Modern Mythos Media Special Announcement - "One of Them"

Today, I want to take an opportunity to announce something very special.  It's the reason why I started this blog, and it's the reason why it says "Home of the '1 for $100' Movie Challenge" up there on the banner.

It's called One of Them, and it's our first feature film here at Modern Mythos Media:

Modern Mythos Media presents: "ONE OF THEM" The story of a world very much like our own. Just don't say that to the Greys, members of an ostracized minority whose presence in the world is a source of confusion and mystery. What does it mean to be a Grey? What makes some people turn? Can humankind and greykind live together in harmony, or is the apocalyptic Separation foretold by extremists on both sides destined to occur? "One of Them" is the first feature film from Modern Mythos Media, a ragtag independent production team located in LA/OC, Southern California. More information will soon be available online. Until then, follow the ModMyth blog at www.modmythmedia.blogspot.com. Thanks! ONE OF THEM. Coming 2011.


The "1 for $100" initiative is exactly what it sounds like.  An opportunity to show that it is possible to make a compelling, interesting, fresh story with only the barest of financial investments.  This will be a test of using only what is absolutely vital, making a movie out of necessities and not frivolities.  


Of course, we will be updating the progress of production (right now, we're still in the writing and pre-production stages) as we go along.


It should be a lot of flying-by-the-seat-of-our-pants fun.  I hope you come along for the ride.

The End (LOST Spoiler Warning)

...and then Bob Newhart woke up and said, "Honey, you won't believe the dream I just had."

After 120 episodes comprising a narrative of nearly 90 uncut hours:

LOST is over.

Sure, there will be bonus features on Blu-Ray boxed sets, ancillary merchandise and games and conventions and re-broadcasts and special re-releases and never-before-seen bonus things for years to come, but for all intents and purposes, the narrative I've been following my entire adult life is complete.  

Viewers across the globe are in a state of quasi-mourning, myself included--especially given the bittersweet nature of the show's final hour.  Yet there is also a sense of relief.  For three years now, we've known how many episodes we had left to go and were counting down the clock.  Yet, as "The End" reminded us time and time again, it was time to "let go" if we wanted to ever be able to move on and manifest our own destinies.  

I will remember LOST for many things.  For being compelling, smart entertainment that was fun and engaging.  For being the only TV show I've ever watched first-run from start to finish, anxiously awaiting the fall return during summer hiatuses.  For being a pastime I could watch with my dad, and later my girlfriend, and have it be something we all enjoyed for once.  The series' reach was certainly broad, even if it required an intense amount of patience and cross-referencing to follow over the span of six years.  But, perhaps most importantly to me, it made me realize the power of good storytelling.  It made me further understand the kinds of yarns I want to weave, and has affected my world profoundly.

I feel the greatest feat Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse were able to pull off, however, was that for all its head games and twists and turns, it all made emotional sense in the end.  That's what the finale had to do.  Without having read too much of others' reactions, I already know the complaints "The End" will receive, because they're the complaints that were going to be lobbed at it regardless of the final episode's decisions.  "It didn't answer my questions," some will say.  "What was the deal with Walt?"  "Who built the statue?"  "What is the Island?"

But those aren't complaints about "The End," those are (sometimes valid) criticisms of LOST in general.  People looking for specifics to all the mythological underpinnings of the Island are bound to be disappointed.  The creators have been saying for years that there will be unanswered questions, and I'm okay with that. Because it gives us something to continue to talk about for years.  And, in the end, those little backstory questions don't matter.  The rules and reality of the time and space that LOST takes place in has an internal working logic to it.  I imagine you can figure out the rest of the history for yourself if you think about it hard enough.  

What this episode did do, however, was answer a question on an order of magnitude so much higher than any of those that I think most people never even bothered to ask it:

"Why does any of this matter?"

"The End" took a cast of characters who, despite having their entire lives put out on display for all to see, had at times seemed like chess pieces in a supernatural board game, and once and for all made them human.  Because we saw what it really meant to be "Lost," and of course it didn't refer to them being stranded on an island.  It was a kind of lost that we all are, and it was a harrowing, sobering final message for the show to impart.  But an important message, about how we ought to define ourselves and what we ought to pursue in our own lives.

If you've seen it, you understand what I mean.  If not, I'll just proselytize for a moment and say, get the DVDs.  Watch the show.  It's fun, it's freaky, but at the end of the day, when the chips are down and shit gets real, it'll leave you feeling moved in a way that transcends polar bears and smoke monsters.

Longtime viewers will look at today, the day after the final episode sailed off into the horizon, and feel two ways.  Either a piece of themselves has just left them, or a piece of themselves that has been gestating is now complete.  I encourage everyone to see it as the latter.

"Network" (1976)

I am publishing a short review of every movie I see.  There's a lot of movies out there I've always meant to get around seeing, but that I keep putting off for one reason or another.  Time to put that Netflix queue to good use.

"I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take this any more!" - Howard Beale, UBS News Anchor and Mad Prophet of the Airwaves

"You are television incarnate...indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy.  All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality." - Max (William Holden) to Diana (Faye Dunaway), his coldly opportunistic lover

Clip #1 from "Network" - Howard's Announcement

I'm always a sucker for good political satire in a movie.  Dr. Strangelove is arguably the most famous, and most lasting, of these.  But Network feels more attached to the modern crisis of media exploitation and conglomeration than any thirty-four-year-old movie has any right to.  

It's the story of Howard Beale, a news anchor for a fictional fourth network in the late 70s, who's been put out to pasture.  His on-air retirement/suicide announcement shocks the nation and renews interest in the Beale brand.  An up-and-coming, cynical producer (Faye Dunaway) sees the potential for a ratings boon, and soon the network's flagging news division has been transformed into a for-profit, infotainment circus spectacle with a mentally-unfit Howard Beale as the paranoid ringleader.  The only problem is, his particular brand of crazy rings a little too true for the interests of the network heads...

Network is sublimely biting and over-the-top in all the right places, and theatrical and wordy like few motion pictures are (or ought to be, for that matter).  It's amazing to watch this movie and realize that author Paddy Chayefsky gets it -- He knows the Year Two-Thousand-and-Ten, even if he was speaking from across an ocean of time.

Watching this movie made me realize that our last decade has been the companion piece to the 1970s--a decade of economic malaise, frustration and mistrust of government, and embarrassing political fumbles at home and abroad.  The 1960s had lots of tragedy, sure--but there was also a list of tangible achievements, great gains made in society and technology that by the end of 1969 made it all somehow feel like the sacrifice had been in the service of something bigger.

The 1970s didn't have that.  Neither does today.

Network is a fine-tuned, very well executed and eminently watchable movie.  Funny and ridiculously excessive exactly how it needs to be, but not so much that we lose our connection with the characters.  The movie asks the right questions, points its finger at the right entities.  The camerawork is all it needs to be, nothing more, nothing less.  The film is carried by a pitch-perfect script and a remarkably talented cast (William Holden, Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall...)

Clip #2 from "Network" - The Howard Beale Show

Some criticism has been lobbed at the movie's use of long-form, theatrical-style monologue, often delivered by some red-in-the-face character in a moment of hotheadedness.  (Film critic Pauline Kael subtitled her review, "Hot Air.")  But the frustration that carries through these characters is at the very essence of the movie's spirit.  And it's a frustration shared by many, including myself.

"Raising Arizona" (1987)

Starting today, as part of the blog I will try to publish a short review of every movie I see.  There's a lot of movies out there I've always meant to get around seeing, but keep putting off for one reason or another.  Time to put that Netflix cue to good use.



Raising Arizona follows a revolving-door inmate, H.I. "Hi" McDonnough (Nicholas Cage), who marries the policewoman (Holly Hunter) tasked with taking his mugshot at the onset of his every stint in the slammer.  H.I. gives up his old ways to be with his new love, and things are good until the couple discovers they can't have children.  So...they steal one.  See, the Nadiya Suleman of 1987 Arizona is all over the papers, and the couple figure some folks just have too much of a good thing, while others have none.  When the enterprising father of the missing youngster discovers one of his infants missing, he places a $25,000 reward on the baby for a safe return.  Needless to say, hilarity ensues and everybody learns a lesson about the meaning of love.

I can't recall exactly why this one had been on my list so long.  I think it's because I've really enjoyed every Coen Brothers movie I've seen, so I've meant to go back to the beginning and catch up on their whole oeuvre.  Raising Arizona was leagues apart from what I thought it would be.  I didn't realize how "broad" it was.  Lots of backwood hick characters and goofy humor.  A far cry from the subversive, Gen-X sensibilities of The Big Lebowski or the biting satire of Burn After Reading, Arizona's particular brand of laughs is more Farrelly Brothers than Coen Brothers.

Pictured: The wild Cage-creature in its natural habitat

Still, their undeniable talent as a writer/director team elevates the movie above what it might have otherwise been.  The film comes to life whenever The Lone Biker of the Apocalypse is featured.  Initially a component of H.I.'s daydreams, the Biker--looking like he just burned down Thunderdome--tears through the southwest on a hell-stallion bike outfitted with grenades and an assortment of knives.  This way in which this strange figure intersects with the plot at large, other characters in the story, and ultimately with H.I. himself, makes us question the reality of the movie's world, and the reliability of the narrator up to this point.

In particular, one quick and ambiguous revelation near the film's climax may speak volumes about what the character is supposed to represent in the mind of H.I.  Deeper critical readings aside, the biker figure's scenes are always the most inventively shot, giving the writer/directors a chance to stage some elaborate fight choreography and spaghetti-West camerawork.

The actors portray their respective characters with plenty of gusto, particularly Cage's repentant, sad-dog crook and Hunter's heart-meltingly doe-eyed wannabe momma.  Still, I feel the film would have been stronger had the directors sought to highlight the more earthy, meaningful qualities of the underlying story by directing the performances to be a little more...nuanced, I suppose?  I just know that an hour and a half of The Flagstaff Hillbillies started to wear a little thin on me.

All in all, it's worth a view, for sure.  The film picks up around the halfway mark, once all the teams' motivations have been established and the film's MacGuffin is firmly in play.  But it's definitely a  sophomore effort that pales in comparison to their diverse body of work that was yet to come.