Dispatches from the Island of Misfit Toys

Welcome back.

That was more to myself than to you. I’ve been holding off on my end-of-the-year wrap-up thing because I’ve been fighting a ferociously infected index finger, and it makes typing and adventure. I’ve also been taking the time to ruminate, and make a battle plan, which goes thusly; I’m going to post series of smaller blogs focused on various elements from 2011, like work, relationships, etc.

Will each one be its own short story? Probably. But this will keep them from becoming a single, full novel. So there’s that.

To kick things off in my normal, light, fluffy, incredibly acerbic tone, I thought I’d start with movies. To me, this wasn’t a great year for film. At this sitting, I haven’t seen a few things I really wanted to like Dangerous Method, J.Edgar, Ides of March… but that being said, I’ve only been truly impressed by two films this year.

This isn’t everything I saw this year, but it’s everything I had something to say about. It also helps that the Oscar nominations came out, so I can bitch about Contagion, my favorite film of the year, getting the big middle finger. War Horse? Really?

Okay, okay…

The Mechanic

This wasn’t spectacular by any means, and it had a bullshit Hollywood ending tacked on, but for a remake of a really tight, well done Charles Bronson film, it’s surprisingly unshitty.

Adjustment Bureau

This, on the other hand, was incredibly shitty. Pointless, frustrating, and built on a plot that makes no fucking sense whatsoever. Hollywood has had some egregious magical negro movies, but never one where the MN in question was literally the only black guy in the film.

Rango

Wow. Yeah. I have to give Rango credit; it’s a helluva lot more than a movie about a CG-animated lizard version of Johnny Depp’s Duke character. If Gabriel Garcia Marquez had written this screenplay, it couldn’t have had more magical realism. I can’t say I actually liked it – in fact, I don’t know what I thought if it – but any movie that delivers its deus ex machina in an actual machine (in this case, a golf cart) embodied by the spirit-form of Clint Eastwood’s “Man With No Name,” deserves a modicum of respect.

Battle: Los Angeles

Every bit as stupid and pointless as everyone says it is.

Paul

Simon Pegg should be ashamed of himself.

Attack the Block

People raved about this movie as if it were the hope and savior of modern genre film. It isn’t. A story about a completely indistinct pack of underage refugees from a Guy Ritchie film fend off a handful of alien attackers who come after them in the block of London council flats.

Unfortunately, there are too many characters, too many dead spots and too many lapses in logic. It also wasn’t lost on me that, once you know what the aliens are after, they actually have the moral high ground.

This is a well-done, entertaining movie, but contrary to fanboy opinion, it doesn’t transcend its genre trappings.

Sucker Punch

Finally, everyone else was able to see what I’d been saying about Snyder all along; he’s an emotionally and sexually retarded 14-year-old boy.

Source Code

When you just can’t get enough of a train blowing up. Duncan Jones, director of Moon, hit his sophomore slump hard with this one.

Hanna

It isn’t sarcasm to say this is the best adolescent female killing machine movie I’ve ever seen. Smart, tight, and (except for the slightly Hollywood ending), really well done. Looks amazing with pacing to match the visuals.

Killer Elite

It takes balls to remake an utterly obscure 1975 Sam Peckinpah movie. It takes even bigger balls to not only set the movie in 1980, but to shoot it as to look like a 1980 film in every way. Like The Mechanic, this is far from great, but it’s a creditable attempt.

Thor

I never would have believed that I would see a big-screen adaptation of my favorite comic from my youth. I would have had an ever harder time believing I’d get one that was actually good. Is Thor perfect? No, but it’s everything King Lear-cum-superhero film should be in the hands of a director like Kenneth Branah; it’s brash, loud, full of sound and fury and spectacle. Yes, the town was ridiculously tiny and shy of inhabitants, and yes, Natalie Portman seems to have been rendered incapable of real emotion at the hands of George Lucas, but I still thought Thor was a blast.

X-Men: First Class

After the abortions that were X-Men: Last Stand and Wolverine, I never thought we’d see an even half-decent superhero flick from Fox, much less a solidly excellent one. First Class is a James Bond film with mutants, and it does a better job with the characters than I could have hoped. Yeah, the women all kind of stink (I call it Sin City syndrome, except the women in that movie were cast because they’re hot… these girls… notsomuch), and Kevin Bacon was an odd casting choice, but the movie is great.

Captain America

The best Marvel Comics superhero flick ever. Joe Johnston, who has been a hack for his entire career, pulls it out to make Cap such a great, involving ride I might have to take back some of the awful things I’ve said about him. From the design to the Easter eggs (the original Human Torch, for fuck’s sake!) to the alterations made to help this film fit in as the “grandfather” of the celluloid Marvel universe, Captain America is spot on.

Green Lantern

A glowing green pointless pile of tedious garbage.

Super 8

JJ Abrams does Spielberg better than Spielberg has in years. Much as I dislike the guy (don’t get me started on Dawson’s Trek), I enjoyed this a lot, though a cleaner emotional through-line for the Cloverfield monster’s uncle at the end would have been helpful.

Cowboys & Aliens

The director’s cut is… less bad… but this will never be a good movie.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Except for James Franco, who is so painful to watch I just can’t stop cringing, this was an excellent attempt to wipe all previous Apes sequels from the public consciousness.

Contagion

The. Best. Movie. Of. The. Year. Without exception, without reservation. Contagion is smart, serious, brilliantly shot and acted, and scary as hell. A fantastically real take on the near end of the world.

Drive

I’m so tired of fighting this battle. Was Drive a good film? Except for the retarded falling-in-love section that gave me Attack of the Clones flashbacks (skipping stones in the river? Really?), yes, it undeniably is. Albert Brooks and Bryan Cranston are both great. Ryan Gosling is… well, vacant, which is what he does so well. But I can’t forget or forgive that Drive is also a beat-for-beat rip-off of Michael Mann’s far superior Thief. Even the title treatment is the same. The only difference is the opening, and Gosling’s character… which are lifted directly from Wlater Hill’s The Driver. If you’re a fan of Refn’s “modern-day noir,” take a look at either of these originals and you’ll see what I mean.

Thing

I hated this movie as much as I love Carpenter’s original.

Three Musketeers

I hated this even more. My friends John & Brusta drug me to this shitfest, and I still haven’t forgiven them. From the ridiculous performances to the moment when the screenwriters just threw out the laws of physics en toto, this is a deeply awful film.

Margin Call

Wall Street for our times, only all the way ’round better. Because, y’know, Oliver Stone is a fucking hack. If you don’t believe that, check out his Wall Street for our times, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Ugh.

Rum Diary

Jonny Depp continues his love affair with Duke, but in a more linear, but less entertaining, Hunter S. Thompson adaptation.

Anonymous

When the director of 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow decides to make a movie about Shakespeare, you know you’re in trouble. At least the effects were good.

Hugo

Incredibly pretty and mildly dull, Scorcese obviously wanted an excuse to get the lovingly restored A Trip to the Moon in front of audiences. He should have just made a straight biopic of Georges Melies.

Shame

I was so much less impressed with this than many critics, because I am not gay and am not in love with Michael Fassbender. Slow, ponders, pouty and incredibly self-absorbed, this movie has no characters, and no structure. Director Steve McQueen seems to have forgotten to have things happen.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The second movie that impressed me this year. I’m a huge fan of the original British miniseries, but this is actually tighter, and manages to leave nothing of substance out in only half the time. A fantastic films.

MI4

Yes, I saw this primarily to see the Dark Knight Rises prologue in IMAX, but the fact is, Mission Impossible 4 is like a really stupid, really hot blonde you just want to fuck; dumb as a bottle of dirt, but a lot of fun for a few hours. Thank god for Simon Pegg and Jeremy Renner, who voice most of the audience’s “bullshit” moments aloud, saving them the trouble.

Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

I love David Fincher; or rather, I used to. Lately, our romance has run cold. I’m not a huge fan of The Social Network, and I greatly preferred the original Swedish version of Dragon Tattoo, particularly the extended cut. It’s brilliant, and Fincher’s is… well… flat. And Rooney Mara is an unfit comparison to Noomi apace in the same way a Beetle is an unfit comparison to a Bentley, even though they’re made by the same company.

Young Adult

This is an incredibly polarizing movie, and I consider that a good thing. I love Jason Reitman, and Up in the Air is one of my favorite films. He and Diablo Cody have painted a portrait of a truly awful woman, and then had the guts to not redeem her in the audience’s eyes by the end. This movie is bold and shameless.

The Descendants

I’m not quite sure what all the hoopla is about this film. Is it a drama? A comedy? Is the moment at the end when Clooney decides not to sell an apotheosis, or just fear of change? I honestly don’t know. And what’s with the narration at the beginning that vanishes after the first twenty minutes? The hell is that? This felt like a movie that was all dressed up with nowhere to go.

So that’s it for the 2011 movies. I’ll be back shortly with a wrap-up of my career, such as it was, in 2011.

Now that I’m 44, one thing has become abundantly clear: women my own age want nothing to do with me. I currently have an eclectic collection of girls in my life, the oldest of whom is 30.

Fucking 30.

I know the immediate reaction is midlife crisis, but the fact is, I’ve never hunted outside my own demographic before. Historically, I always preferred women my own age or older. But when I stumbled back into the world of single men after 8 1/2 years with K, I quickly discovered that my female peers wanted nothing to do with me. Too much baggage, too much bullshit.

Young girls, however, seem to find my damage fascinating. They’re still ingenuous enough to find my brokeness deep and edgy.

So here I am. I shouldn’t complain; the girls I’m surrounded with are all fantastic, but none of them are – or can ever really be – mine, and I’m starting to weary of being, for all intents and purposes, alone.

Here’s the field identification manual, with the players nicknamed to remain anonymous:

LL
We’ve known each other for years. She’s hot, smart, talented and very sexual. The attraction between us is distracting, and we get along so well it’s almost eerie. And yet this is the girl who recently told me she realized she was avoiding thinking about actually dating me because she was afraid a relationship would really work.

We live 2 hours apart, which is an issue. We’re also both busy as hell, and I worry that I’m just too twisted for her. But if we could figure it out I’d love to give it a shot.

BLUE
Ah, chemistry. We have that thing that makes us stare at each other for long periods until it just feels goofy. She’s brilliant, and a total mess. Which, being a mess myself, I completely appreciate. Hey, whaddaya want? I’m the Crazy Whisperer.

BUT. For one thing, she has a live-in boyfriend. For another, we’re both tops and kind of unsure of what to do with each other in bed.

D
Sexy, dirty, submissive, geeky. Loves it when I hurt her. Willing to take whatever I dish out. Gorgeous. Has magical skin I can touch forever.

Also has a boyfriend, who is perfect for her except that he can’t hurt her, which is where I come in.

RED
To be fair, this is strictly one-sided. I am fiendishly attracted to this girl, and we’ve had some fantastic liaisons. But there’s nothing there on her end. I’m a creepy old perv who serves as a friend, occasional rescuer and shoulder to cry on. There’s a very, very dirty girl in there, but she’s still convinced that the white picket fence is going to make her happy, so I’m little more than an aberrant afterthought. Seeing this one is incredibly bad for my self-esteem.

There are other occasional partners and possibles; there’s Crazy Girl, who is a great fuck, but so looney I finally had to cut her off completely. KC, the whitest black girl in the world, who is stunning but purely casual. JJ, JG, AC, and others whom I flirt with, but have never made the timing work.

Lastly, there’s AS, who is about the most amazing woman I know. So smart, so gorgeous, so dirty. But she just doesn’t know what to do with me. We’ve known each other for years, have shared a lot of great moments, and one fantastic kiss. But NY is a long way from LA, and until we can figure out if she’s even interested, it’s not a commute I’m willing to make.

Today was my 44th birthday. Having not written here for nearly a year, it seemed as likely an event to warrant climbing back into the blog saddle as any.

It wasn’t a splendid day. In fact, without sounding too emo, I considered suicide more seriously tonight than I have in decades. I won’t do it, of course. After a certain age, willfully kicking off while all your parts still work just seems foolish. But tonight, the concept held the kind of peaceful allure it hasn’t had since I was a teenager. Tonight, an end seems fantastically desirable.

I’m not sour because I’m a year older; big fucking deal. By the time my actual age catches up to how old I feel, It’ll be well past time for me to go. No, it’s simply life. I’m fantastically broke, and day after day, prospects vanish like dreams at dawn. Contingency plans give way to furtive hopes, and there never seems to be a break on the horizon.

Creatively, I’ve been working for the last several days on a great gig. I’m the DP of a mainstream thriller that has the potential to lead to more real-world work. It’s been refreshing to shoot for a director who appreciates my skill. But, without telling tales, today the entire job went very, very sour, and the director and I are now sitting in a bucket filled with broken glass unsure of how to climb out.

It’s on the personal level, though, that things really fall apart. I moved into a new loft which requires more work than I can possibly complete. I had to put my favorite cat, Basil, to sleep. And day after day I feel utterly alone. The women I want either don’t want me, are already taken, or are unavailable for some other reason. One really fantastic girl told me, “I figured out why I can’t date you. It’s because I’m afraid it might work.”

As the kids say, fuck my life.

I do have friends. Some good, some annoying, some great. One of my best friends is a girl hopelessly in love with me whom I keep at arm’s reach because I can’t reciprocate.

This, dear reader, was NOT the plan.

Here’s a joke that was very popular with the tech crew at the Grady Gammage Auditorium in Arizona:

What do ballerinas use for birth control?

Their personalities.

Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is being hailed by some as the best film of the year, and a brilliant psychosexual thriller. Sadly, that’s far more hype than the movie deserves, and maybe that’s part of my problem. If I had been sold a creditable – but largely rote – film about psychological self-destruction, I wouldn’t have been disappointed.

It isn’t that Black Swan is awful; In fact, I think it’s Aronofsky’s best film. But given that I have largely hated his previous efforts, I suppose that’s not much of a compliment.

This movie got off on the wrong foot with me early because of the way it’s photographed. Shot by the extremely talented Matthew Libatique, Swan lifts the “camera bouncing along behind the protagonist” aesthetic that we first saw in The Wrestler. I didn’t like it in that film, either, but at least I understood it. It was motivated. In Black Swan it simply feels self-conscious and recycled.

I also had a hard time overcoming Natalie Portman’s character. Portman does a truly inspired job of being absolutely true to the character of Nina, but that character is weak, simpering, self-obsessed and fantastically uninteresting. Her reaction to every hurdle and pitfall is to curl up into a ball and cry. By the end of the movie, I didn’t care if she lived, died, succeeded, failed, ate her mother or took wing and flew away. I was just tired of watching Nina break down and sob at every opportunity. Had Black Swan been about Mila Kunis’ much more interesting and self-sufficient Lily, I probably would have had more patience with what I consider to be the movie’s huge failing: the symbolism.

I’ve said before that I think Aronofsky is similar to Zack Snyder in that they both have a very childish understand of human emotion and motivation. Look at the oh-so-shocking (yawn) dildo-show scene in Requiem for a Dream and tell me a 13-year-old sexuality didn’t conceive that. Black Swan is full of metaphor as distilled through the eyes of a child and then purveyed – supposedly – to adults. From the all black & white set dressing that adorns much of the movie to Natalie Portman being the only dancer in white the first time we see the company assembled to Mila Kunis being the obvious “black sheep” dancer because of her wing-like tattoos (oh, the subtlety) to the moment when Natalie Portman has a tantrum which ends with a shot of the shattered ballerina from her bedside music box, Black Swan is jam-packed with such heavy-handed sledgehammer leitmotif that I often found myself laughing suddenly at the ridiculousness of it all.

Is it a terrible film? No. Is it a work of genius? Certainly not. But would I fuck Mila Kunis senseless given half a chance? Oh, hells yes.

It’s  4 a.m. and I just got home about 20 minutes ago. I left for work at 8:45 this morning. This is all in the nature of the business I’m in. In fact, it isn’t even unusual.

I started the day shooting camera on two scenes for Ben. The first was a young girl who’d done very few scenes who was sweet, but as boring as boring can be. The second girl was doing her first scene ever and, really, performed like a champ.

Afterwards, I went to shoot on Punk Rock Schoolgirls for Joanna Angel and James Deen. Joanna writes rally cute, funny scripts for her movies, but sometimes they’re a bit… overambitious. As the oldest warhorse on the set (I’ve got five years on the next oldest person, and 11 years more experience in porn), I had the unenviable task of pulling James & Joanna aside and suggesting that they weren’t going to make their day.

In the past, Joanna has always gotten lucky and pulled off the impossible. This time it just wasn’t going to happen. So, the plug got pulled with one incredibly intricate dialogue scene to be picked up at some later date.

For all that the populace at large things porn is an enormous fuck-off job, I often think there are no harder working people in the world than porn shooters.

Tomorrow I’m going to run errands and spend the evening with Mischief and some of her friends. It’s good because I’ve been feeling incredibly anti-social lately, I think as a reaction to being so overwhelmed by work and debt (strange combination). She forces me to get out in the world.

For my birthday she took me to a big cat preserve, ironically located right next door to the Tropic Desert Mine where we shot The 8^th Day, so I was already aware of the place. It was a great day out, spent mostly in the company of animals (whom I largely prefer to people).

Rape of the Aboriginal Americans day and most of this coming weekend will be spent at the computer, working. Indulging my misanthropic nature.

My fingers are stiff from too many long days in a row, so for now let me just say eat some dead turkey in honor of a dead Indian and enjoy your Thanksgiving.

For my birthday I took myself out to see RED last night, and it was great. I haven’t read the comic, but you can see Warren Ellis’ fingerprints all over it. I’m a sucker for movies about old farts anyway, but RED is a terrifically entertaining amalgam of Sneakers+Ronin+Grumpy Old Men.

And let me just state, categorically, that at 65 Helen Mirren is still just about the goddamned sexiest thing I’ve ever seen in a movie, and I would bang the doors off that woman in a heartbeat.

I also had the treat of sitting through the worst trailer I have seen for a movie since Next of Kin. If you haven’t seen the trailer for Drive Angry, you owe it to yourself. It is absolutely ridiculous, and proves yet again Nicolas Cage’s insatiable urge to embarrass himself. This is the first trailer I’ve ever seen worthy of its own Rifftrax.

If the movie is half as bad as the trailer, it should be The Room of car/driver from Hell movies (and, yes, there’s a long precedent of precisely that; The Car, Christine, The Wraith… shall I continue?)

This morning I looked at the news and discovered that Dino De Laurentiis had died on my birthday. Despite being 5’ 4”, Dino was a giant in the film industry, and was a huge influence on my childhood. He was one of the last old-school independent producers. He never directed a film, and probably never wanted to, but he was the driving force behind hundreds.

Some – la Strada, Serpico, Ragtime – are brilliant films, true classics. Some – Maximum Overdrive, Red Sonja, Lipstick, place easily among the worst movies ever inflicted on an audience.

Many of the movies De Laurentiis produced are cultural icons, pieces of gaudy fluff that have become cool or camp or kitsch because of their shamelessness or over-the-top style. Movies like Danger: Diabolik, Barbarella, Flash Gordon, Dune or Mandingo. I personally dislike every one of these films, but each has its following.

Like many Italian filmmakers, De Laurentiis didn’t distinguish between the pomp and the circumstance. All art was opera, and all stories were to be told on the grandest, loudest, most gaudy scale possible. Every painting deserved a bigger canvas. If De Laurentiis had been a jacket, he would have been made from red velvet and gold lamé.

For me, De Laurentiis was Conan the Barbarian, Death Wish, The Shootist (the first time I cried in a movie), Three Days of the Condor, and his awful remake of King Kong that I watched in awe and disappointment at the age of 8 in the biggest theater in Phoenix.

Tycoon, shlockmeister, showman and crook, Dino De Laurentiis was a bastion of Golden-Age Hollywood bombast and we’ll never see his like again.

Being a huge Douglas Adams fan, I somehow imagined that 42 would be a great year. I thought, at the very least, I would come away a little wiser. Of course, I imagine Douglas himself thought his 50^th birthday would be a pretty big celebration as well.

The truth, as always, was a bit more grounded in reality than my expectations. I had considered a bullet-point list of all the ways in which November ’09 – until today sucked donkey balls, but that just seems self-indulgent. Let me simply state, for the record, that it was the worst year of my adult life.

In fact, to even come close, you have to dig down into some of the major life trauma from my teen years, and I think I speak for all of us when I say we want to do that like we want to… well… suck donkey balls.

Of all Douglas Adams’ characters, I’ve always felt the strongest kinship with Marvin, both in outlook and demeanor. It was a satisfying moment in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish when Arthur and Fenchurch take the aging android to see God’s final message to His creation, written in fifty-foot-high letters of fire on the side of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains. The message reads, “We Apologize for the Inconvenience.”

Upon reading the words, Marvin utters his only positive sentiment in the entire series. “I think,” he says, “I feel good about it,” and he dies. When I read that, my reaction was, Yes. That’s it. That is the way life works.

So I’m not entirely unprepared, emotionally, for years like this.

However, while I’d rather watch Lost again than re-live the last year, there were some highlights. I met Mischief, and she’s flat-out terrific. I produced a movie, Kiss of the Strangler, which I’m very proud of (although it’s technically not finished yet, and hasn’t been released), and I, uh… well… I’ve got a lot more room in my closet!

In honor of saying goodbye to 42, there’s a brand new podcast from Rob Burnett and myself at our new site, MoreHumanPodcast.com. Go. See.

I’m oh-so-cautiously optimistic that things are looking better for 43. Hot Video seems to want another movie. I’ve gone into business with an old nemesis, and so far that seems to be working well. I’m not starving. Today. And neither are the cats. And for the moment, we have a roof and a bed.

So 42 has come and gone.

And the rest is silence.

A few months back we got word that Chris Nolan was producing the re-re-boot of Superman from a script by David Goyer. Now, I’m personally of the opinion that Nolan is one of the finest filmmakers in the world. I can go on for an hour about everything that was right about The Dark Knight, and I would fuck Inception if I could. David Goyer has written a lot of… stuff, some of it genius, some of it… not… so much…

But I had hope.

Yesterday, Warner Brothers officially announced that the director of Superman: The Man of Steel would be… Zack Snyder. Y’know, the director of the pointless, ridiculous gay Fantasia know as 300, the new CG-Fest Owls of Ferngully or whateverthefuck that retarded Owls-in-Armor movie is called, and The Watchmen.

I’ve avoided spending six hours writing the full, doctoral-thesis version of why I hate The Watchmen as much as I do. But I really, really hate it. I mean words fail. The last time I was on the Warner Brothers lot I walked past Snyder’s parking spot where his convertible was parked with the top down and it was all I could not to take a dump in it.

I hated everything about that movie. I mean Every. Single. Frame. I hated the look, the script, the design, the acting, the music (dear lord, the song cuts…). As much as I want to have sex with Inception, I want to drag The Watchmen  into an alley, stab it repeatedly in the abdomen with a chunk of shattered glass, reach in the hole, yank out its intestines and hold it by the throat as I watch its eyes grow cold and dead.

“Hate,” you see, is far too mild a description.

So it was distressing to say the least to think of Snyder, who has the emotional depth and resonance of a Spencer’s Gifts thank-you card, tackling the continuing saga of the Father of Superheroes. Yes, Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns is a flawed movie, but at least it has a story. Emotional clarity. And, I would still argue that the rescue or Richard Branson’s 747 is one of the greatest action sequences ever shot.

The thing I really can’t fathom is how Nolan, who is making some of the most adult-driven and thoughtful cinema today; movies with FX sequences designed to be real and serve the story; movies intentionally shot never to be released in 3D because Nolan believes (as do I) that it’s a pointless gimmick that interferes with the storytelling; how is this man going to produce a movie being directed by the King of Emotionally-Retarded 8-Year-Olds?

Zack Snyder believes that every movie should be a fucking video game, and I’m sure if you could see into his tiny little frantically-masturbating monkey brain and asked him to imagine “compelling human drama,” the result would be a mental catalogue of the cast of Jersey Shore.

Maybe we’ll get lucky and Nolan will beat him to death with a copy of Filmmaking for Beginners.

Well, hello there! I was walking by and saw this blog sitting here abandoned and adrift like the Mary Celeste and decided to come aboard.

Yeah, it’s been a crazy few weeks. I’m gonna keep this short, because, well, I’ve still got shit to do, but I’ll try to check back a little more often.

Been doing a lot of editing. Finished Kiss of the Strangler, which is a new feature (what?! NOT a parody?!  Do they still make those?) for Hot Video. I’m really happy with it. If you’re curious, you can watch their very own on-the-set report here: http://www.hotvideo.fr/usa.php

I don’t come off looking too ridiculous.

I also spent a few weeks under the gun editing Joanna’s Angels 3 for BurningAngel. It’s their big movie for the year, and even though I was the DP on the movie, I forgot what an epic it is until I was faced with trying to finish it in the space of 10 days. That deadline almost killed me when it raced past.

Still, the movie got finished, and I’m quite proud. It’s hysterical.

I’ve got other shenanigans in the works, including the possibility that I’ll be a producer of a multi-million-dollar mainstream film. But those details will have to wait. Until, y’know, they might be a real thing that’s not going to be cursed out of existence by its mere mention aloud. Like love or faeries or justice.

Hey there, Mischief here.

By now, you might be wondering where Bryn has gone off to.  A safari in Africa, perhaps?  A month of back-packing across Europe?  Maybe a guided tour of southeast China?  So busy sleeping with a 26 year-old goth-biscuit, he just can’t find the time to pop in to let you all know where he is?

None of those are true (sadly).  What he has been doing is shopping around for that perfect RV.

You know, “Recreational Vehicle”.

See, after the carbon-dating results came back from the lab, Bryn realized he was way past the standard retirement age.  So he’s decided to spend the remainder of his diminishing twilight years touring the massive spread of America’s greatest RV parks.

One would think that this endeavor would not be so time-consuming, but he has been absolutely devoted to this goal.  After all, we are talking about his last few years on the planet, and he wants to be in the lap of fuel-guzzling luxury.

Anyway, while he’s away, I’ve been charged with the task of putting together a small blog to let you all know that he is still alive, still kicking (twitching, really), and full of the usual fire and Bryn-stone.

(Am I that lame?  Oh, yes, I totally am.)

(I still can’t believe I just did that.  We now need to have a moment of silence to mourn the passing of my writer’s dignity.)

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(Christ.  OK, moving on.)

So, this weekend we are going to be strolling our way up to San Francisco to catch “Wicked” before it moves to the acoustically-dreaded Orange County Performing Arts Center.  I’m a little worried about Bryn’s prosthetic hip and the hills, but I’m sure with my youth and his… er.., yes, with my youth, we’ll make it through.  Worst case scenario, I’ll buy one of those little red wagons and drag him around like a hyperactive puppy.

A very hyperactive puppy.  Those hills are goddamned steep.

We’ll be back on Sunday for Bryn’s pool aerobics class, probably swing through Gilroy and feast ourselves on enough garlic to keep the both of us sated for the next couple days.  It should be a good time.

And Bryn will eventually be back, once he picks out his RV and gets the cats situated.  Just give him another week or two.

Though, with that hip, it might take a little longer…