Where am I?

I was promoted to manager at Massage Envy, running the location in Plano, and we're severely understaffed right now so I'm working pretty much all the time. Anyone want to work a front desk/sales position? $8/hr plus commissions on memberships you sell. Low key and relaxed environment. Full and part time, morning and night shift available. Get in touch and let me know!

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Kitchen Creativity

I've been a bit stuck with my writing for the last, oh, couple of years - for reasons I'll get into in another post (real soon) - but in the meantime, my creativity has found other outlets, primarily cooking.

So I've decided to include the occasional food post here.

A few notes about the way I cook...I improvise a lot. I take risks. I experiment. I play. When I tell you I can't give you a recipe, it's true. Not only do I rarely know how much I used of any ingredient, I often don't remember every ingredient I used. When I want to try a new dish, I research and find about a dozen recipes. I see what they have in common, and what items and amounts vary - and go from there. I also have enough experience to have a very good idea of how certain flavors will play together, or how changing the amounts of ingredients will effect the texture.



Recently I did a brisket, slow cooked for about 18 hours. Yes, that's right, 18 hours. Brisket is tricky - and the only way to really get it tender is to use a whole one (around 10-12 pounds), with the fat cap on (yes, that's just what it sounds like - a good inch or more of fat on the top of the whole thing) and cook it as slowly as you can manage while keeping it as moist as possible (the fat cap helps with this.) I made a rub that I liked, and thankfully have some left over so I'll use it again: salt, black pepper, smoked hot paprika, sweet paprika, dry mustard, cumin, cinnamon (and maybe some other things I've forgotten).

But the thing I was most happy with was the sauce. It was a Dr. Pepper Citrus BBQ. Where I got that notion, I'm not sure. I saw a recipe for a mop sauce (that is, a thin BBQ sauce you mop onto the meat while it cooks) that used root beer, and Dr. Pepper just has a little more complex flavor - so I thought I'd try it. I added the juice of a couple of oranges, some of the dry rub seasoning, a fair amount of liquid smoke (pecan), a little cider vinegar, a little ketchup, and some honey. I simmered it, letting it cook down a bit - and when it was time to baste, I took some of the drippings out of the pan and mixed them into the sauce before using it to baste. The resulting sauce was complex, a little smoky, a little tangy (without being too vinegary - which shuts down the taste buds), a little sweet (but not cloying.) I have no idea if I can repeat that sauce, but I'll definitely play with it again. I'd like to try a thicker version with more citrus on some chicken.



Last night my sister and I shared a Lamb and Apricot tagine. I made something similar a couple of months ago, using dried apricots. This time I used fresh, and you'd never even realize they were the same dish. I used lamb neck this time, too, which is much leaner (and way cheaper) than the shanks I used last time, so the flavor was more mild, not as gamey. If you're going to stew the meat, then a cut like neck is fine - the meat falls off the bone, is tender, the marrow contributes to the dish, and if you have dogs they will appreciate it.

I'd started the tagine over a week ago - because I'd picked up the lamb, not realizing how long the brisket would last us - and had it in a container in the fridge. I wasn't sure if it'd still be good, but when I pried open the top and got a bright whiff of fresh apricot - I knew it was all good. (A cold fridge and air-tight container makes a huge difference.)

For those who aren't familiar with the term: a tagine is a stew, traditionally cooked in a ceramic pot with a high conical top. the word actually describes the vessel, but is applied to the dishes made in it as well. It's designed to cook on a low fire, and works best in a modern kitchen on a stove top. The high cone captures the moisture, allows it to condensate, and drip back into the food. Moroccan tagines are generally made with a cheap cut of meat (often lamb or chicken), a few veggies, some fruit and maybe honey - plus a complex blend of spices.

I'm in love with the Moroccan spice blend Ras el Hanout. Like curry, there are as many variations as there are cooks - and some of the ingredients often used in Morocco are illegal here (like Spanish Fly) - but it's still a wonderous thing. The one I bought from World Market includes not only "warm" aromatic spices like cinnamon, cardamom, turmeric, black pepper and ginger, but rosebuds and lavender. My mother used to refer to cooking as alchemy, and all I need to do open the container and smell this in order to believe there's some kind of magic here.

So - this tagine, I threw together the following: lamb neck, ras el hanout, salt, the juice of a lemon plus the rind, a little honey, red wine, a couple handfuls of baby carrots, and a can of diced tomatoes. I used some mint I'd grown, but I have no talent for gardening and the mint somehow managed to have almost no flavor - so it had no noticeable impact in the dish. (Last time I made the tagine, with dried apricots and lamb shank, the mint played beautifully off of the tomatoes.) When it was all done, I felt like it still needed something - so when I re-heated it last night, I added garbanzos and more ras el hanout and red wine.

This dish was a real joy. The brightness of the apricots and tomatoes balanced the heaviness of the lamb, and the spices wafted off of it, filling the room with the smell.

Good food, especially when I am involved in it from conception, to production, to consumption, to be transported to a realm of pure sensuality.


Right now, I've let my weight climb up alarmingly, and my sister's having health problems related to her weight and diet - so most of my posts on cooking will focus on healthy foods. Whole grains, small amounts of processed carbohydrates, lots of legumes and beans, lots of veggies and fruits, and lean meats of all kinds. I'll be using these posts as a way to keep myself excited about cooking healthy, and remembering that tea-smoked salmon with a wasabi vinaigrette can be as sensual and fulfilling as brisket burnt ends.

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Golden Ages of Cinema

It's generally accepted that the '30s and '40s were the golden age for cinema, and that more great films were made in 1969 than in any other year.

But In a recent blog, Earl Pomerantz says

1939. The Oscar winner was Gone With the Wind, the nominees – among others – The Wizard of Oz (Dr. M's favorite), Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Ninotchka, leaving no room fo Beau Geste, Gunga Din, Young Mr. Lincoln and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Not the mention The Thin Man. May I have your comparable list of any other year? Or any era, beyond the Thirties and Forties, where, by the way, the movie business was just as passionately committed to making a profit?


This was my response:

1976:

All the President's Men
Bound for Glory
Carrie
Marathon Man
Network
The Omen
Rocky
Taxi Driver


That's a pretty good list - and there are comparable ones from every year from 1969 to 1979 (with some stellar films in '67 and '68 as well.)

And of course, 1939 also included Hitler - Beast of Berlin, Barricade, Bachelor Mother, Boys' Reformatory, Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever, and Daughter of the Tong.

Every year has good and bad films.


Though, I do admit, the balance has been off for a while - I think it's cyclical. Film improves every time it's threatened by new technology. In the '30s - there were over 40 million radios in use in homes in the US. To compete with radio shows, the movies had to be better. In the 60's TVs had proliferated - and in the 70's, with the advent of the VCR, movies had to shine a little more to compete with videos.

I think we're about due for another golden age, as "new media" becomes more prominent and studios realize that to compete with DVRs and the Internet, they don't need to make more expensive movies - just better ones.


---

(I left out The Man Who Fell to Earth (one of my favorite movies), and a handful of other favorites)

I get frustrated with the kind of nostalgia that says things were better once and they'll never be that great again because it's all ruined. It reminds me of the nostalgia for a fake-perfect America that conservatives use, an imagined 1950s where everything was Leave it to Beaver and there were no poor people, or shell-shocked vets, and women never minded not being able to divorce their alcoholic husbands, or to work as something other than a secretary or waitress when they were widowed.

There were a lot of great movies in 1939, and in 1976 - but every year has amazing films, groundbreaking work, and every year has schlock. Indiana Jones, this year, is schlock. But did you see Iron Man? Critically acclaimed movies thus far this year include: Reprise, Priceless, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, The Visitor, and The Counterfeiters - and we're not even close to "Oscar season."

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Joss Whedon’s newest

for those of you who love Buffy, Angel, and Firefly/Serenity:
Welcome to Dollhouse.

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the Essential Caesura

Caesura is a literary term, referring, in poetry, to a pause that occurs naturally when a line is spoken. It is used purposefully, using the rhythms of speech to make it fall in a specific place, to create a desired effect, and can be soft (barely noticeable) or hard (as in a full stop, such as a period.) Without these little pauses, the words all run together an become meaningless. When used skillfully, they can not only add to the flow of a piece, but can actually create implied meaning. (For example, when I sing White Christmas, when I get to the line, "everybody knows a turkey and some mistletoe," I like to pause after "turkey". That pause give a whole new meaning to the line.)

What I've noticed recently, is that there is some equivalent to the caesura in all art forms.

On Dancing with the Stars, one of the judges is fond of saying that a good dance needs "light and shade," by which he means aggressive or flashy moments should be punctuated by quiet ones in order to have the most impact. A dance that is all "pow" simply isn't as interesting.

In advertising and print design, we talk about "white space." The page needs to have a certain amount of white space in order to look like something meaningful, or it all bleeds together. A page of advertising that's full of exclamation points and neon lettering and bright photos might as well be a black and white list of dense text - when everything is loud nothing stands out. High end advertising often contains a large amount of white space, and may be a single large object on a white or other simple background, with little more than a short slogan and a logo.

Examples:
3G
VW
Coke
Dove

as opposed to something busy like this, where the message gets lost


This one is interesting because it effectively blends the background details so that they appear monochromatic, and then it also echoes for emphasis and to play on the message. This kind of echo, or refrain, is used in music and poetry in a similar manner.


In visual art, we talk about "negative space," which is, simply, the space not used. It applies not only to painting and photography, but to three-dimensional and functional arts such as sculpture, architecture, furniture, and even jewelry.

Negative space is used to create optical illusions, where we focus on one image, and only when we shift our perception do we see another image as well. Perhaps in a similar manner, in a story what seemed like the background, or what seemed like the pauses between action, could suddenly pop to the forefront, while the the other story becomes backgrounded.

Which brings me to screenwriting and film. The caesura is used here as well.

Visually - framing, focus, and light are used to direct the eye. Where the eye is not directed is the negative space. Look at the use of negative space in these filmic images, and the way they dramatize the actor, make them seem bigger than life, or overwhelmed by their environment:
Pirates of the Caribbean
7-Year Itch
Platoon
Sound of Music
Serenity

Without the negative space surrounding them, these moments in the film would feel smaller, less important. The negative space sets them apart, sets the actors apart.

Here's a great image from Lord of the Rings, where the actor becomes part of the negative space, a shade lighter than the background, and the focus is on an object in the foreground.

These things might be implied in a script by describing the big sky behind the character, or the tight box enclosing them. The focus on an object could be highlighted by describing the character matching the background: grey, more than white, as the tower was a grey of a darker shade - and the red eye of the orb glowed before him (OK, that sucks, but you get the idea.)

But film is not static, and negative space can be manipulated to create meaning and moods in movies through movement - whether it's as simple as pulling back to increase the volume of negative space, or pulling in to tighten on an actor. Changing the color, texture, and location. Changing the focus, sharp on one actor or object, then switching focus to another.

What I'm most interested in right now, however, is the use of the caesura in screenwriting. Pauses in the story. Quiet moments. Or, as Mystery Man put it in a recent post, breathing room.

The most straightforward use is perhaps to modulate pacing. A few movies have come out recently that are non-stop go-go-go, and while Crank and others like it are fun, I wonder if they would have been improved by a little breathing space. The pace goes from 0 to 60 very quickly, and to maintain the feeling of speed, needs to keep getting faster. When you're driving at 70mph, it stops feeling fast after just a few minutes. To keep feeling the speed, you need to slow down a bit at regular intervals. It also gives the character a chance to believably rest and have the energy to go hard again.


Another use of slow moments is to build suspense and tension. The calm before the storm (in a natural disaster movie, this might be literal.) It's suspense, rather than surprise. Hitchcock said it best.

There is a clear difference between surprise and suspense […]. We are sitting here and having an innocent conversation. Let us assume that there is a bomb under this table between us. […] suddenly there is a loud boom and the bomb goes off. The audience is surprised, but before this surprise they have only seen a very ordinary scene without any significance. Let us instead look at suspense scene. The bomb is under the table and the audience is aware of this because they have seen the anarchist plant it there. They also know that the bomb will go off at one o'clock, and up on the wall is a clock showing that the time is now quarter to one […]. In the first scene we have given the audience 15 seconds of surprise […] but in the last scene we have given them fifteen minutes of suspense.

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bad movie making

This week I saw what is one of the worst films I've ever seen: Striking Distance with Bruce Willis. I hadn't heard of it, and had to check to see whether it was meant to be a comedy - because it had some of the funniest scenes I've seen in a thriller, stuff that I thought surely had to be intentionally played for laughs...but no, it doesn't seem that's the case.

Examples:

Bruce Willis' character Tom is assigned to River Duty (basically coast guard) after ratting out his partner and alienating all the other homicide detectives. He drinks too much and doesn't get along with his partners (surprise) until a woman (Sarah Jessica Parker) is assigned to work with him. After she's introduced, he stands on his boat, looking back at her - and picks up her wet suit. It has molded cups. He looks at the molded cups, then at his new partner, then back at the cups again. Now, forget the campiness of the scene...I've never seen a wetsuit with molded cups. I have female friends who dive and surf, and just to be sure, I Googled women's wetsuits. Nope, they don't come with prominent boob holders. The intent of the scene seemed to have been to emphasize the potential awkwardness in working with a woman...


Then there's the fact that their first time out on the water together she saves his ass. There's about five minutes of "tense" (or not really) emphasis of their differences before they jump into the bonding crisis.

And I knew they'd end up sleeping together. Because all female cops are sluts who sleep with their partners. But then, there was no set up for it. I think the (one) scene where she's wearing a dress to the policeman's banquet (despite the fact that most of the others are in their uniforms) and he tells her she looks "different" was supposed to let us know they were falling for each other, but I was surprised when suddenly with no precursor there was a scene of them waking up in bed together. [HINT: You need more than one comment before characters risk ridicule and their career to have sex for it to be believable. And failing to set something up is not the same thing as making it surprising]

Of course, some of the best bad stuff comes early on. The partner Tom ratted out for beating a suspect doesn't show up to the sentencing hearing, most likely because he's making a scene on a bridge over the river. The partner's dad, who is Tom's uncle (cop families) and the partner's brother are trying to talk him down, as he gives a maudlin speech about how mom drove in the river and they never found her body.

Tom, against the advice of everyone else, tries his hand at talking the partner down, and it involves a weird kind of baby talk. The partner says, "Who's the best cop? Who's the best cop?" and Bruce Willis answers, "You the best cop". He reaches out his hand, the partner reaches back and then suddenly whips around and throws himself in the water. I was completely baffled as to why these men were speaking baby talk to each other, but it's revealed near the end that these guys grew up together and used to try to out-do one another to see who was the best cop. I guess it was supposed to be touching, or maybe even creepy - but instead it was weird as hell and funny, especially since we didn't know any of that when the scene occurred.

But the best scene in the movie, the one that helped set the comic tone for me, happens near the beginning - at the inciting incident.

Brucie (Tom) is driving a car with his dad riding shotgun (since he's ratted out his partner,) and they're chasing a bad guy, with several other cops behind them. The bad guy goes off the road and flips. Bruce follows and flips too.

Next scene, three cops are pulling Bruce Willis out from under the car as he re-gains consciousness, helping him try to stand. Because that's what you want to do when someone's been crushed in a car accident and knocked out - move them, pull on them and get them upright. There was no imminent danger of the car exploding, the paramedics were already there - we know, because that's the next shot, a body in a bag being flopped onto a gurney. Because it's more important to load up the dead guy than attend the wounded and heavily bleeding one.

Bruce asks about dad, realizes that's his dad, and kind of stumbles/falls to his knees (on the legs that weren't working at all a second ago) and (get this) strokes his dad's hair as he sobs over the body. Which, y'know, had me groaning - but I didn't get a full belly laugh until I saw that in the background, they popped open the trunk of the bad guy's car, and there, out of focus, as Bruce makes out with his dad's corpse, the body of a woman in a red dress pops out and flops over with a bounce.

I'm all for making a single shot convey as much info as possible, but this is better done in more subtle ways than bouncing bodies - even if they are out of focus.

There's more, there's more - but you get the idea.

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Almodovar’s Women

I finally watched Volver last week. As with all of Almodovar's films that I've seen so far, i spent the first 20 minutes or so not sure I'd like it, and by the end was totally engrossed in the fates of the characters. One of the reasons I get so involved in an Almodovar movie is the fact that the women are all crazy, contradictory messes...in other words, something like me. Admittedly, the women in the earlier films (in particular Women on the Verge) are more like drag queens, but the stories themselves were more like soap operas - over the top in content, color, and style as well as character. But by All About My Mother, there's a definite shift. As his storytelling becomes a little less strident, so too his characters become less exclamatory...and many of his characters are women. This may not seem remarkable, but just try to think of films where the leads are women. Where the female characters have a relationship or interaction with each other, especially one that's not simply about men. But simply featuring women isn't enough. The women are presented with difficult circumstances, hard choices, uncertain alliances - and they find their way through. Volver, in particular, features some of the most mature portrayals of women I've ever seen in a movie. There is insanity and a kind of willful superstitiousness, a desire to believe the stories and myths because they work for the narratives each person creates about their own lives - and when these narratives these women create intersect with parts of other people's narratives in ways that don't fit, the characters are forced to examine themselves. The women find ways to make reality work in their own personal stories. A lot of it is like the fake bottom Penelope Cruz wears to make her look more womanly (can you imagine an American actress doing this, and not for fat jokes but because she's too skinny to be a believable mom?) - it's a fiction that gives an illusion of reality as part of a myth, but those myths are ultimately what allows everyone to function. SPOILERS Raimunda's mother is dead. We start the movie at her grave. But when they visit the auntie, there's evidence that the mother is there in that house. Her smell in the air, her special cookies baked for them. They dismiss it at first, then they subscribe to the idea that Irene (Raimunda's mother) is a ghost, taking care of the old auntie. The sister even takes her in, and continues to half act as if Irene were a willful spirit - but no, she is alive. Everyone continues to pretend she is dead, however, because it hides another truth that's buried in a myth - the fact that Raimunda's father was with another woman when he died. It's only by managing a difficult balance of truth and myth that the characters are able to confront what really happened, and only as a ghost that Irene is able to make amends with the daughter of the other woman. Of course, it's all much more complicated than that. This is Almodovar, after all. But it is this complexity that makes the women real. That makes us go from one outrageous circumstance or belief to another, without ever being thrown out of the story. Raimunda, for instance, is very good at pretending and ignoring the truth. She's had to be since she was a teenager, when she hid the fact that her father impregnated her. Pretended that the loser she ended up marrying to cover her shame and provide her daughter a father was more than a convenience. I also love Almodovar's women because when faced with situations that would crush so many others, they simply go on, as we all must. They make terrible messes and then they find a way to live with them. They find the strength, sometimes in their friendships with each other, sometimes in themselves, and they are often surprised by it. Isn't that how we all muddle through? With some myths about ourselves, a few hard truths, leaning on our friends a little and managing to find surprising strength in ourselves to not only muddle through impossible situations but even managing to shine once in a while. It's refreshing to see such beautiful messes in a movie.

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Sequence: the "Secret" Structure of Movies

I knew there was something I was forgetting. When Malvin Wald died recently, I tried to remember what I actually learned in his class...but that was so long ago. I only remembered that he didn’t know how to use a VCR, wrote the script for the most popular documentary of Marilyn Monroe, and the guy who wrote a Crossroads won the Nissan FOCUS award.

What I was missing, and so desperately needed to remember, was Sequence. I was reminded of this when someone on Triggerstreet asked if anyone used the Sequence approach. Ding-ding! Bells went off, and I Googled it. Turns out there’s a book on the subject now.

Now, you read a lot about the Three Act Structure, which is the most common (though certainly not only) dramatic structure for plays in Western literature. Screenplays, in many ways, evolved from stage plays...but there was one physical element of early movies that was a stronger determining factor than drama in how a film was put together: the reel.

Reels were ten minutes long. Each reel typically was a self-contained mini-movie, or sequence. The sequences still hold together in the context of a larger narrative, build on one another and move the overall story forward - but by making each ten-minute section it’s own piece of narrative, you keep the movie, well, moving.

An average movie would have eight or nine sequences. Each one focuses on a character, leads up to a complication, and has a resolution (if only a partial one, that leads to further complications - and thus further sequences.) These sequences can blend well with a three-act structure, the mini-resolutions falling around the turning points, or they can be seen as following their own rhythm. Shorter sequences, interspersed, can be used to develop sub-plots.

As a screenwriter, it’s less intimidating to approach ten- to twelve-page sections. As a film-goer, it’s more interesting to watch a film that has smaller sequences with rising action, conflict and resolution in each of them. It’s also closer to the approach used by TV writers (each section between commercials is sometimes called an "act" but is really a sequence.)

By focusing on sequences, it becomes much easier to keep the story moving through the dreaded middle-of-the-second-act doldrums.

I’ve been stuck on a screenplay for months. Starting it, stopping, looking at my outline, re-evaluating my characters - because I couldn’t find a way to get through the middle to the end. I had my beginning and ending down, and was on the verge of letting this one go...but remembering Sequences has let me work out an outline for the entire main plot of my screenplay, and I’m going through now and fine-tuning it. But it’s all there. And my "second act" has not four Sequences, but five. And if I feel that I need to break them down further, I can - keeping in mind that each one needs to have rising action and a resolution.

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Script Frenzy

I do well with deadlines, so something like Script Frenzy is perfect for me. A complete screenplay in 30 days (or less.)

Also -
I used to direct those seeking a quick summary of screenwriting format to the Nicholl’s page on the subject, but Script Frenzy’s is more complete, plus they have worksheets for character, setting and such. So this is my new go-to.

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Mystery Man Does It Again

This is why I have a massive intellectual crush on Mystery Man,
and why he has respect from many as one of the most interesting and informative bloggers on screenwriting on the web.

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