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EvRobert

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Posts posted by EvRobert

  6. Posted

    Listen. I'm team Twizzlers ALL DAY EVERY DAY but Red Vines are fine.

     

    I've tried, I just can't enjoy them. I mean if it's a choice between Red Vines or just popcorn in my popcorn, I'm going Red Vines but Twizzlers all day long (except for the weird single wrapped ones that you get a Halloween)

  7. Posted

    I've been waffling on this because I love Caddyshack, but I just don't think it deserves to be in "The Canon" even if it's in my PERSONAL Canon. Personally, I'd put Meatballs, which tells a similar story but a lot more efficiently and actually focuses on the kids and not the comedians, in The Canon before I'd put Caddyshack and I don't think Meatballs needs to go in The Canon either.

     

    okay, so I just talked myself into voting no. Sorry Caddyshack, I still love you in all your weirdness, but I just can't put you in The Canon.

  10. Posted

    I've been waffling on getting FilmStruck, right now I'm paying for four movie services and I don't know which one I'd get rid of. I want to support it though.

    • Like 2

  11. Posted

    3x in the theater here, but I'll be honest once I was completely drunk. Like BLACKOUT drunk.

     

    I was in college when this came out and this movie played in my small town theater (we had two theaters in town with 2 screens each) for over a month. Toward the end, the theater opened it up one night for a late showing for college students (it may have been free and paid for by the college or maybe a dollar or two). Me and two friends decided to go AFTER we have been drinking for a couple of hours. So we walked to the theater (just a couple of blocks) and the only seats available were front row, dead center. So three, extremely drunk guys (who shouldn't have been allowed in) seated front row center decided to Mystery Science Theater 3000 this film. That we didn't get kicked out is a miracle.

     

    One more Titanic related story. I was studying radio and television communications at the time (with an eye at becoming a director, one of the reasons I saw this) and we were getting requests for My Heart Will Go On all the time. I think we were playing that song once every 30 minutes or an hour on our college radio station, and it still wasn't enough. We would get requests for it even during our specialty shows (i.e. the three hour country show, the three hour rap show, the three hour Christian rock show). So a buddy of mine, who was doing the "alternative/indie" show promised that he would play My Heart Will Go On at a certain time. And he did, layered in with sound effects of fog horns, cries, screams and "look out for the iceburg".

     

    He got threats for playing that.

     

    Okay, so on topic, does Titanic need to be on the AFI Top 100? PROBABLY because it is a technological amazement, a nice mixture of practical and breaking edge computer (but is it really any more technological ground breaking than say Jurassic Park?) I can think of a half dozen films that deserve to be on the list that aren't, but I could also probably find six other films on the list who don't deserve to be on the list.

    • Like 4

  14. Posted

    I'll have thoughts later tonight but I found this interesting

     

    from my Facebook Memories from today

     

    Theater Friends, what do you think? I had an interesting thought...three of the most famous "classical" musicals take place in the same time period and yet in three different locations. Oklahoma! (arguably the first musical of it's kind and the one all others have kind of taken their cue from) takes place sometime between 1905-07...Fiddler On The Roof takes place in 1905...and The Music Man takes place in 1912.

    And while my personal favorite (and the longest running off Broadway musical in history, spanning 4 decades), The Fantasticks, takes place in an unidentified time period, the argument could be made that it also takes place at the turn of the century. I wonder what it was about the early 1900s that inspired so many authors and musicians to set their stories there. Was it the sudden almost industrial clash as the world was changing (the song "Kansas City" in Oklahoma! definitely addresses the technology changes of that time..."Tradition" in Fiddler can be looked at the changing of the times) . Is it a romantization of a by-gone era? Thoughts?

     

    Hello Dolly was brought up as well, 7 Brides for 7 Brothers, Show boat, Carousel, and Wizard of Oz. The main consensus was that this was a time frame of great changes (radio becoming more popular and used, agricultural to industrial, etc) that kind of romanticized writers who grew up in that era.

    • Like 6

  16. Posted

    It's been a couple of years since I've read Diablo Cody's book Candy Girl, but if I remember correctly, she says that she had to pay a fee to the club to dance and a certain percentage of her tips went to the house or maybe it was a percentage of their lap dances went to the house or something.

     

    OZARK also utilized the Strip Club model. They also did a thing where you buy a tank of gas you get a burger for free or something. There was a restaurant that just opened up near me where when you order you get your app, drink, entree and dessert. I think there would be a way to cook the books using that method too.Your moving product but your app and dessert isn't as big or something.

     

    Also from Ozark, a church is a cash heavy industry.

     

    I have friends that are hairdressers and they have to pay a "chair rental" to the salon, that could be another small cash heavy business a person could invest in.

     

    The gym membership though, that's brilliant.

    • Like 3

  18. Posted

    No, but it is correct that sitting back and waiting to be 'discovered' is an exponentially worse way of going about making a career. I counsel my graduating students all the time that work begets work, and always point them towards Fringe NY or the like, just to get work up and running, because it's about the hustle and the networking that happens after the shows that gives you a shot at being seen in something bigger. I think EvRobert has the right attitude towards making things happen by continuing to write things that are fulfilling, even if the waiting and the rejection is harder to take. But I have friends in their 40's who are still waiting tables, convinced that they will 'make it' one day but are not willing to hustle to make it happen. I have some incredibly talented friends back home who were not willing to do the work and are still doing the tiny gigs, whereas another one of my friends, never the most talented of us all but the hardest-working, is now a global superstar, playing arenas. So much of this industry is about not giving up and letting everyone else drop away around you, and creating work (in Seb's parlance, gigging or working as a session musician rather than auditioning) is definitely the smartest approach. He over-simplifies, but he also recommends she does something that is good for her soul. And it's the advice that changed her life, because, well, work begets work. And as someone who has also written a bunch of scripts that will likely never be seen, I think you'll agree with me, EvRobert, that it's less about the production and more about the personal catharsis of writing that is the point.

     

    SPOT ON!

     

    I think no matter what you're doing you gotta get out and hustle, weather that's a Fringe fest or just submitting to any and every opportunity you can.

     

    There's a great article I just read that was about the stigma actors who are working in (not to bring this back to Last 5 Years but ya'know) a regional theater in Cleveland have. There was a review in a Philly paper about a play set in Philly that premiered and was work shopped and developed in Philly and went on to Broadway. The reviewer (again for a Philly paper) said "well I can't ever imagine this being done by non-NY actors. So instead of having great actors scattered across the US with training, many actors, still slave away waiting tables, convinced they are going to make it, instead of moving to a Philly or Cleveland, or Kansas City or somewhere where they actually CAN make it.

    • Like 4

  19. Posted

    I'm still going through the comments but there are things in this movie that infuriate me but not for the usual reasons.

     

    I was one of those kids with big dreams of making it in the city. My best friend is in his mid 40s, i'm in my early 40s and we will still wax poetically now and then about "we're going to make it!" -- we know we're not, nor do I think we really want to.

     

    As a playwright, I am constantly submitting, similar to auditioning, except JESUS the waits. If I get a response within 3 months, I'm happy, sometimes 6 months, 9 months and sometimes I never hear back from an opp I've submitted to.

     

    I have a success rate of about 10% and make very little money at this playwrighting gig. But I keep at it, because, dammit I have to.

     

    So, that constant audition, rejection, audition cycle I can sympathize with, but I hate Seb's assertion that "well don't wait for it to come to you, write your own." Yeah that works, SOMETIMES for SOME PEOPLE, but not everyone has those skills, and even if you write one great script (for example Stallone writing ROCKY) it doesn't mean that you will be able to write another and another and another (see Stallone's other scripts he's written :D).

     

    It's such a...I hate to say simplistic view because that's not quite right, but it's totally something I hear a lot of musicans say.

    It's really interesting to me, one of the first real MM discussions I took part in was THAT THING YOU DO! and this feels like the opposite of TTYD! They are both about musicians striving to strike out on their own, to create their own art and chaffing against the system. But Guy seems to be a more practical musician, understanding what makes things popular and what people want to hear and working with that.

     

    It's like this wedding I DJ'd this past weekend. The bride and groom LOVE Post Malone and gave me about a half dozen Post Malone songs they wanted and said "no country" and other rules, ignoring that hey not everyone in small town Kansas wants to hear that much Post Malone, that people that go to their wedding want to dance to music they know and can dance to. It isn't always about you.

     

    That's my $0.10

    • Like 7

  20. Posted

    What has always bugged me about the Wizard of Oz is that they cut the Tin Man's original story to nothing in the film. The Tin Man is my favorite character in the Wizard of Oz and I remember reading the book and being STUNNED at the origin story Baum gives him.

     

    Basically the Tin Man was a woodsman who fell in love with a munchkin girl, but the woman that the girl lived with didn't want to lose her slave help so she struck a deal with the witch and every time the woodsman used his axe it cut off part of his body. Everytime it did a local tinsmith made a new part of the body for him until he was all tin but with no heart.

     

    Paul and Amy talk about how dark the movie is but it's NOTHING compared to the darkness the bark has. The Witch threatens to tear Dorothy piece by piece, the tin man and the scarecrow kill wolves and crows that are sent to attack them, it's wild.

     

    As for the lack of WoO in the discussion of Campbell, it totally should be, and the book does not end with the "it's all a dream!" sequence. But it seems that any time people bring up Campbell, it is in the context of movies not in storytelling as a whole (also, IIRC, since Amy brought up Return to Oz, it's suggested that it wasn't a dream but maybe it was).

     

    On a personal note, I like the Wizard of Oz as a movie, and even more as a book, but as a Kansas native, I H-A-T-E all the "Dorothy/Toto" jokes people make about Kansas.

    • Like 3

  21. Posted

    I went with a soft no on this too. I remember being 'forced' to watch this (as a nearing adulthood teenager) by some of my cousins and thinking "well this isn't so bad" (in fact if I had realized that it was from the director of Glory, I probably would have given it more credence at the time) but it's never stuck with me. In fact i would argue that A River Runs Through It is probably the better movie.

     

    On the old DENZEL WASHINGTON IS THE GREATEST ACTOR OF ALL TIME PERIOD podcast, they labeled GLORY as "black people homework" but I can't see anyone saying that Legends Of The Fall is "white people homework". It's a decidedly middle of the road film that does its job fine, but I can't imagine it being a part of the "canon" of Great Films. No one gives an outstanding performance despite being some legit great actors (the actors involved would either give better performances later or prior to this), the cinematography, while gorgeous, is as Amy and Kendra said, the "Montana" sky. It was designed to be beautiful. There is no iconic score. It's just...fine. The film on the whole is just fine.

  23. Posted

    I've come back after an extended absence, solely to defend this film.

     

    Actually, I don't know if it can be defended per se, but I can try and help explain it.

     

    Ya see, back in the 30s, world war 1 pilot Eddie Rickenbacker wrote a comic strip called Ace Drummond, that featured a daredevil esque pilot who fought various villains. This was later adapted into a movie serial by the same name (with Lon Chaney in a supporting role). There was also a run of stories about a hero named "G-8" who was a heroic aviator, there were the radio shows Captain Midnight (aka Jet Jackson: Flying Commando for TV), and The Air Adventures of Jimmie Allen and the classic "AIRBOY". Whereas Spielberg/Lucas were going for the more swashbuckling intellectual hero (i.e. Doc Savage) with Indiana Jones, I think that the attempt here was to mimic the "daredevil pilot" troupe style story. In fact, this is a troupe George R.R. Martin pulled out in his first Wildcards book with the character of "Jetboy".

     

    Look at this picture of the last re-release of this series:

    wild-cards-i.jpg

     

    And that story is a very small (but crucial) part of that series of books. But there is something about the pilot, in his leather bomber jacket, scarf in the wind, gun in hand, that still has a visual appeal.

     

    That's the ascetic I believe the creators of this film were going for, much like The Shadow and The Phantom, they didn't succeed, at least the film LOOKED and FELT like those types of films, in fact I would argue Sky Captain is closer to that ascetic then those films did.

     

    I would also argue that the cast serves it's purpose as a homage to "pulp novels". In the original pulps you got a really high quality glossy cover promising action, danger and sex. This, one could argue, swaps out the high quality glossy cover for a cast of big name actors but like a pulp novel that was written quickly for a dime a word or something, this is stretched out without much story.

     

    Does that make it a good modern movie? No. Spielberg and Lucas were able to maintain the aura of the serial adventurer ala Doc Savage with a nice 80s touch (at least the first 3 movies. Crystal Skull falls apart for the same reason this does, it tries to hard to emulate a style of film that doesn't exist anymore) that Conran wasn't able to.

     

    Finally, minor correction, technically this is "DIESELPUNK" not "STEAMPUNK"

    • Like 4
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