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“If you want to see a movie about a douchebag, you should probably see Douchebag.” So ends a great little promotional interview with Drake Doremus for his movie.

I would love to see this film — and I will some day, I am sure, though I will not be in Park City on Friday when it premieres. I will see this movie because of an intrigue based on the clip where we hear of an extended, impractical movie-making process, similar to one I’ve been working on, and that clip also shows crazy-good acting. The film is all character-driven, my favorite. Also, one of the actresses in this movie is a new friend, and an amazingly generous and open person. Finally, it’s called Douchebag. Four good reasons! Find this clip and a little more here.

Douchebag, I’m rooting for you!

Here is the Official Obselidia Trailer.
It intrigues me. I think I would very much enjoy watching this movie, especially in an arthouse or smaller theater. I think I would enjoy the philosophical wonderings that this movie would elicit in me. I’m hoping it’s well received at Sundance, and that it enjoys a wider release.

They’ve got a Twitter account for this film. Smart people.

Recently, the Sundance Film Festival announced their lineup of competition films for the 2010 version of the annual Utah event. I have decided to follow 3 of them closely. My decision was based on a few, loose criteria: Scripted (fictional) films where the actors and directors are non-famous and the budget is pretty small, and they were filmed or based largely in southern California. Only three films met those criteria:

Douchebag, directed by Drake Doremus, with a cast that includes one actress I’ve recently met, Amy Ferguson. (This isn’t even her first appearance on a Sundance screen. Sheesh.)

Lovers of Hate, by Bryan Poyser.

Obselidia, by Diane Bell.

I’ve established Google alerts for these people, I’m asking around and doing online research, and I’m rooting for them. Go Team 3!

On Saturday night, I watched The Wizard of Oz at a new friend’s house. This guy has prints of old movies and shows them in his backyard, with an old-time popcorn maker and the works. Good times! The 16mm print was about 20 years old, he said.

I haven’t seen TWoO in a while, and I got misty a couple of times: During the end of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” with lovely simple camera work panning to capture more of the tractor as Judy does her simple lovely thing and Toto just sits there being brilliant. I could only find this image on the internet, but the better moments are soon thereafter.

I got misty again when we enter Oz and see color for the first time. The camera work is once again subtle and powerful. Loved that! You know what, I got misty a couple of other times, too, okay? Okay. Congrats to Judy, Victor, Burt, Harold, the whole creative gang.

(Also, there were a couple of very very cute and engaging women there … but that’s a different story for another time and place.)

This was supposedly written by an agent at CAA to all of his clients regarding the current state of the entertainment industry. It was forwarded to me today by a reputable source, but I am not certain of its true provenance. It’s worth a read, but it may be not be from a CAA agent. Or maybe this high-level agent doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘conflagration’ nor how to spell some well-known names.

Dear Clients,

I wanted to take a moment and give you a number of important updates. Before I begin, however, I wish to tell you that I am so very proud of you for your dogged determination during these most difficult times. Hollywood is being challenged on multiple fronts — labor uncertainty, paradigm shifting and the ‘great recession.’

More…

I’m reading a book that is heavily redacted. If you’re politically aware, you already have a guess as to which book it is. I know the author made the rounds on TV a couple of years ago, including The Daily Show — I remember that episode.

I’m reading this political biography because it’s being made into a movie, and I have a chance to audition for one of the roles. That’s pretty exciting (!!!), especially given the caliber of the talent and the importance of the story. So I am doing my homework.

Guess the book.

Among the whole Academy Awards hullabaloo, there were a handful of very moving moments. I just want to write about one, even though it pertains to a movie I haven’t even seen. Major kudos to Dustin Lance Black for winning an Oscar for the screenplay of Milk — and also kudos for having the guts once upon a time to move on with his life, to move on from Mormonism to something that worked for him.

From his acceptance speech: “When I was 13 years old, my beautiful mother and my father moved me from a conservative Mormon home in San Antonio, Texas, to California, and I heard the story of Harvey Milk. And it gave me hope. It gave me the hope to live my life. It gave me the hope that one day I could live my life openly as who I am and that maybe even I could fall in love and one day get married.”

Later, Sean Penn spoke of the hateful picketers outside the Oscars whose grandchildren will be ashamed of them. While I suppose this is largely true of anybody who would spend time picketing today, a lot of the people I know who are opposed to gay marriage oppose it not out of hate, but out of fear and a misguided sense of duty to God. An important distinction that their grandchildren will cling to.

Yesterday on Science Friday, Ira Flato interviewed some high-level movie guys working in 3-D, aka stereoscopy. Said Lenny Lipton, a long-time 3-D player and the inventor of some stereoscopic technology, “I think all movies, for business reasons, will have to become stereoscopic movies … just as all movies have sound.”

There you have it. This is not a prediction for the far future, but the near future. I don’t know that actors will get left behind this time, like Norma Desmond, but it’s an interesting piece of news, and in particular the pervasive future of stereoscopy is what’s news to me.

Lipton, who also wrote the lyrics of the song Puff the Magic Dragon, might be biased. The others on the panel, director Henry Selick and executive Jim Mainard, think only half of high-profile films will become 3-D films, about 25 titles a year. By the way, Selick pushed for some sort of smell-o-vision on Coraline, but the panel agreed that’s not coming. Rather, new sound technology is the other thing on the verge of changing our movie-going experience.

My first encounter with Doubt was reading John Patrick Shanley’s fine, fine play in a park in Worcester, Mass. I was on breaks from full-time rehearsals at Foothills Theatre there. What a read! Powerful, wonderful, beyond good. I knew I wanted to select a monologue, eventually settled on some lines from the scene where Father Flynn and Sister James talk in the courtyard.

Then, just a few months later, I worked on the set of Brotherhood with Brian O’Bryne, the talented actor who originated the role of Father Flynn. In our brief conversations, I mentioned that scene to him and he told me of shifting his approach to it, ending up with something much less strident or aggressive than during first rehearsals. He also told me that his girlfriend was the actor who portrayed Sister James — that’s how they met. Other discussions were about his more-recent work in The Coast of Utopia so I never got around to asking him what he and Shanley decided on as back story for Father Flynn’s guilt. Sure wish I’d asked that!

Fast forward a year, and a solid production of Doubt in Gloucester was the last piece of theater I saw in Massachusetts before leaving for California. I knew all four of the actors, and I saw there one of my favorite Boston performances of 2008. Originally, I thought I might be jealous of my friend Lewis, who was portraying Father Flynn, but his strong performance and my impending departure and a million other factors resulted in me just absorbing, appreciating, being moved and grateful.

Now here’s the thing. All three of these experiences were stronger and better experiences than watching Doubt in a movie theater on New Year’s Day. It’s a good movie, but these other things were beyond good. Streep, Hoffman, Adams, Davis, others — all are great actors whose work I enjoyed and learned from. (Loved Amy Adams so much, just as I loved Melissa Baroni’s performance in Gloucester. It’s a great role.) But there are key differences that matter so much!

In the play, the very first thing is Father Flynn’s sermon on doubt, directed to the audience. You attend the play, you attend his sermon. That is key. Conversely, the film opens with families getting ready for church, altar boys preparing, street scenes for a sense of time and place (1964, the Bronx) and then after a while you observe Flynn’s sermon — observe rather than experience. The same difference applies to reading the play, versus seeing the movie. When reading that sermon, it spoke to me personally. And I’m not at all Cathloic! The movie, while good, is simply more removed.

As the plot unfolds without us seeing any of the children, the play allows for an amazing journey in the mind. Reading the play, working on monologues from it, seeing a strong production — all allowed for me to have rewarding, extraordinary meditation. The movie, to be sure, is very worthy of post-popcorn contemplation, and I’m happy for that. I’m sure that this good mental thing happens much more after this movie than after, say, The Dark Knight. But the movie “takes us from the realm of philosophical meditation to one of evidentiary fact-finding, where every expression is scrutinized for incriminating information.”¹ And this is why it’s not as good as the play. The film’s realism makes it smaller. No more meditation, just facts. Remember: it’s supposed to be about doubt.

Somewhere in the above, probably more than in Hoffman’s acting work, lies the reason that the movie’s Father Flynn seemed to me more arbitrary in his reactions. More ambiguous for the sake of ambiguity. More like an exercise in writing. Not for a second did I have such heretical thoughts before seeing the movie. Some play-going audience members see him as guilty, some as not guilty; all see their opinion as clearly the only right one. In that sense, you can think what you want about Flynn. But don’t you want to think, “He did it” or “He didn’t do it,” instead of “I don’t get it”? (Or maybe the movie set him up as clearly guilty, while the play is more wonderfully ambiguous, and I don’t want him to be a pedophile.)

Maybe if you haven’t been exposed to Doubt before seeing the movie, none of my ramblings will make sense. If you know the piece beforehand, however, you may feel like I did, that you are seeing a good, but distracting, production — just like the snot you see running down Viola Davis’s face as she pleads with Sister Aloysius. Is it bad? No, how can it be? It’s real, it’s honest, it shows great work from a creative artist. But it’s distracting as hell.

Over the past days, we’ve watched A Christmas Story and It’s a Wonderful Life, staples of the holiday. Watching Jimmy Stewart and Lionel Barrymore was different this time, in light of our current economy and the way its woes are connected to housing, and it really got me thinking. Maybe in the past I noticed the romance more, or nostalgia. Not this time. No nostalgia, that’s for sure, given how current it seemed.

Our economic woes were on my mind and particularly the greed and gains of many key players. I swear, most of the people who are to blame got rich in the process. And don’t forget their employees who figuratively push them around in their wheelchairs, watching silently as they steal an uncle’s and nephew’s life.

Though I’ve seen It’s a Wonderful Life many times, I noticed something for the first time yesterday. In the montage where we learn about brother Harry’s war heroism and George’s homefront duties, we see George spit at somebody. From Stewart’s reaction, it’s clear he only spat on himself. What a contrast between the plight of a good soul, and the life of Potter, George Bush, bad mortgage pushers, and so many other people on this planet whose shit don’t stink. Good people spit and they spit on themselves. They wisely abstain from buying that house, they don’t get bailed out by the government but end up bailing out the foolish and the evil. Or, back to the movie, they lose a few thousand dollars and they’re bound for jail, but not so the stealer of those thousands. He’s miserable, but there’s no further ramifications — how much more black can Potter get? None more black. A good way to avoid jail on this planet is to lose/bilk millions or billions, not thousands. Be bad through and through, don’t be a good person who makes a mistake. Same with murder. Kill one person or a handful, go to jail. Be responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people, and you’ll never even see a trial. I’m talking to you, Rumsfeld. And McNamara. And so many others.

I stepped out during the time where George goes to throw himself off a bridge. I couldn’t watch the whole thing — which has happened before because it felt too corny, too dated, too hackneyed or some completely different reason. Sure, I know that for me there are no George Baileys, no idyllic towns like Bedford Falls, no guardian angels. But there are plenty of Potters out there, and their wheelchair pushers. And tramps like Vi.

Enough! It’s the holidays, and I’m not letting these things get me down — now that I’ve gotten it off my chest. Thanks for listening. Back to joy, snow, family, food, and many other good things in this life of ours, this life that’s … you know … what’s the word? Exactly.