Glutton for punishment

As if attempting to keep up with one blog wasn't enough trouble, for the New Year, I create another blog to possibly neglect... If you look over to the sidebar under the LINKS, you'll see a new addition called MUSIC-SNOB, where all my thoughts about music will go to, for your enjoyment.

Happy New Year

Hope that everyone had a wonderful holiday season…

It’s been a busy month, so busy that I couldn’t spare time to write up any account until now – most of it was finishing commitments I’d made earlier, and the rest of it was spending time with relatives and catching up with DVD watching.

Most of that watching has been of TV season sets, which has been the most addictive thing I’ve encountered, so far. They’ve made for a nice diversion when taking breaks from the work I had to do.

I remember seeing Gerry Anderson’s UFO series when it was first syndicated in the States in the early 70’s – I hadn’t seen the show since that time, so I wasn’t quite sure if the show was as good as I remembered it being, or if I was just seduced by the miniature effects and Moonbase chicks in silver suits and purple wigs. Surprisingly, the show holds up very well compared to genre shows of today – there are elements that date the show like the fashions, the attitude towards women (which is interesting – there are women in command positions, but there’s a strong smarmy vibe in how they’re treated, a vibe that’s very common in shows from the 60’s/early 70’s), and the drinking and smoking – but there’s a total commitment to the concept – no hint of smirking irony that seems to be a necessary component of today’s genre shows, and no fear of presenting unsympathetic characters.

Also took a look at the first season of DEADWOOD, when the discs were available at the library – not having HBO at home, means that I catch their shows later than most people, once the hype has passed – DEADWOOD certainly lives up to all the hype about it when it debuted (unlike CARNIVALE, which, though I’m looking forward to seeing the second year, I can see why it didn’t last any longer).

The big watching project for me has been Rhino’s THE MONKEES season sets… I’m finishing up with the first year and looking forward to the second season eps. THE MONKEES hold up extremely well, some 40 years later, and are a hell of a lot funnier than any contemporary sitcom… while some of the writing is too ‘wacky’ (wackiness being big in the 60’s), there’s a genuine sense of fun and anarchy that must have been bracing when audiences saw the first broadcasts… particularly in the musical romps and the unscripted verite interview segments that end some of the episodes. Whatever you may think about The Monkees being a ‘real’ band or not, it can’t be disputed that the foursome quickly proved their chops at handling the comedy.

Amongst all of this, there hasn’t been time to get out to the theaters to see stuff, but to be honest, there’s not a lot out this season that’s pulling me out to the theaters – well, to the first run theaters, except for GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK, which lasted a whole week at the local cineplex before making way for KING KONG – more interesting things are in the second run theatres like WALLACE AND GROMIT, THE WEATHER MAN, so I’ll hit those before they get to disc hopefully – having seen 2 other versions of NARNIA (animated and BBC), I don’t feel the need to see the LOTR version, and frankly, a 3-hour KONG doesn’t really interest me… methinks the smell of hubris is in the air for Team Jackson, and I hope they take the hint. Fortunately, I’ve been able to sneak in better movies in between all the television viewing, like NIGHTMARE ALLEY, POINT BLANK, THE CORPORATION.

Part of what took a lot of time was finishing up the paperwork for REST E-Z; now that it’s finished, I have another project coming up in a few months – currently reading the script for it now and more about it to come… what I can say is that it’s a genre film and it’s being made by people that I’ve worked with before, so I’ve got a great feeling about it.

Pre-Winter Ennui

Not a wildly exciting time at the moment... having rested & recuperated from the film and Thanksgiving holiday, it's time to get back to work... in this case, means finishing up paperwork for REST E-Z, finishing a scanning project for Film Score Monthly (which will publish it's final print issue this month, but will continue on the Net in an online form... as well as offering new CD releases every month), and touching up some pieces for the Micro-Film website, which will have new content up very soon.

I direct your attention to John Kenneth Muir's blog link over to the right... he has a most insightful post on MEDIUM which is worth your time. And it saves me from making my own lengthy post on the show, since he hit a lot of the points that I was planning to make. Ah, synchronicity...

Dennis of "Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule" blog pointed out that Entertainment Weekly's Nov. 25th issue (the one with Jocquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon on the cover) ran a review of C.S.A., along with an interview with Kevin Wilmott. The review is favorable and the interview reveals that C.S.A. should be in larger markets in Feb. '06.

Keep your eyes peeled; however, I suspect that C.S.A. will end up finding its audience on DVD. I do know that a couple of commentaries have already been recorded for the release, and I think that the disc will have some tasty extras included.

Post-Thanksgiving and Post-Shooting

Happy Post-Thanksgiving! Hope that everyone reading this has had a decent, if not good, Thanksgiving holiday.

The feature I was working on, Rest E-Z, wrapped ("finished shooting" in non-Jargonspeak) last Saturday, so I've been playing catch-up with everything else that went on hold for the month. To take a peek at some preliminary artwork, follow the link to their site (which I wasn't even aware of)... there'll be more going up over the next few months, as the post-production work finishes up.

For a quick glimpse on how things went during production, go visit the new addition to the link list, ThroughAGlass Productions, a production company based in Lawrence, KS. Chris and Jeremy were part of the crew, as well as decent filmmakers themselves, currently in the process of shooting a feature musical, "Air".

I usually don't write about my experience during production - for one thing, there's just no time! My job (as Script Supervisor/Continuity) usually doesn't come to an abrupt end when production wraps... I end up having several days of paperwork to finish up before shipping my notes to the filmmakers, so whatever free time I can get, I end up exploiting it on anything NOT related to production.

Secondly, my perspective is a little bit different than everyone else's - I'm now slightly older than most of the people involved, and have a bit more experience on lo-budget features (though, if all the recent feature activity in the KC area keeps up, that will change soon), and even on the productions that go well, it's a chaotic process in some area or other... plus, whatever my opinion of the project is during filming, you NEVER... let me repeat that, NEVER REALLY KNOW how things turn out until you see the finished product. You could be dead-wrong, or you could be so right, you could be a replacement for Patricia Arquette on "Medium".

If I ever do another print issue, I'll finally write about the films I've worked on... the issue will be called "Lo(Budget)Life".

Jumped onto the NetFlix bandwagon a couple of months ago, courtesy of a friend who sent me a trial tryout... have to say that I've enjoyed the service, getting acess to titles I haven't found in the local rental stores. I'm eagerly awaiting the discs from THE MONKEES television show to start arriving this weekend, and December will be spent mainly watching both seasons.

Takedown!


New Night Stalker Folds

Night Stalker producer Frank Spotnitz posted this on his blog:http://www.biglight.com/blog/2005/11/night-stalker-finis.html

" 'NIGHT STALKER' FINIS

It is with regret that I confirm "Night Stalker" has been canceled. While I'm disappointed the series has come to an end, I am enormously grateful for the experience and the opportunity given me by the network and Touchstone Television. I would like to thank our amazingly talented cast, wonderful crew, killer post-production department, terrific writing staff, producers and partners in crime Daniel Sackheim and John Peter Kousakis, the incredible Jana Fain, and all of you who watched and enjoyed the show. It was a blast."

There IS a God!

Na-na-na-Na
Na-na-na-Na
Hey-Hey-Hey
Goodbye....

LIFEFORCE for the Millennium... but no hot naked alien babes

Back for a quick moment... the feature is halfway through shooting, and so far, things are going pretty well - no major disasters have occurred, we're still on schedule and we're at one location for the next few days.

MICRO-FILM #7 should be out on the newsstands about now - or check out the site to order directly. I have an article on the film FIVE YEARS in the issue, as well as assorted reviews, a couple of columns and a remembrance about the late Sarah Jacobson.

Halloween has come and gone, and I didn't have a chance to expound on my proposed double-feature of LIFEFORCE and DREAMCATCHER, my premise being that DREAMCATCHER is the LIFEFORCE for the Millennium Decade.

When I made this statement to a couple of friends last weekend, they basically laughed in my face... so let me restate the evidence for my "demented" remark...

Oddly enough, it was a remark about POLTERGEIST that helped get things started, my friend having watched it in a spate of movies about ghosts - and finding it really fucking stupid. I, myself, came to this conclusion a few years ago while watching it on television... what seemed really cool and scary back in 1982 became tired and overwrought, some 20 years later.

POLTERGEIST was supposed to have elevated director Tobe Hooper from the muck of "horror director" into the A-list of directors - it had all of the right elements - a good cast, lots and lots of special effects and a story that was a thrill-a-minute roller coaster ride -- that it all really didn't make a whole lot of sense when you sat down and analyzed it was immaterial to an audience wanting to have the crap scared out of it. POLTERGEIST made tons of money in the Summer of '82, but it didn't do a thing for Hooper - the project was produced by Steven Spielberg (and, some would allege, creatively directed by him) and since the film used major elements of Spielberg's oevure, Spielberg got most of the credit for the picture's success and Hooper got the end of a buzzsaw.

When Hooper entered into a deal with Cannon Pictures, the first film he made "could" be seen as a response to the POLTERGEIST experience - a sci-fi/horror picture freed from the cuddly restraints of Spielberg, yet could function on that grand scale (distinguished cast, a thrill-ride story, and - again - lots and lots of State Of The Art effects)...

That was LIFEFORCE.

And the general audience at the time promptly responded, "What the Fuck?!", apparently not ready for an adaptation of Colin Wilson's THE SPACE VAMPIRES done as a slightly tongue-in-cheek homage to Hammer Studios brand of grand scale sci-fi horror, with lots of sexual subtext, and best of all, Matilda May making her debut as a hot alien babe sucking the life out of people and traipsing around naked for the first 1/3rd of the movie.

Some 20 years later, Lawrence Kasdan, the writer/director of films such as THE BIG CHILL, THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST, GRAND CANYON and such, decides to let his hair down and become "Larry Kasdan" again... you know, the guy that wrote RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and did films like BODY HEAT and SILVERADO. So he decides to take on Stephen King's novel of alien invasion, DREAMCATCHER... and the reaction to it upon release was... well, see above.

DREAMCATCHER is Stephen King Science Fiction, and SKSF is ... well, wonky, for lack of a better term. The protagonists are 4 guys, friends since childhood who share a bond with a fifth kid, who is developmentally disabled (and in the film, played by a New Kid On The Block). These four friends go off for a weekend in the woods, when strange things start to happen... animals start to migrate out of the woods, and they come across a man who appears to be lost.
Unfortunately, the man has been probed by aliens who are choosing this particular weekend to stage an offensive attack... and offensive is the word for the films first set piece, in which an alien creature, who has been burrowed up the lost man's butt, makes an appearance in the bathroom (a sequence that works a lot better on the page, especially when you're in the bathroom reading it -- and a note on how much horror has changed... for the over forty crowd, the things that scare you the most are the things that start coming out of your ass).

There are Worms of Death; one of the men (a Britisher playing an American) apparently is taken over by an alien entity, who speaks like a Bond villian... so you have a British actor pretending to be an American who's speaking like a Britisher when he's possessed - the mind starts to spin. Plus, the military gets involved in routing the alien invasion, and the head badass is Morgan Freeman, who eventually ends up a villian. The military hero, who is the voice of reason?

Tom Sizemore.

So anyway, it ends up in a three-way chase: the British/psuedo-American possessed guy is atttempting to get a Worm of Death to the water supply, which will eventually infect the world; the other surviving protagonist goes after him with Tom Sizemore and the retarded New Kid On The Block (yes, he has an important part in this to play) to stop the alien possessed guy; and they're being stalked by Freeman, who wants to Kill Them All and never mind about God sorting them all out or not. There are explosions aplenty, and in keeping with the theme of pulling things out of one's ass, the screenwriters go for broke and come up with something totally out of left field that makes NO sense at all - but oddly enough, it WORKS.

I rest my case.

Time, time time, see what's become of me...

I had intended on a lengthy post; going into some detail on Halloween double-features, as well as a rant on NIGHT STINKER and how Spotnitz and crew chose to exploit the wrong franchise (if they had taken inspiration from THE NORLISS TAPES - Dan Curtis' own failed television pilot featuring a Kolchak-like reporter without Darrin McGavin in the lead - then the current show would probably not suck as hard as it does)... but most of that will have to wait a while.

I may have a job on a lo-budget feature shooting in the area for the next few weeks. Nothing is quite definite - the deal is about 75% there, but nothing's been signed as of yet - but if we come to a meeting of the minds, I'll probably not update for a couple of weeks or so.

In other words, no big changes.

You'll notice that I've added a blogroll on the sidebar - and have added a few more blogs of interest.

A big shout-out to Dennis of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule - he's finally started to post the results of his summer film quiz and has had some nice things to say about my contributions.

As to those Halloween double features... to kick things off, I offer up the combination of:

Lifeforce (1985) and Dreamcatcher (2003)

They're both fairly light films, to start; they're both a lot of fun and they both were reviled at the time of their release, but have gained cult followings.

More later...