While in the Belgium, home of the world’s finest chocolate and 250 types of beer — 250! — I saw something that made me think.
No, it was not the beer. Though the beer was excellent.
This is what made me think: a concert on BBC or PBS or whatever with a violinist doing an insanely difficult piece.
Now, that wasn’t the exact piece. This YouTube video is something close, though it’s far less technically difficult and far more enjoyable. You should’ve heard the crazy thing, and seen her beat that violin like a dirty rug.
Was her technical skill amazing?
Oh yes.
Did she make faces like she was passing a kidney stone?
You have no idea.
Did the music move me at all?
Not one bit. Hated it.
The forest for the trees
Here’s the thing: creative people tend to focus on developing the most difficult technical skills WHILE IGNORING THE BIG STUFF.
Journalists learn all about headline counts and press law, but nobody questions whether the inverted pyramid is the right structure for the next 12,023 stories they’ll write.
Writers spend months or years cranking on novels, but if you put a 9 mm to their head and counted down from five, they couldn’t boil that novel down into four-word pitch — or logline, tagline or headline.
Figure skaters put all this time and effort into triple-axles and whatnot, despite the fact that only professional skaters and judges can tell the difference between a triple toe loop and a triple lux-whatever. The only thing we average people know is (a) whether the skating is fun to watch and (b) how many times they fall down. Also, (c) how you can consider this a sport when the winner is determined by faceless judges, not who runs the fastest or scores the most points?
Now, I’m not saying that you should ignore your technical skills, whether you’re trying to break into Hollywood with your zombie high school musical or become the next Johnny Rotten.
The point is, technical skills come into play late in the game. Without working on the stuff that nobody teaches you — the short, pithy, publicity side — nobody will see your amazing technical wizardry with words, film or electric guitars hooked to amplifiers that go up to 11.
Here’s little kids playing Metallica, with far less technical skill. (Metallica is secretly easy to play.) Yet I enjoyed the heck out of this and would happily listen to it again, while you would have to deliver suitcases stuffed with purple euros to get me to listen to the violin craziness again.
On the airplane to Germany and back, I saw many, many movies.
Some were good. Some were terrible. Though my record of seeing something like 5,982 films on a flight to Dubai wasn’t broken, I saw plenty.
Two movies made a real impression for entirely different reasons: ONE DAY starring Anne the Hathaway and THE DESCENDANTS starring George the Clooney.
First up: ONE DAY.
Anne Hatheway — Catwoman this summer in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES — is a good actress in this bad movie, which smelled strongly of Nicholas Sparks.
Here’s the plot: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back, girl gets hit by a truck and dies.
I kid you not.
When the truck smashed into Anne the Hatheway, I wanted to throw cutlery at the screen.
Then there was 10 minutes of the boy, Dexter, being sad about the love of his life dying like that. The End.
But maybe my sleep-deprived brain was being grumpy. So when I got home, I fired up the Series of Tubes and hit Rotten Tomatoes to see what professional critics thought of this movie, and they thought it stank up the joint. This reviewer hits it on the head.
HOWEVER: Let’s dive into why the movie rubbed audiences and critics wrong. The acting was fine. The dialogue was good. The episodic thing of showing one day per year of their relationship didn’t hurt the movie that much.
It was the structure and storytelling. The bones were all wrong.
ONE DAY is like sucking all of the comedy from WHEN HARRY MET SALLY and replacing the laughs with misery, then making sure the ending left the audience mad.
Love stories should make you believe in the power of love, not make you think, “The love of my life might get hit by a truck tomorrow, so why bother?”
Up until the truck hits Anne the Hathaway, she’s the focus of the movie, the protag, the heroine. It’s really her POV and she’s quite sympathetic while the boy, Dexter, is a charming jerk. After she’s randomly smashed by a truck, the POV and focus shifts entirely to Dexter for the last minutes of the movie. He wallows in misery. He gets drunk, starts fights in nightclubs, blah blah blah. Then he takes his daughter up to the same hill that he and Anne walked up when they first met and credits roll. Oooookay.
There are rules for (a) love stories, (b) tragedies and (c) horror movies. Rules that make sense for audiences and writers alike.
It’s not really a love story when your heroine gets hit by a truck for no reason. Not a tragedy, either, because tragedies require heroes who fall from grace. They cause their own downfall.
Anne the Hathaway didn’t do anything to deserve her death. Neither did she sacrifice herself for a cause, which would’ve made her death meaningful. Tom Hanks dying in PRIVATE RYAN sucked, but you understood why he did it: to save Matt Damon.
Now in horror movies, it’s perfectly fine for the boogeyman to kill any character in any way, but horror movies are really about punishing sin, with the monster going after lusty teenagers or silly scientists who think they can play god. Everybody dies in the end.
ONE DAY was bad because all sorts of things just happen for no reason.
Dexter randomly gets fired from his TV host job.
His first wife randomly cheats on him, so they get divorced.
Anne the Hathaway randomly gets pancaked by a truck.
If you’re doing a French existentialist movie in black-and-white with subtitles, that sort of thing is fine. Life is meaningless! Personal choice is an illusion! Things just happen!
Good love stories, good tragedies and good horror movies work because things don’t just happen. Characters make choices. Bad choices tend to get punished. Good choices eventually get rewarded. That’s a story.
Verdict: Rent it on Netflix if you want to get truly mad and need to pre-funk before the main event.
THE DESCENDANTS is an entirely different movie, and not just because it has George the Clooney in a Hawaiian shirt instead of Anne the Hathaway pretending to have a British accent.
There is a parallel: George’s wife dies in this movie. She’s in a powerboat accident right off and spends most of the movie in a coma before dying.
Now, that sounds sad, and superficially close to ONE DAY. Except it’s not. The wife isn’t the center of the movie.
The A story is George’s relationship with his two daughters, which isn’t great at the start of the movie. His young daughter keeps getting in trouble at school and his older daughter is in a boarding school to shape up.
The B story is whether or not George, as trustee of 25,000 acres of ancestral land — virginal, undeveloped land in Hawaii — will sell the land and turn it into golf courses and condos.
George’s wife is also a thrill-seeker who (a) does dangerous things like ride really fast in power boats and (b) was cheating on him. Also (c) she isn’t the protag for 3/4ths of the movie, as Anne Hathaway is before getting thwacked by that random truck.
So it makes story sense for George’s wife to get injured while riding too fast in a power boat with a man who’s not her husband, though this is a different man than the one she’s sleeping with.
And it makes story sense for the man she is cheating with — who is also married with kids — to get punished. This happens after George and his daughter visit and the man’s wife figures things out.
To get me to watch ONE DAY again, you’d have to hand me a stack of purple euros and an endless pitcher of margaritas, and even then, I’m 50-50.
I’d happily watch THE DESCENDANTS again. There are plenty of neat little moments throughout, like the obnoxious surfer-stoner friend of the daughter who turns out to be kinder and wiser than he looks. George is also happy to look goofy, like whenever his character runs, which is hilarious. He doesn’t insist on being a movie star.
This is what I like about George and his OCEAN 11 buddies Brad Pitt and Matt Damon — despite being voted Sexiest Man Alive, none of them care about looking stupid. They take risks. They roll the dice with movies big and small.
THE DESCENDANTS is a small movie that says big things. There are no CGI effects. It looks like a no-budget indie movie. And you don’t care, because the story is good.
George suffers, sacrifices and grows. He learns how to be a dad for his daughters, and makes the right choice by not selling all that land, consequences be damned. Things happen for a reason, and nobody gets randomly hit by a truck.
You leave the movie feeling hopeful, and a little wiser.
Verdict: Buy it, if movies can still be bought and stored on the cloud or whatever.
In my quest to play more music videos than MTV, here’s the latest installment of Music Video Monday.
Jared Leto is the frontman of 30 Seconds to Mars, and he was an actor first. He also directs these music videos, which is why the band’s videos rock so hard. (If you read the credits, the director has a silly name. Post a comment, whoever sees that name first.)
So: here’s the video, which obviously pays deep homage to THE SHINING.
Yes, I know that there are rumors that MTV still plays some music videos between the hours of 3 a.m. and 9 a.m., when it’s not doing Jersey Shore marathons or finding the next Heidi Pratt or whatever. MTV used to play videos 24 hours a day. Now all you can watch are country videos on some nearby channel. Do I need country videos about somebody’s dog dying and the transmission on his Chevy going out and his wife leaving with his best friend, and him sure missing his best friend? No. I need a channel that just plays music videos. VH1 doesn’t count.
This video by Fall Out Boy is a rocking tune with lyrics that nobody understands.
Listen closely. Tell me if you figure out (a) what the lead singer is saying, especially around the chorus and (b) if you can divine any meaning to those words.
Also: there is a parody video that tries to explain the lyrics. Quite funny and well done, though a smidge NSFW. If you fire up the YouTubes, you can probably find it.
If you were alive, and breathing, you remember watching this on what we used to call MTV, which played these things called “music videos” instead of endless reality shows starring people from New Jersey who tan a lot.
Sidenote: Sir Tans a Lot would be a funny name for a rapper who made fun of The Situation.
Three things: (1) the hair makes me laugh, (2) the effects seems cheap now and (3) the storytelling in the video is much better than the lyrics of the song.
Check out the lyrics below. I’ve read them twice. Saw the video a zillion times. The video sort of makes sense. The lyrics, not so much.
We’re talking away
I don’t know what
I’m to say I’ll say it anyway
Today’s another day to find you
Shying away
I’ll be coming for your love, OK?
Take on me, take me on
I’ll be gone
In a day or two
So needless to say
I’m odds and ends
But that’s me stumbling away
Slowly learning that life is OK.
Say after me
It’s no better to be safe than sorry
Take on me, take me on
I’ll be gone
In a day or two
Oh the things that you say
Is it life or
Just a play my worries away
You’re all the things I’ve got to
remember
You’re shying away
I’ll be coming for you anyway
Take on me, take me on
I’ll be gone
In a day or two
The library in my secret lair contains Every Thriller Known to Man, including every Lee Childthriller, so reviewing his novels is like riding a bicycle for me.
A bicycle with two seats and training wheels. And a chauffeur.
So let’s make one thing clear, right off: Lee Child is the best thriller writer alive.
Also, Lee is British, though he lives in NYC these days, so he’s got this killer accent to go along with the killer books about Reacher.
ONE SHOT is one of his better books. It’s not THE ENEMY, which is his best. But it’s not one of his worst, and his worst are still good.
Here’s the setup: Reacher is a loner. Six-foot-five. Two-fifty. A giant. He’s some kind of hotshot ex-Army major from the military police, and when you’re investigating bad guys for doing bad things and every suspect is a trained killer, you’ve got to be tougher than they are.
Reacher is plenty tough. And smart. He’s like putting the brain of Sherlock Holmes into the body of Dolph Lundgren, and then giving Dolph another twenty pounds of muscle.
It’s almost unfair to the bad guys. But that’s a post for another day.
ONE SHOT takes Reacher to Indiana, where an Army sniper he arrested years ago in Kuwait, for killing four men, has apparently gone bad again, 14 years later. Except when the sniper is arrested, he asks for Reacher, by name. Because they’ve got the wrong guy, he says. This is despite a rock-solid case against the man, Barr: his rifle did the shooting. Five people are dead. The police have his minivan on tape, driving to the parking garage where it happened. And back in Kuwait, he’d also used a parking garage.
Reacher shows up to keep a promise, a promise meant to keep Barr in line. But he discovers nothing is what it seems. The case it a little too good. There’s a puppet master, pulling the strings, who doesn’t want Reacher asking questions.
Without giving the ending away, it’s a rock-solid thrill ride. Are there plot holes? Yeah, sure. You have to suspend disbelief, especially looking back at the first chapter. There’s a huge gamble there. It’s kind of cheating.
But you don’t care, because it’s too much fun watching Reacher in action. He’s not your typical thriller hero. He’s not suave. He’s not sophisticated. He’s completely rough around the edges, and he doesn’t use spy gadgets or fancy guns. The only thing he carries from place to place is a folding toothbrush.
The new cover of Lee Child’s ONE SHOT. Is it better than the original? Yes.
So, on to the numbers.
Number of beautiful women: Four. An ex-flame who’s now a brigadier general at the Pentagon, an NBC reporter, a defense attorney and a pretty redhead murdered to set up Reacher for her death.
Number of beautiful women Reacher actually connects with: One. I admire his restraint and good taste.
Body count: 13. Five victims of the sniper. Two other men. The pretty redhead. Four thugs. Then the puppet master. I may be missing one or two, but I don’t think so.
Overall: 4.75 glasses of bourbon out of 5.
Sidenote: Yes, it is true — and tragic — that Tom Cruise is starring at Reacher in the big screen adaptation of ONE SHOT. Do not like. Reacher is giant, stone-cold blond, a one-man wrecking crew. Cruise is rather short and hyper. Not a good fit.
Science tells us that beauty is all about symmetry, which is a word that I can spell.
That’s because a symmetrical face proves that you have good genes. A lopsided face full of scars and whatnot proves that you have bad genes, bad hygiene and possibly got into a fight with Mr. Green Jeans.
So, your brain’s need for supermodels from Sweden with great genes and symmetry also makes you very, very susceptible to this illusion, which is seven separate flavors of awesomesauce.
Beauty to ugliness illusion
As a bonus, the same evil researchers in white lab coats put together the same illusion featuring a bunch of celebrities, which will change how you think of Tom Cruise forever.
If I remember correctly—and I might not since I wasn’t alive at the time—that was achieved without iTunes. People actually had to leave their homes to purchase that song.
Unfathomable. Those 6 million listeners must not have seen this nonsensical montage to the stuff of which my nightmares are now made.
I needed a glass of wine to make it through the whole video. I kept waiting for the hook, for the melody to diversify and draw me in, but it was as if the first 45 seconds of chords had been looped through that visual assault of ridiculousness. PAINFUL. But it was probably painful for Ms. Tyler as well since her vocal chords are partially damaged.
Let’s review:
Demon-eyed choirboys who FLY (see Guy’s post on the Swamp Demon of Louisiana — cousins?)
Scantily-clad back up dancers. In loincloths. When is a loincloth a bad idea? (A: Always)
A formal toast in which they spill wine (cardinal sin)
Throwing birds
Do I even need to address the vast chasm between the lyrics and the visuals? How many times does the demon-eyed boy ask her to turn around, bright eyes? SHE NEVER TURNS AROUND. How hard would it have been to coordinate that?
And is she wearing lingerie or a really ugly wedding dress? I can’t tell.
Just when we think ritual animal sacrifice would be the only thing to make this video creepier, we see the ninjas and choirboys lined up for school with Bonnie as their teacher. So in the end, we find ourselves accomplices in a terrifying teacher-student prep school fantasy. At least that explains the loincloths…
Well, this is different. It’s not achingly good or insanely low-budget and terrible.
The music is oddly OK, and the production values are high.
But it’s just so flipping weird.
Let’s take inventory: We’ve got (1) a skinny ex-convict or whatever who thinks he’s some kind of ninja, though (2) his albino woman who keeps singing “samurai” all the time and (3) I have no idea whether this third person, the short man wearing a hoodie, is supposed to be a ninja, a samurai or some kind of wizard.
Let’s clear up the ninja vs. samurai thing real quick. Samurai = soldiers with big katanas and armor. Ninja = what every Internet Tough Guy wants to be. Pick one, not both. They are incompatible.
Also, ninjas will NOT allow Tom Cruise into their secret club.
The Red Pen of Doom 