Sing A New Song

Several posts ago I mentioned that I sing in the car, not the shower. Well, today I thought about what songs really make me want to lose my voice; the songs that you sing along to until your voice cracks/breaks/shatters/melts. Here are some I came up with, most are things I listen to on a regular basis, with a couple oldies (for me at least) from the 80s. Feel free to add to the list!

U2 - 40, Desire, Bad, Where the Streets Have No Name, Exit, Beautiful Day, I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, One

INXS - Don't Change, Guns In The Sky, New Sensation, Suicide Blonde

James - Sit Down, Sometimes, Seven

Youth Group - See Saw

Arcade Fire - Wake Up, Keep the Car Running, No Cars Go

The Waterboys - The Whole Of The Moon

World Party - Way Down Now

Tears For Fears - Shout

Snow Patrol - Run

REM - Superman, Green

Depeche Mode - Never Let Me Down

The Cure - Just Like Heaven, In Between Days

New Order - Regret, Age Of Consent, Love Vigilantes

Coldplay - Yellow, In My Place

Travis - Turn

Radiohead - Let Down, Just, Karma Police, Fake Plastic Trees

Interpol - Not Even Jail

Sum 41 - Pieces

My Chemical Romance - The Black Parade

GNR - Paradise city, Sweet Child O'Mine

Journey - Faithfully

Asia - The Heat Of The Moment, Only Time Will Tell

Secret Machines - 1000 Seconds

Nada Surf - The Blizzard Of '77, Killian's Red

The Killers - Smile Like You Mean It, When You Were Young

Bosox!

This is sweet.

My Shorts

Been a while since I've made a movie, '03 to be exact. And that's just fine. I like just writing for now, maybe someday in the future I'll get the bug again, but after shooting 3.5 features and some shorts - all of which went nowhere after lots of hard work by most involved - I have no plans to get back on that horse.

I was going over the list of shorts in my mind today, and here they are:

The Passenger - My Senior Thesis project. What a wasted opportunity. I had access to cameras, film & editing equipment, and I blew it on a lame concept/plot:

Guy is driving home from college, passes broken-down motorists, then he breaks down, starts to walk. Calls home, hangs up on stoner brother, gets beat up by broken-down motorists he passed earlier, then keeps walking.

What did it mean? Was it a metaphor for his life? Beats the shit out of me.

Neil - In class project, the only one I didn't direct. I acted as a newscaster who delcares his love for the weatherman while Neil Diamond's "Today" blasts in the background.

N2 - No budget horror: A group of friends is stalked and killed in a house during a night of nothing happening. At the end, after the last person is killed outside, we see the killer - It's a film camera, who comes back inside the house and sits in front of the TV to watch Neil Diamon sing "Sweet Caroline."

Short - Actually pretty good. Story of 2 homeless guys trying to make ends meet. Very little dialogue, mostly stark images & music mixed in with flashes of their past (via old home movies).

FeedMeBack - Non-sensical film class project, basically I just slapped a bunch of images together (including funky feedback of a video camera taping its own images from a TV screen - trippy). Teacher loved it for its meaning. Damned if I knew its meaning, I just thought it looked cool. Got me an A! Yeah, boooyyy!!

The Family Dog - The most successful. Played a few minor fests and made some cash off the internet (back when Hypnotic, Ifilm and Atom websites were popular). Shot on Super 16. Sweet.

The Reappearance Of Homer Pitts - I liked this one. Story of a kid who feels left out and turns invisible. When he realizes he family indeed loves him, he reappears.

The Disintegration Of A Boy Band: Made before bashing boybands was popular. Ended with a "where are they now" sequence. One was lost in a forest, one cleaned trash of the streets, one was homeless, and the last was a stock boy.

George Clooney as Michael Clayton

Damn! A must-see. One of the best of the year (My tops of the year list is now Sunshine, Michael Clayton and The Lookout).

Clooney is just amazing in it. He really is. A very layered, incredible performance. He lays it all out there. Tilda Swinton is as good as always. Tom Wilkinson and Sidney Pollack rock out in their supporting parts.

Tony Gilroy's writing and directing are so perfect, it blew me away. Not a scene is wasted.

One of my faves was the sequence at a birthday party (at Clayton's childhood home), including the scene with his son in the car afterwards. Any scene with Clayton and his brothers were perfectly done. Gilroy knows mood & tone, and he pulls it all off. Brilliant.

And there is a scene about mid-way through that will rock you. It was so creepy, so freaking disturbing, it easily blows away any junk-gore torture porn bullshit you'll see in Hostel or Saw 9: Buzzsaw!

Check it out.

UNION - Done.

Still polishing my newest baby (UNION), but for the most part, it's complete. And I love it. Can't wait to get a nice, sleep logline together, when I have one I'm pleased with I'll post it and see what y'all think. It clocks in at 102 pages.

Have been editing LAID with some notes from my managers, so although I have a decent version I can send out, it's not officially out of the oven. It's like I put it back in because the middle was gooey....or another way to look at it is they gave me some killer notes and I decided to work on it further.

I just don't have enough freakin' time to write. Between work, wife, kids, and awesome TV like Reaper, Chuck, & 30 Rock, it's hard to get more writing done. Two scripts this year is decent (Laid & Union plus 2 re-writes of 2 older scripts) but I've got about 9837 more ideas I want to write, and easily 100 saved files on my cpu that are either partial scripts or a bunch of scenes that I've been dying to get to.

I'm itching to work on something dramatic next, so I might get to my Dakota idea, or my horror epic. If I feel comedic then I'll jump back into the Stand-In (already at page 60, I just put it aside to simmer) or Temp'd (I'm into act 2) or my mini-golf comedy I started 2 years ago, or Rollin' Thunda, another comedy. Jesus, see?!

For tonight, I'll polish Union. It's a damn good script, I just know it. It's sorta not too commercial, but then again, kinda is.

Oh well, I'll listen to the new Radiohead while I edit. I downloaded the new album. Amazing. As Tommy Cruise once said while manning a machine gun in TAPS: "It's fucking beautiful, man!!!"

Perry Does It Again

Box Office:
Why Did I Get Married: 21.7 million - Damn!
Game Plan: 11 million
We Own The Night: 10.8
Clayton: 10.4
Heartbreak Kid: 7.3 (ouch)
Lizzy 2: 6.2
Da Kingdom: 4.6
Across the Universe: 3.8
RE:3: 2.6
Seeker: 2.2
Final Season: 664,351 (Jesus Christ)

I'm gonna try to see Clayton this week, would love to check out Darjeeling & Yuma, too. Is it just me or does 30 Days Of Night look bad ass?

Damn!

Man, those Rockies handed our asses to us. I almost feel like the Mets....oh, wait, no I don't. We beat the piss out of the Mets all season and skipped past them to win the Division.

Tough loss for the Phillies, but it's their own fault, they just didn't hit.

So, Redsox vs. Rockies? That's what I'm thinking. If so, it's the Redsox in 5.

j o y d i v i s i o n

Please check out this trailer for the Anton Corbijn film, CONTROL, about the life (and death) of Ian Curtis, lead singer for Joy Division (who, after his suicide, became New Order). The film looks amazing, love the crisp black & white, and the actor playing Ian looks JUST freaking like him. Can't wait for this.

IRON MAN

Go, Ben!

I saw this on the movie-bytes.com website:

Newcomer Ben Frahm, who had been working as a special-needs teacher at a middle school, has sold his comedy spec Dr. Sensitive to Universal in a deal valued in the mid-six figures. Shady Acres will produce. The script, in the vein of Liar, Liar, is about a doctor with the world's worst bedside manner who undergoes a transformative experience that makes him overly empathetic. The screenplay was discovered by Frahm's reps at Underground Films through a query letter, and was developed for a year prior to going Shady Acres, where it was developed further.

The thing that caught my eye was that it was initially discovered via a query letter. Whoa. Somebody actually read one of those things? Anyways, good for Ben.

Funny Games Poster

Kudos to the marketing people for this film. Actually, there have been some pretty cool posters coming around lately. Can't stand the typical "headshot" posters Hollywood usually slaps together. Anyway, check this out........