Tarantino shuts down ambitious interviewer

I recently had an argument about this Channel 4 interview in which Tarantino is facing someone who appears clueless and he makes a good point about the fact that the question "do violent movies influence violence in life" has been asked and answered for 20 years and people could google his opinion. I would say that the "link" issue could have been brought out in the pre-interview. It is obviously a sore spot. If this interview is for the UK where they are stricter on violence in films than the States, then an interviewer pushing for a spoon-fed reason WHY there is no link between screen violence and real-world violence is actually counter to the purpose of promoting the movie. If he indulged the interviewer, he could have said that his violence has CONTEXT and the audience can have empathy for certain characters and make judgments of others, whereas video games especially singe-person shooter games and Grand Theft Auto 4 involve only scoring points regardless of a target's humanity. The CT killer and the Aurora killer, as well as the Colmbine kids were known to be "gamers." This doesn't mean a gamer can't be benign either, but the stimulation is different and the discussion of a "link" to real word violence would be valid in that case. Not so much with movies. We want to have a catharsis with a movie like Django, and I think by the end the viewer leaves pacified and amused by the story's closure. He could also have argued that guns CAUSE trouble for characters that have them in his movies and have not until Django solved problems for the gun owner. In Reservoir Dogs, Freddie "Mr. Orange" suffers a stomach wound from a gun and shoots back in reflex despite being an undercover cop and has to live with that collateral damage. The kidnapped uniform cop after all his own suffering is unceremoniously shot by Nice Guy Eddie. The other Dogs confront Mr. Blonde for killing people during the heist. The Mexican stand-off is also a negative portrayal of guns and intransigence and cock-wagging. In Pulp Fiction, a hidden and forgotten character cowers as his friends are killed and then - as the hit men turn to leave - he springs out to shoot them both but his gun solves no problem and inexplicably misses them completely and all he has done is reveal himself and provoke his death. Later, an accidental misfire kills an ally of Travolta causes an entire segment is about the aftermath. In the key Cafe sequence, Jules is unarmed and at the mercy of a twitchy robber and has to reason his way out of the mess verbally. Travolta's character eventually leaves his own gun sitting unguarded on a counter of his target's apartment and the gun is his downfall. Butch ends up under a gun shop in the movie's most harrowing scene, where guns are used only by pure scum and the other weapon Butch uses to free his ENEMY from torture is a sword. So there are a lot of beats about honor and responsibility and Pulp Fiction is no love letter to guns or gun owners. In True Romance, the hero's decision to confront the pimp in his den and try to kill him alerts more danger underworld figures to his existence when he could have just skipped town with his new girlfriend and nothing would have happened, including his father getting shot by an underworld figure. Interesting that in the script for Natural Born Killers the media and penal system are portrayed as just as dangerous as the central characters who are irredeemable and evil and manage to escape at the end. Hard to comment since Tarantino disowned the Oliver Stone rewrites and claims he has never seen the film itself. Kill Bill has its protagonist shot in the head and later after her recovery shot with buckshot, and I don't think The Bride handles a gun. Bill and the little girl BB when we finally get to them "play guns" and play dead for The Bride but her only scene with a gun is during the negotiation with her own contractor to walk away because she is pregnant. Those movies have lots of martial arts and over-the-top jeopardy, but again they are not at all a love letter to guns. Inglourious Basterds is a wild card. It has the usual strong female characters but it does have gun use. I'd say Samm Levine's short and short tempered character is reprimanded for prematurely shooting a Nazi prisoner, and the most focused "Basterd" is the Bear Jew Eric Roth whose weapon of choice is a baseball bat. When he finally shoots Hitler in the face while the Fuhrer is on fire, it is clearly a huge fantasy, but even that I wouldn't count as an ode to guns in general. Everyone wants to kill Hitler. The Nazis are the real threats with guns throughout. Ultimately, by the time of the CT massacre, there would be no line to draw between Tarantino's body of work and that loner killing his parents and innocent kids. If this reporter is indeed Mr. Responsible Journalist and concerned about news and taking this seriously, then he would know the points I have made above. There are plenty of movies from the A-Team on down where people fall like flies and car chases where people are injured in the periphery and violence is in a bubble. Even the silliest of Tarantino's movies are not casual with guns. In Django Unchained with an overseer is shot and his blood mists across the cotton, any reviewer who calls that image gratuitous needs to retire. I obviously side with Tarantino in this interview even though perhaps he should have "acted" more calm -- although I think this is consistent with the way he talks when passionate about something. I say there should have been a pre-interview and the "link between movies and violence" should have been anticipated and vetoed since it has been getting on his nerves. I agree with people who say Tarantino was honest, the interview was agreed upon to promote the film, and the reporter pushed for something more to boost his career. Some claim he is all about superficial trappings and that Roger Avery was the genius behind Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Well, Avery only wrote the radio chatter in Dogs. . . . With all due respect to Avery, I have not seen an annotated version of the scripts or stories to know what he contributed. I did see Killing Zoe, written and directed by Avery and produced by Lawrence Bender. That was a good chance to shine, but not memorable at all. He was also involved with co-writing the Robert Zemeckis version of Beowulf, which I may have at arm's length but I don't know how that script evolved either. For me - all the way through Tarantino's work I see heart and skill. The hip-hoppy imitation or co-option or homage he has copped to all along isn't an issue for me because I was not actually a fan of the films that he reportedly cites. If I saw a moment of Kung Fu it was in passing someone else' TV set. I saw enough to get it but not enough to be addicted. Blacksploitation I am only aware of because documentaries about film discuss it and I did end up seeing Badasss by Mario Van Peebles and then Melvin's original film that led to it. Roots and Amistad pretty much sum up my exposure to and interest in slavery, the former being something I saw as a child when it first aired. Blazing Saddles is pretty much my education in westerns with a black protagonist. I figure I'm seeing it fresh. The other Jango with a silent D who cameos in this film represents something I had no interest in until Tarantino's latest primer on this aspect of grindhouse cinema. Actually my only memory of the word Mandingo comes from a parody segment in Kentucky Fried Movie, directed by John Landis and written by Abrahams, and the Zucker Brothers. When I saw Reservoir Dogs, I only recognized the use of colors as aliases (Mr. Brown) from The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3, and that was given an amusing spin by showing reactions to the names. I like what Tarantino ends up with. Do the girls chit-chat way too much in Death Proof? Yes. But I still found it interesting and it had some genuine scares and later some amusing table-turning. I do wonder if the Dogs are dressed the way they are because of the scene in Blues Brothers where they speak to a landlady and mistakenly call her Mrs. Toronto, and she corrects, "Tarantino." But I had forgotten that bit by the time his name became famous. I think the perspective of the underdog video clerk geek is far more interesting and unpolished and edgy than some of the more academic old farts full of restrictive prejudice about the moral obligations of the artist (which means it is wrong to depict Hitler or slavery unless in a dry and aloof documentary). I think Tarantino has a sure grasp on which buttons are being pushed. Even the scene he is in, where Michael Parks is under-used, which people attack for opening up the locale of the story when it should be narrowing, at least allows Django to purely use his wits and talk his way into a power position which I think is vital to the movie. There are plenty of "original" movies in which we can guess very plot point, and yet in Tarantino movies that are reputed to be derivative anything can happen. his fascination with Pam Grier and The Bride as survivors in their own styles is said to have come from his single-parent mother and her attitude. I'd say that came to the fore in the second half of Death Proof; the first half involved superficial women who ended up being victims and the second group were filmmaking, active and victorious over the villain. Then two strong women were the heart of Inglourious Basterds despite the male screen time. Women are absent from Reservoir Dogs, and lack of that in their psyche leaves everybody dead. Rather than do a domestic drama about making toast, he is using genre to often bring his personal views gradually forward. I think Tarantino makes serious films but it's like Lex Luthor says in Superman: The Movie, "Some people can read War and Peace and come away thinking it's a simple adventure story and others can unlock the secrets of the universe from a chewing gum wrapper." So to each his own. In Django, Broomhilda seems to have a smaller role, but she is constantly shown in flashbacks and as daydreams, obviously his guiding light and motivation to move forward. It is kind of sad that during the Golden Globes Tina Fey joked and nailed QT's place in the minds of women when she referred to him as "the star of my worst sexual nightmares." Because even though he is crass and plays up the twitchy egotist with a quick meaningless peace sign as his wave, the movies I feel show that he has compassion for women and respect for them. This is my defense of Q.T. against his detractors who find him only about superficial homage, pop culture and violence without something to say: I say Tarantino (raised by single mother) centers his movies on women. They would be the code key: strong women. Dogs may seem like the exception that proves the rule because the final cut only has one woman, the anonymous shooter of Freddy who herself is collateral damage. But she is the only female element in the zeitgeist of the film and its psyche kills itself. And SHE is prime mover of the central emotional and ethical crisis/wound in Freddy's gut. Looking closely at the female characters in Tarantino flicks will prove this.

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.

Spaghetti short

A short video about leftovers as breakfast.

Busted Watch: a video short

Here is a 30 second HDV video short about hanging onto a crappy watch just because it still works. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLk8ni9hkKU

mini-review: The Beaver

This is the first of my reviews pulling down DVDs from my own collection. I hesitate to include this one because I notice a disproportionate number of blog posts about Mel Gibson. Strange. I'll hold off any reviews on his other flicks until after I have been through a few others here. Pardon the hiss of sound on this one. The shot-gun mic I was using is not up to snuff. Waste of money. But at least this gets across my glib, flip remarks about The Beaver.

July 21 Murder Near Jobsite

I was working as a sort of guest guard for mostly weekend night shifts during the Olympics at CTV in Scarborough. Most of it was uneventful apart from being told I take washroom runs more often than most guards. I figure over the course of 12 hours three or four is reasonable. On a dark note, I had a couple of unfortunate clashes with the main site supervisor who will remain nameless. The last of which was a matter of which shift I agreed to do. In July he called me at home and asked me to do an additional shift which was Monday 06 August from 1900 hours to 0700 hours. Agreed. Simple enough. I wrote it down on m home calender - Monday 06 August was a civic holiday as well, so it was especially marked in my memory as maybe a possible few extra dollars. The Monday 06 shift arrives and I work it and no problem. My next shift should be Friday. Then Thursday the 9th just after 1900 hours or 7pm I get a call from this supervisor. Maybe he is the account director. I don't know. I've been calling him supervisor. I'm at home chilling and almost went to a matinee of Jaws which would have meant never getting this call. I should have gone to the show as it turns out. Instead of saying what was clearly the truth, "Gee, William, I screwed up and I should have asked you to do the Thursday shift. Can you help us out and come in? I accidentally had someone put you in the schedule for that and posted it but I didn't ask" he immediately starts with an accusatory tone. "William, why aren't you on site? You have a shift." I say no, I work Friday. He says he called me in July and got me to work Thurday the 9th and I remind him it was Monday the 6th. I tell him I guess I can come in at the last minute but it would have been better if I had known. He says it was on the same schedule posted "for the past 2 weeks." At this point I could have told him that Blessing, one of the other guards, asked my last name on Monday because she was apparently in the office correcting the schedule. Unfortunately nobody told me that it was to add me into any other shift. I did not want to bring her into the conversation. The onus should have been on the supervisor to ask me to take the shift, especially since I was a visiting guard and could take shifts from other sites while off. He knew that, hence his call in July, which I contended was about Monday. And I reminded him that I only had one Monday-into-Tuesday shift and it was the one on the 6th. Therefore that was the one he had booked me into. His response was "I'm the BOSS." Even though I agreed to come in, he said, "You are a no-show. You are a NO-SHOW. I am going to make sure (***the company we work for***) knows about it. This is how easily life can go from sane to insane. I reinforced my comment by saying the only times I've been in there on a Thursday were on July 26 and then the following week by accident where I was reminded it was just a one-off and I start my weekend shifts on Friday. FRIDAY. Extra reinforcement of logic. He claimed that he was aware I accidentally came in the previous Thursday and that it somehow indicated confirmation that Thursday the 9th was an agreed-upon shift. I say no, as it was a week away and clearly I came in and worked the MONDAY 6 shift which can't be overlooked. (It somehow did not occur to him to change his story to claim that he asked me to do two shifts; he stuck with the idea that it was Thursday and not Monday he asked me to do. Sheez!!) Now even though it was clearly his mistake, and it was a minor one, rather than accept the slightest responsibility he decided it was easier to throw me under the bus. He concluded - even though I was going to drag my tired ass in for this 12 hour (now it would be 11-hour) night shift - he went so far as to say to me, "I am going to make sure that once this Olympic coverage is done you don't come back." Wow. WOW! That's a pretty hurtful jab, considering that I did nothing wrong. Of course it is tempered by the fact that I wasn't SUPPOSED to come back. He had only decided I was of use as a night-shift gatehouse guard. He had already decided a month previous that I shouldn't be in regular rotation because after touring the complex with him I couldn't immediately verbally give directions to the places I had been. And this is a place that everyone calls a maze. Not to disparage the rest of the staff, because I find them generally nice and the few I've interacted with regularly were quite helpful and accommodating. And there is agreement that the fall-back of a line like "I'm the boss!" does sound like something this glob of shit would say. Maybe he does have friends at our head office who have kept me out of shifts elsewhere. Hard to tell. But for what it is worth, I am not going to be discrete about corrupt supervisors who have become too comfy at a site and become like Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. He may not be chopping off heads of natives but he has an unintentionally comical swagger and the security computer has a desktop photo displaying his precious black fancy car. The sort of car you don't expect a security site supervisor to have. He must have made peace with corruption long ago. Of course, that much is just speculation. A little more charitable than his own speculation about me. The first real offensive call I got from him was on Thursday the 26 (again, the only Thursday I was asked to come in; they don't want to give a lot of overtime) when he phoned me in the gatehouse from his own home to ask about the morning of July 21. He blatantly say, "Not just the cops but I think you should have seen something or heard something. Were you watching a movie or sleeping or what?" I told him even with the A/C on and the radio I likely would have heard a scream if there was one and that I have felt awful talking to family and friends about it and speculating about how a murder could have happened so close by and maybe I could have caught the guy or helped the victim. He left the conversation at that and nobody corrected me. I had to read on-line a news item about the death. Police did catch the killer, partly due to finger-prints on the car that had been abandoned at the roadside. But the murder HAD NOT TAKEN PLACE NEAR OUR PROPERTY !!!!! The victim had been stabbed and killed elsewhere and then driven and dropped in the ditch nearby out site. So in the best of circumstances, the most I would have heard is a car pulling over to the shoulder of a busy street and (hidden from my view by trees) someone dropping a body (whatever that sounds like from half a block away) into the grass slope. And since I can't leave my gatehouse and walk around there is nothing for me to see. According to dickhead, the CCTV cameras show that the killer after dumping the body ran through the opening in the far fence (not on the property) and walked down the court or driveway to flee and may have dropped the knife out there. None of which would read as anything significant in the dead of night. The images I have taken with my still camera (some video setting shots) show how difficult any of that would have been to see. Also, my supervisor would know that I am not the one with CCTV camera access. That is the main console inside, and even when police started to gather on the street and I phoned that guard to pan around he could not spot a body. We helped the police in way way we could and they looked around, but they knew our involvement could only be after the fact and I am certain (considering my own direct interaction with the detectives that night) they knew darn well that the person was not stabbed near us but was dumped and all of our involvement could only be after the fact. I am furious that this goddamn jackass in charge had no problem letting me think I could have saved someone. . . and also had apparent ignorance of what that site looks like from the post I was at.

pitch in with pitching

Bitching should be part of the heading here, but I wasn't bold enough to do that. All I know about this blog is that I may start posting pitches here for my scripts and videotaped movie reviews. The process of retelling myself a film story helps clarify and simplify it. Some details may fall by the wayside, but maybe this is the way to discover what ahould fall out. Some ideas or details I fall in love with, even directorial ideas that I have already imposed on a script not yet finished. Have to make sure I'm not going out of the way and straying from the dramatic center of a story to include stylish wanking. I've also considered using these blogs for knocking off "four pages" as described by Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way. Just an excuse to dump out any random trash cluttering up my head soit isn't the driving force of my creative writing or infecting it. But most of the clutter is exactly what I want to generate, so just getting it out of my system and having it sit unread and unusable or having to cull through it all for morstles that might be of use is not enough. I've put a handful of pitches into my virtual office at zoetrope.com and have changed the office name to Pitch Bitch. People do rely on oral instruction and presentation, to a point where may people in autority can barely write an e-mail. That's a hurdle for me, because I'd rather fuss over something than be a less intimidsting version of me. This pitch-focus means less fussing, mainly streem of consciousness description of a project. We'll see if it works. I have such a backlog of scripts and projects. The stories may as well have their structure and be contained even in their most minimalist and conversational form.