Cynthia Hawkins

New Years Resolution: update blog in a timely manner … starting right after I post this news of a piece that ran almost a month ago.  But if you love film and you love to write and you love writers in film, this one may have been worth the wait.   Thanks to Ryan Rivas for including my Ten Lessons of Fictional Writers in Film on the Burrow Press Blog in December.  The following is only the first lesson.  Check out the rest here and have a look around Burrow Press while you’re at it.

Funny Farm

In Funny Farm, Chevy Chase plays a writer who moves to the middle of nowhere in order to jumpstart work on his manuscript in solitude.  When he’s finally done, he rents a hotel room, chills champagne, hands his wife his manuscript, and sits with his hands folded together in anticipation—watching intently, reading her facial expressions as the pages turn, leaning to check whether or not her laughter erupts in just the right places.  Lesson?  Don’t do that.

You can now get your ebook copy of Writing Off Script: Writers on the Influence of Cinema right here.  A very special thanks to Simon Smithson at Calavera Books, each of the phenomenal contributors and interviewees, book cover designer Steven Seighman, and book trailer producer Vernon Lott for all of their hard work and support.  I’m thrilled to share the result of their efforts with you and to see just how much we can raise to help replace the Joplin High School JET-14 students’ studio equipment, field cameras, and supplies that had been destroyed in the May 22 tornado.  So go buy it!  I promise it’ll be $4.99 well spent.

It’s possible no one will know who you’re supposed to be, but that’s what name tags are for:

Aviators, flak vest, Folgers can of ashes – John Goodman as Walter in The Big Lebowski.

JBJ* ankle tattoo, mom jeans – Amy Ryan as Jackie Flaherty in Win Win.

Mom jeans, plaid shirt, blade, dislocated jaw – Billy Bob Thornton as Karl Childers in Sling Blade.

Missouri accent, knit hat, bag of severed hands – Jennifer Lawrence as Ree in Winter’s Bone.

New York accent, leather jacket, bag of severed hands (frozen) – Gary Oldman as Jackie in State of Grace.

Satin jacket, driving gloves, vacant expression, “A Real Hero” on a loop – Ryan Gosling as the driver in Drive.

Suit, mustache, bowling pins, milk shake – Daniel Day Lewis as Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood.

Bobbed wig, Zorro mask, suicidal goldfish – Audrey Tautou as the titular character in Amélie.

Tux, mustache, garden hose – Harvey Keitel as Winston Wolfe in Pulp Fiction.

Junkie teeth, butchered wig, tiny elderly couple in your handbag – Naomi Watts as Diane Selwyn in Mulholland Dr.

* Did you really have to scroll all the way down here to find out this stands for Jon Bon Jovi?  Tsk tsk.

Supposedly losing-your-teeth dreams mean high anxiety, so it’s no surprise that I’ve had more than a few of them.  Bloody gums, teeth falling through your fingers kind of dreams.  Teeth turning into shards of glass dreams.  Yes, those dreams.  The most memorable of them, perhaps, being the one in which, against my will, I snipped off my front teeth with nail clippers.  Maybe the only sorts of dreams that bother me more are the things-happening-to-your-eyes dreams.  I’m explaining this because in the first few minutes of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, a film written and produced by Guillermo del Toro, a twitchy old man with a hammer and spike knocks the teeth out of the mouth of a screaming woman pinned under his knees.

In other words, del Toro has my number.  Again.  First it was the eyeballs-in-the-palms creature loping after Ofelia in Pan’s Labyrinth and now this, a film about sinister little beings in the walls, hungry for freshly pried-out teeth.  Directed by Troy Nixey in his first feature film, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is based on the 1973 made-for-television movie of the same name, which del Toro claims was the scariest film he’d seen as a child. 

Read the rest here.

I really love Kenneth Branagh.  I don’t understand people who don’t love Kenneth Branagh (I’m looking at you, Joe Hawkins).  But because I know such people exist (Joe Hawkins), I recently tried very hard to review Thor without my Branagh bias.  It required that I get my Holly Golightly outfit on and explain a few things in an accompanying video I’m sure to regret.  Find it all here and enjoy!

Everyone’s writing about Charlie Sheen.  I didn’t want to write about Charlie Sheen.  So I wrote about Emilio’s brother instead.  You know, that one-dimensional guy who barely registers in films like Red Dawn and Young Guns.  But this is a good thing, you see, because I don’t think I could watch Charlie Sheen in anything anymore, but Emilio’s brother is a-okay:  READ IT HERE.

In celebration of its recent Oscar nominations, The Nervous Breakdown Associate Arts and Culture Editor Richard Cox and I take a closer look at Black Swan and ask the question:  Can dark, artistic movies regularly overcome box-office staples like Little Fockers in Black Swan’s wake?

This one starts with a review of True Grit and ends with a short list of the best recent Westerns.

Although I like the way Joel and Ethan Coen try to circumvent the scandal of standing toe to toe with John Wayne’s ghost (might as well be Jesus) by emphasizing that their True Grit isn’t a remake but a literary adaptation of the Charles Portis novel, I’d like to take a crack at measuring the Coens’ 2010 effort against the 1969 True Grit anyway.

Ahem.

Here’s the big difference. The most riveting character in the 1969 version is John Wayne while the most riveting character in the 2010 version is Rooster Cogburn (played by Jeff Bridges). The Dude is a better actor than The Duke. There. I said it.

Read more here at The Nervous Breakdown.

Two-dozen little shoe soles squeaked and squelched across the linoleum of the hallway. The teacher at our church school, leading the way, walked backwards for a few steps, winding the cord of her whistle around her finger. The whistle clacked against her rings. She pivoted to lead us into the library, and the squeaks turned to shuffling on the carpet in the dark. We could see the shapes of things we moved between – tables and shelves. We could see the projector and the screen, and with a click of sound the screen held a square of light and the square of light held our moving shadows. When we lowered to sit on a cleared space on the floor, there was a tingle at my fingertips that traveled all the way up my arm, across my chest, buzzing in my rib cage. A movie.

Last time, we’d watched a teeny tiny animated submarine chugging through the currents of somebody’s animated blood stream. The time before that, Ben Hur (anything featuring Charlton Heston in man-sandals was a winner here). And before that, a cartoon tooth demonstrating how to brush himself. It didn’t really matter to me what it was. I could be in class braiding the strips torn off the edges of spiral notebook pages or I could be sitting here watching the film threading through the projector and producing dark blips on the screen. I loved the blips and I loved the pop of sound coming on and I loved the rapid clacking of the reels as the film, whatever it was, began in earnest.

Today, it was something quite different, as the teacher with her hand overlapping the other in the projector stream had told us ….

Read the rest here.

The Nervous Breakdown’s Arts and Culture Associate Editor Simon Smithson and I recently discussed Smithson’s favorite genre, ’80s action films, for a new TNB post you can find right here.

Here’s a little of what I have to say about what makes this era of action film unique:

“’80s action flicks were equal parts mullet, saxophone, slip-on shoes, and kicking ass. But more importantly, I think what seems to set the ’80s action flicks apart as a golden era is that they departed from the gritty realism of the ’70s action flicks and took action movies over the top. Everything was bigger and flashier — the actors, their personalities, the explosions. The same thing was happening in music as well, if you think about it. It’s like going from Boston to Motley Crue.”

Stay tuned for a part II on The Expendables.