For the last couple days I've been trying to come up with some sort of explanation and analysis of the Google Settlement for you, but the complexity of the agreement has me completely locked up. I'll keep picking at it and see if I can put something together for you, but I hope you'll forgive me if a post on the issue never arrives.
In the meantime, I wanted to pass on a link to this lovely article by Molly Ringwald from the New York Times, The Neverland Club. It's a very thoughtful perspective on her relationship with John Hughes.
Eventually, though, I felt that I needed to work with other people as well. I wanted to grow up, something I felt (rightly or wrongly) I couldn’t do while working with John. Sometimes I wonder if that was what he found so unforgivable. We were like the Darling children when they made the decision to leave Neverland. And John was Peter Pan, warning us that if we left we could never come back.
Ferris:Anything is peaceful from one thousand, three hundred and fifty-three feet.
Cameron: I think I see my dad.
One of the pleasures of growing up with a film is that as you mature, your appreciation for it can also mature. You see new things, appreciate new moments, connect to it emotionally in a different way. For me, nothing encapsulates that experience more than Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I can distinctly remember a time when I found Ferris' synthesizer, the one that emits puking sounds, to be hilarious. A little later I found myself enthralled by the fantasy of Ferris' wild adventure during his day off from school.
But it wasn't until my adulthood that I realized that it wasn't only Ferris who really made me love the film. It was Cameron Frye.
If you have no idea who I'm talking about, you probably haven't seen Ferris Bueller's Day Off.(And shame on you! Dude, it's on TV all the time!) Cameron is Ferris' best friend, and as Ferris so eloquently describes him, he's a little uptight: "Pardon my French, but Cameron is so tight that if you stuck a lump of coal up his ass, in two weeks you'd have a diamond."
The heart of Cameron's problem isn't particularly novel - his absent parents are cold and distant, and his father seems to care more about his car than he does about his son - but instead of the film exploiting his anxiety purely for chuckles, it fleshes him out and treats him with compassion. The film allows Cameron to flip out, break down, and eventually break out. And in the end, it's not Ferris who makes the hero's journey, it's Cameron.
This wasn't uncommon in the films of John Hughes, the writer and director who passed away yesterday at the age of 59. Hughes' films were littered with characters that were just a little bit more than their archetypes. A mom who just wanted to get home to her son (Home Alone), the Geek who will patiently listen to your problems and then still ask to borrow your panties (Sixteen Candles), the tomboy who so desperately wants to be seen as more than a best friend (Some Kind of Wonderful). I could go on. Sure, there were cardboard cut-outs too (Long Duk Dong comes to mind) but for the most part, there were fully-fleshed jump off the page characters, and John always gave them their moment.
In Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Cameron stands in an art museum in front of a pointillist painting by George Seurat, and as he stares at the image of a little girl, the camera cuts back and forth, jumping closer and closer to each shot. As we get closer to his eyes, it seems as if Cameron is having an existential crisis. As if he is facing the realization that we are all just little dots.
In an industry where anything that seems superfluous ends up on the cutting room floor, it is to Hughes' credit that his film allows for the moment, one that continues to move me to this day. That is the gift of John Hughes. "I gotta take a stand. I'm bullshit. I gotta take a stand against him. I am not going to sit on my ass as the events that affect me unfold to determine the course of my life. I'm going to take a stand. I'm going to defend it. Right or wrong, I'm going to defend it."
"Who do you love? Who do you love? You love a car!"
I admit it. I saw this, and I actually became hopeful for something creative, refreshing, and beautiful. What do you think? Is it going to be a travesty? Or is it going to be the classic we can't wait to watch with our kids?
Way back in August, I wrote this post about the similarities between Twilight by Stephenie Meyer and the old TV show Roswell that used to air on the WB and later UPN. That single post has drawn more readers from web searches than any other post from this entire year. Clearly, I was on to something.
Today, Mike Moody over at the TVSquad (cheers, Mike) went up with a side by side comparison of the Roswell series and the Twilight movie. Check out his excellent post here.
While I have been very hard on Twilight on this site (this was my original review of the book) I do think there is something encouraging about its smashing success. According to Box Office MojoTwilight raked in a near $70 million on its opening weekend, a bigger opening than Quantum of Solace the most recent James Bond effort. That's some big money.
Why is it encouraging? Because it demonstrates, yet again, that young women have buying power and that they are a demographic worthy of the attention of publishers and studios alike. And for someone like me, a writer of fiction with a decidedly female bent, that is nothing but good news.
I still hold that the comparison between Roswell and Twilight simply reveals the formulaic foundation upon which they are each built. And it's to that formula, the teen love rescue gambit, that I attribute the success of both. Women (and pre-teens, tweens, teens, whatever) enjoy a good romance now and again, and if you combine that with some creativity, and some quality writing (hopefully) you're increasing your odds of success in that market.
So who is the winner in the Roswell/Twilight showdown? Well, I know which way I vote, but the bottom line is, we all win.
The sky is falling. I'm not sure if you've noticed that, but it is. It's crashing down around us, harder than the falling stock market, deeper than gas prices, louder than shouting political analysts, and faster than melting polar ice caps. The sky is coming down, and I, for one, have been in a duck and cover position for the last few weeks.
But last night I had a phone call with a friend that had me laughing so hard my cold-afflicted lungs gave new meaning to the phrase "whooping cough." And that laughter made me feel better than I have in weeks, and eventually sent me off to sleep with unusual feelings of warmth and happiness.
These are some serious times, so it's easy to forget that sometimes the best way to cope with life's curve balls is a complete lack of seriousness.
Over on Living the Romantic Comedy, blogger Billy Mernit has followed that theme in his last couple posts, including his most recent review of Mike Leigh's new film Happy-Go-Lucky, beginning with the powerfully declared statement: If there's anything I've learned in my short time on this planet, it's that when you lose your sense of humor, you're toast. Read the rest here. Of course, Billy was not the only writer discussing humor recently. Yesterday on NPR's All Things Considered, Shalom Auslander, author of Foreskin's Lament, talked about his favorite bed table book, which happens to be The Groucho Letters: Letters from and to Groucho Marx. In Auslander's words, Groucho is ideal protection against all things overly serious:
On that same small table, there are also books of philosophy, theology and a few that have been blessed enough to qualify as "Literature" (the qualification process is brutal, with a $50 nonrefundable Literature Application Fee and a 17-page questionnaire that must be notarized by James Wood). These books approach life and its myriad questions with seriousness and focus, and after just a few pages, they make me want to kill myself. Which is why Groucho is never far away; I can't do an hour shot of Beckett or Carver without an unstiff Groucho chaser.
You see, I've long been of the opinion that life is too serious to be taken seriously, and if that is my religion, then Groucho is the pope.
Even with recent events seeming particularly dark and dire, those who make their living on comedy have certainly been taking advantage of the opportunity to find the ridiculous in the serious, case in point, the recent resurgence in the quality of political satire over at Saturday Night Live.
There's a great scene in Sullivan's Travels (1941), a Preston Sturges film about a director who wants to make a movie about the struggles of the common man. To research for the movie, he strikes out on the road posing as a hobo and after a series of mishaps he finds himself a prisoner on a chain-gang. In the classic scene, the director and the rest of his beaten and weary fellow prisoners are treated to a showing of a comedy cartoon in a church. And as the movie rolls, the director looks around and sees something that startles him... the prisoners are laughing.
So the sky may be falling. Harder than the stock market, deeper than gas prices, louder than shouting political analysts, and faster than melting polar ice caps. But I tell you what. I'm sure as hell going to find a way to get my laughs as it comes crashing down.
Normally, I find myself disappointed with screen adaptations of books. I think I can count on one hand adaptations that I've actually liked independently of the original written material (Holes, A Room With a View.)And in the reverse, the list of adaptations that I've hated, films that have killed the rich material that they are intending to bring to life, is significantly longer.
Occasionally though, something takes me by surprise and just works in a way that I wasn't expecting. It's been my pleasure to enjoy the Harry Potter movies in concert with the books over the last few years, but for me, only Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was entertaining in a way that a complete movie should, and was better even than the reading of the book itself.
Or perhaps it was simply my childlike awe and giddiness over the magical dueling that the filmmakers exploded off the page and onto the screen that has me desperate for more.
Whatever the reason for my admiration, let it be known that I can't wait for NOVEMBER!
