Mind of Migg

To qualify for this list I had to either

a)    See the movie in theaters

b)   See the movie on DVD, but it was released in theaters in 2009

A disclaimer first.  There are a lot of great movies from this year that I haven’t seen yet that weren’t factored into this list.  I’m going to try to get to most of them before the Oscars, but some of the popular ones I haven’t seen yet include: Avatar, A Single Man, Crazy Heart, A Serious Man, Nine, The Messenger, Brothers, and many more I’m sure.  It’s hard to get to that many movies in a year without press or industry access.  Anyway, on to my list.

I’m not going to list them in any particular order.  It’s hard enough to choose just ten.

Precious – One of the most powerful, heart-wrenching films I’ve watched.  Amazing performances, great movie.  The final scene is a stand-out, and should singlehandedly win Mo’Nique an Oscar.

An Education – Classically well executed British film.  Alfred Molina is an overbearing father with depth, Peter Sarsgaard romances a teen yet somehow isn’t creepy, and Sally Sparrow was brilliant.

Up – If this movie doesn’t make you tear up at least a little, I don’t know what to say.  Great, honest story that deserves to be nominated along with the live action films this year.

Up in the Air – Understated movie.  It says exactly what it’s thinking, but you don’t even realize it because you’re enjoying the ride.  Also, I love Anna Kendrick.

Sin Nombre – Brutally realistic portrayal of the plight of immigrants.  I heard the actor spent years traveling on trains through Mexico like the characters in the movie.  It shows in the authenticity.

Food Inc. – This, combined with reading Michael Pollan, has convinced me to be more mindful of my diet and the food I choose to purchase.  This is a documentary done right – different perspective, clear message, more content than propaganda.

The Hurt Locker – Most intense film of the year.  My heart was pounding through most of it and I couldn’t relax at all.  I imagine it’s actually like that on a whole other level in Iraq in reality, but this film does a great job of conveying that feeling to the audience.

District 9 – Best sci-fi film of the year (until I see Avatar, at least).  Awesome explosions, cool special effects, and strong story.  You can’t ask for much more from a sci-fi and this one delivered.

(500) Days of Summer – Feel good movie of the year for me.  Zoey Deschanel is the latest manic pixie dream girl and it’s a tough character to pull off successfully, but she does here.  I think every nice guy could feel Joseph Gordon Levitt’s pain and roller coaster emotional ride.

Goodbye Solo – I’ve become a huge fan of Ramin Bahrani.  I loved Man Push Cart and Chop Shop and this latest effort was just as strong.  His movies are so quiet and tell so much with so little.

I recently completed the first rough draft of a TV drama pilot I’ve been working on.  Finishing a piece of longer work is strange.  Not only does it feel empty once it’s complete, but it also is a challenge to go back to it.  After all that effort, after all those sweat and tears, reaching “Fade Out” or “The End” is really only the beginning.

The real writing doesn’t begin until the rewrite.  This is a fairly recent discovery for me, mostly because I got away with turning in rough drafts hot off the presses all through college.  In fact, there may have only been one or two papers I actually even read before turning in.  I was lucky to pass, and extremely arrogant in my writing abilities.  I didn’t realize how much that approach hurt my writing potential.  It’s a habit I find hard to break.  Many times I have to force a deadline upon myself to finally get words to paper.

The difficult thing about editing is that the process of writing the first draft is so mentally draining.  Why edit something that already took so much effort?  Add to that the fact that once I’ve stepped away from something for a bit, I can look at it more objectively.  When that happens, my “work of art” quickly becomes a “piece of crap”.  I seriously hate going back to pieces I’ve written.  It’s like going through your digital camera after a drunken night.  You cringe wondering how sloppy those glamour shots you felt you were taking the night before actually look.  I have that same dread when I sit down to edit something I’ve written.  I go through a period of self-doubt and questioning why I keep doing what I’m doing.

At least, that was how it used to be.  Two things have happened over the last year of my writing development.  One, the pictures don’t look so bad, and two, it’s not so hard to fix the ones that do.  I suppose you could say, metaphorically speaking, that I don’t get as drunk as I used to.  Learning how to edit has helped my initial drafts.  I’ve accepted it as a natural part of the process so it allows me more freedom in my writing.

Also, I’m no longer so stubborn and defensive.  I would convince myself that what was already written was not only correct, it was as good as it could get.  Not so anymore.  I won’t hesitate to chop out what was my favorite line or paragraph.  I’ve learned that nothing is written in permanent marker.  I’ve also accepted that just because I didn’t get it right in my first go-round, doesn’t mean it’s a lack of knowledge or talent.  Re-writing is a vital part of the process.  It’s okay to edit.  It took some time to convince the “me” of college of that fact.

Knowing how to rewrite – how to recognize where to edit, what to edit, and how to edit is vital to creating a good piece of work.  I know now that it is one step of the process and not a knock against my writing to edit.

How Awesome Is Glee?

Very awesome.  That’s the answer to that.  I’ve been hooked on Glee this season.  It’s one of only two new shows (the other being Modern Family) that I watch on TV.  I was first turned on to Glee through my summer TV Pilot writing class at UCLA.  The pilot episode was available on Hulu and I just so happened to be writing my own pilot that takes place in a high school.  I watched and thought it was just okay.  It had some potential and closed strong after a shaky middle.  I wasn’t sure it had staying power.  I’m glad it proved me wrong.

Glee follows a high school glee club as they prepare for sectionals with the goal being to move up the ranks and be glee club champions.  The situations are over the top and outrageous, but the characters feel real.  It’s this strange sense of far-fetched reality that I think can only exist in a world where a football team breaks out into a http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ornIWg0VG7g performance of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” to win the game.

I love Glee because it roots for the social outcast underdogs.  Diversity and acceptance are primary themes of the show, but it never feels like an after school special or movie of the week.  There are minorities in the club, football players and cheerleaders mocked for being a part of the team, a singer in a wheelchair, and a girl with a stutter (but not a real stutter.  But she still had a reason for it.).  It’s a group of misfits who are more genuine and caring than any of the popular kids teens so often aspire towards.  It’s been said multiple times by different character that they’d, “rather be part of a group of glee club nerds that accept me for who I am, than part of some popular group that doesn’t care.”  The lead cheerleader discovers who her real friends are when she’s pregnant, and the star quarterback realizes what he really loves doing when he chooses glee club over football.

Glee deals with multiple social issues in touching ways: teen pregnancy, homosexuality, disabilities.  And the best part is, they do it all in song!  There are classic musical numbers, modern songs, and of course, mashups http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMD4Te_SoZM.   I never thought I’d see a show with different musical numbers each week, but I love it and get excited for what songs will be on each new episode.  The songs are always entertaining and have yet to disappoint.

The show provides such a full range of emotions.  It reminds me of the first few seasons of Scrubs.  It’ll have situations that make me laugh out loud, and then serious or heartfelt moments where you can hear a pin drop in our apartment as Violet and I watch.  The episodes are arranged so you can’t help but root for the team and all its members on their path towards Regionals.  You cheer for them every step of the way through the twists and turns.

Glee is on break right now, and won’t return with new episodes until April.  That means there’s plenty of time to http://www.hulu.com/glee catch up on old episodes if you haven’t been watching.  Do it!

Further conversations at Borders

Well, after a month of working, I’m nearly at a breaking point.  I have an intense desire to run away as fast as I can for the first hour of every shift.  I run through a variety of scenarios in my head.  “Should I induce vomiting?”  “Should I just walk out now?”  I start doing the math in my head to see how long I absolutely have to stay.

It’s really not as bad as I make it out to be.  Once I’m through the first hour, the rest of the shift isn’t so terrible.            Here’s a few more thoughts and quotes I’ve gathered since my last post:

-       I’ve been asked this multiple times so I wanted to set the record straight.  We do not “still have” a pumpkin spice latte.  We never had one, so how could we still have one?  Not every coffee shop is Starbucks.

-       If you ask for a round up favor to get the 4-hour validation stamp (minimum $5 purchase) and then don’t put any of the change I hand you into the tip jar and walk away, you sir, are a douche.

-       “There’s a lot of foam in this latte.”

“There’s a regular amount of foam in that latte.”

“I don’t want any foam.  I don’t want this latte, I need a new one.”

“So now you want a latte with no foam?”

“Yes.”

(fake smile) “Sure.”

(make latte) “I have a small vanilla latte with NO FOAM.”

Yes, I’m reduced to passive-aggressive swipes at customers, because it’s all I’ve got.

-       Apparently, “tall” at the UCLA café means “medium”, even though it means “small” at Starbucks.  One of the new café workers used to work in that UCLA café.  It makes for some awesome conversations.  I realize where the confusion is when it starts, but it’s more fun to watch the participants figure it out than to step in and explain it.

“Tall latte please.”

“You mean medium.”

“No, small.”

“Sorry, I thought you said tall.”

“I did.”

“But tall is a medium.”

“No, it’s a small.”

“So you want a small?”

“Yes, a tall.”

“Medium?”

By this point, someone’s head explodes.  It’s happened a few times already.

-       If you ask, “what’s the freshest thing out?” at a Borders, the answer you get in response will be defined as, “the most recently defrosted processed food.”

On the positive side, 95% of the workers are fun, laid back people.  That’s what makes everything after the first hour tolerable.  Also, I’m well on track to winning a $10 gift card after the holiday season.  My numbers are crushing the competition.  It’s amazing the scale of competency at a retail store translates like this: “fulfilling all job requirements = rockstar performer.”  I’ll take it.

Some writers prefer total silence.  For the most part, I prefer to write to music.  It has to be loud music though, and it has to be music that captures the tone of what I’m writing.  In a way, it’s similar to silence, because I use it as a way to drown everything else out.  I work best when I blast the music through my headphones instead of speakers and can’t hear anything else besides what’s in my head.

I used to think it was a way of cheating – stirring the specific emotion in order to write more easily.  I’ve realized that using the emotion from music is really more like a warm up though.  Sometimes I’ll leave one song on repeat to capture a specific beat or mood.  It would be torture to anyone casually listening, but once I get going, I don’t even notice it’s there.  There is also the rare occasion when I use the music to warm up and then go with silence when it’s an especially difficult scene.   Most times though, I opt for instrumental music.  When there are lyrics in a song, it can get in the way of the dialogue in my head.

So what do I listen to?  A wide variety.  A lot of it isn’t even my general musical taste.  It’s not like while I’m driving in my car I ever think, “you know, I could really go for some Clint Mansell right now.”  Okay, that’s not true, I’ve played his music in the car too.  But in general, it’s not music the same music that I would listen to while working on non-writing things or while driving.

Here’s a few of my current lists:

My TV drama pilot playlist –

• The Bravery – Believe (I’m so sick of this song, but it works great while writing)
• MGMT – Kids (Same with this one)
• Regina Spektor – Laughing With (I do this one on repeat a lot)
• Silversun Pickups – Substitution
• The Killers – Shadowplay

These songs make no sense together and have completely different vibes.  Granted, they don’t all work in the same section, but for any given part of the script so far, any one of them will do the trick.

For my sci-fi writing:

• Muse
• Zoe Keating
• Clint Mansell

And for my novel:

• Bon Iver
• Fink
• Regina Spektor
• Jamin Winans – Ink Complete Soundtrack (also works well with sci-fi)

I listen to a few of these artists outside of writing, but not much.  They get the job done while writing though.

Conversations overheard at Borders

I’ve recently taken a part-time job working in the café of my local Borders to help pay the bills.  It’s an interesting experience working for less money than I’ve made anywhere since sometime my junior year of high school.  The things we do in the name of art.  At the very least, it’s been a welcome change from the isolation of writing and working for myself.  I’ve been exposed to all kinds of interesting people.  Here’s a sampling:

“This eggnog latte tastes too much like eggnog.  I can get that at home.  I wanted something with coffee.”

“It has espresso in it.”

“Give me a cappuccino.”
“Would you like any gift receipts or gift cards?”

“WHAT?”

“Gift cards or gift receipts?”

“I get a gift?”

“No.  Gift receipts.”

“What’s that?”

“A receipt to go with a gift in case they want to return it.”

“Oh, I know what you mean.  A gift certificate.  The other stores tried to sell me one.”

“Um, ok.”

“WHAT?”

“Never mind.”

“I want a Frappuccino.”

“I’m sorry, we’re not Starbucks.  Would you like one of our blended drinks?  It’s the same as a Frappuccino.”

“I’ll have a coffee.”

“Venti latte.”

“Large?”

“No, Venti.”

“We don’t have Venti or Grande sizes. (Points to cup sizes.)  Small, medium, large.”

“Medium.”

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Up in the Air.  On the one hand, there’s been lots of positive buzz about it, but I didn’t really know what it was about.  It turned out to be one of those films were most of the best lines are delivered in the trailer.  Yet, that didn’t take away from their resonance when delivered in scene or mean the rest of the film wasn’t any less poignant.

Up in the Air is about Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a man who spends most of his time in the air and living out of hotels while traveling for his company.  His job is to fire the workers that companies are too ashamed or afraid to fire themselves.  It’s not an easy job or a thankful one, but he’s good at it and he loves his lifestyle.

Enter naïve Cornell grad Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick).  I’ve been a big fan of Anna Kendrick since first seeing her in “Rocket Science”.  She’s a fantastic actress with great presence.  Natalie has the brilliant idea of streamlining the company’s entire firing process online.  Instead of flying around the country, costing the company first-class tickets and fancy hotel room stays, they can sit Ryan in front of a computer and fire the employees from there.  Ryan disagrees that such a job can be so impersonal, but is ordered to take Natalie along with him to show her the ropes by their boss, Craig (a small role, but well delivered by Jason Bateman).

Natalie is a rookie traveler and Ryan does his best to show her how to be faster and more efficient.  Where Natalie really struggles though, is sitting across from people while telling them they no longer have a job.  She realizes the full weight of what they do and what a difference it makes doing it in person.

Overall, it’s a very lighthearted movie with some funny moments.  But there is something more just under the surface, revealing each character’s struggle with mortality along the way.  “What’s the point,” one man asks when getting cold feet before a wedding.  Ryan doesn’t have an answer.  Nobody does.  But everyone tries to find one and leave his mark, whether it’s through love, marriage, or collecting a record number of frequent flier miles.

The walls Ryan has spent years building up slowly get torn down by Natalie and by Alex (Vera Farmiga), a woman who lives the same type of lifestyle he does.  Does he completely change?  No.  But he shows a willingness to connect with people again, no matter how much it hurts.  Because we all need that human interaction, regardless of how difficult it is for us to control, or how painful it can be.  That’s how we leave our mark.

I’ve been immersing myself in India cinema for the last few months.  Before I go into a full analysis of what I’ve seen and what I think of it in later posts, I thought I’d first examine a comment about a Bollywood movie made by a friend of mine.  His comment was, “it was made for an Indian audience.” It wasn’t said as a complement, but more as an excuse.  It got me thinking.  Can we excuse a level of mediocrity or lower the bar of standards because of the type of audience a movie is geared towards?  And what does that say about our impression of an audience if we assume that low quality is all they can handle?

It would be easy to generalize the movies of any country that mass-produces films like India or the United States.  Do we shrug our shoulders and accept the mindless action and lack of story in Transformers 2 because it’s, “made for an American audience”?  I’m sure a lot of people do, but I don’t.  The thing is, just because a large number of people enjoy action movies, doesn’t mean we have to dumb down all action movies to satisfy the lowest common denominator.  Look at “Iron Man”.  That was a great movie, full of action and depth.

This brings me back to India and the chicken and the egg question.  Do we lay the blame on the audience, for not being open to films with greater depth and stronger filmmaking?  Or do we blame the filmmakers, raised on this low-level standard and willing to produce weaker films that please greater numbers?  If those of us ranking outside of India are rating all Indian films on an “Indian scale” rather than a “film scale” isn’t that a cause for concern?

The last point is the bigger problem.  I don’t think it’s a good thing for an entire set of films to be subject to a different standard.  It doesn’t allow room for improvement, and it creates a negative stigma about that set.  The blame falls on the shoulders of the audience for not demanding higher standards.  The people producing the films for profit are not going to go out of their way artistically if the people in the seats at the theater keep filling their pockets.  I think it’s a terrible thing, both for the art of the films and for the pleasure of the audience.

So I don’t think it’s fair to rate a movie as “okay because it was made for an Indian audience”.  Until those films start being held to a standard of film that is accepted by the rest of the world, they will never earn the respect they deserve.