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My Wasted Life - February 5th, 2006:

Xmas and Making Movies...

Well Xmas and the New Year took up a bit of space, as they always do. This past Xmas was the complete opposite of the one before… i.e. it didn’t rain every day from November thru March – and boy how much nicer has it been this year because of that… loads better.
So we had a rain free Xmas and then January disappeared beneath a little movie that I worked on. It’s the third movie since last summer… kinda nice to be working regularly… but… life’s very much like a journey up a pair of legs… don’t matter whose legs you pick… when you get to the top there’s always a but.
I’d promised myself several years ago that I wouldn’t work as an A.D. any more. It’s not that I don’t like it… let’s face it, doing anything on a movie is better than doing anything elsewhere… thing is, as the A.D. your day consists of standing on your feet and cajoling people to work as hard as they can. Thing is, when you get a little bit older the idea of standing on your feet all day isn’t as appealing as it once used to be… but like I said… working on movies is better than anything else (with the possible exception of playing rock ‘n’ roll) so I’ll take it if it’s on offer… and I did.
Thing is… out of the three movies, the budgets got lower and lower and lower… and the first one didn’t exactly set any records for the highest budget movie of all time… so I’m kinda worried for the next movie if this trend continues as I’ll probably end up paying them!

But despite being the lowest budgeted movie of my career, we got it done. We always get it done.
Sometimes it’s pretty, oft times it’s not very pretty… but we get it done.

Sometimes getting it done doesn’t always seem like the best or wisest way to proceed. You see… if someone gives you a budget or a set of circumstances that are clearly inadequate for the job in hand then the professional side of your nature wants to see it thru… wants to get it done because you want to prove that no matter what gets thrown at you… you can make it happen.
But then there’s always that part of you which feels, wait a minute… this is not the best way to make a movie, there’s not enough money, the personnel aren’t right, the situation just isn’t conducive to making the best movie possible… but if you do the job, get it done, deliver it in the time and within the budget you’ve been given then you always go to sleep and secretly worry whether you’re doing yourself and fellow professionals a disservice cos how can you then convince the people who put you in that position to give you a better set of circumstances the next time out?

It’s not the world’s greatest professional dilemma… but you know… this is Hollywood… or at least the low-budget end of it that I'm currently inhabiting.

Mo' Movies...

Movies have been worrying me of late as well… I used to there being lean times when there’s just nothing about that makes you want to expend the energy and make a trip to the movie theatre… but the dearth of things worth seeing is really getting beyond a joke.
And sitting in the movie theatre the other day watching ‘Hostel’ – which is by turns very dull and very squirm inducing – things on display during the preview section didn’t make me feel any less worried about my movie going future. And on telly as we speak.. ’16 Blocks’ is it just me or does it look like a very truncated version of ‘The Gauntlet’?

Preview Time

Anyway… back to preview time… is this whole female kick ass leading lady thing getting a little old?
Now don’t get me wrong, I been a champion of female leads in movies since as long as I can remember… and no, I’m not necessarily advocating a return to the meathead days of the 80’s when Stallone and Norris et al were running the show… and maybe this is all the fault of Mila Jovavovavich as it was the preview for… shit, can’t even remember the movie – that’s how dull it looked…
Maybe the fact that she’s been in a list of shitty movies, ‘Fifth Element’ and the whole ‘Resident Evil’ debacle… and this one looked just the same… I mean, the whole tag line is just insulting… Mila intones something on the lines of… ‘my name is… blah blah… I live in a world you couldn’t understand’… oh yeah missy? Let’s give it a try shall we?
Ummm… how about this … totalitarian government… fighting for your survival… not only do I completely understand it… I’ve seen it a million times and could probably think of something more exciting in my sleep (question is… why don’t I then?)
She’s a robot… part of a military experiment that goes wrong and then the robots have to be destroyed so she and her colleagues have to fight to save them… zzzzzzzzzzzz...

WAKE ME UP!!!!

See… same plot as every other one… it could just as easily have been ‘Aeon Flux’ or some other female superhero shit. That no one wanted to see…
Watching this preview I can’t have been the only one feeling that maybe we should leave the ass-kicking to the guys… How long before we get the full backlash and go back to the gun-toting, stripped to the waist ‘Invasion USA’ type movies?
Watch this space.

Superbowl Sunday

It’s Superbowl Sunday and I just remembered… they spend a shitload of money of commercials to play during the Superbowl… so what have we had served up with 4:14 to go in the 1st quarter? Burger King have actually started making fun of their ‘freaky king’ mascot that still weirds me out whenever I see him and I still won’t be eating anything from the UK owned restaurant chain until they retire him. Well they came up with a huge budget Busby Berkeley musical number about making a burger… thumbs down.

Having watched the commercial laden ‘Grizzly Man’ on Discovery Channel a couple of times – it took a couple of times cos there’s so many commercials (at one point ad breaks were three minutes apart) that you just can’t concentrate on the movie… well they just had a Budweiser Select commercial that features a blonde guy who looks weirdly like the poor Treadwell character being terrorized by a bear – coinky-dink?

Fed-Ex spend zillions on a caveman epic that’s mildly amusing…

Pepsi – shit drink, shit campaigns… Diddy making a record with a can of Diet Pepsi… totally uninspiring as was Jackie Chan making a movie with a can of diet Pepsi… but then considering the movies Chan’s made recently and some of the co-stars he’s been saddled with, perhaps this one isn’t such a bad idea.

The Budweiser ‘magic fridge’ commercial has been the best so far and is actually the first time in a good couple of years that Budweiser have come up with a half decent commercial… maybe their creative rot is over… but the ‘hiding Bud in the office’ commercial makes you think that this might just be a blip….