"We've Got a Gusher!"

I feel like I’ve aged 5 years from the last week.

We checked My Fair Lady into the hospital Tuesday night and she began the fluids necessary to initiate induction. The induction proper commenced at 6 a.m. Wednesday morning. When no progress had been made by noon, Doc burst the bag of waters (yes, with an ‘s’) and out flowed enough water to render My Fair Lady a tributary.

“Oh wow, we’ve got a gusher!” is not normally something you expect a doctor to say in a cheery tone of voice.

Six hours later, no progress. My Fair Lady had been under Pitocin (which induces labor, or more specifically, labor pains in a big, big way) for 12 hours by that point and only progressed to 2cm. This is what’s known as a bad thing. She of the iron cervix was apparently having nothing to do with delivering our child. But she would warily take the epidural, thank you very much. This may have made her feel significantly better but the baby still wasn’t coming. Nor was it about to, ever.

Then we had our second gusher of the night.

The epidural brings large scale pain relief to your lower half and based on the dosage you may or may not feel your toes for the next few hours. I feel sorry for women going through it because it literally looks like they're being plugged into the Matrix and have sit still and lean forward over their belly for roughly half an hour. All well and fine by itself if you're not pregnant and in labor. If that's the case, then you have to lean over and sit very still while in the throes of massive labor contractions so the joy adds up quickly. Once the drugs started it took about 10 minutes for her pain to subsist.

At one point, My Fair Lady tried to sit up and her elbow came back on the bed and broke one of the plastic vials on the IV line. We saw clear fluid spill (a small amount) onto the bed, so I left to get the nurse. I returned 30 seconds later to find My Fair Lady covered in blood, the baby monitor was going off the chart and she was clutching her arm while forlornly looking at me.

This is exactly the combination of look and circumstance you never, ever want to be in.

The nurse came in right behind me, saw what was going down, and sprang into action. She called in another nurse who in turn brought another doctor with her. The mighty trio sealed the wound, removed the broken IV, and replaced it all within two minutes give or take. Apparently this never happens, as one nurse kept repeating, and my guess is that for some reason the broken IV triggered a blow-back from the vein. But all was cleaned up and My Fair Lady and Pending were declared just fine.

Thirty seconds later Doc walked in from her rounds and asked if anything was going on. It was one of those sitcom moments life throws at you every now and then to break the tension.

Following another six hours of non-progress, a decision was made to schedule a c-section at 6 a.m. Thursday morning so I went home close to 1 a.m. to get some sleep. I’m laying down and not five minutes later the phone rings. I saw it was My Fair Lady. Now, take into account all that happened that day and tell me what you think she might want to tell me.

Good night? Sweet dreams? Oh no.

Apparently the baby’s heart rate had started dropping while they were administering a new batch of Pitocin right after I left and since Pending wasn’t engaging at all then Doc opted to release Pending a few hours in advance of his/her street date.

Fortunately we live literally five minutes from the hospital. I’ve timed it.

I get back just as they've finished prepping My Fair Lady for the surgery, and she's understandably terrified. It's been a day from hell and the capper is highly invasive surgery to remove a large parasite from her insides. I again gave thanks to the Creator for letting me be the cause of this chaos and not the recipient. As they wheeled her out, Doc tossed me some scrubs.

This proved interesting. I threw on the scrubs followed by the hairnet then looked at the blue shoe covers. I was assured they would fit just about anything. I compared them to the Merrill hiking boots I was wearing. If those fit over the shoes I was wearing, then I was a WWII fighter pilot (Ret.) So I opted instead for the white boot covers and when I stood up I looked like part of a hazmat team. Doc's assistant came to get me and after sanitizing up, into the OR we went.

Doc had me sit next to My Fair Lady’s head while the rest of her remained thankfully obscured by a large drape. I comforted her and told her everything was going to be fine. Meanwhile, all I hear is a giant vacuum going strong on the other side of the curtain. Suddenly an urge struck me. It was the urge to stand up and see what was going on. I just had to see it if only for the sheer novelty of...

I promptly stomped that urge into the ground then rolled over it like Kent did to Otto in “A Fish Called Wanda.”

All of a sudden we heard a loud cry. We stared at each other. Then Doc spoke:

“Oh! It’s a boy!”

Pending had officially hit Release Status. We welcomed Max 0.1 into this world on November 20, 2008, at 1:47 a.m. My Fair Lady was confined to quarters until Sunday when we brought him home to Casa de Skim. Thus far he’s doing well, but Sunday night and Monday night screamed and cried to all hours of the night pushing My Fair Lady to the verge of insanity. That’s how I wound up carrying him for an hour before collapsing onto the couch with him on my chest... a position we remained in for the next three hours. Repeat the following night.

Welcome to parenthood.

It's a boy!

I've written up a much longer post than this but it's on a flash drive at the house so I'll have to post it later. But for the world of the internets, I now have a son named Max 0.1 and he's an absolute doll. Sort of like a Chatty Cathy only everytime you pull the string it screams bloody murder at you.

For the most part, he's pretty laid back considering he's only five days old at this point. When he gets worked up is at night which has resulted in a sum total of 6 hours sleep for Yours Truly out of the last 72. I'm having to type this slowly because I see three keyboards when I look down. Were I any groggier, the spell check would even say, "Sorry dude, I have no clue what word dfadhsfda is supposed to eb."

But he's a keeper. I understand now the sheer absolute panic only parents are capable of experiencing, and if you've heard the stories but blown them off then you have no clue what it feels like. The first night he was home, things were cool during the day. Then 8 p.m. rolled around and he started fussing. By midnight it was into full out crazy and by 3 a.m. we'd lost our minds. More specifically My Fair Lady actually had because she'd been in the hospital the previous five days and was already beyond exhausted. I wound up with Max 0.1 around 4:30 a.m. and he and I wound up on the couch where amazingly enough he slept like a champ in my arms.

Rinse-repeat last night only change my final location to my desk in the office. Whoo-hoo!

We're excited though and after his first pediatric appointment today are proud to note that he's regained most of the initial weight and is progressing quite nicely. He may also have his days and nights mixed up slightly which means this week and next should be filled with fun as we try to correct that. If we can get him to be on a three to four hour schedule at night we'll be in good shape.

In the meantime, I think My Fair Lady will actually hold a gun to my head should I be remiss in future blogging so I may be picking this back up on a more routine basis. I'm sure this week will also net itself plenty of stories worth relating via my skewed perception.

But we got the best present two people could ever hope for - a fully healthy baby that is a bundle of joy. We love him absolutely and I'm looking forward to warping him with my film library. I can hardly believe that I have a chance to see Star Wars and Monty Python through my son's eyes at some point and it should be interesting to see his reactions.

Then again, there's always Kung-fu Panda which I instinctively know he's going to go simply bonkers for.

I Drink From the Keg of Glory

Note: This tale is from April, 2008. Enjoy.

This weekend, My Fair Lady and I drank from The Keg of Glory. Waaaaaay back in 2002, a race of sorts popped up in Dallas. It was called the "Urban Challenge" and it was a scavenger hunt of sorts. The point was to start the race with a set of clues which you would need to decipher in order to find certain locations scattered across the city. Only public transportation, i.e. DART buses and the rail) were allowed in terms of transportation. No bikes, no cars, no nothing. Just your feet and your DART pass. You could have friends standing by in their homes with Google at the ready, and both Crayola and Fireball proved invaluable. Once you arrived at your destinations, you had to take a picture of yourself and your teammate at those locations.

The challenge was not so much in the finding of the locations that year as it was surviving the heat. The organizers, who were clearly not native to the area, thought it a a great idea to hold it at the first of September which is still in the Texas summer. So it was that we journeyed forth in 100+ degree heat, all chipper and excited. Our pictures that year were hilarious because the first one showed us excited, the next one showed us to be a little less excited, then the third one showed us already sunburned but kinda gung-ho, and so on and so forth. The eighth picture, also the point where we gave up, shows us completely melting. Think the ending of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in t-shirts and backpacks and that's it.

Fireball was kind enough to answer his phone that year and not ask any questions when all he heard on the other end was "I'm melting.... MELTING...." I don't recall much after that but apparently in my incoherent ramblings (which come from having to hold the phone with one hand and paste your lips back onto your face with the other) I gave him the address we died at. He drove over, poured us into his car, and drove us back downtown where we crawled across the finish line along with another couple of teams in, believe it or not, worse shape than us. With only a few fatalities that year, the future looked bright for more races to come.

Fortunately, the weather the following year was fantastic and we placed 19th thus qualifying for the National Championships in New Orleans, which we had to forgo since that was right in the middle of My Fair Lady's law school exams. The next year, the contest mysteriously vanished.

Fast forward to this weekend...

The newly christened "The Urban Race" was upon us and of course My Fair Lady would not allow us to miss it. So it was that we arrived at Dick's Last Resort in the West End (i.e. the family-style party center of Dallas) and stood around looking at the other teams. This year, organizers thought to hold the contest in APRIL which proved a wise decision because the weather was in the high 60s, and it was a beautiful, cloudless day. The prices this year included an award for "Best Costume," the result of which was a high number of people wearing all manner of elaborate, and not so elaborate, crazy-wear. We spied a man and woman dressed as Mr. and Mrs. Rambo complete with war paint, inflatable weapons, and bullets wrapped around their chests. Another team was dressed in suits (yes, suits) while two others were dressed as ninjas. I was, frankly, surprised to see them so I assume they were training ninjas who had not yet received details on being covert.

The announcer called to us and gathered us in the square outside Dick's and assistants passed out envelopes containing clues. The good news this year was that we could team up with another couple, and our good friends M&L joined us. They had run in the previous races with us, so it was fun to have fellow veterans on our side. At high noon-ish, the buzzer sounded and all of us tore into our clues. We could do the clues in any order, and we could skip one of them. Two of the clues, however, were mandatory and skipping those was obviously not allowed. Should we miss or mess up on any of the clues, we could still finish and take a 30-minute penalty. The clues broke down as follows:

1) Find someone with an out of state drivers license
2) Find the number 225 on any building and yes, it could be part of an address (i.e. 12256 Somewhere Dr.)
3) Find a Mexican flag
4) Go to a specific carnival inflatable ride place, run their inflatable gauntlet and take a picture coming down the slide at the end (Mandatory)
5) Find a specific tae-kwan-do place and take a 5-10 minute lesson, noting that only groups of 10-20 would be accepted at a time
6) Find a place that made concentric circles in the sand every 24 hours
7) Get to a specific stall in the Farmer's Market, take a banana, then feed it to your teammate (Mandatory)
Cool Decipher an anagram to find a location, then arrive there and hold up the number of fingers that matched the Cowboy's win record last season
9) Get to Flag Pole Hill and take a shot of the flag pole while holding up the number of fingers of the surrounded picnic tables
10) Decipher clues to get an address, then once there high five one another over the address
11) Find a specific bronze cow and take a picture showing its hoofs
12) Do a crossword puzzle included with the clues

AND WE WERE OFF!!! Like the wind, some might say. I'd say more like a subtle breeze. We spent about half an hour or so cracking the clues and between the four of us we figured them out, locations and all. We recognized that the inflato-course and Flag Pole Hill were hell-and-gone from downtown Dallas, but that everything else was within walking distance of the finish line (also Dick's Last Resort). So we figured it would be wise to do the furthest ones out first, then come back downtown and knock out the rest. We headed down a thin alley towards the rail station when My Fair Lady was struck with inspiration. It occurred to her that while we were in the West End that we should start asking people if they were from out of state. So it was that we found this lovely lady right at the start:

We interrupted her lunch but she was gracious enough to be from Pennsylvania and to share that bit of geography with us for our first clue. While we were taking this shot, one of our cohorts ran inside only to come back out and let us know there was a Mexican flag hanging from the rafters. We checked with the gal at the front counter and she waved us through, already tired of our fellow racers hustling past people concerned only with their enchiladas. The result was our second clue:

Viva Mexico! After a quick pit stop, it was on to our next clue. We raced out of the restaurant ignoring the stares of people expecting to see a camera crew following us. We ran to the rail stop and patiently waited for the Blue Line to arrive. It's promptness did not disappoint for it pulled up alongside us and we elbowed our way on board. Roughly 15 minutes later, the train pulled to a stop near where Flag Pole Hill was, twenty or so teams hopped off, but M&L insisted we stay on to the next stop. The next one would put us in striking distance of the inflato-course, which was the same train of thought exhibited by three other teams. The Browns, Mr. & Mrs. Rambo, the Greens, and us all piled out of the train at the next stop and bolted. It was exactly like on the Amazing Race because every team ran full out... for about 30 yards. Then we all remembered we were in Texas, we were not racing for $1 million, and where we were headed was any one's guess.

We all knew vaguely where this inflato-course was, but not specifically. We all made it to the intersection of 635 and some random street which is where our paths diverged. The Browns turned south and opted to follow 635 all the way to the course. We, and the other teams, opted to go north to a major street where we would turn right then follow that around to our location.

While the Greens and Mr. & Mrs. Rambo went further north, we hooked a right and cut through the warehouse row to the far side. We arrived at the major street the inflato-course was off of well ahead of the others. The two teams were behind us and the Browns were no where in sight. Neither was the inflato-course, for the record. We headed south, and amongst much swearing and bickering (entirely from me) we finally came in sight of the cross street we'd all been looking for. My Fair Lady encountered a random piece of metal, cast off from a truck, that whacked her a good one on the shin. Her latest tetanus shot was, fortunately, just a few years back so we pressed on rather than amputate on the go. The other two teams were catching up to us because they'd decided it was a good time to run.

We booked it to the inflato-course where we were warmly greeted by the proprietor and his merry band of people. I yanked off my shoes, then dove headfirst into the course roughly 15 seconds after Mr. Commando had entered. I raced through the course, my years of gaming bringing to me the skill to make split-second decisions on how best to go over/under/through the course. Mr. Commando lacked for such awesome prowess, for I blew past him, scaled the final inflatable ladder, then heard My Fair Lady ask me if I was ready for my picture. The result is such:

I hurled myself out of the course, catching the camera in midair as My Fair Lady hurried off to begin the trial. Moments later she flew down the slide. We were then waylaid by M&L who struggled mightily to get "the perfect shot" of her coming down the slide. Finally, they finished the course (I think the fourth time) then just stood on the slide for the shot. Good enough, we thought and then moved it. With the generously provided lemonade slushies firmly in hand, we were then off and we were forced to make a decision - head back to the train or continue walking south to Flag Pole Hill. Our numbers crunchers did the math and found it to be six to one, half a dozen to the other. A half hour walk back to the train, only to wait for it followed by another 10 minutes south and then to walk over? Or should we just hike south?

We opted to hike south.

Along the way, we cut through a few neighborhoods and went off the beaten path. One team of racers ran past us as they headed from Flag Pole Hill up to the inflato-course. It should be noted here that we were walking downhill this whole time and they had been running up hill. Heh heh heh. After exiting the neighborhoods, we found the hill, counted the lone picnic table, and here was our victory shot:

It was then on to the train, and southward bound once more. As we arrived at the train, a few other racers were exiting and asked us directions. We were kind enough to share, knowing it had taken us roughly two hours to do this circuit that netted us exactly two shots. We figured we'd be in good shape if we could knock out the rest downtown. Once the train started south, we began to formulate our strategery.

Since we exited right next to the street of one clue, we worked to find the address. We stumbled onto it, lay down and high-fived one another as seen below:

We decided to head to the Farmer's Market next since the rest seemed to be grouped together near the finish line. We recalled a previous race where we spent a good hour and change looking for a stall with "Little John's" on a banner, and hoped this time it would be quicker. Fortune smiled upon us because we quickly tracked down the stall, which resulted in my favorite shot of the course:

Potassium firmly in our stomachs, it was off to the other side of downtown. At this point, the nagging sense of doubt began. Where the hell would we find 225 on a building, we all wondered? This part genuinely scared us, more so than finding someone with an out of state drivers license which we admit had been an awesome stroke of luck early on. We continued onward and past Dallas City Hall (aka OCP Headquarters) we came to the bronzed cattle drive. The clue told us to look for one cow with its eyes closed, its tail between its legs, and its hooves in a certain position. No trouble! Only about 30 of these suckers to look at. Between the four of us, we canvased many a cow that afternoon and when I look my grandkids in the eyes and relay this tale to them over hot cocoa many moons from now, I'll be able to tell them with perfect honesty that yes, granddad did spend too much time of his life looking at the underbellies of bronzed cattle.

"HEY!" shouted a female voice. It turned out to be some girls at a quinceanera. My Fair Lady waved frantically over the cows (how she expected me to hear her waving I don't know) and we all ran over to find the cow we'd been looking for. As seen below:

ONWARD! We hustled across a few streets to find the below image:



Apparently, this giant-ass screw makes perfect concentric circles in the sand every 24 hours. Basically, it's a Zen garden by way of Texas oilmen and it's hilarious to behold in person. Following this, we ran on to the next clue. The anagram we'd deciphered pointed us to the Old Red Courthouse, and the result was this picture:

13 wins by the 'Boys last year. Too bad the three loses were, you know, IMPORTANT games. PeteRock no doubt is snickering as he reads this part.

At this point we were down to our last clue - find 225 on a building. It was roughly 3:40 p.m. and we hadn't seen another team in some time so we had no idea what our place was. We scrambled, we talked to people on the streets, we even split up. Nothing. Then, My Fair Lady and I got a call from M&L who'd found it. We ran to where they were - right at the head of the tiny alley we'd walked through at the beginning of the race. The number 225 was scribbled on the wall right there as seen below:

If we'd looked to our right as we entered that at the very beginning, we wouldn't have experienced any panic. With the final shot snapped, we raced back to Dick's and landed on the finish line. We showed them our pics, and they told us we'd placed in the top 25 which meant automatic qualification into the Nationals. An hour later, we found out that My Fair Lady and I placed 16th on the list of north of a 100 teams. Hell yeah. Our final victory pose was with our medals at the finish line:

We have drunk from The Keg of Glory and damn if the taste isn't sweet.

Anatomy of a Scene

I’m nearing completion on my feature (the first draft going out for review, any way) and I thought it might be time to do a quick run down of what exactly has transpired to bring it to this point. My Fair Lady has a tendency to underestimate the massive amount of work that goes into a feature screenplay, and my parents (good natured though they are) remain baffled that someone, let alone their eldest son, would voluntarily want to write for a living.

In hindsight, I think it may have been easier on them if I’d said I was gay. Instead, they’re stuck with a writer as their eldest, and an actress as their middle child. Brother G being the youngest seems to be the only responsible one since he went to work in The Vault.

I began the script back in my college days. It was my second semester as a Junior and my writing class was supposed to write a series of short scripts every week or so. No problem. I showcased how I could switch genres with each new script, regardless of what the topic was. Then the big semester grade hit – Write a short film, or a feature. Either way, it was due at the beginning of May (I think that’s when it was. This is 10 years removed.)

Naturally, I opted for the challenge of writing the feature. Why? Because I was an idiot.

So it gets to the Friday before it’s due. The table read for the two features was Monday starting at 7 p.m. I get back to my dorm from the house at around 8 p.m. I look up my script. Page 3. The blinking cursor flashed about halfway down the page.

Crap.

So I started writing. And writing. And writing some more. I think I managed to get 15 to 20 pages written that night. By the time I blacked out it was around 5 a.m. I woke up about 8 a.m. and realized exactly what I was going to be doing for the rest of the weekend. I phoned my girlfriend telling her not to call me. I contacted friends explaining to them that all trips and distractions were postponed through that weekend. Then I started writing.

I don’t recall much beyond that, and that’s not because it’s been 10 years. Well, partly it’s not. Primarily, it’s because I was on such a Coca-Cola-fueled bender of caffeine, terror, and creative energy for those 72 hours that a literal black spot exists in my memory where that weekend was. I get flashes every now and then, but nothing substantial. Oh, and I didn’t sleep again until some time Sunday night when I blacked out again for a few hours. My girlfriend told me I walked into the school cafeteria wearing my pajama pants at one point. I do recall talking briefly to her and her friend but do not remember wearing pajamas. That’s as specific a memory of the weekend I have.

I wrote the script (which clocked in around 120 pages), printed it, raced to Office Max and had several copies made and bound. Then I raced straight from there to the film school where I sat down as everyone else entered the room for the table read. That’s how close I cut it.

The read went okay and everyone seemed to like it. My professor even gave me an A on the project, but I think that was more on account of the size of the project I endured than on the quality of the script. From my point of view, I thought it nailed the skeleton of what I wanted to do and say with it but that was all. I put the excess copies in a bin and put it aside with the understanding that one day I’d rewrite it into something better.

Fast forward 10 years and I run into my professor at Brother G’s graduation. The professor recalled the script and the general subject matter, praised it, and was disappointed I never did anything with it. I sat there next to My Fair Lady and in front of my parents slack-jawed. How the hell did he recall that? Do you realize how many of these things he’s read over the years? What made mine stand out? HOLY CRAP!!!

We came home and I pulled out an old copy. I got three pages in before throwing it out. “Awful” would be a charitable way to describe it. My guess was the idea behind the script is what stuck out. You know how when something good happens to you and you kinda think you recall it well years later but are, in truth, romanticizing what happened? Yeah, something like that is what I chalk up to regarding his memory of my script.

But I thought about it. Then I thought about it some more.

I fired up my screenwriter program and started writing. I wrote an entirely new opening scene that not only nicely segued into the meat of the story, but established everything I wanted to say in the film. I have a knack for writing killer openers, then flailing about in the middle and the end. Which is why I’ve worked for years to hone my technique.

But you know what? In four months, I’ve turned out what I think is a pretty dang solid script. Not perfect, but a dang good read. It’s commercial as hell while still being funny and scary and entertaining and surprising. Ten years later I still recalled the basic story and with a lot of changes to it, I think it works. I think it really works now.

I’m even happier with it as I’m re-writing it now for essentially the third time. I wrote 15 pages in my screenwriter software, and then exported to Word to do notes in my spare time. I wound up writing the rest of it on the fly here and there even though I kept meaning to go back to my specialty software. Around page 65 I said screw it and just kept writing in Word. Once it was done, I figured I would transcribe it all back into my other software so as to accomplish both proper formatting along with another re-write to smooth out transitions, gaffes, plot holes, etc.

It worked. For example, I wasn’t satisfied with how the bad guy and the good guy met in the Word draft, but I rewrote the scene as I got to it and it works better now. Not great, but better. I’m still reworking that scene in my head because I know there are better ways to do it. I think, however, I’m going to let that go for right now and get another opinion once it’s done. See what notes I get, then apply those to the scene. I have another idea on how to do the scene but it would take far more research than I have time for.

The goal of this was to bang it out in the span of a month or so. It’s now gone over four. But the end is in sight. Honestly. I’m in the mid-40s on the re-re-write now and I’m going to blaze through as much as I can in the next few days. If I can finish it by the weekend and get it to my former professor before heading out on a road trip for the weekend, I’ll be one seriously happy camper. Even if he comes back with “this sucks” it will at least be more feedback on my script writing than I’ve had in the last few years. Not to mention it’ll be a solid monster movie script right around Halloween which is as good a time as any to bombard Hollywood agents with it.

I don’t know if this will sell. That’s less the point for me right now, to be honest. I want to have this completed and sent to my prof for review, then hopefully he’ll send it to his agent with a disclaimer of “Read this now!” at the top. That’s what I want: My work in front of an agent’s eyes for the first time ever.

Regarding money, let me state exactly why every writer in Hollywood is a bullshit artist. To a one, all of them say the same thing: “Write what you want. If it’s good enough, it’ll sell. Don’t write with money in mind. Never do that. Write from your heart.”

Meanwhile, you’re slogging through your personal life story in script form which they know will never sell and they’re cranking out “John Tucker Must Die 2.” Never, ever, ever listen to one of these clowns when they tell you not to worry about the sale. It’s ALL about the sale. This is a business that involves art. It may have been reversed at some point, but not anymore. Thank you, “Star Wars.”

Writing “The Godfather” today will get you no where unless your name is Steven Spielberg, Jerry Bruckheimer, Ridley Scott, James Cameron, or now Christopher Nolan. If you’re established with a proven track record, you can get anything you want done (for the most part). If, however, you’re an outsider like me that no one has ever heard of then your tragic tale of woe and redemption ain’t gonna cut it. Not at all. Hell, it may not even make the festival circuit. If you have personal visions, and I have plenty, write them but do not lead with them.

Hollywood wants what will make them plenty of money, first and foremost. Awards are nice too, but between an Oscar and the grosses of “The Dark Knight,” which do you think studio executives are going to choose every single time?

Is that a deeply cynical view? Nope. It’s a realistic one. Hollywood is a business. It invariably learns the wrong lessons from success but this is where people can capitalize. If a script is rock solid and appeals to a broad demographic, then it will sell. I genuinely believe that. And will continue to believe that until my script gets shot down by every studio in town. At which point my tune shall change.

To that end, what I’m writing should ultimately be pretty solid. Maybe even “Lost Boys” solid if I’m lucky. I’ll settle for “Transylvania 6-5000.”

I’ll let everyone know if it sells. That sound of someone screaming at the top of their lungs will be me. I will likely also be jumping up and down at that time. Worst case scenario, I get feedback on a script my professor enjoyed when he first read it. Hopefully this time he’ll genuinely have something worth loving.

Stay tuned...

Times Are A Changin'

The Times They Are A Changin’ Come Nov.

My Fair Lady and I purchased our first house last July and closed mid-Sept. Right around one year later, we finally have improved it enough to where we’re satisfied with it. That’s not to say we didn’t like it to begin with. One thing everyone says who sets foot in the house is a variation on this sentence: “Wow, you’re place is so homey!”

It’s even more so now, baby.

We found out in March that we were expecting Holy Screaming Fury v.1 to release in November. Until we settle on an official title, I hath dubbed thee… Pending. We’re excited about Pending, but were more than a little nervous when we looked around Casa de Skim and realized how much work we had to do on the house prior to release. To wit:

• The designated nursery still had boxes in it from Sept.
• The office looked like Poland post Blitzkrieg, if the Nazis had used paper instead of tanks
• A grand total of four pictures were on our walls across the entire house. A large world map showing where we’ve been was hung in our main hallway when we first moved in. The other three were hung this year at my insistence. The remaining wall space was deafening in its emptiness.
• The fountain in the atrium remained hostile towards us. Whenever we plugged it in, it would grind and growl and call us names before allowing a bare trickle of water out. Said trickles would then fall over the edges and spill out onto the tile floor. Again, while the fountain would huff and puff and give me every reason in the world to kick its ass with a sledgehammer.
• The amount of empty space in our front and back yards bordered on ridiculous. After speaking with our neighbor, we learned that the previous tenant did not tend the yard as much as the tenant before them. The result was a series of gaping holes in our grass, branches from our SEVEN TREES in the front yard going every which way, and massive patches of dirt everywhere. This needed to be fixed, ASAP.
• Unwelcome boarders. We discovered in late fall of last year that several unruly squirrels in the neighborhood had long ago labeled our house a flop house. A hostel, if you will. Squirrels backpacking through North Texas were all welcome to crash at our pad for a while before moving on. I think I even saw a sign out once. Not only were they running across the ceiling through the night, but they weren’t even paying rent!

So what was the solution to all of these quandaries? Prioritizing.

That list may not be as long as my annual one to Santa (started a little early this year, Big Guy, so you may get two Fed Ex Overnights from me this year instead of just the one), but there are a load of subtleties per each line item. We have thus far fixed most every issue though, with the side benefit of my ongoing war against the bushy-tailed invaders inspiring notes for a new screenplay, and finished off the nursery and the office this weekend.

Then we figured it would be a smart thing to buy a chest of drawers from IKEA, one that would look nice and that we wouldn’t care about if Pending took up some red and yellow crayons and drew a mural devoted to Dora the Explorer on. Plus, the one we spotted a few weeks back was about half the cost of anything at genuine furniture stores. So we picked it up in the two boxes (we opted to go with the one made by the Poles instead of the Fins, a fact which I now find doubly amusing considering my earlier Poland reference was entirely off the cuff) and brought it home where I unpacked it last night.

My Fair Lady’s reaction was priceless. She walked in after I had everything unpacked and sorted accordingly, took one look and said, “Sweet merciful crap!”

I love a woman who can whip out appropriate “Simpsons” quotes.

“What? You were expecting something smaller?” I asked.

“I just wasn’t expecting so much… wow. Are you gonna be able to do all this?”

“Yeah,” I replied, “It looks fun.”

“FUN?!?!” Yes, she said it in all caps. “Do you know how many guys on The Nest would volunteer for something like this? No one.”

“Recall, dear, that I’m the freak who at five years of age complained that Santa was putting all my G.I. Joe toys together when that was something I wanted to do. My father, standing behind me unbeknownst to Yours Truly at the time, practically fainted from the combination of shock and joy at not having to work so hard every Christmas henceforth.”

What can I say? I like putting stuff together, though only to use. Models, with the exception of LEGOs, I consider a waste of my time. If I’m going to put something together, then I fully intend to use it on a daily basis for more than just a show piece. Toys, furniture, etc. all work for me. I also enjoy jigsaw puzzles, Scrabble, and long walks on the beach at night. Call me.

I managed to get about a third of the way through before sleep pimpslapped me upside the head. But on the whole it was a highly productive weekend. The office is done. The nursery itself is done, and all that’s left is furniture construction. This week will see the delivery of a genuine entertainment center with matching side tables, which will get all electronic cables off the ground and back behind locked doors so that Pending will not inadvertently strangle him/herself while gaming with Daddy.

This will be the culmination of the baby proofing necessary for Casa de Skim. We’ve been told repeatedly that nothing can prepare you for the changes in store. I disagree. I believe that the house can be as ready as humanly possible and once we throw the number of Poison Control and Dominos on the fridge, we will be set. The emotional journey is something entirely different, and one that I’m not focusing on at the moment. There are too many tangible issues on deck at present and the sooner those are knocked off the “To Do” list the better off we’ll be.

More stories to follow, especially once Pending hits release status.

PS – Regarding the fountain, the least it could have done is tell me its airway was constricted. I guess it was giving us a trial run for the last several months which we managed to fail spectacularly. “Is it supposed to sound like that?” “I don’t know, why don’t we dampen the sound in the room so it’ll quiet down.” Yeah, like that’s gonna fly with an infant. Upon taking it apart, draining it, then cleaning it out I found the water tube was bent in half. Fixed it, filled it up, works like a champ now. The fountain gave us failing grades across the board for taking so long to resolve its issues. We have filed an appeal, but the outlook is grim. More on this story as it develops.

Now Playing: Syriana

I find it amazing when a film is heralded as one of the best of "Insert Year Here" yet it succeeds only in repeating a previous film from the writer. In this case, writer-director Stephen Gaghan ripped himself off by retooling his script for "Traffic" and replaced the international drug trade with the international oil trade. Change the character names and he was good to go.

Overall, "Syriana" isn't a bad film at all, but it is one that I've seen before to the point where I knew the ending about 30 minutes in. For a film proclaimed as deep, heady, and impossible to predict that's pretty sad. I also don't understand why Clooney won an Oscar for his role. He's good, don't get me wrong, but Oscar caliber?

The film takes several branching paths so run with me for a moment. Clooney plays a burned out CIA operative who specializes in Beirut and the Middle East at large. He's conflicted about a missile sale that goes wrong right at the start, and works to regain approval from his bosses to return to the Middle East as soon as possible.

Matt Damon plays an energy analyst based out of Geneva, Switzerland, who trumpets the company line regarding oil futures. He, his wife (played by Amanda Peet), and their two sons live well based on his predictions and he's given an opportunity to sell his firm's services to a reigning Saudi emir. While at the party, a tragic accident strikes their family resulting in Damon working hand-in-hand with the emir's eldest son, played by Alexander Siddig (Yup, Dr. Bashir for you "DS9" fans).

It seems the eldest son is worried about being usurped by his younger brother who has the attention of oil interests lead by Christopher Plummer's character, a grizzled industrialist concerned only with controlling as much of the world's oil supply as possible. Meanwhile, Siddig's character wants to become emir so he can begin to instigate genuine reform in his country, and the region at large.

Naturally, other forces in the CIA and the oil industry, which is holding its breath pending a government greenlight on a merger between two massive companies with control of an untapped field in Asia, wouldn't appreciate the emir's son reforming squat. Meanwhile, two oil workers laid off begin their inexorable drift towards becoming suicide bombers.

Still with me so far?

The short of it is that every step of the oil trade is corrupt and nothing will change unless the oil runs out, or if the men in charge willingly change their practices to allow for the Middle East to implement honest reforms. What are the odds of either happening in our lifetime?

"Syriana" has a lot on its mind and it is a message worth hearing if only for the debate, but it would have been more of a landmark film had it not been little more than a carbon copy of one of the best films of the 90's.

Is this thing on?

Holy crap.

Talk about time flying and so forth once you get busy. It helps when your personal life spirals damn near out of control and by that I mean it totally consumes you. So let's hit a few highlights before moving on, shall we?

1) Last year I left my job on account of not getting paid for the three months prior. That would be too many pay periods by far, for those keeping score at home. A year later that account was settled up. Ahh, liens on deadbeat property enforced by the Texas Workforce Commission are a fun tool to keep in one's back pocket.

2) While out of work, attempted to make it as a professional writer. Quickly discovered that my lack of drive for the past year and change combined with my natural ADD tendencies meant I was not ideally suited to being my own boss. This resulted in...

3) Finding a temporary job as a substitute teacher at my old high school and middle school. The middle school I went to has long since been torn down and the shiny new one standing in its place made me resoundingly angry that I lacked such awesome tools when I was there. Back in my day we still had an abacus and WE LIKED IT, DAMMIT! This job resulted in pretty consistent work there on account of hitting it off with all the kids and knowing instinctively how to corral the anarchists among them. Finally, I got to deal with people on the same devious intellectual level as my own. Teachers kept calling me wanting me to cover for them, and the kids loved hanging with me. I now have a personal resume designed by two fifth grade girls hanging on my fridge because it's too adorable. More tales will follow.

4) My Fair Lady and I went through a pretty substantial personal loss last winter only to follow it up this spring by the discovery that Yours Truly packs a .44 Magnum that has six bullets in it, punk, and not five. Our little bundle of Holy Screaming Fury is slated to arrive on or about Thanksgiving of this year. Said spawn has already shown a predilection for chocolate brownie sundaes, hamburgers, and ice cream shakes. Definitely mine. Gender is unknown and will remain a mystery until the birth, and many names have been picked out. If you have thoughts or suggestions, feel free to throw them in the pot.

5) Yours Truly obtained a 9-5ish job as a writer this year. While it's in the industry of commercial real estate, something I plum knew nothing about, I know people and I know marketing and I know how to market to people. As such, I was slick enough in my interview to land the gig and have since been working steadily as a marketing guru designing brochures, documents, and the like until recently when I inherited the metrics project from Hell. I am not a spreadsheet guy but fatefully answered yes when El Jefe asked if I knew Excel. Subsequently, I found myself building an extensive database out of Excel which brings up thoughts of suicide roughly once every 45 minutes or so. This is actually down from once every 5 minutes when the project first started. Not sure if this is good or bad progress.

6) Script writing has been extensive to say the least. Wrote a script off and on all last year then finally finished it early this. I'm looking at it right now and it is desperate need of rewriting. Ran into my old college writing professor at school during Brother G's graduation in May and said prof recalled a script I'd written for his class, and expressed his disappointment that I'd never done anything with it. I returned home, pulled it out, skimmed it, threw it out, and started rewriting it from scratch. It's nearing the end and is 100X better than the crap I threw together in 72 hours 10 years ago. He is expecting to read it by the end of this month and shall, come Hell or high water. Ideally, he will pass this on to his agent who will reward me with a sale. Or a very nasty letter saying how much better this was when it was called "Titanic."

7) Also landed a scripting job two weeks ago for an animated short film. A former co-worker rang and wanted to adapt a children's book specifically targeted at cancer patients into an animated film. The idea was to script a short story from it (the book is a series of short stories told by animals to one another), have it professionally animated, then pitch it to possible investors. I turned in the script this past Thursday and my friend read it today and loved it top to bottom. I meet with her and the animator tomorrow and hopefully we'll get something going on this.

8) Also did a rewrite on another former co-worker's short film about spies and that was a lot of fun. He offered me a wordless part as a guy who gets sniped which of course I leaped at. Then his DP got a job working as the DP on Oliver Stone's future bomb W so obviously the short was put on hold. Expect it to resume sometime this fall. Said short is planned to be shopped to various festivals and no doubt my 15 second cameo will result in a sale.

9) The house My Fair Lady and Yours Truly bought last summer continues to take shape. The nursery has been finished save for the installation of new closet doors followed by furniture. But the room is painted, a new fan/ceiling light is installed, new blinds are hung, and the crib is built all courtesy of Yours Truly. Apparently, I know how to install lights on the quick which saves a ton on paying an electrician to do it. Next up is a new entry way fixture which we should pick up in the next few weeks.

10) The future of this blog remains in doubt. While I definitely need to blog more, I'm pondering changing the name to something else. Casa de Skim was funny for me, not so much for people actually looking for something which increasingly I see the value in. I guess it depends on whether I can actually post more than once every other year. Funny enough, I've actually kept up with blog posts but they remain on my flash drive. Call it laziness on my part but the more Word docs I see on that drive the less inclined I get to transferring them to this blog. I'll do it someday. Maybe.

And that brings us up to speed, pretty much. My primary focus now that the nursery is done is the completion of this full script. I'm currently in the 70s and the story continues on at full speed. The problem I hit with the script earlier in the year was that the story ran out around page 86. I know a subsequent rewrite will help that along, but the good news for the current script is that the story hasn't run its course at all. The way things look now it should blow past page 100 easily and in theory top out around pages 110 and 115. In theory.

More as it develops...

Oops, I've done it again

Look at that. Not a single post in close to a month. At some point I honestly may stop trying to convince myself that I'll post with anything resembling frequency but until that day I'll do what I can to remember I have a blog in the first place. I'm working on what can only be described as life-changing work at the moment, hence my temporary departure from the land of the living. It may not seem like much to the non-writers of the world, but for me it is a major league event:

The completion of my first full screenplay.

Technically it would be my second since I banged one out in 72 hours in college because I was on page 10 on Friday night and 110 more pages of it was due that Monday. But the one was a feeble skeleton held together by cliche and rote whatever, not to mention the caffeine bender from hell, and I think the professor gave me an A on it out of sympathy more than quality. I'd tell you what the details were but I honestly can't recall that weekend. There's a giant blank spot where it was and I had to rely on my ex-girlfriend's account of me walking into the college lunch facility wearing my pajamas to assemble anything close to a full memory.

As it stands, this is one that I've been working on for close to a year off and on and since I've finally, finally, finally decided to stop being, well, an indecisive tosser and actually be a writer, then it helps to finish one project before moving on to the next. The result goes something like this: I finish this script in either by or during this coming weekend. I print the entire monster out (which should be between 110 and 130 pages) then I'm going to let it sit on my desk for one entire week. If I have thoughts about it, I'll make notes and stickie them to the script. But I ain't making a single edit until exactly 168 hours have passed me by.

At which point, comes the re-write. Followed shortly thereafter by the polish, then the re-polish. During the one week interim period, I intend to get cranking on fine-tuning two outlines I've played with on additional scripts. One is a detective thriller and the other is a horror film. God only knows why but these things pop into my head and won't let go, so I may as well give 'em a chance to run around and play.

During this time I've been working as a substitute teacher to bring in additional funds to the household and believe me when I say there is a gigantor post coming about those experiences. I've also been burning through movies and should start posting those reviews shortly. In the meantime, know that I'm still around, alive, and actually working on being a professional at all this which includes my current job search for full-time employment. I have some good leads, applied to one in particular tonight I'm anxious about, and here's hoping I'll have something by my birthday in a few weeks.

For now, it's off to sleep and tomorrow I'll keep writing.

Updates

You know you're behind on your reviews when you have to pull up your Netflix queue history just to remind yourself of everything you watched in the last month. Plenty of reviews are coming over the next few weeks along with a some more stories and possible change of Blog title. "Casa de Skim" struck me as an amusing personal joke but not one any body outside of me is likely to find funny. As such, I will change the title of the blog soon once I decide on a better name for it.

Maybe then I might actually get some more traffic in addition to my parents. Hi mom!

Personal Best... ish

My Fair Lady queued "The Talented Mr. Ripley" this weekend and decided to watch it yesterday. She made it a grand total of 13 minutes in before declaring, "This is stupid!" That beats my record of making it 25 minutes into the film before deciding it was awful.

Yet for some inexplicable reason both my mom and Diva enjoyed it. Go figure.

Happy New Year 2008

Why not start off the New Year with a video that's just hilarious. And I mean that in the strangest possible way.

Terry Tate Compilation

"The pain train's coming for you! Woo-woo! Woo-woo!"

Whoever came up with this ad campaign at Reebok is hopefully running the company now because it was nine kinds of genius. Terry Tate - Office Linebacker is iconic and the ads are so blasted funny it is physically impossible to keep a straight face through any of them. Each spot has is packed with quotable lines so picking one or two favorites is nigh impossible. Someone on the interwebs compiled most of the ads into one 10 minute spot on YouTube and here it is.

Behold, the genius that is Terry Tate - Office Linebacker:



The missing ones I know of explain how Terry was "discovered" and his "sensitivity training," both of which are absolutely hysterical. Sensitivity Training and the OSPN Terry Tate restrospective. Enjoy.

Now Playing: Hollywood Homicide

Harrison Ford, why hast thou forsaken me?

This is Indiana Jones, Han Solo, and John Book. Anyone that grew up in the 1980s idolized him, yet his last genuine hit was the over-amped Air Force One 10 years ago (and I’m not counting the awful What Lies Beneath because that film, like this one, sucked). Instead of using his 30 years worth of clout to only work with the best, he apparently doesn’t care anymore.

I swear I don’t know what goes on in the man’s head when he goes out of his way to star in unfunny tripe like Hollywood Homicide when it is so clearly beneath him that even he doesn’t seem cognizant of which film he’s in.

Not helping matters is the fact that his partner is played by Mr. Lacking Personality himself, Josh Hartnett. This is another case of an undeserving actor having a career when no semblance of talent is ever on screen. His character, of course, wants to be an actor, which proves unintentionally ironic during his thespian displays of shouting “Stella!” at the top of his lungs. About the only time he’s convincing during the film is... wait, nope. I can’t finish that sentence with a straight face so let’s move on to what else fails.

The plot involves a rap group finding themselves on the wrong end of a machine gun at a club, and when the cops are called in to investigate they find their personal lives intertwined with the case. Think of a cop movie cliché and I guarantee you it makes an appearance somewhere, which is shocking considering the amount of talent both in front of and behind the camera. There are plenty of big names who sort of blow through their roles as though they’re just doing this for the paycheck and aren’t ashamed to let it show. Martin Landau has an Oscar, last I heard, yet he's playing a knock-off of Robert Evans who was better spoofed by Dustin Hoffman in Wag the Dog.

Just sayin'.

It's funny now to watch Isaiah Washington play the rage-filled music mogul behind everything, because of the hostility which bounced him from "Grey's Anatomy." The ultra-hot Lena Olin appears as Ford's psychic girlfriend and like Keith David as Ford's supervisor, is completely, utterly wasted. So much talent, so little script. The film is not serious enough to become emotionally involved with, funny enough to laugh at, or sleazy enough to revel in. It limps along to its conclusion, the least exciting car chase I think I've ever seen followed by equally unexciting show downs with the villains.

While I may have a glimmer of hope for the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, it has more to do with the combination of Lucas, Spielberg, Ford, and the return of Karen Allen than with Ford by himself. By this point, I think it’s obvious that the man doesn’t care anymore which is heartbreaking for fans. When Ford wants to, he proves time and again that he’s more than an actor. He’s an icon.

I sincerely wish he would care about something again, and soon.

Now Playing: Modern Romance

"Petey... Carol... Petey... Carol..."

Albert Brooks walks a fine line for me. Sometimes he’s funny while others he comes off as annoying. I think it depends on how likable he is in his films. Witness Finding Nemo or Defending Your Life where his schtick works because the characters are genuinely heartfelt, sweet characters who try their best but are held back by their personal fears.

I bring up those examples because his work in Modern Romance falls on its face immediately after the opening. By the end of the film, literally nothing has changed for any of the characters and Brooks' neurosis fail to come off cute and register instead as stalker-ish.

He plays Robert, a film editor currently working on a sci-fi film starring George Kennedy, and is in a semi-continuous relationship with Mary, played by the luscious Kathryn Harrold. The opening scene is hilarious as he meets her for dinner then tries to break up with her. Robert demands she not call him, then Mary looks him straight in the eye and asks, “This time?”

It turns out they break up all the time, then get back together, only to break up later and Robert isn’t as much in love with Mary as he is with the pain and essential "rebirth" of the breakup-makeup process.

The film does have its moments like when Robert, post-breakup, is flying high on Quaaludes, but it has one note it hits repeatedly for 90 minutes and it’s not a good one. His first date after the breakup laid me out but afterwards the film simply wasn’t very funny.

Alright, the George Kennedy film was pretty funny as was the discussion with the director afterwards but that’s it. Certainly nothing funny happened after that. Oh Albert, why won’t you make me laugh more? You know I love you, don’t you?

Imagine a film like that and you have Modern Romance. I was hitting my head on the desk in frustration from the moment he finds the phone bill through to the credits, so thanks for the migraine, Al. I suspected based on the premise that My Fair Lady wouldn’t find any of the film funny and when I gave her a verbal highlight reel her response was succinct:

“That doesn’t sound very romantic. Or funny. Why would I watch that?”

Exactly.

This may come with the reputation of being Albert Brooks’ masterpiece but it says less about modern romance than it does about Brooks’ desire to be in a room where Harrold disrobes completely before climbing into bed with him.

If nothing else, you have to admire her willingness to show off her killer, and all-natural, body and for that alone I thank Albert Brooks. But the rest of the film could have been spent, I don’t know, maybe playing a character that actually funny. Or grows.

Then again, Brooks’ point is that that’s the joke. It’s too bad no one told him it wasn't a funny one.

Now Playing: I Trust You To Kill Me

“Sometimes you have to go through something to find out why you did it.”

“If you know anything about Kiefer, organization is not his middle name.”

I Trust You To Kill Me is a brilliant documentary about what happens when you take a well-known actor and make him the road manager of a band on the verge of success during a two-week road trip across Europe around Christmas. Throw in a metric ton of egos and chaos ensues. What I found absolutely fascinating though was the intimacy the cameras caught because Kiefer Sutherland is very guarded about his privacy now that he’s grown up.

Kiefer has a very touching story about a case he carries. He also attacks a Christmas tree while drunk, which makes him even more awesome in my book. But the moments that stick with the viewer are ones where he lets his guard down completely while talking to the film crew and just says what is on his mind. When the band gets to one gig and no one is there, Sutherland and his best friend literally hit the streets of Dublin and go into bars and restaurants handing out tickets and talking the band up. He also calls in to a local radio station for an impromptu interview where he talks at length about the band and invites all listeners to come to the pub that night to hear them.

Sutherland knows that it is his fame that will help get butts in the seats and he is fine with that. He shares some hearty laughs with his friend along the way and it makes you happy for him that he is enjoying himself, even if bar patrons only recognize him as Jack Bauer.

If the music were not good then the documentary would suffer, but fortunately Rocco and his band can play. I don’t think they’re quite as good as Sutherland talks them up to be but they do have plenty of talent. Rocco has some anger issues to work through but he’s smart enough to channel them through his music and his vocals are better for it.

Sutherland starts the documentary talking about how he can only take them so far and then after a certain point he will have to, by necessity, step back. When they reach that point in Berlin the result is hilarious. Without going into the specifics, the editing is pure gold as it contrasts the situation the band is in with where Sutherland is.

I Trust You To Kill Me is a very good look behind the scenes of an up and coming band on the road as well as an unguarded look at Kiefer Sutherland as he begins to realize his hard partying days are almost over.

If you consider yourself a fan of his then you absolutely must watch this.

Now Playing: 28 Days Later

Danny Boyle knows how to direct a thriller, no doubt about it. His introductory film, Shallow Grave, remains the single most malevolent film I’ve ever seen. There’s no other way I can think of to describe it, not even as a descent into madness. Boyle knows how to build tension and wring ever last drop of sweat out of his audience but far too frequently he’s undone by those very same talents.

As such, I think 28 Days Later is all the best and all the worst examples of his personal tics together in a single film.

The film opens with a group of animal rights activists trying to free some chimps from a research lab. A doctor catches them then freaks out when he sees what they’re doing. He warns them that the chimps are infected with rage and clearly the activists think that’s nothing more than a metaphor. They find out how wrong that assumption is about five seconds later then the film jumps to a hospital bed 28 days later.

Jim (Cillian Murphy) sits up in an empty hospital and finds himself very much alone in the greater London area. As he starts to put together the pieces he discovers the United Kingdom has been evacuated because of a virus. Then he goes to church and finds out that not everyone has left.

The “not-a-zombie” people in the film are genuinely frightening especially in the context of germ warfare. I say that knowing full well the film, despite the obviousness of the infection metaphor, is pretty much Boyle’s attempt to ramp up the zombie horror thriller and in that regard the film succeeds. It’s genuinely unsettling throughout and the digital video grainy aspect lends an extra layer of grit to the film.

I think Murphy is talented when it comes to being creepy but he’s sort of stranded here since he’s playing “normal.” Even the point where he would, one presumes, naturally excel late in the film feels like a cheat because I couldn’t see the character going all “Lord of the Flies” that quickly. Which brings me to the turning point of the film for me and for long time fans.

About an hour in, Jim’s crew arrives at a military base and this is the exact moment where the film tends to lose people. I can understand what Boyle was saying here, but it does feel wildly out of place. There is only one truly bad guy introduced here and he’s more of a right-hand man than the actual military leader (long-time Boyle pal Christopher Eccleston) who wants to do right by his men more than anything else.

The film maintains its intensity through to the very end, but this sequence feels more like a middle than an end, the coda not withstanding. On that note, I somewhat preferred the other ending that played theatrically (included on the disc) even if Boyle should have stopped it before his final shot.

I’m curious now about the sequel, 28 Weeks Later, to see what effects a larger budget and bigger explosions have on this story. The original film definitely is a good scare-fest, but those same scares are muted by that final hour and some poor character decisions.

Now Playing: This Film Is Not Yet Rated

After watching this documentary two things are abundantly clear to me. The first is that MPAA former honcho Jack Valenti was an absolutely brilliant politician and the second is that Kirby Dick is my new hero.

Dick set out to make a documentary on the MPAA which is considered a very shadowy organization, an obvious irony very much at the forefront of this documentary. Every film maker has to submit their films to this organization for a rating and never knows how the process is going to turn out.

No one knows who the raters are.

No one knows who is on the appeals board if someone doesn’t like the rating their film is tagged with.

The only thing any one knows, really, is that an individual’s film is screened for a select few people who fill out a form and arbitrarily decide what rating a film deserves.

Dick decided to find out who exactly was behind this process and the results are as illuminating as they are infuriating.

The first step Dick makes is to hire a private investigator to track down the raters. Thus begins a month-long odyssey where they manage to uncover the identities of most of the raters, the form the raters use while watching a film, and other scandalous items. But why, you might ask, is everything so scandalous? Doesn’t the MPAA work for us, the viewing public, to help parents decide what to let their kids watch?

The answer is yes and no.

The “yes” to that question goes back to the MPAA’s stated purpose of being a self-governing watch dog that helps Hollywood police itself with no intrusion from Washington. In a fun twist, that’s also the answer to the “no.”

The MPAA takes a movie, watches it, decides what rating to give it, then sends it back to the film maker with the rating stamped on it. If someone doesn’t like their rating, they can file an appeal with the appeals board and hope for the best. That much is obvious.

What isn’t as obvious until Dick starts digging is how blatantly the MPAA approves of bad language violence over sex and nudity. If there is full frontal nudity of either gender at all, that film has about a 99% chance of getting slapped with an NC-17. If those same people are blown to smithereens by a cruise missile while the villain throws out f-bombs, then welcome to either a PG-13 or an R.

Through interviews with dozens of film makers and industry insiders, Dick exposes one MPAA hypocrisy after another all while his PI continues digging. The interviews cover Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry), Kevin Smith (Clerks), John Waters (Hairspray), Matt Stone (South Park), and others famous for knocking heads with the MPAA. When they get enough evidence together, Dick assembles a cut of the film and then proves he has bigger cajones than any one else I know.

He submits it to the MPAA for a rating then captures what happens.

Not surprisingly, his film is slapped with an NC-17 and an extra on the disc has him talking about this moment at the South By Southwest film festival in Austin. Make sure you watch this extra because that one story alone is absolutely hilarious. After getting the rating, Dick files an appeal and goes through that process showing every step of the way. But as jaw dropping as his film is, the finale is where his point is most brilliantly made on who exactly the MPAA truly serves.

If you have any interest whatsoever in the film business, then This Film is Not Yet Rated is essential viewing. It may be NC-17, but Netflix has it available and you can find it through additional channels. Watch this film and let the debate rage on.

Greatest. Wine ad. Ever.

Martin Scorsese recently directed a wine ad. Of course, it being Martin Scorsese he didn't just shoot a 30 or 60-second spot. Oh no. He has an entire story devoted to it and the brilliance is a testament to both him and to Alfred Hitchcock. You'll know why the second you start watching the video which is mandatory viewing for film lovers.

Check it out right here.

Also, the music that kicks in during the action sequence is from "North By Northwest."

Now Playing: The Host

I must not be the obsessive fan boy that others in the Internet-based film geek community are (which would explain my disdain for "Serenity") because I watched this with the understanding that it was a kick ass monster film.

Instead, it’s a flat, slow, over-the-top monster film with bursts of greatness followed by loooong stretches of boring. I won’t argue that the film does itself a great service by not sticking to the basics of the formula and in that regard "The Host" is a heck of a good idea.

But the execution, frankly, sucks.

The film starts with an elderly American doctor instructing his younger Korean assistant to pour a ton of dusty chemicals down the drain even though it will lead straight into the mighty Han River. We’re then introduced to members of a family apparently governed by two idiots.

The patriarch of the family worries about his dimwitted son screwing up their business which is a little snack shack by the Han. The son has a daughter who is clearly smarter than either him or the patriarch, and she proves to be the grounded center of the film.

This is all about 10 minutes in which is when we get our first look at the monster. Credit is due to the film makers for not hiding it because you know right from the start what exactly the family is up against. The monster is basically a giant mutated fish, but the film makers treat it as a genuine animal.

It’s not just a killing machine despite the carnage it wrecks. The thing moves and acts like a wild animal would which is that it will attack when provoked and retreat when threatened. The downside is it looks fairly silly, and that silliness is magnified by the family’s reactions when it snatches the little girl.

The family is in a triage mourning and the way they just fell apart on the floor cracked me up. Somehow I doubt that’s what the director was going for. There are tons of genuinely funny moments, especially the biohazard suit wearing guy who walks into the triage with a megaphone. His reaction to the news cast had me howling. The family is taken to a hospital but when they get a phone call from the little girl who is clearly still alive, the family decides to take action and get the girl back.

I’d find everything far more believable if the two leaders of the family weren’t so completely bone stupid. When the little girl’s dad keeps falling asleep despite the situation, yet somehow has moments of clarity, it feels like the film wants to have it both ways. If he was going to start dumb and useless but end up on top of things that would be one thing, the formula if you will. But when the characters start stupid, have flashes of intelligence at just the right moments but then slip right back into Stupidville, I call shenanigans.

I give the film a lot of credit for bringing the funny and for not adhering to the standard monster movie formula, but the big finale doesn’t feel earned and the ending just kind of sits there. It doesn’t help that the characters are more a mess of jumbled contradictions than genuine people and that doesn’t fly when you need the story to move forward based on something more than an idiot having a spontaneous idea.

"The Host" is alright, but it’s no where near worth the accolades showered upon it by the Internet community.

Now Playing: Guess Who?

"Oh God! Are we being audited?"

I never watched Bernie Mac’s show when it was on but he seldom fails to make me laugh. He seems to specialize in the get in and get out style of cameo, which is perfect. Here he carries the film, which is no mean feat considering the weight includes the lifeless Ashton Kutcher.

I have yet to understand who in Hollywood decided he was A-list material because his utter lack of charisma or comic timing suggests he is anything but. The script is a fairly predictable reworking of "Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?" with the twist being a black family’s daughter brings home a white guy. It even includes the typical "issue" you know will divide before the characters ultimately conquer and everything winds up happy in the end.

So what did I like about it?

Practically everything with Mac’s family is gold including a hilarious dinner conversation where Kutcher is forced to tell one black joke after another. You know he’s going to hit a wrong note eventually but the build up to it is genuinely funny.

It’s an amusing little comedy with enough funny moments to justify the rental. I’m keeping this commentary short since I watched it a while back and don’t remember a lot of it. Or any of it, really.

Take that for what it’s worth but I do recall laughing out loud a few times.