The Third Draft

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Reviewed by Coach Patton
©D. Patton, All Rights Reserved

Written by: Guillermo Arriaga (story) and Alejandro González Iñárritu
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

Runtime: 2:05 Rated R for language, sexuality, some violence and drug use.

PLOT: A freak accident brings together a critically ill mathematician (Penn), a grieving mother (Watts) and a born-again ex-con (Del Toro).

Cast: Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Naomi Watts, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Danny Huston, Clea DuVall, Marc Musso

How much does life weigh?

They say we all lose 21 Grams at the exact moment of our death . . . everyone.

The weight of a stack of nickels. The weight of a chocolate bar.

The weight of a hummingbird . . .

Mexican director Alejandro Inarritu made a huge impact with his stunning debut, a Spanish-language film Amores Perros (2000) a couple of years ago and 21 Grams is his eagerly-awaited second feature. It’s written by Amores Perros screenwriter Guillermo Amaga and is shot in English, with terrific performances from its cast.

Using a brilliant, highly complex structure, it’s bleak, uncompromising and immensely powerful – as such it’s one of the best films of the year.

Guess How Much Your Soul Weighs . . . The film takes its title from the amount of weight we are said to lose at the time of death – believed by some people to be a consequence of the soul leaving the body.

The plot centers on three characters: Naomi Watts as a bereaved mother tortured by grief and battling a drug addiction; Sean Penn as a math professor with a terminal heart condition; and Benicio Del Toro as an ex-con with a wife and family, who has found God and is in search of redemption. The lives of the three characters are linked by a tragic accident at the heart of the film, an accident which is also the key to understanding the complex structure of the film.

Effectively, it’s as if the impact of the accident itself has completely splintered the narrative around it, so that scenes occur in a seemingly random order and the film trusts the intelligence of the audience to piece together the story.

It’s a bold, challenging move that yields impressive results – for example, during the first part of the film it’s genuinely impossible to tell the order of Sean Penn’s character’s story (though the state of his facial hair provides important clues).

The acting is extraordinary, with all three leads giving career-best performances. Naomi Watts, in particular, gives an emotionally raw, gut-wrenching performance that is almost painful to watch and shows that she is an actress to be reckoned with – to say that she deserves an Oscar really doesn’t do her justice.

Del Toro is also extremely impressive – especially in the latter half of the film. Penn has a trickier role because his character is largely unsympathetic at first, but he does an amazing job. There’s also good support from Charlotte Gainsbourg as Penn’s partner and from Melissa Leo as Del Toro’s wife, as well as, in smaller roles, Clea DuVall and Danny Huston.

The non-linear narrative proves not to be an art house gimmick designed to disguise a lack of substance. There is an organizing principle at work. The story segments, which are often very brief, are ordered along an emotional arc rather than a chronological one. The happier, sunnier scenes occur before we even know about the accident, at the beginning of the film, which then turns darker (often literally), bleaker, and more frenetic. Like in The Limey (1999), our inability to place most of the events along a timeline adds an element of suspenseful intrigue. We can only place ourselves in the hands of the filmmakers and trust that all the pieces will eventually fit together. Through it all, Paul's meditations from a hospital bed provide a loose linking thread.

Few films released in 2003 can boast having as much strength as 21 Grams. It is, in a word, amazing. It's one of those motion pictures that haunts your thoughts and won't let go. Like Memento (2000), it virtually demands a second viewing to understand and appreciate the story's complexity and to recognize the artistry inherent in all of the transitions. Or at least that’s How It Seemed from Where I Sat.

Roll credits

Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Producers: Alejandro González Iñárritu, Robert Salerno
Screenplay: Guillermo Arriago
Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto
Music: Gustavo Santaolalla

CAST:

Sean Penn --- Paul Rivers
Naomi Watts --- Cristina Peck
Benicio Del Toro --- Jack Jordan
Charlotte Gainsbourg --- Mary Rivers
Melissa Leo --- Marianne Jordan
Clea DuVall --- Claudia
Danny Huston --- Michael
Carly Nahon --- Cathy
Claire Pakis --- Laura
John Rubinstein --- Gynecologist
Eddie Marsan --- Reverend John

Fade to black

In The Name Of Truth, Justice and In the Service of A Higher Good, I Remain Your Friend, Movie Reviewer and Spiritual Advisor, Coach Patton

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Relationships are crucial in this business, and I've been good at making friends and contacts from far away.  It was high time I met  them face-to-face, so here I am in Los Angeles for a two-week immersion in the biz. Tomorrow begins a 4-day Sherwood Oaks event with Gary Shusett and fellow screenwriters from Hal Croasmun's Pro Series. On the 27th, I'll be attending  the IFTA Production Conference. The rest of the time, I'll be networking, networking, networking. Stay tuned for updates!

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Reviewed by Coach Patton
©D. Patton, All Rights Reserved

Directed by Roger Donaldson
Written by Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais

Running Length: 1:50 Rated R (Violence, Profanity, Nudity, Sexual Situations)

PLOT: Martine offers Terry a lead on a foolproof bank hit on London's Baker Street. She targets a roomful of safe deposit boxes worth millions in cash and jewelry. But Terry and his crew don't realize the boxes also contain a treasure trove of dirty secrets - secrets that will thrust them into a deadly web of corruption and illicit scandal.

Featuring: Jason Statham, Saffron Burrows, Stephen Campbell Moore, Daniel Mays, James Faulkner, Alki David, Michael Jibson, Richard Lintern, Keeley Hawes, David Suchet

The true story of a heist gone wrong -- in all the right ways.

The Bank Job is based on a true story - a daring 1971 robbery that made front page headlines until MI-5 made a “D-Notice” request that stifled further coverage by the press (on the grounds that it created a danger to National Security), driving it from the newspapers and into myth and memory.

Because of the D-Notice, the story disappears from the newspapers. It’s just gone, like it never existed. Rumors of a government cover-up abound. Rumors run wild about what could possibly have been stolen from those boxes -- maybe just one of those boxes -- that would prompt the government to quash the story.

While some of the facts are known, there are many gaps in the official record. Screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian Lefrenais, supposedly collaborating with anonymous inside sources, seek to provide “fill” for many of those gaps.

That’s where The Bank Job exists, in the delicious space between all the unknowns, filling in those blanks, guessing on some of it but working from as many possibly known quantities as it can. Maybe it’s not the 100-percent truth -- maybe it’s half, or more, invented. But it’s a damn good guess, and a ridiculously entertaining one.

Jason Statham (War, Crank) is perfect here -- leads a band of, well, patsies, though of course they don’t know that’s what they are: guys who’ve been set up to pull off this break-in and take out something that the British covert agencies really, really need to keep secret. (The someone it belongs to is threatening to go public with it, and it’s that someone’s box the thing needs to be stolen from.) Statham’s small-time crook Terry cooks up a careful plan for the job, but he’s suspicious, of course, of the old girlfriend, Martine (Saffron Burrows: Reign Over Me, Troy),who brought it to him, and he’s right to be. Terry may not be the brightest bulb, but he’s not totally stupid, either, and he knows she’s up to something.

We do too, which is part of the brilliance of the script by the team of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais (Across the Universe): we know more than Terry does, and even if we don’t know it all, even if we can’t guess how it’s all going to shake out, we know it’s not gonna be good . . . but it is gonna be a whole hellova lot of fun getting there. That much is obvious from the “fade in.”

Director Roger Donaldson (The Recruit, Thirteen Days) makes the cynicism of not being able to trust anyone but a crook like Terry -- who’s not a bad guy at all, even if his work is a bit shady -- seem like an okay place to be. And The Bank Job ends up being a fresh and cheery spin on the heist movie. Cuz it really is easy to root for Terry and his gang, like we always want to root for the villains in movies like these -- because the acknowledged villains are the only ones worth rooting for.

Some of what appears on-screen in Bank Job is speculative, but most of it has the ring of truth and fits in with the facts. Of course, since the names have been “changed to protect the guilty," Bank Job doesn't provide any shocking revelations about still-living individuals. What it accomplishes, however, is to present a possible autopsy of a crime that has baffled people for decades. And, regardless of whether it's more fact or fiction, it provides an enjoyable two hours.

Much as I enjoyed Stephen Soderbergh's Oceans 11, 12 & 13 (more for the company and chemistry of the actors than for the story-lines), The Bank Job demonstrates how much more richness there can be in a heist movie when layers are woven into the story and the storyline extends beyond the innermost escapade. When “The End” flashes on the screen, the viewer feels as if he has seen a complete story open up rather than merely having been granted the chance to look closely through a window at the inner workings of an infamous historical crime. The Bank Job is exciting entertainment for adults; it’s well-paced and smart -- something that is more of a scarcity than it should be. Or at least that’s How It Seemed from Where I Sat.

What’s it worth?
For film buffs -- the price of the evening shows
For the average viewer --- matinee price at your local cinema.

Roll credits:

Director: Roger Donaldson
Screenplay: Dick Clement & Ian Lafrenais
Cinematography: Michael Coulter
Music: J. Peter Robinson

CAST

Jason Statham --- Terry Leather
Saffron Burrows --- Martine Love
Stephen Campbell Moore --- Kevin Swain
Daniel Mays --- Dave Shilling
James Faulkner --- Guy Singer
David Suchet --- Lew Vogel
Peter De Jersey --- Michael X
Rupert Frazer --- Lord Drysdale
Colin Salmon --- Hakim Jamal

Fade to black

In The Name Of Truth, Justice and In the Service of a Higher Good, I Remain Your Friend, Movie Reviewer and Spiritual Advisor, Coach Patton

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I was offered the opportunity to pitch my script in front of a live audience, and silly me--I took it. There's a long-running play-reading series here in Paris called Moving Parts, and I was allotted 10 minutes before one of the plays. So up I got in front of about 30 people, most of them writers or actors, and pitched.

Well. The good news is I did it.

The bad news is nobody liked the story.

I see this as a three-part problem.

First, I was pitching a genre piece to Parisian expats, who tend to be literary in their tastes.  Already the genre was a bad fit, and my pitch emphasized the dark and creepy setting. Lesson learned: Do my homework before pitching a producer. If they're not looking for what I have, I might as well spare us all the agony.

Secondly, I wanted to be respectful of the time limit (this was, after all, the playwright's evening), so I left out the anecdote about how I came to write the story. Unfortunately, that was my chance to explain the more unusual elements in the script and involve the audience more. Lesson learned: never skip the set up.

Third, although I thought I had trimmed to the bare bones, the pitch was still too detailed. Too heavy on plot line, too light on emotional moments. Big mistake. Huge. Lesson learned: A pitch is about selling the story--not  telling the story. And selling is all about emotions.

 (It could also be that the story sucks. Always a possibility. I'm looking at a rewrite.)

So there you have it.  I'm more nervous  than ever, despite having been told by a former Hollywood studio executive that I was in control and professional. (Huzzah! I cling to that as my one small consolation.)  But while it wasn't fun, it was  useful, and I  know my next pitch will benefit from having bombed in front of a live audience. A big thank you to Stephanie Campion of Moving Parts for creating such a safe space to fail and grow!

I'm back from a wonderful week at DreamAgo's annual Plume & Pellicule international screenwriting workshop  (Sierre, Switzerland). Plume & Pellicule literally means "Quill & Film" but stands for "From Script to Screen." Designed as the first step in a process of taking a script into production, this year's Plume & Pellicule brought together 10 writers, 4 screenwriting consultants, and 2 directors for a series of intensive workshops.

Both writers and consultants hailed from around the globe.  The countries represented amongst the writers were: France, Martinique, Chile, Cuba, the USA, Tunisia, Cameroon, and Portugal. The coaches were John Herman Shaner (USA); Maggie Soboil (South Africa); Hasan Legzouli (Morocco); Arturo Arango (Cuba); Randa Haines (USA) and Yves Lavandier (France).

I went along as part of the organizing team. My duties included scheduling and translations (DreamAgo's working languages are English, French, and Spanish), and I had a chance to sit in on several consultations. DreamAgo's inexhaustibe founder Pascale Rey set out with a very specific goal: to foster global storytelling and to help scripts that touch on our common human experience get off the ground. Her vision is beginning to manifest. I was astounded by the quality of the scripts and the intensity and insightfulness of the coaching. The work was rigorous, the comments pertinent, and in every case the writer walked away with a new perspective on his or her story. For seven days we functioned at a very high level in three languages--sometimes speaking all of them at once. 

Days began at 8:30 with breakfast, followed by the first consultation.  Then lunch, then another consultation. Promptly thereafter, we all walked down the hill to Sierre's movie theater for the screening. Dinner was at 10 PM. We rarely got to bed before 1 AM. In addition to consultations, the writers also had sessions on scene work with Randa Haines and pitching with Yves Lavandier, and the opportunity to spend some time with special guests from the screenings, such as John Jeffcoat (director, Outsourced) and Belén Rueda (actress, Mar Adentro).

Although we worked hard, we  played hard, too. Comfortably ensconsed in the Chateau Mercier, nestled in a valley surrounded by snow-capped mountains, and spoiled by a marvellous chef and generously flowing wine, it would have been impossible  to do otherwise .  Conversation topics ranged from the state of Tunisia today, the differences between male-female relationship dynamics in the US vs. France, to sexuality in Cuba,  the US independent film distribution system, the Spanish-language telenovela market, what it's like working with Jack Nicholson, and cross-cultural lessons in flirting.  I was blown away by the diversity and the wealth of experiences each person brought to the  table (One young man claimed to be able to kiss in Spanish!).  By the end of the week, we had forged strong bonds with one another and became friends and colleagues in the truest sense of the words.

For more information on DreamAgo, go to: www.dreamago.com.

To see the YouTube videos of this year's Plume & Pellicule, go to: http://fr.youtube.com/user/dreamagoers. Make sure you check out Day 8! We took a special excursion into the Alps. You can see us ziplining through the canyons!

Also, keep your eye out for Tengri, a beautiful film by Marie-Jaoul de Poncheville, a 2005 Plume & Pellicule participant! Although it hasn't officially opened yet, DreamAgo premiered it at this year's screenings.