Because precisely no one asked for it and I need some feedback here is the script, tentatively called Blackout, the latest P.I. film. It's a bit . . . different. Very Dame-centric. I'm looking to film it (haha, record it) this summer.
Comments welcome.
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Friday, April 12, 2013
You Watch Television?!
You're right. This is a new thing. I didn't used to watch television. I occasionally enjoyed the extremely time shifted pleasures of seasons past (Doctor Who, Psych, Burn Notice, Top Gear, 30 Rock) when they finally hit Netflix. But it turns out, I had severely misunderstood the state of On Demand. In my defense, I haven't paid for cable in three or so years and three years ago "On Demand" meant straight to video crap, renting movies, and nothing else. If you wanted to timeshift a show, you had to know which one that was going to be and record it your own damn self. My sister, a proud homeowner now, inadvertently clued me in to the new world order. On Demand now means that ALL of the regular television shows have been DVRd already and you can pick and choose je nach Laune, as the Germans say (or might if they were translating an American expression into German, let's roll with it), which is awesome in its brilliance (and it took years for them to figure this out because . . . ).
Knowing of the existence of On Demand's in season vault is great and it will change my TV watching habits, but it will not help me with the cultural void that developed over the last couple of years (the lacking access to cable years). I have deliberately kept myself out of the conversations of Mad Men, Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, House of Lies and every HBO show worth watching, which is, frankly, all of them. (A note to HBO, if you are listening: Make HBO Go available to people who aren't subscribers. I don't buy cable in my household, but I would happily give you money to watch your amazing shows. Every month.) I consider that a good thing. If you are someone who cares about those shows, you don't need to listen to me.
But now that I have cracked the On Demand code, I feel like there are shows out there that I can get in on the ground floor on, shows like NBC's Hannibal. What I understand from those in the know is that NBC has no idea what to do with this show, it's in the Thursday night death slot (the one that used to belong to E.R. - oh, how the mighty have fallen), and it might get cancelled once the initial run has aired. It makes you feel bad for Bryan Fuller. Fuller is responsible for Wonderfalls, Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, and Heroes. Not one of those shows lasted for even three full seasons. So, just be forewarned: Hannibal will be cancelled soon.
Which is a shame because Hannibal is AWESOME. I don't use those capital letters lightly. Thomas Harris is responsible for bringing us the character of Hannibal Lecter and the universe that grew up around it. His novels, Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal, inspired four movies, a musical (I wish I was kidding) and now a television show and, you could argue, created the serial killer/profiler as a genre. Silence of the Lambs is one of the greatest films of all time, a document so complete and authoritative that it is impossible to explore those characters any further. Hannibal, the movie and the novel, attempted it and failed. Even Ridley Scott directing Julianne Moore couldn't add anything substantial to the Lecter/Starling story. But then you have Red Dragon.
Red Dragon is the back story of Silence. It's primarily about Will Graham, a profiler who was so empathetic that he could solve murders from inside the murderer's head, that he could think the murderer's thoughts. That's a compelling character that you could explore forever, right? And then on top of that, we get Hannibal Lecter, the brilliant sadist serial killer who helps Graham catch these killers. That's a dynamic that has automatic tension to it, it's just too juicy. So juicy, that you've got two movies that try to deal with it, mostly unsuccessfully (Manhunter succeeds far more than the dull and obvious Red Dragon - I'll take Michael Mann over Brett Ratner any day of the week), and now, we have the medium necessary to explore the complete complexity of this dynamic: television.
Television allows David Slade (Hard Candy - do yourself a favor, watch) and Bryan Fuller to take their time, to let the dynamic unfold in front of us, with that delicious sense of inevitability, that wonderful suspense that Hitchcock talks about: watching the time bomb under the cafe table tick down inexorably to that final explosive moment. Hugh Dancy is great as Will Graham, who has been invited as a kind of idiot savant, who has little or no social skills, no use for social niceties, and who is clearly damaged by the use of his empathetic gifts. The show lets us into the Graham's world, to his torture, by re-enacting the crime scenes with Graham as the killer. It's highly stylized and totally immersive. But the real brilliance of the show is casting Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal Lecter, an actor who is the polar opposite, in terms of technique, as Brian Cox and Anthony Hopkins. Mikkelsen is a master of the subtle, cold, and calculating. He is outstanding in Casino Royale, but he has some Danish language work that is also brilliant, particularly the Dogme-95-lite piece, After The Wedding. Mikkelsen is a total . . . er . . . pleasure to watch. He is understated but always masterfully present.
But great actors and good style aren't enough to make this show work, though it helps tremendously. It's going to come down to the monsters these guys are hunting down on a weekly basis. Harris may have invented the the profiler/killer rules, but modern science has come to understand something about those early profilers: they were full of crap. Most serial killers are not loner white men who have trouble keeping a job. Many of them are dedicated family men and pillars of their community (which gibes with what we know of pure evil from . . . you know where, that place and the thing . . . do I really have to go there?). The first killer in the series is a family man killing girls like his daughter because she is about to leave the nest. Immediately, we know that we aren't going to be stuck with run of the mill psychos and loners. No Jame Gumb, no John Doe, no Dahmer. We are getting a great look at a very interesting dynamic and new look at what we think of evil.
So, yeah. I'm all in on Hannibal.
Knowing of the existence of On Demand's in season vault is great and it will change my TV watching habits, but it will not help me with the cultural void that developed over the last couple of years (the lacking access to cable years). I have deliberately kept myself out of the conversations of Mad Men, Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, House of Lies and every HBO show worth watching, which is, frankly, all of them. (A note to HBO, if you are listening: Make HBO Go available to people who aren't subscribers. I don't buy cable in my household, but I would happily give you money to watch your amazing shows. Every month.) I consider that a good thing. If you are someone who cares about those shows, you don't need to listen to me.
But now that I have cracked the On Demand code, I feel like there are shows out there that I can get in on the ground floor on, shows like NBC's Hannibal. What I understand from those in the know is that NBC has no idea what to do with this show, it's in the Thursday night death slot (the one that used to belong to E.R. - oh, how the mighty have fallen), and it might get cancelled once the initial run has aired. It makes you feel bad for Bryan Fuller. Fuller is responsible for Wonderfalls, Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, and Heroes. Not one of those shows lasted for even three full seasons. So, just be forewarned: Hannibal will be cancelled soon.
Which is a shame because Hannibal is AWESOME. I don't use those capital letters lightly. Thomas Harris is responsible for bringing us the character of Hannibal Lecter and the universe that grew up around it. His novels, Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal, inspired four movies, a musical (I wish I was kidding) and now a television show and, you could argue, created the serial killer/profiler as a genre. Silence of the Lambs is one of the greatest films of all time, a document so complete and authoritative that it is impossible to explore those characters any further. Hannibal, the movie and the novel, attempted it and failed. Even Ridley Scott directing Julianne Moore couldn't add anything substantial to the Lecter/Starling story. But then you have Red Dragon.
Red Dragon is the back story of Silence. It's primarily about Will Graham, a profiler who was so empathetic that he could solve murders from inside the murderer's head, that he could think the murderer's thoughts. That's a compelling character that you could explore forever, right? And then on top of that, we get Hannibal Lecter, the brilliant sadist serial killer who helps Graham catch these killers. That's a dynamic that has automatic tension to it, it's just too juicy. So juicy, that you've got two movies that try to deal with it, mostly unsuccessfully (Manhunter succeeds far more than the dull and obvious Red Dragon - I'll take Michael Mann over Brett Ratner any day of the week), and now, we have the medium necessary to explore the complete complexity of this dynamic: television.
Television allows David Slade (Hard Candy - do yourself a favor, watch) and Bryan Fuller to take their time, to let the dynamic unfold in front of us, with that delicious sense of inevitability, that wonderful suspense that Hitchcock talks about: watching the time bomb under the cafe table tick down inexorably to that final explosive moment. Hugh Dancy is great as Will Graham, who has been invited as a kind of idiot savant, who has little or no social skills, no use for social niceties, and who is clearly damaged by the use of his empathetic gifts. The show lets us into the Graham's world, to his torture, by re-enacting the crime scenes with Graham as the killer. It's highly stylized and totally immersive. But the real brilliance of the show is casting Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal Lecter, an actor who is the polar opposite, in terms of technique, as Brian Cox and Anthony Hopkins. Mikkelsen is a master of the subtle, cold, and calculating. He is outstanding in Casino Royale, but he has some Danish language work that is also brilliant, particularly the Dogme-95-lite piece, After The Wedding. Mikkelsen is a total . . . er . . . pleasure to watch. He is understated but always masterfully present.
But great actors and good style aren't enough to make this show work, though it helps tremendously. It's going to come down to the monsters these guys are hunting down on a weekly basis. Harris may have invented the the profiler/killer rules, but modern science has come to understand something about those early profilers: they were full of crap. Most serial killers are not loner white men who have trouble keeping a job. Many of them are dedicated family men and pillars of their community (which gibes with what we know of pure evil from . . . you know where, that place and the thing . . . do I really have to go there?). The first killer in the series is a family man killing girls like his daughter because she is about to leave the nest. Immediately, we know that we aren't going to be stuck with run of the mill psychos and loners. No Jame Gumb, no John Doe, no Dahmer. We are getting a great look at a very interesting dynamic and new look at what we think of evil.
So, yeah. I'm all in on Hannibal.
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