Happy New Year, Everybody!

52x52x52x52: The Reckoning

Lately I've been thinking about 2012 resolutions and how concrete goals have become less useful for me these days. Trying to develop NEW HABITS seems more productive and human than trying to achieve a list of arbitrary goals which may or may not be achievable, as projects change and grow and become something else.

Dad says the last new year's resolution he made was when he was 32 and it was the only one he was ever able to keep: He resolved to never make more resolutions.

However, setting the 52x52x52x52 goal (Quad 52s: 52 books, 52 movies, 52 blog posts, in 52 weeks) has kept me on point all year. There was even a moment when I thought I might reach 60 on all fronts.

For a while I thought that this goal was achieved without cutting into other time--that I had simply carved space from the leftover bits in my life. But I see now that is not the case. Next year I might make a similar goal, but it will be half as ambitious.

Here is a partial list of the books read this year, not including craft books (on writing, gardening, etc, which are technically books which were read cover to cover, and which add to the overall total, but which are not worth listing here):

1. Blood Meridian -- Cormac McCarthy

2. A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder -- Eric Abrahamson & David Freedman

3. In the House -- Lynn Kilpatrick

4. Zeitoun -- Dave Eggers

5. The Mezzanine -- Nicholson Baker

6. Everything You Know is Ping Pong -- Roger Bennett & Eli Horowitz

7. The Wasp Factory -- Iain Banks

8. The Financial Lives of the Poets -- Jess Walter

9. Gun With Occasional Music -- Jonathan Lethem

10. Shop Class As Soulcraft -- Matthew B. Crawford

11. The Lady and the Monk -- Pico Iyer

12. The Kite Runner -- Khaled Hosseini

13. Best Magazine Writing 2006 -- American Society of Magazine Editors

14. Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout -- Lauren Redniss

15. Juliet, Naked -- Nick Hornby

16. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother -- Amy Chua

17. The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac -- Free Darko (Bethlehem Shoals, et al)

18. Freedom -- Jonathan Franzen

19. Manhood for Amateurs -- Michael Chabon

20. Robinson Crusoe -- Daniel Defoe

21. The Great American Stickup -- Robert Scheer

22. Buffalo Lockjaw -- Greg Ames

23. Huckleberry Finn -- Mark Twain

24. Where Good Ideas Come From -- Steven Johnson

25. The Big Short -- Michael Lewis

26. Lush Life -- Richard Price

27. Planet of Slums -- Mike Davis

28. The War of Art -- Steven Pressfield

29. Wuthering Heights -- Emily Bronte

30. The 25th Hour -- David Benioff

31. How We Decide -- Jonah Lehrer

32. Conquest of the Useless: Reflections on the Making of Fitzcarraldo -- Werner Herzog

33. Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America -- Steve Almond

34. How Soccer Explains the World -- Franklin Foer

35. Never Let Me Go -- Kazuo Ishiguro

36. Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) -- Tom Vanderbilt

37. Jesus' Son -- Denis Johnson

38. Word Freak -- Stephan Fatsis

39. I Am Not Sidney Poiter -- Percival Everett

40. Do-Over -- Robin Hemley

41. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob DeZoet -- David Mitchell

42. Wise Blood -- Flannery O'Connor

43. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks -- Rebecca Skloot

44. House of Holes -- Nicholson Baker

45. Oyster -- John Biguenet

46. Divisidero -- Michael Ondaatje

47. In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction

Others: McSweeney's Panorama Single-Issue Newspaper (like a book), Grow Great Grub, Small Claims Crap, Your Screenplay Sucks, Save the Cat, The First Five Pages, The Forest For the Trees, On Writing by Stephen King, Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, etc.

Galacticon

K and I have become addicted to Battlestar Galactica, which aired between 2004 and 2008 on the lowly Syfy Channel. I know we are addicted because I get very angry every time there is a lame episode, which is happening more often now that we are in Season 3, the season "where Galactica lost its way." I feel betrayed by this series and I swear I am done with it. That is how I know I am addicted. It feels like the emotional push-and-pull of an affair.

K punched me in the arm last night after I scrolled ahead to see when the series was going to get good again. I discovered a spoiler reading through the synopses, oops.

Furious!

First, I'd just like to say that I was skeptical of this series and Syfy's low-budget history of purchasing schlocky content for its programming. I have worked on a few movies that ended up on the Syfy Channel, and, let me tell you, it is nothing to be proud of.

But this show is pretty durn good, and one of the main reasons is because it seems to be addressing many important sci-fi themes in its episodes. I'll say it: Battlestar Galactica is superior science fiction; more so than the Star Wars franchise, which isn't really sci-fi, more like space fantasy.

We are getting to know the writers and the directors, and who is great and who is not, and which episodes were probably purchased on spec, since they involve writers who never returned and involve plots that have nothing to do with anything else. These are the worst and most frustrating episodes: the ones where half the cast is on hiatus and none of the main storylines are pushed forward and it's just a standalone plot that has nothing to do with anything--characters are introduced just to be killed and when it's done you wonder why you wasted your time with it.

If I waited an entire week for such an episode, I'd be even more furious.

Here are some pros and cons of the Galacticon:

Pros:

-Canadian actors and production lend series a stilted "foreign" edge

-Best director able to combine terrible new age soundtracks with sublimely emotional scenes

-Supporting actors (not Edward James Olmos) are Canadian and have never gone on to do anything else meaningful (except for the Asian American Cylon who is in Hawaii Five-O), thus they completely embody these characters.

-Great handheld, zoomy CG shots of ships in space!

-FX great for low-budget television

-Aforementioned sci-fi themes addressed

-Baltar

-Documentary-style shooting surprisingly non-annoying

-The use of "frack" as a substitute for "fuck"

Cons:

-Some questionable actors in supporting roles

-QC problems in the latter half of Season 2 and Season 3

-Actors not strong enough to transcend their directors-for-hire (great acting when working with skilled director, bad acting when working with poop directors)

-Uneven writing

-The use of "frack" as a substitute for "fuck"

This is my first time to sit down and view the entire lifespan of a television series on fast-forward. What becomes clear is how hard it must be to farm out episodes to guest directors and writers and juggle the cast and keep quality up when you're cranking out 20 episodes on a short production schedule.

If the original creators wrote all of the episodes and the main director directed all of the episodes, then this would be the most amazing television ever created.

But it doesn't work that way. They have to crank out 20 hours of television a season, good Lord. It's almost 80 hours of content, total.

Talk about a real space opera.

And to think that a movie that's 2 hours and 20 minutes feels unnecessarily long. How about 80 hours?

For now, though, the Galacticon and I are taking some time off from each other. I hear the last season is fantastic, but I'm not sure I can muddle through the half-assedness.

I need you to commit to this relationship, Galacticon.

I need you to believe in us.

Five Gold Rings

Yesterday we shot a Budweiser commercial: a parody of the 12 Days of Christmas starring various NBA peripherals such as the Chicago Bulls cheerleaders, the Phoenix Suns gorilla, and Mark Cuban.

The last person to be filmed was Steve Kerr, the former shooting guard with the highest 3-point percentage of all time. Kerr won five championships (3 with the Jordan-era Bulls, and 2 with the Spurs), but I will always remember him as the short, blonde gunner on the Arizona Wildcats of 1987-1988. That was the year he and Sean Elliott took Arizona to the Final Four, losing to Oklahoma, who eventually lost to Danny Manning and the Kansas Jayhawks.

But I remember watching numerous Arizona games that year, being in high school and having plenty of time to do so. Kerr would launch 3-pointer after 3-pointer, and whenever he made one, the Arizona PA announcer would sing "Steeeeeeeeeeve Keerrrrrrrrrrrr!" and 20,000 U of A fans would sing back, pitch perfectly, "Steeeeeeeeve Kerrrrrrr!"

I think he shot 55% from 3-point range that year, or something just as ridiculous.

So, of course, when Kerr finished his scenes with us and everybody was clapping politely, my assistant and I had to yell: "Steeeeeeeeeve Kerrrrrrrrrr!"

Nobody else knew what we were doing, but he looked at me, threw back his head and laughed.

He's the general manager of the Suns now and I think he might be back doing broadcasting for TNT, and he's won 5 championship rings, but I suspect nothing compares to that Final Four run in 1988, when he was 22 years old and chucking threes and the whole world was chanting his name.

Y'all

I would like to make a case for "Y'all."

It is difficult to believe that our language has no unique word for second-person plural. Maybe it's not so hard to believe, since English is so damn irregular--the messy child's room of languages.

But we need this word when you're talking to more than one person and wish to be inclusive.

In the past we had:

-Ye, plural of thou.

And certain other English-speaking countries and areas have tried to bridge this gap:

-Youse (Australia, Scotland)

-Yinz (Pittsburgh)

-Ye (dialectical Hiberno-English)?

-You guys

But nothing sounds as good as "y'all."

In the South you hear it all the time. It sounds so homey, and friendly.

And it gets the job done.

It's time to use "y'all," y'all.

Small Claims

Yesterday K and I went to small claims court to destroy the company that sold and serviced the water filter that exploded and flooded our place a couple of years ago. This warlike rhetoric comes easily for some reason. "Destroy" prevails over "beat." "Crush" wins over "beat." "Emasculate" beats "beat."

In short, being in court makes me aggro.

I loved everything about small claims: this weird Wild West version of the judicial system, the scoping out of everybody in the hallway (wondering who you're going to be up against), the unprepared riff-raff, the people coming in from off the street into the wrong courtroom or on the wrong day, the elderly Russian couple who talked loudly during the whole afternoon (earning the continued ire of the bailiff and the clerk), the bailiff who looked like a short angry version of Uncle Fester who stalked over to the man behind me and pointed sharply at his own head (please remove your hat, I translated), the crazy plaintiffs with no case, the crazier defendants who showed up even less prepared, the window into debased human existences.

Completely entertaining.

And I loved the process of building a case, doing the research, anticipating our adversary's line of argument, refuting it, and then delivering the performance of this water-tight reasoning in front of a judge. I enjoyed my last session of jury duty as well. I'm learning that the law can be fascinating, even when the details of the case itself are boring. And, in our case, it came down to who was better prepared, not who was the most brilliant. We were shocked at how unprepared the enemy (defendant) was. We were shocked that the crux of their defense was "They signed on the line that the filter was fixed when the service tech left" (even thought the filter exploded 30 hours later).

As one of our lawyer friend/relatives said about this defense, "Yeah, that never works."

We were better prepared, we won. How gratifying is that? It's the opposite of Hollywood -- it's like an advertisement for hard work or something.

Mostly I loved hearing the following words, which are the sweetest words in the English language:

"Judgment is for the plaintiff, for the full amount."

Karl & Iris

Ten years ago I worked on a very low-budget Bollywood film shooting here in Los Angeles. I quit after three days due to the awful conditions, but in the process made friends with the German sound mixer Karl and his quirky boom operator wife, Iris. They invited my assistant and I over to their place for wine and cheese and told us their story... how they had recently wound up in Hollywood and what they were doing there.

They told us of buying a ramshackle place in the south of France and moving there to fix it up and live for a few years. After that they moved on. They were following their dreams.

Iris sang songs and painted and acted and made hats and weird animations. Karl played guitar and made films.

They recorded sound on low-budget movies and documentaries to make money.

They were so European.

And yet they were a lot like us too. Except they didn't give up. I suppose the only way they could fail would be to stop creating. And they will always be successful because success means getting a chance to make stuff.

Who cares what the rest of us think?

I have been on their mailing list for years. Every six months or so they send me an update. Iris landed the starring role in a commercial or Karl did something notable. Or they made a homemade music video. Or Iris was having a fashion show. Sometimes I don't hear from them for awhile and sometimes I feel deluged. Once I was tempted to mail them with the subject line "Unsubscribe," but I'm glad I never went that far.

They should be celebrated, not discouraged. They don't make a lot of money, but they live for art! How many of us can truly say this?

How many of us would actually want to?

Now they have an album out and they are touring Japan as Leafy Satori Risk.

Say what?

So let's raise a glass for the Renaissance Folks of the world, especially Karl & Iris, who remind me that it's just a matter of not quitting, isn't it? Stop being a lazy whiner, they seem to be saying. Just keep making stuff.

You can do it.

Anybody can.

Weird Punctuation

My favorite, the Interrobang, was invented in 1962 but never really caught on. It combines a question mark and an exclamation point into one beautiful character. Use it when you ask an emphatic (or rhetorical) question!

This is the Interrobang.

Ex: WTF?!

Ex: Who the hell is this man in my house?!

Chess players could also use this one-character version of the "?!" (dubious move) or "!?" (provocative move). BTW, subjective chess notation is a worthy blog topic for another day (my brother would use it as a form of non-verbal trash talking, marking my moves with question marks and his with exclamation points).

This is the Asterism:

The Asterism is for minor breaks in text. Hmm. It has a great name, however, and comparisons to the game of Asteroids are inevitable!!!

This is the Exclamation Comma:

It was developed in Canada for two years in the 1990s. This is great for when you want to keep on yelling after expressing an idea.

Ex: I can't believe you didn't wash the dishes (exclamatory comma) especially after I was so clear about it!

It's sister mark is the Interrogative Comma, which works as above but in a question form. This novelty mark also expired in the mid-90s.

This the section sign:

It denotes a section break, most often in legal texts. It looks like a brand you might see on the haunch of a cow at the Slippery Sam ranch. Or some kind of physics notation. Or any number of things. It looks really cool, actually.

But it's pretty boring in the end.

These are my favorite weird punctuation marks. We need more them. There is too much ambiguity in written text.

Oh, wait, emoticons!

Replacing Yourself

The first time I had hire someone above me I laughed it off as a novelty. Then it kept happening again, and again. An odd feeling to hire a person who makes 50% more than you and who prevents you from being promoted. Odd to have them be ungrateful and aloof as well. Just odd.

"But I'm hiring you," I would think. "I am in charge of your employment, even if you're technically higher than me and making more." At least acknowledge this, please. Not that I'm needy or anything, but come on.

As commercials and movies started shifting to HD from film, a new position was called the Digital Imaging Technician was created to supervise this nascent video format. The duties of this new position are amorphous and unclear, although most of us have our own definition. As budgets get smaller and smaller, our own pay scales suffer, but the DIT position seems impregnably new and scary.

Lately it's been a bunch of 25-year-olds with little set experience who bluff their way into these positions. They have computer experience but no video engineering experience and definitely no camera experience. But they have something that these productions think they need, for now. It's hard to watch this happen. It's hard to be asked to be the one to select which kid will get his undeserving payday while you get passed over.

Then again, I could very well set myself up to make a play on this position, even though it might sabotage my current status with my boss. I could complain, like a unionized old man whose skills are becoming less and less valued and relevant. Or I could adapt, and adopt, and be flexible.

I suppose this is what it is all about. Feeling obsolete and unappreciated and doing nothing about it.

We must be flexible if we are to survive.

We must.

Flashbackked

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the cinematic flashback cliche where the screen goes wavy and a harp runs through its tonal scale. I seem to remember this being a running gag throughout Johnny Dangerously:

Michael Keaton: (starts reminiscing, screen goes wavy)

Boy: Wait, what the hell is going on?

Michael Keaton: Don't worry, it always does this when I talk about the past.

Or something like that. I saw this 30 years ago.

But the wavy screen/harp scale trope wasn't always a cliche--some enterprising editor or director created it, and the effect must have worked well to have had it repeated so often.

I'm trying to locate the first instance of the wavy screen/harp flashback effect. I haven't been able to find anything online yet.

If anybody knows anything, please let me know!

Catfight

Last Sunday I stayed up until about 3 in the morning churning through YouTube videos of girlfights. I'm not sure what came over me, but I was at it for a good three hours or so. Videos like "Vanessa vs. Chantal" and "Betty vs. Melissa" came up in the column of suggested videos on the right. Of course these were mostly high school fights with dozens of girls gathered around, cell phones out and recording, shouting encouragement at the two girls grappling. Sometimes cheering for one or the other, most of the time just rooting for a good fight in general.

There is a lot of hair pulling and most videos degenerate into what looks like a two-person rugby scrum, with both women leaning over at the waist, with arms extended, hanging on tight to their adversary's hair. In boxing the ref would break them apart and yell, "Box!" and the crowd would boo at all of the hanging on and resting.

But this is not boxing, and it rarely ends in much punishment although I saw one girl make the mistake of wearing a hoodie into battle and getting it pulled over her head where she was pummeled for a while, sightless. One girl was getting her head lifted up and smashed on the pavement a couple of times before the thing was broken up. But it's mostly pretty harmless.

It's great to see the skinny girls kick ass on the beefy bullies. In fact, I learned there's a whole strain of street-fight videos that deal with Nerds Kicking Bullies' Asses. Which is gratifying of course, very gratifying. Why wouldn't it be?

It is a little embarrassing, though, and I started to worry I would be discovered spending my time watching this stuff. But then I seemed to remember an article in the Believer magazine that dealt with this very thing, Kimbo Slice, backyard brawls, etc. This seemed to justify my behavior in some academic sense. But I couldn't find this article, in the Believer or anywhere else. Maybe I never read this article, maybe I imagined the whole thing.

Not that I need a scholarly essay on YouTube fights to justify my viewing choices, mind you. But I do wish I could find something sweeping to write that would tie all of this messy, low-resolution fighting (and my viewing of it) into a pretty little thesis about life. But I can't, really.

So for now I'll just watch. And shake my head in disbelief.

Thank you for listening.

The Ballad of Jack of the Lantern

Each year around the beginning of October, our neighbors' yard fills up with castoff bits of stage walls and props and giant skulls and a janky gothic fence.

When I first came across this junk five years ago, I thought it might be homegrown set design and stagecraft to spookify their house for trick-or-treaters. But no, it wasn't that.

It was for some crazy local musical theater.

Our neighbors have been putting on elaborate Halloween productions for over twenty years. This year they performed "The Ballad of Jack of the Lantern."

They play four shows a night (at about 20 minutes each) on Halloween, and on the two evenings that straddle it. This year got a larger turnout than most, although a few people inexplicably walked off in mid-performance.

Hooray for this and hooray for our neighbors, that's all I have to say. And hooray for Halloween.

Yes, hooray for Halloween.

The Men of Nordstrom's (Wait Patiently)

WTF Nobody Told Me! -or- I Am an Award-Winning Human

I was doing some ego-Googling today and came across this surprise:

http://www.storysouth.com/millionwriters/2007notablestories.html

in which my story "The Instructions" was listed as one of Story South's "Million Writers Award Notable Stories of 2007."

Nobody told me! It's as if it never happened... Maybe if I would have known about this award it would have given me the confidence to change my life for the better! Maybe it would have impelled me to write more fiction instead of trying to write and make movies. Maybe everything would be different.

Then again, maybe not. Maybe things would be worse.

Who can say?

Plug

Looks like my air hockey documentary is going to be on PBS in the Northwest (Washington State and British Columbia), starting on Monday, October 24.

I am personally torn between secrecy and self-promotion on this one, vacillating wildly between 1) the plan to contact old high school acquaintances in order to get the word out, and 2) the plan to remain as Pynchonesquely reclusive as possible.

What if Scott Amell finds out? Or Matt Kirchberg!

I like being hidden from view, dammit!

If anybody has family or friends in the area, please let them know so at least they have all the facts when they choose to go to bed instead (I have to think my time slot, 10pm, has something to do with the unsavory adult themes running through the movie)!

Reading Randomly

A couple of months ago I picked up a hardback of Michael Ondaatje's Divisidero in the bargain bin of Powell's Books in Portland. It cost seven dollars. That is why I bought it.

I didn't know anything about this book. I read The English Patient a hundred years ago.

What a pleasure to sit down and read something I had no preconceptions of. The reading list is long but this was not on it, so it felt like playing hooky to go to the track. Maybe I'd win, maybe I'd lose. I didn't even know what horses were running.

The book was lovely, though, and now it feels like a bonus little something that filled up my life for a few days. Completely unexpected.

I am reminded of going the Metro Cinemas in Seattle in 1991 with no idea of what was playing and sitting down to Neil Jordan's The Miracle. I don't think I even knew that Neil Jordan had made this, although I probably knew who he was at this point. I didn't know what to expect, but what I encoutered was a small, beautiful film that transported me for an afternoon. A Get Out of Jail Free card.

There is something to be said for reading (and viewing) randomly. I'm afraid there is less and less opportunity for it these days.

A few years ago Middlebrow and I had a book swap where each of us was tasked with browsing bookstores to buy five books that the other person definitely hadn't read, and then sending them to him.

It may be time to revive this program.

Fast

Let me tell you about this fasting business.

The lemonade, the maple syrup, the cayenne pepper. Two weeks of it. This can't be good for your body. No doctor would ever approve this.

I tell everyone that it's a psychological fast more than anything, that it's a hard reset, a way of pushing Control-Alt-Delete on myself. Going from Excess to Nothing to Moderation is child's play compared to going from Excess to Moderation. At least for me.

K says I have no discipline.

But I do, I reply. I do have discipline. Circumstances just have to be extreme, that's all.

I broke my fast yesterday and ate some spinach. Goddamn if that wasn't the most delicious spinach I've ever tasted. Anything saltier or more complex than that would be too much.

I have the taste buds of an 85-year-old man. Give me the blandness.

Craving for my three vices has vanished however. Coffee, sugar, and a drink before bed. Amazing how easy that was. What I'm craving, however, is a steak quesadilla from the taco truck that used to park in front of my place in Koreatown.

Meat and cheese. Umami.

I remember seeing the first time I saw a quesadilla cost five dollars. Highway robbery, I said to myself. Do kids still use that phrase? Highway robbery? Anyway, when I got it, I understood. This was no Taco Bell quesadilla. This was a flotilla of meat and cheese and veggies. A whole damn raft it it.

That's what I want. And that's where I'm going when this is over.

What else can I say about this fortnight of self-denial?

Oh yes, the BO. What is it like to have somebody else's body odor? That is what is like on this fast. I smell weird BO emanating from somewhere and then I realize it is myself.

My tongue is coated white. I tell K that if this were a Warner Brothers cartoon I'd stick my tongue out and it would be covered by a rain slicker.

But my skin is cleaned up and glowing. K says I look ten years younger, a boy. She marvels that the man convicted in the terrible salon shooting is 42, barely older than me, my brother's age. She suddenly feels lucky to be married to my vibrant youthfulness.

Hear that? Suddenly feels lucky, yes.

My stock has gone up, huzzah!

The Best Introduction Ever

Middlebrow directed me to this a long time ago: Thomas Pynchon's introduction for a newly collected book of older short stories, Slow Learner. Pynchon takes opportunity (20 pages) to explain, in great detail, why his stories are kind of crappy. This is so refreshing to read in today's enervating climate of constant self-promotion; I would love to be able to introduce my documentary this way.

"My first reaction, rereading these stories, was oh my God, accompanied by physical symptoms we shouldn't dwell upon. My second thought was about some kind of wall-to-wall rewrite. These two impulses have given way to one of those episodes of middle-aged tranquility, in which I now pretend to have reached a level of clarity about the young writer I was back then. I mean I can't very well just 86 this guy from my life. On the other hand, if through some as yet undeveloped technology I were to run into him today, how comfortable would I feel about lending him money, or for that matter even stepping down the street to have a beer and talk over old times?"

Great, really great.

As for the stories, well, I took Pynchon by his word and gave them a miss.

Pyro

Last week I worked on pyrotechnic and miniature shots for the movie Battleship. E....1....HIT!  These were all done on film, because slow-motion pyro still looks better on film than in HD video. We used an ancient Mitchell camera and a more modern 435 and, crazier than ever, a Photosonics high-speed film camera, a camera I haven't seen in about 8 years since all high speed stuff these days is done with a Phantom HD camera. This camera actually has a setting called "OUCH!"-- the highest speed possible--where everybody stands back and waits for all the screws to back themselves out, and hopes the whole thing doesn't explode.

The producer actually made the point that film is coming back into style for the moment, for 18 months at least, when he estimates that HD will kill off film forever. For now, though, the high-speed pyro on film is the best technology for the job, even though it's the oldest technology. He also pointed out that while we could go to the moon in 1969, there's no way we could go to the moon now, even though it's been 42 years, an eternity. These two comments were related somehow.

Our unit was a little ragtag and rough around the edges, but being in a parking lot with a large water tank and bluescreens surrounding us while blowing up miniature spaceships (I guess there are aliens involved?)--it reminded me of old still photographs of shooting Star Wars miniatures at Industrial Light and Magic. Hirsute men, shirtless, in short cutoff jeans, baking in the California sun, working over 1/6 scale X-wing fighters in some unglamourous parking lot.

That's us! Hirsute!

Drive

A friend of mine worked on the new film Drive, starring Ryan Gosling. He said the whole time he couldn't tell if the director, Nicholas Winding Refn, was a complete genius, or whether the movie was going direct to video. After seeing the film, I think it's still up in the air.

Drive is beautiful and wonderful and terrible all at the same time. It's an art-action film, if such a thing is possible. The script is atrocious, but the direction is kind of magnificent, and it makes sense that Refn won the Best Director award at Cannes this year for this movie. In some ways his achievement is made even more amazing because he took a crappy, direct-to-video script (A Hollywood stunt driver by day and getaway driver by night gets ensnared in a heist-gone-wrong) and made it into something special. It's not nearly as difficult to make a great script into a great movie, but to take a polish a turd into a masterpiece is worthy of our applause.

This is the quietest, and yet, most intense film I think I've seen in the last ten years.

Don't get me wrong, there's no character development or anything like that. And the violence, when it does come, is gory and excessive, cartoony almost. And Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman as bonehead goombas, well, who cares, really.

Refn has made an homage to 80s LA movies like To Live and Die in LA . There's a heavy synth score, and a pink neon title sequence, and even a terrible happy montage in the middle. But it's all a bit off, through a Danish point of view. It's the John Woo problem, but in a good way -- when foreign directors make American films and vice versa. It's all a little bit off.

Drive was made for $14 million. A tiny amount, really, compared to most films. Yet is doing something new, at least, within a tired old genre. It's uneven, but that is what happens when you set out to try something different instead of dialing in the same old garbage. I can tolerate the failures because at least it's trying to do something, dammit!

I expect Refn will get more like $80 million for his next effort. Let us hope he maintains his crazy vision of the world instead of getting steamrolled by the suits.