As for me, I’ll always curse the Scream series’ name.  Not because the second two sucked, but for de-constructing the workings of the horror genre in an attempt to seem hip and smart, while only making serious horror look stupid; for de-fanging a form based on menace, making it fit for mass consumption but damn near un-scary; and for dragging out the dull concept of the dude with a knife, long after it had become cliché.

But even for me, it’s a little sad to see Scream become irrelevant.

Love it or hate it, the first movie has an indelible place in horror history.  When Hollywood spots a trend, it snatches it like a catnip treat and rolls around with it until there’s nothing left but unrecognizable scraps.  We can’t blame Wes Craven or the films themselves, but until The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project closed the decade strong, the 1990s were dominated by painfully ear-piercing echoes of Scream.

If you dig fright flicks and you’re over 25, you might have been pleased that this mainstream hit made horror hot again after a long fallow period.  During the Clinton Administration, the economy was good and we felt safe from annihilation but almost nothing original was finding its way to movie screens in the U.S.  At least not in the category Scream refers to, in a rather juvenile manner, as “scary movies.”

One breath of fresh air, or gust of wind from a charnel house, was Candyman (1992). That lurid phantasmagoria would be original in any decade.  But the slasher was dead in a way the bad guy in the movie never is.  Audiences had grown as weary of slashing as Jason Voorhees’ machete-swinging arm.  And before movies like Blair Witch, The Ring and 28 Days Later cleared new paths, to many it seemed like a psycho with a sharp instrument was the only definition of horror.

Screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s Scream (1996) stuck to that tired template, but it did bring something new to the table.  It was meta, it was sly, and it didn’t cast a bunch of unskilled no-names to suck face and get stalked the way the Friday the 13^th movies had a decade before.

This movie took hot talent from teens’ top TV shows and put them right on the poster.  Hunky guys and fresh-faced females that the fairer sex not only recognized, but might adore.  Courteney Cox from Friends. Neve Campbell from Party of Five. Plus, a real movie star, Drew Barrymore.  Ole’ Ghostface sat down at his drafting table and drew up the blueprint for horror aimed at teenage girls.

As a movie, it wasn’t half bad.  Scream had a harrowing opening set-piece that set a bar the rest of the movie couldn’t touch, but overall the flick was a suspenseful and clever bit of business.  It toyed with and teased the horror genre, but it tried pretty hard to deliver an actual horror film as well.

The film created a new paradigm for Hollywood horror that was easy to screw up.  A parade of jokey, watered-down exercises in empty suspense followed.  The business model was that if you took a bunch of pretty faces from the small screen, a “whodunit” mystery element and a lot of shadowy corridors to traverse, you had a horror movie.

At best, the films inspired by Scream were shallowly manipulative but entertaining.  At worst, they were what no horror film should be: toothless.  Maybe they played by “the rules” outlined by Jamie Kennedy’s character in Scream, but they failed to meet the true definition of a horror film.  There was nothing transgressive, shocking or unsettling about this stuff, unless ‘90s fashion counts.

So what’s Stogie’s take on Scream 4?  “Pleasantly mediocre.”  The movie is decidedly old-fashioned and more than a bit uneven, but you could do worse things on a date.  That said, as a self-referential comment on the genre this thing not only fails the test, it decides to sleep in and send its stoned cousin.

The last decade of horror is addressed in a few glancing references to torture porn and zombies, as this weary iteration of a now passé series decides to leave trailblazing to the young.  There are moments of satire that skewer sequels and remakes effectively, but they come from a conservative stance.  Content to take its position as the creaky old guard, the movie makes the statement “Never f##k with the original” in dialogue.  Wait, wasn’t that exactly what the first Scream was doing to its elders?

Happily, this time around we don’t really need another Scream movie to revive the genre.  There is provocative work coming out of Europe and Asia.  In the U.S., filmmakers are finding new things to do with ghosts, zombies, vampires and werewolves.  Producers aren’t as unwilling to take risks because audiences have proven to be open-minded and unafraid of being afraid.  We’ve survived the short-lived spate of Saw imitators, thanks be to all that is unholy, and the horror genre is healthy.

As for Scream, it can take its rightful place as the answer to one of a raspy-voiced caller’s trivia questions.

“How did THAT get nominated?!”  A bitter biddy tsk’ed to her companion on their way out of the theater.  What distasteful dreck!

But it’s not just the silver set who scoffs at this movie.  I’ve heard “How did THAT get nominated?!” from twenty-somethings and mid-thirties alike, in person, on podcasts, and in print.  Even the great Roger Ebert, a cinematic sage if ever there was one, offered only bemused praise for the film.  In his brief review he was reduced to the cliché of comparing it to a car crash (“You cannot look away”).  Roger didn’t really try to make heads or tails of this thing.

So how DID it get nominated?  In the wake of criticism of the Academy’s conservative choices over the years, rules reforms were instituted after a particularly traditional 2008 field.  Now an executive committee of about 20 members can add three movies to the six-film short list from which the nominees are culled.

The idea was that the several hundred members of the foreign-language committee were, through the magic of group-think, producing a lot of middle-of the-road nominees.  If you weren’t a Holocaust film, a tender coming-of-age tale, or an arty feast of the senses, you were probably not going to score an Oscar nom for Best Foreign Film.  Meanwhile, the movies that were being remembered 10, 15 and 20 years down the line weren’t the safe, often dull-as-a-dinner-knife Academy Award nominees.

Until now.  Riskier fare could be championed by worldly tastemakers like cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (Schindler’s List) and screenwriter Michael Tolkin (The Player), both members of the executive committee.  Films that might be challenging, disturbing and flat-out unique could be recognized for their potential to be relevant over the long haul.

Films like Dogtooth.

This year, the executive committee made Dogtooth one of its special selections, rank-and-file be damned.  The uproar has been steady and indignant.  Blasted for being brutal, pretentious, pornographic and indecipherable, this film has become the chew toy of choice for segments of both the high- and low-brow audiences.

Yeah.  Stogie is inclined to disagree…

C’mon, folks, this is a brilliant movie!  Rather than being self-indulgent, exploitative or deliberately elliptical for its own sake, this is in fact a stark yet comprehensive portrait of how home-schooling parents (without religious motivations, it should be noted) went wrong in keeping their kids completely isolated from society.

No doubt about it—this flick doesn’t go out of its way to spoon-feed the audience the particulars of exposition, back-story or character motivation.  Many people who have disliked the film clearly did not understand what was going on or why, in individual scenes if not as a whole.  But all the key pieces of the puzzle are right there on the screen!  Movie lovers used to enjoy putting these puzzles together, but maybe this one was a little too unpleasant for some people.  I get that—I found the film hard to watch at times, myself.  But in the end it’s unforgettable, in a good way.

Some of the criticism has revolved around the movie’s unclassifiable nature.  I’ve heard it compared to everything from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Village to a Dogme 95 film.  That’s like comparing an apple to an eel.  But people like to label a movie so they can hold it up to the standards of the genre.  This gives them a reason to slag it if the movie falls short of those expectations.

Genres are great, but they strip a film of its ability to surprise.  What is a genre if not a set of rules the film must conform to?  The romantic comedy is so rigid that many entries are practically movie-by-numbers.  (500 Days of Summer is a notable exception.  Check it out, if you haven’t already.)  There are comforts to the familiarity of genre, but a movie that exists outside of that prison is free as a bird.

Like Dogtooth. This movie has moments of dark, dry humor that are hilarious.  It has elements of horror.  There is a mystery to be solved, and family drama.  But this is not a movie that plays the genre game.  You don’t know what you’re getting, scene-to-scene.  For me, that’s part of what made the film so goddamn riveting.

Clearly, Dogtooth is an acquired taste, like haggis or kimchi.  I don’t think you have to be a freakin’ idiot to hate the thing.  The larger point is that the Academy is taking heat for this nomination.  From some of the same folks who whined and mocked when those hidebound prudes put another pearls-and-furs movie in the place now occupied by Dogtooth.  The committee chair has received a flood of emails from Academy members protesting the nomination.

Great.  If this dustup has a chilling effect on the Academy’s nascent attitude of audacity, you can bet the boring but safe selections will be back.  We can go back to bitching about that, while comforted by the fact that at least the films are of obvious “Oscar caliber.”  Not like that dreadful Dogtooth. “Saints alive, Betty, I thought I’d stumbled into a screening of sadists’ home movies!  Let’s go get a salad.”

Meanwhile, Dogtooth will be debated, written about and remembered, long after the latest triumph-over-adversity stories are forgotten.

I’m quick to blast the entertainment industry for any idiotic pandering to the percentage of the audience who want to be given garbage and told it’s gold.  That percentage isn’t as high as some seem to think.  But I also like to give credit to deserving work, so allow me to shed my snark for a minute here and get serious about a couple of great movies.

This Oscar season finds Stogie in a contemplative frame of mind, and the 2010 Best Picture nominees provided plenty of food for thought.  It should come as no surprise that two of the best movies of the year explored powerful themes.  But what’s a little surprising to me is that one of those themes, though considered from vastly different perspectives, was examined in both movies.  And that theme is relevant to artists of any kind.  Including screenwriters…

The Social Network and Black Swan have something important to say about what the pursuit of personal greatness can cost you.

Every artist strives for perfection of some kind.  Every artist can relate to the one in director Darren Aronofsky’s triumph Black Swan. Even a downtrodden screenwriter, sitting down before that cold, unloving white screen (or blue or black screen, if you couldn’t face the white one for another second and changed the background).

These lines from the script, credited to Mark Heyman, Andrés Heinz and John J. McLaughlin, capture the struggle within the artist:

“I just want to be perfect.”

“The only person standing in your way is you.”

“You could be brilliant, but you’re a coward.”

“Perfection is not just about control.  It’s also about letting go.”

Black Swan unflinchingly depicts the painful physical sacrifices made by a ballet dancer, but also something more universal….  The exhausting effort to reach your fullest potential.  To somehow coax your personal best from the web of self-doubt, inhibition and self-destructiveness that are always threatening to sabotage any act of creative expression.

As a writer, do you try to harness your inner demons and put them to work for your story?  Do you try to make peace with your dark side, proposing a truce to stop the destructive conflict raging beneath the surface of your consciousness?  But giving this dark faction representation in the government of your life can be a very dangerous thing.

In Black Swan, Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) draws strength from her dark side in hopes that this will unlock the uninhibited power of her subconscious.  A neurotic perfectionist born to play the delicate White Swan, Nina must open locked doors within her mind if she hopes to land the reckless, savage Black Swan part in Swan Lake.

Is it true that a writer must access repressed pain, desire and aggression to write something great?  Or is a dance with the Devil always doomed to come at the price of a soul?

For Nina, greatness may come at a steep price.  There is almost always a pinch of madness in all great things.  But venturing to the edge of the dark pit within you is a perilous journey.  If you go to that well too many times, you might fall in.

Many successful writers achieved their career breakthrough by writing something fierce, raw and reckless.  They danced the Black Swan.  Once the steadying influences of a career, family and reputation enter their lives, their demons become more distant.  Maybe the demons have to be chased down and rounded up.  Their faces are blurry, less familiar.  These writers do whatever they can to recapture the element of imaginative chaos that eludes them in a more stable, conservative frame of mind.

This is how addiction and other self-destructive behavior can take root.  It will also leave you feeling utterly alone, even in a crowd.

Mark Zuckerberg may not be an artist, but he certainly understands the relentless pursuit of greatness.  The Mark Zuckerberg character we get in David Fincher’s nearly perfect film The Social Network pays a different price than Nina Sayers or the writers I’ve been talking about.  This is not someone who careens into madness, addiction or violence in his search for perfection.  His approach is meticulous, lucid, calculating.  But this character is also obsessively driven to achieve.  And he will pay his price.

As brilliantly portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg, there is no room in this character’s heart for true loyalty, warmth or understanding.  Whether it’s simply a broken spring in his head, the result of experience or some combination thereof, this is a man who sees friends as a means to an end.  He justifies his thinly veiled contempt with people’s perceived inferiority to him.  In his mind, being the best makes him more important, more deserving of success.  In turn, their victories must be seen as his defeats.

The Social Network depicts a scenario where Mark’s best friend Eduardo gets into a club that Mark coveted membership in.  This curdles whatever affection Mark felt for Eduardo.  The fact that Eduardo is less deserving than Mark is immaterial; what matters most is that Mark cannot step outside himself and be happy for another human being.  Even if that person is a loyal friend to him.

No one should be happy until Mark is happy.  And it’s an open question whether or not Mark, as depicted in the film, will ever find happiness.  Or is even capable of it.

Our protagonist’s obsessive drive is fueled by slights to his ego, the unfairness of life, and perhaps an awareness of his inability to truly connect with other human beings.  Among the intriguing ambiguities of the character screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has penned and Fincher and Eisenberg brought to life are the glimpses of warmth we see in Mark.  If he didn’t want to form meaningful relationships, he wouldn’t be so motivated by his failure to do so.  (The irony of such a person creating the world’s greatest social networking site is lost on no one, I’m sure.)

It’s not a spoiler to say that the character becomes massively successful, but achieving his goals doesn’t make him capable of warmth and empathy for others.  His pursuit of perfection will never end, but nor will his isolation from the imperfect people who actually make up the human race.

I know folks with a little of Natalie Portman’s character in them, or Jesse Eisenberg’s.  They aren’t happy people.  Unfortunately, our culture is built on competition, on shoving the other guy off the stage so you can be anointed a star.  That’s the way the system works in ballet, business… and screenwriting.

As someone who has given and received more notes than I’ve had hot meals, here’s Stogie Joe’s advice on the subject.  (If you missed Part I, check it out.)

Know Your Audience

For most people, the screenwriter whom you’re giving notes to will be a friend, lover, family member… Someone you’re at least fairly close to.  If it’s a classmate you hardly know or you wound up in a writing group with virtual strangers, then try to balance out your constructive criticism with acknowledgment of the script’s strengths. There’s always something nice to say about even the worst scripts…

“The formatting of the scene headers was spot on.”

But generally you know something about the person you’re giving notes to.  Are they thin-skinned?  Are they really just looking for a pat on the back?  Or will they be receptive to rigorous, detailed notes?  At the end of the day you have to consciously decide on your approach to their script.  Pick your shots to be as helpful as possible without discouraging them from the project.  If you feel you NEED to discourage them from the project, for their own good, focus on why it’s not right for today’s marketplace.  Meanwhile, look for strengths of the story or their writing that will lend themselves to a more viable movie idea.

I’m telling you to be nice to these people, aren’t I?  There goes my image.  But the fact is, this is their dream.  Don’t piss on the dream.  It’s rude, and unsanitary.  Assuming that you care about this person even a little bit, don’t be petty.

I know that reading a bad script can be a chore.  It can leave you thinking “God, I’ll never have those two hours of my life back.  I missed the Lakers game for THIS?!”  You’re forgiven if your first instinct is to punish the writer for putting you through it.

But try to remember that they wrote the screenplay hoping that readers would laugh, cry, shiver or have profound thoughts.  They’re not trying to suck.

There are plenty of things in this world that people should suffer for doing.  Being a bad writer is not one of them.  In fact, it’s punishment enough.  Failure is plenty cruel—you don’t have to be.

Am I saying that you should pump sunshine up their untalented keisters?  Hell no.  Just turn this…

“This character was so laughably stereotypical that I thought you were going for Black Dynamite 2.”

Into…

“Adding an unexpected layer or two to his personality would make him a better developed, more interesting character.”

Of course, some people might appreciate the humor and candor of the first note.  (That’s why I put this in the Know Your Audience section, right?)  As long as you don’t limit your notes to snarky remarks, a zinger or two might actually make your point more clearly than a carefully couched comment.

In sports, successful coaches almost never treat every player the same way.  They get to know which players respond to what.  The same is true for directors and their cast.  The idea is always to get the best performance possible out of someone.  Think of giving notes as a test of your ability to coach a writer.  What do they respond well to?  How can you get through to them?  And what will make them tune you out?

Think Like the Audience Will

Every aspect of the development process comes back to this question:

What does the audience want to see?

Everyone from the Story Editor to the Executive in Charge of Production to the VP of International Distribution to the person who cuts the trailer are searching for the answer to that question.  Why shouldn’t you?  At every turn in the story, when each dramatic beat lands, and however a scene unfolds—the underlying question is, “How will this play to the intended audience for this movie?”  It all starts with figuring out who is the audience, what did they buy their tickets to see, and how will the story give them what they want in a satisfying way they didn’t quite expect?

Apply this to your notes.  If you hate romantic comedies, pretend to be the audience for a romantic comedy when you’re evaluating the script.  That’s right—actually imagine yourself as unimaginative, insecure female who wants to be told that everything is going to be all right.

Just kidding—we all love a GOOD romantic comedy.  But even if you’re not a big fan of the genre, compare the script to successful examples you’re familiar with.  Consider trailers you’ve seen, even if you didn’t watch the movie, to isolate the appeal of the premise.  Does your friend’s script have similar selling points, whether they’re fully developed or not?

It’s quite possible that the script you’re doing notes for has unrealized potential.  If an idea, character or avenue of story are promising but not fully explored, this is something to tell the writer.  If a discordant note is struck, something likely to disappoint or confuse fans of this type of film, point it out.

Actively apply “the audience mindset” in your evaluation.  Reflect it openly in your comments, even at the risk of being repetitive.  Go ahead and say things like “Horror fans expect extended scenes of extreme tension.  But the script doesn’t attempt any suspenseful set-piece sequences.”

A serious writer will give these comparative observations, if accurate, much more credence.  Who can discount the value of a note that takes into account the perspective of audiences and compares the script to quality, successful films of a similar type?

Writers of genre films, at least, are almost always actively attempting to put a fresh spin on a proven formula (or at least they should be).  Any note that helps them get the script one step closer to achieving that goal is a good note.  If they ignore your note, to hell with them!  You’ve done your job.

A note about how something struck you as an individual can be valuable too.  Just provide the caveat “this is just my personal opinion,” or some such.  It will only make the writer take ALL your notes more seriously when you draw a clear line between subjective impressions and your attempts to help the script equal its popular predecessors.

So good luck, give good notes, and hopefully you’ll be thanked in someone’s Best Original Screenplay acceptance speech one day.  Or at least you’ll know they aren’t talking to you when they say “thanks to everyone who never thought I’d make it—you made me strong!”

Every writer gives them, gets them, hates them.  They’re a necessary evil.  Like the unlovely comparison between opinions and a certain part of the body, everybody’s got a note for every script.

Take any two of the PAGE Awards winners and you’ll probably find a Judge who loved one but not the other and another Judge who felt the opposite.  Read a script that sold and tell me you don’t have notes.  Have your friend read it and see if those notes are the same as yours.  Probably not.

If everybody has a different opinion, a different sense of what’s selling or not selling and why, and a different degree of commitment to the task, what makes one set of notes better than another?

The best thing to do is get as many people to read your work as possible and see how many of the same notes you get back.  If you hear the same things from all kinds of people, you can probably take that to the bank.  If you hear something from one person and you know it’s true—even if you’d rather gargle glass than admit it—well, you should probably take that seriously, too.

But today I want to talk about GIVING notes, not receiving them.  Every writer should make giving good notes a point of pride.  Not only is helping each other succeed a great feeling, analyzing other people’s work rigorously will only make you a better writer, too.  And what goes around comes around—if you move the needle for someone else, they’re going to remember that.  It’s karma, kids.

Here’s what to do and what not to if one of your fellow scribes asks for your opinion on their work.  It’s a pain in the ass but it’s also a compliment, and an opportunity.  Take it seriously.

First off, and for me this is Rule Number One…

Don’t Tell ‘Em What YOU Would Do

Every writer is different, every story is different, and no one understands the intricate web of ramifications that radiates from every little tweak like the person who wrote the damn script in the first place.

When you and I talk about your script, I assume you’ve thought everything through from every possible angle.  A script is a house of cards, and the writer should be able to rattle off where all 52 of ‘em are without looking.  If you can’t, you haven’t done your job.

But nothing makes me want to grind out my cigar in somebody’s smug mug like a litany of new story turns or even SPECIFIC DIALOGUE as they act out THEIR scenes for you.  Congratulations, you’re creative!  Wow, let me record this performance so I’m sure not to lose a word of it and can immediately transcribe it into my script, verbatim.

I know the Improvisational Note-Giver is coming from a desire to help.  They probably think that the best thing you can do for someone is to solve their problems for them.  Makes sense in any other walk of life, right?  What’s your friend going to appreciate more, telling him that his car’s spark plug wires are shot or saying, “Hey, I fixed it! Get back on the road and go with God, buddy!”

Screenwriting is a little different.  Unless you’re the Screenplay Savant, whatever you come up with off the top of your pretty little head is not going to be the best fit for the script.  How could it be, if you haven’t thought through all the consequences of your changes?

If they plug in all your great ideas, chances are your friend is going to discover a host of new problems to solve.  The word for this is “churn.”  You could also call it robbing Peter to pay Paul or cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Give other writers the same credit you want for yourself.  We’re good at this; we’re committed and creative people.  Show me the problem and I’ll solve it in my own way.  The way that’s going to be best for me and best for my story.

Which brings me to Rule Number 2…

Make a Compelling Case for Your Note

“Your protagonist was kinda, I dunno… Flat.”
“Flat is in, lacking dimension?  You thought she was one-dimensional?”
“No, no, she had plenty of depth… I just found her sort of ordinary.”
“Do you mean boring?  You didn’t care about her?”
“No, I guess I thought… She didn’t blow me away.”
“Okay.  Thanks.”

Wishy-washy, instinctive, vague negativity is the worst possible note you can give.  Basically, you’re saying “I didn’t like this, but I can’t really tell you why.”  Sure, there’s something to be gleaned from that, but only at the most civilian, test-audience level.  The writer can reevaluate this aspect of the script and try to find out what isn’t working, but if she liked that aspect and put a lot of loving care into it, chances are she isn’t going to find anything wrong with it.  Notes like these are the easiest to ignore.

But here’s the thing…

Chances are, that crappy note-giver was onto something, but his effort was just too half-assed to be of any damn use to anyone.

Don’t be a half-assed note-giver.  Make a case for your notes.

I truly believe that you could give the most damning, humbling and monolithic note to the most adamant, resistant writer in the world and if you make your argument in a detailed, specific and clear manner, the writer will thank you.  Maybe after swearing, throwing something, and going for a long walk around the lake while pondering a career in the garment industry.  But that writer will ultimately thank you if you lay out exactly WHY whatever it is doesn’t work.

This doesn’t mean you have to become incredibly anal and do a PowerPoint presentation for every note.  It just means that your job is to explain how and why something rubbed you the wrong way, fell flat, didn’t make sense, wasn’t believable, or whatever the case may be.

If you focus on convincing the writer that they have a problem and showing them exactly what that problem is, you’re doing them a great service.

Now, if you also have a few ideas for what to do about it, great—maybe they’ll take your suggestion and run with it, maybe it will spark an entirely new idea for the fix, or at least get them moving in the right direction.  Just don’t tell a writer what to do as if it’s the best or only thing to do.

There is nothing sadder in the screenwriting world than someone pinballing from draft to draft, chasing their tail after a cascade of half-hearted, ill-thought out notes or someone else’s vision sent them down the rabbit hole for another few weeks or months.  You aren’t doing them any favors, so don’t do it!

To be continued…

“As a documentary it is the sad record of a man lost in the wilderness of drugs, ego and narcissism.  As a fake documentary—a fiction film—it is a rather awe-inspiring record of a piece of high-risk performance art played out in public by Phoenix and Affleck over more than a year.”

Whether you see the film or not—and it grossed less than $1000 a screen in its first week of release—this hoax or experiment or whatever you want to call it is an opportunity to consider our society’s relationship to celebrity.  Since Phoenix’s train wreck of a Letterman appearance in 2009, we’ve watched a gifted actor with a fine track record and little history of trouble careen into a professional and possibly literal death spiral.  How surreal it must have been for Phoenix to witness the world’s reaction to his freefall from what was actually a completely lucid vantage point.

It’s certainly a relief to all that Phoenix’s bizarre behavior was premeditated and in character.  While it’s fashionable to say now “I always knew it was a stunt,” and such speculation was rampant from the beginning, it certainly seemed possible to most observers that he was on the path to self-destruction.

The ratio of sympathy to scorn and concern to indifference in the media’s response was balanced enough to offer no stunning insights about our celebrity-obsessed culture.  At least not at first glance.  That might be disappointing to Affleck and Phoenix, but I have a feeling that their audacious endeavor will be analyzed in university classrooms and scholarly texts for years to come.

To me, what is most interesting about the whole affair is that it underscores a larger truth about humanity.  The closer the proximity between human beings, the stronger the kinship and understanding they feel for each other—whether they like it or not.  You may find a co-worker obnoxious and wish you never had to see him again, but news of his unexpected passing will probably rattle you in a deeper way than learning that an earthquake has killed thousands on the other side of the world.

The unexpected death of one of my neighbors, four years ago, still crosses my mind today.  She died of natural causes at an age earlier than most, but not unthinkable.  Though we exchanged no more than a handful of words, she was always very kind to me.

I don’t know Joaquin Phoenix in the way that I know my neighbors.  The representation of him that I know is a public persona, abstract and artificial.  I can like that persona or not like it.  I can respect it, root for it, or dismiss it.  But he is not someone I know, and thus any relationship I have to him is inherently impersonal.

Public figures are often dismayed at the lack of empathy they receive from the public.  The truth is, we just aren’t wired to bring the same warmth and understanding to the idea of a person that we do to a person we actually interact with.  This must be a survival instinct.  For example, if we grieved deeply every time we learned that human beings had died somewhere in the world, every day would be an agonizing experience.  We’d be useless much of the time.

Finding compassion for strangers is a vital part of being the civilized, transcendent creatures that each of us are capable of being.  Finding a healthy balance between caring and carrying on is an essential part of our progress as a species.

However, in a technologically close-knit world where we are increasingly aware of other people without truly knowing them, we can’t expect our instincts to evolve at the same pace as technology.  Our investment in others extends in ever-widening rings that begin with our families and grow more diffuse the farther from our “tribe” they extend.

While technology may bring a star into your living room every week, it does not make you friends.  Celebrities exist in a strange and often uncomfortable zone of inappropriate adulation and disconcerting detachment, as they are known but not known, intimately understood but unfairly judged.  To live a healthy life, they can never expect their broadcast image to forge a real bond with real people.  This may be unnerving, but it’s less a sign of a sick society than a lingering biological truth.

Seeing a lot of cynical amusement in the public reaction to his self-immolation, Phoenix might consider this a test of compassion failed.  But it doesn’t matter whether we knew his antics were his own or those of a character he was playing.  Movies and other media turn celebrities into characters every day.  Inevitably, celebrities are more character than person to those who perceive them only through media.

For his audience, Phoenix’s plight could never be as real as what’s happening next door.

If you don’t know anything about the flick, know this: It won a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year and Guy Pearce is in it.  That should probably be enough to get your tuchus into the theater, but if you want to know more I’ll add that it’s a crime drama that feels unlike any other.  You’ve probably seen a movie about a family of criminals whom the law is closing in on, but you DEFINITELY haven’t seen this one.

Writer/director David Michôd consciously makes small left turns at every opportunity so that each scene isn’t quite what you expect.  The unique rhythms of these people’s lives and how they deal with the life-and-death predicaments they face is quite riveting.  The story is shocking in ways that feel completely authentic to the characters and their world.  This movie fulfills all the expectations of the genre—it’s searingly intense and gritty as hell without getting melodramatic, or even showy, for a second.

If you’re writing anything like this—a crime drama, a thriller, even an action movie—you have to see how Michôd ratchets up the pressure on his protagonist while giving the character room to grow.  His original screenplay takes the familiar assassinations, interrogations and betrayals into unexpectedly compelling places.

And this guy is a helluva director as well as a writer.  The way he composes and sustains shots is haunting and melancholy, yet fraught with tension.  The film gets a big boost from D.P. Adam Arkapaw’s languidly menacing tracking shots. But the performances Michôd conjures from his cast might be the film’s greatest asset.

If Jackie Weaver doesn’t get an Oscar nomination, there’s no justice in the world. She plays a criminal matriarch you won’t soon forget—equal parts solicitous Mom and cold-blooded monster.  The whole cast is naturalistic, nuanced and entirely convincing.  They do phenomenal work.

If you liked Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone—not coincidentally, the other drama to win a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, and a great crime tale in its own right—you have to see this.  But I think Animal Kingdom is even more ambitious, technically accomplished and narratively sound than that top-notch film. (Though Jennifer Lawrence’s resourceful Ree Dolly definitely tops James Frecheville in any contest of teen protagonists. She’s another Oscar lock in my book.)

So you can wait for the Oscar buzz to start, or be the cool kid who tells your friends about it.  The movie’s only in limited release right now, but if you find a screening within 60 miles of your domicile, do yourself a favor and check it out.  I’m giving it four cigars on the Stogiemeter (that’s a perfect score).

Indeed, several high-profile spec sales have been made in the last few weeks for ideas that-gasp-originated in the minds of their writers rather than a survey of recognizable brands. The studios have put out the word to agencies that they’re in the market for new material.

I can see how that call might go. “So, um, yeah. We were totally planning on making next July’s tentpole film the story of Bazooka Joe, America’s favorite RPG-toting chewing gum magnate. But now we’re a little nervous about that, so… do any of your clients still write, you know, new stuff?”

Encouraging signs for scribes, but the touching tale of your Uncle Marty’s quest to find the perfect roast beef sandwich is still not guaranteed a greenlight. Not by a long shot. While the summer’s developments are a refreshing breeze after all that recycled air, the winds of change aren’t sweeping Tinseltown just yet. “Uniquely familiar” is still the order of the day and that mandate does come straight from the movie-going public.

While critics swooned for Splice and the Internet sizzled with talk of Kick Ass, these independently produced, studio-released risk-takers generated little enthusiasm among audiences. In the case of Splice, which was more like a playfully perverse early David Cronenberg film than the suspenseful chiller that teens probably wanted, it got a big fat D on CinemaScore and scared up precious little at the till.

Make no mistake, your spec still has to remind people of big hits but put a daring spin on the proven formula. It needs a succinct and easily grasped setup that instantly promises a good time at the movies. But at least it doesn’t have to be based on a video game, book or brand of bottled water.

Even if the retread concepts make a comeback, time is on our side-there are a finite number of brands that everyone knows and Hollywood is using ‘em up fast. As our culture becomes more niche-oriented and audiences more fragmented, there will be fewer and fewer of those household names to plunder for movie franchises. Soon enough, this town will be making movies based on new stories simply because they have no choice.

Yes, my friends, I am confident that the day will come when the release schedule is empty, panic has set in within the studio gates, and anything easily marketable to mass audiences will be seriously considered.

So write that script…market it to reps…get a manager out there working for you…and hope that the word “recycling” will go back to being about bottles and cans.

Louis Leterrier, director of the Clash of the Titans remake, confessed to The Hollywood Reporter at the film’s premiere that he told the 3-D conversion team, “Don’t make it so much like a View-Master—so…so puffied up.” Apparently, they didn’t listen—or this 3-D conversion technology is about as much like a 747 as those wacky propeller-powered chairs the earliest aviators used to drive off cliffs. Meaning, it’s a little too soon to start taking your customers’ money and sending them for a ride. But readers of this blog should rejoice that the View-Master movie we’ve been anticipating so eagerly could enjoy 3-D tailor-made for it. Hell, you could probably justify another price hike for those tix!

These days, a tweet or simple status update can really spread the word, and I’m hoping the word is out on 3-D conversions. I’m actually pretty optimistic that right now, a sixth-grader in Dubuque, IA is giving his buddy a sage look and saying, “3-D conversions are crap. Unless it’s shot in 3-D, I’m not going.”

I’ve always been a proponent of the third dimension in cinema for its immersive potential and pure fun factor. But putting out a shoddy product is taking the bloom off this rose. Hollywood better work out the bugs in the process or we’ll go from boom to backlash in a hurry as history repeats itself.

So if you give a damn about the Golden Globes, you know that Avatar (or “Abadah,” as Arnold Schwarzenegger inexplicably pronounced it on the telecast) won Best Drama and James Cameron won Best Director.  His ex and director of The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow took the snub gracefully, but she had to be thinking, “C’mon!  Really?!”  Avatar is now on course to take the favorite’s mantle going into the Oscars’ Best Picture race (though the outcome of the DGA Awards will tell us a lot).

You know, Avatar is a nice little movie.  Feels weird saying that about a movie that cost a bajillion and has already made two bajillion, but to me, it’s not that big of a deal.  The movie’s heart is in the right place and there are some breathtaking moments (assuming you’re watching it in IMAX 3-D), but I don’t see it as the huge “game-changer” some are making it out to be.  We’ve been watching the incremental evolution of CGI and even 3-D for years now.  Technologically, this seems less a leap forward than the next logical step.

On a script-level, what I like most about Avatar is the concept of remote piloting a superhuman alien body and the pervasive but not-quite-overdone social commentary.  I don’t think the script merited a WGA (and probable Oscar) nomination with dialogue as wooden as Titanic‘s and only a few notches better than one of the later Star Wars movies.  The comparisons to Dances with Wolves (some call this “Dances with Smurfs”) have been made elsewhere, but the storyline definitely takes its cues from what you might call the “stranger in a strange land” formula.  The lone wolf gradually earns the respect of the natives in scenes laced with comic and emotional beats, falls in love with one of them and eventually fights for them against his own people.

Hey, this is a formula for a reason — it makes for an entertaining story when well executed.  And it’s well executed here.  However, if you’ve seen a few of these stories, it’s also as predictable as sunny days in So Cal.  If more effort had been put into subverting expectations as the script hit the formula’s requisite plot and character beats, I might give it an award.  But with these script nominations, it seems like they’re just loading up the bandwagon.

All the same, that’s not what really stuck in my craw.  What I liked the least about this movie was the character played by Sigourney Weaver.  This is not the great Sigourney’s finest performance.  It’s a little arch, a little one-note… like she never quite got a handle on who she was playing and whether or not there were nuances to explore in subtext.  But I think she did all right with what she had.  The issue here is the character as written.

Let’s take a look at Dr. Grace Augustine.  This chick’s like a dumbass Dian Fossey.  A smudged mimeograph copy of Sigourney’s more heroic character in Gorillas in the Mist. She wants to help the Nav’i, but she doesn’t even manage an inspired speech about how beautiful their culture is or how we have so much to learn from them, so Parker and Quaritch and the rest might think of them as more than smart blue monkeys.  No, she just kind of impotently rails and grouses and practically stomps her foot in a shockingly unpersuasive kind of way.  No wonder these guys want to bulldoze the Na’vi tree-village.  The supposed expert on their culture doesn’t even get the moving speech you’d think a character like this would have, whether it changes anyone’s minds or not (maybe she could have won over Michelle Rodriguez’s character this way, instead of that happening off-screen).

What bugs me the most is who they cast in the role, who directed this movie, and who wrote it.  I’m talking about Sigourney Weaver, James Cameron, and James Cameron.  They worked together on another little movie in 1986, maybe you’ve heard of it — Aliens?  Anyway, in that movie, which also made a lot of money, they created one of the top five feminist icons in film.  Yeah, even if you’re a women’s studies major at the University of Iowa, you probably know and love Ellen Ripley.

The character got off to a good start with Alien in ’79 when she was written as a male character and they just swapped Sigourney in without changing a word of her dialogue.  That was quite a statement, and it dovetailed nicely with Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall (1977), who with just her funky, mannish wardrobe softened some of the bright white lines between gender roles.

But what makes Ripley an even better character in the second movie — James Cameron’s movie — is that she gracefully embodies the best parts of BOTH male and female archetypes, in her own feminine way.  Ripley is the kind of person who can handle whatever the situation calls for.  Cameron’s superb screenplay also explores a surrogate mother / daughter relationship in remarkable depth for a roller coaster movie, including the challenge of explaining to a child that there may not be a Santa Claus, but there ARE monsters in this world and we must reconcile ourselves with that fact.  Ripley’s muted romance with Michael Biehn’s character, Hicks, springs entirely from mutual respect rather than lust.  And yet, you have the feeling that if these two had a few hours alone without any creatures trying to kill them, things might get pretty hot.  (Don’t get me started on the studio’s asinine decision to kill Hicks and Newt in between this movie and the next one, rendering their inspirational struggle to survive Aliens meaningless.)

Anyway, we all know that Ripley kicked open a door for Lara Croft, Sidney Bristow, The Bride and a host of other badass female characters.  After Ripley, the masses seemed to realize they were bored with the “love interest” stereotype who might be introduced as tough but ended up being led around by the hand while things blew up around them.  And sure, Zoe Saldana’s Neytiri is a respectable warrior in Avatar. But the point is not that Ripley could take a punch.  She was not just tough, she was tough-minded.

The fact that Dr. Grace Augustine is older than Ripley and a scientist should mean nothing.  Knowing that force is not an option, why doesn’t she scheme against her adversaries and undermine them in other ways?  She and her team have total access to the facility and could even use their avatar bodies to sabotage the operation (if they don’t stick their faces in a security camera, like protagonist Jake Sully does at one point).  We see that the military is monitoring Jake’s video diaries, but there’s no indication that they are watching avatar feeds (especially not when Augustine moves their lab into the field).  If she really believes that genocide is brewing and all these company men are unreasonable, why draw attention to yourself by bitching about it?  She should be expertly playing both sides of the fence — like any thinking person would — and secretly doing everything she can to save these people.  Look at Shosanna in Inglourious Basterds for a great example of a double agent in action.

Instead, Cameron seems to be quite intentionally painting the military and the scientists as opposite sides of the same worthless coin.  It’s just that the big brains are feckless and not actively harmful.  In this movie, I guess we need one hero, this soldier with a heart, to solve everything just by being THAT badass.  Because other than being the setup for a later payoff, Augustine has little impact on the plot.

In many ways, Avatar resembles District Nine, another big sci-fi hit from last year.  In that film, the hero starts out clueless and insensitive to an alien race before “going native” (albeit in a different way) and seeing things more literally from their point of view.  Like Avatar, there’s a robotic exoskeleton / battle-suit.  But District Nine posits that while one person can do a little bit of good, he can’t ride in on a white horse and save humanity from itself.

Paradoxically, I don’t think it’s any more cynical than Avatar.  Aliens ended with a human being in a super-suit, Ripley, doing battle with an alien for the lives of the innocent.  Avatar reverses that equation.  This time, the human is the threat to the innocent and Ripley is nowhere to be found.  The movie presents a much more bleak assessment of the human race.

Hey, I can understand the decision to make Sam Worthington’s character the hero here and give Sigourney Weaver more of an emeritus role.  Cameron and Weaver are not obligated to pay homage to Ripley when they work together or separately.  But when I consider Weaver’s character here, I can’t help thinking that the world of Avatar is somehow less evolved, less inspiring, and less real than the world of Aliens. Maybe that’s because our civilization has been heading in the wrong direction, and Cameron knows it.  Or maybe it’s just because he had too many balls in the air with this movie to worry about the legacy of a character from another one.

I can’t help but wonder what would happen if, instead of being found by that deep salvage team, Ripley’s escape pod had crash-landed on Pandora?  It wouldn’t be long before she taught this “Dr. Grace Augustine” how to handle corporate sleazebags and military morons.  Hell, why stop there?  This could be like The Incredible Hulk TV series all over again.  Because she doesn’t have anyone left alive from her old life, Ripley just keeps bouncing around the galaxy, waking up in different civilizations where she has to get up to speed on their version of the future and solve their problems for them.  Because that Ripley was a problem-solver, man.

I miss ya, Rip.