stage and film

Last night we moved rehearsal from the Off Market Theatre back to my apartment. I had rented out the space in advance, and we were short an actor anyway, so I decided it would be a good opportunity to work some of the key 2 and 3 person moments. We got a LOT of stuff cleaned up and polished, which will really allow us to leap forward tonight and tomorrow as we shape the rest of the play around these pivotal points.

As a director, I don't know that I'm the most brilliant visual artist in the world. Perhaps that's partly because I'm so used to working on a shoestring budget. I'm not accustomed to making visual extravaganzas ("Pinch" being the obvious exception). I do have a good sense of how to put a scene together though. I actually surprise myself, watching the actors and suddenly seeing how to communicate what is going on to the audience clearly, and being able to explain exactly why an actor should angle themselves in this way, or what they need to convey emotionally to the audience, or why some choices obscure the intent and some clarify them. After decades of acting, directing, and observing, I've built a very clear vocabulary of movement and performance in my mind and I'm having a great deal of fun bringing all of that to this process.

Vial will be a nifty bit of theatre.

I'm starting to get nervous about my lack of musician for "Nothing in the Dark" however. We've still got time, but I am getting edgy. I found a bed headboard with a "free" sign on it in my apartment building lobby and quickly grabbed it for the show, but soon realized that it was entirely too wide for my needs and had to return it where I found it. As low budget as "Vial" is, "Nothing in the Dark" is even more extreme. The stage is literally the size of my living room, and I need to have three actors and a "bed" in that space. I'm sharing the space with another "Twilight Zone" episode that night, so whatever set I have needs to be able to go up and come down within moments. Interesting challenges. For now though, most of my attention is on "Vial", and I hope that my musician presents him or herself soon.

On totally unrelated notes, I caught "Pan's Labrynth" with Mayu on Monday and was both compelled and repulsed by it. It's a fantastically done film, but one that I found deeply and profoundly disturbing. It's strange to have such a high quality film be one that I can't recommend universally, but this is a "Fantasy" film that children should not be taken to. I couldn't bear to watch some parts of it, because there are certain images I just don't want in my head ... and they had nothing to do with fauns, fairies, or inhuman monsters. As scary as these images are in the film, they are nothing to the human monster that dominates the narrative.

One thing that movie did, aside from give me the screaming meemies, was take my mind off the abomination that the Ghost Rider film has turned out to be. This is a character that I have a lot of emotional investment in, and from the second I heard that Nick Cage was cast as Johnny Blaze I began to worry. Then I heard that there were two scripts being considered. One of them was a dark, gritty horror script and the other was a "superhero" script. They went with the latter and I worried a bit more. Then the trailer came out, and I thought that some of the visuals looked great, but everything else about the film took me from worry to a sense of forboding doom. Well, now it's out. The reviews are in, and it's craptastically bad. Bad script, bad acting, unfinished special effects, and all the sensibilities of a bad video game.

Everything thinks "I could have done it better", but the truth is... most of us could have done it better. I wanted a film with a young Johnny Blaze. I wanted to see him obsess over his black magic books, obvilivious that he was toying with the real deal. I want to see his anguish over the impending loss of the man who is like a father to him. I want to see his girlfriend save his ass at the last minute. But most of all, I want to see him turn into a demon from hell... and to struggle with his own desires for vengeance. I want to see Johnny Blaze let the Ghost Rider exact the vengeance that Johnny's own anger and frustration and pain demand... and then see what happens when the demon goes too far. A film where the "hero" who is no hero without a human conscience goes out of control and then see how Johnny confronts his own heart, and desperately tries to regain the control he has sacrificed.

That would have been an amazing movie. But instead we get Nick Cage, the plastic Eva Mendez (who didn't even look like she could act in the trailer... which is always a bad sign), and some bullshit about water, air, and earth monsters and a protaganist who is about as conflicted as a man choosing paper versus plastic. I would have preferred that the film had died in pre-production, or gone straight to video because now it will be 20 years before anyone even considers trying to make a good Ghost Rider movie... at best.