» Fringe Blog – Writing on Film, Culture, and Things on the Fringe

The Dream

jelewis8 — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 06:59:44 +0000

It was the balloon ride that did it. He was forever in ecstasy of flight, and nothing less than the perpetual openness of sky would keep him happy. He tied the cape then launched himself over the edge. They found his body fifty meters downstream, a smile on his face.

I Dream Of Beheading

jelewis8 — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 16:21:43 +0000

Note to self: Drink less Coke at 11:30 at night. Not the caffeine factor. It’s been playing hell with my dreams. Last night, I dreamt, in Technicolor, that I was camping with some friends and then a crazy islander ran up with a look in his eye that meant business, and proceeded to cut off my head with two sharp knives. There are four oddities associated with this event:
1) It happened in slow motion
2) I didn’t feel any pain from the severing
3) I was still able to think and see as my head rolled off
4) My last thought was to avoid splashing blood on my pristine white shirt. I did so by directing the arterial spray outward.
Alas, I never found out the fate of the white shirt. I woke up just as I saw the islander smile in satisfaction and run off into the jungle. I own that particular shirt that I was wearing. You’d avoid spilling your own blood on it if you could help it. It’s that comfortable. As for the islander, I seem to recall that he had suffered from abuses earlier in the dream at the hands of a miserable cur of a pirate captain, and he and I bore a slight resemblance to each other. The hazards of unconsciously creating a doppelgangbanger…
In case you haven’t seen it, check out my mashup trailer for V For Vin Diesel, which, if made, would probably be the single most testosterone-laden movie EVAR. The process of making it wasn’t too bad. Several hours in the editing cockpit, which included downloading trailers from other Vin Diesel flicks and cutting out the best parts, reassembling and adjusting dialogue, adding sound effects and finally picking music. All in the name of science. Or something. It was a fun project. Now if only I could get paid for it!
Wrote some more in Book 2 after taking all of last week off to pursue paying work opportunities. That’s the trick these days; making time to do what you must, but making sure there’s time left to do what you want. Sometimes there simply isn’t the means. It’s like putting Vin Diesel on one end of a see-saw and a tiny tot on the other. So I plug away. I am happy to note that I’m a quarter way through writing Book 2, though suffering from a frightening case of “How am I going to end this” shakes. I’ve got several scenarios in mind, none of them entirely satisfying. I have been trying to draw the threads more tightly, whilst guiding the comfortable world I constructed carefully toward dystopia, whilst selling my own theological, cultural, and philosophical market shares, all without becoming diluted or straying down the path of selfish pap and self-indulgent conclusions. I am trying to challenge myself with the point of the story as well as readers, and I certainly don’t want to sell anything short with the ending.
But that’s vague enough to be disinteresting, right? Sell today. Buy tomorrow. And by that I mean I’ll see you later.

Drunk Driving

jelewis8 — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 04:11:14 +0000

Rain glints down, it’s three am
Time to get a drink again
I’ve been sucking back dry bottles and bottles of
old times, like whiskey with that old
burning sensation, like cutting up onions
with a dull knife blade.
Cuts not so deep you can’t feel the wound.
I pour myself another shot and nod at the night
waitress, hoping she’ll smile at me and
give me a knowing glance. I like her hair, it makes
me think of safety, but it’s not her hair that
snags me, but the way she bustles back to
my table, being the only customer has its advantages
since there’s no one else here and there’s nowhere else
to go and she’s got no one else to talk to
and she’s just run out of cigarette breaks and I must
have that look on my face says I’m here to stay
’til her shift is done. Might as well, she might
be saying to herself. The long ones never tip well.
God I wish I smoked. It would make these long nights
bearable. But what about life says things gotta be
so? When you’re jacked or loaded or both you
get a sense of time floating along like a tiny
river, you only gotta dip your hand in to feel the flow
but you can stay outside of it as long as you
keep your balance and watch that bank it’s slippery
easy to fall in
easy to remember
especially looking back, you see all that water comin’
at you like a wall of memories
Funny how time runs back to front. Funny how we’re always
scraping, paddling, trying to swim to the stuff we
left behind.
Bottles of whiskey floating on the surface.
I take another slug and slap down a C-note, give the waitress
another nod–you deserve it, lady–and get the hell out of there.
It’s a dark wet night out, and I feel like driving.

MovableType, Celebrity Morphs, Monkeys, and Memory

jelewis8 — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 21:21:29 +0000

MovableType 3.2 is out. Wait. Before you stampede off to log into TypeKey (or am I the only one here who actually uses MT?), you may want to consider the following:
Check out the front page of the MovableType site. The grinning Drew Barrymore lookalike on the lower right side of the screen–see her? It’s deceiving, isn’t it. You’re tempted to think, what a nice person, what a nice smile! Who couldn’t love the adorable pixie cuteness of a younger, drug-softened Drew Barrymore?
But look closer. It’s not Drew at all. There’s been some strange amalgamation of Drew and the imminently floatable Angelina Jolie. Or more precisely, those river barges tacked on her face that are sometimes called lips. And with the glasses of Ashley Judd, she’s three parts of a celebrity trio famed for beauty, if not acting skills.
But fitted together, she’s like those old celebrity clone images, the morphed “what would happen if so-and-so had a kid with such-and-so” photos. They always look slightly repulsive, a description I don’t usually apply to people. But technically, they aren’t people, they’re photo manipulations created by a computer morphing program to whet the humour buds of people who think fart jokes are funny.
Ah, but you say, this is an advertisement for Typepad, a different service from MovableType. Even barring the difference, Typepad is built on the MT interface and uses the same protocols. For all I know, Typepad is simply an automated, sleeker, more user-friendly MT. But, let’s call it a different product completely.
Scroll down.
Featured on the left hand column, hawking MT “threads”, is a monkey with a baseball cap. No, I’m sorry. It’s Joey, a guy I knew from fourth grade on who was tall and lanky and had stringy, Gollum-like hair that always looked as if it had been plastered to his forehead with undercarriage grease from a 1940 Buick. His head appeared to have been elongated to eggplant proportions, and his nose had been broken in a fight, so it puffed out enormous, as if it was attempting to consume his face.
Oh, I really shouldn’t be so mean-spirited. Joey was an interesting guy. He ran off to join the Peace Corps, but came back a year later. He never went back to school, and last I heard, he was working at a pulp and paper mill in my old hometown of Franklin. His sister Krystal had a crush on me and we danced together at senior prom. I’ll never forget that, because one of the biggest computer geeks was there–Andy–and he told me I couldn’t dance. Wow. Talk about your all-time humiliations, being slam dunked by a computer geek. I wasn’t a star athlete, and I wasn’t a geek, and I wasn’t a genius. I made very little impression on most people I met, and so I passed through high school like a ghost.
Joey was similar to me, thinking back. He didn’t have a lot of friends, and the ones he did have were outsiders. Like me, he sort of drifted through school, not doing poorly, but not doing as well as he could have. Joey was smart, but book learning wasn’t one of his gifts. He could fix cars though. I often saw him outside his house working on the engine of a Corvette that perpetually sat on cinderblocks in front of his house. He’d even work on it mornings, before school started.
I know for a fact that at least a few people from my old high school days read this site on a semi-regular basis, so I won’t do biopics on them…yet. Still, the days of yore sometimes rear their heads, a twinge of memory struck like ore in a mine, and flow until tapped. It’s always in’erestin’ to see what settles in the sieve.
“Look Ma! Gold!”
Fool’s Gold, maybe, but still, at least it’s shiny. And even monkeys love shiny things. One of these days, I’ll dig up an old elementary school photo of me in bowtie. I truly looked like a monkey (some would secretly, or not so secretly, say I still do). Something impish in that smile, made you wonder if I wasn’t about to throw some metaphorical feces at you or hand you a banana as a gift.
At this point, I have no idea what I’m writing about, so I’ll end before this post explodes from incoherency. Oh yeah, have a good weekend.

Best Actor

jelewis8 — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 06:19:14 +0000

Winner for Best Actor.
- My pick: Jamie Foxx in Ray
- Oscar pick: Jamie Foxx in Ray
This was one of the tough choices, but Jamie Foxx really deserves the win. Congratulations. If he hadn’t won, I may have turned the TV off.
Who knew the man from Booty Call would have the chops to really put in a resounding performance in what was an intimidating role. I’m impressed, and glad for Foxx.
Johnny Depp approves, though he could stand to smile. Nice speech, classy crediting Ray. I loved his shout out to his grandmother. Good ending.

Assault on Precinct 13

jelewis8 — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 20:26:35 +0000

When you stand in line and request a ticket for a movie like Assault on Precinct 13, hand your money over with a smile, and gleefully stroll down that long dark hallway to Theatre 7, odds are you aren’t there for David Mametesque dialogue or scintillating drama, the pathos of a humanity-laden, emotionally charged period piece, or a high-caliber comedy in the style of Some Like It Hot or His Girl Friday. After all, Brian Dennehy never came close to convincing me he was worth his weight in anything other than, well, his weight.
Nevertheless, should you find yourself in that line, paying that money, and wearing that smile of contented brainlessness, you can do worse than to watch the remake of John Carpenter’s 1976 Assault on Precinct 13. This modern day retelling has been updated with a few twists, a different cast of characters, and a John Carpenter-less score, but otherwise is the same picture.
The problem with seeing movies like these is you can hardly remember anything worthwhile about it after the fact. It’s not that it’s not memorable per se, it’s just that the pacing is so fast and the story so undeniably simple that taking anything away from the experience would require several pints of your own blood. I enjoyed myself whilst in the theatre, but there’s little I can say about it that’s either good or bad. But I’ll do my best here, because hey, that’s what I do.
Detroit, present day. Jake Roenick (Ethan Hawke) is an undercover cop who loses some team members in a drug bust gone bad. He survives, but trades in his field spurs to be a desk jockey at Precinct 13, which on the eve of the New Year is closing down for good. He medicates his pain, guilt, mid-life frustration, and possibly his singleness with pills and whiskey, and taunts his shrink (Maria Bello) who accuses him of not caring anymore.
Also at the Precinct 13 is the One-Day-To-Retirement cop Jasper O’Shea (Brian Dennehy), playing a cheerful stereotype of the Irish cop, Drea de Matteo as an oversexed (or undersexed, depending on your perspective) party girl cop, and Matt Craven, who has one of the most recognizable faces but least remembered names in Hollywood, as a maybe dirty cop who sneaks into the action midway through.
In the middle of a blizzard that would make Vince Lombardi cringe, Precinct 21 orders a prisoner transfer by bus, ala The Fugitive. The star of that show is Marion Bishop (Laurence Fishburne), a criminal mastermind and ultra bad dude with good fashion sense, who has just killed a dirty undercover cop. Also on the bus are the comedic relief, made up of Ja Rule as “Smiley”, a criminal who refers to himself in the third person, John Leguizamo as a junkie (a civic and constitutionally minded junkie at that), and Aisha Hinds. The bus stops at, of course, Precinct 13 and offloads the prisoners until the storm dies down.
But Bishop has powerful enemies. In this case, it is Marcus Duvall (Gabriel Byrne), head of the anti-racketeering and undercover division and former “business” partners with Bishop. Duvall wants to stop Bishop from testifying against him and all the other corrupt cops in the city. To protect themselves, they stage an assault on the precinct in which they must kill everyone inside.
After a failed attempt to break in quietly and assassinate Bishop, Duvall and his ask-no-questions men try it with rocket launchers, C4, and .50 cals, dealing out lots of broken glass but not a whole lot of bodily injury to the party inside. Hawke, once again under pressure, decides that the only way they’re getting out alive is to arm the prisoners. Oh, the drama! The conflict! The Humanity!
Director Jean-François Richet has an obvious love of violence, and the R-rating here is well-earned. It is best not to get too close to the characters, as a number of them suffer fates that, at one time (way back when), were not able to be shown on screen. Thankfully, Hollywood knows what young men want (no, not porn), and so we get the violence and action in spades. There are a few obligatory scenes where Hawke questions himself, resolves to take charge, etc. It’s pandering, we know, but we accept it as long as it doesn’t take away from the next scene where someone gets shot in the head.
Then there is the icicle stabbing scene ripped directly from Die Hard 2, which despite its legacy, isn’t quite the movie you want to be emulating. The end starts to meander a little, turning into standard cops vs. robbers vs. cops affair, but you can handle it.
Assault isn’t a bad movie, it’s just not that great. It was enjoyable, however, and that brainlessness I talked about in the first paragraph only lasted as long as the end credits. You can drive away from this one feeling okay about yourself, and that’s something in the age of Alien Vs. Predator. Compared to that dreck, Assault on Precinct 13 is a shot in the arm.
Fringe Rating: out of 5

Chapter 18 – Continued 2

jelewis8 — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 11:44:13 +0000

I am just about fool enough to try and make a run for it when another cop squeals up, siren going off like a wet cat, and then another one behind him. Other end of the alley is about the same picture: cop convention. There’s a whole lot of yelling going on, and I’m stuck in the middle. I know the story, how it will go with my boys in blue; how it always goes with people like me. I can sense everything I might’a thought good about them dissolving away in a white anger, hatred at the way they worked, working the law, twisting it so even when they were inside it, they were outside it.
Then it strikes me, like a slug from a champion boxer, and maybe for the first time since that day in New York City when I saw her face for the first time, I start thinking clear.
“Freeze and put your hands in the air!” yells one of the deputies. I smile, though I know I probably look like a movie monster freak.
“Which one you want?” I ask, and the guy pulls a confused face out of his chest of drawers. “Which one, freeze or put my hands up?” I ask him. He motions with his gun. I raise my hands slowly. “I’m Ferret-Eye Jack, Private Investigator,” I say. “Can I show you my badge? It’s in my left breast pocket,” I tell him, and he nods.
“Do it slowly, Mister.” I reach in and pull out the white and brown wallet stitched up with cheap leather, and let it fall open so he can see the state seal. “Throw it down next to my feet,” he tells me. “Cuff ‘im,” he says to the cop who’s come up behind me.
“As I was saying, my name is Ferret–” I start to say, but the other cop grabs me roughly from behind, forcing my arms behind me. He shoves me forward and tells me to shut my mouth, which I do, since I can’t even breathe because of the sudden, sharp pain his wrenching movement causes inside my chest. Like a burning desert in there.
He pushes me forward, and the first cop kind of nods. “You’re a PI,” he says, looking at my badge again. “That really don’t mean jack shit here, now does it? You’re under arrest for murdering two cops, doncha know? And damned if you didn�t resist arrest too.”
He gives a Significant Look at the cop behind me who instantly punches my side-my drinking side. I can feel my liver sliding westward and my lungs seize as I try to pull air from the vacuum. He hits me again and there’s spots and I–