Staring into the grim face of a blank page labeled "Draft 5" made my weekend into a marathon of profane self-abuse. Axe and I have entered into making the Panda Girls comic a real live boy, with expediency.

We spent a lot of nights in coffee shops, and a lot of mornings in front of hot word processors, trying to figure out the PG Story. In the end we ventured down a road that was far too long, and far too dangerous for what our original intent had been. and coming back to it some two years down the road, we have a very different view of things. We just want to make a comic with a simple, cool story. Oh, and we want hot chicks draped all over everything.

Hot chicks sell, if you've been asleep for 70,000 years and hadn't noticed.

And yet, here I am writing draft after draft of the comic treatment. I wonder at times whether we're over complicating things again, but then I find myself thinking of the clarity of our "simple" story. The fact remains that simplicity, and elegence, are the hardest fruit to cultivate. So I go on with my drafts, trying to shed the wasteful, unnecessary exposition, to align the characters with their intended meanings, and still have hot chicks draped over everything.

This time we aren't going to stumble over our own ignorance and misspent passion. We need to produce our comic. So I glare down the sight lines, and sharpen my pencil. And I look for draft 6 on the horizon of a better tomorrow.

Dear Drunk Assholes,

    Good Day! It’s been nearly a year since you were hanging around outside my house, making life miserable for me. I can’t tell you how much I've missed you, and wondered for the past 355 days what you were up to, and how your family is doing.

    I appreciate you keeping me up to date. However, I do not appreciate the manner in which you keep me up to date. It’s funny, because I could swear we had this conversation last year, and ever year since I moved into this condo. While I want to know all the great news about Troy’s girlfriend blowing another dude in the bathroom of an all-night breakfast spot, or how shit-faced you were last night ( a story that contains few fresh twists, but is told with startling gusto), I find it strange that you’re compelled to tell me at 2 A.M.

    2 A.M. outside my bedroom window no less. Now, Drunk Assholes, we’ve been colleagues, and dare I say it “mortal enemies”, for a long time now... I feel we can be frank with each other.  You’re kind of pathetic.

    Please, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that your choice in life to be Drunk and an Asshole constantly throughout the Stampede is pathetic; I applaud your continued efforts. What I mean is that your drunken antics are mediocre. You’re standing outside, yelling at your friends, talking on a cell phone, and recounting lurid and sad stories to other drunken assholes. Your average work output will decline by nearly half, and within the next month you’ll need to have a large cluster of venereal warts savagely roasted off your cock with liquid nitrogen.

Is that really the best you can do?

    You know, Drunken Assholes, about a week before the Fireworks went off down at the grounds, signaling your perennial orgy of stale draft-beer in plastic cups, and festering, syphilis engorged tongue bathing of skirtless trollops, the genuine street people were keeping it real on my block.
    The Monday night before Stampede the friend of someone living in my building got blind drunk, punched his way through the glass of my building’s front door, covered the foyer’s walls, floors, and doors in blood, and then broke the elevator before escaping unseen.

    This person is Pro.

    That’s what i’m saying to you, Drunken Assholes. In the halcyon days of my youth, I probably would have been angry at you for making noise outside my place, but those days are long gone. I don’t care about the noise, so long as it signals the commencement of true, wholesale slaughter. You have to understand, I’ve lived downtown too long. I don’t shy away from the unbridled lunacy that runs wild here. Not anymore.

    I crave it.

    There are no words to describe the joy i feel when I have to go outside to move my car, even if it’s only down the block. I know at any moment that I could get savagely knifed; I live on it. It’s like i’m doing cocaine 24 hours a day. I have a nine inch para-trooper knife hidden in the folds of my jeans, just waiting for that moment to shine. I want to see a gun-wielding, blind drunk, crack-head with blood pouring out of his eyes, hand me my morning paper. I want my Mailman to be a ravenously hungry, cannibalistic proto-human, with no skin and a massive frontal lobe that can process the smell of my sweat from nine blocks away. I want to start my car every morning by sliding across the hood, and barely managing to get the lock closed, so that the army of sun-defying vampires can’t get a hold of me, and turn me into one of their undead legion.

    I’m angry at you because you disturb the dream, Drunken Assholes. You have the hoof prints of the Unspeakable Dream that awaits me every time I slap my deadbolt open, but you never deliver. Go home, drink some drain cleaner, maybe watch some snuff footage on the internet, take notes. Do better.
 

I’m waiting,

Crom

Hot Tub Time Machine is a dumb movie. This idea must preface everything else I say about it. Dumb. Not good.

But it does have some funny juice floating around in it. I think a lot of that can be attributed to the actors. The film attempts to leverage the stupidity of the premise in order to spread its wings, but it doesn't quite make the nut.

It's a tricky game; being so stupid that you flip the script and come back as funny. There aren't that many movies that pull it off in my opinion. Even the films that are specifically attempting to be absurd (the Scary Movie franchise for instance) are usually caught up in the mockery of their subject, and lack any kind of real story. Now some people may say that lacking a story is inherent to the very films that are being made fun of, but as the saying goes "being wrong sarcastically, doesn't make you right".

Here's the problem: films that attempt this trick spend their screen time adorned with the shell of their mockery; they wear the mask of their subject, often for comic effect. But they never carve out their own indentity. Here are two movies to compare against each other:

Spaceballs vs. Date Movie.

Date Movie is terrible, and often pursues jokes about other romantic comedies, to the detriment of whatever is happening within its own story. There are buttons on scenes, or entire scenes, that have no value in the story, and are instead self-indulgent tangents giving the film makers the opportunity to personally make fun of something they find foolish. They are attempting to mock something through a mechanism that transforms their own film into the same trite shit they are mocking.

Then there's Spaceballs. It's playing the same game, and occasionally falls victim to the same problem (the whole beaming scene for instance, it was completely unnecessary), but the story within the film has a specific identity. It may be ridiculous, but that's the whole point of these movies. Absurdity. However on the cosmic scale, Spaceballs makes a point of combining the concepts that drive the story forward, with the ridiculous ball-melting scenes. Even if sometimes tenuously.

What does all that have to do with Hot Tub Time Machine? Well, it tips the scale more towards the Date Movie side. But some of the dialogue and character movements are funny, and heartfelt (Rob Corddry actually made me think "yeah, friends do fucking stick together), but the film spends too much time jerking itself off. It seemed like the film makers themselves felt that the story was thin, and when you have to move over thin ice, you move fast so as not to drown. But the film could have been smarter, could have been deeper, while maintaining the hijinx.... which in fact would have EARNED them the hijinx.

Earn your shit guys. All it takes is the commitment.

"Check out this youtube clip".

Those are Gord's words in the email I was reading. Not always a safe bet when someone uses those words. But I'm a sucker, and I watched it.

The clip is an interesting study, not only for the opportunity to appreciate when a Director makes a smart call regarding the tone and treatment of a scene, but also further evidence that George Lucas is shitty at what he supposedly does. Now when I first watched it, I was ready to burn Lucas for writing such a shit scene, but it turns out that we have to point the steely gaze of Arm-Chair Quaterbacking at Lawrence Kasdan for this one. Still, the sticky fingered assness of Lucas can be clearly divined.

I replied to Gord, telling him that it WAS an interesting clip (he was worried about being an inane doucher, which is a serious crime these days), and it was most especially interesting to see how the principles of aesthetic framing were coming into play.

This is a problem that Axe and I have grappled with on many occasions. And I wouldn't be surprised to learn the same of almost anybody writing ANYTHING these days. There is a balancing act happening during any writing process, and that balance is: how much do we give the audience? We don't want to stuff the point of the scene/act/story down their throat; we want to create a subtle, succulent creation that they will jam down their own throats.

Audiences look at Harrison Ford's hip improvisation during the Carbon Freezing scene in Empire Strikes Back, in which he replies to Leia's "I love you" with a chillass-badmotherfucker-rogue reply of "I know", and we just think he's being a cool S.O.B. But after the chips are down, and we look at the big picture, we can see that it wasn't just a question of Han being a stone cold gun fighter in a situation gone south. The character of Han would almost NEVER say "i love you" straight up. Ever. No matter the situation. It would be completely A-typical.

It also creates business. Not selling lunch boxes, I mean emotional business on screen. When Han holds back, and drops his Superfly response, the audience is given mental business to perform, in which they come to their own conclusion about Han, and his feelings. It's a small secret that everybody knows, but by holding it back, we've made it part of the contract between creator and witness.

Axe, while we yammered at each other about this, put it this way: "Holding back is a component of creating the aesthetic frame; we're building the stage for the sub-text to play out on. Without sub-text, without holding back, without creating the frame, we wouldn't be making a play. It would just be matter of fact". I'm paraphrasing, because I can't remember exactly on he put it, but that's the jist. We'll probably end up debating this for several hours now that I've misquoted him.

Awesome.

At any rate, the point that i'm trying to make, is to compare this decision by Kershner, a seasoned director, who took this moment as it was crafted by Lucas and Kasdan, and realized that it needed to be different. It needed something different from what was on the page, because the page was just telling us the story, rather than showing us a story. Sound familiar? It's the #1 complaint of the new Star Wars films. In the new films, there's almost no sub-text, and the characters act irrationally, and contradict their own nature. The fact is, Lucas had the juice to do it however he wanted, and there was no Kershner, or any other directorial body, around to stop this dumb shit from happening. Lucas needed to stop telling us everything a character was feeling, especially the stupid parts.

Shut UP. Hold it Back.