I've been tardy in getting the HV30 posts put together and online, but I've been busy with other stuff, too.
On or around Canada, or the 4th of July if you prefer, Miller & Mullet will be launching a whole bunch of stuff.
With artist Kam Gates, we're kicking off a weekly comic strip. Think of it as the Addams Family (the original Addams' strips) meets Ziggy, or Hitchcock meets Garfield. Something like that. At any rate, Mullet and Kam are coming up with some darkly funny stuff that works best in the 3-5 frame world of comic strips.
Alongside the strip, we're launching a tri-weekly radio series starring Miller and Mullet. I'm doing the post stuff on that project, as well as most of the writing. The nice thing about audio-only is that sound effects are a lot cheaper than visual effects, so we can finally put some ideas to work without having to worry about how much it costs. The radio show will be available on our website and will, hopefully, be available via iTunes as a podcast. Look for Miller & Mullet Radio.
And, as the third prong of our 2009 Extravaganza, we're posting our 2003 project, Babysitters, in chapters on Youtube and as video podcasts at iTunes. Each week, we'll release another chapter in our first major project. this will be the first time Babysitters has been seen since our rough cut screening at Christmas of 2002.
Back to work!
Showing posts with label comedy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label comedy. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Burn After Laughing
I saw the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading this weekend, and it’s definitely a lot funnier than No Country for Old Men.
Spoilers lurk after this point, so if you haven’t seen the movie, stop here. It’s a fun movie best enjoyed without preconceived notions.
It’s definitely one of the Coens’ funnier movies, with Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, and Richard Jenkins playing the dumbest characters I’ve seen them do. These three talented actors play gym employees who fumble their way into the Coens’ whacky thriller, and, for me, half the fun is seeing how these smart people play clueless people. Pitt in particular is hilarious with his remarkable gym trainer Chad.
The Coens contrast these three clueless characters with smart characters—Tilda Swindon and John Malkovich play intelligent upper-middle-class characters whose crumbling marriage gets the plot rolling, with Tilda’s Katie having an affair with Treasury agent Harry, played with twitchy energy by George Clooney.
Clooney’s character is what fascinates me the most after my first viewing of the movie, with one scene in particular resonating days afterwards.
I realized I had, while watching, divided the characters into 2 groups, the smart ones and the dumb ones, since the Coens had kept the 2 groups separated into those groupings for much of the first act. I assumed that Clooney’s character, as twitchy and as jogging-obsessed as he is, was one of the smart ones.
Harry, while having an affair with Katie, is also married to a successful children’s book author (Sandy, played by Elizabeth Marvel) and trolls internet dating sites for flings, including McDormand’s Linda. Despite being intimidated by Malkovich’s Osbourne at a dinner party, Harry seems bright enough to be involved with Katie, a doctor. He’s a philanderer, sure, and obsessed with “getting a run in,” but he blends in with the smart characters quite easily. The twitchiness is explained, early on, by his former job as a U.S. Marshal where he acted as a bodyguard, and by his current job as a Treasury agent—he’s in law enforcement, used to constantly monitoring his surroundings. He’s an older man for a field agent, so I had assumed he’d started taking the job home with him and constantly watched his surroundings even when not on the job (we never actually see Harry working).
But at one point in the movie, he reveals a secret project he’s building in his basement to Linda during his wife’s absence. We aren’t shown much of it prior to this scene: just some metal pipe purchased from a store, and some sort of complex metal hinge or mechanism as he works on it (he does, however, keep it locked up in a caged area within the basement, so I assumed it was something related to his job to require the extra security).
The Coens use the moment to not only reveal a great joke, but it also made me realize everything I’d assumed about Harry up to that point was wrong—he was as misguided as the gym trio. It’s a brilliant bit of writing. The thriller genre demands that information be given to the audience bit by bit as they solve the mystery, but the Coens apply this strategy to Clooney’s character (perhaps as a contrast to Pitt’s more obvious character, whose obliviousness is clear from the moment we watch him snap something in a customer’s body by accident).
With Linda at his side in his basement workshop, Harry unveils his device to her and to the audience, telling Linda that it’s a gift for his wife, Sandy. The machine has a seat on it, which Harry rolls back to activate a thrusting pink dildo. A beat later, after the comedic shock has worn off, you realize Harry has built this for his author wife, a woman who has appeared as intelligent and as cultured as Katie or Osbourne during the dinner party. Harry eagerly tells Linda he copied a machine he’d seen in a men’s magazine, building the device for a fraction of the cost. And he’s told her it’s a gift for his wife—he’s forgotten the lie that he and his wife have ended their relationship.
The character of Harry changed for me at that moment—he went from being the long-in-tooth law enforcement man to a sex-obsessed goof who has probably tormented his wife with inappropriate gifts and other whacky behaviour.
The scene doesn’t really advance the plot that much, but it’s not a throw-away gag inserted for laughs, despite the roar of laughter the pink dildo creates when it emerges over and over again from the black seat (a comic version of the alien chestburster from Alien maybe?). It is a clever, and hilarious, means of revealing Harry as a character, tweaking the audience’s expectations. From that moment forward, we realize Harry’s not as smart as he’d seemed to be, and that he isn’t the smooth philanderer we’d assumed he was—he’s a sex-crazed lunatic.
That scene allows the Coens to move Clooney’s character into buffoon county quite easily—in scenes following, he shoots someone in a reflexive moment (followed by a mad panic) and becomes increasingly paranoid as the plot rolls along. His wife, revealed in the scene to likely be long-suffering based on what he considers a gift to her, is on a book tour where she is having an affair of her own with someone presumably smarter than Harry.
The critics are calling Burn After Reading a minor Coen movie, but that scene proves to me that they are still master writers and filmmakers.
Spoilers lurk after this point, so if you haven’t seen the movie, stop here. It’s a fun movie best enjoyed without preconceived notions.
It’s definitely one of the Coens’ funnier movies, with Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, and Richard Jenkins playing the dumbest characters I’ve seen them do. These three talented actors play gym employees who fumble their way into the Coens’ whacky thriller, and, for me, half the fun is seeing how these smart people play clueless people. Pitt in particular is hilarious with his remarkable gym trainer Chad.
The Coens contrast these three clueless characters with smart characters—Tilda Swindon and John Malkovich play intelligent upper-middle-class characters whose crumbling marriage gets the plot rolling, with Tilda’s Katie having an affair with Treasury agent Harry, played with twitchy energy by George Clooney.
Clooney’s character is what fascinates me the most after my first viewing of the movie, with one scene in particular resonating days afterwards.
I realized I had, while watching, divided the characters into 2 groups, the smart ones and the dumb ones, since the Coens had kept the 2 groups separated into those groupings for much of the first act. I assumed that Clooney’s character, as twitchy and as jogging-obsessed as he is, was one of the smart ones.
Harry, while having an affair with Katie, is also married to a successful children’s book author (Sandy, played by Elizabeth Marvel) and trolls internet dating sites for flings, including McDormand’s Linda. Despite being intimidated by Malkovich’s Osbourne at a dinner party, Harry seems bright enough to be involved with Katie, a doctor. He’s a philanderer, sure, and obsessed with “getting a run in,” but he blends in with the smart characters quite easily. The twitchiness is explained, early on, by his former job as a U.S. Marshal where he acted as a bodyguard, and by his current job as a Treasury agent—he’s in law enforcement, used to constantly monitoring his surroundings. He’s an older man for a field agent, so I had assumed he’d started taking the job home with him and constantly watched his surroundings even when not on the job (we never actually see Harry working).
But at one point in the movie, he reveals a secret project he’s building in his basement to Linda during his wife’s absence. We aren’t shown much of it prior to this scene: just some metal pipe purchased from a store, and some sort of complex metal hinge or mechanism as he works on it (he does, however, keep it locked up in a caged area within the basement, so I assumed it was something related to his job to require the extra security).
The Coens use the moment to not only reveal a great joke, but it also made me realize everything I’d assumed about Harry up to that point was wrong—he was as misguided as the gym trio. It’s a brilliant bit of writing. The thriller genre demands that information be given to the audience bit by bit as they solve the mystery, but the Coens apply this strategy to Clooney’s character (perhaps as a contrast to Pitt’s more obvious character, whose obliviousness is clear from the moment we watch him snap something in a customer’s body by accident).
With Linda at his side in his basement workshop, Harry unveils his device to her and to the audience, telling Linda that it’s a gift for his wife, Sandy. The machine has a seat on it, which Harry rolls back to activate a thrusting pink dildo. A beat later, after the comedic shock has worn off, you realize Harry has built this for his author wife, a woman who has appeared as intelligent and as cultured as Katie or Osbourne during the dinner party. Harry eagerly tells Linda he copied a machine he’d seen in a men’s magazine, building the device for a fraction of the cost. And he’s told her it’s a gift for his wife—he’s forgotten the lie that he and his wife have ended their relationship.
The character of Harry changed for me at that moment—he went from being the long-in-tooth law enforcement man to a sex-obsessed goof who has probably tormented his wife with inappropriate gifts and other whacky behaviour.
The scene doesn’t really advance the plot that much, but it’s not a throw-away gag inserted for laughs, despite the roar of laughter the pink dildo creates when it emerges over and over again from the black seat (a comic version of the alien chestburster from Alien maybe?). It is a clever, and hilarious, means of revealing Harry as a character, tweaking the audience’s expectations. From that moment forward, we realize Harry’s not as smart as he’d seemed to be, and that he isn’t the smooth philanderer we’d assumed he was—he’s a sex-crazed lunatic.
That scene allows the Coens to move Clooney’s character into buffoon county quite easily—in scenes following, he shoots someone in a reflexive moment (followed by a mad panic) and becomes increasingly paranoid as the plot rolls along. His wife, revealed in the scene to likely be long-suffering based on what he considers a gift to her, is on a book tour where she is having an affair of her own with someone presumably smarter than Harry.
The critics are calling Burn After Reading a minor Coen movie, but that scene proves to me that they are still master writers and filmmakers.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
The Kings of Silent Comedy
My exposure to the silent-era comedians courtesy of Mother’s Pizza led me to research and seek out the great silent clowns, as Walter Kerr called them.
Charlie Chaplin: the superstar of the silent era. His movies seem dated now (theatre-style compositions, a wide maudlin streak), but he is still an important teacher. Chaplin used characters to create comedy rather than stringing together a series of gags (pay attention, Mike Myers), and he spent his career trying to find the perfect blend of comedy and tragedy.
Buster Keaton: a man before his time. Watch any of his shorts or features and you’ll see the roots of modern comedy filmmaking, with the naturalism and cinematography of our movies today. Watch his masterpiece, The General—there’s not a wasted frame in that tightly controlled, well-told story, and the film ranks as one of the best ever made. Where Chaplin’s tramp instantly mastered any task thrown his way, Buster’s poor sap would struggle before mastering anything.
Harry Langdon: the man-sized infant. His comic persona was that of a baby trapped in a grown man’s body, and he puts it to good use by putting that character into unsavory places as often as possible. He was the master of making the little things bigger than the big things. A glance, a stunned stare held for a beat—Harry was the master of understatement, but he made every gesture and beat stronger for it. Watch The Strongman if you can.
Harold Lloyd: the go-getter. It’s possible to watch the development of Harold Lloyd’s “glass character” through the surviving shorts. By the time he’d fully developed the character, he was creating great comedy that rivals that of Chaplin and Keaton. He was the king of the “thrill comedy,” with Safety Last being his finest effort.
Laurel & Hardy: two gods of comedy, no waiting. Most people have seen the duo’s sound-era shorts, but they did quite a few silents as well. I’ve seen parts of their silents in some of the Youngson re-releases. The characters are overgrown children, polite and well-meaning, but placed in their well-crafted stories they fail time and time again. The Music Box is one of the best comedy shorts ever made, but any of their shorts are gems. I love Towed in a Hole and Me and My Pal. Stan Laurel was a great craftsman, writing and editing their output. Their later features aren’t as good as those shorts are, but they are still a lot of fun. Laurel & Hardy took action and reaction and set them to a comfortably slow pace, allowing the gags to build on each other, with some of the finest physical comedy on film.
Interestingly, these great clowns, all long-gone, have official websites. There is hope that future generations will know their work.
Charlie Chaplin: the superstar of the silent era. His movies seem dated now (theatre-style compositions, a wide maudlin streak), but he is still an important teacher. Chaplin used characters to create comedy rather than stringing together a series of gags (pay attention, Mike Myers), and he spent his career trying to find the perfect blend of comedy and tragedy.
Buster Keaton: a man before his time. Watch any of his shorts or features and you’ll see the roots of modern comedy filmmaking, with the naturalism and cinematography of our movies today. Watch his masterpiece, The General—there’s not a wasted frame in that tightly controlled, well-told story, and the film ranks as one of the best ever made. Where Chaplin’s tramp instantly mastered any task thrown his way, Buster’s poor sap would struggle before mastering anything.
Harry Langdon: the man-sized infant. His comic persona was that of a baby trapped in a grown man’s body, and he puts it to good use by putting that character into unsavory places as often as possible. He was the master of making the little things bigger than the big things. A glance, a stunned stare held for a beat—Harry was the master of understatement, but he made every gesture and beat stronger for it. Watch The Strongman if you can.
Harold Lloyd: the go-getter. It’s possible to watch the development of Harold Lloyd’s “glass character” through the surviving shorts. By the time he’d fully developed the character, he was creating great comedy that rivals that of Chaplin and Keaton. He was the king of the “thrill comedy,” with Safety Last being his finest effort.
Laurel & Hardy: two gods of comedy, no waiting. Most people have seen the duo’s sound-era shorts, but they did quite a few silents as well. I’ve seen parts of their silents in some of the Youngson re-releases. The characters are overgrown children, polite and well-meaning, but placed in their well-crafted stories they fail time and time again. The Music Box is one of the best comedy shorts ever made, but any of their shorts are gems. I love Towed in a Hole and Me and My Pal. Stan Laurel was a great craftsman, writing and editing their output. Their later features aren’t as good as those shorts are, but they are still a lot of fun. Laurel & Hardy took action and reaction and set them to a comfortably slow pace, allowing the gags to build on each other, with some of the finest physical comedy on film.
Interestingly, these great clowns, all long-gone, have official websites. There is hope that future generations will know their work.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Blockbuster Season, 2008
When I was a kid, I worked for Dickie Dee Ice Cream, pedaling one of those white ice cream carts around the south end of Oshawa, where I was more the neighbourhood mobile nutrition centre than the floating dessert vendor. My favourite product was the grape Blockbuster, one of three flavours of a Creamsicle™-type ice cream bar.
But say the word blockbuster to me now, and I tend to think of the big popcorn movies that come out in the summer, what the industry types called the tent-pole movies (not sure if they still do or not).
This year, Iron Man led off the pack, opening at the beginning of May and doing quite well. Let’s hope that the inevitable sequel(s) maintain the same quality as this one.
The next big movie was the Narnia sequel, which I haven’t seen. The trailers for Narnia 2 give me the impression that the movie is much of the same as the first one, so I’ll probably skip it. It’s nice to see fantasy epics returning to the big screen in the wake of the LOTR trilogy, but the first one felt like a Harry Potter retread rather than a source of Rowlings’s scribbles.
This past weekend, I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (hereafter shortened to Indy 4). This movie was as entertaining as Iron Man was, and it’s a worthy addition to the franchise. I went in hoping it would be better than Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and at least as good as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Fortunately, there’s no Jar-Jar Binks to be seen. Dr. Jones fist-fights his way on and off trucks, sneaks into booby-trapped ruins, and still manages to teach archeology to classes filled with enamored young women. The movie doesn’t drag, with godless Russian commies taking the place of the Nazis of the earlier films, and the movie is kind-hearted in its treatment of the characters in the world of the 1950’s. It’s not a documentary, so the plot holes are pretty easy to ignore—it’s pure, escapist fun intended to allow you to put the world aside for 120 minutes of adventure, which is how I define the summer popcorn movies.
There are a few other movies I am looking forward to seeing this summer.
Three high-profile superhero movies promise to make comic-con crowds dress up as more than just Imperial storm troopers this summer. The new Batman movie, featuring the late Heath Ledger, is coming out, as is a sequel to the excellent Hellboy movie.
I’ve only seen one trailer for The Incredible Hulk, so I haven’t decided whether it’s something to see (the 60’s TV cartoon is still the best Hulk experience, hands down, with a rockin’ theme song).
Tropic Thunder looks like fun: Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Robert Downey Jr. playing war-film actors stuck in a real war. With a supporting cast that includes Steve Coogan and Nick Nolte, this should be a lot of fun. Downey plays a white actor who dons blackface to get a role, which has generated some controversy, but I’m sure it’s more a source of comedic gold than something racist. I saw posters at the theatre this weekend, and Downey’s makeup cracks me up. I hope the movie’s as funny as that poster….
There’s an Adam Sandler movie coming out—to come out in prime-time, it must be pretty good by Sandlerian standards. He plays an Israeli agent who just wants to style hair in New York. So… he’s a martial arts expert with a funny accent. You Don’t Mess with The Zohan may be my guilty pleasure this summer. Or it may be two hours wasted.
One controversial comedy is on its way: Mike Myers’s The Love Guru. Hindu organizations are up in arms over this movie’s portrayal of their religion, which will undoubtedly drive ticket sales up for the first weekend. The first trailer was the most unfunny thing I’ve seen in a long time, to the point that I was shocked they would put it out in the first place. The second trailer was actually funny, so I’ll probably end up seeing this one. Guru is a throwback to the politically-incorrect movies of Peter Sellers, such as The Party or The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, where he impersonated people of other races. Today, that type of racial comedy is somewhat risky, with the unwritten rule being that you have to be from the ethnic group being mocked in order to mock a group of people. Still, in a world where Larry the Cable Guy’s white-trash, homophobic, xenophobic semi-routines have propelled him into making a series of what could be called next generation Pauly Shore movies, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised to see a white guy from Scarborough play a South Asian man. Still, the true test of a comedy is whether it’s funny or not. I have my doubts.
I may actually go to the theatre to see a Uwe Boll movie for the first time ever. Postal is getting decent reviews from the blogosphere, and it features the mighty Dave Foley, one of my favourite comic actors.
Surprisingly in the testosterone-soaked world of the blockbuster, the movie generating the most mainstream press these days is a chick-flick, Sex in the City, starring the ubiquitous Sarah Jessica Parker. Not my cup of tea since I don’t collect shoes or purses, but at least I have an excuse to ignore infotainment shows for the next few months….
But say the word blockbuster to me now, and I tend to think of the big popcorn movies that come out in the summer, what the industry types called the tent-pole movies (not sure if they still do or not).
This year, Iron Man led off the pack, opening at the beginning of May and doing quite well. Let’s hope that the inevitable sequel(s) maintain the same quality as this one.
The next big movie was the Narnia sequel, which I haven’t seen. The trailers for Narnia 2 give me the impression that the movie is much of the same as the first one, so I’ll probably skip it. It’s nice to see fantasy epics returning to the big screen in the wake of the LOTR trilogy, but the first one felt like a Harry Potter retread rather than a source of Rowlings’s scribbles.
This past weekend, I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (hereafter shortened to Indy 4). This movie was as entertaining as Iron Man was, and it’s a worthy addition to the franchise. I went in hoping it would be better than Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and at least as good as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Fortunately, there’s no Jar-Jar Binks to be seen. Dr. Jones fist-fights his way on and off trucks, sneaks into booby-trapped ruins, and still manages to teach archeology to classes filled with enamored young women. The movie doesn’t drag, with godless Russian commies taking the place of the Nazis of the earlier films, and the movie is kind-hearted in its treatment of the characters in the world of the 1950’s. It’s not a documentary, so the plot holes are pretty easy to ignore—it’s pure, escapist fun intended to allow you to put the world aside for 120 minutes of adventure, which is how I define the summer popcorn movies.
There are a few other movies I am looking forward to seeing this summer.
Three high-profile superhero movies promise to make comic-con crowds dress up as more than just Imperial storm troopers this summer. The new Batman movie, featuring the late Heath Ledger, is coming out, as is a sequel to the excellent Hellboy movie.
I’ve only seen one trailer for The Incredible Hulk, so I haven’t decided whether it’s something to see (the 60’s TV cartoon is still the best Hulk experience, hands down, with a rockin’ theme song).
Tropic Thunder looks like fun: Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Robert Downey Jr. playing war-film actors stuck in a real war. With a supporting cast that includes Steve Coogan and Nick Nolte, this should be a lot of fun. Downey plays a white actor who dons blackface to get a role, which has generated some controversy, but I’m sure it’s more a source of comedic gold than something racist. I saw posters at the theatre this weekend, and Downey’s makeup cracks me up. I hope the movie’s as funny as that poster….
There’s an Adam Sandler movie coming out—to come out in prime-time, it must be pretty good by Sandlerian standards. He plays an Israeli agent who just wants to style hair in New York. So… he’s a martial arts expert with a funny accent. You Don’t Mess with The Zohan may be my guilty pleasure this summer. Or it may be two hours wasted.
One controversial comedy is on its way: Mike Myers’s The Love Guru. Hindu organizations are up in arms over this movie’s portrayal of their religion, which will undoubtedly drive ticket sales up for the first weekend. The first trailer was the most unfunny thing I’ve seen in a long time, to the point that I was shocked they would put it out in the first place. The second trailer was actually funny, so I’ll probably end up seeing this one. Guru is a throwback to the politically-incorrect movies of Peter Sellers, such as The Party or The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, where he impersonated people of other races. Today, that type of racial comedy is somewhat risky, with the unwritten rule being that you have to be from the ethnic group being mocked in order to mock a group of people. Still, in a world where Larry the Cable Guy’s white-trash, homophobic, xenophobic semi-routines have propelled him into making a series of what could be called next generation Pauly Shore movies, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised to see a white guy from Scarborough play a South Asian man. Still, the true test of a comedy is whether it’s funny or not. I have my doubts.
I may actually go to the theatre to see a Uwe Boll movie for the first time ever. Postal is getting decent reviews from the blogosphere, and it features the mighty Dave Foley, one of my favourite comic actors.
Surprisingly in the testosterone-soaked world of the blockbuster, the movie generating the most mainstream press these days is a chick-flick, Sex in the City, starring the ubiquitous Sarah Jessica Parker. Not my cup of tea since I don’t collect shoes or purses, but at least I have an excuse to ignore infotainment shows for the next few months….
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Influences, Part II: The Marx Brothers
I first saw the Marx Brothers courtesy of a Buffalo TV station—one of them used to broadcast old comedies on Sunday mornings. I think I saw their first swansong, The Big Store (1941), first, and despite it not being their finest work, I was hooked by Groucho, Harpo, and Chico.
If you’ve never seen the Marx Brothers before, I’d recommend watching their movies in chronological order (The Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930) are adaptations of their Broadway shows). If you want to jump in head first, start with the next 3 Paramount movies, Monkey Business (1931), Horse Feathers (1932), and Duck Soup (1933). The start of the downfall is their first MGM movie, A Night at the Opera (1935). With Zeppo in tow, the boys attacked high society with a zeal that must have been like what the Sex Pistols did to music in 1977.
I like the Four Marx Brothers a bit better than the trio—Zeppo adds something that is missed in their later movies. As a wooden parody of the male love interest, his scenes in Monkey Business are pretty good (“the trees are lovely” while escorting a lovely lady around the deck of an ocean liner is my favourite Zeppo line and scene). He doesn’t do much in the other movies other than help move the exposition along (one scene in The Cocoanuts features him doing nothing other than saying “yes” to Groucho).
I initially liked Harpo the most—he’s an amazing clown, and with his silent act he gets in some great physical business. Alone or with Chico or Groucho, he gets a lot done, with the most visibly anarchic attitude. Harpo was a force of nature.
I think Chico’s best scenes are those where he plays with Harpo as they try to pull some scam on someone, usually Margaret Dumont (they do some great physical comedy together, such as the effort to escape from the gamblers in Horse Feathers or stealing a painting in Cocoanuts). I also like Chico’s scenes with Groucho as they mangle the language and the logic of language. The Chico-Groucho scenes are the ones most remembered (the contract scene in Opera, the map scene in Monkey Business, and the Why a Duck scene in Cocoanuts). Chico is a great con artist, ignorant and sometimes stupid, but shrewd enough to fleece you without you knowing it.
Groucho is probably the best-known brother today, and his machine-gun delivery and non-sequiter style still influences comedy today. Groucho would have been a great standup comedian if he were born into this era.
The greatest Marxist scenes involve all four (or three) brothers: the stateroom scene in Opera, the passport scene in Monkey Business, the speakeasy sequence or the lecture in Horse Feathers, for instance.
At Paramount, the Brothers were the romantic male leads—the leading lady was either Margaret Dumont or Thelma Todd. Both of these actresses were great comediennes, and the Paramounts would not have been the same without them. Todd, a gifted physical and verbal comedian, holds her own against Groucho in two of the Paramounts, playing a sexy femme fatale. Dumont, matronly and stuffy, represents the upper class and spends her time (and in some of the MGM’s) as the target of Groucho’s half-hearted efforts to woo her money into marriage. In both cases, you don’t expect the romance to last long after the movie ends as the boys move onto their next scam.
At MGM, the Brothers became the helpers for the romantic leads, and the movies aren’t the same. Although they were never as sentimental as Chaplin was, the later movies don’t have the same bite to them as the early ones. By giving up the role of the male lead, the boys became secondary to the plot. MGM wanted to sell tickets to women by featuring more romance, so you can blame your great-grandmother for it all.
Still, a bad Marx Bros. movie is better than no Marx Bros. movie….
If you’ve never seen the Marx Brothers before, I’d recommend watching their movies in chronological order (The Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930) are adaptations of their Broadway shows). If you want to jump in head first, start with the next 3 Paramount movies, Monkey Business (1931), Horse Feathers (1932), and Duck Soup (1933). The start of the downfall is their first MGM movie, A Night at the Opera (1935). With Zeppo in tow, the boys attacked high society with a zeal that must have been like what the Sex Pistols did to music in 1977.
I like the Four Marx Brothers a bit better than the trio—Zeppo adds something that is missed in their later movies. As a wooden parody of the male love interest, his scenes in Monkey Business are pretty good (“the trees are lovely” while escorting a lovely lady around the deck of an ocean liner is my favourite Zeppo line and scene). He doesn’t do much in the other movies other than help move the exposition along (one scene in The Cocoanuts features him doing nothing other than saying “yes” to Groucho).
I initially liked Harpo the most—he’s an amazing clown, and with his silent act he gets in some great physical business. Alone or with Chico or Groucho, he gets a lot done, with the most visibly anarchic attitude. Harpo was a force of nature.
I think Chico’s best scenes are those where he plays with Harpo as they try to pull some scam on someone, usually Margaret Dumont (they do some great physical comedy together, such as the effort to escape from the gamblers in Horse Feathers or stealing a painting in Cocoanuts). I also like Chico’s scenes with Groucho as they mangle the language and the logic of language. The Chico-Groucho scenes are the ones most remembered (the contract scene in Opera, the map scene in Monkey Business, and the Why a Duck scene in Cocoanuts). Chico is a great con artist, ignorant and sometimes stupid, but shrewd enough to fleece you without you knowing it.
Groucho is probably the best-known brother today, and his machine-gun delivery and non-sequiter style still influences comedy today. Groucho would have been a great standup comedian if he were born into this era.
The greatest Marxist scenes involve all four (or three) brothers: the stateroom scene in Opera, the passport scene in Monkey Business, the speakeasy sequence or the lecture in Horse Feathers, for instance.
At Paramount, the Brothers were the romantic male leads—the leading lady was either Margaret Dumont or Thelma Todd. Both of these actresses were great comediennes, and the Paramounts would not have been the same without them. Todd, a gifted physical and verbal comedian, holds her own against Groucho in two of the Paramounts, playing a sexy femme fatale. Dumont, matronly and stuffy, represents the upper class and spends her time (and in some of the MGM’s) as the target of Groucho’s half-hearted efforts to woo her money into marriage. In both cases, you don’t expect the romance to last long after the movie ends as the boys move onto their next scam.
At MGM, the Brothers became the helpers for the romantic leads, and the movies aren’t the same. Although they were never as sentimental as Chaplin was, the later movies don’t have the same bite to them as the early ones. By giving up the role of the male lead, the boys became secondary to the plot. MGM wanted to sell tickets to women by featuring more romance, so you can blame your great-grandmother for it all.
Still, a bad Marx Bros. movie is better than no Marx Bros. movie….
Friday, March 28, 2008
One Near-Hit, One Bomb, One Classic
Over the Easter weekend, I saw two comedies on the big screen. This is the first double-movie weekend I’ve had in a long time—I used to go once a week or every other week, but I haven’t been motivated to leave my DVD player much in the last year. Good comedies are scarce in recent months, so most of my movie choices have been from the comparatively consistent flow of good and great dramatic and genre movies.
On Good Friday, I saw The Grand, an improvised mockumentary a la Christopher Guest. Directed by Zack Penn, it boasted a cast including a few of my favourites: David Cross, Woody Harrelson, Dennis Farina, Michael McKean, Judy Greer, and Ray Romano, with many other fun performances. It wasn’t a great movie, but it wasn’t terrible, either. I’m not sure how Penn’s methods differ from Guest’s, but Guest can always find the comedic gold with his actors through conflict. I don’t think Penn did that as well as Guest can, so other than David Cross’s Larry feuding with Gabe Kaplan’s father character, the other characters didn’t really bicker or fight, so it lacked the punch and pathos of a Guest movie has in spades. I’d recommend The Grand as a rental as it was a lot of fun just the same—Michael McKean’s absent-minded developer steals his scenes, as does Werner Herzog. Dennis Farina isn’t given much to do, as is Judy Greer, which is a shame given how much fun those two actors can be.
The other movie, Be Kind Rewind, laid an egg on Easter Sunday (sorry). I really wanted to like this movie—I hoped it would be like watching Channel 101 on the big screen. It ended up being more like Channel 102, sadly. The plot is goofy enough, but Michel Gondry (who I only know from the marvelous Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) wastes the talents of Jack Black and Mos Def by chasing what should have been a subplot as his main plot.
This movie has more loose ends in it than any movie I’ve ever seen. I suspect this movie was butchered in the edit bay because the creator of Eternal Sunshine couldn’t have created such a sloppy mess here, right? Let’s see—a romantic subplot is set up in a charming little scene and then completely ignored… Black’s character takes on a power station and gains superpowers in a hilarious sequence that is later nullified with a funny pee scene)… a rival video store run by another kindly neighbourhood man which seemed to be set up as a possible merger partner and therefore a solution to the other store’s closing—what the hell was the point of introducing all of this if nothing is done with it? The story of Black’s character taking on the power station and the superpowers he gains would have made for a much better comedy if they’d stuck with that as the main plot. The making of fake movies was funny the first time (Ghostbusters, which was featured in the Be Kind trailers and got me excited about seeing it), but the other movies weren’t funny not because they weren’t funny but because they showed not the finished movies but the making of them--in a fucking montage!
I’d recommend you wait for Be Kind to wind its way into the discount DVD rental pile. There are a few things in it well worth seeing (Jack Black and a chain-link fence is one lighting-fast but hilarious visual gag), but I wished I’d had a scan button in the theatre.
So what’s a guy to do after watching 2 disappointing movies? Fire up the DVD player and watch some proven comedy.
I watched all three seasons of Bottom over the last few weeks, and it restored my faith in character-based comedy after Sunday’s fiasco. Bottom ran for 3 seasons in the UK, written by and starring Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson, our heroes from the last entry.
The two leads, Richie and Eddie, are much less angry than Rick and Vyvyan, but the relationship has some similarities. Richie and Eddie are flatmates in a rundown London neighbourhood, with Eddie supporting them with his welfare cheques. Rick comes across as the bitchy wife type, and Eddie is an alcoholic who prefers spending time with his buddies Spudgun and Dave Hedgehog (the latter played by the Young Ones’ Christopher Ryan).
Mayall and Edmondson did a number of tours in the UK with the characters, and the show has a definite theatre feel to it—most of the scenes take place in the living room/kitchen area of their multi-floor flat.
On tour, the two were noted for being able to drop the script and improvise around flubs, comment on the performances, etc., before returning to the story. I think you can see the results of this in the three series of the TV show. All 3 series (1991, 1992, 1995, with 6 episodes each) were good, and there was no decline in the quality of the show. The last episodes are as funny as the first ones, and they spend more time outside of the apartment.
The episodes aren’t as tightly plotted as The Young Ones. Sure, there’s a main plot for each episode, but the scenes feel more like distinct sketches. In one episode (Smells), for instance, after returning home after not picking up women, the boys head out and obtain a spray that will make them irresistible—and then head off to the pub to test it out. The apartment, sex shop, and pub scenes could all stand on their own as sketches, and you could remove any one of those and still have a pretty funny episode (which would still make sense plot-wise).
There’s still a lot of violent slapstick, toilet humour, and two people who hate each other yet couldn’t function without the other. Edmondson and Mayall were inspired to write the show after appearing in a production of Waiting for Godot, and there is a certain bleakness to the characters’ lives. However, instead of lives of quiet desperation, these guys live lives of loud desperation. Definitely a highlight of 1990’s British comedy just as The Young Ones was in the 1980’s.
I haven’t seen the Bottom movie, Guest House Paradiso, which followed the TV series in 1999, but it’s definitely on my list, as are the taped performances from the 5 tours. Next time I’m in England I’m going to be buying some region 2 DVDs….
On Good Friday, I saw The Grand, an improvised mockumentary a la Christopher Guest. Directed by Zack Penn, it boasted a cast including a few of my favourites: David Cross, Woody Harrelson, Dennis Farina, Michael McKean, Judy Greer, and Ray Romano, with many other fun performances. It wasn’t a great movie, but it wasn’t terrible, either. I’m not sure how Penn’s methods differ from Guest’s, but Guest can always find the comedic gold with his actors through conflict. I don’t think Penn did that as well as Guest can, so other than David Cross’s Larry feuding with Gabe Kaplan’s father character, the other characters didn’t really bicker or fight, so it lacked the punch and pathos of a Guest movie has in spades. I’d recommend The Grand as a rental as it was a lot of fun just the same—Michael McKean’s absent-minded developer steals his scenes, as does Werner Herzog. Dennis Farina isn’t given much to do, as is Judy Greer, which is a shame given how much fun those two actors can be.
The other movie, Be Kind Rewind, laid an egg on Easter Sunday (sorry). I really wanted to like this movie—I hoped it would be like watching Channel 101 on the big screen. It ended up being more like Channel 102, sadly. The plot is goofy enough, but Michel Gondry (who I only know from the marvelous Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) wastes the talents of Jack Black and Mos Def by chasing what should have been a subplot as his main plot.
This movie has more loose ends in it than any movie I’ve ever seen. I suspect this movie was butchered in the edit bay because the creator of Eternal Sunshine couldn’t have created such a sloppy mess here, right? Let’s see—a romantic subplot is set up in a charming little scene and then completely ignored… Black’s character takes on a power station and gains superpowers in a hilarious sequence that is later nullified with a funny pee scene)… a rival video store run by another kindly neighbourhood man which seemed to be set up as a possible merger partner and therefore a solution to the other store’s closing—what the hell was the point of introducing all of this if nothing is done with it? The story of Black’s character taking on the power station and the superpowers he gains would have made for a much better comedy if they’d stuck with that as the main plot. The making of fake movies was funny the first time (Ghostbusters, which was featured in the Be Kind trailers and got me excited about seeing it), but the other movies weren’t funny not because they weren’t funny but because they showed not the finished movies but the making of them--in a fucking montage!
I’d recommend you wait for Be Kind to wind its way into the discount DVD rental pile. There are a few things in it well worth seeing (Jack Black and a chain-link fence is one lighting-fast but hilarious visual gag), but I wished I’d had a scan button in the theatre.
So what’s a guy to do after watching 2 disappointing movies? Fire up the DVD player and watch some proven comedy.
I watched all three seasons of Bottom over the last few weeks, and it restored my faith in character-based comedy after Sunday’s fiasco. Bottom ran for 3 seasons in the UK, written by and starring Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson, our heroes from the last entry.
The two leads, Richie and Eddie, are much less angry than Rick and Vyvyan, but the relationship has some similarities. Richie and Eddie are flatmates in a rundown London neighbourhood, with Eddie supporting them with his welfare cheques. Rick comes across as the bitchy wife type, and Eddie is an alcoholic who prefers spending time with his buddies Spudgun and Dave Hedgehog (the latter played by the Young Ones’ Christopher Ryan).
Mayall and Edmondson did a number of tours in the UK with the characters, and the show has a definite theatre feel to it—most of the scenes take place in the living room/kitchen area of their multi-floor flat.
On tour, the two were noted for being able to drop the script and improvise around flubs, comment on the performances, etc., before returning to the story. I think you can see the results of this in the three series of the TV show. All 3 series (1991, 1992, 1995, with 6 episodes each) were good, and there was no decline in the quality of the show. The last episodes are as funny as the first ones, and they spend more time outside of the apartment.
The episodes aren’t as tightly plotted as The Young Ones. Sure, there’s a main plot for each episode, but the scenes feel more like distinct sketches. In one episode (Smells), for instance, after returning home after not picking up women, the boys head out and obtain a spray that will make them irresistible—and then head off to the pub to test it out. The apartment, sex shop, and pub scenes could all stand on their own as sketches, and you could remove any one of those and still have a pretty funny episode (which would still make sense plot-wise).
There’s still a lot of violent slapstick, toilet humour, and two people who hate each other yet couldn’t function without the other. Edmondson and Mayall were inspired to write the show after appearing in a production of Waiting for Godot, and there is a certain bleakness to the characters’ lives. However, instead of lives of quiet desperation, these guys live lives of loud desperation. Definitely a highlight of 1990’s British comedy just as The Young Ones was in the 1980’s.
I haven’t seen the Bottom movie, Guest House Paradiso, which followed the TV series in 1999, but it’s definitely on my list, as are the taped performances from the 5 tours. Next time I’m in England I’m going to be buying some region 2 DVDs….
Friday, March 14, 2008
The Young Ones
Ask us who our biggest influences are, and we’ll likely include The Young Ones near the top of the list, along with the Marx Brothers, Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello, Rush, etc.
We often have to explain who The Young Ones are—the show didn’t run here in Canada until the 1990’s, long after they’d left the air in the U.K., and only on MuchMusic, Canada’s music video channel, at weird hours. The show centred on four college roommates (a revolutionary poet, a punk, a hippie, and a con artist) who, for me, personified the punk aspects of the new wave of British comedy in the late 70’s and early 80’s.
For more information about the show and its place in the history of comedy, check out this Wikipedia article.
I once worked with a real-life anarchist, and he was the one who recommended The Young Ones to me. I bought a VHS tape of the first 3 or 4 episodes, and I loved it. I eventually got all four tapes to complete the collection.
So why The Young Ones?
First, the show is very funny. I still laugh after many repeated viewings. Like all great comedy, it’s not predictable, and the inherent friction between the four main characters drives the show and the comedy. The Young Ones was my first forays into the 80’s new wave of British comedy, so it was as refreshing to me as Monty Python’s Flying Circus was when as a kid I saw the reruns on PBS.
Second, for a TV show, there was a lot of physical comedy. TV relies heavily on the verbal branch of comedy, so I’m always pleased when I see good physical comedy on a TV show (Three’s Company, for instance, is one old show I’ve rediscovered as a great source of slapstick—John Ritter was one of the greats). In its day, the usual grim types criticized The Young Ones for the cartoonish violence, as was Rik Mayall and Ade Edmundson’s earlier work with as the Dangerous Brothers. But the violence is so over the top that a small child can tell that it wasn’t real or to be emulated. Rick embeds a pick ax in Vyvyan’s skull, yet Vyvyan survives. Vyvyan is the most violent, frequently using his trusty cricket bat to restore or destroy order, but he resorts to using frying pans and even a window to punish Neil, the hippie, for being himself. The Young Ones were so physical that there were a lot of master shots and medium shots to capture the action, and very few closeups as you find with most verbal comedy. As a result, the show often feels like a filmed stage play rather than a sitcom.
Third, the structure of the episodes was disjoined and surreal. The A-plot revolved around that week’s adventure with the four main characters, but it the writers weren’t afraid to make the plot somewhat non-linear, such as “Bambi” where the boys conduct a mission to the laundromat, then hop on a train to be on a gameshow. The writers also interrupted frequently with cutaways and brief b-plots. The diversions varied, ranging from live action scenes to the use of puppets (including Vyvyan’s pet hamster Special Patrol Group as well as skating vegetables, a shark, filmmaking flies, and cannibalistic rats). The live action scenes usually segued between scenes of the main plot and had nothing to do with the rest of the show. My favourite is the Narnia parody in “Flood.” Alexei Sayle would also appear, as their landlord Jerzy Balowski or one of Balowski’s relatives, and do a standup bit, sing a song about his Doc Martins (“Oil”), or even become part of the A-plot. The structure reflects how they wrote the scripts: Ben Elton would take the material Rik Mayall and Lise Mayer had written together and incorporate it into the material he’d written, making for a melding of styles, plots, and ideas. This was no American sitcom with a strong A-plot supported by a comic-relief B-plot.
The Young Ones was a big influence on our first video effort, Babysitters. We wrote the script separately—Mullet was two time zones away that summer—so we unknowingly emulated the way the writers worked on the show.
The Young Ones’ spirited anarchy puts it in the same part of town as the Marx Brothers. They attack the status quo with a glee and energy that draws the audience in—you find yourself rooting for them. It’s classic outsider humour—us versus them—and we identify with the outsiders in this case. The four leads are all poor (except maybe Mike who seems to be running some sort of underworld empire at times), and they end the series as homeless bank robbers on the run. They follow the tradition of the Marx Brothers, who frequently played penniless immigrants who conned their way into the halls of the wealthy.
Even when they are shown amongst their fellow students, the Young Ones maintain their outsider status. The party they host in “Interesting” reveals Rick to be awkward in a social situation. Later, Rick is mocked by a bomb-plotting anarchist after he discovers Rick is just a posturing rebel. Vyvyan’s friends are violent punks, the extreme outsiders, yet he admits he’d like to join the police force. Neil’s hippy friends seem the most like him, but in another episode, “Cash,” he becomes a police officer and arrests them at another party. Mike is the only one to not have outside friends shown in the episodes, but he seems to be the most connected of the group (has employees running a roller disco, got Bambi a TV commercial job, and is blackmailing the dean).
The Young Ones has a strong political streak, with frequent references to Margaret Thatcher’s government. Being Canadian, I can easily substitute “Thatcher” for “Mulroney,” and I immediately remember a time when a conservative government polarized the country during the economic and political turmoil as well as the Cold War rumblings of the 1980’s. The show contains the uncertainty and pessimism of the early 80’s quite well.
When The Young Ones first aired in 1982, the top sitcoms here in North America were Family Ties and Cheers, alongside existing shows like MASH, Buffalo Bill, and Webster.
When the second series of The Young Ones ran in 1984, Who’s the Boss, AfterMASH, and Night Court were starting out here. None of these shows were anything like The Young Ones, so it’s little wonder that the show didn’t air here until long after—and on specialty cable channels. Fox apparently made a pilot for an adaptation of the show with only Nigel Planer crossing the Atlantic, but the network decided not to make it a series.
Next time, a rambling look at another Mayall/Edmondson collaboration, Bottom.
We often have to explain who The Young Ones are—the show didn’t run here in Canada until the 1990’s, long after they’d left the air in the U.K., and only on MuchMusic, Canada’s music video channel, at weird hours. The show centred on four college roommates (a revolutionary poet, a punk, a hippie, and a con artist) who, for me, personified the punk aspects of the new wave of British comedy in the late 70’s and early 80’s.
For more information about the show and its place in the history of comedy, check out this Wikipedia article.
I once worked with a real-life anarchist, and he was the one who recommended The Young Ones to me. I bought a VHS tape of the first 3 or 4 episodes, and I loved it. I eventually got all four tapes to complete the collection.
So why The Young Ones?
First, the show is very funny. I still laugh after many repeated viewings. Like all great comedy, it’s not predictable, and the inherent friction between the four main characters drives the show and the comedy. The Young Ones was my first forays into the 80’s new wave of British comedy, so it was as refreshing to me as Monty Python’s Flying Circus was when as a kid I saw the reruns on PBS.
Second, for a TV show, there was a lot of physical comedy. TV relies heavily on the verbal branch of comedy, so I’m always pleased when I see good physical comedy on a TV show (Three’s Company, for instance, is one old show I’ve rediscovered as a great source of slapstick—John Ritter was one of the greats). In its day, the usual grim types criticized The Young Ones for the cartoonish violence, as was Rik Mayall and Ade Edmundson’s earlier work with as the Dangerous Brothers. But the violence is so over the top that a small child can tell that it wasn’t real or to be emulated. Rick embeds a pick ax in Vyvyan’s skull, yet Vyvyan survives. Vyvyan is the most violent, frequently using his trusty cricket bat to restore or destroy order, but he resorts to using frying pans and even a window to punish Neil, the hippie, for being himself. The Young Ones were so physical that there were a lot of master shots and medium shots to capture the action, and very few closeups as you find with most verbal comedy. As a result, the show often feels like a filmed stage play rather than a sitcom.
Third, the structure of the episodes was disjoined and surreal. The A-plot revolved around that week’s adventure with the four main characters, but it the writers weren’t afraid to make the plot somewhat non-linear, such as “Bambi” where the boys conduct a mission to the laundromat, then hop on a train to be on a gameshow. The writers also interrupted frequently with cutaways and brief b-plots. The diversions varied, ranging from live action scenes to the use of puppets (including Vyvyan’s pet hamster Special Patrol Group as well as skating vegetables, a shark, filmmaking flies, and cannibalistic rats). The live action scenes usually segued between scenes of the main plot and had nothing to do with the rest of the show. My favourite is the Narnia parody in “Flood.” Alexei Sayle would also appear, as their landlord Jerzy Balowski or one of Balowski’s relatives, and do a standup bit, sing a song about his Doc Martins (“Oil”), or even become part of the A-plot. The structure reflects how they wrote the scripts: Ben Elton would take the material Rik Mayall and Lise Mayer had written together and incorporate it into the material he’d written, making for a melding of styles, plots, and ideas. This was no American sitcom with a strong A-plot supported by a comic-relief B-plot.
The Young Ones was a big influence on our first video effort, Babysitters. We wrote the script separately—Mullet was two time zones away that summer—so we unknowingly emulated the way the writers worked on the show.
The Young Ones’ spirited anarchy puts it in the same part of town as the Marx Brothers. They attack the status quo with a glee and energy that draws the audience in—you find yourself rooting for them. It’s classic outsider humour—us versus them—and we identify with the outsiders in this case. The four leads are all poor (except maybe Mike who seems to be running some sort of underworld empire at times), and they end the series as homeless bank robbers on the run. They follow the tradition of the Marx Brothers, who frequently played penniless immigrants who conned their way into the halls of the wealthy.
Even when they are shown amongst their fellow students, the Young Ones maintain their outsider status. The party they host in “Interesting” reveals Rick to be awkward in a social situation. Later, Rick is mocked by a bomb-plotting anarchist after he discovers Rick is just a posturing rebel. Vyvyan’s friends are violent punks, the extreme outsiders, yet he admits he’d like to join the police force. Neil’s hippy friends seem the most like him, but in another episode, “Cash,” he becomes a police officer and arrests them at another party. Mike is the only one to not have outside friends shown in the episodes, but he seems to be the most connected of the group (has employees running a roller disco, got Bambi a TV commercial job, and is blackmailing the dean).
The Young Ones has a strong political streak, with frequent references to Margaret Thatcher’s government. Being Canadian, I can easily substitute “Thatcher” for “Mulroney,” and I immediately remember a time when a conservative government polarized the country during the economic and political turmoil as well as the Cold War rumblings of the 1980’s. The show contains the uncertainty and pessimism of the early 80’s quite well.
When The Young Ones first aired in 1982, the top sitcoms here in North America were Family Ties and Cheers, alongside existing shows like MASH, Buffalo Bill, and Webster.
When the second series of The Young Ones ran in 1984, Who’s the Boss, AfterMASH, and Night Court were starting out here. None of these shows were anything like The Young Ones, so it’s little wonder that the show didn’t air here until long after—and on specialty cable channels. Fox apparently made a pilot for an adaptation of the show with only Nigel Planer crossing the Atlantic, but the network decided not to make it a series.
Next time, a rambling look at another Mayall/Edmondson collaboration, Bottom.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Walk Hard: the Review
Happy New Year! This week, I’m posting a review—the software testing is going slow with all the holiday distractions, but I hope to have enough done to post some results next week.
Mullet and I saw Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story this weekend. It likely won’t stay in the theatres that long as it failed to make the top 10 box office list, which is sad.
The movie itself is a really good parody of the music-related bio-pics that have come out in recent years, particularly the Johnny Cash bio Walk the Line, along with a swipe or two at the Ray Charles bio Ray. Walk Hard also references Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson, as well as portraying The Beatles, Elvis, Buddy Holly, and the Big Bopper.
I thought about my favourite comedic music-related movie, This is Spinal Tap, afterwards, and I realized that there was something missing. Don’t get me wrong--Walk Hard is funny (the punk song, the Beatles, and the angel-dust freakout being my favourite scenes), but it wasn’t a great comedy like Spinal Tap is.
Webster’s online dictionary defines parody as:
a literary or musical work in which the style of an author or work is closely imitated for comic effect or in ridicule..
It also defines satire as:
1 : a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn
2 : trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly
The difference, for me, between Spinal Tap and Walk Hard is that Spinal Tap is a satire of the then-dominant heavy metal/hard rock segment of rock music in the 1980’s, and Walk Hard is a parody of musical biographies. Spinal Tap shows a heavy metal band on the brink of extinction, with interal dissent, led by their slighty-smarter manager, through a North American tour in support of an album that few outside the band seem to want to hear. Gigs are cancelled or changed to smaller venues, the set list changes to older material, and the manager eventually leaves in favour of the lead singer’s girlfriend. Only a place on the Japanese charts and a subsequent tour keeps them together in the end. Throughout the movie, the music business is ridiculed by showing a rotating cast of record company personnel, promoters, radio, and retailers spark, mismanage, or barely survive mishap after mishap. The band’s personalities collide frequently, with large egos battered and bruised as they take 2nd place to a puppet show and end up at an Air Force dance. Spinal Tap is not a parody of anything else other than rock documentaries of life on the road, but as a satire it shows no mercy.
Walk Hard, on the other hand, mocks not the subject of the musical bios but the bios themselves. It mocks the plot and characters of Walk the Line most of the time, but breaks it up with parodies of Brian Wilson’s wall-of-sound 60’s burnout, Dylan’s wordplay, the Beatles’ trip to India, and even the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies. You could argue that Walk Hard holds up human vices and follies to ridicule (Dewey’s drug addictions, multiple wives and children, etc), but when the movie does so it is lifting something from Walk the Line and exaggerating it for comedic effect.
The poster itself parodies The Doors original poster and DVD artwork, but, alas, there is no walk in the desert for Dewey, nor do we get a chance to see him confront the rise and fall of disco, punk (aside from a drug-fuelled romp through his biggest hit), New Wave, hair metal, boy bands, etc., etc. A satire certainly would have done so, but the parody has to follow the path of its target, so we skip from the 70’s to the 90’s via a hilarious transition device that I’m not going to spoil here.
Parodies have returned with a vengeance the last few years (Epic Movie, Not Another Teen Movie, Scary Movie, etc., etc.), but there have been very few satires by comparison. Scream satirized the horror genre, and itself was parodied by Scary Movie. Walk Hard avoids the gag a minute frenzy of those movies (and the earlier parodies like Airplane! and the Naked Gun series). This, however, seemed to confuse some of the audience we were part of—a few walked hard for the exits, actually. Knowing the sources of parody helped, to be sure, but these people were not in the mood to sit and wait for the jokes.
There are some great comedic performances in Walk Hard. John C. Reilly, a great character actor in both dramas and comedies, proves he can carry a movie (and sing). Jenna Fischer is also great in this as the femme slightly-fatale, as is Tim Meadows as Dewey’s longtime drummer. The four men playing the Beatles steal their scene effortlessly, as does Jack White as a knife-packing young Elvis Presley.
Go see movie. It’s better than recent parodies, but it’s not on the level of a Spinal Tap.
Mullet and I saw Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story this weekend. It likely won’t stay in the theatres that long as it failed to make the top 10 box office list, which is sad.
The movie itself is a really good parody of the music-related bio-pics that have come out in recent years, particularly the Johnny Cash bio Walk the Line, along with a swipe or two at the Ray Charles bio Ray. Walk Hard also references Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson, as well as portraying The Beatles, Elvis, Buddy Holly, and the Big Bopper.
I thought about my favourite comedic music-related movie, This is Spinal Tap, afterwards, and I realized that there was something missing. Don’t get me wrong--Walk Hard is funny (the punk song, the Beatles, and the angel-dust freakout being my favourite scenes), but it wasn’t a great comedy like Spinal Tap is.
Webster’s online dictionary defines parody as:
a literary or musical work in which the style of an author or work is closely imitated for comic effect or in ridicule..
It also defines satire as:
1 : a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn
2 : trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly
The difference, for me, between Spinal Tap and Walk Hard is that Spinal Tap is a satire of the then-dominant heavy metal/hard rock segment of rock music in the 1980’s, and Walk Hard is a parody of musical biographies. Spinal Tap shows a heavy metal band on the brink of extinction, with interal dissent, led by their slighty-smarter manager, through a North American tour in support of an album that few outside the band seem to want to hear. Gigs are cancelled or changed to smaller venues, the set list changes to older material, and the manager eventually leaves in favour of the lead singer’s girlfriend. Only a place on the Japanese charts and a subsequent tour keeps them together in the end. Throughout the movie, the music business is ridiculed by showing a rotating cast of record company personnel, promoters, radio, and retailers spark, mismanage, or barely survive mishap after mishap. The band’s personalities collide frequently, with large egos battered and bruised as they take 2nd place to a puppet show and end up at an Air Force dance. Spinal Tap is not a parody of anything else other than rock documentaries of life on the road, but as a satire it shows no mercy.
Walk Hard, on the other hand, mocks not the subject of the musical bios but the bios themselves. It mocks the plot and characters of Walk the Line most of the time, but breaks it up with parodies of Brian Wilson’s wall-of-sound 60’s burnout, Dylan’s wordplay, the Beatles’ trip to India, and even the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies. You could argue that Walk Hard holds up human vices and follies to ridicule (Dewey’s drug addictions, multiple wives and children, etc), but when the movie does so it is lifting something from Walk the Line and exaggerating it for comedic effect.
The poster itself parodies The Doors original poster and DVD artwork, but, alas, there is no walk in the desert for Dewey, nor do we get a chance to see him confront the rise and fall of disco, punk (aside from a drug-fuelled romp through his biggest hit), New Wave, hair metal, boy bands, etc., etc. A satire certainly would have done so, but the parody has to follow the path of its target, so we skip from the 70’s to the 90’s via a hilarious transition device that I’m not going to spoil here.
Parodies have returned with a vengeance the last few years (Epic Movie, Not Another Teen Movie, Scary Movie, etc., etc.), but there have been very few satires by comparison. Scream satirized the horror genre, and itself was parodied by Scary Movie. Walk Hard avoids the gag a minute frenzy of those movies (and the earlier parodies like Airplane! and the Naked Gun series). This, however, seemed to confuse some of the audience we were part of—a few walked hard for the exits, actually. Knowing the sources of parody helped, to be sure, but these people were not in the mood to sit and wait for the jokes.
There are some great comedic performances in Walk Hard. John C. Reilly, a great character actor in both dramas and comedies, proves he can carry a movie (and sing). Jenna Fischer is also great in this as the femme slightly-fatale, as is Tim Meadows as Dewey’s longtime drummer. The four men playing the Beatles steal their scene effortlessly, as does Jack White as a knife-packing young Elvis Presley.
Go see movie. It’s better than recent parodies, but it’s not on the level of a Spinal Tap.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
End of Summer (almost) Roundup
OK, my biweekly promise has gone the way of Paris Hilton's dignity. I can't even remember what I wrote the last time, so I'm probably going to repeat myself from earlier posts here.
So here's an update on the Miller & Mullet DVD:
1. This week, Andrew Curriecopied the media and project files for Can onto my external hard drive. I now have his rough edit on my Final Cut timeline. The cut turned out really, really well. It's different from how we would have shot it on our own, which makes it a better short, I think. We've been doing a more theatrical style of shooting, and Andrew shot Can in a dynamic, visually interesting way. The cut he gave us is a rough edit, so the cuts have to trimmed for timing and any future sound effects added, but the overall shape is there. The current running time is 4 minutes, and I'd expect at least 30 seconds to come off that, if not more (depending on how much I play with speed).
2. We did all the interiors for Bags, the short formerly known as Dressing Room (finally found the one-derful, er, one word title we wanted). We shot the stage manager scenes with Alastair Forbes, a Theatresports colleague of Mullet's and an outstanding talent. Alastair graciously allowwed us to shoot in his home, so he gets two gold stars on his Miller & Mullet report card. A week later, we shot my interior pickups to replace my laryngitis-plagued original takes. Mullet directed me, and while I was batch-capturing the takes, a few things made me laugh out loud (which is rare becuaase I normally cpature stuff as soon as I get home from shooting, which means I'm watching something that was repeated ad nauseum all day and has lost all the funny by the time I watch the multiple takes of said something repeat itself on my camcorder). I still have to sit down and watch all the takes for the 3 shooting days before I even attempt to start cutting something together. Unlike Can, I'm too close to this to be excited about it --if the magic struck this production, too, I won't know until I play it for another person and see their reactions. The only remaining scene is an exterior with Alastair's character to wrap up the short, which we'll shoot when schedules permit.
3. I've dusted off our "boot camp" movie, Babysitters. We shot this from October 2001 to July 2002 and ended up wtih a 74-minute feature, all shot on a single-chip Canon Ultura. Insane? Yes. We went into it with the goal of putting something together that we could use as a calling card, but it was also meant to be our self-taught film school. We shot almost every Saturday, dragging friends Jeff, Kasia, and Nic out to help us shoot an episodic story about two babysitters (guess who?) who lose the baby they're supposed to care for --will theyy get the baby home? We ran a screening for cast and crew in 2002 and then put it quietly aside (after about a year's worth of post-producction). We plan on doing another screening this fall or in the winter for the cast, crew, and friends jsut so I can get it off my hard drives.
4. I'm re-editing a short we did in 2004, Stalls. Stalls was our first post-Babysitters project, so it has some similarities to it, such as a linear storytelling style and limited coverage. I've been working on it, on and off, since then, but we did have a cut that we submitted to the 2006 San Diego Comic-con film festival in conjunction with our entry into the small press section that year. The short didn't get in, so I've been tinkering iwth it since then. I'll likely turn a very linear story into a non-linear story. comparing Stalls to Babysitters, the first thing I notice now is that the writing improved greatly, as did the performances (especially mine --I was taking a directing class at Ryerson U when we shot it, and the Meisner technique had taken hold of my performing by then). but we cut out all the distractions and shaggy dog plotting that makes Babysitters a mess, and told a very linear story. But with us not shooting a lot of coverage, there's no room to change that linear story very much, so I'm going to break the plot up a bit with flashbacks to make it, hopefully, a less predictable and more lively short.
So that's where we stand --3 shorts in various stages of post, plus an old "feature" awaiting its final tweaking.
The NeutrinoPlex show ended in July, and I had withdrawal symptoms for a couple of Fridays afterwards. I think I benefitted from being part of the show, even if I wasn't actually shooting stuff myself. I was the cheif button pusher, running the intro and outro DVD clips, cueing up mini-DV tapes, and switching each scene. Three teams went out and shot 3 scenes each of a story, rushing the tapes back to the theatre, where we started playing them after about 20 minutes of videos or standup comedians. It was a high-wire act, with late tapes spelling disaster a few times, but otherwise, when the show worked, it was comedic gold with improvised scenes that made the most of what the performers could find and use on the bright lights of the Danforth. Each week, before the show, we'd watch the prior week's archive tape, and it would be the first time I'd really see the show without the distraction of loading and unloading tapes. I learned the value of closeups, making relationships between characters clear and distinct right from the start, and many other lessons that will come to me after I've posted this missive. I would say that the NeutrinoPlex cast and crew, plus the inestimable director, Andrew Currie, provided me with a course in no-budget, on the fly filmmaking that has freed me up from how I've thought out shots and cuts before. All for the price of dinner every other week! If and when they do the show again, I'd be glad to be asked back.
Alastair Forbes, the improviser I plugged earlier, asked us to help him out with some shorts he and Natalie Urquehart were putting together. Mullet's off for a while after some nasty dental work, so I volunteered. I was glad I did --the shoots were all fun and very easy-going. I did minimal prep for the 2 shorts, Spy Bum and Office Wizards, basically figuring out the style of shooting for both. For the Office Wizards short, I emulated the Office (UK version) with handheld camera, riding the zoom lever in and out to give it a documentary feel (I didn't hide behind office plants or anything like that --the emulation was a bit limited by geography). For Spy BUm, I watched the sole 007 tape I own, the George Lazenby Bond, On Her Majesty's HOlidays in the Sun. It had a very conventional '60's style, so I shot Spy Bum entirely on tripod, zooming only when needing to reframe (and practically panning on each zoom as well). Both shorts were a joy to shoot --the cast, all improvisers, worked out the beats with a few rehearsals, and then did the scene beautifully each time. Office Wizards was done from top to bottom each time, and with a master shot, 2-shots, closeups, and inserts, I think they did it about 20 times in total. Yet, with the skills of the improvisers at hand, they made minor variations work each time, and I am glad I'm not editing it as I don't think it will be easy to pick one take over another (aside from a few takes that did go south). With Spy Bum, the short was broken into several scenes, so it's much more of a bits 'n' pieces production. Again, the cast were amazing. My hope is that I managed to get that magic on tape so that Alastair can cut them into something wonderful.
So, now that the summer is rolling into Labour Day (the sound of summer ending in Toronto is the airshow at the CNE), I'm shifting into post. I also ahve to start writing more scripts for our winter shooting plans, which would likely be in January and February (interiors, naturally). And then there's the theme song we need to write and get someone to perform. More about that next time --hopefully in two weeks....
So here's an update on the Miller & Mullet DVD:
1. This week, Andrew Curriecopied the media and project files for Can onto my external hard drive. I now have his rough edit on my Final Cut timeline. The cut turned out really, really well. It's different from how we would have shot it on our own, which makes it a better short, I think. We've been doing a more theatrical style of shooting, and Andrew shot Can in a dynamic, visually interesting way. The cut he gave us is a rough edit, so the cuts have to trimmed for timing and any future sound effects added, but the overall shape is there. The current running time is 4 minutes, and I'd expect at least 30 seconds to come off that, if not more (depending on how much I play with speed).
2. We did all the interiors for Bags, the short formerly known as Dressing Room (finally found the one-derful, er, one word title we wanted). We shot the stage manager scenes with Alastair Forbes, a Theatresports colleague of Mullet's and an outstanding talent. Alastair graciously allowwed us to shoot in his home, so he gets two gold stars on his Miller & Mullet report card. A week later, we shot my interior pickups to replace my laryngitis-plagued original takes. Mullet directed me, and while I was batch-capturing the takes, a few things made me laugh out loud (which is rare becuaase I normally cpature stuff as soon as I get home from shooting, which means I'm watching something that was repeated ad nauseum all day and has lost all the funny by the time I watch the multiple takes of said something repeat itself on my camcorder). I still have to sit down and watch all the takes for the 3 shooting days before I even attempt to start cutting something together. Unlike Can, I'm too close to this to be excited about it --if the magic struck this production, too, I won't know until I play it for another person and see their reactions. The only remaining scene is an exterior with Alastair's character to wrap up the short, which we'll shoot when schedules permit.
3. I've dusted off our "boot camp" movie, Babysitters. We shot this from October 2001 to July 2002 and ended up wtih a 74-minute feature, all shot on a single-chip Canon Ultura. Insane? Yes. We went into it with the goal of putting something together that we could use as a calling card, but it was also meant to be our self-taught film school. We shot almost every Saturday, dragging friends Jeff, Kasia, and Nic out to help us shoot an episodic story about two babysitters (guess who?) who lose the baby they're supposed to care for --will theyy get the baby home? We ran a screening for cast and crew in 2002 and then put it quietly aside (after about a year's worth of post-producction). We plan on doing another screening this fall or in the winter for the cast, crew, and friends jsut so I can get it off my hard drives.
4. I'm re-editing a short we did in 2004, Stalls. Stalls was our first post-Babysitters project, so it has some similarities to it, such as a linear storytelling style and limited coverage. I've been working on it, on and off, since then, but we did have a cut that we submitted to the 2006 San Diego Comic-con film festival in conjunction with our entry into the small press section that year. The short didn't get in, so I've been tinkering iwth it since then. I'll likely turn a very linear story into a non-linear story. comparing Stalls to Babysitters, the first thing I notice now is that the writing improved greatly, as did the performances (especially mine --I was taking a directing class at Ryerson U when we shot it, and the Meisner technique had taken hold of my performing by then). but we cut out all the distractions and shaggy dog plotting that makes Babysitters a mess, and told a very linear story. But with us not shooting a lot of coverage, there's no room to change that linear story very much, so I'm going to break the plot up a bit with flashbacks to make it, hopefully, a less predictable and more lively short.
So that's where we stand --3 shorts in various stages of post, plus an old "feature" awaiting its final tweaking.
The NeutrinoPlex show ended in July, and I had withdrawal symptoms for a couple of Fridays afterwards. I think I benefitted from being part of the show, even if I wasn't actually shooting stuff myself. I was the cheif button pusher, running the intro and outro DVD clips, cueing up mini-DV tapes, and switching each scene. Three teams went out and shot 3 scenes each of a story, rushing the tapes back to the theatre, where we started playing them after about 20 minutes of videos or standup comedians. It was a high-wire act, with late tapes spelling disaster a few times, but otherwise, when the show worked, it was comedic gold with improvised scenes that made the most of what the performers could find and use on the bright lights of the Danforth. Each week, before the show, we'd watch the prior week's archive tape, and it would be the first time I'd really see the show without the distraction of loading and unloading tapes. I learned the value of closeups, making relationships between characters clear and distinct right from the start, and many other lessons that will come to me after I've posted this missive. I would say that the NeutrinoPlex cast and crew, plus the inestimable director, Andrew Currie, provided me with a course in no-budget, on the fly filmmaking that has freed me up from how I've thought out shots and cuts before. All for the price of dinner every other week! If and when they do the show again, I'd be glad to be asked back.
Alastair Forbes, the improviser I plugged earlier, asked us to help him out with some shorts he and Natalie Urquehart were putting together. Mullet's off for a while after some nasty dental work, so I volunteered. I was glad I did --the shoots were all fun and very easy-going. I did minimal prep for the 2 shorts, Spy Bum and Office Wizards, basically figuring out the style of shooting for both. For the Office Wizards short, I emulated the Office (UK version) with handheld camera, riding the zoom lever in and out to give it a documentary feel (I didn't hide behind office plants or anything like that --the emulation was a bit limited by geography). For Spy BUm, I watched the sole 007 tape I own, the George Lazenby Bond, On Her Majesty's HOlidays in the Sun. It had a very conventional '60's style, so I shot Spy Bum entirely on tripod, zooming only when needing to reframe (and practically panning on each zoom as well). Both shorts were a joy to shoot --the cast, all improvisers, worked out the beats with a few rehearsals, and then did the scene beautifully each time. Office Wizards was done from top to bottom each time, and with a master shot, 2-shots, closeups, and inserts, I think they did it about 20 times in total. Yet, with the skills of the improvisers at hand, they made minor variations work each time, and I am glad I'm not editing it as I don't think it will be easy to pick one take over another (aside from a few takes that did go south). With Spy Bum, the short was broken into several scenes, so it's much more of a bits 'n' pieces production. Again, the cast were amazing. My hope is that I managed to get that magic on tape so that Alastair can cut them into something wonderful.
So, now that the summer is rolling into Labour Day (the sound of summer ending in Toronto is the airshow at the CNE), I'm shifting into post. I also ahve to start writing more scripts for our winter shooting plans, which would likely be in January and February (interiors, naturally). And then there's the theme song we need to write and get someone to perform. More about that next time --hopefully in two weeks....
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Finally something in the can!
We finally have something in the can!
After all these months of moaning about preproduction and rewriting, we actually went out with camcorder and director in hand and shot stuff.
This past Saturday (May 12), Mullet and I were joined by Andrew Currie, esteemed grad of the Second City mainstage company, one half of the Devil's Advocates, blogger extraordinaire, and producer of the late Second Cine video show which played a couple of videos we did. AC is also a graduate of the Canadian Film Centre, so he actually knows what he's doing.
This was our first experience with a pro, and it was a good learning experience for us.
We shot it on location on a side street one block north of Queen West, between Spadina and University. Behind the Rivoli, really. In fact, we used their garbage cans for a few shots, much to the dismay of some tired-looking cooks and a bemused manager. The street had these great alleys and laneways, strewn with garbage, brilliant and mundane graffiti, and that big city grunge that can't be craeted by art directors (unless they have a lot of money or use the real thing...).
AC wanted to work chronologically as he was basically editing in camera with minimal coverage. He didn't need the slate as he'll be editing it himself, but I did grey-card the first tape just to make sure I can get colour-balance done later on. I brought along my usual continuity log sheets, but they weren't needed, either. This was one difference between how AC shoots and how we did it, but with a 5-page script, I guess the usual slate/log stuff is probably borderline overkill. We have shot stuff without logging it or slating it, like our Aristocrats DVD contest entry which was 5 takes of the same story with 2 cameras, so I only changed the take number on the slate to mark the start and end of each take.
We did a number of takes for each set up until he got one good one and one safety in the can. This is basically what we do, so this was nothing new --though he did apologize when making us do another take when hunched over or fumbling through garbage (not necessary --we've made ourselves do a lot worse for a lot more takes...). With the lines being minimal and me not having to do more than perform, I was more focussed on the performing than I usually am, so I believe I sucked less than usual.
Mullet was good, too,
After all these months of moaning about preproduction and rewriting, we actually went out with camcorder and director in hand and shot stuff.
This past Saturday (May 12), Mullet and I were joined by Andrew Currie, esteemed grad of the Second City mainstage company, one half of the Devil's Advocates, blogger extraordinaire, and producer of the late Second Cine video show which played a couple of videos we did. AC is also a graduate of the Canadian Film Centre, so he actually knows what he's doing.
This was our first experience with a pro, and it was a good learning experience for us.
We shot it on location on a side street one block north of Queen West, between Spadina and University. Behind the Rivoli, really. In fact, we used their garbage cans for a few shots, much to the dismay of some tired-looking cooks and a bemused manager. The street had these great alleys and laneways, strewn with garbage, brilliant and mundane graffiti, and that big city grunge that can't be craeted by art directors (unless they have a lot of money or use the real thing...).
AC wanted to work chronologically as he was basically editing in camera with minimal coverage. He didn't need the slate as he'll be editing it himself, but I did grey-card the first tape just to make sure I can get colour-balance done later on. I brought along my usual continuity log sheets, but they weren't needed, either. This was one difference between how AC shoots and how we did it, but with a 5-page script, I guess the usual slate/log stuff is probably borderline overkill. We have shot stuff without logging it or slating it, like our Aristocrats DVD contest entry which was 5 takes of the same story with 2 cameras, so I only changed the take number on the slate to mark the start and end of each take.
We did a number of takes for each set up until he got one good one and one safety in the can. This is basically what we do, so this was nothing new --though he did apologize when making us do another take when hunched over or fumbling through garbage (not necessary --we've made ourselves do a lot worse for a lot more takes...). With the lines being minimal and me not having to do more than perform, I was more focussed on the performing than I usually am, so I believe I sucked less than usual.
Mullet was good, too,
Thursday, March 1, 2007
A brand new blog
Hello! Welcome to my blog. I've futsed around with a blog at Myspace , but I've decided to chronicle the making of the first Miller & Mullet live-action DVD. Since the internet is full of all sorts of weird and wacky stuff, I thought I'd contribute with my own rantings.
Who am I? I am half of Miller & Mullet, a comedy duo based in Toronto, Canada.
So far, we've shot a 74-minute "boot camp" video, shot a 5-minute short, completed issue 1 of a comic book (with the help of a great artist named Kameron Gates), and took the comic book to the 2006 San Diego Comic-Con. Now, we're turning our attention to both issue 2 of the comic book and a self-published live-action DVD, with a return to San Diego (assuming they'll have us back...).
At this point, the project is basically a dozen first-draft scripts, most of which I've abandoned and will not polish into second drafts. In 2005, when I started writing scripts, we were aiming at filling a broadcast half-hour (22 minutes in Canada, I think 20 minutes in the U.S.) with a no-budget pilot for a sketch show starring... Miller & Mullet. The plan was to shoot 3-4 sketches and edit them down into a cohesive show. But before we started shooting, we met industry people in Toronto who told us the half-hour wasn't necessary --just concentrate on 5-minute shorts. People in San Diego told us the same thing, so our 2007 plan is to do a DVD with 4-5 5-minute shorts. The 10-20 page scripts have gone back into the trunk, and now I'm working on making the magic happen on less than 6 pages.
I started brainstorming ideas last August, writing stuff into a notebook I started carrying with me all the time (or my trusty Palm if I'm going where no backpack has gone before). Stories began to appear in my head, and I dutifully put them down on paper where most of them died quick, painless deaths (the cold light of the written word tends to spike the weaker ideas quickly, I think).
Then I got writer's block. Back when I was in college, I wrote for about 2 hours a day, making great leaps forward in my writing. I lost that daily exercise, so now I've had to work hard at getting back to an hour session 2-3 days per week. The goal is to get back to an hour a day, 7 days a week. I'm not there yet....
I've found the writing process liberating and frustrating in equal amounts. You don't have a lot of time to play with, so the diversions we're so fond of doing with the characters have gone by the wayside. There's not a lot of room for other characters, either, so the end result is the stories have to be more direct than they have been in the past. But I find that it takes me 3 pages just to set up the situation, so once I've written out the script in a rough first draft, I go back and trim the beginning down.
In the next week or so, aside from brainstorming new ideas and getting them down on paper, I'm going over the stuff I've already shown Mullet and pickign them apart to make sure I can't do things better. Checking for internal logic, making sure the writing beats are set up properly, trying to find a better setup for gags, trying to find better payoffs for gags --that's how I'll be spending my weeknights, TV be damned.
Our budget for these shorts is pretty low, probably in the $100 (Canadian) range for each production day (1 short per day is our goal), so I can't include exteriors we can't use for free or include too many characters as we'd have to feed them.
For inspiration, I've been watching the shorts I have on tape and DVD at home, like Laurel & Hardy, W.C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, etc. --mostly to see how they economized on the story and character development to fit one or two reels. These were the people and shorts that inspired me to get into comedy. They had a much better budget than we can scrounge up, but when I watch them, I'm paying more attention to how they're telling the story.
I've got a collection of shorts from the late, great Second Cine, a show that Andrew Currie ran at Second City Toronto a few years back. When the show ended, Andrew brought in a big collection of submission tapes which were eagerly grabbed as potential dubbing tapes. I haven't erased any of them, and with the mix of good and bad, I've watched a few to see what I like and don't like. My favourite shorts from Second Cine were those from HotdogBoy.
And there's Channel 101 and 102, which I visit every month to see what the L.A. and NYC videoheads are doing. I've spun 101 alumnus David Hartman's DVD a few times this week, too, just to marvel at his freaky and violent little opuses (opi?) --will I ever have excellent gun flashes like he does? I have saved a lot of favourite 101 and 102 videos to my hard drive just to watch whenever the mood strikes me. Originally, I saved just my favourites, but about a year ago, I started saving all of them, even the rejected pilots. Some I can't sit through, others have that magic to them.
It's good to study the good with the bad. I paid money to see Dude Where's My Car 2 weekends in a row (at the gone but not forgotten Eaton Centre cinemas, which cost all of $5, making the study of bad comedies cheap). I think I learn more from my own mistakes than when I succeed, and other people's mistakes are a great help, too.
We're prepping for a live appearance at the 2007 Ad Astra con here in Toronto (30-minute show to fill time before the Masquerade starts), so I've put the scriptwriting aside this week.
I think I need 4-5 new stories to add to the 7 I've already done first drafts for. Of the scripts I've done so far, "Can" is my favourite and the first one I've shown to anyone other than Mullet. Another script was actually a clone of "Can," so I've discarded it after I realized what I'd done.
So, after the Ad Astra show, it's back to finding new stories to write. Mullet is slaving away on the script for issue 2 of the comic book, so he's my sounding board rather than writing partner for the next few weeks.
It's still too cold and crappy outside to do any exteriors, so I have about a month to work on the scripts before we have to start the more commitment-heavy parts of preproduction: crew, casting, scheduling.
Keep writing,
Ed
Who am I? I am half of Miller & Mullet, a comedy duo based in Toronto, Canada.
So far, we've shot a 74-minute "boot camp" video, shot a 5-minute short, completed issue 1 of a comic book (with the help of a great artist named Kameron Gates), and took the comic book to the 2006 San Diego Comic-Con. Now, we're turning our attention to both issue 2 of the comic book and a self-published live-action DVD, with a return to San Diego (assuming they'll have us back...).
At this point, the project is basically a dozen first-draft scripts, most of which I've abandoned and will not polish into second drafts. In 2005, when I started writing scripts, we were aiming at filling a broadcast half-hour (22 minutes in Canada, I think 20 minutes in the U.S.) with a no-budget pilot for a sketch show starring... Miller & Mullet. The plan was to shoot 3-4 sketches and edit them down into a cohesive show. But before we started shooting, we met industry people in Toronto who told us the half-hour wasn't necessary --just concentrate on 5-minute shorts. People in San Diego told us the same thing, so our 2007 plan is to do a DVD with 4-5 5-minute shorts. The 10-20 page scripts have gone back into the trunk, and now I'm working on making the magic happen on less than 6 pages.
I started brainstorming ideas last August, writing stuff into a notebook I started carrying with me all the time (or my trusty Palm if I'm going where no backpack has gone before). Stories began to appear in my head, and I dutifully put them down on paper where most of them died quick, painless deaths (the cold light of the written word tends to spike the weaker ideas quickly, I think).
Then I got writer's block. Back when I was in college, I wrote for about 2 hours a day, making great leaps forward in my writing. I lost that daily exercise, so now I've had to work hard at getting back to an hour session 2-3 days per week. The goal is to get back to an hour a day, 7 days a week. I'm not there yet....
I've found the writing process liberating and frustrating in equal amounts. You don't have a lot of time to play with, so the diversions we're so fond of doing with the characters have gone by the wayside. There's not a lot of room for other characters, either, so the end result is the stories have to be more direct than they have been in the past. But I find that it takes me 3 pages just to set up the situation, so once I've written out the script in a rough first draft, I go back and trim the beginning down.
In the next week or so, aside from brainstorming new ideas and getting them down on paper, I'm going over the stuff I've already shown Mullet and pickign them apart to make sure I can't do things better. Checking for internal logic, making sure the writing beats are set up properly, trying to find a better setup for gags, trying to find better payoffs for gags --that's how I'll be spending my weeknights, TV be damned.
Our budget for these shorts is pretty low, probably in the $100 (Canadian) range for each production day (1 short per day is our goal), so I can't include exteriors we can't use for free or include too many characters as we'd have to feed them.
For inspiration, I've been watching the shorts I have on tape and DVD at home, like Laurel & Hardy, W.C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, etc. --mostly to see how they economized on the story and character development to fit one or two reels. These were the people and shorts that inspired me to get into comedy. They had a much better budget than we can scrounge up, but when I watch them, I'm paying more attention to how they're telling the story.
I've got a collection of shorts from the late, great Second Cine, a show that Andrew Currie ran at Second City Toronto a few years back. When the show ended, Andrew brought in a big collection of submission tapes which were eagerly grabbed as potential dubbing tapes. I haven't erased any of them, and with the mix of good and bad, I've watched a few to see what I like and don't like. My favourite shorts from Second Cine were those from HotdogBoy.
And there's Channel 101 and 102, which I visit every month to see what the L.A. and NYC videoheads are doing. I've spun 101 alumnus David Hartman's DVD a few times this week, too, just to marvel at his freaky and violent little opuses (opi?) --will I ever have excellent gun flashes like he does? I have saved a lot of favourite 101 and 102 videos to my hard drive just to watch whenever the mood strikes me. Originally, I saved just my favourites, but about a year ago, I started saving all of them, even the rejected pilots. Some I can't sit through, others have that magic to them.
It's good to study the good with the bad. I paid money to see Dude Where's My Car 2 weekends in a row (at the gone but not forgotten Eaton Centre cinemas, which cost all of $5, making the study of bad comedies cheap). I think I learn more from my own mistakes than when I succeed, and other people's mistakes are a great help, too.
We're prepping for a live appearance at the 2007 Ad Astra con here in Toronto (30-minute show to fill time before the Masquerade starts), so I've put the scriptwriting aside this week.
I think I need 4-5 new stories to add to the 7 I've already done first drafts for. Of the scripts I've done so far, "Can" is my favourite and the first one I've shown to anyone other than Mullet. Another script was actually a clone of "Can," so I've discarded it after I realized what I'd done.
So, after the Ad Astra show, it's back to finding new stories to write. Mullet is slaving away on the script for issue 2 of the comic book, so he's my sounding board rather than writing partner for the next few weeks.
It's still too cold and crappy outside to do any exteriors, so I have about a month to work on the scripts before we have to start the more commitment-heavy parts of preproduction: crew, casting, scheduling.
Keep writing,
Ed
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