Why Playing Spider-Man Broke Andrew Garfield’s Heart

I wonder about this business about story serving the character, especially in the case of Lois Lane. In Superman II (1981 theatrical version) Margot Kidder's Lois drove the initial sequence because of her tenacious propensity for trespass in the name of journalism which put her in harm's way. Later, she put both herself and Clark and ultimately the world in harm's way by testing Clark and uncovering his identity for the abstract sake of truth and her pride as a journalist compulsively pushing. Today, these traits would be torn apart by the busybody internet bogging itself down with blogs on feminist behaviour versus "woman in trouble" or "woman as problem" narratives. In Man of Steel and Batman Versus Superman, Amy's Lois Lane has to be shown as tough and one step ahead of everybody and solving problems. By solving problems, she is by definition serving the story. If she is creating problems, them her character is driving the story. So the actress may be better off not getting what she wants. I don't know.

Rape and Blog Panic Buttons

They say that if you are being attacked by a rapist it is more likely to draw help yelling "Fire!" than, "Rape!" I wonder if that has changed over the years. We ignore car alarms. I have not seen anyone scamper away guilty when a car alarm goes off. It is likely just the average car owner who may or may not know how to use the controller and shut the damn alarm off. This last half of the year a couple of blogs hit me as very annoying car alarms. One was about Louie CK's TV series and the other was about the (at the time of this writing) unaired Family Guy episode which crosses over with The Simpsons. The Louie episode reportedly involved a scene where (writer-director-star) Louie playing version of himself attempts to rape his co-creator, co-star Pamela Adlon!!!!!!!!! (animation trivia: Pamela was the voice of the boy Chris on King of the Hill; she's better known as Marcie Runckle from Californication though) I had not yet seen that episode, despite being a regular viewer, and I thought this was a disaster. I could not reconcile that image. The still was simply Louie and Pamela at the door and he is leaning on the door to block it. Well, I saw the episode with reduced entertainment value because of the misleading blog and lo and behold leaning on the door is the absolute worst of it. The episode was about his vulnerability and his sputtering lack of game in trying to re-introduce an interest she had in him previously. It was an awkwardness with which many of us are familiar, the need to be heard out, as if there is something reasonable you can say to make a moment happen. Yeah, he gave her an awkward kiss and she ket him with a wince. And yeah, it is rude to push a door closed and seem to trap someone even though realistically there is no trap. He is guilty of attempted sex, or attempted seduction - and failing to do a good job of it, and having poor timing - but not attempted rape. She ends up moving in and they are a couple an episode later. The danger of a blogger sounding a false alarm is that, frankly, if what I saw on Louie is "attempted rape" then the term is of less concern. The Family Guy or Simpson Guy "rape joke" people were up in arms about was not a joke about rape after all. Having seen excerpts from the episode, it was a scene where Bart is showing little Stewie (his guest on the show) how he has fun doing crank calls. He does one of his trademark phone calls to Moe at the bar with a name that sounds like a sentence when spoke in full so that Moe can be embarrassed after asking patrons. Then Stewie takes a turn, calls Moe, and instead of a harmless play-on-words he tells Moe, "Your sister has been raped" and hangs up telling Bart that yes indeed it is fun to do crank calls. The joke is not making light of rape; it is actually a stark contrast between benign brat Bart and the evil Stewie, obviously intended to address the accusation that one is too much like the other. While these trivial things are going on, in reality a 36 year old woman participated in a rap contest and apparently her rhyming improvisations won a contest which caused some of her male competitors to attack, rape, stab, shoot her and leave her for dead. She survived, but it is ghastly to think that such a demonic sort of poor losers would have that reaction. It wasn't what she wore. She went to a music competition and got targeted for being talented. This underscores a signature quality of a rapist: a loser mentality. I don't know what the campaigns against rape and exploitation will do to communicate with rapists. Peer pressure won't persuade them, because their peers are likely rapists/losers too. I don't know the solution, and saying this in a blog is ineffective because it won't be solved by blogs. Especially crying over TV shows when the real thing should get more coverage. I don't know if people need to get angrier. Like there is a house currently ablaze and you can actually yell "Fire!" to get any attention.

Badness

http://oitnb.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/111.jpg Finished watching Season 2 of Orange is the New Black. Every now and then what is in the zeitgeist filters into their dialogue. One example that struck me was a woman talking about her marriage being too tame or nice guys negating the “fear” of romantic or sexual engagement. She says that fear is an essential ingredient in her passion, whether it is fear of discovery or danger projected onto the male or partner. This is an idea that has been pushed aside by the blogger culture and those who might compulsively post links on Facebook. One recent post I’ve read asked men to ensure that they project a non-threatening presence when approaching or sharing an elevator with a woman, to engage her to diffuse tension, all of which sounded contradictory to me and overly self-conscious. Much is being said about something called “rape-culture.” This appears to be in bizarre tandem with compulsive use of the term “slut-shaming.” Shame in general is considered uncool, just as perhaps shyness may be considered repression. One – perhaps unrelated – line I appreciated on Orange was, “That stuff about don’t snitch was probably made up by someone who needed to be snitched on.” The concepts of loyalty are especially transparent for their contrivance in a prison setting, where loyalty to a psycho or a criminal is especially absurd and most likely one-sided at best. There are conceits in life that are exposed as false when placed into a dramatic structure. If we talk about cracking down on bullying, are we pouncing on the kid who throws a punch or the person who badgers him/her verbally leading up to that? And are social dynamics in school part of a set of trials we have to go through, or should schools micro-manage kids to make sure they have to make a show of including each other? Is it naive? Is it necessary for a child to identify his or her sexual identity as soon as possible and then be loud-and-proud of this through High School to test the system, or is it okay for kids to feel the slings and arrows of adolescence and rejection that everyone pretty much has to go through? Later in life, the reality is that many people put on whatever mask is necessary to get a job or to rent an apartment or make their way and package or market whatever goals they have. The same with marketing – instinctively – whether a girl is in control of her image or a boy is in control of his. One axiom going around is, “It’s none of your business what people think of you.” That seems like a head-in-the-sand mentality. Of course it matters. A girl might want to project a conservative image and if asked how many guys she has been with she may say skew her number lower than reality, while a guy being asked how many girls he has been with might skew his number higher than reality. This has been true for a long time, and might be the product of generations of frontier societies where a woman’s future was presumed to be either wife or prostitute. But regardless of its origin and its compatibility with modern society, people are still working the numbers that way. Thoughtful men don’t want to be jerks on-line and to be the target of lectures, so they will likely avoid playing devils advocate or offering the dissenting opinion when it comes to the assertion that equality means embracing all and pretending that we have no preference between a completely independent woman with hundreds of lovers or someone focused more on one person who may be content and less restless in a relationship. I mean if you throw out the idea of marriage or monogamy, then it is easier to be accepting of this trend. But if you don’t want a relationship based on a lie, eagerness and enjoyment of sex may not increase in a woman with the number of lovers she has nor necessarily will her confidence; a boy or man’s confidence will increase with the number of women he has had sex with, however, and this confidence does have more value to a woman than a man’s genteel or shy or repressed virginal image. Even his full dedication and devotion to her will not be ultimately what keeps the fire burning. This brings us back to the line in Orange about fear and now the nice guy or the tame husband routine is not going to hold her interest. There is an axiom that goes or may as well go, “Talking about sex is like dancing about architecture.” I’m seeing links to a lot of talk about what must be done to regulate “rape culture” and to get rid of the word “slut” while still making use of the neo-feminist-blog term “slut-shaming.” This all ends up in a context where every guy from Marc Lepine in 1989 to Elliot Rodgers who have done something horrible gets knighted as the poster boy for the ostensibly heterosexual male population. While I acknowledge that everyone has an opinion, I don’t respect every damn one in the sense of admiration. So I won’t throw around the word respect. There may be well-meaning bloggers and fans of these but most of what I see is just self-serving propaganda, and not even ideas to be contemplated and weighted but matter-of-fact-sounding babble that makes me nostalgic for Andrew Dice Clay being accused of isms and phobias. The culture is so used to being placated, for marketing or seduction purposes, that a person looks ten times colder and meaner by offering a dissenting opinion. Speech or conversation is inherently political. We make choices, either off the cuff or carefully considered. Therefore, what we say can be judged. What people feel, as instinctive reaction or attraction or repulsion, is not a choice and can’t reasonably be judged. But here’s where it gets mechanical and our flesh and blood humanity is turned into data and digitized and categorized until mere admission of taste calls for punishment or shunning. I’ve seen it too often, the artificial camps that pop up. Someone jabs two fingers at your eyes and if your reflexes are healthy you evade impact, and then your tormentor punches you twice in the shoulder, “Two for flinching.” There are many forced-answer questions out there, opinions or platforms we are supposed to pay lip service to, many of which are nicey-nice lies. In one’s forties, a conversation about whether high school girls call each other slut is exasperating. In my old Catholic high school, the girls pretty much did what they did. People are going to want to prop up their own stock market value. Whatever they have, that’s what you need in order to be cool. Pretty basic. But that is at the heart of bullying – status. If someone asks a guy at any age whether he finds a set of attributes or characteristics attractive, it is academic what the truth is. A woman might prefer a man with confidence, and might not care that some of it comes from his “score” with women; after all, it is part in parcel. She might find power attractive or his status, so if she ends up dating her boss maybe it’s not coercion or harassment but just mutual attraction. I’ve seen some exciting women with much older guys and appearing to be happy. Men are not especially attracted to the power or status of a woman. Those things are incidental and may even pose a challenge to his own ego and how he is perceived with her. As for external beauty, there is an expectation that a woman will lose appeal to a younger lover when she ages. If a man finds success later in life, in his forties or beyond, he might not be seeking out someone who merely remembers the same era of music videos but someone who has a physical draw and someone he expects to maintain interest in as a monogamous mate for decades ahead. He could compromise and lie to himself and to whoever he is with, because that is the politically correct thing to do. Imagine living to satisfy TMZ or the local gossip with who you are marrying, since they are not the people who have to sleep with her and wake with her. The opinion of the community therefore is useless. It may read as cruel to point out what should be obvious. What we know is there under the surface. I struggle with weight, so I don’t expect petite angels to fall at my feet. But I don’t want to register for any kind of dating service either and write in my weight when I know how it reads to me and when I historically feel no obligation to play couple with someone merely because we have the same size waistline. When that bubble bursts it will be a mess. I don’t feel the driving need enough to have someone fill the position of girlfriend for me to “learn to love” someone I might only have empathy for. But again all of that is noise, brain chatter that is like the pentagon shape of thought coming to terms with unpleasant reality – the finger turning in a circular motion beside your head indicating crazy. There is the effort to make the world better, even the will to do your part, and openness to ideas, but also against the tide of your own identity. We observe our own personal reactions and this can be much like observing characteristics of others and yet it will be judged if only because it has been perverted into language because words are often choices – truth can be rude or unkind. Maybe those of us who would rather talk about movies or sport statistics know more than they are being credited. Sometimes there is no point in openly pulling something apart until it shapes into the right comforting lie or over-simplification.

video blog Talking to a Wall begins

Occasionally I will throw one of these on-line, mostly random spiels about film making. From the perspective of a low-profile director clawing his way along.

Pet Peeves - film and ads

I had in mind a topic to blog about which had nothing to do with what is now the first pet peeve on my mind. First, I'm sure some insufferable boob is going to say, "If you don't like ads there is nobody forcing you to use the website." That is the kind of remark that deserves a slap in the head with a dead fish. I finally make my way to google and blogger and click "create new post" and lately what I get is a blank screen with nothing but an ad banner and at the bottom a "send feedback" button which I may have use for. If I want to actually see where to put my subject line and the body of my blog entry I have to click refresh. This I find out purely by experimenting. When I sign into a hotmail account, I see at the top an indication like, "a password is not enough," which looks like the name of a philosophically horrific song raising money for internet stupidity. To circumvent that I have to highlight the address bar and either go to another site or type hotmail again and then I am in. So I'm learning two things from msn in that case: They want to force me to give them a phone number or credit card or some other perhaps false verification of identity for an account I have had for 13 years (which is something I don't respect) and the security of their stupid system can be gotten around (which I also can't say I respect). I have heard that something on the horizon will replace hotmail accounts entirety, but have received no alerts and it may have merely been hype for the new service. Some of us have records of hotmail messages archived in such a way that there would be a loss if they were deleted. I don't know how to fight these things without seeming naive. What I had in mind was to talk about filmmaker pet peeves. Mainly the way that aspects of production are played off without context. An actor brags, "We don't need to use monitors or video assist. The camera man can do that. And I don't like the director looking at a monitor during the take. He should be looking at me." Or somebody says, "Oh, out director doesn't bother with storyboards. He just makes up his mind as we go along. That keeps it all fresh. he doesn't need the crutch of storyboard sketches." There seems to be nobody responding to those kinds of sound bytes, and so they are taken at face value. This drives me nuts. About the actor saying a director should be looking at him/her during the take, the actor is important but so is context and perspective. Even if the director is ONLY concerned about the actor, the lens and the lighting and the way the actor is framed and frankly whether a moment within a take is actually IN FRAME at all are all elements of that. And the actor's job is largely concentration. If the reality of the director standing there in his/her eye-line and staring at them is important, that actor has problems ACTING!!!!!! There IS NO director between action and cut, only your character and whatever other fictional person should be imagined there. Furthermore, the director has to sign off on the shot. It is nice if other people do to, but the director HAS TO be able to give the minimum direction of YES or NO. The director can sign-off blindly and take the cinematographer's word for it, but chances are the cinematographer might not be operating the camera either and if HE isn't using a monitor to at least see how the lights interact with the scene then it would come down to the camera operator's sign-off. However competent or extraordinary each member of the crew may be, the director should WANT to be the person who signs off. Especially because there may always be one detail that shouldn't be taken for granted and he should have to take responsibility when it comes to edit and there are no surprises about something being there you don't want or something missing that should be there. About the storyboard, this is not spelled out enough. The kind of storyboards to avoid are the ones that a studio might give to the director of a tent-pole film and say "just shoot this." A good storyboard for s similar size film might be Paul Verhoven's personal storyboards for Starship Troopers which depict the shooting plan pretty much as it emerged on screen, and with the added benefit that he happens to be an excellent draftsman so the illustrations are true to the subjects. Whether it happens all the time or not, I like the idea of the director drawing each frame within a shot and having a plan. If a movie were 100 pages of screenplay, I estimate that two and a half weeks of 8-hour days could be spent on the director doing the first pass of thumbnail storyboards for a feature. That is thought and time and close regard of the scenes that will not be spent during the high tension of making the movie itself when time is of the essence. Plans can be modified or adapted as circumstances change, but having done storyboards makes a person mentally prepared for how to use the camera as visual reinforcement to contain the relationships and moments of the story. They can also help narrow down locations. If someone expects to be a beggar and not a chooser with locations or sets, they might compromise the best way to shoot a scene. For example, being unable to get the camera far enough away from the actors to blur out the background because the location is too confined might be something that they are willing to compromise or it might be an argument that can be defended persuasively with storyboarding (and with pointing to the sketch and explaining "this is the character and this is scribble is the blur because he is isolated from others and should have his own focal plane"). The camera (except in faux documentary style which I dislike) should not be playing catch-up with the actors. There is nothing unusual about giving the actor the edge of the stage and the confines in which he/she has to work. Sometimes it will be just their hands acting in close-up, sometimes just the face, and sometimes head-to-toe body language. The actor's requirements include technical competence. They can certainly bring something to the table, and may have a better-motivated start position or an idea of how to be introduced. But even those are best as early discussions instead of last minute so their implications can be applied throughout the story and not as a whim or as a concession to a star's ego. If you are lucky, Samuel L. Jackson has a character-motivated way to first show his religious character in Black Snake Moan, in a prayer-like position leaning on a vehicle. If you are unlikely and actress doesn't feel like wearing the hat the movie is named after and scenes that have already been done with it have to be abandoned, as detailed in "Claire's Hat" the bootleg documentary by Bruce McDonald. I'm sure there are other examples but those were the ones I had to get off my chest today. In case anyone is reading.