So, I’ve finished the first draft of another movie screenplay. This is exciting. I’m gonna start work today on a new idea for a tv programme I’ve had. This is exciting too. All of this, combined with a weird shoulder ailment which has spread into my left arm meaning typing kind of hurts has meant that itagi has been quiet. I do have big writing plans though, so don’t delete that RSS feed just yet : )
So how have you been? –>
Hello! I’ve been off having a cold, then going to London - it’s been either busy or feverish. I went to London to see the faaahmly (pronounced with a thoroughly inappropriate Mitchell brothers accent), but also because me and David had tickets to see Eddie Izzard, who was trying out a bunch of new material on a three day run at the Arts Theatre, which is just off Leicester Square. The trip happened because I happened to be on the phone to David when the email announcing the dates arrived in my inbox. He immediately got two tickets, and after umming and ahing for a bit, I decided to take the second one. There’s something very exciting about being in an audience of 500 or so people, at 11.30pm watching your, and everyone else there’s, favourite stand up comedian.
I first discovered Eddie Izzard, like so many good things in my cultural life, through my friend Bob. She is a person of excellent taste, and way before he was a massive comedy icon, she had his “live at the ambassadors” video (video! Ol’ skool!). I was on board from the first viewing. Steve the Dalek and Kev the Dalek and their plungers and inability to walk up stairs…ah memories. However, the sudden realisation that he was a world class and mindblowingly good stand up came later, the day I first saw Definite Article. I was at university at the time, and watched it with two friends (at least one of whom has been known to visit itagi, hello!), and could not believe how good it was. I also remember being amazed by how long it was…I still drank at the time, and remember being quite drunk, and laughing hysterically.
I’ve since seen Definite Article approximately 800,000,000 times. There are lines and moments of mime in it which have become part of the shorthand language of shared cultural heritage that have bonded and cemented the friendships that are most important to me. I’ve laughed at the same jokes countless times, and occasionally whilst thinking about something else, they’ve come back to me and made me laugh, or just shake my head in general comedic awe. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed every video and dvd he’s ever put out, although none of them blew me away as much as Definite Article, mostly because I’ve had very high expectations each time since.
But neither time I’d seen him live had lived up to that. The first time was on a tour called “Circle” which sadly was almost all material from the “Dress to Kill” video, which was something of a disappointment, because of the differently named tour. The second time was on the “Sexie” tour - the material was great, but stand up comedy really doesn’t lend itself to 15,000 seater arenas. We were sitting not only right at the back of the NIA, but also right at the back on the side, so we could barely see him, and there’s something odd about the rhythm of comedy in an environment like that.
Last Wednesday night though more than made up for those evenings. The material was almost all brand new, except for a couple of old lines thrown in in a greatest hits kind of a way. It may have been a work in progress, but lots of it seemed polished, and look out for the giraffes playing charades, and the latin backwards, massive, hairless squirrel elephant if you get a chance to see this show or the show it becomes…
He gave short shrift to hecklers, one of whom was just making odd noises at him. “Is this your first time heckling? You will need to say actual words.” was quite a good line I thought. One of the most interesting things to me about the evening was not directly related to the comedy though. When he came out on stage, it was as if the texture of the air in the room had changed - there was just an outpouring of love and appreciation from the crowd. It must be incredibly addictive to be hit by that whenever you walk out on stage. I’ve heard many stand ups discussing their art form, and love and attention seems to be a pretty common thread for peoples’ reasons for wanting to stand up making strangers laugh.
I’ve just spoken to David, who said that he thought that Izzard was a bit loose and flappy compared to the tightness of his earlier work, and I’m not sure I agree. I mean, there were definitely moments where the act wasn’t polished yet, and he played with the microphone stand for a solid 2 minutes, but I really liked that stuff. I like the idea of seeing, as the show was called, a “work in progress” from one of the world’s great creative minds. As well as the fantastic material, there’s an insight into the way it comes about which I found really valuable. I also got to feel all clever when I got a joke about 30 seconds before the rest of the audience. He also said “Jam” without any irony a few times, which was nice. The show comes highly recommended by me, and if you like stand up comedy and for some reason aren’t familiar with Eddie Izzard, you should rush out and get Definite Article to correct that… –>
Writing took an absolute battering…I’ve had a fever for 4 straight days now, so anything I did write might come out a bit, you know, flaky and delirious : )
–>
When I found out that Aaron Sorkin was writing a new series, I was very excited. The West Wing, which Sorkin created, had been an extraordinary television programme, running for 7 seasons, at least 4 of which were spectacularly good. The dialogue, the high minded idealism, the having meetings whilst walking through corridors, it all worked for me, and like most of the right thinking world I thought how nice it would be if President Bartlett was real, and really the president. (Incidentally, that’s right as in correct, rather than wing…)
Studio 60 arrived to great fanfare and buzz. Set behind the scenes of a Saturday Night Live type weekly topical comedy sketch show, its central protagonists were Matt Albi (Matthew Perry) and Danny Tripp (Bradley Whitford) a writer/director team brought in to run Studio 60 by the new head of “NBS” a fictional television network, (not at all NBC at all. At all.) Albi and Tripp were based not so loosely on Sorkin and his best friend and creative partner, Thomas Schlamme, the director responsible for the West Wing’s fluid stedicam heavy visual style. As the series progressed we were introduced to the cast and crew of the fictional show within a show, and the top brass at NBS. The show was beautifully written, slickly shot, sparklingly well acted and sadly is about to reach the end of its first and only season, having been put on early hiatus midway through its run and then officially cancelled about a month ago. It received an incredibly warm critical reception which began to cool off quickly as the numbers of people watching were less than stellar, and Entertainment Weekly ended the year by naming Studio 60 “Worst Show of 2006.” This is one of the most impressively and remarkably wrong titles ever to come out of the wide world of wrong that is entertainment journalism. It’s one of those moments where you wonder if everyone else is watching the same thing as you, or if they’ve somehow mistaken Studio 60 for a random evil reality television programme. All the people that I know that have seen Studio 60 either liked it or absolutely loved it, and whilst I can see people finding it overly highbrow, or somewhat unbelievable in the nobility and honour that it attributes to its central characters, to describe it as in any way “bad” in terms of quality seems to me to be a bit of a travesty.
So why did Studio 60 “fail”?
Well, there’s a strong argument to say that it didn’t, certainly in terms of quality, I will remember it as a high point of the art of American television drama at its best, but also just in terms of numbers. According to the source of all truth that is Wikipedia: On December 29, 2006, “Nielsen Media Research reported the results of having, for the first time, monitored viewers who use a Digital Video Recorder to pre-record shows for later viewing. According to the Nielsen numbers, adding these viewers increased Studio 60’s ratings the most in percentage terms of all network shows. These ratings, called “live plus seven”, include all viewers who use a DVR to record the show and then watch it within a week of its initial airing.”
Even with that additional percentage, though, Studio 60 was a very expensive show to produce, and the numbers obviously didn’t justify NBC’s continued support.
Whereas the West Wing arrived during the Clinton White House, a time of general economic and social optimism, Studio 60 arrived at one of America’s darkest political hours - an unloved and untrusted administration, two expensive and highly questionable foreign wars, economic and social unrest - all of which combined with a television culture that, Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert aside, tends to be fairly bland or at least, if not bland, then more interested in exploring the personal than the political and the cultural. Sorkin decided to set his new show in the world of television probably as partly a “write what you know” kind of a thing, but also because it was an opportunity to explore the culture wars - America is torn between the Red State Fox News Gun Totin’ Bible Beltin’ types and the Blue State Liberal Intelligensia Soft On Crime Godless Unpatriotic types, at least that’s what the two sides call each other, and I think Sorkin wanted to investigate the middle ground. He also wanted to examine how the “War on Terror” was manifesting itself in the lives of the people making America’s entertainment, and (perhaps allowed to be completely independent once the show had been cancelled) the last few episodes have dealt directly with the impact of September 11th.
The sad truth of it is that Studio 60 might just be ahead of its time, or if not ahead of it then at least out of step with it. America doesn’t seem to be ready for the kind of analysis played out through the drama of the Sunset Strip. There is a critical consensus that at least part of the cool response has been because the show is too “inside baseball” and people really aren’t that interested in the mechanics going on behind the scenes of television, but I don’t really believe that - Larry Sanders certainly never suffered from that, and people originally said the same thing about the White House before the West Wing arrived. People at some point probably said “no one’s really interested in what goes on in legal firms and court rooms are they?” There is definitely a compelling argument to suggest that Sorkin’s impassioned and culturally and politically significant dialogue may be better served by the infinitely grander stage of the White House than a comedy sketch show, but Sorkin, like a modern day Edward R Murrow appears to believe that television should and could be about something, that it’s such a powerful and pervasive medium that it has the opportunity, or even the obligation, to be actually about something, and that great debates about the state of the nation played out through believable, human and entertaining drama is ultimately something worth aiming for. It’s a real shame that America didn’t go with him this time.
So, as I have made mention of in the past, I used to be something of a superhero comic book fan (used to be, much to the chagrin of my inner geek, who would like it if I a. still was, and b. played multi sided dice based D+D games on a regular basis, or indeed, ever.) Thus, I always get a bit excited about big blockbuster movies based on Marvel characters. I didn’t bother with the first Fantastic Four movie, on the basis that absolutely everyone said it was rubbish, and sometimes you just have to believe people. The one that came out last week, however, made itself pretty unmissable by virtue of the inclusion of the Silver Surfer.
The Silver Surfer should be the stupidest character ever invented. Created in the 60s, in the middle of the surf boom, and given the name Norrin Rad (Rad, for goodness sake…) he is an alien who, you know, surfs around the galaxy. But, as is Stan Lee’s wont, behind the overblown silliness is real heart - The Surfer is the unwilling herald of Galactus, “the devourer of worlds” (cor, its hard to type that without feeling faintly ridiculous), who is forced to find new life for Galactus to consume in order to protect his own homeworld. Of course, he comes to earth, meets the Fantastic 4, and realises that he has to stand up to Galactus regardless of personal cost. There is something about the Surfer’s visual and emotional design that means you forget he’s Mr Rad, the intergalactic surfer, and gives him an iconoclastic quality which has meant that he’s generally beloved amongst comic book fans, and meant that I wasn’t going to miss his big screen debut - there’s no way my inner geek would have let me.
So we come to the movie itself. And it’s really pretty good…I mean, it’s a comic book movie, right, and not the modern, dark and broody aimed at semi-emo-teenagers kind. It’s brightly coloured and fun and mostly kid friendly (although I think some of it would have freaked me out a bit when I was a kid, but I was sensitive!). The first Fantastic Four movie, was, so I’m told, an origin story - wherein we see 4 astronauts get super powers because of something or other in space…Thus we meet Mr Fantastic - Dr. Reed Richards, a renowned genius scientist type, who is given the power to become all stretchy and that, The Invisible Woman, Sue Storm, Reed Richards’ girlfriend - guess what her power is…Johnny Storm, Sue’s brother aka The Human Torch, who gets all flammable when he says “Flame On.” and The Thing, Ben Grimm (he might be someone’s cousin, but he’s definitely their best mate) who turns into a super strong man who looks like he’s made out of rock. He likes to says “It’s Clobberin’ Time” which is not the best catchphrase I’ve ever heard, but does make me think of this. Is it can be Clobberin’ tiem now please? They also have an enemy called, Victor Von Doom. Or Dr Doom for short. He really would have struggled to be a good guy, no one would have believed him. “No, sorry, you’re called Victor Von Doom, bad guy it is…”
In this sequel, the Surfer arrives on earth, causing all manner of trouble as the Power Cosmic wielded by his surf board causes a bunch of odd natural phenomena. The Fantastics get caught up in investigating what goes one, Dr Doom gets involved, and it all ends in *SPOILER WARNING* the world narrowly averting disaster due to the Fantastic Four doing their generally fanastic thing. But, the thing is, it really works - the world shown to us on screen is recognisable and believable, and everything works within the parameters set by the universe it takes place in. There’s one coherent story, with a couple of sub-sub-plots to keep interest and vary tone and the special effects are pretty stunning. The Surfer is brilliantly rendered and really does look like he’s there, rather than animated onto the world. I was trying to think of an effect which didn’t quite work for me, a la the compositing in the Sandman creation bit in Spiderman, and the only one I could think of was some of the Mr Fantastic stretching. There’s a scene in an aeroplane where he gets his hand luggage into the overhead locker on the other side of the plane, and that didn’t look quite right to me, but it’s nitpicky to even mention, really, as the effects are generally so good. The jokes are incredibly cheesy and terrible, but it’s the Fantastic Four, and their jokes have always been terrible and cheesy and so that works too. There’s a few sketchy spots of acting, but generally the performances are fine.
It compares incredibly favourably with Spiderman 3 because of its coherence - it’s aiming for something much less grand than Raimi’s Spidey, so it risks much less, but achieves everything it sets out to. Which is really all you can ask for from a comic book movie. Your inner geek will probably enjoy it… –>
Wow…
Hello everyone! It’s been a while. My old computer died a few weeks ago, and with it, I lost my password to itagi. The peerless and awesome Des, who runs things behind the scenes here was busy helping his good lady wife with their fantastic newborn (not, sadly, to be named Version 3.0) and I didn’t want to disturb them with my pc related needs, so I’ve had an accidental holiday.
I’m writing this on my lovely shiny new pc, bought with help from my parents and the proceeds of the car sale (Dell, Athalon 64 5000+ Core Duo, 2gb ram, 256mb Radeon blahblah graphics card and most lovely of all, a 22″ flat screen monitor, running Vista). I haven’t done any screenplay writing whilst I’ve been away because it was awaiting data recovery, but that’s done now too, so it’s back to the routine - I’m going to be aiming for a significant post every other day on Itagi whilst I get to the end of the first draft of the current screenplay (which is not far off.) I’ve seen a couple of movies which I’d like to write about, and I might also do something about Vista, since it’s all nice and that…
How’s everyone doing? Did anyone miss itagi whilst it was on holiday? –>
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Help a brutha out! : ) –>
