Mediola

King Arthur and the 10 page rule

How wonderful to know that I won't be writing about any more current film epics like Troy and this horrid piece of trash. At 16 minutes into the DVD, I had absolutely no idea what was going on. About 37 minutes in I stopped watching. Good thing I'm a Netflixer. Would anyone care to tell me if this was about King Arthur and the knights of the round table? Or something? Was there a story? Help, please.

I want to add to this rant for all you screenwriters out there, that what's wrong with King Arthur is what's wrong with what 99% of the scripts I, and everyone else in Hollywood, read. Number one is Structure. Three acts, etc. Syd Fields is the master of explaining this in his book Screenwriting.

Then there is the 10 page rule.  Everyone should know that a page of script equals one minute of screen time, so this could be referred to as the 10 minute rule as well. If the viewer doesn't have the whole setup; if they don't know exactly what the movie is about; if the central characters haven't been established--all in the first 10 pages, go back and rewrite the script. And read Robert McKee's Story for good measure. Every development person in Hollywood has taken McKee's seminar. If you can afford it, you should take it too.

King Arthur's first 10 pages? Utter confusion. There's the bell. See you tomorrow.

Cellular: Even worse than Planet 9 From Outer Space

I'm as we say "calling for scripts", putting out the word to screenwriters that I'm looking for scripts I can produce. One of the sources I'm using to request "queries", or brief emails with story synopses, asked what genre I'm looking for. I replied, "Suspense and horror". She asked if there was a single film I could identify that was similar to what I was looking for, given certain parameters I listed for her. While I was pondering, she suggested "Cellular". I hadn't seen it, and told her I'd dash out to Hollywood Video a grab a copy.

OK, I got through about 15 minutes. Now, I read a lot of scripts, as everyone in the film business must. I've read some stinkers, and some absolutely amateurish efforts. But I've never read anything nearly so pathetically, laughably horrible as Cellular. And the direction is equally awful. The people who made this film could not possibly ever make even one episode of a prime time TV series.

The box office on this picture was over $30 million dollars. The budget was $25 million. It looks like it cost 3 cents. This means they lost a lot of money. Which is good. What's not good is that some people like this garbage.

This is at the bottom of my Vomit List.

Troy: Unbearable ancient shit

I've known since junior high that Trojans were designed to prevent life-bearing sperm from getting into a woman's vagina. They've always worked for me, and they worked for Warner Bros. too, sucking any possible life out of this never ending, incomprehensible bore of a feature.

I remember when Wolfgang Petersen could direct. But there isn't even one single shot in this mess that looks better than any 14 year old could make with a Kodak. The CGI is the worst I have ever seen. The script, by somebody who doesn't deserve mentioning, but who has NEVER written one single movie that played anywhere but in his brain, is semi-literate and so stupid and confused and simple-minded that if I did any research I'd probably discover that he is a milkman who screwed a studio executive.

Puke, puke and puke.

I truly feel bad for the actors. They seem to be trying to do what they can amidst this barrel of slops.

I had a long conversation last night with a very bright young development executive. At one point he expressed his belief that many brilliant people in the movie industry work extremely hard to create the scripts that we may think are mediocre. He said if they're mediocre, it's be cause these brilliant people want them to be mediocre.  Years, he said, are spent shaping these films into their final form.

If he's right, I'm a green Chuckle. This movie was made by illiterate morons with too much money.

Fans of The Da Vinci Code...I want to point out that Troy spelled backwards is Yort. And yort an idiot if you see this piece of crap.

Man On Fire: Relentless, brilliant, powerhouse filmmaking

Director Tony Scott has taken a script by Brian Helgeland (Mystic River, and this one is better) from a novel by A. J. Quinnell and created a masterpiece of action, suspense and love that surpasses any genre movie I have seen in the last year.

I want to applaud the extraordinary work done by the editing team headed by Christian Wagner. He and two other of Scott's TV commercial editors create for Man on Fire an entirely new form of film editing. Aside from the overall brilliant work, there are vignettes throughout that are heart-pounding, gut-wrenching quick-cut micro-films that themselves are worth watching over and over.

Helgeland's script is flawless. He takes the formula of the redemption of a broken man whose reason to live is snatched from him, triggering a staggering pursuit of bloody revenge of more gore and power than you would imagine you were in for at the beginning of the ride (it's near Reservoir Dog level), and lifts it from the genre into a great film. The bloody revenge onslaught feels right, you want Denzel to demolish his victims, and you want it in the worst way. And the nobility of the ending is written so sparingly that when the film fades to black, you don't want it to ever end.

Tony Scott's casting brings together a superb central team:

The House of Breast Enhancement and Bad Breaks

This movie (House of Sand and Fog) lacks so much it's hard to make a list.

Here's what it has. Gloriously globular breasts added to the Jennifer Connelly physique. They're everywhere. In a lovely rose bra, pressing against a sweater about 3 inches from the lens while erect, in some totally blah nude love making scenes.

I'm not going to go on at length about this disaster. First of all, recently reformed alcoholics, who presumably are not attending AA sessions any longer (and why isn't she?), aren't the sweet, innocent doe-eyed "OK, I'm alone, the hubster isn't loving, but not a real bastard" types Connelly plays. They're in pain and wrestling with their disease.

This is not truth. It may not be truth that they wouldn't open their pay-up envelopes, but paralysis and self-destructiveness, may be truth.

Say hello to Eastern Europe

I met at the 101 today with a very experienced Bulgarian director. She has directed hundreds of hours of multicamera and single camera drama, comedy and childrens' programming, and has won awards in her native country. She is fluent in English, Russian, Ukranian as well as her native tongue.

This middle aged woman is a formidable presence: there is no doubt of her ability to command a set. She has taught acting as well as directed, and most important, she is a dreamer. Her head is full of ideas, delightfully free of the genre-lock that binds virtually everybody here except Charlie Kaufman.

Naturally, the idea of her directing something domestic scares the bejesus out of the usual gang. But I'm determined to break her out. She was brave enough to come here to tackle Hollywood, and I've asked her to take one of her most commercial ideas, a major spectacle feature set in an exotic time period, containing ideas and conflicts applicable to our lives, and get to work on the script. She also promised to read McKee.

Cold Mountain: Oscar? Or Oscar Meyer?

When I comment on features, it's to share my analysis of story, characters, action and performances.

Who liked this film? I watched it yesterday on DVD, thank God, so I could take kitchen and bathroom breaks while absolutely nothing was going on.

First, of course, it must be said that that Nicole remains breathtakingly beautiful, and despite her ersatz accent, what I call a transparent actress. There's simply no sense that she's acting in the film.

Interestingly, Jude Law gets top billing. He's bigger than Nicole? Now, Jude is one handsome fellow, and an actor with great range. So if you were the director, and you had a super handsome actor as your lead...a Pierce Brosnan, Tom Cruise or the like, would you make him up to look like Chewbacca? Thank you, Anthony Minghella, for covering Jude's face with hair. Half the time I couldn't tell if it was Jude or somebody else. Compare his appearance to his makeup in A.I., where he was made to look perfect, and did. If Renee could help him shave with a knife at the end of the movie, because he wanted to, why wouldn't he shave during the entire war and shlep north? Because he only had a date with his hand? This is the most incredibly sexless movie I have seen in years.

And poor Oscar winner Zellweger. Her early scenes when she arrives at Nicole's farm were some of the worst acting I've ever seen. And she didn't get much better as the picture went on. Hello, Academy. This is a supporting actress award, not Best Impression of Shirley Temple.

I could go on and on about the absurdity of the years-long love story, in which people who barely met spend their days pining away for each other, but why bother? All we need do is look at the closing sequence, where we are supposed to believe that Nicole Kidman, the child she conceived in one graphic sexual encounter (including totally flat shots of Jude's hand arousing Nicole's vagina), the father dead, no intention of remarrying, her pal Renee, another victim, and their older female friend, who watched her husband and two sons murdered, are happy as clams with their new lives, the sun is shining, the Civil War is over, and happiness is in full bloom. Give me a break.

And by the way, Mr. Minghella, using Civil War weaponry, the odds that every handgun shot you fire hits the target head on is like some 1860's version of The Matrix.

Cold Mountain is a loser.