Guys On Film

Photo by Libby Csulik.

Or rather: guy. Or rather: me. Last Sunday I attended, in a little bar in Williamsburg, the screening of Android Insurrection. You may recall my experience filming Android Insurrection a little over a year ago (see 5/11/11). In that time the director has dropped us completed acts here and there through Vimeo, and the whole thing was off to the presses (They use presses still, right?) in the spring, but this was my first time really seeing the fruit of our labors. This was in fact my first time seeing myself die on screen.

Actors often mention in interviews that they are loathe to see their own performances. The reasoning is often offered that all we can see is the mistakes, but I think it goes a layer or two deeper than that. There's a dissonance between what we perceive of ourselves, and what is objectively observable by a camera. It's similar to the response most people have when they hear their recorded voice. The view from the inside is just too subjective to immediately match with what other people perceive.

So there was a lot of that. I did, I have to admit, come out of the screening vowing never, ever to have my mouth open in performance again unless I was speaking. There was also a more positive response, here and there. I may not have a face that sucks one in, but neither is it loathed by the camera (if only I could slice out this weird, Willsian slope to my neck/chin [my nin; my check] area) and once or twice during filming, I fancy I managed to contribute something useful to the storytelling with my eyes.

There was also the more introspective consideration, as I sipped my vodka tonics and laughed at the sheer balls-ery of some of the movie's moments. I was watching myself of a year ago run around a warehouse in new Jersey, before I acted in Sacred Ground, before I had been to Seattle, before I had this new job and a baby girl on the way. The idea that you can never step into the same river twice felt very real indeed during this experience, which proverb stands as a lovely contrast to such lines as, "I only care about you and me making it out of here alive. Me, because I only care about me. And you, because I'm gonna kill you once we get out."

And the movie? Well, there's one word that describes this movie, and that word is: Art. Pure art. Which would of course be two words, so you can choose either - "art," or "pure." One of them is the only one to describe Android Insurrection. Well, also "movie," I suppose. I mean, if you want to be technical about it, there are probably several words that can, together or of a piece, describe my cinematic debut. At some point soon, I may have a private screening for a select few adjective-makers, and leave them to label it.

The thing that's great for me about doing this movie is that it fulfilled something for me, a childhood fantasy, and it not only did so but it did so with a positivity and lightness of which I consider myself very lucky to have been a part. When the screening was over, Friends Nat and Virginia and I, and eventually Joe and Libby, enjoyed one another's company for as far as we could manage on the trips to our respective homes. It was a fitting reward for a job...well: fun.

Sadly, in spite of having acquired an American distributor, Android Insurrection is not yet for sale in these United States, and so I can't link to it for you. If you'd like a copy dubbed into Thai, I understand that may be possible at this time using something called an "Internet." Happily, there is the "party video," edited by the inimitable Maduka Steady. I emphatically encourage you to enjoy:

Android Insurrection Party Video from Andrew Bellware on Vimeo.

Be a Hero

When I was in high school, one of the first stories I wrote - the one that started the creative-writing ball for me in earnest, as a matter of fact - was one set in a not-too-distant future. Now-a-days the half-finished story would be an easy fit into the all-too popular "dystopian" niche, but at the time I wasn't thinking of it as such. I just imagined a world in which priorities had aligned a bit differently. It was about a reporter who goes to live amongst a secret leper colony, established on an island off the eastern seaboard, but the thing that sticks with me the most these years later was an idea I had about the culture of the city from which he came.

The idea was that everybody smoked. Everybody smoked, indoors and out, and they did so because the popular opinion was that air pollution had gotten so bad that it was safer to inhale through a cigarette's filter. Something like: the smoke conditioned one's lungs to handle the much-worse stuff in the air, and inhaling through the filter helped keep the majority of that worser stuff out. I justified it by suggesting the "doctor recommended" smoking ads of the '50s had won out, but it worked for me as the storyteller by making everyone a little distant, a little coarse and plenty short-sighted.

Now occasionally I wonder if I just got the wrong orifice. Ray Bradbury, may he rest in peace, in 1953 imagined these far-fetched tiny "seashells" the folks wore in their ears to hear entertainment anywhere. These were all a part of an imagined, self-isolating technology that we were irresistibly drawn to, which included wall-sized television screens and self-prescribed medication, and I'm ashamed to admit that I willingly use so-called "ear-buds" as such every single day. Nothing's so good an excuse to avoid survey-takers and the homeless - heck, even normal people! - as those handy, dandy ear-buds. And just look at how pocket computers help with eye contact!

Found here. See how happy they are not to see you?

 I indulge in this side-effect willingly. I'm grateful for it. Thank God, say I, for my iDevice, and its music and pod-casts and games and even occasionally sometimes if I can be reminded of it connectivity to productive tasks. Furthermore, I'm not writing here to lament this turn in human interaction. True, there are plenty of trade-offs. Yes, I fantasize about a badminton racket reserved solely for knocking the device from the hand of anyone trying to walk and tweet simultaneously. Yes, I'm reading less and have a shorter attention span. And, yes, I want more people than just the local lunatics to hear me if I scream for help. But also: Music! Games! Blocking out the God-awful continuous hammering of street construction! I am fervently all-for the critical resource of my mobile device.


However. There is a finer point of urban etiquette for which I make exception to my electronic enthusiasm. It has to do with a naturally artificial social situation we call The Subway.

I am not going to tell you to turn down your salsa music. Blare it out of the vibrations of your skull! I am not going to tell you to stop hugging the pole to maintain balance while playing Draw Something. Get that palate enormous, and three coins for Gryffindor! I am not even going to tell you to start taking your seashells from out your ears. Leave your seashells in. You are a beautiful mer-maid/man, and you glisten with the rapture of this week's Epic Meal Time.

I am going to tell you this: Open your eyes. And one more thing: Especially if you are fortunate enough to have a seat.

The Subway is a miserable solution to a miserable problem. No one - apart from the aberrant tourist - is pleased to be there when they're on The Subway. The best solution, the only and final solution, is to zone right the heck on out. ZONE, SON. You can get miles away, especially if you have those magic ear-shells. And maybe you are on there at five in the morning, and your hour-long commute is going to make the napping difference between a good day and an impossible one. And maybe you are coming off a fourteen-hour nursing shift, and the only thing that makes sense is bending your legs, just for a few minutes. And maybe it's just the stress (God, the stress) that makes you want to hold yourself and rock during the one period of your day when no one expects anything from you. I get it, and I'm with you, and I'm in the ZONE.

But open your eyes. This isn't the zombie apocalypse, despite what you've heard on the news lately, and the dog-eat-dog world isn't applicable to mass, underground transportation. Here is where the humanity is needed most. Here is where you can toss a token (so much more poetic than a MetroCard) and it will be quickly caught by someone looking longingly at something about the bounty of your position. Because we're all lucky to have what we have, and we're all here for one another. It shouldn't take a catastrophe to remind us of that - just a little gratitude, held in your heart for these moments when you have a chance to help.

So, please: Keep your eyes open. For the nurse, if you're a napper. For the napper, if you're a caffeine addict like me. For the guy on crutches, who'll argue with you for a little while about it. For the lady in heels (maybe she has to wear them for some reason). For the elderly. For the family. That makes you a hero, for the littlest while. But who knows? It may also help you reconnect a bit before you go back to conquering the world on your cell phone.

And just one final and specific point I'd like to make in closing. Some might argue that it is the entire purpose of my meandering exposition, and some of those same may accuse me of out-dated modes of thinking, but I will have my point made regardless. If you are male, between the ages of 13 and 60, and of reasonable fitness, and have the benefit of a seat when a pregnant woman enters the subway car, give up your seat. Right. The fuck. Now.

IN A WORLD...

Found here.

I know I couldn't act my way out of an unlocked locker in junior high. I didn't know at the time - that's one of the blessed ignorances of youth that allows us to learn, I think. No, at the time, I was just excited to be there. Excited to get that outlet for all my confused emotional and physical energy, excited by all the trappings that were new to me.

Prior to junior high (and the inimitable Mr. John Newman) what I knew about performing was that my peers responded more when I made a performance more physical - especially when I inflicted some kind of damage on myself - and my teachers responded better when I recited lines clearly, from memory. What more could there be to it? It would take me many more years to learn even the most basic of acting skills and concepts, but in junior high I was suddenly and thrillingly dropped into a semi-professional environment.

We had published scripts. We spent time on dialects. We had auditions as well as performances for people other than our parents. We had a vast theatre - hell, we had TWO theatres at Lake Braddock, both the classroom proscenium (which dwarfed most off-off-Broadway spaces) and an auditorium space (co-designed by a former theatre teacher, so it was built as much for plays as for more official events)

Probably the biggest thrill of all this, though I can't explain quite why, was "tech day." Tech day was when we moved from the classroom stage to the auditorium for the first time. I don't remember if it was a formal thing every show, but it felt like it to me. It felt like getting real. We would open the doors to the curving, dark hallway that led around to the auditorium, and immediately we'd hear power tools and smell sawdust. That smell, in the cool dark, just before stepping into a vast room of seats leading down to a three-quarters-thrust stage . . . well. Memories.

I've had my last day filming on Android Insurrection out in Metuchen. In terms of a career as an actor, this work probably won't hold a lot of significance. I mean, it could be huge, just as anything might, but it's not a job I need to sing from the mountaintops about. (Getting on IMDB finally is a little mountain-toppy for me, though; perhaps I'll sing it from a monadnock.) It was more significant to me, though, than just a bit of fun. Working on this movie was a bit like revisiting that initial thrill I felt as a pre-teen, invited to walk down a dark corridor into a little living through fiction.

And now, too, there's a teaser for the movie. It expresses quite well, I think, the level of fun and excitement involved in making a genre movie of this sort. These movies, they seek to thrill and titillate us. Maybe we find them appealing because we feel a little younger watching them, a little less prepared, a little more thrilled. Our teaser starts with "In the 23rd century..." rather than with "In a world...", but danged if that isn't close enough to titillate me, just a little:

Android Insurrection Teaser from Andrew Bellware on Vimeo.

Row Butts

Photos by Andrew Bellware.

A couple of weekends ago was my first experience on a real film set.

Now, some will argue that what I was experiencing was not by any stretch a real film set. Craft services consisted of Chinese take-out and a stunning abundance of snack foods and sodas. We were filming in the warehouse space of a railing-design workshop (right next to the bundled set of the recent tragically short-run Les Miserables). And, believe it or not, I worked without a trailer. That's as may be, but it's the closest I have yet to come to a real film set, and I think all the major elements were there. For example: A crew of really smart and funny people (myself excluded, naturally) got together, played pretend, and someone recorded the whole experience.

Mercs + android.

It's one I rather stumbled into myself. One night I went to see Friend Nat's one-man Lovecraft show at Manhattan Theatre Source, the which the charming Ms. Laura Schlachtmeyer happened to be stage managing. We sat for a bit after the show, she asked me if I was SAG, I said no-with-sad-face, she cheered me up by offering to send me a script. It looked like it wasn't going to work out schedule-wise for a while. And then it did, just like that. So I'm playing the ambitious, arrogant ex-space-mercenary Rathbone. I have two more weekends of filming after Easter weekend in which to live some of my favorite tropes.

Said android.

The movie is probably best described in the current parlance as a mock-buster, but I don't like thinking of it that way. Sure: It is Predator meets Aliens (with more than a dash or two of Whedon-istic glee/feminism) and yes: we have no money. I resist the term, though, because everyone knows what they're doing, and everyone takes it just seriously enough. That is to say, we have a ball and laugh as much as possible at ourselves, but on-camera everyone's in the same high-stakes movie. If this were ever to get picked up by, let's say, Syfy (ARE YOU LISTENING, SYFY?!), you would turn to it in the early-morning hours and most likely think, Huh. This looks like it would go nicely with this pint of Americone Dream I have here. I wonder if there will be much gore...


To be a bit more succinct: It's good fun, done well, and I can't complain at all about getting to play around in a genre and process that I've enjoyed since I was about eleven years old.

It's made even easier by enjoying all the folks whom I've thus far met. In no particular order, there's:

• Nat Cassidy, as a medic a bit out of his depth.
• Virginia Logan, as the hard-scrabble, near-invincible leader of the merc crew.
• Juanita Arias, as a scrappy merc.
• Sarah-Doe Osborne, as an elite prototype android.
• Tom Rowen, as a cocky, quasi-rock-a-billy merc.
• Joe Chapman, as the heavily-armed, bulldog merc - also the set designer.
• Libby Csulik, amazing do-it-all-er.
• David Ian Lee, as the maniacally handsome Colonel (David also co-wrote the first draft of the script with Mr. Cassidy).
• And Mr. Andrew Bellware, as a maniacally maniacal director who occasionally seems to be having even more fun than I am (and the aforementioned Ms. Laura Schlachtmeyer, keeping him in check).

LENS FLARE!

In our little tale, we venture into a suddenly radio-silent robot factory to extract a special new prototype of android from what appears to be a situation wherein the artificial intelligence has taken over and slaughtered all the human faculty. I essentially play the dubious jerk of the crew - think Predator's Carl Weathers meets Aliens' Paul Reiser (by which I of course mean Weathers' muscle tone and Reiser's razor wit). It's delightful, made all the more fun by the implication of a storied past with Virginia's character and some blatant animosity with Joe's. So far I've mostly gotten to trade what are hopefully telling looks with folks, and say a few lines; but I've also been kicked over by a giant robot.

HOW FUN. IS THAT? (Answer: VERY FUN.)

"It's quiet...TOO quiet..."

I'm back this weekend for what are likely to be much longer shoot days, and I'm very much looking forward to it. It's difficult for me to imagine enjoying the product nearly as much as the process, but it might be pretty cool to finally see some actual robots incorporated. For now I'm more than content to let the enormous gnashing things be played out in my imagination.

Alternating Realities

Warning: I will be spoiling the new Star Trek movie for you. If you haven't seen it and give a tootin' holler, go read this instead.

So, apparently, everything we've ever been taught by the cinema about extra-normal time travel is wrong. Go figure. I can't say how we can be wrong about something that at this time exists purely in our imaginations, but if such a blunder is possible, I'm sure Hollywood can find seventeen ways to achieve it in but one script session. It would seem that paradoxes, changing the past and alternate time lines, as such, aren't. I'm certainly crushed. There goes one of Hollywood's greatest plot crutches. I'm sure we'll never, ever have another story that ever uses time travel to the screenwriters' advantage ever again ever.

Unless, of course, someone goes back in time and changes that.

In the new Star Trek, the world of the 60s television show is effectively re-imagined, with lots of lens glare and "hand-held" close-ups. I am told the kids are calling this a "reboot" and, indeed, I noticed they put new boots on the Federation uniforms. This reboot is explained, justified, and otherwise meant to be made more palatable by way of time-travel incidences and alternate realities. (Alternate time lines = bogus. Parallel universes = apparently not ruled out just yet.) My biggest complaint about the movie -- which I enjoyed, by the way -- was how adamantly they established and reinforced this argument for making fresh new choices about Star Trek backstory. Just under the scene-after-scene of repetitive expository dialogue I could detect the seismic effects of so many screenwriters giving themselves pats on their backs. Thank you. Yes. I get it. The future is now, conveniently, mostly, unwritten.

It did, however, get me thinking about alternate realities. It's not inconceivable to much smarter people than me that there are multiple universes in which an incredible variation of common elements occur. We tend to be pretty narrow in our conception of such alternate dimensions, imagining them largely as revolving around us and our personal choices in life. But who knows? If the alternate realities are as infinite as we believe space and time to be, anything we can conceive of might occupy one or several. A moss universe. A universe in which the motions of the planets are determined by the game mechanics of backgammon. If nothing else, the notion of alternate realities is a very decent metaphor for, or illustration of, the human imagination.

Viewed through the filter of my comicbook-ridden mind, the new film makes Kirk our Batman, Spock our Superman. Kirk is the vigilante anti-hero, Spock the alien who wants more than anything to do right (and be accepted), and now both are motivated by parental demise. There even seemed to be an aggressive (in more ways than one) sub-theme of Kirk getting his ass handed to him in fights. These interpretations are not too far from the originals, so I took them in stride and tried not to snigger derisively. (Aw man, they blew up Krypt- . . . I mean, Vulcan . . ..) Uhura is way more bad-ass-er, which they tried really hard to make less-than-obligatory, and then they made her Spock's love interest, thereby reinforcing what Hollywood considers its biggest obligation to its audience: a love story. McCoy's a divorcee drunk, thank you Spielberg, Chekov is adorable, Sulu is exactly who you'd want in a bar fight, and Scottie -- well, Simon Pegg I love you and you can do nothing wrong not even Run, Fatboy, Run.

It's the characters that struck me and stuck with me, you understand. I suppose they were the reason I was there, to see a different troupe tackle archetypes, strap on the classic masks and have a whirl. This can be a recipe for disaster, and this wasn't a disaster, not by a long shot. It's just that the actors came across as more imaginative than the writers, which, keeping with a commedia dell'arte metaphor, is fairly apt. But it would have been nice to have both; maybe next time, or in an alternate parallel universe, somewhere/when/which. Which brings me back around to how we think of these alternate lives we could have had, or are having, in some-dimension else.

It's popular to opine that if we had it all to do over again, we wouldn't change a thing. Even when we think about changing something, many of us realize that we sort of like who we are -- the only "who" we know -- and we wouldn't be said "who" without the "what" we were given, when it was given. Or perhaps taken, depending upon your philosophy and/or theology. At any rate, the experience of our age just allows the slightest logical space to daydream about the past, and what-if scenarios. "What-if," I'm not the first to say, is an essential element in all aspects of acting. It's that logical crack that lets a little imaginative fresh air and warm light into the room. As Friend Melissa quotes Leonard Cohen, "There is a crack, a crack, in everything - that's how the light gets in...." There are people we have been, as we've grown, who in retrospect seem as foreign to us as strangers. Personally, I'm usually embarrassed by my former incarnations; but there are a few of me that I still love, that I'll always love, and will never quite be again.

Fortunately, there are no paradoxes, so I can visit with those guys any time I want, and the universe(s) is safe from implosion.

Unfortunate Accident w/an Intrinsic Field Subtractor

Photoshappage compliments of Dave Youmans.

Serenity

Now this is how you choreograph a fight. Note the quick direction, yet LONG SHOTS to take in the ACTION. Plus a woman with actual arms...

And the Award Goes To... (3)

As If You Care. is a sardonic sort of title for a 'blog. I recall that when Friend Younce started it, I was so out-to-lunch on the whole 'blogometric phenomenon that I thought, that's odd; if he disdains the medium, why is he engaging in it? The answer to my question was, of course, that he didn't disdain it at all, and understood it immediately, and saw possibilities for using it to his own ends and by his own means. He just wanted to be funny about it. That's how Dave is. And though it might not be immediately apparent from reading about his awesome family and game theory and distinction-making and his intense appreciation of a vast, ecclectic variety of (sub)pop music, Dave is also a mastermind type with strong creative leanings. This mostly gets expressed through gaming and online collaborations to produce real-world community and more game play, but to my mind, Mr. Younce will always be an aspiring author of fiction. Even if he never publishes a word of it.

I've known Dave since time immemorial. Well, since high school, at any rate. But we weren't exactly friends in high school. We had a few classes together, and were both involved in the theatre department, but the actual friendship didn't really crystalize until after graduation, when I suppose we both thought, Hey, wait a minute. I knew some much cooler people in high school than I've met so far in college. Thus was a really cool collaboration formed. Yet the roots extended back to that final year in the school of high, when even then there was a hint of the underlying creative current that would stick with us through college and missionary assignments and {shudder} adulthood. The photo atop this entry is from a project Dave did in that same time reinterpreting characters from the Sandman comics. At some point we geeks (we happy geeks) were backstage during some show or other discussing some thing or other, and Dave had this wild idea of people preserving their bodies past their normal lifespan by encasing themselves in a sort of radioactive gold. This in turn led to me having the idea of people who exponentially increase their intelligence by training themselves to experience a year's worth of living in a single night's dreaming. We discussed the possible overlap of our ideas, and Dave said, "You should write that."

I still haven't.

However, this kind of idea-swapping and assignment tradition continued as Dave and I reunited in the summer after our freshman years away at college. I didn't know it at the time, but the whole three months were extremely formative for me, as a person and as an artist, and Dave was around for a lot of that, giving me books to read and music to listen to and assignments to complete. It was reciprocal, this creative tête à tête, but of course I remember what I was assigned and absorbed more than what I offered up. Frankly, I remember being challenged by the effort to return in kind when it came to assignments and influences. Dave was, and is, a very focused thinker, yet seemingly without being overly linear, and the result is that he can pound out ideas and improvements upon those ideas while one is still sitting at the keyboard contemplating how you're supposed to punctuate "tête à tête." More recently, Dave has worked to connect me with the gaming community (see 5/12/08 & 5/7/07), which I was resistant to and which probably stands alone as the experience most encouraging to my creative processes since reading the Sandman comics for the first time (also Dave's doing).

Expatriate Younce has moved to jolly ol' England, which is bad for me, but great for As If You Care. Now, in addition to never knowing quite what you'll get when you sign into his 'blog, you also never know when it might be something wicked cool that you wouldn't have thought of today without it, like new random generators, observations on information diagramming or photos of Dave's adorable progeny clambering about on the heath. I'm particularly fond of Dave's five-word movie reviews. If Dave ever does become an author, he will probably remind us of Hemingway in the efficiency of his prose, crossed with a Gaimanesque sense of humor and a Stephensonish complexity of ideas. Dave himself is a big fan of Eco and Pynchon. Mercifully, he does not sound a bit like either. (You could write a respectable epic poem about Dave's efforts to get me to read Gravity's Rainbow. "Don't you understand the amazing things this guy's doing?" "No Dave, I don't.") For all those influences, Dave writes things like, "When I was a young, cynical LDS missionary on the hardscrabble streets of LA, I would often see black plastic bags floating along the ground or in the air, or fluttering helplessly in a tree, and I would daydream of having a Nature-channel special that would follow them around, while a British narrator in hushed tones talked about what they were doing."

And so, this award goes to Dave Younce.

No, I'm here. I am. I'm just . . .

So, this week is nutso in the extreme for yours truly. I just wanted to say that I have lots o' lots to write about, and little time (and virtually none in front of a computer) in which to post it. So be patient, Gentle Reader. All in good time.


In other news, did anyone else ever notice how similar Robert Downey Jr. and I are in body type? You know -- if I had five hours with a personal trainer each day. Uncanny Iron Man:

Update! Just in case you can't get Dave's link in the "Reactions" section to work :

Here's tooth in yer eye!

It's official. Nothing a science fiction writer can think of is sufficiently weird or outlandish enough anymore:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080228/ts_afp/irelandbritainhealthoffbeat

Brass Monkey

Pursuant to Friend Dave's recommendation, I caught an $11.75 matinee of The Golden Compass yesterday. To be honest, this was also pursuant to not working, having a cold and being pretty certain that I'd do myself worse financial disadvantage if I had two hours more out amongst the Christmas fairs of New York. But I digress (shamelessly [and at great length {mostly as an excuse to ((ab))use proper parenthetical structure}]), and the title of this entry has not merely to do with ripping off Friend Davey's 'blog conceit.

The Golden Compass, in my opinion, has two highly effective devices on which most of the success of the movie rides. The first has to do with the first half of the movie. Everyone's soul, you see, in this imagined world, exists outside of themselves as a sort of animal familiar that never leaves their side. Nicole Kidman's familiar (or daemon) is a monkey, with oddly metallic fur. Upon her introduction to the plot, the metastructure of the story goes a little something like this: Hey, look at how pretty our film is, how fantastical, isn't it all so calming and utopian and OH MY GOD WHERE'D THAT SCREAMING MONKEY COME FROM!? I am not kidding. There was this one time when, I swear to you, the monkey popped up from the bottom of the screen from out of nowhere. I mean, he didn't even have something he could realistically be standing on in the environment, and there he was again, screaming. If I had been one of the animators on this, I would have saved the file, program, whatever, of the monkey, for use in startling my coworkers for years to come. Just imagine sweating through your 2007 TurboTax when, from out of absolutely nowhere, a screaming golden monkey juts his head into your screen. In all fairness, the movie should have at least been subtitled The (Screaming) Golden Monkey.

Oh yeah. The other highly effective device can be summed up in two words: Bear and Fight. Bear fights. Fo' reals. Keep your eyes peeled. This could be a whole new sub-genre of action film. And if so, I am there, I am wearing the t-shirt, I am learning the terminology (ah, the classic Rips-Lower-Jaw-from-Body technique...) and I am enrolled in the Bear Fighting fantasy camp. Stick some giant foam paws on me. I am ready to rumble.

When the fur settles, and the dust as well, this is pretty much a good-time, only-enough-pathos-to-justify-some-violence Christmas movie. Lots of snow. Talking animals. Cute kids. And two of the most gorgeous adult actors on the screen these days, for mom and dad. (In fact: Hey: I know that movie casts often repeat themselves, but weren't these two just in that Body Snatchers reremake? This reminds me of the Batman Begins/The Prestige and The Matrix/Memento phenomenon. Not to mention the unholy trinity of Willis/Jackson/Travolta. Spread some of the love around, Hollywood.) They even clipped off the ending of the first book in order to make the film conclude a bit happier, which actually upsets me more than sucking the supposed Atheism out of it.

As to that (the Atheism)--I'm sorry, but I just can't stay off this topic (see 12/7/07). Friend Younce posits in his Comments section that if the ultimate plot of this trilogy involves "killing God," it indicates not only a belief in God, but an actual finger, pointing to God, saying (yes, they'd probably have talking fingers in this sort of trilogy), "Hey look: It's God. I found him/her/it. He/she/it exists." I'm afraid I disagree, to a certain extent. The author, as any fantasy author may be accused, is clearly working in allegory. To "kill God" is in his allegory to eradicate the supposedly irrational belief in God from within ourselves. In fact, what will be really interesting as far as these movies go will be to see how they handle that little feat in the third film. The characters' "daemons" represent individualism, or Humanism, after a fashion.

I have a curious history with the books this franchise is sprung from. I have only read the first two, and those quite by necessity. It was toward the end of my first trip to Italy, in 2006, and I came down with a serious bug that laid me up with a high fever for almost a week. With nothing to do but lie in bed and either read, or try to learn Italian from their daytime television, I quickly tore through the novel I had brought: The Mask of Apollo. (A birthday gift from Friend Patrick, and the first Mary Renault book I ever undertook.) Friend Heather loaned me the first two books of His Dark Materials and I drank them up in lieu of the excellent white wines of Orvieto. I write about it now, similarly afflicted (though no high fever, thank...whatever providence may be), and acknowledge that my knowledge of the books is partial and drenched with fever-sweat.

I reiterate: Go Atheists. I've got nothing against them, just like I've got nothing against Christians or Muslims. Those for whom I do have something against (that made sense grammatically, I swear), is them what (that bit didn't, though) exercise their beliefs--any beliefs--by way of disparaging others'. Up with that I shall not put. It may seem only fair; the Atheists have had to deal with eons of persecution, I realize, but here's another thing I'd do away with: the symbol for justice being a beam-balance scale. Balance is good, but dichotomy is simply a deceptive paradigm for identifying anything. I'm all for clarity, but I aspire to understand all things beyond a simple yes, or no. All things are a part of a whole, in my humble opinion. Balance, in the theological, philosophical sense, cannot be expressed on a simple beam. I come around, by tender footfalls, to my point.

In my post of December 7th of this year, I mentioned in passing that the notion of "fate" is inescapable to me because it permeates every story we tell on some level. (Pullman, the author of the books in question, by the way, values stories above all else. Reminds me of Gaiman in that way.) Especially in theatre, fate, or some analogue of it, sort of makes the motor run. This goes for both tragedy and comedy. Similarly, I'm not sure one can tell a story without God entering into it. If we could, I'm not sure we'd want to. The storyteller is, after a fashion, God of the story. What gives the majority of humans meaning in their lives? God. Who determines meaning in a story? The storyteller. This paradigm (or matrix, if you will) manifests in our novels, movies and plays on conscious and subconscious levels. It's tough for me to point toward it in His Dark Materials before having read the third installment but, for those who know the series, might not the presence of "dust" (magical stuff from the universe that connects people to their souls, and their souls to the source of "dust") be a manifestation of a, albeit rather Universalist, concept of divinity?

Perhaps I am simply too influenced by what little classical education I have absorbed. All the Greek plays have a theme that can be summed up as, "Hey, you can mess with the Gods all you want, but after a few hours, they get the last word, machina or no." I agree with the Atheists when they tell us (calmly, without insult) to take responsibility for the here and now, and love humanity for being human. I'm just not sure that it's possible to kill God off entirely, in spite of Nietzsche and Pullman and the rest. Please, contest my claim; I'd love to hear theories, especially as relates to storytelling. Interestingly enough, Friend Dave is also a big proponent of role-playing games for which there is not necessarily a storyteller. In these, instead of a typical structure of a game-master, who tells everyone what's going on, the players themselves contribute to the narrative in different ways. Perhaps therein lies a way of retiring God. Perhaps, instead, it creates a pantheon of Gods.

Part of my holiday travel plans include venturing south to Friends Davey, Dave and Mark, to play this sort of game all together. It's an appointment a long time in the making, and I'm looking forward to it. These friends of mine are some of the best storytellers I know. I'll let you know what stories we create together.

You can bet a screaming monkey will enter into it, somewhere.

Like Soundwave, I've Got Something To Get Off My Chest.

Fellow victims, I caved and rented Transformers (2007). I'm aware of my crime. This is equivalent to buying one of the new VW bugs, or digging that "new song" by Elvis, which is actually an unused, dance-remastered vocal track. I have been sold my own nostalgia back to me, and I bought (in to) it. One moment I was Principled Actor Jeff, and then-- ENH-ENH-ENH-ENH-ENCH --the Deceptacon, Eightiesdork.

The worst part is that I knew, going in, that it was directed by Michael Bay. Now look: Sure, I liked Michael Bay. When I was eighteen. I can admit that. I was young, and I needed the stimulation. I DON'T NEED IT ANYMORE. Somehow, it was easier for me to accept the idea that I was the camera, back then, and capable of that sort of camera kung fu he's made his name with. Now, I prefer the long shot, and the relatively grounded camera that shows me precisely what is going on, so I can appreciate moments more than general motion.

I didn't even go in to the movie with high expectations. There was a reason I was renting it, and didn't catch it in the theaters. In point of fact, the only reason I rented it at all was that I caught The Battle of Shaker Heights on TV the other day, which convinced me that this Shia LaBeouf lad might just have something to him. (Though my jury remains resolutely not-in on his worthiness to wield the Indiana Jones mantle in 2008.) Indeed, Shia made the movie for me, which would be an accomplishment of sorts, considering he was up against two-storey robots (and the gorgeous, not-remotely-in-high-school Megan Fox) most of the time.

"Would be," I say, because said two-storey robots were rendered hopelessly uninteresting by the same aesthetic that directs Bay's camera. They were astoundingly complex and animated, and utterly uninteresting. I see the need to update the dozen motion points found on the first Transformer designs, to spin them into something more conceivably versatile and bad-ass, but I would submit for Hollywood's consideration the idea that part of the fun of a Transformer is being able to appreciate exactly how it changes shape. Also, imagine if those endless man-hours spent designing and rendering the 'bots had been spent, even fractionally, on, oh, I don't know, the script?

Bay makes kids' movies, essentially. Gratuitously violent, often verbally lewd, but kids' movies, all the same, for their attention span and priority on visual stimulation over elements such as story and character.

I begin to question why these things are important to me. They shouldn't be, right? I mean, by all standards, selfish and selfless, I and the world stand to gain nothing from the successful or unsuccessful update of my childhood enthusiasms. Yet somehow it really matters. All this childish stuff from my youth is something I cherish, and I want to see it--if it must be resurrected--done to my current standards.

At least now I can relax. They couldn't possibly rehash any other favorite cartoons into movies.

Notions (Part 3 of ? [SPECIAL BIF!SOCK!POW! EDITION])

My earliest experiences with superheroes(TM) were plenty early. I can't pinpoint it, actually. I just know it was early enough that I started dressing as Superman(r) for Halloween when I was something like two. (No doubt this had something to do with the movie coming out when I was quite young.) Since then, I've had gradually increasing experience with that world. Oddly enough, I came to the origins of all that--comicbooks themselves--rather late in my youth. It wasn't until I was about 11 that I started noticing comicbooks. (Not quite true--I came upon a Conan-the-Barbarian comic when I was something like 8. It scared me.) It wasn't until late high school (and Friend Younce's collection of the Sandman comics) that I started collecting graphic novels for myself. Since then, it's been a pleasure that enjoy with very few side effects. In fact, it can contribute to weight loss. To my wallet.

So my appreciation for comicbooks as a genre is rooted in hero worship, tempered with an education in theatre and eventually realized in my early twenties, when I took my first crack at writing a comicbook script:

• Freaky Chicks. I wrote approximately the first issue--a self-contained origin story of sorts--which introduced us to the two main heroes. The ideas were many in this little adventure, and I was trying to avoid writing a straight-forward comicbook, but ultimately the "superhero"(TM) conceit was that these girls were put together by fate, had very different personalities and abilities, but abilities that complemented each other perfectly. To wit, one was an abrasive young woman who could survive any external injury, but couldn't heal from any; the other a quiet sort who had the ability to heal, presumably through religious gift. The script was about the abrasive one discovering her ability and the two discovering one another.

This script has a long, sad history. I started it in hopeful, long-distance collaboration with an artist friend, and we never really got going with it. I shopped it around a little thereafter, but didn't really have the contacts with the kind of artist I was looking for. Now, most sadly, the only version of the actual script exists on a defunct hard drive I lug from apartment to apartment. For some reason, all my notes and correspondence on the thing transferred to my latest laptop, but not the script itself. Balls. It may be for the best, because I have to imagine at this point that it could use some reworking.

I have had another idea I could see myself sitting down to flesh out some time, though:

• Aspirant: Two guys this time, best friends from age five. One is maniacally crazy about building himself into a vigilante a la Batman. The other is incredibly regular about his life, wants very basic things, but also feels compelled to prevent the first guy from killing himself in his foray into vigilantism. What the first guy doesn't know, is that his friend Joe Normal has superpowers. He's a rather-more-vulnerable-Superman sort. Joe just doesn't have any of the drive Guy One does to defend justice. Again, very set in a real-world environment; no capes all over the place, or anything like that. I got pretty upset when I saw this sort of relationship being outlined between Peter and his bro in Heroes, but they have thankfully taken it in a different direction.

This last would actually make a pretty great movie in my mind as well, on the indie level. An independently produced superhero(TM) movie would just be old-school bad-ass in my imagination. In practice, well . . . here again is where my lack of experience in film making makes for a dodgy proposition.

It's interesting posting my ideas on the Aviary here. For a long time I felt it took the steam out of my creativity to share my ideas with people, so I avoided this kind of entry. Now, however, I suppose I have become a more collaborative creature (as frustrating as collaboration can sometimes be), because sharing my ideas here has me more excited about them and thereby more ready to work one or two out for awhile. In the immortal words of Stephen Colbert (character): Thanks, Nation.

Happy Halloween. We're all gonna die.

As though worries about the environment and global strife were not enough, it appears that the science fiction writers were right once again. I refer you to this link, courtesy of Friend Nat. Read it, if for nothing else, for your own safety and those of your loved ones:

http://www.cracked.com/article_15643_5-scientific-reasons-zombie-apocalypse-could-actually-happen.html

The Invisible Man

No finsky for the quote today, only the gratification of knowing you're the grand prize winner.

"...I'm going to take back some of the things I've said about you. You've...you've earned it."

Some of you (three) may have felt I was a little harsh with the mediums of film and television a few entries back (1/29/2007). Let this entry serve as my apology for such slander. It's not that I find these mediums lacking in value. Rather, it is that they diverge from my priorities--and experience--to date, and I can't help but feel that they're overly popular. Something is lost if you never see the acting live, something important. But I want my MTV. I seriously worship movies. It's genetic. Next time I'm home I'm going to try to remember to photograph my Dad's DVD/video collection for you.

So today I suffered again from oversleeping (gad durn it, but how that bothers me) and commenced my breakfast over a viewing of "Of Human Bondage," the film adaptation of Somerset Maugham's awfully autobiographical novel of the same name, starring Leslie Howard and Bette Davis. It's the first Bette Davis film I've seen (Leslie Howard too, for that matter) and it's plain to me her appeal. There's one shot of her eyes over drinking a glass of champagne that suddenly made that damn song from the 80s make sense to me. The movie is pretty marvelous, but awfully dated, particularly in acting style. Actually, for the time it was probably naturalism bordering on the shocking (which is apt, given the subject matter [sex, obsession, poverty, modern medicine]) but now it reads rather stilted most of the time, particularly any time Phillip (Leslie) has a moment of reverie. I still recommend it highly; Maugham always delivers, and if you see it for no other reason, see it for Mildred's million-dollar freak out.

What was interesting for me was to start my day in this way, then venture off to NYU to work with their TV/film directing class on a short project. The set-up for today's work was very much like a soap opera set, with three cameras, all the technical roles filled by some 20+ students: the works. We began with a five-page scene that myself and two other actors had received about a week prior. There were no given circumstances for the scene, and very little contextual background. This was intentional, as part of the lesson for the class was about learning to work with actors (apparently a much-neglected aspect of direction in film schools). So we spent a good deal of time reading through and having table discussions before putting it on its feet. All-in-all, it was two hours of rehearsal before we actors broke in order for the class to confer about shot lists, etc. All we were aiming for today was different aspects of rehearsal; Tuesday we'll film.

So when we returned to the set, everyone was ready in their role. And I began to learn. My character makes a surprise entrance in the scene after about two pages of dialogue. As anyone who's worked on a film or TV set can tell you, that usually means at least a half hour before you'll get taped. Like something of a schmuck, I stood backstage to await my cue. Theatre instincts. (People kept offering me a chair out in the "audience," and didn't seem to understand why I wouldn't want to sit down.) There was a monitor back there, so I could watch the action on stage through a cut-out in the set wall, or one of the three shots they were working on. As I learned to watch the monitor instead of my fellow actors, I made a couple of observations.

It could be said that whereas theatre is constructed to celebrate profound moments, film (in this case meaning anything taped) is constructed to celebrate the intimate. This is an incredible generalization, and of course the intimate can be profound, and vice versa. But I was struck in particular today by the way a camera allows us closeness and angles of visual perception that we otherwise only have when we're in an intensely intimate relationship with someone. The scene we shot today began with a couple in bed, and as camera 3 kept a tight shot on the woman, she rolled to face her bedmate. On stage, it was a simple motion, unremarkable. On screen, however, I recognized it as a specific image I had only seen with people I had slept with (and, of course, in other films). We take it for granted, an aspect of contemporary storytelling, but it's an amazing thing.

The second observation I had to make today had to do with super powers. (You can take a geek out of the comic store....) I have a favorite hypothetical question. Actually, I have several:

• Trapped on a desert island with only a CD player for company, which 5 albums would you take?
• What deceased historical figure would you most want to share a lunch with?
• What animal would you most wish to be?

But the big one for fanboy #1 here is:

• Would you rather be able to fly, or to turn invisible at will?

Most people choose flying. It often descends to a discussion of practicalities (If you flew, you'd never escape public attention...invisibility would change your personality...what good is flying unless you're invulnerable, too...if you turn invisible, do you have to be naked...etc. ....) but the point is to understand why one appeals more than the other. Of course, everyone would like to have both. Well, you can't. Them's the breaks. Me, I choose invisibility. Don't get me wrong--I'd love to be able to fly (invulnerable or no) but I see such wonderful possibilities for invisibility. (And once again, I'm going to have to ask you all to remove your collective mind from the metaphoric gutter.) You'd be the ultimate ninja. You'd have information. You'd be able to taunt politicians and just go around miraculously rewarding the just and punishing the unjust. It. Would. Rule.

We're already experiencing it! That is exactly what film allows for. We're not just voyeurs at a glass wall; we're "invisible wo/men," getting just as close to the experience as if we were literally there. We go in for the kiss. We rock back from the hit. The only thing missing is the physical sensations, which in many cases our body is all-too-willing to supplant. We are the "invisible man" when we watch a film. What's more, particularly with contemporary visual short-hand, we're allowed the additional super powers of teleportation and slowing-down or speeding-up time. Film empowers us in this sense, giving us this sense both of investment in the actions of the story, and a subtle sense of control over it. Sure, we're along for the ride, someone else is driving, but we're used to that. It's called dreaming. Haven't you ever had a dream in which you saw everything going on, but couldn't intervene or didn't perhaps even exist in the same reality? Oh . . . no? Just me then? Awesome. Awesome . . .

I'm certain I'm not the first to suppose this connection, but I may be the first to parse it in such geeky terms. And of that, I am proud. I'm proud, too, to have made discoveries that reignite my excitement for the technological entertainment mediums. It seems to me now that when I consider film in these terms, it is a far-less-tapped mode of exploration and expression than I had imagined. I had an art history teacher in college who insisted that there was no progress in visual art (or perhaps he meant art in general); that artistry merely changed modes, never "improved" or in some way refined itself. Naturalism is not better than cave painting, cubism is not better than pointillism. I agree. Oedipus Rex, across centuries and translations and reinterpretations, can still work brilliantly as a play. Film is not an improvement on mediums for acting, nor a refinement. It simply suits our time more closely, and our time suits it (art:life::egg:chicken). What does that say about our time?

Maybe that we all want to be superheroes(tm).

Car! . . . Game on!

Five bucks to the first person who can name the movie quote.

I'm here today, folks, to talk about an addiction. My usual methods of coping with an addiction are two-fold:

1. Keep all resources and enablement as far away from me as possible; or
2. Indulge it.

The first is what I do with cookies and ice cream. Most of the time. The second is what I do with things like theatre, circus, etc., which, though legal, are often more difficult to attain than certain controlled substances. I practice "TYPE 1" coping with a number of things, not the least of which is television. I have no cable service, and a roommate who is okay with that. I've never attached an antenna to my TV. The only thing attached to it is my DVD player, and I'm seriously considering locking my DVDs in a time-sensitive safe that only opens on weekend evenings. This may seem excessive to you, but I assure you, it comes of self-awareness. And it always surprises me when I am praised for my discipline; for anything, really. Because it ain't discipline.

Nosce te ipsum. That's my only "discipline." If I am successful in working out regularly, it has more to do with circumstances that I can manipulate to make it easier for me than it does with any great, internal control. If I am at all impressive in my dedication to pursuing acting, it is as much because I have made my life so it's harder without the theatre, as it is because I feel theatre on a deeper level than some. It's choices, hopefully wise ones. I suppose maybe that's all discipline really is--a series of helpful choices.

My point? I have no point. (Haven't you been reading my 'blog long enough to know that?) But my purpose is to reveal that I have accidentally tripped over TYPE 1 into TYPE 2 on an old addiction. My circumstance became less helpful, I wasn't vigilant enough, and one thing led to another. Thus, I am indulging, once again, in that most insidious addiction:

Games.

More specifically:

Video games.

I know. I know. Therein does not lie the most productive use of my time! In point of fact, it is an astonishingly effective time-sucker. If you play, you know what I mean. You sit to play, maybe an hour, and when you look blearily up from your electronic pursuit, it's dawn. Someone is poking you in the head, making sure you aren't in a reflexive coma. Your survival instinct has been channeled into a screen for half a day, in which time your Mom has called saying she's fallen and she can't get up, and you didn't hear it because you thought it was the aliens firing plasma at your sidekick. The last time I was this plugged-in to the gaming world was when I was about 14, playing a D&D game in the basement (you flew dragons; it was really cool) while listening to Nirvana on my grandfather's single-speaker cassette player.

How did I come to this prepubescent nexus? A variety of factors are involved:

1. Friend D. Younce started emailing me about a year ago about game theory.
2. I gave unto myself a chemical epiditymitus (see 12/31/06), rendering me unable to exercise with purpose for months.
   
3. Friend Heather loaned me "Catch-22" to read.
   
4. Friend Adam got an XBox 360.
5. Friend Mark started playing "City of Heroes" again, and had my account reactivated so we could play together.
6. Friend D. Younce got his own "CoH" account and created a character to sidekick my own.

Perhaps you're wondering what Joseph Heller's immortal classic of war-time bureaucracy "Catch-22" has to do with my current plight. Well, I hate it. I am not enjoying it at all. This must be my problem, for it is widely acknowledged as hysterically funny. My feeling is that it excels with great vigor at telling the same joke ad nauseum. War doesn't make sense, and neither do people, and we'll never, ever, stop. I know: It doesn't even have a fart in it. Nevertheless, I am compelled to finish it. I only have 100 more pages to go. One hundred unrelenting pages, just sitting there, getting read four or five pages at a time. But oh, here's that GameBoy Advance dear Megan got me two years ago. So portable. So full of colored light patterns bent on my destruction...

So here I am, visiting Adam way up in Washington Heights to play "Gears of War," coming back home to sit at my laptop to play "City of Heroes," and during the subway ride I make Luke Skywalker my avatar for our journey through the only three Star Wars movies that matter. I am the addicted. I am the damned.

But it will pass (God, please make it pass). Because when all's said and done, I'd much rather be rehearsing a play or bettering my handstand, which is why the guilt. If I were "normal," and had a 9-5 job, and after I paid the bills could afford sections of time to save the virtual world, I doubt I would have this complex. But mine is not the "normal" life, and my "free" time is needed for a variety of pursuits, such as mailing resumes/headshots/cover letters, rehearsing audition pieces, networking and learning at long last how to do a kip-up. Hence: guilt.

But it's not rewardless. Sure, it's easy and artificial and time-consuming, but the game(s) has changed since I started wondering what it would be like to kiss a girl. Last night, for example, I signed on to "CoH" and discovered Youncey online. He lives in NoVa, and I see him maybe twice a year, if I'm lucky. And last night our heroic personae, Peppah (yours truly) and Salt Shakah (his, truly) got their asses whupped together for a couple of hours. Having a reason to see Adam more frequently than whenever the latest kung fu movie comes out is also great, and we end up talking about his stand-up comedy and my commedia dell'arte more than we might otherwise.

So all that remains (when my "discipline" kicks back in) is to sell my GameBoy on eBay. Maybe with the funds I can afford the Cliffs Notes on "Catch-22" . . .

Wallace Shawn: Call Me

Hi there, Wallace. How've you been? You're certainly looking well. I like those pants. Really I do. I'm thinking about getting some myself. Where did you get them? Oh yeah? That's part of what I love about you: stylish, yet down-to-earth. It's great. It's just great. Oh, and Wally, while I have your ear, about The Hotel Play...

WHAT?

And, if I may pose a follow-up question:

WHY?

For those of you, avid readers, who are ignorant of The Hotel Play, it is a work of unparalleled...er...work by the actor probably most widely known for his portrayal of Vezzini in "The Princess Bride." And to apply a little intellectual CO2 to the burning question of how this play exploded across my horizons, see my entry dated 1/12/07. It is a play requiring no less than 70-80 actors, covering the events of twenty-four hours in a tropical hotel. It has a ton of characters about whom we learn only a little from selected moments of their day, and who are designated only by certain demographic information, such as "Middle Aged Couple" and "Man Who Listens to Fish Story." The only character representing a through-line in this forty-two-page epic is the clerk.


SPOILER:
At the end we learn that said clerk is a ruthless murderer. Possibly by accident. (It turns out "ruth" is an archaic word meaning "pity." So to be "ruthless" really does mean "lacking in pity." I am not smart enough to know this, just lucky enough to have a friend who does.)


Now, I will concede that I may have missed the point entirely. I did only read the play once, and certainly that is not enough to grasp the brilliant interconnectedness of the dramaturgical likes of Shakespeare, Beckett or Lewis Carroll (his adaptation of "The Illiad" for the stage--words can not describe), but I still have trouble shaking the feeling that The Hotel Play just doesn't quite matter. Or inform. Or entertain. Like I say: I may have missed the point. But I quote here the final line of the clerk, whilst steeped in the remains of his quasi-sadistic act:

"The pumpkins--the pumpkins, tumbling down the road..."

A line worthy even of my translation of the lyrics of Paolo Conte (1/10/07).

On an entirely different note, let me announce to you that I saw (solo, which seems to be a very successful formula for my enjoying the hell out of a film) on Thursday "Children of Men." It is the rare day when I actually need a rest that I get it, and Thursday was such a day. I had plenty I could have gotten done--what aspirant actor doesn't?--but found myself wallowing at home, unable even to compel myself to do laundry, much less write the great American novel. So out I went, in the finally-wintry weather. The best thing, the only good thing, in fact, that I can say about the way cinemas are packaging their viewing experiences these days is that even if you are running dreadfully late for a film you stand a good chance of only missing the first seventeen previews. I got in, in other words, and had one of the most satisfying movie-watching experiences I've had in a year.

The Times review does a fair job of summing up some of the quality of this film. I think Manohla Dargis is surprisingly narrow-minded in the connections she draws between "Children of Men" and current events, relating the thing wholesale to the situation in Iraq. That's hard to trace to an explanation. She started writing for The Village Voice, and both papers have reputations for waging war on the current wars, but perhaps it was a matter of having only so much column space to devote. And World War II parallels may indeed be over-worked by this time. At any rate, the climax of the movie may indeed be a sneak-peek at battles in Baghdad, but the connection I drew over and over again was to documentaries I've seen on the subject of the Gaza Strip.

The movie is a drastic, yet to me entirely credible, supposition on where all the evil in the world may have us heading. It's a time-honored tradition in the science fiction genre, but rarely have I seen it so intelligently, effectively and (dare we hope) humorously done. The movie is in this sense more of what I had hoped for in "V for Vendetta," and achieves some of the seemingly magical prognostication of "Minority Report"...sans the guilty aftertaste and empty calories. Its stabs at modern society are acute and undeniable. As Michael Caine's character says, we live in a society that endorses drugs for potency and assisted suicide, but marijuana is still illegal. There's even a running joke (beautifully, subtly crafted) in which different people admonish our hero for smoking, reminding him that it will kill him (thankfully, Owen is never given a line in response to this advice [and, hey, uber-geeks: the cigarettes are manufactured in similar fashion to those smoked by Willis in "The 5th Element"--all filter, an inch of tobacco; it's never stated, that's just the prop used]). The best joke, of course, is that even after the world goes to diarrhetic shit and all the children are gone, Julianne Moore will still look ethereal.

I will go on, if ever I get talking about this movie with someone for whom I will not spoil it. Sadly, it seems to be getting ripped for all the wrong reasons. People are trying to understand it as a science fiction movie, as an action movie (and the action sequences are amazing, exciting but terrible with consequence), as a well-funded art film, and so keep pegging it as being flawed for various reasons. It's not, folks. Yes, the ending is unnecessarily conclusive for a story that dares you to accept ideas about the coexistence of chance and faith that no one's been able to quite get around in the course of human history. It should have ended merely with lights approaching through the fog. Remember I said that when you see it.

The meaning to it all, here? Don't let chance trick you into visiting The Hotel Play. Have a little faith in the "Children of Men."