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Under discussion:

Sin City  (2005)

Watchmen  (2009)

The Spirit  (2008)

The Pineapple Express  (2008)

Zach and Miri  (2008)

One of several sponsored by Entertainment Weekly, this panel brings together four filmmakers who will be flogging their upcoming wares on other panels here this weekend: Judd Apatow (producer of Pineapple Express), Kevin Smith (Zach and Miri Make a Porno), Zach Snyder (The Watchmen) and Frank Miller (The Spirit).

According to the guide, it’ll be an evening devoted to “a free-wheeling conversation on the movie business, their upcoming projects, and what it means—to them—to be a geek.” But mostly, people are probably just anxious to get a seat for Kevin Smith’s annual stand-up comedy session, which begins in the same room immediately after, although if Frank Miller is yet aware of the drubbing The Spirit panel is getting online, things might get interesting…

Questions from the floor

5:57 - “Is the pirate story in Watchmen being animated and coming to the DVD?”

5:55 - “Who inspired you?”

Smith: “Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Richard Linklater…”
Apatow: “Well, Kevin Smith laid down the track for me.”
Smith: “Yes, bitch, yes! Say that shit in print!”

Apatow: “Also Hal Ashby, and Cameron Crowe…”
Smith: “**** those guys!”
Snyder: “I did my Star Wars thing so I’m good.”

Miller sort of shrugs and says “It would be a really long list, things like Gunsmoke and Astro Boy and Citizen Kane. I’m not even going to try and start that list.”

5:54 - “Will we ever see a Judd Apatow sci-fi flick or a Zack Snyder feel good family comedy?”

Snyder: “Yeah, I’m working on a family movie right now… so, okay no. I’m kidding. I have a hard time with PG.”

Apatow: “I don’t know how to move the camera… that seems to be my issue. I remember when I saw Dawn of the Dead, and about 5 minutes in I turned to Adam McKay and said “Did I just stumble into the coolest fucking movie ever?” which is always followed up with “I am not capable of doing anything like this, ever.” So no, you won’t see a movie with fairies or goblins in it from me.”

Then question man shouts out “PILLOW PANTS FOR LIFE!” and runs off.

5:52 - “Do you have a lot of improvisation in Zack & Miri?”

Smith: Smith: “We’ve had some ad-libbing in the movies since Dogma… but I think, and Apatow will back me up on this, Seth Rogen is one of the best improv guys around.”

Apatow: “Yeah, I’m just glad people think I wrote everything he says. Oh, and plus I think that guy has an erection.” (The question asker, not Seth Rogen)

5:49 - Now comes the questions from the floor. First up, Apatow says “Hey, I love that t-shirt!”… the kid is wearing an identical Ghostbusters shirt. Apatow: “I guess we both spilled coke on our shirts earlier.”

“So does the popularity of geek movies allow you to have more creativity? Or do the studios still have you by the balls?”

Snyder: “By the balls.”

Apatow: “I think I might have their balls. Maybe I have a little bit of one ball. I have one ball.”

Smith: “I got no balls to grab. So they got me.”

Questions from EW readers, from the EW host, courtesy of EW online.

5:46 - Smith: “We work in an industry where originality is not praised. It’s like ‘What worked last time? Yeah, do that shit again! Only for more money!’ I think geek culture is definitely here to stay. You can thank Quentin Tarantino for that.”

Marc: Have you all ever had any geeky fanboy moments of your own?

Smith: “Well, just backstage I met Zack Snyder for the first time, and he came up and hugged me. I hugged him back, but then he pushed back a little bit. It’s like, ‘Hey, it’s not that big a fraternity, fat boy.’”

Apatow, “Fanboy? Well, I once saw the star of Baa, Baa, Black Sheep, Robert Conrad, and I followed him around on a bike for five miles. Does that count?”

Snyder, “Well, I was shooting a commercial with Harrison Ford once, and I thought we were like buddies. So, I told him I had a Han Solo frozen in carbonite in my house, like full-sized. He said, ‘Yeah, you probably shouldn’t have told me that.’”

Miller: “I was on the set of Sin City, and the first time I saw Jessica Alba dance on stage, swinging the whip around, I burst into tears because I realized my dream had come true.”

5:37 - “What does Rogen taste like?”

Apatow: “I think you should ask Rogen what Apatow tastes like.”

Smith: “It’s funny, I tasted both Rogen and Apatow at the same time, and I was like ‘Hmm, that tastes semitic!’”
“Was The Dark Knight good for comic book movies?”
Snyder: “Was it? Well… I mean there’s no money left in the economy now. All the Warner Bros. people have it.”

“How much importance do you give to negative fan’s reactions online?”

Smith: “I live and die by it. I have no sense of my life, so I go online and read stuff all the time. Then I look in the mirror and I’m like ‘Shit, it’s not getting any better’ then someone online is like ‘You’re great’ and I’m like… I am? Yay!”

Apatow: “I’d just like to say… my wife is fuckin’ hot.”

Smith: “Dude, you’re so gettin’ laid tonight. You might have earned yourself a hummer on the way back.”

Apatow: “Do you check Google Alerts on your own name?”

Smith: “All the time, I have ‘em sent directly to me. Do you guys know about this? You can set up a Google Alert for your name so they’ll send you an update when you get mentioned. As a result I know a lot about the Kevin Smith who works in the Sioux City parks department. That guy is in the news a lot. Every now and then I get a news alert that says “Clerks guy still sucks,” so then I go back to reading about the other guy.

Snyder: “Yeah, apparently there’s a Zack Snyder who plays baseball…. baby where is that guy? Sorry, my wife is in the audience, she gets my Google Alerts. I think he’s in Wisconsin.”

Frank Miller: “What is this about?” *laughter*

Miller: “Oh, the internet? I just do things the way I want to do them.” He’s like the curmudgeonly neighbor. “GET OFF MY LAWN! GRR!”

The inane philosophical questions, the non-sequitor banter they inspire.

5:36 - Smith: “You know, part of why they made the San Diego Comic-Con was so someone would make the Watchmen movie. I swear to god, after I see that movie, I can fuckin’ die. Snyder, if you don’t have the footage, can you just act it out?”

Snyder: “Yeah, let me go backstage and I’ll just paint myself blue. Then these cups can be the Vietnamese soldiers…”

Smith: “Ooh, can I be Silk Spectre and you’re Dr. Manhattan?”
Snyder: “Okay, that’s just not cool.”

5:34 - Marc wants to know if Kevin Smith and Judd Apatow rely on audience testing and tracking. Apatow comes back with “Well no.. I’m usually tracking like, how much penis we can show in a movie. For Sarah Marshall” — people applaud — “Yes, thank you for applauding Jason Seigel’s penis.”
Kevin Smith: “Well, I tend to go with my gut. But my gut is prodigious, so that’s good.”

Apatow: “Well, I remember someone called me “a fart in the face of American culture” online, and that bothered me. But, then I looked at the username, and it was ‘DannyGlover’sDickBlood.’”

Kevin Smith: “It took me a long time to come up with that username.”

5:30 - Marc wants to know why some comic book movies go so wrong (”Ghost Rider,” he whispers)

Snyder “Well, the jury is still out on if that is going to be cool or not… but once we got Nixon back in the film, I started to feel better.”

Miller says, “Well, there’s a scene in The Spirit where he’s climbing up a big mountain, and he stumbles a little bit. When I saw that I was like, ‘We got it.’”

Frank is saying “I have a miserable life… I mean, I wake up and I’m like ‘I gotta do this stuff?’”

He’s now trying to be funny by saying “You know, I grew up as a comic book nut.” *Crickets* “I grew up reading Superboy!” *laughter*.

It’s a bit weird hearing him talk about work as a “veteran filmmaker” because he’s made half of one film, and The Spirit doesn’t look to be a great follow-up to that.

5:27 - They’re all answering the question “Why do you do what you do?”

Apatow tells us about the first time he had sex, he turned to the girl and said “Was it good for you? And she said ‘Well, it’ll get better.’ and then I knew.”
Snyder says “What’s the question? Why did I want to do this kind of material? What?” He genuinely looks lost.
“I’ll just come right out and say it. This little movie called Star Wars. It seemed super cool…. and I… that’s it.”

Kevin Smith: “It’s a good thing your visuals are so cool.”

Smith follows that up with “Wait, how many of you people were here for Watchmen this morning? Doesn’t it look superfuckin’ cool?”

The crowd is clamoring for Zack to show the footage again…as if he carries it around in a little bag.

The Intros

5:26 - And last, Kevin Smith… the crowd goes nuts for him. Marc introduces him as “Kevin Motherfuckin’ Smith” and boy, he’s gained a lot of weight. Holy moses.

Kevin says, “On the back of these namecards it says ‘Please be aware that many members of your audience may be under the age of 18.’ I’ll try to abide by it, but my vocabulary isn’t that large. I just wanna get my **** sucked, sir.”

5:25 - First out, Frank Miller. I wonder if he’s started to hear the bad buzz yet. Next, Zack Snyder, who is “filming the unfilmable.” Judd Apatow, the Tom Clancy of comedy is next, wearing a Ghostbusters t-shirt.

The Pre-show

5:24 - Marc Bernardin, a senior editor from EW is here to introduce everyone. He’s talking about how cool “Geek” is. “From comic books to action figures to tv to film to slave Leais, geek is cool.” Isn’t this like preaching to the choir?

5:23 - The house music continues, and there are giant ads for EW on the screens. Everyone nearby is cramming junk food into their mouths and checking out all of the schwag they’ve acquired over the past two days. The most popular item today: giganimous cloths Watchmen bags given out by Warner Bros.

5:20 - This panel will include Kevin Smith, Judd Apatow, Frank Miller and Zack Snyder. Sort of an odd combo.

5:19 - If you want to re-live the glory days of last year’s “Evening with Kevin Smith,” you can listen to the entire audio of the panel here.

5:17 - Here we are, waiting on the Entertainment Weekly: Visionaries panel. It’s anther packed house, and they’re pumping in some house music. Probably EW’s “Pick of the Week!”

Literally everyone in line that I spoke to said they were coming to to see Kevin Smith. Smith is on this panel, then his regular Friday night panel, which is from 6:30 until 8. That’s two and half hours of Kevin Smith, folks.

Under discussion:

2001: A Space Odyssey  (1968)

Jurassic Park  (1993)

The Love Bug  (1968)

Sin City  (2005)

300  (2007)

3:55 - Kicking the fans while they’re down:

Well, that’s all the time they have.

The poor folks who waited in line to ask questions got nada.

The end.

3:54 - The Spirit clip #3:

They’re introducing yet another clip. Wow, I feel like we’ll get to see the whole movie in bits and pieces.

Still talking… please just roll ‘em.

Miller: “Folks, here you go. When Titans clash.”

The Octopus and The Spirit duking it out in an extremely muddy and watery set. The Spirit gets clocked in the head with a cinder block and quips “You’re giving me a headache, Octopus.”

Jackson then gives The Spirit a crotchshot with a massive steel wrench.

The Spirit then pounds The Octopus deep into the mud with punch after punch after punch. Literally, like 20 punches.

Then The Octopus appears behind The Spirit and crashes a toilet down on The Spirit’s head, pinning his arms in place with the toilet seat. He laughs his ass off (whoops, bad pun) and yells “Come on! Toilets are always funny!”

I think that clip just provided all the shark jumping I needed. My hopes for this movie just got drowned in mud and toilet humor.

3:49 - The Spirit setting: a “nevertime” filled with Jews:

Del Prete: “This movie is set in a time we call ‘nevertime’. There are things from the 40s in the there, the 50s, but there are also cell phones.”

Miller says “I’ve gotta say there are more Jewish characters in two hours of The Spirit movie than there are in one year of The Spirit comic book.”

3:48 - The Spirit clip #2:

Another clip is rolling, The Spirit with the love of his life.

I just noticed that his mask is painted on.

The Spirit and his lady love are making out somwhere in the police station.

Wait, I take that back, it looks like his mask is real, and painted on.

They make out, and she tells him that he falls in love with everyone he meets.

Sure enough, a gruff detective comes in and introduces The Spirit to a rookie cop he’ll be working with, who also happens to be hot. They leave the room, and Girl #1 hurls a scalpel at the closed door and calls him a bastard.

Girl #1 was Sarah Paulson as Ellen Dolan, the police commissioner’s daughter.

Del Prete says “There’s nothing campy about the movie. You’ll notice that when you see it. It’s just an organic kind of humor.”

When asked what Will Eisner would have thought about the scene, Miller said “Well, he probably would have said ‘It was good, but Ellen probably wouldn’t have thrown the scalpel, because it would bend the end of it and she’d have to use it later in surgery.’ He was a picky man.”

3:43 - The Spirit arrives:

Here comes Gabriel Macht, The Spirit, from… The Spirit.

Jeff “What’s your take on the Spirit? Is he funny? Is he a tough guy?”

Gabriel “I think he has a lot of different colors. He can laugh at himself, he can be tough while he’s beating the snot out of Sam Jackson, he loves women… every one woman he meets he just falls in love with.”

He’s recapping the origin of The Spirit. For those of you who don’t know, Denny Colt was a young detective who got shot, and later awoke from a sort of “suspended animation” in the graveyard. He contacted his friend, police commisioner Dolan, and became a secret masked vigilante. The “eyes and ears” of the City.

3:39 - The Spirit clip #1:

Finally, here we go.

Okay, I’m hoping this footage will get out onto the web, because it looks terrible.

I mean, really, really, really bad.

Remember that James Bond movie where they filmed the underwater scenes dry, and just using a blow dryer to move hair around? Well, this footage makes that amazing.

It doesn’t look like they’re underwater at all, and Eva just squints while her hair whips around.

They’re about to introduce a new panel member, but I’m still reeling from how bad that footage was.

Ouch.

Miller is talking about the challenge of finding a “real man” in Hollywood.

3:36 - Introducing The Spirit clip:

They’re going to show us a bit more from the movie, and Frank actually wants to introduce this clip.

“Sans Saref is a lover of jewelry, and she has a lead on the most unspeakable fantastic treasure of all time. In order to get this, she has to do a lot of swimming, and she’s played by the very gorgeous Eva Mendes. And she’s wearing a very tight swimsuit.”

Miller: “We have a technical term for filming underwater, and we call it “A fucking nightmare.”

They’ve filmed all of this dry, with Eva in a very tight wetsuit, using a camera that “films slower than death,” according to Miller.

They’re speaking a lot about how technically cool this footage will be. So let’s see it already.

In fact, they’re still talking about it.

Sam Jackson: “By now you know there’s actually no clip, right?”

3:33 - The ladies of The Spirit:

Now they’re talking about the women in the trailer, who all look hot in that noirish sort of way.

Del Prete “So while Frank was wiring guns together, I was picking out jewelry for all the ladies.”

Now they’ve brought out Jamie King onstage, and she plays Lorelei, who Frank Miller told her is like “The Spirit of Death”

She goes from extreme love to extreme rage and anger in regards to The Spirit.

Miller “One of the ways you realize The Spirit is a noble hero, just take a look at what he’s willing to give up.”

3:28 - Samuel L. Jackson on The Octopus:

Jackson talks about the evolution of The Octopus, and how in his mind he’s a man who’s been experimenting with drugs and different concoctions and has lost his mind.

Jackson: “I’d come in and show Miller some ideas and I’d be like… okay, here’s The Octopus as a black Nazi, and Miller would go ‘Okay, cool.’ So I’m like, wow, I’m a Nazi!”

Miller “Ain’t it a great country?”

3:25 - So many Samuel L. Jackson action figures:

Jeff is asking Sam Jackson “what’s the favorite action figure of you?”

Jackson: “I think probably Mace Windu, because I have so many different versions of him. There’s small, big, medium, and one that walks across my desk. But, I also have some cool Afro Samurai figures coming out. I remember the first action figure I should have had was Jurassic Park. Everyone except Wayne Knight and me had action figures.”

“Now I have action figures everywhere, all over my office. Every now and then I catch The Shaft glaring and Mace Windu, I got Frozone sledding through, laughing at everyone…”

Someone yells out “What about Nick Fury?”

“Well, you know when I was a kid… Nick Fury was a white dude.” *laughter* “Now I’m glad that he’s evolved into something I can understand! See? You too can grow up to be a black man.”

3:20 - Samuel L. Jackson as The Octopus:

Frank Miller wanted the villain to be someone that “Wasn’t very scary… like Herbie.” Does he mean The Love Bug?

“So… who’d I pick? Mr. Sam Jackson.”

Sam bounds up on the stage, wearing his official costume of glasses and a Kangol hat turned backwards. And he’s wearing a “Badmofokos” t-shirt.

Sam is talking about the challenging of auditioning to play The Octopus, since he was only a pair of white gloves in the comic book.

They had to try and find a huge gun for The Octopus to handle, and Jackson says “We started with the Desert Eagle, and then we went to these .40 caliber pistols that were just huge. Then we started wiring guns together…”

Miller: “Remember that scene in 2001 with the monkeys and bone? At one point I started stacking one gun on top of another, on top of another, on top of another, and I finally just told the props department to wire them together like that. And when Sam wields them, he looks like a Transformer.”

Jackson: “Yeah, so I had to work out just to hold these things. Then we had to have wires holding the guns up because they were so heavy. I think I lost some weight that day.:”

Jackson: “Miller is totally open and without ego, which is a lot different than most directors.”

3:15 -The Spirit trailer:

Jeff asks Frank Miller to introduce the trailer, and Miller retorts “Well the whole purpose of a trailer is not to have an introduction…”

It’s rolling.

“From writer director Frank Miller, creator of 300 and Sin City.”

Okay. I am officially freaked out.

This trailer is extremely strange.

A tiny man sliding out of a woman’s mouth.

A collection of female heads, lined up as if they were on a shelf…

It’s mostly all about the femme fatales.

Sam Jackson appears on screen and says “What is it with you and women?”

It looks very comic booky and over the top, but there are guns galore all over the place.

This isn’t your father’s The Spirit, and definitely isn’t the campy fun comic book that Will Eisner used to write and draw.

3:11 - More on getting the movie made:

Deborah Del Prete said she’s “been waiting her entire life” to make this make, which makes me think about a two year old toddler, poring over script notes. She says she’s a major comic book fan, and she speaks a million miles an hour. She’s very excited for this movie.

Frank and Deborah have both “tried to make this film the way Will would have wanted it made.”

Deborah: “We got Eisner, and we got Miller. Those are the only two people I wanted working on this movie.”

Now we’re about to get a trailer for the movie, which I hope is better than the lackluster “My city screams” version that ran recently.

3:05 - Frank Miller meets Will Eisner:

Frank Miller tells us how he was introduced to The Spirit, and how he finally got to meet Will Eisner at a party thrown by Neal Adams.

“Neal Adams used to keep a lot of us comic book artists alive by getting us commercial work while the comic book studios paid us slave wages.”

Frank Miller is doing an impersonation of Will Eisner, and I can’t quite tell if it’s touching, or vaguely insulting.

Frank said “He was my mentor, and my friend.” So, okay. Let’s go with touching.

Frank literally “dropped everything else” to get to work on bringing The Spirit to the screen.

3:02 - The panel begins:

I’ve got two names for you…

Will Eisner and Frank Miller.

There’s no way you can tell the history of graphic novels without those two names.

This Christmas, they’ll have an important milestone in that history, on Christmas Day: The Spirit.

This is Jeff Boucher from the LA Times, “Sorry, I forgot to introduce myself.”

He’s moderating the panel.

Frank Miller and producer Deborah Del Prete come out.

Under discussion:

An American Werewolf in London  (1981)

Star Wars  (1977)

Farscape [TV Series]  (1999)

Norbit  (2007)

The Wolfman  (2009)

Legendary six-time-Oscar-winning make-up artist Rick Baker joined stars Benicio Del Toro and Emily Blunt to bring us the first footage of Universal’s new version of The Wolfman. And it’s a period piece.

Highlights:

- The origins of the remake stem from Del Toro’s Lon Chaney Jr. fandom.

- It looks like “Francis Ford Coppola’s The Wolfman”

- Of course, Anthony Hopkins would be more welcome as Van Helsing again

- At least it will likely be R-rated, as it looks quite bloody

- Baker honors Stan Winston by labeling his death “the end of an era”

- Blunt is apparently into two-headed dudes

Check out the full liveblog transcript after the jump.

5:31 - Another look at the Wolfman clip:

They’re rolling the clip one more time, and now I can see how bloody it is.

Brains, guts, carnage.

You only see a couple of extremely quick flashes of the Wolfman.

It’s very gothic looking, lots of blacks and browns. Full costumes, long takes. It’s almost like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Wolfman.

Anthony Hopkins comes up on his son, post-transformation and rasps “You’ve done terrible things.”

Apparently he gets caught and is strapped down in a medical observatory while he transforms.

We’re out, and it’s not even a full moon

5:29 - Extra guests and more Q&A:

Rick Baker brings Dave and Lou Elsey up on stage and introduces them, as they helped out with the creature effects. They’ve worked on Farscape and Star Wars.

A pair of twins (they asked a question during the Watchmen panel) get up and ask what the “most fun part of working on the movie was.”

Del Toro says, “Uh, the chase.”

Rick Baker says, “Is that a two headed man?”

and Emily Blunt says, “Hi… what are you doing later?”

So now we know all about her secret sexual proclivities.

5:25 - Regarding CGI and “the end of an era”:

While it might be del Toro in a costume, it looks like they’ll be using CGI to show the Wolfman’s transformation. Baker is hoping they’ll do something like the physical transformations in An American Werewolf in London.

Rick Baker is waxing poetic about Stan Winston and all the contributions he made to the art. He calls his death “The end of an era.”

5:22 - Regarding The Wolfman’s rating:

“Will this movie be rated R?”

Del Toro: “I don’t think we know yet…”

Rick Baker chimes in with “I think based on this trailer it looks like it’ll be rated R.”

5:20 - The Wolfman Q&A, Question #2:

Rick Baker gets asked if it’s more challenging to do makeup effects on something like this or working on Norbit, and he said working on human character faces, like Eddie Murphy’s Mr. Wong character, was much more challenging. “But I’ve been making myself up as the Wolfman since I was 10 years old.”

Rick Baker quips “Look, it’s Criss Angel!” — the next kid asking a question is wearing some sort of street thug wear and a black bandana. And he looks like Criss Angel… at age 10.

Emily Blunt said “I was really terrified during the chase scenes. I was literally running. While wearing a corset.”

Del Toro leers: “And I just had to chase her.”

Del Toro geekily giggles and admits that he’s a big fan of both Lon Chaney and Lon Chaney Jr.’s film roles, and that he watched all of them. He also got into the old Hammer films like “Curse of the Wolfman”.

5:17 - The Wolfman Q&A, Question #1:

Q&A’s start, and the first question is “What similarities are there between this movie and the original?”

Del Toro wakes from his bout with narcolepsy to say “That’s a good question for the director….”

He’s talking about keeping the movie a period piece, rather than updating it to modern times. “I think you just need to see the picture. I mean, I need to see it too.”

5:14 - Becoming the Wolfman:

Benicio said “Putting the makeup on was great, it was building and that was exciting. Taking it off, that was a bit more desperate.”

“He cried like a baby,” said Baker. “He may look like a big tough guy, but he’s actually a big pussy.”

Del Toro was asked if he studied any animal behavior in order to get into the role, and he quips “I checked out Emily Blunt.” Clearly it was meant as a joke, but it just came off really creepy.

Del Toro is talking about how great it was to have Anthony Hopkins on set “Not just as an actor, but as a person.” He literally seems like he’s about to fall asleep.

5:11 - On the decision to get involved:

Del Toro is talking about how he loved the Lon Chaney Jr. role in the original movies. Del Toro’s agent saw a poster of The Wolfman in Del Toro’s house, and he said “I’m going to go to Universal and talk to them about this.” So start buying posters, folks.

Emily Blunt heard Anthony Hopkins and “Benny” were involved in the film, so she said it was pretty easy to make the decision to take the role.

5:08 - The Wolfman clip:

Benicio is sleepily introducing a clip of footage from the movie. No one has seen it yet, except del Toro “But without sound! So I want to hear this.”

Mediocre whoops and hollers.

Murky shots of a Wolfman running through the woods, and turn of the century townsfolk finding an eviscerated body.

A man runs home and melts down his mother’s silver spoons and makes bullets.

Anthony Hopkins walks down the stairs, he’s playing Del Toro’s father.

Hugo Weaving, better known as Agent Smith, plays the head Wolf hunter.

It’s all shot in period, and looks pretty good… except del Toro looks oddly out of place.

This just makes me wish that Hopkins was playing Van Helsing in this. Granted, he’s not in the original, but he’s a kickass monster hunter.

5:04 - Rick Baker, Benicio Del Toro and Emily Blunt take the stage:

Universal has brought out Rick Baker, sorry… “the legendary Rick Baker” to talk about Wolfman.

When Baker heard that Universal was remaking The Wolfman, he called everyone he knew at Universal and said “I have to be involved with this.”

Two surprise guests, Emily Blunt and Benicio del Toro.

Baker said what’s important is that they didn’t want to make a CGI version of the Wolfman, but they wanted it to actually be a guy in the suit.

Under discussion:

American Teen  (2008)

Nanette Burstein’s American Teen has become ubiquitous since its Sundance premiere, both on the festival circuit and, thanks to a poster carefully calibrated to target Gen X nostalgia, online. Its title suggests a wishful universality, as if to say, “This is it! This is an unfiltered portrait of averageness!” Certainly, its semi-rural Indiana location was chosen for its middleness, both geographically and demographically––or, at least, to conform to a coastal idea of what that looks like. Certainly, in choosing to focus on a cross-section of subjects playing into our media-fed concepts of high school stereotypes, Burstein manages to show life at the same high school from a variety of different angles, whilst simultaneously playing up the idea that all American Teens are––really––hopelessly insecure dreamers stuck in a variety of systems and strictures that they’re desperate to break out of. But everyone prevails, because that’s what totally mythic average Americans do –– it’s, like, rugged individualism!

Much has been made in regards to Burstein’s alleged “manipulation” of her subjects and their lives: did she recreate email/text message exchanges or the reactions they caused? Does it matter if she did? I’ve seen the film twice, and neither time did these shot-reverse shot depictions of near-instant communication seem to get in the way of a larger truth.

But there are other elements of American Teen’s construction which are troubling––not because they came after-the-fact and weren’t produced organically in real life, but because Burstein either isn’t aware of or has made a conscious decision to ignore the very fact of “non-fiction” filmmaking that her subjects and their peers are likely most exposed to: MTV’s various reality shows, including True Life, The Real World, and, especially, Laguna Beach and The Hills.

Check out this Burstein quote in a recent story on the film, by Mark Olsen for the L.A. Times:

“I think it’s unusual to have a very narrative documentary, so people aren’t used to it,” she continued. I think people have a hard time believing teenagers are willing to be that intimate on camera. So sometimes I feel I’m being criticized for what the film’s achievements are.”

This is a bafflingly solipsistic statement coming from a filmmaker whose work has been criticized for being too “glossy” and “mainstream.” Her “achievements,” this “very narrative” form of documentary that she apparently thinks she’s pioneering, looks an awfully lot like the “non-scripted” content that MTV has been producing for 15 years or more, which has evolved from teenagers and young adults being actually, naively “intimate” in front of a camera––which more often than not meant exhibitionism in lieu of real intimacy (have you watched the first season of the Real World lately?)––to teenagers delivering a rote, practiced version of what television has told them looks like intimacy.

Of course, this transition has reached its apex with the stunningly successful The Hills, a reality show in-name-only that miles more stylish and satisfying than most scripted media about Americans of the same age. That Paramount Vantage would acquire American Teen is a no brainer: it accomplishes many of the same things, stylistically and thematically and atmospherically, that have lured a massive audience of eye and brain candy hungry youth to the other “non-fiction” products of Viacom––whether Burstein is ready to admit it or not.

There are scraps of voiceover in American Teen that come across as every bit as hollow (if not scripted) as the narrative catch-up which opens most episodes of Laguna Beach, suggesting, at the very least, that Burstein’s subjects have internalized the cadences used by “real” people on television. Formally, the film’s use of comic cutaways––such as talking head testimony about Megan (aka: The Bitch, aka My Favorite) laid into footage of Megan shooting guns––seems borrowed from the countless reality shows where we see visual irony used to subtly and not-so-subtly mock the contestants; if this is one of Burstein’s “achievements,” it’s one she shares with Flavor of Love.

But ultimately, what really pisses me off about American Teen is the way Burstein––following countless mainstream non-fiction productions before her––privilieges the female victim at the expense of asking difficult questions about the psychology of victimhood and its roots in social constructs like high school. American Teen propagates the same, modern-day martyr, constant victim-as-star bullshit that L.C. plays out season after season on The Hills. And even that, it gets wrong.

There’s not a single scene featuring American Teen victim/hero Hannah that’s anywhere near as elegant, sympathetic and purely satisfying as the final shot of the recently-released trailer for the next season of The Hills. As frequent watchers know, L.C. wears a lot of eye makeup –– grease paint armor against a camera primarily concerned with collaging her every eye roll out of context. But here, in a fight with a female friend, the poster girl for the cool, enigmatic eye twitch allows a single tear to carry a stream of mascara down her cheek. It is the moment that Hills fans––nay, the entirety of the culture––have been waiting for for three years. Nay, the entire decade!

Burstein clearly has a fondness for certain for her subjects, which allows her to present them sympathetically, even when their behavior is less than admirable. Unfortunately, this leads to an almost total lack of interrogation of Hannah, an artsy girl whose “unlikely” Achilles’ heel is attractive men. Burstein privileges Hannah’s milquetoast heartbreaks over the exploits of “princess” Megan, which I think is a shame; for all her non-conformist posturing, Hannah reveals herself to be so easily led by the concept of traditional romance that you end up wishing that someone would just slap her with a copy of Sexual Personae and make her education compete

Meanwhile, Megan, who survives Burstein’s regrettable stab at “humanizing” her mean girl behavior through a gently montage describing a family tragedy, is clearly a great, natural villian who revels in her caste-based supremacy. She’s a wildly compelling and infuriating socio-sexual manipulator straight out of Dangerous Liasons (or, maybe more accurately, Cruel Intentions)––except, though comfortably upper-middle-class, she can’t quite hide behind the excuse that money breeds depravity. She’s just not a nice person, and that’s real. There is, I’m sure, an amazingly insightful film somewhere in American Teen’s discarded footage, purely about Megan and the social psychology of high school power. And I’m dying for it.

But as its title suggests, American Teen is shooting for a wider scope, which might be more interesting if Burstein wasn’t so complicit in reinforcing tired stereotypes in her unwillingness to cast her camera outside of them. In one of the film’s most egregious **** yous to objectivity, Burstein implicitly condones the scarlet letter outcasting of Megan’s rival for her male friend’s affections, by discarding that character from the narrative as quickly as Megan does from her circle. This girl, whose ill-advised willingness to send a crush a smutty photo resulted in her being ostracized from the cool kids table and, we are led to believe, more or less total shame from the community––if THIS girl is not an American Teen, who is?

Note: Scant portions of this review appeared in a piece previously published during SilverDocs.

Under discussion:

2001: A Space Odyssey  (1968)

Solaris  (1972)

A.I.: Artificial Intelligence  (2001)

Wall-E  (2008)

This week I wanted to make a simple point: Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E is a near-masterpiece of A.I. proportions and socio-political implications, reduced by its cloying musical score to just another ingenious Disney/Pixar heart-tugger. The most effective way to illustrate this would have been to create a video mash-up of the WALL-E score and an immersive philosophical sci-fi like 2001: A Space Odyssey, THX-1138 or Tarkovsky’s Solaris. But my laptop’s down, so I’m stuck here telling you rather than showing.

Let’s try another way:

This column is written by a single man in his 30’s who spends a lot of time alone. If Disney or Sony or the Weinstein Company made a movie about my life, there would be lots of alienated, bassy sounds over shots of me staring red-eyed at a library computer screen; piano tinkling accompanying my pitiful walk home; despairing choral chants and Middle Eastern wailing as I trudge up to the arthouse ticket booth on a Saturday night (”One for Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, please.”). You all would feel sorry for me and maybe see something of your own sorrows in mine. But you’d walk out of the movie filing me away with other cinematic sad sacks, somewhere between Travis Bickle and the fat guy with the watery eyes in Heavy. Then, on to dinner and your own troubles.

But how could you forget me so easily? Don’t my isolation and suffering mean something beyond the screen? What about the scene where they diagnosed me with that rare illness? Or when that stick-up kid shot me in the leg? I was just trying to get home to my noodles. My dog falling down the elevator shaft–only a faint memory now, huh?

Well, I blame the music. It never let you really get that close to me, beyond how cute and pathetic I am. There’s a lot more to me than my pratfalls and one-liners and humiliations. Even in my scene of triumph, when I won over the girl from the clutches of that finance asshole, your applause was mere ritual, far from spontaneous, because a 90-piece orchestra and a synth blast told you just when to decide that I was The Man. You clapped for me the way you’d clap for somebody else’s kid at the school play.

Okay:

WALL-E joins Shadow of a Doubt and On the Waterfront as another brilliant and devastating visual statement on American life dulled and softened by an overbearing orchestral score that says, “It’s only a movie, y’all. Have fun. Shrek it up. More popcorn!” The film’s mostly wordless first act builds a convincing world and lets the trash-compacting robot WALL-E wander yearningly through it (his loneliness in a world he never knew jibing with our wistfulness amid familiar ruins). Other than the old musical number WALL-E watches and imitates, Ben Burtt’s sound design is as much music as this segment requires. Along with the expected Pixar dynamism and grit, Burtt’s work makes WALL-E’s junkyard Earth a very real, menacing, strange and wondrous graveyard for the American empire.

This intense WALL-eyed subjectivity and naturalism-plus-reminiscence can hang with the greatest of Studio Ghibli animations (and early Pixar shorts). Ghibli directors Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata can make things like leaves and parasols weep and die real deaths. Burrt and Stanton do the same for our beloved 20th century gadgets. But Thomas Newman’s score emerges like clockwork at plot points to lend the film a more Dreamworks-ish sense of hectic postmodern showmanship. Party time, not story time. The film’s cluttered and increasingly talky midsection set on a space colony/resort/mall throws the party in full swing.

Yo Pixar, howbout a WALL-E DVD with the option to mute the musical score? Underneath your reliably sturdy, entertaining 2008-edition Disney product is a film of finer and deeper Pixar shadings that might just rouse the consumer blobs in the audience out of their floating recliners– rather than simply prod, placate and party with them. But that would be truly revolutionary, and I doubt your overlord Disney is having any part of that.