Bloody Work teaser banner

No, the annihilatorfilm.com site is not up yet. Will let you know.

It's the Apocalypse, no doubt

I've completely dweebed out and set myself up a MySpace page. Ghod help me.

The latest writer's fad: plagiarism!

John Scalzi was among several bloggers last week who made the world aware of some dumb, dumb, dumb girl named Lori Jareo, who wrote a dreadful novel-length piece of Star Wars fan fiction titled Another Hope and, in an act of ballsiness heretofore unseen in publishing, offered it for sale on Amazon, where the listing, astonishingly, is still up as of Monday evening!

Though Jareo herself clearly got wind of all the bad ink she was getting through the blogosphere for her actions — literally no one defended her — and promptly took her personal site down, I can't believe the book is still up on Amazon, where I'm beginning to think the staff is hired specifically for their cluelessness and indifference to the concerns of customers, publishers, or the law. (Amazingly, the book is still up on both Barnes and Noble.com and Powells.com too. Are Lucas's lawyers in cryosleep or something?)

But now, even more amazing is the story of some 19-year-old chippie at Harvard who signed a — wait for it — half-million dollar book deal for a couple of chick-lit books, one of which has been revealed to have significantly plagiarized passages.

Get a load of this girl's excuse.

"When I was in high school, I read and loved two wonderful novels by Megan McCafferty, 'Sloppy Firsts' and 'Second Helpings,' which spoke to me in a way few other books did. Recently, I was very surprised and upset to learn that there are similarities between some passages in my novel ... and passages in these books," Kaavya Viswanathan, 19, said in a statement issued by her publisher.

"While the central stories of my book and hers are completely different, I wasn't aware of how much I may have internalized Ms. McCafferty's words. I am a huge fan of her work and can honestly say that any phrasing similarities between her works and mine were completely unintentional and unconscious. My publisher and I plan to revise my novel for future printings to eliminate any inappropriate similarities."

Oh, please! She was "surprised and upset to learn that there are similarities"? I imagine that I am expected to believe that, while she was writing those similar passages, one of two things happened — she either blanked out and forgot she had ever read the McCafferty books, so much had they taken control of her mind that their "internalized" content was just pouring out in defiance of Viswanathan's free will, or, her brain has actually been possessed by plagiarism demons from the fourth level of hell, near the back in the ghetto reserved for bad hip-hop artists who sample Sting songs from the 80's.

In any case, this is the kind of lame excuse a junior high schooler would give caught with shoplifted items under her sweater while walking out of a grocery store. I just don't know how those got there! I must have put them there to free up my hands — and then forgot!

But what's really disheartening is that the girl's nascent writing career isn't going to suffer for this at all. Is her publisher doing the ethical thing by dropping her and tearing up the contract? No, no. They're just letting her revise the book for future editions. What procedure they have in place to ensure the revisions won't simply be more regurgitated "internalized" content from someone else is unclear.

Why is this, you wonder? Well, if there's one thing we've learned in the last couple of years, it's that dishonesty pays. First the scandal was simple lying, with guys like James Frey and Stephen Glass just making shit up, passing it off as true, then banking cash when the "controversy" hit the media and their sales soared as curious book buyers snatched up their crap to see what all the fuss was about. Now, this "oops, you mean I copied that? so sorry" routine is going to boost the sales of the girl with the hard-to-pronounce name as well, mark my words.

Meanwhile, hordes upon hordes of undiscovered, talented writers desperately trying to realize their own personal original visions will continue to labor in obscurity, most never getting a book deal at all, let alone one with a half-million dollar advance. Life is unfair, and the cream sinks to the bottom, it seems.

Oh well. Silent Hill sucked. Life goes on.

If there was any video game-based movie I feel I had a stake in, it was Silent Hill. I'm a devoted fan of the games, having played all four multiple times each. I don't think I've ever had as spine-chillingly memorable a time doing anything related to the horror genre as I've had playing those games. After the crushing disappointment of the Resident Evil movies, I had cautious optimism about Silent Hill. Early interviews with director Christophe Gans seemed to point to a guy passionate about the material and determined to do right by it.

Sadly, this movie goes down as Just Another Failed Game Adaptation. If the best video game franchise can't even get a good movie made from it, I think Hollywood and video games should be kept away from each other for good, preferably by restraining order.

Gans may be passionate, but here he's done the impossible. He's taken Silent Hill — which is not only the most frightening horror video game ever made but quite possibly one of the most frightening horror entertainment experiences in any medium, games, books, or movies included — and made it boring. The video game is scary as hell. The movie has — I cannot stress this enough — not one single solitary scare, and indeed, a few of the intended scares come off as silly.

The movie has the look of the game down just fine. The production designers have replicated the game's foggy, deserted streets and dingy derelict buildings perfectly. But Roger Avery's script (and here was a guy who took great pains to warn fans he was not a huge devotee of the games) suddenly feels the urge to explain everything in exhaustive detail. So, instead of piling on suspense and scares, it piles on exposition. And I mean, piles it on. We get endless talky scenes of back-story and history, and yet the more the movie attempts to clarify the whole history of Alessa and the cult that victimized her and turned her into an evil malevolent force, the less coherent it all seems.

Gans's devotion to reproducing the game's visuals makes him forget that there will be a sizable audience who sees this without ever having played the game. And to them, no concessions are made. Non-fans of the Silent Hill games are given no clue as to why the town changes appearance, or why it's inhabited by poison-spitting faceless monsters and other weird beasties. To non-gamers this will be the most nonsensical movie ever, despite Avery's endless info-dumping dialogue.

But worse than info-dumping dialogue is Obvious Dialogue, where the writer assumes his audience is suffering from Downs Syndrome and must have everything spelled out no matter how obvious it is. In one scene, Cybill (the cop from game one, who has a much different fate here) has just found a drawing by Rose's missing daughter in a slot at the hotel desk.

Rose: "Where did you find this?" Cybill: "Room 111." Rose: "We have to go to Room 111!"

Well, duh.

Rose has her momentary lapses of intelligence, too. Early on, while Cybill is in the process of gunning down an advancing monster (one of the acid-spitters from game two, looking dead perfect, naturally), Rose runs off. Hmm. You're in a deserted town that you now know to be inhabited by weird monsters, and you run away from the one person with a weapon. Smart.

Then there are all the little moments of plot convenience. Rose finds a working flashlight in a drawer in the school. Rose's husband, played by Sean Bean in a thoroughly unnecessary subplot, is looking for the Silent Hill police archives in a neighboring town. They won't let him have them, so he breaks in to the office at night (shades of The Ring) and, lo and behold, there's the box he's looking for, right there on the top of the stack in the first room he enters. Why would they even have those? Because they're needed as a Plot Device, of course.

All of the exposition and clumsy plot contrivances simply pad the running time out to over two hours, while spending as little time as possible in the Otherworld for which the games are famous. Here's another failing I cannot stress enough: where the hell was Silent Hill in Silent Hill? Why are we listening to Alice Krige doing her endless Cruella DeVille routine when we should be trapped in terrifying dark corridors or fleeing monsters down misty back alleys? This stuff gets started just fine in act one, then stops when the script settles into a talk-fest.

Much from the video games appears in the movie to please fans, but only at the most superficial level. It's as if Gans pored over each game, saying, "Okay we'll use that, gotta have that creature, okay, and how about a Lisa Garland cameo!" But that's where the homage stops. The school? The hospital? Yeah, they're there, but wasted. Radha Mitchell literally runs through the hospital (which, for some reason, is about 200 stories underground) in the third act, until she encounters the nurses...who look great, in their prosthetic makeup, but move in such an absurd way I kept expecting them to break into a dance routine like some Janet Jackson video. And Pyramid Head? Jesus Henrietta Christ, how do you waste Pyramid Head!?! He has two scenes, does one cool thing where he grabs a woman and tears her skin off like a candy wrapper — then it's bye-bye. He's gone from the movie after that!

By the time we're well into the protracted act three, in which a mob of mad cultists is threatening to burn Rose's daughter alive, any resemblance between any of the Silent Hill games and this movie is purely coincidental. I saw a post from one guy on Rotten Tomatoes suggesting the filmmakers must have come down with ADHD and thought they were making a Hellraiser movie instead. Couldn't have put it better myself. The movie degenerates into one cheesy line of bad dialogue after another at this point. I just cannot listen to a mob of people (and where did this mob come from, anyway?) shouting "Burn the witch! Burn the witch!" without thinking of Monty Python and the Holy Grail!

I'm hurting. I'm angry. I'm bitter. The video game movie that should have been a masterpiece is just another disasterpiece. I don't know how everything that was so awesome in the game got so badly lost in translation. Is it too much to hope someone, someday, will do another Silent Hill movie that will nail the whole thing, not just the perfect set design? Maybe. I'm going to play the game again, to remind myself why I love Silent Hill in the first place.

HD-DVD apparently underwhelming

The reviews are coming in for the first wave of HD-DVD players and discs. And the reviews are, well, "meh" in quality. Not bad, just more along the lines of, "Yes, it looks better than DVD, but not that much better." Also meeting with disapproval are appallingly long load times in the one-minute range, though to be fair, this will likely be one of the first things fixed in second generation hardware.

Most amusing is this account on The Digital Bits of an exchange between the webmaster and his wife.

I was watching The Last Samurai on Tuesday night, when my wife Sarah came home from work.... Anyway, she walked into the home theater and sat down to soak in the picture and sound for a bit. Then, after a few minutes of watching, she turned to me and said, "So this is HD-DVD?"

"Yeah."

"It looks good and all, but I don't know... I guess I don't see what the big deal is."

"Well... it looks more like film. More like it should."

"Yeah, but doesn't regular DVD look like film too?"

"Sure, but not as much as this does."

"Well... I don't know. I guess I just don't see what the big deal is. I could live without it."

We'll see what fate has in store...

A little rant clarification

In the wake of my preceding rant, I ought to clarify that, in fact, HD-DVD technology itself is something I'm excited about. I've long been looking forward to true 1080p high definition home viewing, and I hope there's a resolution to the format war of some sort soon so I can know which way to invest. So the preceding really shouldn't have been called an "anti HD-DVD rant." If I'm "anti" anything, it's the way certain studios are clearly lusting after the opportunity to use this dazzling new technology in the most meretricious manner possible, and one in which the artistry of films is devalued to the maximum degree in favor of using movies simply as a tool for other revenue streams.

No clarification on the F-bombs, though. I enjoy those when they're necessary.

An anti HD-DVD rant with high F-bomb content — enjoy!

So I've been keeping tabs — somewhat — on the HD-DVD rollout that has begun tentatively this week. I have no imminent plans to buy. I've been thinking, like a lot of folks, that I'm just going to wait and see how the dust in the format war settles. But I would like to see some of the units in action. There was nothing at my neighborhood Best Buy this week, and I refuse to darken the door of Wal-Mart. So maybe later in the week I'll trek out to one of our fine city's specialty retailers like the Home Theater Store, where I'm sure the sales staff is sick of guys like me wandering in and gawking at all the glorious high-end tech toys we can't hope to afford.

But tonight, I was reading a few articles on the rollout, and initial sales reports, while not exactly orgasmically glowing, are favorable. Still, when it came to the part of one article on Video Business Online discussing the bells and whistles that studios plan to include on future releases, I stopped cold at the following:

Among the examples of new features the studio is considering are, for example, allowing a user to connect to the Internet and trick out a car and then insert that car back into the film so the movie would include their creation.... [Universal Studios Home Entertainment president Craig] Kornblau called DVD bonus features “yesterday” and said HD DVD will change how consumers watch movies by allowing them to personalize objects in the film and connect online with friends to share opinions while watching the film—and, he emphasized, it will do it by the end of this year.... That connectivity also could open up new promotional opportunities for studios, which could allow users to click on a car or pair of shoes or any other item on the screen and connect online to a Web site for more information and to make purchases.

What. The. Fuck!?

Okay, let's stop a minute here.

What is a movie? Is it simply a product? In the eyes of the studios, I imagine that answer must be "yes". But is it also an art form, a medium that storytellers use to tell stories? If it is — to any teeny tiny minute degree — the latter, then what in the holy hell are these asshats at Universal thinking by getting all excited by the idea of people "personalizing" movies? Sure, the example given was for an upcoming release of one of the Fast and the Furious movies, which I suppose no one in his right mind would call art and everyone would agree are clearly nothing more than cash-cow products to shore up Universal's bottom line in the summer season.

But where do we stop with this? Can you imagine the lunacy if people were allowed to "personalize", say, Peter Jackson's The Return of the King, by, say, putting their kids in the middle of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields? There we are, right in the middle of one of the movie's sweeping crane shots, with a hundred thousand men and orcs going at it in hot-blooded combat...and suddenly, right in the middle of it, two warriors stop fighting, take off their helmets, smile, and wave at the camera! Look, everybody! It's the kids!

I mean, how fucked is that?

All this hype about "changing how consumers watch movies" and "personalizing" films reflects a masturbatory love of the technology for its own sake that loses sight of what the movies themselves were actually meant to be: self-contained entertainment experiences, assembled by teams of creative people under the guidance of a director following a vision, with a goal towards telling a story!

And did you notice the flack's use of the word "consumers" in the preceding quote, instead of "fans" or "audiences" or even "people." That's right. To the studios, watching movies isn't about sitting back and winding down at the end of the day with a good and compelling story. It's all about generating more consumerism. Buy buy buy! Hell, everything is a revenue stream. Who gives a shit about the whole notion that if a director or a screenwriter wanted a particular style of tricked-out car or pair of shoes or whatever to be in their movie, they'd have put it there in the first goddamn place? Nah, do it yourself! It's the high-definition experience! After all, why should Peter Jackson or Ridley Scott be the only guys to decide what goes into making a Peter Jackson or Ridley Scott movie? Why shouldn't the almighty consumer have a say? Democracy is good, right?

And let's not stop there. Let's move on to e-books. Don't like the way Stephen King's new novel ends? Rewrite your own ending and edit it back into the book, then go online and chat live with your friends about it. Hell, respect for artistic integrity and creative vision are so "yesterday." Everything's just a product, so if you can switch around and match other products to your taste, like your clothing and accessories and food and home decor, why not change your favorite movies and books to your taste too? Welcome to the HD future, where movie studios are like Burger King: have it your way!

You know, I think a better idea would be that if Joe Blow thinks he can make a better movie than Peter Jackson, then Universal ought to just give him the money to make his own fucking movie rather than giving him the opportunity to fuck with PJ's using his fancy HD-DVD remote. In the meantime, this whole fantasy the studios have of reducing the movie experience to that of video games or online shopping seems to have given me all the reason I need to not by HD-DVD anytime soon...or later. It should also give every director pause...and a sense of urgency to make sure any contracts they sign include a clause preventing such "personalizing" of the films they make. Assuming they are filmmakers of integrity and not hacks. I fully expect the Brett Ratners and McG's of the world to be right there in the HD circle-jerk with Universal.

Bloody Work: Research continues

Not much to blog about lately, other than that I'm back to work on researching the film. The Austin History Center has a glorious treasure trove of old photos (though none, sadly, specifically pertaining to the SGA murders — the Holy Grail of crime scene photos just don't seem to exist). The downside is they charge out the wazoo and back in again for scans. Well, no one ever said filmmaking was a cheap hobby. In any event, the history of Austin in the late 19th century was quite colorful and this material will really go a long way to giving the movie a rich historical context in which to examine the murders. Later on this week I'm going to head out to Oakwood cemetery, where, if you know where to look, you can find the marker for the killers' most tragic victim, 11-year-old Mary Ramey. As the Statesman reported on 8/30/1885, the bastards "dragged the child into the wash house adjoining, ravishing her, and then drove an iron pin into both her ears, killing her in a short while." Maybe it's a good thing we don't have all the crime scene photos.

Should be on track to shoot my first interview by the first week of May or so.

Legal downloads! (And they're already screwing 'em up.)

For the first time, movie lovers can legally download feature films. As I've touted this before as an inevitable evolutionary development in film distribution, I'm happy to see it finally exists. But why am I not more enthusiastic? Because again, the industry has gone apeshit with DRM and is slapping ridiculous restrictions on the films you purchase through Movielink and CinemaNow. From the article I've linked:

Usage rules remain restrictive for the movie downloads, which are encrypted and in Windows Media format. Although the files can be burned to a DVD, that disc is just for backup and will not be recognized by a DVD player. Movielink users can put the movie on up to three PCs, which is verifiable since the file connects to the service for a license each time it is loaded onto a computer. CinemaNow users are limited to the PC onto which the movie was downloaded. In both cases, an appropriately networked home could view these digital movies from any connected television or computer screen.

Which immediately prompts the question: If they're charging me the same amount of money for the download as I'd pay for the DVD, why wouldn't I just buy the DVD, especially when I can't burn the downloaded movie I allegedly "own" to DVD in any way that my DVD player will recognize?

Clearly what these folks are envisioning is the digital living room of the future, when everyone will presumably have their PC's hooked up to their plasma screens in the den and everyone's collection of everything — movies; music; hell, even your children and pets — will be in the form of digital files on hard drives. And then what happens when your hard drive crashes? The only disc copy you can have is one that simply stores the movie as data, to be loaded onto a new hard drive instead of just being able to be popped into a DVD player and watched? And then what if your replacement hard drive won't play back the movie downloads you "own," because the DRM doesn't recognize your new hard drive?

Sorry, but for now there are so many things about how this is being launched that I see as half-assed (among other things, neither movie service is Mac or Linux compatible) that I don't think the current programs are ready for prime time. I can understand slapping the sort of DRM on the movies that won't allow anyone to post them to newsgroups or P2P or BitTorrent or that sort of thing. But for chrissakes, if I'm being asked to shell out $20 for a movie download, then what I want, quite simply, is a straight-up "VIDEO_TS" folder from which I can burn a DVD to watch to my heart's content. After all, when you buy music from iTunes, you can listen to the tracks not only on your iPod, but burn up to seven copies of the album on CD (and yes, those CD's aren't just "backup"; you can play them on any goddamn player you have). I mean, it's simple. If I'm being asked to buy these downloads, I should be allowed to watch them in whatever way I choose. Why is that hard to figure out?

UMD dies, surprises no one

If Sony's PSP handheld console weren't enough of a disappointment to the gaming world, now comes word that the UMD format for movies is on the cusp of extinction. Which surprises me not at all. Why would anyone want to pay 30 bucks for a movie on a rinkidink little disc that can only be played on one piece of hardware, when for $15 or $20 you can buy the same movie on DVD, which can be played on home decks, laptops, and any number of portable players, and which feature all those juicy extras and bells and whistles? If anything surprises me, it's that so many studios committed to the format in the first place, before the PSP had had a chance to show its performance muscle in the marketplace. Presumably there was an expectation that the PS2's lightning would strike twice, and PSP would become the next iPod among portable doohickey fans. Oops. Oh well. I wouldn't get much out of watching a movie on a 4-inch screen. Can't imagine why anyone else would. But watch. I bet Steve Jobs will be the guy who makes it work — again.

Catching up on a lazy March: random movie musings

No, I haven't blogged in two weeks, as I've needed a breather and have been busy with other stuff. When work is slow, I donate myself to science, which I've been doing over the last couple of weeks, and that's always like going to camp, but with needles. Still, easy money, and a chance to concentrate on creative things during the long hours of downtime. Happy to be back in the swim now, though, and throughout April my bloody work on Bloody Work will resume in earnest. I plan to have at least one interview in the can before the month is out.

Here is some of what's been on my mind, cinematically speaking, over these last 15 days.

• Bite this! Superman Returns? Bleh. X-Men: The Last Stand? Yeah, whatever. Mission: Impossible III? Don't make me laugh. The DaVinci Code? Okay, that one's a given. But is there anyone out there who still hasn't realized that the sleeper monster hit of the summer is going to be none other than...
It just doesn't get any better than this! This may be the most honest movie Hollywood has made in decades. As everyone has already pointed out, you know exactly what you're getting with that title. And when you add to the movie's self-aware cheese value the presense of Sam Jackson in full badass mode, and a studio thoroughly conscious of the unprecedented level of advance internet fan buzz and responding to it by scheduling reshoots specifically to get a hard-R rating — well, there's just no way this can miss! I mean, it's snakes...on a plane! $50 million opening weekend, minimum.

• More horror-related good news. Though I didn't win the Silent Hill poster contest (and yet it's eeenteresting how similar the poster they seem to be using looks to mine — scum! where's my money!?), I'm still stoked about the movie, which opens the week before my birthday. The trailer is pure bliss if you're a fan of the game, really capturing the look and mood and creep factor! In even better horror news, that dreaded remake of Suspiria looks like it's no longer happening. Sometimes, the forces of good win one. And, after a long dry spell, it looks as if John Carpenter is back in the saddle with two features on his plate! Huzzah!

• The post-Oscar Brokeback curse continues. It seems that the worst enemies of Brokeback Mountain are turning out to be not so much homophobic Christian fundies, but the movie's most ardent supporters themselves. First, author Annie Proulx publishes that petulant, embarrassing rant that got the entire blogosphere talking (and not in a flattering way), and now it turns out that co-star Randy Quaid is suing the producers for allegedly misrepresenting the earnings estimates of the film so they could get him for far below his usual fee. While I find it baffling that a man with Randy Quaid's experience in the business would be caught off-guard that people in Hollywood — gasp! — lie about money, what's more interesting is how all the love that this movie had gotten before Oscar now seems to be waning bigtime, as its biggest boosters collapse into sour-grapes whining and infighting. Shame, because that movie's merits should be its legacy, not the behavior of stupid people who happen to be associated with it.

• Asian cinema continues to dazzle me...even when it's not across-the-board brilliant. And it continues to get easier and easier to find the best movies over here. Perhaps the most stunning and unique movie I've seen recently: Shinya Tsukamoto's Vital, in which a young medical student who's suffering amnesia after an auto accident that killed his girlfriend discovers that the body on his dissection table in gross anatomy class is none other than hers! By literally digging into her remains, he begins the process of digging into his past, who he was as well as who she was, and what they meant to each other. The themes concern exactly who we are in relation to the bodies, the machines we inhabit. The student, played with focused intensity by Asano Tadanobu, barely has any personality left at all due to his amnesia; he's like a human blank slate, an uninhabited body going through the motions of a day. So are we nothing more than our accumulated memories? Without a past, is there any person inside us at all? Beautifully directed, with some of the best cinematography I've ever seen in a Japanese film, and, given the subject matter, not nearly the exercise in grisly death imagery you might expect. You should absolutely check this out. I'd go so far as to say it would have easily deserved a Best Foreign Film nomination, if I thought the Oscars were all that important any more.

I was less satisfied by Marebito, from Takashi Shimizu, who gave us the chilling Ju-on and its markedly unchilling U.S. remake The Grudge. I give the movie all props for a swell premise and for being shot on the fly in eight days. A video-obsessed loner (played, coincidentally, by Vital's director Tsukamoto) who tapes everything around him all day long, and only ever sees fit to view the world through his viewfinder and on his monitors, records a grisly suicide in a Tokyo subway station in which the victim drives a knife into his eyeball. It appears the victim saw something that paralyzed him with fear, and the video geek becomes obsessed with discovering what it was. He ends up venturing into the dark tunnels (dating from WWII) beneath the city, where he discovers a feral young girl chained to the wall. (The US art, as you can see, drapes a blanket chastely over the girl and doesn't actually attach the chain to her leg, because the MPAA has a strict rule that no movie poster art is allowed to depict violence against women.) He brings her home and eventually finds she'll only consume blood. Great idea, but as it goes on, the movie's explanations become more contrived and confused, and the final act crumbles into some J-horror clichés — many of the type Shimizu established in Ju-on, ironically — and nonsensical explanations that suggest unbelievable relationships between the characters. Still, it's worth at least a look on DVD, if only to see the most twisted excuse for a love story made in recent memory.

I've read that Shimizu's latest, Rinne (Reincarnation), flopped abysmally upon its Japanese theatrical debut, indicating that the J-horror thing is well and truly over and done with. Still, I'm eager to see it, as well as The Loft, the latest from the understated genius Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who gave us such cerebral thrillers as Pulse and Cure.

Finally, those amazing folks at Criterion keep the Japanophilia running at full steam with more movies by Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa on their slate. Having already given us one of the best DVD releases ever with Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu, as well as Ozu's Tokyo Story, Floating Weeds, Good Morning and Early Summer, they're now bringing out the much-demanded Late Spring. Plus this year will see long overdue DVD remasters of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, Yojimbo and Sanjuro. Truly these are good times to be a Japanese movie übergeek!

See everyone again soon — much sooner than two weeks.

Come on, people, it's only the Oscars

Okay, so the ceremony is over for another year, and Crash pulls an upset and wins. Fine. Whatever.

But the Brokeback supporters aren't yet willing to let go. Among the latest challenges to the loss is a weird claim, similar to the "hanging chads" controversy of the 2000 presidential elections, suggesting that Oscar voters are boobs who misread the voting ballot and voted for Crash when they really really meant to vote for Brokeback. The following image has been making the rounds online.

Personally, I find the ballot (assuming it is an accurate reproduction of what the real ballot looked like, and there's no evidence of that) easy to comprehend. You follow the black arrow. But maybe when I'm old and stupid, I might make such a mistake. I'll let you know when I'm old and stupid.

Next, a group of Brokeback supporters have successfully solicited thousands of dollars online to place a full-color ad in next weeks' Variety that looks like this.

Well, that'll show 'em, won't it?

Look, I'm delighted to see any movie garner a following of passionate fans who will get behind it to this degree. That's wonderful. But this has nothing to do with the relative merits of either movie. It has to do with placing too much importance on the wrong thing — to wit, the Best Picture Oscar. Here's the deal. Brokeback Mountain exists, and it will always exist, for this generation and future ones to see. It has made its mark on film history, and the loss of a glitzy but increasingly meaningless industry award has no bearing on that legacy. For those who think its loss is a grave injustice, newsflash: it's not the first one in history. Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction? Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan? Chicago over The Pianist? There are more examples over the last 78 years of Oscar getting it wrong than getting it right.

I've often said, and many of my friends seem to agree, that regardless of whatever awards a film may have on its mantlepiece, if that movie isn't on my DVD shelf then said awards aren't that special to me. I'm not more likely to hold a movie in higher regard than another one simply because it has "Academy Award Winner Best Picture!" emblazoned on the DVD package in 48 point type. If I had a choice, right now, between watching Oscar winner American Beauty or the couldn't-get-near-the-Oscars-with-a-ten-foot-pole Big Trouble in Little China, could you guess which I'd pick?

Brokeback's legacy doesn't lie in a gold-plated statuette. It lies in the hearts of the audience that loves it. Life goes on.

Since I'll be doing something else Sunday night...

I really don't have a horse in the Oscar race this year. I felt heaps of personal gratification when Spirited Away won the very first Best Animated Feature award. And naturally, the Best Picture for The Return of the King, which was really an award for the achievement of the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, made my inner geek squee. But this year, while I think by and large there are some good movies up, it isn't a ceremony to get all excited about, with the exception of John Stewart's hosting. And this will be the easiest ceremony to handicap in ages. Herewith, my predictions.

Best Picture: Brokeback Mountain

Best Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman for Capote

Best Actress: Reese Witherspoon for Walk the Line

Best Supporting Actor: George Clooney for Syriana

Best Supporting Actress: Tossup — either Amy Adams for Junebug or Rachel Weisz for The Constant Gardener. I'm leaning toward Weisz.

Best Director: Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain

Best Animated Feature: Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit

There. Three years ago, when my then-roommate was working on The Alamo (interesting to recall how that notorious megaflop was at the time really expected to represent at the Oscars), the crew had an Oscar pool and I helped her on her entries. We won it and split $180 between us! Wish that were happening now; I feel more confident now than I did then. And I'm not even all that excited about it.

Damn damn damn!

Darren McGavin has died. Yes, I know Don Knotts has died too. And that's a huge loss to the comedy world. But I was always less into Andy Griffith than Kolchak, the Night Stalker, whose show was a direct inspiration for The X-Files. What a bummer. But both men were in their 80's, a long healthy life we should all hope to have. Ah well. So long.

Update, Monday evening 2/27: Good grief! The Reaper really cut a swath over the weekend. In addition to McGavin and Knotts, we lost Dennis (McCloud) Weaver as well as the brilliant science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler. What up? Maybe this would be a good week to stay indoors. I'm gonna go hug my dog or something.

Biggest lamers on net found!

A bunch of goofballs with too much time on their hands have launched the website craignotbond.com to protest in the most petulant fanboy fashion the casting of Daniel Craig as James Bond. While I thought Brosnan was a fantastic Bond (his movies not exactly canonical, though), it's pretty pathetic to slag an actor, particularly when no one has even seen a frame of film he's shot yet. Much of the website is a pretty uncool exercise in character assassination against Craig himself, most of which appears to be motivated by the fact he doesn't have Brosnan's male-model looks. They also mock a lot of the roles he's already done, as if versatility in an actor is a liability. As anyone's who's seen Munich or Layer Cake can tell you, Craig's acting skills should not be in doubt. And however "odd-looking" these webdweebs think Craig is, I'd bet he's probably handsomer than they are. They do not, of course, post pictures of themselves nor identify themselves by name. There's nothing like having the courage of your convictions, eh?

This kind of stupid bullshit is fanboyism at its worst. So who cares if these dinks boycott Casino Royale? Millions of people will see it anyway, and those with brains will know not to judge Craig in the role until they've actually, like, seen him in the role. And as for Craig not being good-looking enough for the role...since when was that the criterion? Connery and Brosnan were handsome and tough, Moore had the handsomeness but no depth (never a hair out of place on that man).

But it might interest these folks to realize that Ian Fleming himself (you know, the guy who wrote the Bond novels, which I bet no one associated with this dickless "boycott" has read) didn't exactly see Bond as a Calvin Klein studmuffin. Fleming described Bond as looking something like musician Hoagy Carmichael, whose photo is to the left there. One can imagine heads exploding over at the craignotbond.com guy's mother's basement offices if a big-nosed guy like this was cast as double-oh-sebbin.

While I bemoan the departure of Brosnan — hell, I bemoan the shittiness of the last three Bond movies overall, plus the producers' idiotic choice to turn down Quentin Tarantino's offer, which, had that movie been made, would have racked up more box office than all the previous ones combined — I'm open to a newer, rougher, tougher, nastier Bond who will fuck people up and not mess around. Hell, Craig has already broken two teeth in a fight scene for the movie. If that isn't throwing yourself into your role, I don't know what is. I kind of wish he'd leave them unfixed, just to piss these guys off more.

Annihilator title revision, thank ghod

As I just couldn't get over how much Annihilator sounded like some Dolph Lundgren movie from the 80's, I've finally figured out the title I like for the documentary — and it was staring me right in the face, from the very first newspaper headline about the crimes. The actual title for the movie will now be Bloody Work: The Unsolved Mystery of the Servant Girl Annihilators. That still allows for the actual killers' media names to be part of the title without any risk of sounding cheesily Dolphish.

Of course, it's just like me to have changed my mind on the title after dropping 27 bucks to register domains under the old one. There's a Homer Simpson moment for you. Well, hey, I can still use those domains. You can rest assured my usual filmmaking skillz are just a teensy bit less disorganized than this.

I'll continue posting kewl historical info about the crimes here over the next few weeks, and this blog will still be the home of my production diaries when that begins as well. I intend to have an official movie site up soon, too.

Feeling very auteurish and stuff right now!

If he builds it, will they come?

Just read this article from News 8 Austin about developer David Cuddy and his elaborate plans to build several sound stages on about 250 acres of land near Neiderwald. It's great, in that the Austin area does need full-fledged state of the art production facilities of the type Cuddy plans. The Austin Studios in the old hangars of what used to be Robert Mueller airport are, like so much else in the Austin filmmaking "industry," pretty half-assed. But the immediate concern is whether facilities like this will actually lure a few productions to this area for a change. There's a lot the city and the state need to do to get studio and quality indie productions happening here again. Right now, there is simply no work. Is part of the reason we don't get more projects shooting out here the lack of first-rate sound stages and post houses? Could the construction of some bring in the work? I'm rooting for Huddy. It's cool to hate developers in Austin, but not when they're developing something kickass. You go, bud.

Annihilator: The first murder

So this ought to start you off with a little taste...

From the Austin Daily Statesman, January 1, 1885, comes the first of many news reports abut the serial killings that were to be attributed the "Servant Girl Annihilator" (or "Annihilators"). The body of Mollie Smith, a "light-colored mulatto" about 25 years old, was found "nearly nude" by an outhouse roughly fifty paces outside the bedroom where she had been sleeping with her commonlaw husband, Walter Spencer. The assailants — and there were probably two here — first bashed poor Spencer's face in with some kind of heavy object, either a brick or metal pipe. Mollie was then dragged outside; she apparently put up a heroic struggle, but she wasn't heard to scream (there were other people asleep in the same house). This indicates the assailant probably was covering her mouth while dragging her outside. Spencer came to some time later, noticed Mollie missing, went for medical help himself (his facial bones had been cracked up pretty good by the blows), but didn't find Mollie's body until the morning.

A number of interesting questions about this event. For one thing, a bloody axe was found on the floor by Mollie and Spencer's bed. Since Mollie was still alive when she was being dragged out of the house, she wasn't killed until she had been taken out by the outhouse. Where she was killed...with an axe. (One out-of-town newspaper reports she was so hacked up her body was falling to pieces as it was being lifted into a casket, but that can't be confirmed and is probably an example of the kinds of lurid reporting you see in Victorian era newspapers.)

This suggests the killer either went back inside to leave the axe on purpose, or, perhaps, went back inside to do something else (subdue another victim? look for valuables?) and left it behind either uncaringly or accidentally. But moreover, it strongly suggests two assailants. Spencer was not hit with the axe but some other object. The axe had definitely been brought to the scene by the assailants; everyone living at the house testified no one there owned an axe. So whatever the other object was that struck Spencer, it must have been brought and taken away, since there were no reports of another bloody weapon on the scene. So, if there were only one assailant that night, we're left with the spectacle of a man dragging the thrashing, panicked Mollie outside while covering her mouth to stifle her screams, and simultaneously schlepping a big axe and whatever he hit Spencer with. Seems implausible. Two men that evening are more likely.

Spencer recovered, only to be arrested as a suspect then released. (No one really thought he did this or any of the subsequent murders.) There were other arrests, other suspects, and more ghastly killings to come.

Announcing Annihilator!

The journey of a thousand miles begins with blah blah blah. I'm really excited. Today I officially announce my next film project, the feature documentary Annihilator: The Unsolved Mystery of the Austin Axe Murders.

Two things about this project have me super-excited. First of these is that I have always, up till now, pursued narrative filmmaking projects, and I never really thought of myself as a "documentary filmmaker." But then I realize that the distinction is meaningless. If you're a filmmaker, you're a filmmaker. Period. There's nothing carved in stone that says a director can only pursue one area of the filmmaking art. Orson Welles and Martin Scorsese made documentaries, and Scorsese has also made a concert film and (in one admitted lapse of judgment, though I imagine the check was wonderful) a Michael Jackson music video.

The other thing is that it's amazing to think that virtually no one in Austin today knows that this city had its very own Jack the Ripper, who went about his nasty business a full three years before Jack did. (Some armchair sleuths think that the murderer — murderers? — who came to be called the "Servant Girl Annihilator" fled justice overseas and picked up his old trade in Whitechapel, but I find that doubtful.) The more I've read about these killings, the more my filmmaker's bells have been going off. What a fan-fucking-tabulous subject for a documentary. There was simply no question — Holmes is on the case! I'm officially underway on my research, and as writing and shooting commences, I'll post updates here. This will be one kickass movie. If I do say so myself. I can't wait to get it made. I can't wait for you to see it.

Addendum: I admit there is something about the current working title that sounds a bit like a PS2 game or a Dolph Lundgren movie. "Servant Girl Annihilator" was, in fact, the name given the killer(s) by writer O. Henry, living in Austin at the time. As there is strong evidence that at least two killers were involved in some of the killings, I considered Annihilators plural, but thought that didn't sound quite right. The Servant Girl Annihilator just sounds like some bad imitation-Argento cheapass Italian horror movie, and The Austin Axe Murderer is too bland, like an episode of some History Channel show. Any readers with better suggestions will find me receptive.

Cake and Ice Cream of the Dead

Yoiks! To think Saturday has almost passed and I didn't notice this on IMDb until almost midnight. Today was George A. Romero's birthday! Happy 66 to the Zombiemeister! Here's a filmmaker who's a legend in his field, and spent years being chewed up and spat out by that ultimate zombie of all zombies, the Hollywood system. I'm happy to see him back in the saddle making movies again, even if it's late in life.