Adaptation, the work of genius incarnate from which this blog takes its name

Or, dude this movie is frickin' sweet.

And has inspired me to realize what it is that I really want to do with my life: screenplay theory. It's so obvious, I don't know why I didn't think of it earlier. I like writing and studying screenplays, I like academia, surely those things can be combined in some useful/meaningful way. Score!

I have decided to write a paper (or an article, I suppose, as they're called in the real world) on said topic for my next round of grad school applications. Since I have managed to fail so very terribly at the grad school game this year, I have already begun to plot and machinate my successful entrance into film programs next year. I am now officially a lapsed Lutheran *and* a lapsed English major. I'm a little afraid to write something without the opportunity for professor input, but perhaps it's time I lose my intellectual training wheels and grow a pair o balls.

I haven't completely decided what aspect of Adaptation I'll write about, though... there are so goddamn many awesome pretentious intellectual things to study in that film. There's the obvious riffing on"pop screenplay theory" a la Robert McKee-- 3 act structure, voiceover=bad, wow them in the third act, etc etc-- in that he completely disregards the "rules" in the first two acts and then whips out every single one in the last. Except for the no deus ex machina rule. Kaufman whips out a pretty tasty deus ex machina.

Beyond the playing with screenplay tropes and the supposed rules all screenwriters are supposed to follow, there are even more interesting things going on with words and structure in Adaptation. The most basic rule, the one thing that everyone is told when they're writing a screenplay, is "show it, don't tell it." But in Adaptation, there are *multiple* levels of telling-rather-than-showing; it's about a guy writing a screenplay about a woman writing a book. It's completely inundated with words (or at least for the first two acts).... at one point, it's nothing but Kaufman reading a passage from Susan Orlean's book aloud, which gradually fades into her own voice reading the book. It's all words, no image. But then in the third act he turns 360 and the plot becomes action and image-driven to the point of ridiculousness. Did I mention the deus ex machina?

Anyway, I'm not going to write the paper yet. I'm working frantically on a screenplay right now actually, and the deadline for the Bluecat screenplay contest is April 1st, so I have 3 weeks to write another 40-50 pages of script. But I did want to mention, since I thought of my life today and all.

That is all.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Fact: there is no movie that Alan Rickman does not make better.

I’m a big fan of Tom Tykwer, who directed Lola Rennt and Der Krieger und die Kaiserin,, two pretty sweet German movies starring Franka Potente on which I have written papers in German (albeit the German of a five-year-old). This is certainly of different stuff than those films, more atmospheric and darker, and I’m not sure if it’s quite as good. I had quite the argument with my friends about the end of the film, which, I’ll admit, is a little ridiculous. It’s a *lot* of slow-motion and the floating handkerchief is a little Forrest Gump feather-in-the-wind, the cheering crowd is a little over-the-top, and there’s pretty much no way to portray a crowd-sized orgy with a straight face. They made the argument that the fantastic nature (as in of the fantasy realm, not as in awesome) of the crowd scene was too out of place in the rest of the film, which had up to that point been relatively realistic. They argued that if Tykwer was going to whip out something like a slow-motion perfume-induced orgy scene, there needed to be something in the first portion of the movie that set up the magical quality of the perfume.

I argued back that Tykwer’s choice actually placed us, the audience, in the same position as the characters in the crowd: suddenly overwhelmed with sensory perception, taken aback with sensations that transcend that which we are accustomed. I’ll admit that I mostly made this argument to play Devil’s Advocate, and I might have gotten a little too into the argument and maybe even a little pissed off due to something that might be PMS, but I at least half like that argument and I refuse to write off Perfume based on the film’s sudden shift in tone of the last twenty minutes. It is a difficult task to attempt capturing scent in a medium based singularly around image and sound; Tykwer manages to accomplish this with impressive success through his use of haunting instrumental music and color. The yellow of the fruit-girl’s plums, the red of Laura’s hair, the lilac fields... if the cinematography of this movie is supposed to be a substitute for smell, it does as well as it could possibly be expected to.

I was actually going to use this entry as an opportunity to rant about my ambivalence about voice-over and the complexity and artistic/philosophical implications inherent in attempting to adapt a novel to film. Ah well, next time. There’s plenty of pretentious rant in me about the complex dichotomy of image/word and time/space and... well, I’ll save it for a time when I can blow my whole pretentious load at once.

Finally, I think this further proves that it’s never a good idea to go into a hedge-maze at night when there’s creepy music. Abandoned alleyways also generally a bad idea. When will people learn.

“Hard core, man. Fucking hard core.”

So I finally saw Full Metal Jacket. Yeah, I’m interested in film and I haven’t seen Kubrik’s iconic Vietnam War movie. I know it’s ridiculous. Moving on.

For one thing, I had no idea that the boot camp scenes comprised so much of the film. I was expecting something more like Platoon or Apocalypse Now (I have seen *some* iconic Nam movies thank you very much): largely comprised of sticky crawly-feeling jungle scenes with an inescapable feeling of paranoia pervading all. While I really can’t use the word “juxtaposition” with any amount of seriousness as it belongs in a Freshman English paper, the... juxtaposition... of the harsh masculine order of the training scenes really did make the Nam scenes that much more chaotic and fucked up. Not that the boot camp scenes lacked in the Fucked Up category; the climax with Pyle’s murder-suicide (always better than just murder or suicide) certainly accomplishes its obvious goal of seriously unnerving a viewer to the point of nervous giggles and expressions like “Duuuuuude.” It was a little strange to go from that to the seemingly-minor character of Joker, but maybe I was just too absorbed with Pyle to see the details beyond his character. Then again, previous disclaimer still standing, juxtaposition is sort of the name of Kubrik’s game in Full Metal Jacket.

The most salient example, the one thing you can’t help but take away from this movie, is Kubrik’s brilliant use of music. Again we come to that damn J word. I wasn’t particularly surprised by this display of brilliance, having already witnessed Kubrik’s use of music in Dr. Strangelove, but it made a little more sense in a satire. Here, it doesn’t only arouse that sort of bemused indignance one feels when confronted with the absurdity of war, the general feeling one takes away from Strangelove. Here, in a “serious” movie, it’s more sobering, unsettling. Portentous even (that’s right, I said portentous). Because as opposed to Strangelove, you know that this is about more than pointing out the ridiculousness of war and the way we wage it. With Full Metal Jacket you know those snatches of “Chapel of Love” and “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” are only to lead you up to scenes of absolute horror like only war can deliver. And of course Kubrik delivers just such scenes. A Vietnamese girl choking out "Shoot me" on the floor to a journalist-- that's pretty dark.

Then again Kubrik does directly call attention to this use of opposites in Joker’s explanation of his peace pin and Born To Kill helmet. “Something about the duality of man” indeed. It’s something that could have easily turned cliché but that Stanley Kubrik, being Stanley Kubrik, pulls off masterfully. Full Metal Jacket is a cultural staple, even down to “Me love you long time,” and it’s about damn time I saw it.

I would go on about the interesting comparison made between shooting cameras and shooting guns made in the movie as well, made as explicitly as all of the soldiers raising their rifles to shoot as Rafterman raises his camera to shoot. But I've said enough. Moving on.

An introduction

So I suppose I should start this thing with an explanation of what I'm doing. I don't really have much interest in outlining a personal manifesto of some sort or anything like that, but I should make it known that I am a 22-year-old girl who has been struggling with the following competing desires: to be a professor, to be a famous screenwriter, to be a film critic. I decided that a blog ostensibly dedicated to movie reviews that allowed me to opine on films and general artistic/philosophical/social/random issues could perhaps be a way to appease all three of these interests at once.

Until I actually become a professor of film with an Academy Award under one arm and my own film review column under the other, of course.