I Guess I'll Write About Movies Now

Back in 2004, I was faced with two prospects: work in the oil and gas industry or go back to grad school. Given that this blog isn’t about my ostentatious wealth, you can probably guess which path I took. On the strength of three year-old GRE scores and meager charm, I secured a spot in a mass communications MA program and spent two years studying at the University of Oklahoma. In my own nerdy way, I was running away from growing up and becoming a productive member of society. I had an assistantship that paid enough for me to live on, I loved the school and the people I worked with. I loved being part of an in-group, even if it ultimately left me at a disadvantage for dealing with the realities of life outside my bubble. I’d like to say that’s why biker films resonate with me, that the insider-outsider dynamic is why I felt so drawn to them that I eventually wrote my MA thesis on the genre (I’ll send you the pdf if you want) but the truth is that I’d never seen a single biker movie be...

Science is great, isn’t it? Math, physics, chemistry, medicine, geology—they’re all absolute bangers. They help us understand how the world works, from the grandest spiraling of galaxies to the lowliest muon and everything in between. I mean, I saw Oppenheimer . Science is an unstoppable juggernaut of repeatable, measurable facts and data. If we were erased tomorrow and replaced by an alien species or, like, super-smart squirrels, then science would reveal the universe to them in the same way. It’s objective, as opposed to the soft-headed arts, which exist because we have a shared, made up worldview, and we’re committed to it. Do you think those super-smart squirrels are going to come up with Night Court ? No way. They’re going to build their own culture and it’s going to create its own artifacts, completely alien from ours. And that’s kind of a shame, because I would love to see Squirrel Night Court . Even so, I’d bet all my acorns that at some point, they’d start telling each other t...

When Paul Reubens and Phil Hartman started writing Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure , so the story goes, they had no idea how to structure a feature film. It makes sense, because they were sketch and improv comedians, so to guide their story they turned to the gold standard of scriptwriting: Syd Field, and his seminal book, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting . They hewed precisely to Field’s page-by-page structure, right down to scene and act breaks falling on specific page numbers. It was so spot-on to the formula that Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure is now taught in many screenwriting courses as the Platonic ideal of a Field screenplay. And as anyone who has seen Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure knows, the formula fucking works . Obviously, it’s not the only way to make a movie, but it’s a reliable chassis to build upon. Sure, in some circles it’s considered gauche to make a “formulaic” movie. But then there are other circles, where people just want to roll around in giant piles of hundred dollar ...

Commit to the bit. It’s good advice for a comedian, unless that comedian is considering kidnapping his child from his ex-wife’s custody and driving across the country with him, as in Ezra . Oh, right. Spoiler alert . And I guess trigger warning. Let’s just get it out of the way up front: in Ezra , a comedian kidnaps his child from his ex-wife’s totally legal custody and then drives him from Hoboken to Los Angeles. Promotional materials for the movie describe it thusly: “Comedian Max co-parents autistic son Ezra with ex-wife Jenna. Faced with crucial decisions about Ezra's future, Max and Ezra go on a life-changing cross-country road trip.” I don’t know if “go on a life-changing cross-country road trip” is how I would describe kidnapping a child in the middle of the night and taking him across a goddamned continent, while his freaked out mother does everything in her power to get him back. I guess technically it is a life-changing cross-country road trip, in that lots of lives were...

There is something inherently masochistic about watching a horror movie, slashers in particular, and we, as the audience, know that’s the price of admission. We will punish ourselves for 90 minutes, usually, in exchange for the thrill of adrenaline in our brains, some uneasy laughs, a few jump scares, and ultimately the catharsis of coming through the ordeal as a survivor (whether or not anyone on screen does). To get there, we get to know a group of strangers ( not these ) and we travel along with them on the ride. We see who they are, what they love and fear, and, if the film is any good, we come to identify with them and care about them before they are brutally and ostentatiously slaughtered for our amusement. See? On paper it sounds crazy. In practice, it’s one of the most enduring film genres of the past fifty years. Carol Clover wrote a really great book about them, Men, Women, and Chainsaws , and I encourage you to read it if you have even a passing interest in the genre. These ...