Tales From The Industry, I

So it seems like an age ago, but it wasn't really..... [Flashback, Apr. 21st '04] Roberto Emparan had come to give us a seminar entitled "New Horizons in Higher Dimensions", (on higher dimensional black holes and their cousins) which was excellent. As he is a good friend of both of us, my wife and I took him on one of our standard (back then) guest routines wcih we enjoyed very much: Dinner out West (that time at Joe's on Abbott Kinney in Venice), and then ice cream at that excellent place two doors down with the very authentic tasting ice cream (Massimo's?..... closed down not long after....have not been to the new one, whereever it is). From there, take the ice cream the four or five blocks to the beach and walk along the isolated (why oh why isolated? -It's great at night!) beach and walk. So we got to the beach and headed South, since in the distance, there was a very clear white light, unusually bright, and we wanted to know what it was. So we walked until we got to the source. There was a large number of people milling around, and quite a few people who were also out walking (yes, it happens in LA) had stopped to look. It was in front of one of those fun-looking mostly-windows Venice beachside houses, and they were filming a movie in one of the rooms on the upper floor. Well, as you may know if you have hung around a movie set for any length of time, there was a lot of standing around with nothing happening. But people have this fascination with movie-making, and so people stayed. (It is not hard to tell the difference between movies and commercials or other projects...there are several signs.) Now two things helped people stay despite that fact that not much was happening. (1) A rumour had gone through the assembled on-lookers (I'm talking about 20 people at most) that it was "some new Val Kilmer movie". My (and others') reaction was "oh, let's be off then", but then ...... (2) There was a giant, huge, enormous - humongous - pile of cardboard boxes being slowly glued together, layer after layer, below the balcony of the upstairs room. Clearly there was going to be a stunt! So people hung around - this is not something you see every day. So they built and they built and they stopped. Then there was a rehearsal. You could just in the distance see into the room, and there was a guy in a really cheesy-looking robot suit. We rolled our eyes, and I thought "yep.....Val Kilmer movie...", but we stayed. The robot guy seems to be in the room, there are shots fired, he jerks as though hit, and then staggers backwards to the balcony..... Oh. So you can see the setup. This ought to be interesting to see, people thought. Then there was a consultation......and they decided to build another layer onto the boxes......this took another half an hour, twenty minutes at least. More standing around. A huge amount of time went by. Roberto had an early plane to catch (if I recall correctly), and frankly, watching the assistant to the assistant to the assistant to the chief box-taper build a huge pile of cardboard boxes gets a little old really fast. ...and it was only a Val Kilmer movie that I'd never go to see anyway. We took him back to his hotel and said goodbye. [Present day. Today (Saturday night 3rd Dec. '05 ) in fact!] I'm sitting in the movie Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, with Robert Downey Jr., Michelle Monaghan, and.... Val Kilmer. The movie is excellent. Excellent. Excellent. Downey Jr., Kilmer, and Monaghan are all brilliant in it. The script is tight. It is very knowing, self-referential and clever, and this will annoy a lot of people, but I loved it since I think it pulled off the stunt of being self-aware rather nicely. It is a very LA movie in the sense that it is genuinely on location, but it is very aware of the LA way of being (at least a certain part of it) and lovingly and brilliantly contrasts it well with the way of being from....New York. Ok, and the rest of planet earth. It is very LA also because I suspect that there are things in there that will not be fully appreciated unles you've lived here for a while. It was great to see it with an LA audience too. I can't explain it exactly, but they captured some little LA things nicely: A certain type of conversation, a certain way of speaking and being that some people have...etc. It is rather like the fact that, say, Men In Black is best appreciated if you've lived in Manhattan.... and if you first see it with a New York audience. Same thing. Where was I? Oh, right. So early in the film (I won't spoil anything by giving significant details)...that scene we saw being prepared back on the beach shows up! A single word made me sit up in my seat and sure enough, in a few scenes, there it comes...the Venice house, the robot guy, the works. How compeletely unexpected! I will encourage you to see the film, since it is rather striking to have such a clever and playful script stay consistently good to the end in such a high-profile movie. Part of my encouragement will be that it has nothing to do with cheesy robot-guys. Nothing. It is just a convoluted thriller. With great humour and cleverness. I should also mention that there are a few good grammar jokes and at least one probability joke as extra enticements. Well, that's enough babbling. Off to bed. Painting tomorrow. Next in the series (maybe): Report on my attending a press screening of Peter Jackson's King Kong. -cvj