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Josh and I went to see Tron: Legacy over the week­end. Despite its 49% rat­ing on Rot­ten Toma­toes at that point, I still thought it might be a fun 3D thrill ride.

Boy was I wrong. The movie opened with a title card that instructed us to keep our 3D glasses on for the whole movie, even though only cer­tain scenes were in 3D. It was if the film apol­o­gized to us before even get­ting started.

And then it was two hours of bor­ing. I don’t want to post spoil­ers here, even though I’d save you $13 and two hours, but the plot would be pretty dif­fi­cult to encap­su­late any­way. There were plenty of oppor­tu­ni­ties for smart, clever writ­ing, but it felt like they were made dull and con­fus­ing on pur­pose. To that end, I guess, it was faith­ful to the orig­i­nal. Oh, snap!

So then there’s this Daft Punk video, made with the same aes­thetic as the orig­i­nal Tron. There’s more awe­some packed into these three min­utes than all of the new movie, and who­ever directed it should have directed Legacy. Maybe then we could have seen the evo­lu­tion from the orig­i­nal 80s look to the rubber-and-leather sex­i­ness of the new com­puter world. Oh well.

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Kick-Ass is not a movie for every­one. But, as is the case with most movies not designed for broad appeal, it’s focused and stays true to its vision through­out. It will res­onate with some audi­ence mem­bers, and they will become instant fans. Those put off by its hyper-violence—specifically, the mul­ti­ple acro­batic and extremely graphic exe­cu­tions per­formed by 11-year-old Hit Girl—will prob­a­bly strongly dis­like this film. I sus­pect there will be lit­tle mid­dle ground between the two opinions.

Clearly, I’m a fan. It was dis­ap­point­ing to miss the the SXSW screen­ing, so I was very excited to see it at the Charles on Fri­day night.

Kick-Ass trav­els along well-worn ter­ri­tory, but the way the story is told feels new. It’s self-aware when it winks at comic books and comic book read­ers the whole way through. It’s bloody and hilar­i­ous, wrong and right, gut-wrenching and heart-pounding, but unflinch­ingly gen­uine at its core.

It embraces the tropes from clas­sic super­hero sto­ries and sets them in a very vis­ceral and real world, one where char­ac­ters’ are flawed and con­tra­dic­tory, where agen­das aren’t imme­di­ately obvi­ous. Heroes try their best to do what they think is right, though their method­olo­gies are morally suspect.

If you aren’t squea­mish and like your com­edy a bit darker than most, Kick-Ass is prob­a­bly for you.

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Lis­ten, this blog is a blast to write and the pod­cast is a ton of fun to record, but last week­end, while sit­ting around a fire pit at Rob and Amber’s place, we came up with an idea that has already become far more suc­cess­ful than any of our other Inter­net projects or ven­tures. It’s simul­ta­ne­ously exhil­a­rat­ing and depress­ing. But it’s hilar­i­ous, so that makes it exhil­a­rat­ing again.

Ladies and gen­tle­men, I present a late-night conversation/joke that has been lov­ingly trans­lated into a full-fledged Inter­net phe­nom­e­non: IMD­Boner. An exam­ple of said hilarity:

All the kids will be talk­ing about this in a few weeks. I am not kid­ding. Also: You’re wel­come, Internet.

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Sun­day, March 14, 2010

I wasn’t com­pletely sure what to expect as I waited for Jef­frey Tambor’s act­ing work­shop ses­sion to begin, but I had heard noth­ing but over­whelm­ingly pos­i­tive things about ses­sions from pre­vi­ous years.

As it turned out, the praise bestowed on his work­shop was much deserved. This year, Tam­bor ran the work­shop around two actors, Chris Doubek and Heather Kafka, from the SXSW film Lovers of Hate.

Imme­di­ately, it was clear that Tambor’s work­shop was free from pre­ten­tious­ness. I loved his phi­los­o­phy about get­ting the best per­for­mance from actors. “You can’t fix a scene unless you fuck it up first.”

So that’s exactly what he did. He had the actors per­form a scene from their movie, then encour­aged them to re-create the same scene, pur­pose­fully over-act, run through a gamut of emo­tions, and even had them sing their lines as if they were in an opera.

The key to have your actors to loosen up and run through their scenes in out­ra­geous ways, Tam­bor said, is to make them feel safe. It’s the director’s job, he said, to tell the actors, “You’re safe to fall. You’re protected.”

Once they’re safe, actors can feel free to play. “Keep play­ing, keep play­ing,” Tam­bor repeated through­out the panel. He said it’s impor­tant to access the three-year-olds inside your actors, and make them play.

How­ever, he cau­tioned that it’s impor­tant for these play­ful ses­sions to never be done in front of the crew. The crew can make actors feel exposed, vul­ner­a­ble, and closed from things they’d oth­er­wise try in pri­vate. Once the actors are “hot” and once the scene is at a level the direc­tor and actors are happy with, it can be per­formed in front of a crew.

Direc­tors shouldn’t be afraid to have their actors access dark places in their per­son­al­i­ties or pasts, he said. “No actor has been hurt by going to the dark places.” In fact, he said, they usu­ally love it.

The best advice he said he had for direc­tors was “Just be a human.” Under­stand­ing and relat­ing to actors as human beings is the quick­est way to earn their trust and make them feel safe enough to per­form at their peak.

So much of the art and craft can eas­ily get lost, espe­cially in stu­dio pro­duc­tions with lots of money at stake. Tam­bor made a very clear dis­tinc­tion between an ama­teur, which he con­sid­ers him­self, and a pro­fes­sional: “Ama­teur means ‘lover’. Pro­fes­sion­als want to get paid.” The best actors, he said, are ama­teurs in the strictest sense.

To the actors in the audi­ence, he sug­gested they always say “Thank you,” when a direc­tor gives notes, whether they like them or not.

It was fas­ci­nat­ing to watch Tam­bor work and share sto­ries and advice from his seem­ingly lim­it­less col­lec­tion. He made two actors, who were thrown into a brightly-lit room filled with strangers, relax and open up to emo­tions and approaches for a scene that they hadn’t explored.

He has such a pleas­ant and easy way of speak­ing, and he makes the core of act­ing, and the core of what we do every day, stag­ger­ingly obvi­ous: It is all about human inter­ac­tion. Once you strip away the pre­tense and arti­fi­cial hier­ar­chies of the world, it’s noth­ing more than humans inter­act­ing with each other.

I left the ses­sion feel­ing a bit lighter, and the peo­ple in the cor­ri­dors of the Austin Con­ven­tion Cen­ter didn’t seem like such strangers anymore.

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Sat­ur­day, March 13, 2010

Late Sat­ur­day night, I fought my strug­gling eye­lids and caught a shut­tle van from the Austin Con­ven­tion Cen­ter to the Alamo Draft­house Lamar 6 for the pre­miere of Mon­sters. I had a blast watch­ing this film. Here’s the plot as given by the filmmakers:

Six years after Earth has suf­fered an alien inva­sion a cyn­i­cal jour­nal­ist agrees to escort a shaken Amer­i­can tourist through an infected zone in Mex­ico to the safety of the US border.

The film was billed as a cross between Clover­field and Dis­trict 9. I found myself mis­led by that descrip­tion. The film turned out to be some­thing quite different.

Writer/director Gareth Edwards uses a sci-fi/horror back­drop to drive a roman­tic story between reporter Andrew Kaul­der (played by Scoot McNairy) and his boss’s daugh­ter, Saman­tha Wyn­den (Whit­ney Able).

I felt like the title of the movie is all wrong. Mon­sters seems like too bland and generic-sounding of a title for a movie with mul­ti­ple lay­ers of story, action, and dra­matic ten­sion. It doesn’t quite fit the mood of the story. As we develop more of a rela­tion­ship with the two leads, and as they develop a rela­tion­ship with each other, we find that the story has less to do with “mon­sters” than it does to do with two peo­ple try­ing to make it home.

Once I found myself ori­ented within the movie’s uni­verse and tone, I was able to really enjoy it. When I stopped expect­ing it to be an all-out action piece and relaxed into the idea that action was ancil­lary to the character-driven story, I really started to dig it.

The spe­cial effects and cin­e­matog­ra­phy were quite impres­sive. Even more impres­sively, Edwards wrote, shot, edited, and cre­ated all the spe­cial effects on his lap­top. Now that’s one seri­ously tal­ented filmmaker.

On the shut­tle ride back from the the­ater, every­one seemed to dis­cuss the movie, but it sounded like opin­ions were mixed. I over­heard two friends argu­ing about it. One guy hated it, thought it rep­re­sented every­thing wrong with sci-fi and hor­ror cross­ing over into “main­stream cin­ema”. His friend couldn’t have thought he was more wrong, and said it was an inge­nious twist on old movie-making conventions.

Me? I thought it was totally fun. I went in expect­ing one thing and was pleas­antly sur­prised to dis­cover some­thing else. The fact that it was shot with such a tiny crew and cast with effects cre­ated entirely by a very tal­ented writer/director made it even more impres­sive. But I went into the movie with­out that knowl­edge and still had a great time. I’m not sure how it will hold up upon a sec­ond view­ing, but Mag­net has report­edly picked it up for dis­tri­b­u­tion, so I’ll hope­fully have the oppor­tu­nity to find out.

Oh, and a cute bit of infor­ma­tion was revealed with the Q&A with the cast and direc­tor after­ward. Scoot McNairy and Whit­ney Able, who met on the set of this movie, announced their engage­ment in real life. Adorable!

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Sat­ur­day, March 13, 2010

I was pretty dis­ap­pointed when, after hours of flight delays and my even­tual frus­trated switch to South­west from Amer­i­can Air­lines, I landed in Austin too late to get my SXSW badge and attend the pre­miere of Kick Ass. Walk­ing past the the­ater and its brightly-colored pre­miere dec­o­ra­tions was a lit­tle salt in the wound.

Sat­ur­day morning’s dis­cus­sion panel with the movie’s cast went a long way to make me feel bet­ter. Even though the ses­sion wasn’t com­pletely spoiler-free (Oops!), it made me even more excited about see­ing the movie when it comes out next month.

Ques­tions from the audi­ence ranged from tech­ni­cal and geeky to philo­soph­i­cal and artsy. Some film­mak­ers wanted to know exactly how much green screen was used. Oth­ers were curi­ous about what drew the actors and direc­tor to the story. There were great ques­tions about changes to the char­ac­ters from the orig­i­nal graphic novel to make for a more com­pelling film.

It wasn’t a sur­prise to learn that, orig­i­nally, the stu­dios all turned the movie down. They didn’t like the idea of Hit-Girl, a filthy-mouthed 11-year-old assas­sin. Pretty much every stu­dio exec they encoun­tered asked them to tone it down. So, instead of com­pro­mis­ing, they made the film inde­pen­dently. Find­ing a dis­trib­u­tor for the final prod­uct wasn’t that tough.

Of course, one of the high­lights of the panel was Chloe Moretz, the tal­ented young actor who plays Hit-Girl. Some­one asked about the acro­batic stunts nec­es­sary for her char­ac­ter, and she revealed that she went through months of train­ing and did most of her own action sequences because, as it turns out, there aren’t a lot of 11-year-old stunt peo­ple in Hol­ly­wood. (Who knew?)

Another audi­ence mem­ber asked if the cast had seen the final edited ver­sion of the film. Moretz said that she hadn’t, adding that she tech­ni­cally wasn’t allowed to see R-rated movies.

Direc­tor Matthew Vaughn expressed dis­plea­sure more than a few times that, at the SXSW screen­ing, one of the speak­ers in the the­ater was blown. In his opin­ion, it ruined half of the movie. After hear­ing that, I don’t feel so bad about hav­ing missed it. When I see Kick Ass for the first time, it’ll be right.

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SXSW was amaz­ing. I had more incred­i­ble expe­ri­ences packed into one week than I can remem­ber. Inter­ac­tive sparked new ideas and helped me develop new ones. Film encour­aged me to approach my writ­ing from dif­fer­ent angles. Music con­vinced me that I need to start writ­ing songs again. All three com­po­nents of SXSW were sources of seem­ingly end­less inspi­ra­tion, and that made the trip com­pletely worth it, air­line delays and all.

I learned a few things about the SXSW expe­ri­ence itself, too. In the pre­ced­ing weeks, I made a sched­ule of every ses­sion and show I wanted to attend. In the­ory, I thought I’d be able to string one after another seam­lessly, bounc­ing from talk to party to band. In prac­tice, some­times events would over­lap, it took more time to get from one event to another than I thought, and some­times there were lines to deal with.

I also learned that blog­ging and pod­cast­ing dur­ing SXSW are near-impossible feats.

Back here in the “real world”, I’ve never been more moti­vated to take on ambi­tious projects, trans­form my pro­fes­sional life into some­thing I enjoy and am proud of, and ded­i­cate more time and effort to my cre­ative writ­ing. I feel so for­tu­nate to have so many smart, tal­ented, and encour­ag­ing friends off of whom I can bounce ideas and get feedback.

Tonight I plan to go through my note­book and recap my favorite moments from SXSW 2010. I have over a thou­sand pho­tos to sort out. I can’t wait to share the high­lights with you.

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There. I said it. It’s not even sum­mer yet, but the block­buster sea­son begins and ends this Fri­day with Star Trek. Sure, X-Men Ori­gins: Wolver­ine came out last week, but any tepid urge I had to go see it has been flushed from my sys­tem. Since it’s not released until this Fri­day, May 8th, I’m going to keep this post as spoiler-free as I can.

I was lucky enough to score an advance screen­ing pass at the AMC in White Marsh, Mary­land, thanks to my friends Spam and Anna. My dad met me at the the­ater, and we all went in with cau­tiously high expectations.

I’m used to being let down by big-budget Hol­ly­wood movies, espe­cially those adapted from source mate­r­ial I already know and love. This movie did some­thing that very, very rarely hap­pens: It was bet­ter than I had hoped. Way better.

Star Trek is unbe­liev­ably awe­some. I loved nearly every­thing about this movie. The fight scenes are great. The space bat­tles are expertly done with­out being visu­ally over­whelm­ing (I’m look­ing at you, George Lucas). Each cast mem­ber is per­fect in his or her role. The story was well-paced and never hit a stretch where I felt it dragged. Even though the sets, ships, weapons, and cos­tumes all received 2009 updates, they still feel like they’re a part of the famil­iar orig­i­nal story.

It some­how man­ages to be awe­some for hard­core fans and peo­ple who have never stepped foot into a Star Trek uni­verse, some­thing I thought would be impos­si­ble. It’s help­ful that the story starts way at the begin­ning, before the orig­i­nal series. Every­body in the the­ater, Trekkie Trekker or not, has to get ori­ented with the tone of the film as they are intro­duced to the char­ac­ters. Even if you don’t know your Scotty from your Chekov, you’ll feel right at home.

The movie also has a great sense of humor, which makes the seri­ous parts even more pow­er­ful. There are plenty of ref­er­ences to the orig­i­nal series and movies. There are bar fights and phaser shoot-outs. There are big sur­prises and twists. And at the end of it all, you want to get back in line and watch it again.

Okay, Gavin. Breathe. This is unlike you. You’re nor­mally very, very cyn­i­cal about movies. What didn’t you like?

Well, there were two minor things that irked me. Near the begin­ning, there’s a cer­tain pop-culture ref­er­ence and a cer­tain prod­uct place­ment that com­pletely threw me out of the nar­ra­tive. You’ll know them when they hap­pen. It was a very Michael Bay-esque move, and I started to get really wor­ried that J.J. Abrams ruined every­thing. Thank­fully, the movie was non-stop awe­some from that point on, so I was able to for­give him for the blunder.

Of course, there are bound to be unflap­pable, hard­core, über-nerdy fans that will tear this movie to shreds sim­ply for not being the orig­i­nal mate­r­ial. To those peo­ple I say, relax. Enjoy. No one going to break into your house and trash your DVD box sets while you’re in the the­ater. No one is going to open your sealed action fig­ures. Your char­ac­ters and canon­i­cal sto­ry­lines are safe.

It’s going to be very dif­fi­cult for any other block­buster of the 2009 sea­son to be this good. As far as I’m con­cerned, Wolver­ine can wait for DVD, the new Ter­mi­na­tor is a toss-up, and there’s no way I’m get­ting any­where near the Trans­form­ers sequel. G.I. Joe? I fear it’ll be another Trans­form­ers–cal­iber let­down. Of course, I could be totally wrong about all those movies. Still, they’ve got some tough com­pe­ti­tion from the young crew of the Enter­prise.

If you’re uncon­vinced, do your­self a favor and make this the one movie you go see in the the­ater this sum­mer. I can’t wait to go see it in IMAX for my sec­ond go-round.

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This has been a great week­end for foot­ball. First the Ravens beat the Titans, and this morn­ing I saw the doc­u­men­tary Har­vard Beats Yale 29–29 at The Charles The­atre. It was part of Cin­ema Sun­days at the Charles, which I think might have become my new favorite Sun­day tra­di­tion. I just heard about the film series from an email the the­ater sent last week, even though their web­site has a list of films shown on Cin­ema Sun­days dat­ing back to 1995.

Every Sun­day, the box office opens at 9:45 am, and the $15 cost of admis­sion includes bagels, cof­fee, an intro­duc­tion to the film, then a Q&A ses­sion and dis­cus­sion after­ward. Here’s a descrip­tion from the Cin­ema Sun­days website:

In Har­vard Beats Yale 29–29, [direc­tor Kevin] Raf­ferty takes us into the world of America’s Ivy League uni­ver­si­ties via a 1968 foot­ball match that had a highly unex­pected out­come. He inter­views play­ers on both sides, who – in addi­tion to talk­ing about the game – sum­mon the socio-political milieu of the time, rec­ol­lect­ing their thoughts on issues like Viet­nam, birth con­trol and stu­dent insur­rec­tion. These tes­ti­monies inter­weave with remark­able footage of the game, an erst­while style of col­lege play that pos­sessed a grace lack­ing in today’s pro­fes­sional football.

Mil­ton Kent, host of Sports At Large on WYPR, led the dis­cus­sion about the movie, col­lege foot­ball, the way sports have evolved since 1968, the shame­ful state of the Bowl Cham­pi­onship Series selec­tion process, and of course the Ravens win over the Titans last night. It was great to hear reac­tions and rec­ol­lec­tions from peo­ple who were in the sta­dium dur­ing the Harvard/Yale game 40 years ago. It’s true that col­lege foot­ball isn’t as impor­tant to this area of the coun­try than it is else­where (espe­cially the south), so it was neat to hear some per­spec­tives on it I really hadn’t considered.

The con­ver­sa­tion turned to the ques­tion of why peo­ple like sports in the first place, and it made me think about last night’s Ravens game. No mat­ter what back­ground, eco­nomic sta­tus, eth­nic­ity, polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tion, or any other dif­fer­ences, they can all be set aside to share in watch­ing their team play. In the video I took, every sin­gle Ravens fan in that room shared in the celebration.

It was lots of fun and a spec­tac­u­lar way to spend a Sun­day morn­ing. I’m look­ing for­ward to this week’s announce­ment about next Sunday’s movie.

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