chicken, egg, &c.

I had to have been in middle school when my dad first told me about the classic Mel Brooks comedy The Producers (1968). We rented it and watched it together, and ever since then, it has been one of my favorite movies of all time. Who can forget the first time they entertained the concept of springtime for Hitler? My dad had to explain to me some of the cultural cues of the late '60s that I was missing for all of the humor to stick, but otherwise, I had a blast. By high school, all of my close friends had seen it too, and we used to get a kick out of breaking pregnant silences with a hearty singalong of, "Germany was having trouble, what a sad sad story..."

In 2001, when we heard that Mel Brooks was adapting his movie into a stage musical, I was mostly excited. Though to be honest, I wasn't sure why the entirety of The Producers had to be turned into a musical, when the songs in Springtime for Hitler stand on their own. I ended up seeing the musical version when it came to the Pantages in Hollywood starring Jason Alexander and Martin Short. It was funny and entertaining, sure. But I was pretty underwhelmed, I guess. Then, in 2005, I made the unfortunate decision to watch the movie adaptation of the stage musical adaptation of the original movie, starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick who brought Zero Mostel's and Gene Wilder's roles to the stage in the first place. Oy. I understand that Mel Brooks was making mad dolla off of this morphing franchise, but really - a lot of the magic of the dialogue and the original genius actors was lost with the pointless new songs.

Now, hairstory (oh, I know I slay you) is repeating itself. In 2002, someone got the bright idea to turn John Waters' 1988 film Hairspray into a Broadway musical. About this, I can't say much. I have never seen the musical nor listened to the soundtrack, but I do know that it has been very well-received by audiences. I would tend to think that the source material is much more appropriate for the stage than The Producers was, because of Waters' fine skill with camp. Also, the whole thing is about music and dancing, not just a few scenes. Now, Adam Shankman, who brought us such comedy hits as A Walk to Remember and The Pacifier, as well as such artful masterpieces as Bringing Down the House and Cheaper by the Dozen 2, will be at the helm of the movie adaptation of the stage adaptation of the original.*

For some reason, I have a lot more confidence that the new version of Hairspray will be a lot better than the new version of The Producers even though I have not seen the musical, and it involves the most hideous looking version of John Travolta this side of treating his son's medical conditions by giving him a stress test. Certainly, I will miss Divine, Ricki Lake, and Jerry Stiller, but I think that at least Travolta and Queen Latifah have proven their experience in musicals, Christopher Walken is a great dancer (see bottom of post, beneath trailer, for proof), and Shankman is a dancer/choreographer. I'm curious if the original film's racial issues have been altered in any way for the new movie, though I would be surprised if they were, considering that even in '88 it was a period piece. But they changed the character of LSD from a hippie to a homosexual in The Producers, so you never know.

I'd be interested to know if any of my readers have seen the Hairspray musical, or can give any other insight, as I know very little about the details. Any thoughts on whether or not Hollywood may want to adapt Pink Flamingos for a younger audience?




(Spike Jonze is the shit.)

*Really, I can't hate on Shankman for directing really cheezy movies like Cheaper by the Dozen 2. Hell, The Pacifier was even kind of fun (maybe because I watched it with Czech subtitles in an empty theater in Prague, wondering what I was doing with my life?). As an aspiring screenwriter, I know that the key to success is most likely selling out as early as possible. How many times have I said, "If making it big means I have to crap out a few Scary Movie 8s starring DMX and Steven Seagal, then so be it." I'm personally hoping that Shankman's dance experience will shine, as I would love to see movie musicals really have a strong presence for modern audiences.

hot mess

Okay, so I'm no tabloid writer. I adore tabloids, and would love nothing more than to waste my life away reading about people who don't matter in my personal life, and all the trouble they get themselves into. So I must confess that Paris Hilton has been on my mind quite a bit these past few days. So, she's leaving jail soon - can't wait for the interviews and ghostwritten book. Then, of course, there's darling LL, who - let's face it - is every little girl's dream. I mean, before she got coke-bloat and started looking like an old Judy Garland. As far as Britney's concerned, I would just like to go on record as having always believed Xtina was going to come out ahead in that race.

So, those are our main American trashy starlets (sorry M-K and Ash, you've been boring me for a little while; Nicole, you better confirm that pregnancy or go to jail or something to shake things up; and Mischa, you're English anyway, right?), and my extremely abridged thoughts about them. I mean, I could go oooon, but I won't. Then there's the faves from across the pond, talented hot messes Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse. I've been listening to a lot of Winehouse lately, and I saw Lily Allen in concert a little while ago, so you can tell that I am a fan of both. I mean, Lily Allen drank jager onstage and chain-smoked and forgot her lyrics and all that. And Amy...homegirl is missing a tooth. And all that ruckus with Blake Fielder-Civil - outstanding. For shame, Pete Doherty and Kate Moss!

I'm not exactly sure what compelled me to write about these crazy cats, except I feel like if I'm going to write a blog about pop culture, I can't ignore the tabloids, which I spend a decent chunk of my day reading anyway. I don't intend to write about them frequently, I kind of just wanted to put my thoughts out there. But as much as I love Tara Reid's unfortunate areloae and Britney Spears' horrific extensions, I would also like to go on record and say that I wouldn't be able to enjoy their antics if it weren't for the beautiful young Hollywood actresses who make it worthwhile. I mean, if they were all trashy, I would just feel bad. Like a 24/7 exposure to Maury Povich show guests if they were all filthy rich. But knowing that there also exist level-headed beauties makes it all go down a lot easier. So here's to my real favorites...

what? why? huhhh?

For months and months, everyone has been telling me how much I need to see Oldboy. I was all set to add it to my Netflix queue, when I realized that director Chan-wook Park had created a sort of stylistic trilogy in 2005, and I wanted to watch them in order. I'm very picky about watching movies or reading books in order if I can, so I waited and waited to watch Oldboy until I had time to watch the first film, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. In fact, I still haven't seen Oldboy, though it is coming next on my queue. Last night I settled in to watch Sympathy, which I was expecting to be a suspenseful gore-fest. What I got was...something else.

I've seen some weird movies, both domestic and foreign. I've seen crazy game shows and other random snippets of things on TV that have thrown me for a loop. And that's not even talking about the internet. Online, there is a whole world of strange that a single person can only scratch the surface of. When I was finished watching Sympathy last night, I turned to my friend Evan and said something which most adequately describes what we had just experienced. "I've seen a video of a Japanese girl in a pleather kitten costume fellating a severed octopus tentacle, and that made more narrative sense than this movie."

(SPOILER ALERT!)

The beginning of Sympathy is promising. The plot and character motivations are set up, and bad things start to happen that cause that perfect sense of suspenseful unease that a viewer is supposed to feel at the beginning of a horror movie, before all the really bad things happen. Our protagonist (?), Ryu, is a deaf-mute factory worker whose sister is in desperate need of a kidney transplant. Since he is the wrong blood type, they are waiting for an organ to become available from a suitable donor. Increasingly panicked that this isn't going to happen, Ryu contacts a black market organ tradeswoman, who says she will find him a kidney in return for one of his own, and 10 million Won. He wakes up naked in an abandoned building, missing a kidney and without any of the money he had saved up. The junkie "surgeon" has escaped the deal and will not be providing a kidney for his sister. A few weeks later, their real doctor informs them that there is finally a match off the donor list. "You still have that 10 million Won saved up, right?"

Ryu's girlfriend Yeong-mi, some sort of political activist (frankly, I never understood her manifesto), encourages him to kidnap Yu-sun, the daughter of Park, who is the president of the company who had fired him for missing too many days at work after his dirty kidney surgery, and use the ransom money to pay for Ryu's sister's surgery. Since they are not bad people, they kidnap her, but they treat her very well, and tell her that they are friends of her father's who are babysitting for a while. This is also the story that Ryu and his girlfriend tell to his sister. For some time they all live together quite happily, waiting for the ransom to go through. While Ryu and Yeong-mi are out getting the briefcase full of money from Park, Ryu's sister finds out that Yu-sun is not a friend's daughter, but a kidnapping victim. (Sidenote: Bo-bae Han, who plays Yu-sun, is possibly the cutest little girl ever. All little kids should wear big glasses to remind me of myself as a little girl!) Distraught, and worried that she is too much of a burden to her brother because of her illness, Ryu's sister kills herself. Whoops. Ryu takes her body to the lake where they played as children, because that is where she wanted to be buried. Of course, he can't leave Yu-sun alone, so she has to come along. Poor thing. Of course, she drowns.

This is when things start getting weeeeeird. I can't even really describe the rest of the movie. The cops get involved. There's a mentally retarded guy who comes out of nowhere and just changes everything up. There's a totally random sex scene, a couple of murderous rampages, and at least two autopsies which Park is a witness to for NO reason whatsoever. Honestly, I have no idea what the message of this movie was supposed to be. Evan was able to gleam some sort of communist sentiment from it, based off of the apparent victory of Yeong-mi's terrorist group above all the other characters, but that was a bit of a stretch.

Really, I don't even know what to say. It was an experience. Some of the scenes were certainly visually appealing, and I am still quite looking forward to Oldboy. But Sympathy wasn't even that gory or frightening. It was just totally confusing. After watching it, Evan and I tried to come up with a list of movies we'd seen that were worse, and when movies like Battlefield Earth and Must Love Dogs are out there, it really throws off the whole curve. More to come when I get to see Oldboy and Lady Vengeance next.

*the movie ends*
Kat: Um...
Evan: For real?
Kat: F'real?
Evan: Fuh reeeal?
Kat: 4Real?
Evan: Was this worse than Serendipity?

falling slowly

This weekend I went to the Laemmle 7 in Pasadena, where I have made so many movie memories that it's difficult to quantify. On Saturday at the matinee, I made another. My dad and I went to see Once, a small Irish film about love, music, and their inextricable link. It's difficult to describe Once because it is one of the least plot-driven movies I've ever seen. I keep seeing it described as the reinvented movie musical, but for some reason it doesn't come across that way to me. Musicals convey story and action in their songs, where the music in Once conveys emotion and character. There's more backstory than there is plot here, and I think that is somehow truer to life than I would have imagined. How often do we spend the day dwelling on our pasts instead of paying attention to the movement forward that we're living through? Our main characters in this movie, The Guy and The Girl, are given the chance to stop and look at what is happening to them, and it is a gift to the audience that we get to witness this landmark week in each of their lives.

The music that carries the film is absolutely stunning. The filmmaker has referred to it as a video album, and that description totally gelled with the experience I had of watching it. Sometimes I just had to close my eyes and listen to the music as it reverberated off the worn fabric lining the walls. Watching this movie for the first time is like listening to a beautiful album alone on your headphones and not wanting to escape the environment you've created between you and the music. Walking around afterwards, it took quite some time for the street sounds to permeate the dusky atmosphere I was in.

I've conveyed to you the experience of Once without being able to give any real details about the picture. I think this movie is for anyone who's ever loved music. If you understand how music can take care of you in difficult times, and exalt with you when you're happy, then you'll be moved by the songs quite a bit. I intend to buy the soundtrack as soon as I'm off work today, and listen to it until I can't anymore, for fear of being overwhelmed by it.

lady business

Last semester I took a course that focused entirely on Jane Austen. We read her novels, her letters, her juvenilia, her unfinished works, her biographies. We read articles about her, watched adaptations of her novels, and we talked about her role in society. It was very interesting to see how at the end of the semester, after we had all become Austen scholars, all of the students' opinions of her had changed. Many people came into the class with the same stereotype as exists in the rest of society, which is that Jane Austen is only read by teenage girls and housewives looking for something light to read about romance. As it turns out, Austen is ranked among the greatest of British authors to have lasted since her lifetime. Readers' devotion to Austen's work and the mysterious minutiae of her life parallels that of Shakespeare addicts, and yet Austen maintains this less-than-flattering public image.

I recently saw a trailer (see bottom of post) for the upcoming Austen biopic entitled Becoming Jane. It stars Anne Hathaway and tells the story of "her true love" or some other such nonsense according to Mr. Voice-Over man. Here's the thing - we don't know a whole hell of a lot about Austen's romance by the sea. We know she rejected a proposal from an eligible suitor, which was a very bad financial decision for her to make. I am really curious how this movie is going to be all happy and romantic if the true story ended with her being a spinster writing letters to her spinster sister and being dependent on the kindness of her brothers. I mean, this is basically Shakespeare in Love but probably with less nudity.

Reportedly, Anne Hathaway does a good job and was coached into having a very appropriate dialectic accent for Austen's time and location. She is quite pretty, though, and Austen scholars will always point out how since her death, Austen has been 'prettified' by those promoting her. The best image there is of her is a sketch done by her sister in which she looks pointed, sour, and a little old. Her relatives revamped this portrait to be published with her works, making her look young, angelic, and quite lovely. Yet more changes are being made to her appearance nowadays, which continues to fly in the face of the feminist Austen tradition.

I guess I'm just curious to see how Bennetizing this film will be on the image and reputation of Austen herself. My hope is that some of what scholars know to be true will be left untainted by this movie, as it is being released in conjunction with a new biography of the same name, I believe. Maybe after it comes out I should have a marathon of all the literary biopics, from Shakespeare in Love to Wilde, Sylvia, The Hours (kinda), Capote, Miss Potter, and any others I can find.



P.S. I did a Google search of "literary biopics," and apparently Michelle Williams, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Evan Rachel Wood have been cast to play the Brontë sisters. Yowza.

fish out of water

I first heard of Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones when I was a high school freshman, and read an excerpt from it in a girls' magazine - I want to say it was "Girl's Life," but I can't be sure. I knew the premise was that narrator Susie had been raped and murdered, and that the bulk of the novel consisted of her watching her family cope from heaven. I certainly remember being fascinated by the concept of Susie watching her earthbound younger sister, who has had the opportunity to grow up, losing her virginity while at summer camp. "'I'm ready,' my sister said. At fourteen, my sister sailed away from me into a place I'd never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood. In the walls of hers there were windows." (P. 125)

I loved the novel when I first read it, so much so that I convinced both of my parents to read it as well. Despite the fact that it was geared and marketed to young women, I believe both of them were as struck by it as I was. The relationships between Susie's parents and sister compete with the observations of the murdered girl to be the most captivating theme in the book.

Jeremy Smith's article on CHUD let me know that Peter Jackson will be turning the novel into a film. Those familiar with Jackson's work will know that he can make a movie that isn't a blockbuster heavy on special effects. So I'm willing to believe that Jackson can reign himself in and give us this story without layering it on too thick. But I'm really not sure about how this novel will translate to the screen. It's difficult for well-written narration to come across as too hokey or obvious in film, I think. Little Children did a good job of not going too heavy on the narration while keeping the storybook feeling of the novel. But even with that and the wonderful performances, there was still something off for me after having enjoyed the book.

This is a common problem for adaptations: that fans of the written narrative will always be let down by the film. The Harry Potter movies, for example, have always disappointed me, because there are too many omissions and changes. Then there's something like The Grapes of Wrath, where I could never expect a filmmaker to come close to the brilliance of Steinbeck's prose (I'm a little obsessed with Steinbeck, by the way), so the movie is still impressive on its own. But it pleases me to see Peter Jackson on the project, because The Lord of the Rings is the only novel whose film adaptations have exceeded my expectations. Even Gone With the Wind leaves me wishing that so many things hadn't been changed, and I love that movie.

However, there is a scene in the novel The Lovely Bones which I won't spoil, because I highly recommend reading it, which I just do not understand how it could be translated to the screen. It morphs narration with the visually and intellectually complex concept of corporeality, and I really don't know if they'll even keep it in the adaptation. Though I guess Jackson would be the man to try, so we'll see.

How do you feel about novel adaptations onscreen? Any outstanding ones you'd like to recommend?

series finales

So, I can't really write about it as I don't have cable at the moment, but I know that everyone is talking about The Sopranos series finale, and from what I gather, everything was left up in the air. On KROQ's Kevin and Bean show this morning, a lot of people were calling in either glad or concerned that the fate of Tony was not revealed to us. I used to watch The Sopranos pretty regularly for a couple of years somewhere in the middle of its run, and someday I'd like to rent all the seasons and just follow all of the characters' story lines, but as of now, I don't have a lot to say. I am very curious, though, what everyone else thought about the series finale, so please comment!

Also, I was thinking about series finale styles in general. What were your favorite series finales? Your least favorite? Is it better to cauterize every hanging question there was, or allow each viewer to decide what sort of ending will make them the happiest? Certainly I think the success of a series finale is tied to the timing of it. If the show's creators let the show go on too long, the finale may be a dud because no one cares about the outcome anyway. If the show got cancelled before its time should have been up, fans may find the ending to be rushed.

Arrested Development was a show that was certainly canned before its fans wanted it to be. I was there with the Bluths from the beginning, and I could have stayed with them until George Michael (and Maeby?) had kids of their own. The third season was a mixed bag for me, because though I loved it, the creators and the viewers were so painfully aware of the show's fate. Self-referential in-jokes are at once genius and saddening. In the end, we find out all we wanted to know about George Bluth, Sr., George Michael and Maeby, and the Bluth Company itself. Despite the cruel cruel trick of teasing us into thinking a movie was in the works, everything was wrapped up, which I appreciated. I think when audiences are invested in a show, and they don't have a chance to follow them as long as they'd like, the least the show's creators can do is answer the outstanding questions.

Six Feet Under was my favorite series finale by far, though. Like a lot of HBO shows, this one was difficult for me to follow because with going off to school and everything, I couldn't always keep up with the random placement of seasons. But I made sure to tune in for the series finale, which still haunts me when I think about it. Every episode of the show had begun with a character's death, a fade-to-black, and a title card displaying their name and years of life. The finale began with a birth, which was a beautiful tack to take anyway, but it was the final sequence of the show that threw me for a loop. Audiences always regret missing out on what happens to the characters of a show they love after the final credits. Six Feet Under showed us how each of the main characters would die years into the future. These scenes were intercut with a shot of Claire driving across the country to start life fresh. For a show about death, I thought it was very smart that we got absolute closure. We got to see where life would take each of our characters. Years later I was in a sort of a funk, driving around the L.A. freeways and listening to Indie 103.1 when Sia's "Breathe Me" came on the radio. I had to pull over to the side of the road because the song was so beautiful. I didn't remember at the time, but that was the song playing during the final sequence of Six Feet Under, and it was magical. Watch the clip below...

Clearly these two finales stuck with me, and while I'm sure there are others that I have enjoyed or appreciated, I am curious what it is you look for in a series finale, and what your favorite have been!