THE OBLIGATORY DARK KNIGHT RISES POST

It's about Bat-time for some Bat-links, y'all:

1) Here are my collected reviews of every Batman movie up to and including The Dark Knight at Tor.com.

2) My non-spoiler review of The Dark Knight Rises, which says pretty much all I've got to say; you want to fight about particular elements in it that “don't make sense,” I'm not your guy. Besides, I already ripped whiny bullshit fan reactions the other day.

3) My piece in The Atlantic about where both Christopher Nolan and Batman stand at present.

Happy Monday, kids!

IN ANOTHER COUNTRY

This here's a guest post over at my friend Isaac Butler's site, Parabasis. It's about fandom, as portrayed in the movies Big Fan, The Fan, and Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope, and I'm pretty proud of it as a piece of writing. Cheggitout!

"MR. DANNY BOWES IS A BRAINLESS MORON...."

Now, as many of you may know and those who don't should, I write a weekly column for my old pal Dan Hudak's site Hudak On Hollywood. Hudak likes me to be the wild, ranty me you all know and love, as opposed to the less foul-mouthed Tor.com me (and soon-to-be Next Projection me, as of a couple days from now; this is in addition to, not in replacement of, my other rapidly-growing list of credits.)

What I'd like to do, besides plugging all the sites I write for, is direct your attention to this very funny bit of hate mail, in response to my piece about The Help this past summer. If nothing else, my mom should find the bit about washing my mouth out with soap hilarious. No . . . fucking hilarious. There we go.

KUBRICK WEEK AT TOR.COM!

Image (c) Tor.com

Hey y'all! My rewatch of all of Stanley Kubrick's SF (and related) movies is done and all week, the reviews will be posted. So mosey on over to that fine place and check 'em out!

YET MORE SELF-PROMOTION (OR, THE THIRD WORD IN MOVIES BY BOWES WILL ALWAYS BE THE MOST IMPORTANT)

Sup byetches. As of today, every Wednesday I'm going to have a column up at my old buddy Dan Hudak's excellent movie site Hudak on Hollywood. Back at Bard (before the ubiquity of the Internet; yeah, we some old mahfuggas) Dan and I used to play the Six Degrees game (which, contrary to popular opinion, you can play without Kevin Bacon; my mom's fond of a variation where you have to use Bart the Bear from The Edge and Legends of the Fall, among others) and more than a few times, we came up with linkages so obscure that we'd actually attract an audience hoping to watch our brains explode as we tried to solve them. Yeah, I know, life before the Internet was a quaint place. But here's to the continuance of an excellent partnership in movie geekery.

My first post over there is a slightly edited reprint of my post from a while back about how much I hate the term "chick flick." Future Wednesdays (or whichever day it might be should it change) may feature new material, in my own inimitable style. So be sure to check in over there every day, and like his site on Facebook and follow Dan on Twitter and all that good stuff. (And follow me, for fuck's sake).

That's all for now. I'm a little busy futzing around with a movie script I want to try and shoot, that I'll be talking your ear off about in the coming weeks/months, but many good posts with lots of cursing and addled brilliance are on their way at this fine establishment. Happy summer, Northern Hemisphere!

FOR YOUR READING PLEASURE

(h/t edifyingspectacle.org)

I've got a bunch of cool stuff planned for this place, but while we wait for that, here's a bunch of stuff at other quality destinations around the Internet:

1) There's always Tor.com, where I'll be covering the summer's biggest SFF releases (except for Green Lantern because every time someone says the words "Green Lantern" to me I lose consciousness; this aside took me eight hours to write) as well as a thrilling, multi-part series on a movie franchise that shall not be named. Expecto critique-um. Okay, yes, that may be the worst joke that ever appeared on this site. Moving on.

2) I've written a couple pieces over at TruTv.com's Dumb As A Blog. All you sports fans out there, my pieces on the dumbest trades in the history of sports, and the dumbest attempts to cheat in sports. More musings on dumb stuff are sure to follow, not exclusively on sports.

3) Because it ain't always just about me (shocking, I know) I present you with Our Beloved Armond's ghastly, almost hauntingly shitty review (by which I mean it's a really terribly done piece of film criticism) of Terrence Malick's newly-minted Palme D'Or winner Tree of Life.

4) To close things out, and a bit of a palate cleanser after Armond's weird bullshit, the great Roger Ebert on lazy-ass movie theaters doing more to destroy the movie business than lazy-ass movie studios. Rog, I love ya.

So, soon as I finish L.A. Noire (which is a fucking humdinger, boy, lemme tell ya) and a couple other extracurricular things, I'll be back posting on a more consistent basis. Hope y'all are good. (Oh, and happy birthday to friend of the blog Steve Gilpin, who just turned the big 3-0. Go get yer fuckin wheelchair, old timer).

PODCAST!

It's a little long, but it's pretty funny. Listen to me (and Filmi Girl, Asim Burney, and Martin Cawley, sophisticated cineastes all) discuss Fast Five, Thor, and Game of Thrones. If you're prepared for how terrifying I sound at 8am with only two cups of coffee in me, venture forth.

KIND OF SORT OF OFF-TOPIC....

What the hell, it's April Fools Day, so why not have a post that has nothing apparent to do with movies. My March 24th appearance at The Soundtrack Series is now immortalized for all time in podcast form; pop on over to their blog and have a listen.

This leads me to another, tentative announcement: my movie podcast inches ever closer to reality! All kinds of goodies in store. Stay tuned for more details!

THE LATTER HALF OF THE PHRASE "MOVIES BY BOWES." OR AS THE KIDS SAY, SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION

Readers in the NYC area, take note! I will be telling a story about Radiohead (and LSD, voyeurism/exhibitionism as related to the performing arts, and all that jazz) at The Soundtrack Series, 7pm Thursday March 24th at Le Pouisson Rouge. I'm very excited to be part of The Soundtrack Series; I've been most months and literally have never heard a bad story there. The best are jaw-droppingly awesome.

Until then, acquaint yourselves with the excellent Soundtrack Series blog, where you can hear some of the great stories. And, until the 24th, I'll be waiting . . . with a gun and a pack of sandwiches.

WEEKEND RECAP, AND THE WEEK AHEAD

I'm currently busy finishing up a first draft of a play that is already absolutely fucking insane and will only get more so before the action-packed climax, so posting might be a little light over the next few days. I'm going to try to get in previews of the Spirit Awards and the Oscars this coming weekend, so be on the lookout for those.

I reviewed a couple movies for Tor last weekend: Unknown, the latest entry in my favorite new genre (Liam Neeson owning the fuck out of people in a randomly selected European city). I didn't really like it all that much (the intervals between ownages were a little long and a little dumb), but it had its moments, and was a flat-out fucking masterpiece compared to the thing I saw the next day, that may be the single stupidest fucking piece of shit I've ever seen, I Am Number Four. When I got out of that movie, I went on a Twitter rant:

Reviewing I AM NUMBER FOUR without the f-word and death threats is going to be a challenge.

I saw a guy on the subway who was going to recharge his cell phone with the third rail; he said I AM NUMBER FOUR was his favorite movie.

I AM NUMBER FOUR is so stupid, Glenn Beck denounced it as a fourth columnist trying to discredit stupid people (think about this one a sec)

I AM NUMBER FOUR is so fucking stupid, stupid people just hired Ron Kuby for a defamation lawsuit.

I AM NUMBER FOUR is stupider than doing heroin off a stranger's key because he told you it was coke.

Any movie that can't be saved by an Australian biker chick with guns is deeply fucked.

Sarah Palin in a fucking coma would be smarter than I AM NUMBER FOUR. Bad reviews aren't enough, we need prison sentences.

A number of my friends seemed to find this highly amusing, but really, it was using humor to hide the pain. When someone who counts Tango & Cash, Marked For Death, Bloodsport, and The Last Boy Scout among his favorite (do not confuse with "best") movies of all time tells you something is offensively stupid, you best be fucking sitting down. Because the concept of something being that stupid ought to fill your soul with dread. Matter of fact, since I can curse here, this is my actual review of I Am Number Four:



Happy President's Day, my friends.

R.I.P. PREMIERE.COM

Once one of the best movie magazines we had, and then in its web-only edition the first place that ever paid me to write for them (a sign of excellent taste), Premiere as we knew it has ceased to be. It's now been folded into some French entertainment website. The exact details, whatever. Premiere will live on in my memorial gratitude.

In all the hooraw in the site's last days, they never got around to posting the last thing I wrote for them (the original idea for which was James Comtois' that he let me have because he couldn't think of 7 movies to fill the list out). That they never posted it is a shame, because I rather liked it, but the good news is they did pay me for it. My good friend and editor John DeVore told me (well, I think is what he said, if it turns out I heard wrong, it's my fault not his) that this piece was basically mine to do with as I chose since they never posted it. What I choose is to share it with y'all; it's in a different style and format than I usually employ here, but hey. Fuck monotony. (Ed. Note: anything that contradicts anything that the author wrote here on this blog is because he was talking out of both sides of his mouth to please The Man like the shameless little slut that he is):


****

7 MOVIES THAT MAKE NO SENSE (BUT THAT WE STILL LOVE)

by

Danny Bowes

We've all been there: watching some movie, thoroughly enjoying it, but one thing (or more) comes up and you're like “wait a minute . . . what?” If the rest of the movie's good enough, more often than not we'll cut it some slack, but that doesn't make it make any more sense. Here are a few examples of the most forgivable “huh?” movies:



1—Inception (2010) dir. Christopher Nolan

Dreams within dreams within dreams (within dreams?) Christopher Nolan's enormously successful summer mind-heist blockbuster features a lot of very attractive, well-dressed people doing a lot of very attractive, well-photographed things. And talking. A lot.

But what about all those rules? The thing about attractive people is that you want to be cool enough to understand everything they say, so that they'll think you're smart enough to sleep with. But much like the previous sentence, not everything the comely cast of Inception says holds up to close scrutiny. Or any scrutiny at all: why, if it's so important to use your own totem, does Leo DiCaprio use Marion Cotillard's? That's just the first of many threads that, if pulled, start to unravel the movie.

Why none of that matters: They're all so pretty. And the zero-gravity fight scenes. And that awesome BWWAAAAAH sound. And Edith Piaf.




2—Mulholland Dr. (2001) dir. David Lynch

You could plug most David Lynch movies in this spot, since they're all really good and none of 'em make a lick of rational sense. And do not, whatever you do, ask your pothead friend to help. You'll be listening to them make as little sense as the movie for twice as long, without getting to see Naomi Watts naked.

So . . . what the hell's going on here? Ya got me. It looks cool, sounds cool, makes a couple thought-provoking statements about the subjectivity of reality (I think) and both literally and metaphorically deals with the cruelty of the movie industry (maybe?)

Why it's still great: Naomi Watts and Laura Harring may be the sexiest couple in the history of cinema. The “no hay banda” scene is killer. And even if the movie's gibberish, you still have to pretend you like it to shut annoying David Lynch fans up, since nothing is worse than having them tell you you “just don't get it.” Cut them off by saying “I enjoy it on a post-rational level” and go get another beer.



3—The Matrix (1999) dir. The Wachowski Bros.

Sure the sequels sucked, but the first one still holds up. The action's great, no one says “whoa” like Keanu, there is no spoon, and any movie with Joe Pantoliano playing a weaselly douchebag is automatically watchable at least for his scenes. However, there is the matter of the script . . .

“The body cannot live without the mind”? Seriously, Morpheus? If that was really the case, the whole country would drop dead each Election Day. The machines spent all this time and brainpower coming up with a virtual reality for human beings to live in, when they could just as easily have kept everyone in a coma. But that's not even the most confusing thing: a bunch of artificial intelligences smart enough to subjugate humanity, and they can't find a more efficient energy source than the bioelectricity generated by a human body? For real?

Why none of that matters: Because they need a virtual reality in order for Neo, Trinity, Morpheus et al to do all that cool bullet time stuff. And make no mistake, The Matrix is a cool action movie, not a deep science fiction opus.



4—The Terminator (1984) dir. James Cameron

Arnold Schwarzenegger is sent from the future by evil computer Skynet to unleash hell on southern California (as redundant an idea as that might be) and kill the mother of the leader of the human resistance before she can give birth to him.

But wait . . . Much like the computers in The Matrix, Skynet is in serious need of an Occam's Razor program: it's going up against a small human resistance composed of biologically frail opponents who need food, water, and sleep and often make emotional mistakes. The humans squeak out a couple lucky military victories and Skynet's first response is to launch this byzantine time-travel plot that violates causality and the laws of physics instead of just making a few more new Terminators and just laser-gunning the fleshlings?

However . . . Are you really willing to give up the awesomeness of The Terminator (and the first sequel) just because the central premise doesn't make any sense? That's what I thought.



5—Superman (1978) dir. Richard Donner

Young Kal-El is sent by his parents from the dying planet Krypton to a small, out-of-the-way place called Earth for his own protection, where he Anglicizes his name and finds he can do all kinds of cool stuff like fly and see through women's clothes.

Not to belabor the obvious, but to belabor the obvious: No one can tell Clark Kent is Superman just because he has glasses on? I thought the Jedi mind trick was invented on Tattoine, not Krypton.

Again, obviously: The general public had gotten over that little problem before the actor who played Superman in this movie was born. Christopher Reeve was great, and the whole movie really holds up in terms of craft, narrative drive, and genuine wide-eyed innocence. Also, Gene Hackman and Ned Beatty are the greatest closeted gay couple ever.



6—Vertigo (1958) dir. Alfred Hitchcock

Jimmy Stewart develops a fear of heights after a terrible accident, and has to leave the police force. An old college buddy hires him to follow his wife (Kim Novak), who's acting weird.

I'm not saying it's not still one of the 5 best movies ever made, but . . . The college buddy wants to kill his wife and make it look like a suicide. Sure, why not. Okay, why does he hire Kim Novak to pretend to be her? Wouldn't it be easier to just snuff the wife and bribe some cops to falsify the evidence? Same probability you'll get away with it, much simpler. And the whole thing about bringing Jimmy Stewart there to be a witness to the fake suicide and assuming that Jimmy Stewart will have a panic attack and not see the college buddy throw the dead body of his wife (remarkably well preserved, since Jimmy Stewart didn't smell her) off the tower? Little complicated.

But, still, it's one of the 5 best movies ever made: It's so gorgeously shot, and Jimmy Stewart is so good playing a guy whose obsessive love for a woman he barely knows drives him to mania, and the ending is so beautifully tragic and ironic that, really . . . let the logic loopholes slide. It'll be okay.



7—The Usual Suspects (1995) dir. Bryan Singer

A modern classic, made stars out of Kevin Spacey (temporarily) and Benicio del Toro, though Gabriel Byrne was still the coolest guy in the whole movie. Well, except Keyser Soze. Unless he is Keyser Soze . . .?

Spoiler alert: he's not: When Kevin Spacey is revealed to be Keyser Soze, after spending the whole movie tying Chazz Palmintieri in knots with that story about the $91 million in coke and mythical Hungarian/Turkish gangsters and Pete Postlethwaite as a Japanese guy (a clear sign something was off), it raises the distinct possibility that the movie we just spent two hours watching was all a lie and never happened. Or was Kevin Spacey lying to protect Gabriel Byrne? Probably not. Either way, untangling everything causes massive headaches.

Or, more accurately, only if you let it: There's plenty of textual support for the “twist” ending, that only seems like one because the story is so masterfully constructed. Actually, part of the appeal of The Usual Suspects is that it's confusing. It's a story being told by a con man. If you were able to see where it was going before he wanted you to, he wouldn't be much of a con man. As with the other movies on this list, too, it's better to figure it out afterward (if possible). Until then, enjoy the ride.


****


So, yeah. I'll miss Premiere. Thankfully Tor.com's still going strong; I'd hate to get a rep for killing every publication I write for. I'll have to kill more than one to do so in any case, and I have no intention of doing so. I'm in the process of finding more freelance work, and will keep you all updated on what far-flung spots in cyberspace are kind enough to print my ravings. 'Til then, happy weekend, my friends.

BATMAN WEEK: A LOOK BACK

All my Batman reviews are now up in all their glory over at Tor.com:

1) The 1940s serials.

2) The 1966 Batman.

3) The 1989 Batman.

4) Batman Returns.

5) Batman Forever.

6) Batman & Robin.

7) Batman Begins.

8) The Dark Knight.

There you go. The reviews you deserve, and they are the ones you need right now. So motherfuck me for my abrasive opinions, because I can take it. Because I'm not your hero. A not-so-silent guardian. An extremely unwatchful guardian. A Foul-Mouthed Blogger.

COMING ATTRACTIONS: DELIGHT AND CONFUSION

The fine folks at tor.com have been kind enough to hire me to follow The Hollywood Reporter's Twitter feed and find stuff to geek out about (which is to say, what I do anyway), with this fine piece of concise snark being the first of hopefully many. I'm very pleased with this situation, and charmed by the extremely nice way they asked me to get by with "50% less swear words." Out of gratitude, I countered with an offer to do without them at all. Because I don't fucking need to curse.

Now, onto that hazy, poorly-defined, less interesting part of the world that isn't all about me: this weekend, this comes out:

It may be a while before I get to actually see it, but I'm extremely interested to see what David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin have managed to with this. Not to put too fine a point on it, but when I first heard someone was making a movie about Facebook, I reacted about the same as I did when I heard that Ridley Scott was making a movie out of Monopoly: "What the fuck are you talking about? If you're kidding, that's not funny, and if you're not kidding, I wish to acquire surplus Russian nuclear warheads."

The punchline is, people are coming back from screenings comparing this picture to fucking Citizen Kane, and calling it and the Colin Firth thing where he plays George VI the two Oscar frontrunners. Now I've been hangin' around this here Internet for a long time, long enough to know how to spot a troll a mile away. And I wouldn't put it past someone like [name of group redacted] who hang out on [name of messageboard redacted], the most popular board on [name of website redacted] (Ed. Note: redactions mandated due to Rules 1&2 of the Internet; if you don't know what they are, look them up. Behind seven proxies) to have cooked this up, much like they did the Scientology protests, in a diverting bit of IRL trolling. But no. These people talking up The Social Network are fucking serious. Voices as diverse as Roger Ebert and my old buddy Hudak are united in bestowing four stars (out of four) on it. So there's that.

I, personally, am in shock that this movie exists. What makes this startup different from all other startups? I'm going to go in to see it with an open mind, and fully willing to accept it as good. But seriously. You didn't make the Scooby-Doo "who farted" face the first time you heard this movie was good? You be lyin', byetch.

AN IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

Hey, guys! Check out this piece I did for premiere.com; I swear it's me even though it's not 7500 words long and 66.6% profanity. I will not do anything as tacky as exhort you to pimp this blog in their comment section, but if you absolutely must I suppose there's nothing I can do.

MOVIES (ACTUALLY) BY BOWES

When not blogging about movies, sometimes I actually make them. In the past year, after a decade or so of endless yammering—for listening to which I compliment my friends on their patience—I finally wrote, produced, and shot two short films: Byron Invented Boredom, a 15 minute drama about a womanizing writer who, upon meeting the now-adult son he never knew he had, discovers the need to take responsibility for his actions; and Monday, a seven-minute short for Bryan Enk's horror anthology The Sinister Six Must Be Destroyed, about a woman—guided by some unspecified but malignant inner Other—who mutilates herself to death (that one was for the kids).

Toward the end of the editing process on Byron, I was stumbling home drunk one night when it occurred to me to make a series of films of similar length about a large, interconnected group of characters dealing in various ways with matters of the heart. The second, Until Death (wherein a married couple each hires their respective lover to kill their respective spouse), is currently in pre-production (specifically, the stage in pre-production where I tear my hair out going “Fuck! I need a couple thousand dollars! Help!”) and the third, as yet-untitled installment (I was thinking of calling it The Elusive O; it's a comedy about a woman with really bad taste in men) is still being developed. The idea with this series is that each film, although interconnected through its characters, may be in a completely different genre from all the others. I'm also experimenting with process: for example, Until Death is going to very tightly scripted, blocked, composed, and edited, and the third as-yet-untitled one is going to be developed through improvisation and maybe even shot hand-held. Hopefully, once I get a couple of these under my belt, I can start showing them at festivals, and some nice person from California will give me lots of money.

Although I've only recently discovered industriousness and focus, I've wanted to make movies for a really long time. I started writing in junior high, churning out a number of three-to-five page short stories about a character named Agent 000 who was the last line of defense against nefarious villains attempting to nuke Brooklyn (though one time I branched out and had Agent 000 investigate the assassination of George Bush in Grand Army Plaza). Then when I discovered Raymond Chandler I started my hand at detective fiction, though my detective only ever managed to solve one case. I must have started about thirty different whodoneit premises, and the only one I ever finished prompted this kindly proffered but nonetheless stinging note: “Your detective doesn't seem to do any actual detecting, people just come up to him and tell him stuff.”

Due to a failure of imagination, it never occurred to me that being a writer meant anything other than being a novelist or short-story writer until I was just about to turn 16. In October 1994, Pulp Fiction came out, in a perfect confluence of age, mindset, and movie. The final title card “Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino” made me say to myself: that's what I want to do. “Written and Directed by Danny Bowes.”

So I started studying photography at school, because I could, thinking that learning what I could about framing and composition could come in handy. I wrote a play for a citywide student playwriting contest, and started several abortive attempts at screenplays—influenced though I was by Quentin Tarantino and to a lesser extent Kevin Smith, it had failed to dawn on me that their scripts were anything more than endless, idle chatter.

When I arrived at Bard College, I intended to major in film, though due to a youthful inability to focus and a (related) Pac-Man-like tendency to gobble every chemical in sight I was all like, “I'm going to be a novelist, historian, economist, philosopher, and filmmaker while racing stock cars and being the left-handed short reliever for the Yankees in my spare time.”

My first film production class was a nightmare. The only introduction they gave us was a semester of theory and history, which was fruitful intellectually, but from a practical standpoint pretty useless. Still the first day, the professor's first words to us were, “So you've all made movies before, we don't need to spend too much time on boring shit like how the camera works, how to make a work print with sound, et cetera.” Now, I probably should have raised my hand and said, “Sir, not to be a dickhead, but this is Intro to Filmmaking, and I've never made a movie before, so could you maybe cover all that 'boring shit'?” But I was 18, and terrified of appearing uncool, so I didn't say anything.

I went and bought a Bolex, not realizing that the reason I was getting a good deal was because it didn't have a viewfinder. Out of caution, I signed up to present my first finished film a ways into the semester, after a few other people had already done theirs, so I could look and see what they'd done. Happily, none of their movies made any sense or were about anything, and seemed to just be a random collection of shots designed to look cool and pretentious. Awesome, I thought, I can do that.

My first couple test reels came back from the lab completely blank. I screened them for my class, not knowing that they were completely blank because I'd had to take the train back from the lab in Manhattan up to Bard the morning I had class, and only made it back to campus five minutes before class started. One of my classmates—who had previously been very condescending to me because, among other reasons, he'd had to explain who Stan Brakhage and Will Oldham were—got very excited and started chattering with a huge, sincerely delighted smile on his face how I'd redefined cinema, employing brutal minimalism as a defiant, dare he say Marxist, act of rebellion against the bourgeois Cult of Pretty. I spent about thirty seconds thinking, “Seriously, if Nathan convinces the professor that that's what I was trying to do, I will literally blow him” until the professor peered at me over his little half glasses.

Professor: Danny, is that really what you were trying to do?
Me: Yeah, totally, I mean . . . minimalism is like more effective when it's practiced brutally. I, um, I . . . I did this as an homage to Stan Brakhage! Yeah! Stan Brakhage!
Professor: Did you load the film in the camera properly?
Me: No.

So my professor heaved a melodramatic sigh and explained to the veteran filmmakers in the class that it appeared we needed a lesson on how to load film into the camera. He kind of sounded like the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket explaining that everyone else had to do pushups when Pyle fucks up, except fortunately I wasn't beaten with bars of soap by film students.

After that debacle, I got some more film and walked around DUMBO with my Bolex and shot a few reels of 16mm black & white and spliced it all together randomly. I made a recording of a phone conversation between me and a playwright friend of mine that had nothing to do with the footage in “an ironic juxtaposition between sound and vision” (the only reason I survived five years of college was because hippies don't have guns) and screened the film for the class. Reaction was less than stellar.

Professor: This is just random footage that you didn't even edit.
Me: I edited in camera.
Professor: No you didn't, you just strung a bunch of random shots together.
Me (under my breath): Just like everybody else in this class . . .
Professor: What was that?
Me: Nothing.

And, when he yelled at me for running a print with tape on it through the projector and I asked, “How are you supposed to screen edited footage if you can't run tape through the projector?” instead of doing a punishment lesson on what a work print was—to my naïve mind, possibly useful knowledge—he just shook his head and moved on.

Because I'd turned in a film, he couldn't fail me, so my professor gave me a C- and wrote “Danny has very little talent and aptitude for cinema” on my report card. The next semester, the rest of my class and me had the other Intro to Filmmaking professor, who was much nicer and actually didn't say “narrative” in the same tone of voice as “chlamydia.” She had us write an outline of our movie and present it to her so she could say “Hey, this is gonna be too expensive/time-consuming/impossible” if necessary. I proposed a silent comedy—since a buddy of mine in the class had just showed me how to make title cards and I still didn't know how to work the sound equipment—about a shy, introverted Bard kid who stumbles upon the idea of starting an escort service, gets popular and successful, becomes full of himself, and loses everything, except the love of the girl he liked from the beginning but was too shy to talk to.

My professor liked it. She told me: “It's transgressive. If you can pull it off, it'll be fun.” Feeling more confident than I had yet in my embryonic filmmaking career, I went around and started casting: a friend of mine who'd never acted before as the lead, a couple theater girls (I had, completely by accident, been cast in a couple plays, about which more later) as the escorts, and a random selection of non-actor friends of mine in incidental roles. So I shot like hell, never more than two takes, and took my footage down to the lab in the city one weekend to develop. I chilled out at home, told my mom all about the movie while she nodded politely and said, “Sounds great,” probably distracted by the astronomical fucking credit card bills I was running up buying and developing all this film. Then come Monday I picked up my footage and headed back up to Bard.

Whereupon I found out that the lab ate a good half my footage, and what was viewable was murky, dark, and all fucked up. The next day I had class, and went up to my professor, who I liked, respected, and got along with, figuring she'd understand:

Me: The lab ate half my footage, including most of the stuff that makes it all make sense.
Her: Seriously, Danny? That's the film student's equivalent of “the dog ate my homework.”

Stung, I went back to the editing room to try and salvage what I could. I basically had a (very badly lit) nighttime party sequence, about half the footage of a—very attractive and topless—female friend of mine, and some random stuff I shot of this tractor behind my dorm. So I slapped it all together and played a tape of “Rock n Roll” and “Stairway to Heaven” because they kind of fit my footage. Fingers crossed, I screened it for my class:

Proto-hipster classmate: So, wait . . . do you like Led Zeppelin unironically?
Me: Ye—no—well, kind of . . .
Professor: Thank you, Danny. Who's next? (Translation: “You won't be majoring in film at Bard.”)

At that point, the hundreds (I really hope it wasn't actually thousands) of dollars I'd pissed away making a couple unwatchable student films were starting to weigh on me, so I called up a theater professor I'd met in the course of my acting dilletantery and asked if I could switch over and major in theater. Not only was it okay, they pulled all kinds of strings so I could take two years of intro classes in one year and basically made me feel like I was home and among friends.

Nice as that was, and as seriously as I took my acting training, playwriting classes, design seminars, part of me always treated my theater education as enrichment for my eventual—though delayed—career in film. When I graduated, my department head called me out on this.

Department Head: You keep citing films and filmmakers as your primary artistic influences. Why did you choose to major in theater and not film?
Me: Um . . . because . . . well, I flunked out of the film department.
Department Head: I see.

Needless to say I didn't get a whole lot of grad school recommendation letters from the theater faculty. It was only due to the generosity of the same friends of mine who cast me in the first show I was ever in that I was able to get a foot in the door of indie theater in New York after I graduated.

Meanwhile, I was still movie-crazed, and in 2002 I finished my first novel, The Van Damme Papers, narrated from the point of view of Jean-Claude Van Damme, renaissance man nonpareil, musician, philosopher, lover, savior of humanity. A friend of mine living in Bordeaux, France, serialized this craziness, and I had had plans to try and make a movie out of it someday . . . until I got scooped by JCVD, which would have pissed me off if it wasn't a terrific movie.

Since then, I've been doing a fair bit of indie theater, meeting people, having experiences, gradually meeting enough theater people who also made movies that it finally occurred to me, “Hey, asshole . . . why don't you just fucking make a movie?” Why indeed?

And so we arrive at the present day. And a glorious future in which I keep making movies, which when I'm totally honest with myself, have been my main obsession in life since seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark in the theater. Long live cinema!