbeth ever taken any action against his royal cousin? If the witches can know which grain will grow and which will not then must they also know that speaking that future to Macbeth that place him on the path that ultimately leads to his doom? Are they the inversion of Avengers: Endgame knowing that if they speak the future to Macbeth that unlike Strange certain that his prediction will destroy its possibilities their will ensure it? If that is the case how do you divide responsibility between the Witches and their future meddling and Macbeth free will to choice his destructive path?

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Movie Review: Official Secrets

Playing in a limited run throughout the United States Gavin Hood’s drama Official Secrets  starring Kiera Knightly and Ralph Fiennes the story is inspired by actual events surrounding the United Kingdom’s skullduggery in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Knightly plays Katherine Gunn a language translator working for the GCHQ, Government Communication Head Quarters the heart of British signals intelligence where Gunn translates foreign language communications by suspected enemies of the United Kingdom. As the United States attempts to obtain a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing an invasion of Iraq, Gunn’s department is directed to intercept personal communications of ambassadors on the Security Council in order to provide leverage for the United States to ‘convince’ the Ambassadors to support the invasion. In other words hoping to find blackmail material to rig the vote. Faced with such maleficence leaks the memo running afoul of the UK’s ‘Official Secrets Act’ and when the press, through the actions of journalist Martin Bright played by Matt Smith, publishes the memo an intensive investigation for the source of the breach is launched threatening Gunn with decades in prison.

Official Secrets  is Hood’s second foray into politically charged controversial cinema, following up on his masterful film Eye in the Sky  that used a fictional operation to crack open the complex morality surrounding drone warfare. Hood’s approach in Eye was even handed, presenting the complexities of combat where stark right and wrong often evaporates in the fog of war.  In Official Secrets  there are few shades of grey but that could be my own viewpoint coloring my opinion as I was staunchly against the invasion and firmly support that idea of whistleblowers that expose governmental misdeeds. What I can say is that the film is excellent in every regard, the writing, the directing, the acting, all create a reality that is tense, taunt, and never overblown. There is a temptation in drama inspired by actual events to heighten the action, meaning figures in the dark, high-speed chases down airport runways, to think that action is required for stakes and that is a misplaced concern. Official Secrets  opens with Gunn having to enter her plea and when the film return to that moment there is no doubt about the enormous stakes that rest on her answer.

I can fully recommend this movie to anyone who’s entranced by superior dramatic fiction.

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Streaming Review: The Void

Released in 2017 to a limited theatrical run The Void is a modestly budgeted cosmic horror film set in a rural besieged hospital.

Daniel Carter is a sheriff’s deputy in a small rural community when late one evening while on patrol his discovers an injured man, bloodied and disorientated on an isolated back road. He takes the men to the closest hospital, one that is in the process of closing down after a fire devastated most of the building leaving the facility this night with a skeleton staff and only one patient already admitted. Daniel’s wife Allison works at the hospital as a nurse and though they are not estranged it is clear a tragedy haunts their relationship. Before long Daniel, Allison, and the small collection of characters are besieged when masked cultists willing to murder anyone who attempts to flee the building surround the hospital. Strangely, the cultists seem uninterested in invading the facility and it quickly becomes apparent that the real horror is already inside the hospital.

Avoiding second tier digital imagery and boasting practical creature effects The Void  makes the most of its limited budget. Inspired by but not based upon the works of H.P. Lovecraft, this film starts itself grounded in a real and recognizable world before sliding into a scenario of monsters, madness, and unimaginable horrors from beyond. Competently acted and directed the film is not perfect but works overall as an entertaining horror movie that is perfectly willing to leave questions unanswered and matters to audience interpretation. While there is plenty of gore and injury effects the heart of this movie is about loss and how loss transforms us into people we may have little understanding of. There is a slight cinematic trope of ignoring serious injury after a few scenes but overall the movie is fast paces, enjoyable and for fans horror well worth their time.

The Voidis currently streaming on the horror service Shudder.

 

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Detective Fiction vs. Noir

In now way am I proposing a final definitive definition of Noir fiction and what sets a story in that particular sub-genre but I do think I may have stumbled across one of the lines that separates noir  from its close elder cousin detective fiction.

Detective fiction, in general, derives from a European tradition of the intellectual puzzle solver that reveals the killers identity in a dramatic drawing room monologue. In the United States, a rougher culture, this transformed into the genre of hard boiled, where the detective still uncovered the killer’s identity, but through the course of resolving the mystery the protagonist usually faced more serious danger to his life and was often less than a stellar individual himself. Noir  also often dealt with detectives and a crime that needed resolving but as often as not the protagonists of noir  fiction were the criminals themselves and in the cases where the protagonists weren’t the perpetrators they often were as morally compromised as the characters the challenged.

Dividing the genre between hard-boiled and noir is difficult thing but I think it can be done with the concept of moral order and which characters are responsible for restoring the moral order.

In a murder mystery the moral order has been destroyed by the immoral killing of a character and it is restored when the killer is revealed and brought to justice. In this situation the detective is the agency that restores the moral order, it is the detective intelligence and devotion to that moral order that propels the characters, (Side note it is interesting that in Murder on the Orient Express  Poirot does not bring the killers to justice because it is determine that the murder itself is an expression of the moral order. In others words, ‘He had it comin’.’)

Noir  particularly that films made in the classic period of the 19640s and 1950s also restored the moral order by the time the credits appeared on the screen what set them apart was how the moral order was restored.

In noir  films the moral order isn’t restored by way of an intelligent and morally upright character but usually because the seeds of their own destruction sowed by the characters themselves fruited with the final justice. Consider how Keyes was unable to reveal the murders in Double Indemnity but instead Walter and Phyllis bring about their own destruction. The moral order is restored, after all the production code insisted upon that, but the restoration had little to nothing to do with the integrity of the upstanding characters.

Perhaps an interesting boundary case is the classic The Maltese Falcon.Sam unravels the mystery and turns Brigid over t the police, restoring the moral order, she will pay the price for her crimes, as will al the other criminals, but there is the lingering question of why does Sam do this? In the final scene between the lovers he gives lots of potential answers, when your partner is murdered you need to do something about it, maybe he loves her maybe he doesn’t, and of course if he doesn’t he could never trust her and not turning her over puts him, at the risk of ending up like Thursby. Pick an answer and you change the moral calculus. Is Sam doing the right thing because you honor your partner? Then this is more like detective fiction. Is he just looking out for himself? The moral tone gets darker with that outlook. Neither the novel nor the film provides any definitive answer to Sam and his motivation leaving it to our interpretation.

So one test, and only one test of many, for is something noir or not ask how does the moral order get restored and you’ll have a leg up on answering the question.

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Knowing What You Write

There’s an adage in writing that goes “Write what you know,” but I think it should more properly be phrased as ‘Know what you write.’ It isn’t about sticking to things you already know but knowing and understanding your subject well enough to write honestly.

One of the short films at this year’s Horrible Imaginings Festival brought this home to me.

In the film Vicious a family of urbanites are in the lonely rural south when they become guests of an odd local family that invites them for dinner. The film starts off looking as though it is going to be a rather bog standard ‘folk horror’ about the strange and scary people found in the countryside but the filmmakers invert the paradigm and end of a rather different note.

What might have been a fun reversal of a trope felt flat and inauthentic because the filmmakers did not know what they wrote. When visiting a culture not your own it is important to get people who are deeply familiar with it to help you in avoiding simple mistakes.  Here are two of the most glaring examples from the film where inaccuracies damaged my enjoyment.

First off, in the south you do not have dinner outdoors shortly after dusk. Californians might think of this time as pleasant, the cooling air, the breeze heading towards the sea, but California is dry and the south is wet and filled with mosquitos. A table outside is setting a table for those biting insects.

Second, if a Southern family invites another for supper, particularly is this Southern family has a large lovely brick home, the meal they set out will not be a plate of beans and nothing more. Southern culture is a very food centric one and the offerings would have been numerous both as a matter of hospitality and of pride.

These may feel like small errors but they destroy the credibility of the film, yanking audience member who see them out of the tale and shattering the illusion. It is always vitally important to ‘Write What You Know.”

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Horrible Imaginings 2019

This year was the 10thannual Horrible Imaginings Horror Film Festival. For the second year, the festival has been hosted by the non-profit theater The Frida Cinema and this year I managed to attend 2 of the 3 day run time. I am sad that I missed Friday but day-job commitments are paramount.

Saturday started with a block of short films programed around the theme ‘A Shock to the System’ where the horror lies more in systemic and cultural issues than a beastie or man with a knife. There were 11 films in this block and many were quite compelling. The film that most disturbed me was Off Fleek  which centered in a young woman and the terrible effect of the cyber-abuse she endured. It is a film that haunts the mind well after its brief running time has ended. Per haps most entertaining  was Kathy  a film about growing up gay in a fundamentalist household where demons and possession are common dinnertime discussions. And most artistic visually striking of the block was LVRS a film without dialog that symbolically explored the nature of abusive relationships.

The next block continue the theme with the longer films Conversion Therapist  and What Daphne Sawand included a panel discussion about the issues of ‘reparative’ therapy and human trafficking. We rounded out Saturday with two feature films but the one I enjoyed the most from that evening was Reborn  starring Barbara Crampton and Michael Pare.

Sunday again started with a block of short subjects, this time the theme being Monsters, Sci-Fi and Beyond. Nest  was a ‘found footage’ style short that understood brevity if powerful in that model of filmmaking. How to be Alone  was a wonderful exploration of isolation and the mental toll that can take on a person while Ulysses  presented perhaps the best mermaid design I have ever watched.

Then we were treated to a long form short film block where instead of running times between 2 and 12 minutes the films were along the lines of a half an hour including a lovly film about a séance in the White House at the height of the Civil War. Though perhaps my favorite of that black came from Brazil For My Cat, Mieze  where justice comes paired with a fine wine.

We rounded out the day with two feature films, Antrum – the Deadliest Film Ever Made  which included as part of its conceit a mini-documentary about the fictional film Antrum  and the deaths associated with it, but the film struck me as more gimmick that story. The final feature was Pornoa movie about religious teenagers who accidentally summon a succubus in the theater where they work. It’s over-the top, bloody, sexy, and funny, providing one of the festival’s’ most memorable line of dialog; “I’m not going to get excited by your exploded testicles!”

All in all the festival was a grand time well worth the 3 hours of drive time each day.

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Film Review: All the Colors of the Dark (1972)

Hailing from 1972 and currently streaming on the specialized horror service Shudder, All the Colors of the Dark  is a giallo,  a genre of Italian cinema that specialized in sensation lurid tales often centered on aspects of sex, sexual perversion, and violence. Part of the global exploitive cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, giallos  are colorful, have amazing photography, and bold art direction, the best of them are usually associated with the noted directors Mario Bava and Dario Argento. Though an Italian film All the Colors of the Dark  was filmed and set in England.

Jane (Edwige Fenech), while recovering from a car crash that injured her and killed her unborn baby, is tormented by terrifying visions of a knife-wielding attacker. The vision manifest most often when Jane and her boyfriend Richard (George Hilton) attempt to be sexually involved. Richard insists she needs vitamins, while her sister Barbara, who works for a psychiatrist presses for psychiatry. Jane’s neighbor, Mary, introduces Jane to a satanic coven and the events explode into debauchery, assault, and murder with Jane’s visions becoming apparently real as she loses connection with reality.

With plenty of blood and nudity All the Colors of the Dark is not a film for the young, sensitive, or easily offended. The final act of the movie ties things together with an explanation, but this, as with most giallos  in my opinion, is more a perfunctory move providing only the barest of rationales that allow the dream-like and nightmarish imagery to play out.  This sort of movie you do not watch for logical consistency or carefully interlocking plotting but rather for the surreal nature of the visuals and the emotional punch of the scenes. I find the style reminiscent of David Lynch albeit with a much more conventional approach.

 

 

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Reading HBO’s Chernobyl

Unless you have been under a rock hiding from the insanity of today’s world, and honestly who could blame you, you have probably heard of HBO’s fantastic mini-series Chernobyl  chronicling the infamous Soviet nuclear disaster. Show runner and writer Craig Mazin, best know for films such as The Hangover 2,  delivered an amazing, frightening, and moving depiction of the terrifying and heroic events surrounding the 1986 event.

Mazin also co hosts with fellow screen scribe John August the podcast Scriptnotes  where the pair, along with occasional guests, discuss screenwriting from both a creative and a business practical viewpoint.  As part of their mission to help screenwriters Mazin has published all five scripts for Chernobyl  and I have spent the last two days lost in a wonderful reading experience.

I have read a number of scripts for both television and feature films and I have to say that Mazin has really opened my eyes to ways this particular art form can be expressed. His approach is a close subjective style with elements that I have not seen often in screenplays. The narrative elements of the script contain descriptions that are purely internal to the character. It’s a guide to the reader, the director, and the actor how a scene needs to be played. I have to say that these scripts are a good reading experience one that is as enjoyable as any well-crafted short story or novel. Not only has it made me appreciate the craft more, but also it has enhanced my respect for the series as a whole and ignited a desire to re-watch the entire run.

The scripts are available for free downloading at John August’s website.

 

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