My roommate auditioned for BIRDEMIC 2: THE BIRDEMICENING -- because, come on, he had to -- and he said that the director was a complete jerk who thinks he's the new Hitchcock. Especially the "actors are cattle" part. He's not being funny. He believes wholeheartedly in his own genius.

Check out his appearance on "This Week In Horror," where the lead actor corroborates this while Nguyen is sitting three feet away. I haven't even watched it all the way through yet, but in the first ten minutes, take a drink every time Nguyen says Hitchcock.*

*Just kidding, don't; you'll die.

Give a listen to our 2010: MOBY DICK commentary and it might make more sense. Trey teaches us how the Asylum makes their sausage.

We probably were, this was a year ago and we're pretty much only just coming out of that phase in our negative commentaries. (Or I am, anyway; I might have lagged behind everyone else.)

Here's the less assholish (I hope, anyway) way to put it. As we most recently articulated in the LOST WORLD commentary (which if you weren't in the chat for the recording session you won't have heard yet), one of if not the primary thing that distinguishes a well-told story from a poor one is that, at the end, you can say, "Okay, I see why you told me that." The filmmakers had some idea they wanted to express, some perspective on the human experience they wanted to lay out there and say "here's how I see it," and they succeeded in doing so. You may or may not agree with what the filmmakers have to say, but at least you get it.

I don't understand what GDT was trying to say here, and the most popular answer I get when I say that -- something about imagination being an escape from harsh reality -- isn't supported by what I would consider an honest reading of the film. It's okay to break the rules but it should be for a reason, and I can't discern what that reason is. It's all style and no substance -- and the style, admittedly, is striking. If I watched this film without subtitles I'd probably be mesmerized. But with them on, knowing what's being said, it rings vapid and hollow to me.

So when people praised it to the rafters for being deeply philosophical and a modern fairy tale, I got shitty about it, because I don't think it is and to say so is, in my view, an insult to the transformative and instructive power of true fairy tales.

It's like if wizards were real, you've gone on adventures with them, and then many years later, after they've all gone, you hear a new one has come to town and everyone's saying the age of wizards has returned. So you go to see him... and he's an illusionist, not a wizard, performing tricks and sleights and not an ounce of true magic. And he's good, he's really good at doing what he's doing, but he's no wizard. After all the praise and buildup -- and hope, frankly, because you would LOVE to see a second age of wizards begin -- you just want to yell "Are you fucking kidding me? We've rolled with Merlin! Doesn't anyone remember what that was like?" And then you despair, because it starts to seem like no one does.

Had this not been presented -- by its filmmakers and admirers alike -- as a "fairy tale," but just a weird quirky fantasy movie, I probably still wouldn't have much cared for it since I still don't think it tells a proper story, but I probably wouldn't have had the emotional response I did.

HUNGER GAMES is a Wonderland story. The setting is the magic bean.

It's definitely fantasy with a science fiction gloss, not science fiction. The technology is treated fundamentally the same as magic -- how does it work? Who knows. It does though. Whereas science fiction usually tries to create some kind of justification for the existence of the advanced technological element, sci-fantasy doesn't. I'd put movies like INCEPTION in the same category. The technology is barely explained, because the technology itself is not as important as the story the technology's existence facilitates.

I found HUNGER GAMES a fun and diverting read, if juvenile and superficial, and that's the only thing that keeps me from nerd-raging wildly about how awful the end of the series is. It took me like three weeks to get through, so I wasn't terribly invested.

For more on this topic, see my published works.

I'm going to give Squiggly the benefit of the doubt and say that this is what he was really getting at, until he lets us know otherwise.

You can boil any action scene down to a sentence (and it's not out of the question that it was simply a sentence in the script). I think it's less about the ability to do that, and more about looking at a scene and asking the question Doctor Submarine mentions -- could this be cut out of the film entirely without affecting the narrative? If the answer is yes, you've got a problem.

I think this is why some action films get credit for being "smarter" than others. Christopher Nolan's films, for example, have their share of problems, but one thing they do very well is have a clear justification for their action beats, a clear mini-story where the outcome will determine the course of the rest of the film, and therefore the struggle actually matters to the narrative.

As opposed to a lot of action films which just have people/robots/whatever chasing and punching each other, and we're supposed to root for one side because we've been told they're the "good guys," even though we have no clear concept of what would happen if the "bad guys" triumphed.

Maybe I'm rationalizing, but I still think that's on the mark. Ask Scorsese in 2001, "hey, you want to make a kid's fantasy film?" I bet he declines.

I'd guess it's because of the rampaging success of the POTTER films -- and probably 10 years of aging in which he decided he wanted to make something his younger relatives could enjoy -- that Scorsese decided to take on HUGO. I don't think he would have been comfortable forging that particular path, nor indeed the right man for it IMO.

But you're right, it was particularly amusing that it premiered with HP7.2. When the trailer revealed Scorsese's name I leaned over to Anthony and said "Well, now we know what that looks like."

It's never really addressed in that way. It's kind of like the Louis CK bit about the word "Jew" -- it can be either the perfectly polite way to refer to a group, or the slur for the same group, depending entirely on how much stank you put on it.

Right, this one lost its head fast.

So anyway.

First thing's first -- if you're going to adapt the story you gotta figure out what in the hell the story is. As we discuss in the GREEN MILE commentary, the way King rolls is just to start writing and see what happens. So what you tend to end up with is a GREAT premise with really weird, wild, and out-there characters and concepts populating the world, and which ultimately go kind of nowhere. King writes well (or at least did, I haven't read anything since Cell) so his books, sentence-by-sentence, are engaging and enjoyable. But if you're expecting a point -- or even a decent ending -- you're shit out of luck often as not.

Of course, the interpretation of what the story is "about" is always the director's job -- it's what used to be meant by the director's "vision" for a film, before most directors actually started dictating the visual style itself. So if you ask my vision for Dark Tower, I've got three bullet points:

1) The broad theme of the story -- what the entire story is about -- is the importance of imagination. When all we had for nearly a decade was the first four books and were trying to sort out what was going on, I settled on the idea that Midworld, where the Tower stands, is the world of fantasy. That the Tower, in fact, IS human imagination, connecting all worlds of human fantasy together. But people are losing their sense of wonder and fantasy for the cold world of technology and mindless consumerism ("the world has moved on," technologies literally gone mad like the Beam Guardians and Blaine, one of the only remaining societies being the Luddites), and the Tower is falling. This is why other worlds of fantasy start to encroach on Mid-world -- why the Emerald City appears in their path, why the Wolves of the Calla look like Dr. Doom. Roland has to save the Tower, to save his world and, really, ours as well. Astute film fans may realize that this is also what THE NEVERENDING STORY is about.

2) Roland's arc is about learning to care about others. He's so focused on saving the Tower, saving all possible worlds, that he's forgotten what and who he's saving it for. On several occasions he will abandon someone he loves for the sake of the Tower. Only when he makes the opposite choice does he become worthy of finally getting there.

3) Salvage anything in books 5, 6, and 7 that help to tell at least one of those two stories and nuke the rest from orbit.

Because we have the benefit of having the whole series laid out before us, unlike POTTER, I would in fact want to write the entire series in adaptation form before a frame was shot. Dealing with Jake, as you point out, I would want to shoot everything with youngest-Jake, even stuff that wouldn't show up until far down the series, all at once, and otherwise shoot as chronologically as would be feasible.

How I would execute it... I don't know. I'd probably do the first four stories in the order we got them, so WIZARD AND GLASS would be the fourth film, not the first. My guess is that they are planning to do it the same way.

The talk of interweaving films and TV seasons has some appeal, especially in the light of such a successfully executed adaptation in GAME OF THRONES; though honestly I think if the films were allowed to be 3 hours you could do about a book per film and probably not lose too much (and probably not even need 3 for GUNSLINGER). Much would probably depend on the alternate second half that would have to be developed -- could be there's only a need for one film after W&G instead of three.

No, that's actually a really good example. That is exactly what it's like. But, if you're telling a story about cops and the term "Baker's dozen" isn't a colloquialism in the culture you're porting over to, "Cop's Dozen" makes almost as much sense as "Baker's Dozen" would to them anyway. (Americans have never heard of the Philosopher's Stone. We call it unobtanium.)

...

*begins writing COP'S DOZEN for Asylum, alongside THUS SPELLCAST ZARATHUSTRA: RISE OF THE ÜBERMENSCH*

TWO CAN PLAY AT THIS GAME ZAR AN

I'm not sure if it has a different definition -- Jimmy says no -- but the second part is the important bit. The publishers wanted to make sure the potential readership knew, from the title, that the book was about wizards and not philosophers. Both for the sake of more accurate representation of the content, and also because American culture has a strong anti-intellectual streak and they wouldn't be interested in a book about faggy Greek brainiacs.

HARRY POTTER IS SERIOUS BUSINESS ZAR AN