The Zombie Log–Part III: The Art of Waiting

Our very own Chip Kincaid of WWM is appearing in his first feature film, playing the role of Christian, a post-apocalyptic survivor of a zombie holocaust, in “Day/Night,” written and directed by David Kearl and Scott Clarke. We’ve asked Chip to write a weekly insider’s report of the shoot. Check back each Monday random weekday on which I get around to it, over the next several weeks for updates. Click on the appropriate links to read the earlier installments:

Part I: The Curse of the Bat

Part II: Ah, the Sweet Smell of Burning Urine

If you ever have the chance to be in a film in which you wear the same costume in every scene you shoot (and I hope you do), there are a couple of things you shouldn’t do. You know that really awesome Beatles shirt that you wore to the hippie paint-throwing party, which ended up with really awesome colors splotched all over it–colors so awesome that you never washed it? I know you think it would look really cool as part of your costume and that it would be the perfect complement to your character’s laid-back attitude. But take my word for it–DON’T DO IT! Because the day will come when your shirt will get all offensively stanky, so stanky that its scent will resonate in your nostrils for hours after every shoot. And on that day, you will want to wash that shirt, which, of course, you cannot do, because it’s already in the movie with all the awesome hippie paint on it. Take my word for it and wash that damn shirt BEFORE you start shooting. You’ll thank me later.

So anyway, when you make a movie on a 1,500 dollar budget (You could make 60,000 Day/Nights for the cost of one You Don’t Mess with the Zohan.), involving unpaid friends and acquaintances, and not professional actors, it’s only natural that different participants harbor different understandings of the significance of the project. Some find it an entertaining diversion. Others find it something between a favor and a chore. I, on the other hand, see it as a crucial test–a high-stakes assessment of the viability of my personal ambitions.

I know that might seem a bit presumptuous of me, to base my auto-permission to pursue my own dreams on an exploratory endeavor that most would consider a mere learning experience. But really, my standards aren’t all that particularly high. The movie doesn’t have to be a worldwide sensation for me to feel validated as an actor. Basically, if I can watch this movie in the presence of others without feeling completely ashamed of my performance, I’ll be pleased. Still though, those modest intentions are enough to make this movie business a big deal to me.

Anyway, being the complete nerd about this movie that I am, I felt pretty lousy about being twenty minutes late to our shoot yesterday morning. Of course, at the same time, I knew that I’d be the first one there. Other than David, of course. Ah, David Kearl… that stalwart lad. That bastion of quiet dignity. Oh, and Susan too–a queen of unyielding support, and might I add, our most loyal reader at WWM. I and these two fantastic persons had the gift of 100+ minutes together before the rest of the cast showed up, with nothing to entertain us but our witty brains and an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger.

In this episode, Walker and Trivette are running a military-style boot camp for wayward young men, called Camp Justice. Camp Justice is just about the best name for a camp ever in the history of camps. (Quoth David: “Camp Justice is waaaayyy cooler than the lame-o camp across the lake, Camp Mercy.”) Walker and Trivette use their punching/kicking/general ownage skills to teach the delinquents at Camp Justice (one of whom just happens to be the yellow-eyed bully from A Christmas Story) a thing or two about truth, freedom, and the American way.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but I suppose when you’re waiting 100 minutes for your co-stars to show up (and one doesn’t even make it), and you’re watching Chuck roundhouse kick some dude in the eyebrow, you can’t help but start wishing Chuck were around to teach a lesson to all those who don’t appreciate the blessings of life and movie-making.

That is all.

Happy Linksday

• For this week’s B-Movie Bonanza, we present the opening scene from Zardoz. Zardoz is a giant, floating, stone head, and he rules over the people of a post-apocalyptic Earth. In this clip he gives some excellent advice, including “The penis is evil.” And yes, the man who fires the gun at the camera at the end is, in fact, Mr. Sean Connery.
• So Columbia has obtained the rights to a Smurfs movie. Amy Wilkinson suggests Ricky Gervais for the role of Gargamel (= Awesome). I’ll see it if they do it Donnie Darko-style.
• Here‘s an interesting article from the LA Times about how the clogged release schedule, combined with weak box-office attendance, is making for unpredictable earnings. Hollywood, as an industry, has always been cooperative and not competitive. It seems like that may be changing, which hopefully will lead to greater discretion in greenlighting projects. In a competitive environment, maybe they spend 50 million less on something like Zohan.
• Hey, you want to start a comic-nerd riot? Try leaking a story that Captain America is going to appear in your new, lucky-it-even-got-made-after-the-first-one, Hulk movie. Then, just decide to leave that part out.
• I’m only linking to this because the article’s headline somehow references my three least-favorite things in the whole world.
• I may be wrong, but if I were making a Street Fighter movie, it wouldn’t focus on Chun Li. And it definitely wouldn’t do so at the expense of omitting both Ken and Ryu. Sheesh.
• This just in, Brokeback Mountain just got gayer!
• So, um… I think I found my calling in life…
• And for this week’s trailer theater we present Seth Rogen and James Franco in Pineapple Express. And if you, like me, fall in love with the song in this trailer, it’s M.I.A. performing “Paper Planes.”

For the Price of a Single Zohan

So I watched You Don’t Mess with the Zohan yesterday. It was about as good/as bad as I expected. Some parts were kind of funny, but there was about an hour in the middle of the movie that was just boring and dreadful. The gross-out jokes seemed a little over-the-top for the PG-13 rating, and the political “satire” was immature, ineffective, and non-threatening. My overall reaction was more just surprise that someone even thought it was worth it to spend a Hollywood budget to make such a lightweight, pointless movie.

That reaction got me thinking, and after a quick Google search, I found the estimated production costs for Zohan.

90,000,000 dollars.

NINETY MILLION DOLLARS.

That’s a 9 with 7 ZEROS after it.

I don’t think I can fully express how this makes me feel. Today I worked seven hours hopping bell at the local hotel. I made six dollars for each of those hours, plus tips. Each of those 42 dollars is precious to me, representing 1/42 of today’s addition to the barrier between me and starvation, homelessness, and poverty. When I find a single dollar tucked away and forgotten in a rear pants pocket, it is no small occasion. That one dollar has translatable value: it’s a can of Diet Dr. Pepper; it’s a Spicy Chicken Sandwich from Carl’s Jr.; it’s 1/5.5 of a matinée movie ticket or one RedBox rental.

In other words, I look at a dollar and i see an object of personal utility. Some dude looked at NINETY MILLION of those same dollars, and all he could see was… Zohan. Again, the movie was a completely forgettable, throwaway attempt at politicized gross-out humor. I doubt anyone in the world will ever name it as his or her favorite movie, and it will fade quickly into the mediocrity of the post-Wedding Singer era of Adam Sandler’s career (with the exceptions of Punch-Drunk Love, Spanglish, and to a lesser degree, Reign Over Me).

Now, I understand that the ninety million was an investment–a sound investment, probably, in the omnipubescence of middle-America. Even if the movie is a complete bomb, most, if not all, of the production costs will be recouped soon after the DVD release. Despite this, I thought it would be fun to follow the lead of my friend David Kearl’s Christmas post on Zooby News, and make a list of some of the things that could be bought with 90,000,000 dollars. Here we go:

1. 95,238,095 liters of Diet Dr. Pepper
2. 3,610,108 shares of Dr. Pepper stock
3. A brand new Lamborghini Murcielago for each of your 254 closest friends
4. 11,739,130 cubic centimeters of Gary Busey’s fecal matter
5. 4,092,769 baby toupees
6. 7,421 years of college at a public university
7. 1,855 complete college educations for underprivileged students
8. A lifetime of fresh water for 1,800,000 people who need it

OR: A single Zohan.

I love/hate this world of ours.

Reservations… Lots of Reservations

When you watch movies with friends, there is a delicate balance you have to maintain. In order to preserve sociability, your standard of “watchable” must be flexible enough to adjust itself to different groups. For example, if I only watched movies by myself, I doubt I’d have ever watched Transformers. As it is, I’ve seen it twice. There are few people I dislike more than Nic Cage and Jon Voight, but somehow, my family convinced me to watch both National Treasure movies in one day (ugh).

So when I ventured to the movie store with three female friends, I knew I wasn’t necessarily going to get to watch Rescue Dawn, which I’ve been meaning to see for over a year now. Not that I didn’t try:

“But it’s got Christian Bale in it!”

“Really?” (They look at the case.)

“Ew, gross, but he’s like skinny and dirty looking.” (Putting the case back on the shelf)

We ended up settling on No Reservations, which seemed like a decent compromise. Yeah, it’s a romcom, but it has a pretty solid cast, and I’ve seen and liked the German movie it’s based on, Bella Martha. All in all, I didn’t expect it to be great, but I figured it was safely in my watchable zone in the context of my company. After watching it, I’m not sure there is a watchable zone for this movie, unless you tend to gather socially with the catatonic or the criminally insane.

Before this poor excuse for a movie was over, I was hitting myself in the head with my cell phone.

Hard.

It hurt.

My stated excuse was that I was trying to erase it from my memory, which isn’t really unreasonable, as it was easily the worst movie I’ve seen in months. Really, though, I think I was just trying to feel something, even if it was pain. You see, No Reservations is completely void of real emotion and anything resembling a cathartic experience. The anti Ong-Bak, No Reservations fails to create a single memorably good moment, instead preferring to beat us over the head with obvious, disinteresting, pseudo-emotional blather.

The relationship between Zeta-Jones and Aaron Eckhart vacillates between unbelievable and revolting, as for some reason, they are portrayed on multiple occasions swapping food between their mouths. Is that supposed to be sexy? I think it’s gross. None of the characters seem to change or develop in any sort of realistic character arc, which is partially because we NEVER HEAR THEM TALK. Every time you think some interesting dialogue is coming, the filmmakers instead opt to drown out the voices with the hideously repetitive score from Philip Glass. It probably happened ten times. The result is that the relationships that develop seem way to shallow and pointless to motivate the drastic character changes that happen without any sort of believable explanation. Even Abigail Breslin is a disappointment in this movie. By the third time Zeta-Jones walked in on her crying and holding on to a sentimental artifact of her deceased mother, I’d lost all sympathy, and that’s hard to do when you’re dealing with a RECENTLY ORPHANED CHILD. I seriously heard myself say, “Why don’t you stop crying already? I get it, you miss your dumb, dead mom.” That is what No Reservations does to people.

My final complaint, and perhaps the more important, is the sheer absurdity of the notion that Bella Martha needed to be remade. I understand the business behind it–Americans don’t pay to read subtitles. But come on, are we really so dumb and ethnocentric that we can’t enjoy something fresh and interesting without dumbing it down, commercializing it, and involving Aaron Eckhart of all soulless, revolting beasts?

After watching this movie, my intelligence was insulted, my filth-tolerance was at an all-time low, and my head hurt. But maybe that last one was partially my fault.

Happy Linksday!

• For this week’s B-Movie Bonanza, we present the “greatest fight scene ever” from the obviously amazingly awful movie, Undefeatable, which was made in Hong Kong but stars English-speaking actors. Just to give you an idea of how incredibly awefulsome (a new word I invented, meaning awful and awesome) this movie is, here is its plot synopsis from IMDB: ” Kristi Jones (Cynthia Rothrock) avenges her sister’s death at the hands of a crazed martial arts rapist.” The clip to follow is pretty violent, but also completely jaw-droppingly sweet.
• When I first heard of the upcoming fourth installment in the Beverly Hills Cop series, I said, “I thought Eddie Murphy’s career was over.” Turns out, I was right.
• Why don’t urban fires ever veer into the right areas?
• So when I read that Will Ferrell and Adam McKay were filming a remake of the hit 1970’s TV show, Land of the Lost, I had one of those crazy moments of intense, unexpected memory of the 90s remake of the series. A quick YouTube search didn’t disappoint:
• This very well could be the single most frightening list I’ve ever seen.
• Who messes with the Zohan? Turns out Robert Cabell does.
• Vikings vs. Aliens… FINALLY!
• And finally, we present this week’s Trailer Theater. How does the new Coen Brothers movie, Burn After Reading sound? Yes, please! Starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt? Yes, please! How about Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton? Yes, please! We’ll even throw in a little bit of John Malkovich and the dad from Juno. Enjoy.

The Zombie Log — Part II: Ah, the Sweet Smell of Burning Urine

Our very own Chip Kincaid of WWM is appearing in his first feature film, playing the role of Christian, a post-apocalyptic survivor of a zombie holocaust, in “Day/Night,” written and directed by David Kearl and Scott Clarke. We’ve asked Chip to write a weekly insider’s report of the shoot. Check back each Monday over the next several weeks for updates. You can read Part I here.

So Tuesday night, after a few last-minute plan changes, we went up to Rock Canyon Park to film a few campfire scenes for the movie. It was a gorgeous night for filming, and we had a great time, sitting around the fire, butchering our lines, and bathing in the warm glow of firelight and camaraderie. It was windy, so the smoke was swirling around in our faces, and we had to constantly feed pages of script into the fire to keep it bright enough to film, but all in all, things went as well as we could expect–that is, until the shoot was over.

There are a few ingredients needed to make a fire. You need your logs, tinder to burn first and fast, kindling to transfer the flame from the tinder to the logs, and an initial source of heat (matches, a lighter, flint, etc.). What you don’t often think of is that you also need some sort of intended method for putting out the fire when you’re done. We didn’t have any water, or any receptacles for carrying water if we could find it. We didn’t have a shovel or anything to get dirt to throw over the fire. It would have taken hours to hang around and wait for it to die down, even if we separated the logs. There really was only one option–only one source of enough moisture to calm the raging inferno: the acrid pools of waste-liquid curdling in our bladders.

If this piques your curiosity at all, you can conduct an experiment at home! Take some sort of deep pot, urinate into it, and place it on the stove. Turn the stove to high and ignore it for an hour or so. Your house will not smell good. And when you are done with that, try this one! Build a very big room, about the size of a large campsite. Make sure to include no useful light source brighter than the cloud-covered moon. Cover the floor with a snaggly carpet that resembles overgrown grass. Then have someone place your keys somewhere randomly in the room. I believe you will discover that trying to find those keys is not terribly fun. Especially if you’re constantly worried about stumbling into a piss-soaked fire ring.

Anyway, after a half-hour or so of combing the campsite, our cell-phones positioned inches away from the ground, providing the most paltry of search lights, we found my keys. A few handfuls of dirt completed the extinguishing of the pee-drenched logs, and we were on our way. Our clothes smelled awful and my car smelled awful, but the only scent that truly lingered in our nostrils was the sweet smell of scenes completed–the lurid, enticing aroma of realized artistic vision.

Or maybe that was just pee.

Part III: The Art of Waiting

The Best Indiana Jones Movie You’ve Never Seen

So ever since Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (which I have stubbornly avoided going to see so far) came out, I don’t know how many times I’ve been asked which Indy movie I like the most. As long as I can remember, the answer has been Temple of Doom by a fair margin. Raiders is great and it gets credit for being the original. Last Crusade boasts the best production values of the three, and Sean Connery is no lame addition. Despite all this, Temple of Doom is the best, because it is the one which most fully epitomizes the campy charm of the franchise. It takes itself the least seriously of the three, and the result is more exciting and re-watchable than the others.

And if someone is an expert on the matter, it is me. I’ve spent at least 1/6 of the last 48 hours watching Indiana Jones movies, which I believe is more than I’ve spent sleeping. I feel as if I’ve been soaking overnight in a vat of Harrison Ford chest-sweat. As a result, I’ve had to rethink my aforementioned preference. The best Indiana Jones movie does not star Harrison Ford. It is not directed by Steven Spielberg. It’s never been distributed in theaters and you can’t rent it. The best Indiana Jones movie is entitled Raiders of the Lost Ark: An Adaptation. Allow me to explain:

In 1981, three friends–each twelve years old–fell so much in love with Raiders of the Lost Ark that they decided to meticulously remake the movie, shot by shot. They proceeded to gather friends to act, direct, and wrangle snakes, and embarked on a production that took them six years to complete. The result is an amazing testament to the powers of perseverance and collaboration, a paean of cinematic idealism, some strange and wonderful sort of a coming-of-age story, and a masterpiece of meta-film making.

The sets and effects are ingeniously duplicated, and half the fun is trying to piece together how they set it up, Be-Kind-Rewind-style. Despite the low production values, the movie never veers into self-parody; this wasn’t a joke to these kids. If there was an effect or a prop they couldn’t adequately replicate, they adapted. They used a motor boat instead of a sea-plane in the escape scene near the beginning of the movie. The Nazi, monkey was replaced with one of the kid’s dog, Snickers, who didn’t miss a beat (the film is dedicated to his memory at the end of the credits, as he died two years before the film was completed). The truck used in the final chase scene had no motor, so the kids had to push it or tow it with another vehicle, depending on the angle used in each of the 70+ shots used in the scene. These “adaptations” don’t weaken the movie. Really, they heighten the power of the untold story–a subtly extraordinary story of sacrifice and friendship.

As the movie took six years to complete, and it was not shot chronologically, there are rapid shifts in the actors’ ages. Their voices change pitch, their body-types and hair-styles change, and some of the characters even grow or shrink by feet in height from scene to scene. As a result, the viewer experiences the joy of piecing it all together. You imagine the sheer teenage joy they felt when they received permission to shoot the boat scenes in the Navy yard. You imagine the off-screen romance between the actors playing Indy and Marion. You imagine their attempts to justify nearly burning down their parents’ houses. But most of all, you imagine what it would be like to be those kids. And that’s what makes them movie stars to the fullest degree.

The movie only exists as a bootleg VHS or a digitized copy thereof, but one copy found its way into Eli Roth’s video collection, and he passed it along to Steven Spielberg, who reportedly loved it. There are rumors of plans to make a movie chronicling the kids’ experience. I’m not sure that would be a good idea, and I’m absolutely positive it isn’t necessary. The fact of the matter is that the kids’ glory is in their work–a piece of nuanced brilliance that rises even above the object of their own emulation.