Chained To The Keyboard

I’m happy to report that Superman Returns is a wondrous piece of cinema. It swings giddily between moments of reverence — nay, fetishisation — of Richard Donner’s film, and moments of staggering beauty and emotional resonance.

The critics are fairly united behind it (although poor, old Ebert seems to have missed the point again), and as usual Walter Chaw turns in the smartest review of the bunch.

For the True Fans: Be sure to look out for the reference to 1938’s Action Comics #1, and the Aquaman pyjamas in the second-last scene.

Grant Morrison once said that Superman is more real than you or I, because he was around long before we were born and he’ll be around long after we die. If Bryan Singer keeps directing his films, I see no reason to doubt the truth of that statement.

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My pet fanboy theory, which I now feel obligated to share with the world, is that we haven’t seen the last of that giant chunk of contaminated crystal. I’m betting it somehow bonds with some surviving Kryptonian technology, becomes sentient and returns to Earth… as Brainiac.

Maybe I’m crazy. But man, that’d be cool.

Mr John Rogers, the fabled Kung Fu Monkey, recently launched a new meme into the cold void of space. It floated there for a time, before latching onto my psyche and forcing me to automatically type the following list.

The question?

Explain America to someone from somewhere else by giving them 10 movies to watch.

A quick explanation: With his list, John seems to be trying to cover all the bases - a film about war, a film about class, another about race, etc. I’ve taken a different tack, possibly because I’ve never been to America and therefore couldn’t care less about trying to comprehensively represent it.

I’ve simply listed the films that I feel build an image of a nation both beautiful and terrible. Here we go:

King of New York.

The Godfather.

Groundhog Day.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Apocalypse Now.

Forbidden Planet.

Star Wars.

Raging Bull.

Chinatown.

Dr. Strangelove.

And as an extra bonus feature, I’ve decided to add an optional portion to the meme:

Explain America to someone from somewhere else by giving them 10 television shows to watch.

The Twilight Zone.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The Simpsons.

Deadwood.

Twin Peaks.

Freaks and Geeks.

Star Trek: The Original Series.

Six Feet Under.

The X-Files.

The Sopranos.

Holy lack of updates, Batman!

I’ve been a very busy little writer this week, and consequently the blog has fallen by the wayside a little bit. On the plus side, you’ve all had a good solid week to follow my advice and go find yourselves a rare 1856 edition of the Arabian Nights. It shouldn’t have cost you more than a few thousand dollars. That’s good, we’ll all be on the same page now.

On a completely different tack, King Kong is absolutely brilliant. This review by Walter Chaw - my favourite film critic - completely sums up my feelings on the film. I had in fact seen and loved the first film, but I feel Jackson’s singular vision actually surpassed it. If ever a beloved film needed a remake, this was it. It’s that enduring, iconic image of the ape atop the Empire State building, clutching the blonde heroine while being buzzed by fighters. That image is etched in my mental encyclopedia next to the entry for ‘Cinema’. So it’s good to know that the Kong story will live on with a new generation of cinema-goers. Make no mistake: This is a remake of love.

With The Lord of the Rings and now Kong, it’s become clear that Jackson has the amazing ability to micromanage every fine detail of a film while simultaneously staying focussed on the core story. And it obviously helps that he seems to have an amazing team of writers, production crew and visual effects people all working together as one. He’s got a team going, and he’s not afraid to use them. I say: Long may WETA reign.

In fact, I’d even be prepared to commit Nerd Seppuku by claiming the unclaimable: Kong is better than LotR. It’s tighter, cleaner and stronger in almost every way. Definite Film of the Year material.

Speaking of which: As the year end approaches and I look over my top films list for the year, I notice that at least four of the very highest-rated (Serenity, King Kong, Sin City, Batman Begins) are genre films, and all are adaptations. Funny that.

Then I notice that a lot of my low points are also genre adaptations/remakes: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, War of the Worlds, Star Wars Episode 3.

Coincidence, cosmic alignment, or evidence of Hollywood’s growing lack of originality? You decide!

NOTE: If you like comics, you might be interested to know that I’ve started occasionally contributing to this blog. It’s a fan blog, open to many contributors, with the noble mission of talking about comics without utilising snark, sarcasm, hate, vitriol or bile. A difficult task, indeed.

Everybody knows about Superman.

The man from Krypton. Red, blue and yellow. Look, up in the sky! Faster than a speeding bullet. Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Lex Luthor and Kryptonite.

Superman is the most popular comic book character of all time, and the most well-known. He singlehandedly created an entire genre of storytelling, and even gave it a name: Superhero.

It’s been a big week for Kal-El. Eight months and two hundred million (!) dollars later, Mr. Singer has graced us with a teaser trailer. The big surprise? It’s excellent. Maybe it’s because hearing the disembodied voice of the late Marlon Brando playing the role of the disembodied voice of Jor-El is eerily touching and appropriate. Perhaps it’s the uplifting John Williams score. It might even be the fact that Brandon ‘Who?’ Routh doesn’t actually look too bad in the main role.

And meanwhile, over at Superman’s birthplace of D.C. Comics (that’s ‘Detective Comics’ Comics, in case you were wondering), the biggest book launch of the year has just hit. It’s called All-Star Superman, and it’s by two of the biggest all-stars in comics today: Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, creators of We-3. It looks set to demolish the sales charts, and no wonder, because it’s one of the best single-issue comics of the year.

How can this still be happening after sixty-seven years? Like the Christ-figure that he is so often accused of representing, Kal-El of Krypton just keeps coming back to life. So why is this tights-clad impossibility one of the most important fictional characters of the 20th Century? Because more than a comic book, more than a movie series, more than a merchandising tie-in, Superman is a symbol.

Most obviously, he represents the Ultimate Immigrant. 1939 was a time when refugees and immigrants came to America to start a new life, and Superman came from very far away. Faced with the destruction of their home planet, his parents placed him in a rocket ship and sent him to Earth. He grew up among humans; experienced human pains, yearnings and loves. And like many refugees given a second chance, he grew to love his adopted country.

Superman, therefore, embodies the American Dream; that anyone can make it in the land of the free, anyone can rise to greatness by their own strength. The Kent family instilled in him good ole’ fashioned American values and, incredibly, they took hold. Born from a cruel, cynical, violent race which destroyed themselves through hubris, Superman defied his own genetics and embraced the highest human morals. Which is not to say that humans aren’t cruel and violent. If he had been raised by any other family, the Man of Steel could have turned out very differently. But he found the Kents, and thus Nurture won one over Nature.

Yet some would argue that Superman is entirely inhuman, an alien overlord enforcing his own code of morality upon humans; a god-like Nietzchean uber-mensch. But the point of Superman is that he’s not a god at all. He cannot be physically harmed, but he still feels pain, confusion, loss, anxiety, fear. Quentin Tarantino’s little speech at the climax of Kill Bill Volume 2 is about the alien-ness of Superman; about how his Clark Kent persona is his own personal commentary on humanity. I prefer to think of Clark Kent as Superman’s vital link to humanity. Without that Clark Kent ‘disguise’, he’d always be in costume, always be flying high above the people he’s supposed to protect. With it, he gets the daily opportunity to better understand the human world, looking at it from the inside, sharing mortal lives and collecting information on his adopted community. There’s a reason Clark Kent chose to become a reporter, after all.

Everyone has a different reaction to Superman. There’s a brilliant moment in Steven T. Seagle’s graphic novel (and here the term is actually correct) It’s A Bird… in which the protagonist, struggling with writing the character of Superman, has a personal epiphany and exclaims: “He’s a fascist! That’s why I don’t relate to him!” For some people, the idea of an all-powerful hero policing the world according to his own rigid moral code is reprehensible. I would argue that Superman’s moral code is actually rather flexible. He evaluates every situation on its own merits. With super-hearing, super-sight and super-speed, he faces choices every single minute. Save those flood victims in Pakistan, or that child falling out of a window in Chicago? There’s only time for one. (This concept was brilliantly explored in the very first issue of Kurt Busiek’s seminal Astro City.) And time and again he’s had to question his own reasons for existing. Does the world really need a Superman, or is he actually holding back the progress of humanity? Unlike Wonder Woman with her warrior code, or Batman with his vengeance-fuelled crusade, Superman is never quite sure he’s making the correct decision.

And that, Dear Reader, is why Superman is interesting. Of course, that’s only my opinion. Superman means something different to everyone.

What does he mean to you?

Somewhere between the time I made this post and the present day, a miracle occurred: An excellent Australian movie was released. Not only is it excellent, but lots of human beings are actually going to see it. And, even better than that, it has people talking.

The name of this anomaly is Wolf Creek. Written and directed by Greg McLean, it’s a confronting, mean, nasty, scary slasher film. I loved it.

The film has all the right moves. Accessible genre for 20-something audience on a Friday night? Check. Controversial subject matter to drum up word of mouth? Check. (There’s been lots of nice free fluff articles about white-faced people walking out of cinemas, British backpackers swearing off going to Australia, etc.) No painful feeling of Australianness? Check. In fact, Wolf Creek is the first truly universal Australian film since Shine, 9 years ago. The Weinstein brothers certainly thought so; they bought it for $7.5 million, the most ever paid for distribution rights to an Australian film.

Some critics seem to have difficulty classifying it, but it’s really very simple: it’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the Outback. From the setup (teenagers in a car travel far from civilisation and meet some mentally-unbalanced people), to the resourceful heroine, to the mad-but-ingenious killer with meathooks and murky motivations, TCM was all I could think of while viewing it.

But despite the obvious heritage, Wolf Creek has enough of an individual style to set itself apart. The lengthy first act (something like 30-40 minutes) is enough to make it stand out. Maybe it’s the sense of underlying dread; or maybe it’s the improbably gripping verite style of quick-and-dirty character development contrasted with lingering shots of harsh desert landscape; but that first act just rocks.

What’s more, as in all great slasher flicks, there are Iconic Moments. You know what I mean. Grandpa with the killing mallet, Michael Myers pinning that guy to the wall with a knife. Moments that enchant with their very wrongness, that stick in your head for days after. Unfortunately, Wolf Creek’s ending really lets it down. Instead of Leatherface swinging a chainsaw in the middle of the road, or the camera frantically searching for The Shape’s body, we get instead… well, I won’t spoil it for you. Suffice it to say: It’s a bit lame.

But let’s put the ending aside and celebrate instead the first great film to come out of our country in donkey’s years. Regular, non-artsy people watching Australian films is surely a sign of the End Times. I just hope Wolf Creek inspires in the correct way. Which is to say, I hope it doesn’t just spawn a clone army of second-rate Australian slashers. On the contrary, I pray that it demonstrates to filmmakers that they really can do anything, if they try; that they can make films set in Australia that aren’t necessarily about Australia; and that there is an audience out there just waiting for them to get it right.

On a completely unrelated note: It’s a good week to be me. This week I get paid for not one, but two writing jobs; I will meet with a Mysterious Hollywood Acquaintance to discuss my feature spec script (no, really); and I will commence watching my just-arrived-from-Amazon copy of Veronica Mars Season One. Oh, and The Movies comes out on Wednesday.

Let the Week of Awesomeness begin!

Warren Leonard, of the excellent blog The Screenwriting Life, wanted to know about my TV job out here in Australia.

Well, it’s a long and tragic story, but what it really boils down to is this: The Australian film and television industries are irrevocably broken.

About a half hour’s drive from my house there stands a full, operational movie studio equipped with six enormous sound stages and miles of production office space. Local legend has it that Dino De Laurentiis set it up in the late 70s, then promptly abandoned it, leaving the state government with a gigantic white elephant of a site.

Ever since then, we’ve been stuck in a continuous cycle of rotating fortunes that goes something like this:

Phase One: Big American film production swoops in, takes over the entire studio complex and employs everyone in 100km radius for a few months. Our politicians opine to the media that this heralds ‘a new golden age of movie production for our state’.

Phase Two: Big American film packs up and leaves. The studios stand empty and silent for a year or so. Professional crew members get fed up and move to Sydney instead.

Phase Three: See Phase One.

And we don’t even get the decent American films down here. Far from it. In the last three years, our biggest claims to fame have been House of Wax, Ghost Ship and Peter Pan.

So what about our homegrown films? Well I don’t want to be mean or anything, but they’re uniformly fucking awful. They’re also completely unmarketable. At least British and Canadian films can actually be sold to the U.S. market - nobody likes watching films with Australian accents in them. Hell, even we don’t like them.

And the plight of the Australian TV industry is just as depressing. Just like the U.S., we’re hit with a constant cavalcade of worthless reality television. Unlike the U.S., we have no recourse to excellent cable channels like Showtime or HBO, just a continuous stream of valueless crap. Every time one of the braver networks tries to produce an original drama show, the premise is always something painfully provincial and yawn-inducing - like a sheep farmer and his three daughters and their dog called Bluey, trying to find their way in a sleepy Outback town, with lots of shots of Ayers Rock in the background - and it’s mercifully cancelled after two weeks.

This cannot go on. Someone needs to buck the system and break this trend of awfulness.

Which brings me back to my original point, and it’s about time too because you all fell asleep somewhere around ‘Dino de Laurentiis’. The show I’m working on is different. It’s so different, in fact, that it is the first children’s show in Australian broadcast history to reach the production stage without government funding. That’s right, it’s completely independent - a very gutsy move in such a tiny industry. The creator/showrunner tells the story of how he was actually physically attacked at a producer’s conference a few months ago by a woman screaming that she’d been trying to get her show concept made for 10 years, and how dare he come in and make his show before hers.

What’s more, there’s not a trace of Australiana in any part of the production. No landmarks, no colloquialisms, no nothing. The voice actors are actually using American accents, because that is the only sure way to make it globally marketable.

Perhaps another writer with a bigger patriotic (or idealistic) streak than myself would be having all sorts of ethical dilemmas right now. Me, I’m jumping up and down with excitement. The fact is, the creators of this show are beholden to no one but themselves (and their investors), which means that there is very little chance the show will get cancelled, and a very large chance it will go on to be a major success. Also, they can afford to pay me properly.

So how did I get this dream job, you ask? Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret: If you’re trying to get on an animated kid’s show, send them an Invader Zim spec. Turns out most animation people are huge Zim fans.

UPDATE: Denis McGrath of Dead Things On Sticks addresses the subject of my previous post (yesterday’s) in a manner far wittier than my own. Clearly, he is trying to make me look bad.

UPDATE PART DEUX: A friend of mine recently addressed the issue of Australian cinema’s crappiness in a rather excellent essay. To give you a taste:

“Not one of these “issues” is treated with any dignity whatsoever: rather, they’re simply approached as checkpoints that need to be hit by filmmakers in order to obtain financing from our conservative government funding bodies. “Your film doesn’t have a token homosexual character in it? No autistic hobos? Nothing about Reconciliation? Well, then, no soup for you!””

Oh, snap. Yeah, he went there.