not with a bang, but a meh

As with most soon-to-graduate fifth year seniors, I spent my last semester of college not taking things very seriously. A go-nowhere internship at a third-rate production company and a disastrous string of PA gigs on z-grade indie flicks, coupled with my increasing focus on writing, and by the time my last semester rolled around I knew - knew! - that a career in film wasn't for me. My resolve was further solidified by a class called CTCS 466.

CTCS 466 was -- and, part of me hopes, still is -- the hot-damn end-all-be-all of blow-off classes. Taught (and I use the term as sarcastically as possible) by Leonard Maltin, it consisted of watching a movie that hadn't been released in theaters yet, then watching The Maltin bring on a guest speaker involved with the production and hold court over a sycophantic, uninsightful Q&A. Think Inside the Actor's Studio, but instead of James Lipton fawning over Sharon Stone's brave character-decisions in Gloria, it's Leonard Maltin fawning over the DP for AntiTrust. It was, in short, the perfect opportunity for a disillusioned film student to hone his contempt for the pomp and pretense of the industry to a stabbing point. My time in the class was one long, slow eyeroll, but there are three distinct memories I'd like to share.

The first is of Ron Livingston, who starred in a movie called Two Ninas. The movie had been listed in the curriculum as Two Ninjas, and when The Maltin informed us of the error the collective groan of disappointment was comically loud. After the screening Ron came out and answered our questions and was just an all-around cool guy. Afterward me and my friend Jen Bradwell went up to him and asked if he wanted to go drinking with us and our friends. And yeah, yeah, we were both kind of stoned, but it just felt right. He laughed and said that he was flying to New York that night but that he totally would've come out if he were sticking around. And you know what? I think he would've.

My second memory, and one perhaps more nakedly indicative of my mentality at the time, was the screening of Shrek. This was about a month before it was released in theaters, and none of us had any clue that it would become such an embarrassingly prominent pop-cultural landmark, let alone spawn two sequels which, I can only assume, saw a further drop in what the produders no doubt laughingly referred to as quality. As with most of the movies we watched, I didn't particularly care for it, but I was less bothered by the movie itself than by the guffawing, hillbilly adulation it inspired in the rest of the class. After the screening the two co-directors and a couple of animators came out for the Q&A and were warmly received by the audience. And for good reason, because they were funny and charming and very unpretentious and eager to talk about something they'd clearly worked very hard on. Comments from the class were of the "Omigosh, your movie was SOOO great!" variety which only irritated me further, so I raised my hand. The Maltin called on me, and I had an exchange with one of the directors that went something like this:

Me: Yeah, question. Did you guys choose the music yourself, or was there pressure put on you from outside?

Director: No, we chose the music ourselves.

Me: Because there were parts where it seemed like more of a marketing decision than a creative one. Setting a montage to "You're A Rockstar" seems, I dunno, a bit calculating and obvious.

Director: I, uh...

Me: It just doesn't feel like the choice of someone who, y'know, cares about the creative integrity of the project.

Director: That's your opinion, I guess.

In the excruciatingly awkward silence that followed, I heard someone behind me mutter, "Jeez, what an asshole." And shit, he was right.

My third memory, and by far the one that left the most lasting impression, was the very last class of the semester. With graduation and the terrifying prospect of life after college coiled next to us in the high grass, we piled into the theater one last time to see a movie directed by a recent USC graduate, some weird sci-fi flick that hadn't even found a distributer and that they were probably screening as a personal favor for an alumni. That movie was Donnie Darko.

I find Donnie Darko difficult to talk about, because I've never been able to separate myself from the mute, thunderstruck wonder I felt seeing it for the first time. The one thing I'd learned in film school, the one hard lesson I'd been bludgeoned with again and again, was that the mighty fortresses of personal vision invariably crumbles beneath the thousand kinds of compromise -- but here I was, faced with living proof that a personal vision, and one so demented and bizarre, could not only live to see the light of day, but flourish, and in one fell swoop, a movie nobody had ever heard of came along and knocked me on my ass. Quite simply, Donnie Darko left me speechless.

Or rather, almost speechless.

The director, Richard Kelley, came out to tepid and uncertain applause -- a far cry from the rapturous reception that greeted the director of A Knight's Tale, though perhaps the comparison is unfair. Nobody seemed sure of what to ask him, and after a few awkward minutes, The Maltin called for one last question. I raised my hand, grabbed the microphone from the usher, and said what, in my head, sounded like the following:

"Mr. Kelley, though I have grown disillusioned and cynical about the film industry and find myself on the verge of abandoning my plans to pursue film as a career, I feel I must say to you now with a sincerity so deep and pure that it scares me a little, that your film touched me in a way that no other film has. It is something that, until this very moment, I believed to be a cruel fiction: a film borne of a complex, powerful, and uncompromising personal vision. Nay, sir, not merely vision, but something deeper and longer-lasting. I hesitate to use the word "genius", because to do so would be an injustice to the towering monument of your work. And though it pains me greatly to clothe in such drab, clumsy words the glorious feeling that stirs even now in my chest (O! this pain twin to that of the fool who stares too longly at the sun!) I must speak now, or forever curse my stubborn tongue. I ask sir, humbly, that I be allowed to do your whatever bidding you deem fit, to be near you that I may sup on whatever scraps you may carelessly toss my way, to witness first-hand the strange alchemy by which you conjured light and sound and with it transformed mere celluloid into something so rich and sublime. There is no task too menial, no abuse I will not gladly endure if it means obtaining some small window through which I may spy upon the glorious mechanism of your brilliance. Sir, I prostrate myself before you. I am your humble servant."

Clearly this would have been embarrassing enough, had the movie not reduced me to a babbling wreck and mangled my wide-eyed admiration into something that sounded more like this:

"Uh, yeah, I, um...it's just that...wow, you know. Great, and just like wow. Movie, uh...can I, like, uh...you know, boxes, lifting boxes or whatever, see how it's done, see myself firsthand, how it's, y'know, it's like, really, really great. Also, can I have a job?"

His response was what you might expect, something to the effect of "Sorry dude, I can't really hook you up with a job right now." I thanked him and sat down, too blinkered to be embarrassed until, as everyone was shuffling out of the theater, a football player slapped me on the back and told me that it took balls to beg for a job in front of 200 people. From time to time I have thought about that moment and cringed, less out of a sense of personal embarrassment than out of a frustration that my sincere and profound fondness for it, however clumsily communicated, should have been mistaken for mere ass-kissery.

Cut to six years later, and it was with impossibly high expectations that I went and saw Richard Kelley's much-delayed and much-maligned sophomore effort, Southland Tales. It is, put simply, a convoluted and embarrassing mess that suffers not from lack of vision, but from an overabundance of it. This wouldn't be a problem in and of itself -- or would be one balanced, at least partially, by sheer audacity and scope -- were Southland Tales not at heart merely a thematic retread of the ideas that drove Donnie Darko. But all the mindfuck talk of time-traveling souls and wormholes and wounds in the fourth dimension and the general sense of apocalyptic dread, which worked to such startling effect in the latter, come across as such pretentious, incomprehensible gobbeldygook in the former. The big ideas that drive Donnie Darko work because they collide with such a small film. Donnie Darko can be about the end of the world because, at heart, it's really just about one very troubled boy. But when Richard Kelley uses those same big ideas to tell a story about the end of the world that is so stiflingly, literally about the end of the world, the result is a frustrating wreck -- an enigma, to be sure, but sadly one that hardly seems worth the effort to sift through.

And yet aside from my disappointment, there's a symmetry to it all that I find comforting. Donnie Darko was a bittersweet goodbye kiss on my way out the door, a small reminder of what, exactly, I was giving up. Now I'm back in town, and Donnie has grown bloated and slow, and made one too many bafflingly ill-conceived casting decisions (Jon Lovitz? Really?). It's the guilty comfort you feel after running into a girl who dumped you and then, in the intervening years, went a little bit nuts. It wasn't satisfaction, it wasn't schadenfreude; but it was some kind of omen, a small but subtle sign that, fuck it, at least I'm on the right track. I left the theater and decided to walk the whole way back to E 119 from Times Square. It was cold and starting to drizzle, but by the time I got home I was whistling.