The MacGuffin

When thinking of the original 1985 film Fright Night, the first thing that comes to mind is Chris Sarandon, as the film’s antagonist Jerry Dandrige, standing at the top of his staircase mocking the late night monster show host Peter Vincent. “Welcome to Fright Night.” He says it with a jovial over-the-top manner that as a kid seemed terrifying, but as an adult comes off quite hilariously. Either way, I still think that film is a great example of the heyday horror films had in the mid ’70s to mid ’80s. It’s also a fine example of how to have fun being scared. For a while now, it seems horror films have lost sight of some of the aspects that made them box office giants in the past, such as the ability to enjoy being terrified for an hour and a half. I feel with Craig Gillespie’s remake we may see, in part, the way for horror films to return to that audience-respected stature.

Dark comedies are a fickle bunch. I can imagine this statement is just as true for filmmakers as it is for audiences. There’s a fine line that must be maintained between danger and humor, and as humor is a defense mechanism, it would seem that the two would be ripe for the plucking. Unfortunately, this balance seems to be lost more than it is obtained, especially in films as of recent. I think this problem stems from several issues: 1) what is considered dangerous is in a precarious place at this moment in time. The world has changed. In the past what was considered absurd is now a reality (I’ll get back to this in a moment), and this has led to 2) what is considered risqué is more often than not simply being raunchy these days. Since filmmakers and audiences are confused on what kind of topics are acceptable to approach when it comes to violence, they are turning to humor about sex, something more of us can probably relate to.

King of Marvin Gardens

Around Christmas time last year, I picked up a copy of the Criterion Collection’s box set “America Lost and Found: The BBS Story.” It wasn’t until just a couple weeks ago that I finally sat down and watched King of Marvin Gardens, starring Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Ellen Burstyn, and Julia Anne Robinson. Directed by Bob Rafelson, who was coming off the critical success of Five Easy Pieces, King of Marvin Gardens takes a different look at the male psyche in modern America. The story centers around two brothers (Nicholson and Dern) and the nature of their relationship.

Many more intelligent people than I have already summarized life as a series of dueling, chaotic and organized events. John Lennon said, life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. Roberto Begnini’s character Bob, in Jim Jarmusch’s 1985 film Down by Law, makes the observation tha it’s a sad and beautiful world. The phrase leaves an impact on the co-star Tom Waits’s character, Zach, who begins singing the phrase in a drunken soliloquy. My point is, life happens. And life has certainly happened in my reality recently. Leaving me little time for the movie watching I prefer to do. However, as the opportunity has afforded it, I’ve been able to sneak in a film or two here and there. While I have not been to the theaters since I saw Fast Five for the MacGuffin, I have been able to slide in the occasional DVD, and a Blu-ray or two.

In 2001, the original The Fast and The Furious film started a storyline involving an undercover cop and an ex-con and the unlikely friendship they formed. It also left the storyline open until 2009’s Fast and Furious reunited undercover-cop-turned-FBI-agent Brian O’Connor (Paul Walker) with the criminal car jockey Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel). Now, in 2011, as Fast Five begins, anti-hero Toretto is on his way to prison when O’Connor—no longer a federal agent—and Toretto’s sister, Mia, break him out in transit. After that, O’Connor and Mia split their own way, moving country to country to avoid the feds. They eventually find their way to Brazil, where they are reunited with an old friend set to pull off a job to earn some money. Toretto shows up to help with the job, but things go bad, leaving the trio not only on the lam from the law but the local drug lord. To make things worse, the FBI. has decided to send out its top agent, Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson), to track them down, and Hobbs always gets his man. In order to escape, O’Connor and Toretto have to pull one last job and recruit people they’ve worked with on each of the previous films.

SPOILER WARNING: The following interview contains conversations about things in the film “Win Win” that may be considered spoilers. If you would rather see the film first, simply bookmark this page and come back to it after. Thank you.

With his new film Win Win now in theaters, writer/director and actor Tom McCarthy is now on his third film. This time around, Tom has set his story sights on suburban America and the age old sport of Greco-Roman wrestling. The film, like his two previous works The Station Agent and The Visitor, is one part character study, one part genre film, and two parts the world through Tom’s lens. For the press tour for the film, I was given an opportunity to sit down with Tom and discuss the film’s characters and his personal take on the stories he chooses to tell. He is a very well-spoken, intelligent person with a unique voice in film today.

SPOILER WARNING: The following interview contains conversations about things in the film “Win Win” that may be considered spoilers. If you would rather see the film first, simply bookmark this page and come back to it after. Thank you.

In the new film Win Win, actor Alex Shaffer portrays the film’s young star Kyle, a wrestling prodigy who shows up in a small town and helps a losing team become one of the best in the state. At 16 years of age, this is Alex’s first feature film, basically his first acting of any sort. With the precision of a well-practiced actor, Alex embodies the disaffected Kyle and brings to the film a well-balanced cast of characters that make it one of the best comedies of the year. I recently sat down with Alex while he was in Seattle as part of the press tour for the film. The first thing I learned was that Alex is nothing like his character, he is very outwardly friendly and very upbeat.

There’s something unusual lurking at the heart of director/writer Tom McCarthy’s latest film, Win Win. But then, that’s the case with all of McCarthy’s films; they’re not exactly what you expect, or what they lead you to believe they are. His first film, The Station Agent, was a pleasant comedy with some surprisingly complex emotional issues. The Visitor, McCarthy’s second film, looked like it was going to be a typical indie dramatic comedy, about an older man who learns to play the drums to cope with life. However, that film was something entirely different, delving into very complex modern day American morals and social issues while all the while maintaining an almost upbeat level of enthusiastic entertainment. It was one of the greatest unseen films of 2008.

“His friends call him Mr. T. His enemies call for mercy!”

In the summer of 1971, the seminal action film Shaft smoothed its way onto the silver screen and exploded at the box office. Made for a budget of one and a quarter million dollars, the movie grossed over twelve million. By casting an African American male as the lead, John Shaft—a private investigator hired to find a crime boss’s missing daughter—and centering the story in the predominant African American neighborhood, Harlem, the filmmakers signaled the agency of an as yet untapped market, and inspired a new generation of filmmakers, most of whom made their movies outside of the Hollywood system, and yet reached a distribution level that established a new genre. It was the following year, during the fall and winter of 1972, that a group of films were released marking the birth of the Blaxploitation movement. Most of these films—Trouble Man, Across 110th St., Super Fly, and Hit Man, just to name a few—not only heavily borrowed from Shaft, but also from each other.

Somewhere in Hollywood, on some producer’s desk, sits the ultimate playbook of movies. Not unlike that of a football team, this movie playbook consists of every conceivable plan of action that is needed, every feasible film genre known to Hollywood, and the step-by-step guides on how to reproduce the films manufactured from these formulas. While I’m fully aware that by decreeing this I’m doing two things: One, I’m overstating the obvious, which is evident to anyone who’s seen more than three Hollywood films in the past five years. And, two: I’m making mention of the book that some insiders claim is, “the tome that shan’t be named.” It’s kind of like the first rule of Fight Club: you don’t talk about it. Therefore, by doing so, I’m either opening myself up to be the target of Hollywood assassination, or this article will just be dismissed and played off as the one that went there.