News & Notes Inside the Week in Film

I Ran From 71st Street to 14th Street in 20 blocks

Star Wars fans grew tired of hearing that a parsec is a unit of distance, not time, so they did something about it.  They changed the space/time continuum to help Han Solo out.  There is nothing short of genius at work here.

by Chris Neumer

Watching Star Wars again recently, I smiled when I heard Han Solo utter the line, “Fast ship?… It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.”

It’s one of several lines from Star Wars that I have co-opted into my own lexicon and break out when necessary.  “What an amazing smell you’ve discovered,” and “I used to bullseye womp rats in my t-16 back home,” are two other personal favorites.

The Kessel Run line took on new meaning several years ago when I learned that a ‘parsec’ was not, in fact, a unit of time, but, rather, a unit of measurement.  It is also the acronym for the Pittsburgh Area Real-time Scientifiction Enthusiasts Consortium, but this is neither here nor there.  The parsec is actually a specific length equal to roughly 19 trillion miles (or 3.26 light-years).

What Solo is really saying is, “It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than 228 trillion miles.”  And when you look at it like that, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.  Sure ‘parsecs’ sounds like a unit of time—it is pretty close to ‘seconds’—but it isn’t.

I felt sure that the error occurred because George Lucas simply plucked a cool sounding word out of the ether when writing the script.  Space lingo doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to seem futuristic and hip… which is precisely why the Empire doesn’t just have lasers, but ‘turbo lasers’.  However, I overlooked one little detail in this parsec scenario: the rabidness of Star Wars fans.

There is no question that Lucas made a mistake by having Solo use the word ‘parsec’ in the film—Solo’s dialogue was changed for both the novelization of the book and the radio version of the tale to 12 “time units” and “time parts” respectively.  What makes this scenario so interesting though is that Lucas’ original linguistic flub got covered up in a manner that would have White House press secretaries gasping in envy.  Fans changed the space/time continuum so that Lucas’s words would ring true.

When it came time to explain why Solo’s 12 parsecs comment was still applicable even in the face of instructions written by Lucas on the original script that Solo was supposed to be boasting and ‘obviously lying’ and the fact that a draft of the script featured this instruction “Ben reacts to Solo’s stupid attempt to impress [him] with obvious misinformation,” people got creative.

On the outset, this would seem kind of difficult given that a unit of measurement is a unit of measurement.  It’s hard to fathom any situation where an inch doesn’t represent, you know, an inch, but herein lies the genius of the scenario concocted by the Star Wars fans.  They explained that the 18-parsec long Kessel Run was next to a series of black holes.  Yes, the very types of black holes that can alter and warp time and distance.

As such, Solo’s original statement thus becomes an indictment of how impressive the Millennium Falcon was.  Because, when Solo would make the Kessel Run in his ship, he would fly so close to the black holes that he could shorten the distance of the trip to, you guessed it, under 12 parsecs.  That’s how fast the Millennium Falcon is: she can fly away from the most powerful force in the universe: black holes.

The only thing that could possibly remove the true and unbridled awesomeness from what these Star Wars fans did to help Lucas out would be if Lucas himself recorded a DVD commentary track for Star Wars in the late nineties and attempted to explain that, with his comment, Solo was giving proof of how good of a navigational computer the Millennium Falcon had so that he could shave off a couple trillion miles from the Kessel Run when plotting his course.  But, really, what are the odds that that would ever happen?

 

It’s Nice Work if You Can Get It

Screenwriter Duane Adler pulled off an interesting trick on Step Up: Revolution.  He got paid for creating characters that weren’t in the movie.

by Chris Neumer

Last week I wrote about the unusual and somewhat baffling nature of the writing credits in The Expendables 2.  I have a rule: any time I see two completely separate groups of people getting credit for coming up with one story, I make mention of it.

This week, while looking at the credits for Step Up: Revolution, I noticed something even more unusual: Duane Adler was given a ‘characters’ credit on the film for characters that weren’t in the film.

Adler is known in Hollywood as a man who has his finger to the pulse of the dance world.  If there’s a movie about teens dancing, Adler is probably involved in some capacity.  He wrote the screenplays for Save the Last Dance, Step Up and Make it Happen, among numerous other titles.  In writing Step Up, Adler rather obviously created the characters in that world, as well as the plot line and dialogue.

Adler did not write the screenplays for any of Step Up’s three sequels, Step Up 2, Step Up 3D or Step Up: Revolution.  Not only that, but he didn’t he earn ‘story by’ credit for them or receive any type of producer credit for them.  He did, however, get credited with creating the characters for the films.  And here’s where it gets strange: writers in film get the ‘characters’ credit when they create a set of characters for an original movie that has a sequel or is remade entirely.  For example, when Star Wars Episode 7 comes out, George Lucas will not only be listed as some variety of producer on the project, but will also be credited with creating the characters that the film follows.

What makes Adler’s ‘characters’ credit so weird is that none of the characters from the first Step Up movie actually appear in Step Up: Revolution. I mean, Step Up takes place in at a prestigious dance school in Baltimore and Step Up: Revolution focuses on an inner city neighborhood in Miami with dance flash mobs, it’s hard to fathom how much overlap there would be there.  It should be noted that Channing Tatum’s character, Tyler Gage, does appear in the second Step Up film, making Adler’s ‘characters’ credit there fairly meaningful.

Technically, it’s possible that Adler did create the characters in the three Step Up sequels but didn’t write any dialogue for them, offer any plot suggestions or anything else, but this seems rather unfeasible given that the character of young, hot girl who wants to dance and falls in love with a fellow dancer isn’t exactly copyrightable.  If it was, Adler would have a ‘characters’ credit on everything from Center Stage to Dirty Dancing.

Adding a cherry to the top of this bizarre credit cake: one character who was created for the third Step Up film, Jason (Stephen “tWitch” Boss), does make an appearance in Step Up: Revolution, but the screenwriters of the third film are not given any ‘characters’ credit here.  The same holds true for Step Up 2’s, Robert “Moose” Alexander III (Adam Sevani), who also makes a cameo here.

Trying to figure out how/why writers get credits for movies is really something that I should stop thinking about.

 

Don’t Call It a Comeback. No, seriously.  Don’t.

Lindsay Lohan has her comeback project in Liz & Dick… if by ‘comeback’ you mean something other than ‘comeback’.

by Kevin Withers

When the Red Sox erased a 3 game deficit to win the 2004 ALCS series against the Yankees that was a comeback.  When Robert Downey Jr. emerged on the opposite side of decades of drug and alcohol abuse as first Tony Stark in Iron Man and then as Sherlock Holmes to become one of Hollywood’s most successful stars, that was a comeback.  When Mickey Rourke landed the lead in The Wrestler and garnered an Oscar nomination for his performance, that was a comeback.  Lindsay Lohan taking a break from yelling at her parents on the street to play the role of Elizabeth Taylor in Lifetime’s Liz & Dick?  Not a comeback.

With daytime soap operas folding left and right, Lifetime network productions have stepped up to fill the maudlin void.  Lifetime is where actors and actresses like Patricia Heaton and Rob Lowe go when they want work, not where they go reclaim any previous glories.  If Lohan is going to trumpet Liz & Dick as her comeback, she is going to need some serious help from Merriam and Webster in redefining the word ‘comeback’ to mean something other than it currently does.  Middling ratings for a made-for-TV movie on deep cable isn’t something that anyone would normally call a ‘comeback’.  If you comeback with a Lifetime movie, what are you actually coming back to?  You’re still in a Lifetime movie.  Of course, this also brings to mind the question of what Lohan is coming back from in the first place, but we’ll save that for a later column.

The Photo of the Week

Borat

The 5 Things I Learned This Week

Fascinatingly true things to broaden your mind

 

1) The RWA is a guild for romance writers (the Romance Writers of America).  Feel free to visit www.rwa.org for more info or to see about joining.

2) Pop singer Ke$ha has a bra made out of 1,000 human teeth.  And not just any human teeth, they are the teeth of her fans.  If you’re wondering how you can get human teeth to turn into clubwear, the answer is simple: ask.  Ke$ha put out a call for her fans to send her their teeth… and they did.

3) Actor Levar Burton’s first name isn’t simply ‘Levar’.  Levar is actually short for Levardis.  Burton’s full name is Levardis Robert Martyn Burton.

4) The Seattle Seahawks play their home football games in CenturyLink Field.  The field opened ten years ago and has had three names since then.  It was Seahawks Stadium for a while, changed to Qwest Field and then, in 2011, changed again to CenturyLink Field.  Whatever it’s called, the Seahawks play well there.

5) Madison Square Garden is currently undergoing $850 million worth of renovations.  This figure is fairly amazing given that the Orlando Magic built a new basketball stadium from the ground up in 2010 for a total cost of $410 million.

 

 

This Week’s Stories

New Releases

Lawless

THE PLAYERS: Starring Shia Labeouf, Guy Pearce, and Tom Hardy; written by Nice Cave; directed by John Hillcoat;  Released by The Weinstein Company. Rated R.

THE PLOT: Virginia bootleggers fight corrupt lawmen during the depression.

THE SKINNY:
– Since Shia Labeouf burst onto the scene is 2007’s Transformers, here are the non-Transformers/Indiana Jones movies he’s been in: Eagle Eye, New York, I Love You, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, The Company You Keep and now Lawless.  That’s not a great collection of movies.  I mean, Nicolas Cage is making fun of that series of films.  I am not exaggerating when I say that (according to rottentomatoes.com) Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the best reviewed film of the last five years for Labeouf.  Ouch.
+ Lawless is a veritable who’s who of up-and-coming, talented, not quite box office stars like Labeouf, Tom Hardy, Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska….
– …All of the aforementioned actors have been the leads of huge movies (Transformers, The Dark Knight Rises, The Help and Alice in Wonderland respectively) and when they came together in the same movie, their star power gave Lawless a $10 million opening weekend on the way to a $37 million total box office.  Whoo-hoo?
– The film’s tagline caused me to almost sprain my eyes after rolling them too hard: “When the law became corrupt, outlaws became heroes.” Yeah…
+ If there were odds that one of the three brothers at the center of the film were to die, they’d be 1/10 on the brother played by Jason Clarke.  Wait, you say, who?  Exactly.
+ The scope of this picture is as broad and epic as one can get.  It doesn’t exactly succeed in every arena, but it’s a nice change of pace to see a film’s director striving for greatness.

YES, IT’S TRUE: Want another reason to celebrate in December?  FDR repealed Prohibition on December 5th, 1933 declaring, “What America needs now is a drink.”

Men in Black 3

THE PLAYERS: Will Smith, Josh Brolin, and Tommy Lee Jones; written by Etan Cohen; directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. Released by Sony Pictures. Rated PG-13.

THE PLOT: Agent J (Will Smith) travels back in time to stop an alien prisoner from killing Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones).

THE SKINNY:
– For a (supposedly) major franchise, the Men in Black series has had a lot of hiccups.  So many, in fact, that I’m starting to wonder if this isn’t what would happen if a studio tried to create a franchise that no one was interested in and kept releasing new movies in it.  Yes, I feel like Men in Black is a ponzi scheme.
+ This film is significantly better than Men in Black 2.
+ Josh Brolin does a spot-on impression of a younger Tommy Lee Jones that looks like it would have been a lot of fun to create.
– If the world really was to have ended in the 1960s, as is suggested by the new timeline of Men in Black 3, wouldn’t that have precluded the new timeline from actually existing in the first place?  I’m actually hoping that time travel never becomes possible because of all the existential and philosophical contradictions that would arise from it.  It’s just easier this way.
+/- Written by Etan Cohen…. But not *that* one.  The guy that wrote Fargo and The Big Lebowski with his brother? That’s Ethan Coen.
– This might just be me, but it seems like Will Smith is now doing an imitation of a younger Will Smith.  It’s a very subtle difference, but the young Will Smith appeared genuinely energetic and carefree on screen; the current Will Smith appears to be acting like he’s energetic and carefree.

YES, IT’S TRUE: Will Smith’s last film was Seven Pounds (December 2008), making it 3.5 years since he has released a film.

ParaNorman

THE PLAYERS: Starring Kodi Smit-McPhee, Anna Kendrick, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse; written by Chris Butler; directed by Chris Butler and Sam Fell. Released by Focus.  Rated PG.

THE PLOT: A boy who can communicate with ghosts tries to save his town from a curse that brings the dead to life.

THE SKINNY:
+ The stop-motion animation technique used to create ParaNorman is superb.  It’s amazing to think that this is the same medium that was used in Gumby.  A lot has changed in 40 years.
– It’s not particularly hard to understand why ParaNorman failed at the box office, taking in just $55 million domestically.  It’s a movie that isn’t easily summarized or recommended without a slew of footnotes or very broad statements that don’t shed much light on the joy and entertainment contained within.  Simply telling someone, “It’s good,” doesn’t spark much passion and attempting to explain where the warmth and excitement does come from is far to long a conversation to have.
+/- ParaNorman has gotten some attention for having one of its characters be openly gay.  The plus is given because this is progress.  The minus is given because people have made a pretty big deal out of this fact and it is, categorically, not a big deal.  There are zombies walking around, witches coming back from the dead to end life as we know it… and people are writing about the fact that one of the characters is gay?! Heavens!!
+ Christopher Mintz-Plasse (McLovin from Superbad) voices the film’s bully.  Nothing like going against type!

YES, IT’S TRUE: Norman’s hair was primarily made out of goat hair held together with adhesive and colored with hair dye.

Step Up: Revolution

THE PLAYERS:  Starring Kathryn McCormick, Ryan Guzman, and Cleopatra Coleman; written by Amanda Brody; directed by Scott Speer.  Released by Summit Entertainment.  Rated PG-13.

THE PLOT: An inner city dance group in Miami stages public performances to protest plans to demolish their neighborhood.

THE SKINNY:
+ The Step Up series moves to Miami to give it that Latin flavor it has so sorely been missing.
+ Step Up: Revolution is one of those rare movies where the pros and cons can ably be described simply by writing different plot points.  In this case, the wealthy developer who is trying to bulldoze the neighborhood of the Latin lead?  The father of the female lead who has fallen in love with the aforementioned Latin lead.
+ The aforementioned wealthy developer?  Played by Peter Gallagher.
– No David Caruso cameo.
+ Holy fucking balls: this film pulled in $140 million worldwide.  To put that in perspective, Moneyball, a movie nominated for a Best Picture Oscar adapted from a best selling book, starring Brad Pitt pulled in $110 million worldwide.
+ This movie is about a group of Latin teens called “The Mob” who show up at different places around Miami to perform varying, extremely kick-ass dance routines.
+ We are inching ever closer to an ImprovEverywhere movie.

YES, IT’S TRUE: Encyclopedia.com calls a flashmob “the idiot child of our instant-communication age.”

The New Releases were written by Chris Neumer and Kevin Withers