have the riots started? let me get my nikes.
Had insomnia last night, overslept this morning.
Didn't run yesterday.
Did 3.5 miles on Monday.
As some of you know, I don't believe in spoilers. I don't think knowing that Spock dies ruins The Wrath of Khan; I don't think knowing that Norman and his mom have a special relationship ruins Psycho.
I have finally seen a movie where knowing the ending ruins the movie: John Sayles' latest, Limbo.
I am of two minds about John Sayles: I love him for being an iconoclast who does his own thing, who does various genres, who tells stories about wildly different people; but I've found a couple of his movies (treason! loss of film student status!) boring and self-indulgent. However, he's always a different voice, and that's worthwhile. He gets a lot of attention with most of his movies, particularly since Lone Star.
Limbo is definitely a bid to get a lot of attention.
The movie is the story of a small town in Alaska where things are going downhill: the pulp mill closed last year, the salmon canning factory is closing down now. Joe Gastineau (David Strathairn) is a likeable schmoe who's had it tough: he was a star high school jock whose knee gave out; he was a fisherman whose boat sank, killing two of his buddies; his last girlfriend left him because he's "downbeat." He meets traveling singer Donna D'Angelo (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) who has a teenage daughter Noelle (Vanessa Martinez), who's having trouble adjusting.
The first half of the movie takes place in the town, with various interlocking stories (the Sayles trademark). It's too slow and there are too many extraneous stories, for my taste. The movie becomes a little more traditional midway through, when Joe agrees to help his brother Bobby with a little sailing trip and takes Donna and Noelle along. Turns out Bobby has some very unfriendly heavies after him, who board the boat and kill him. Joe, Donna, and Noelle manage to get away but they're forced to survive in the cruel Alaskan wilderness, knowing that the bad guys are probably after them.
As always, the character studies are great--everyone has a ton of backstory and the actors are clearly sinking their teeth into this stuff. Sayles's adoption of the man against nature motif is great as well.
I'm not going to say any more about the movie than this, other than it is definitely a movie you will either love or hate. I have a never seen a movie before which had the entire audience saying, "Oh my GOD!" at the end. (I believe I actually shouted that.)
I really liked Limbo; there is every possibility you will hate it, but I think it is worthwhile seeing.
And it's amazing how incredibly apropos the title is.
Monday night Linda called and asked to postpone writing group because it was Memorial Day weekend and a friend of hers was having a party; did I mind? Hey, if somebody else is attending parties, then I don't have to. (As if the two have a correlation, let alone a causal relation.) We're meeting on Thursday.
I proceeded to celebrate not having class by napping for three hours.
Tuesday was spent reviewing material for Novel Writing class and waiting for the blackout to be over. The power went out over a large section of my area at about 2 in the afternoon. A power outage isn't terrible for me, considering I have a Powerbook, but still: we're pretty much an electricity-based society, in case you hadn't noticed, and having no electricity is kind of a bummer. Brent and his cousin came over to pick up Darin (our cars being behind the garage door that, natch, has an automatic garage door opener), and he said the looting and rioting had already begun. "Kind of like after an earthquake."
I considered going looting for a while, but then went to go read instead. I stopped working on my reviews because I no longer had access to a printer. Then after an hour the power came back on and I had no excuse.
The stuff I reviewed last night was really impressive: the chapters were leaps and bounds better than their initial incarnations. I had thought that Maureen Connell was only fair as a teacher of novel writing, because she never really did explain how to structure a novel or figure out its story or whatever--she just had us start writing sans outline, ending, or (in the case of the two of us writing mysteries) the crime fully figured out.
But I saw quite starkly in the material I reviewed that she is in fact a very good teacher. She got a lot of good work out of the students in the class, several of whom started off with absolutely no idea how to tell a story, let alone a long-form story. Maureen managed to teach students with wildly varying writing backgrounds and strengths how to get the most out of what they were doing.
I doubt many of the students in that class (or any class, really) will go on to write and publish novels. They've clearly learned a lot about writing though, which is great.
I talked to Len on the phone a few days ago to find out what the hap was, and he told me a story about this year's crop of Screenwriting graduates that I find a)distressing and b)oh-so-typical. One student failed for writing a very funny script that one teacher thought didn't have enough character development--"Like the Marx Brothers?" Len says he asked--and another teacher was simply offended by, quality of the script aside.
Len thinks USC is teaching students how to write movies for the 50s, not for the 90s (or the 00s). You can't spend 20 minutes solely on character development, the way you could in the 50s.
I told him I'm having trouble coming up with an idea for my next script, so he asked me what emotion I've been feeling the most often of late. "Fear," I said. "So write about that," he said.
So today I'm writing up a list of 100 of my fears. I thought getting to 100 would be easy. I'm currently stuck on 20. So I guess I'm not quite as crippled by fear as I thought I was.
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Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com