Bizzaro Film Review: Rubber

Man, I do not know what to say about this movie. And don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I don’t have an opinion here. The problem is, that I’ve got two of them. One opinion is that this film is sheer cinematic brilliance. The second is that it is the worst kind of pretentious crap.

And the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced both opinions are right.

Rubber is a film about a killer tire. It is also a film about the way people expect a film to be made, and why they’re willing to accept some breaks from reality but not others. I think.

Therefore I am.

The movie opens with a shot of a dirt road with chairs standing of the middle of it, looking vaguely like some kind of surrealist painting. Then a car pulls onto the road and swerves back and forth hitting every chair, just so, making it fall over without doing any damage.

At this point you’re probably wondering what this shot has to do with anything. Luckily the car pulls up in front of the camera, and a man dressed as a sheriff gets out of the trunk and explains it, saying that in all films there are certain elements which are included for “no reason” and that this is a film that explores the deeper nature of that practice. Then it is revealed that instead of addressing the camera, the man was in fact addressing a group of people who are getting ready to watch the movie happen in real-time with binoculars in the desert. Then a discarded tire wakes up and starts rolling around killing things.

Yes. It’s that kind of movie.

Probably the most interesting aspect of the film is the continued interaction between the sheriff and the viewers. And when I say, “continued interaction” I mean, “repeated murder attempts.” I would guess that this was supposed to symbolize something about the artist/viewer relationship, but since we are assured that this is a film about things that happen in films for no reason I’m gonna say that he’s probably doing it just to be weird.

And in the end, it kinda works.

Rubber isn’t what you’d call a good film, but it is a film that sticks in your mind and makes you think.The cinematography is masterful and though the bizarre nature of the film wears out its welcome after a while, luckily it doesn’t overstay for too long, wrapping up at a neat 82 minutes.

It’s an unusually accessible arthouse flick, that toys with questioning the very nature of fiction. It is both delightfully playful and utterly serious, leaving the viewer wondering whether he should be laughing or thinking.

And the answer is, as always, probably both.

Hacking Your Way to Better Writing

I just finished reading Larry Brooks book, Story Engineering, and although it certainly isn’t anywhere close to weird enough to feature in its own Bizzaro Book Review, I gotta say, you people really need to pick this thing up, if only for the section on structure.

But while I was reading this book, I came across a theme which seemed to be repeated with alarming regularity. Namely, that some writers simply refuse to accept the idea that there might be a basic format with nearly all good stories follow and that learning and applying that format can vastly improve your chances of getting published.

It boggles the mind to think that someone could write a book saying, “This is the structure on which 99% of all financially successful stories are based. Disregard it at your peril,” and struggling writers would choose to completely ignore it.

It would make sense if you didn’t know about fundamentals of structure, but to know and refuse to apply them seems completely nonsensical. Yet according to Brooks writers do this all the time. And I think I know why.

Writers want to feel special.

Sure, maybe all those other hacks need to pay attention to things like story structure, but not you. You’ve got something unique. And while I don’t want to tear down anyone’s self-image, I do have a bit of cold hard truth for you to swallow:

You’re not special.

I know you’re hackles just went up. After all, you’ve been told that you were special by wonderful well-intentioned people for your whole life. And here’s the thing: pretty much everyone else was told the same thing.

Now, are you unique? In some ways, sure. Do you have something valuable to offer the world through your writing? Probably, yes.

But trust me when I say there are thousands, possibly millions of writers out there who think they’re the ones who’ve really got what it takes if only the big mean publishers would get out of the way and print their stuff.

This is not to say you are not a good writer. You may be a great writer. You may be a great storyteller. (These two things are not synonymous by the way, a topic which deserves a post of its own one of these days).

But the odds are good that as long as you keep thinking of yourself as the next greatest thing in the literary world, you’re not going to be able to learn as much as you need to learn to get better.

Instead, try taking a page from fellow blogger The Hack Novelist. When I first saw Hack’s internet moniker I thought, “Well, that’s odd. I wonder why someone would choose to be so self-deprecating.” But the more I think on it, the more I believe he’s got the right idea.

See, if you start to think of yourself as a hack, it’s very liberating in a way. For one thing you’re freed from the obligation to write the perfect story. After all, you’re just a hack right? You do the best you can and move on to the next project.

You also create a better psychological environment for learning. Because if you’re nothing more than a hack pounding out pulp fiction for the masses, you’re going to be open to any advice you can get.

As always, the single biggest thing getting in the way of your success is you. And the same advice goes double for me. The more I can get out of my own way, the better my chances of success become.

Bottom line: we need to check our egos at the door. It’s a good practice for writers and for life in general. Only through humility can we achieve greatness.

My Dad vs. The Talkative But Paranoid Barber

[The following is a mostly true story. Whatever that means.]

My dad says that the important skill a barber possesses is not his ability to cut hair. The ability to cut hair is important of course, but it comes in a very close second to the ability to talk. Because basically you’re this guy’s prisoner for fifteen minutes, sitting in his weird chair while he does things with sharp objects very close to your head. Hmm. Come to think of it there may be a story in that somewhere.

But this story, like I said before, is true. Or at least as true as a story can be after two retellings and being processed by a writers imagination.

The story goes like this. My dad goes to the barber a couple of weeks ago, this barber, like all good barbers (and good hairdressers too for those of you who might accuse me of sexism) strikes up a conversation.

And somewhere in the conversation it comes out that I am a writer. I would be lying if that part of the story didn’t make me a little proud, to know that my father is willing to talk about his son’s prospective writing career with complete strangers. Anyway so somewhere in there my dad mentions that I’m a writer and the barber says, “Oh is that so? You know, I do some writing myself.”

My dad, a little surprised by this says, “Really? I didn’t know that.”

“Oh yes,” says the barber. “Yes indeed.”

“Have you been published anywhere?”

The barber shakes his head. Dad glances up at his reflection in the big mirror that covers the wall of the barber shop and sees that the guy looks just a little nervous.

“What I do,” the barber explains, “is I type out all my stories on the computer. When I’m done for the day I print out what I’ve written and close out the file without saving.”

“I don’t understand,” my dad says. “Why go to all that trouble?”

“That’s the only way I can be sure,” says the barber. “Don’t you see?”

My dad doesn’t see, and he says so.

“They can see that stuff if they want to. They can get right onto you computer and see all your files. This is the only way I can be sure, see?”

My dad, realizing that logic has become something of a rare commodity in this situation does not ask who “they” are or why “they” would be so anxious to read the writings of a small town barber. Instead he asks, “Well do you ever plan to get any of them published?”

The barber shakes his head. “Not me, Albert” (My dad’s name is also Albert. But I’m NOT a junior. Clear as mud?) “I’m putting them all in a safe place. Somewhere where no one will find them until after I’m dead. Then…well we’ll see.”

“I don’t understand. Why not send it off to some publisher somewhere? Who knows? Maybe you’ll get published, get rich.”

The barber shakes his head looking a little sad. “I can’t do that,” he says.

“Why not?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” says the barber. “When I was a young man I had my palm read, my fortune told. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but over the years every single one of the predictions that fortune-teller made came true. I met my wife on a train. She conceived within the first year of our marriage. And then my dad died in a car accident three days before my thirty-fifth birthday. All of this she told me, understand?”

My dad says he does, but that he doesn’t know what any of that has to do with the barber’s hidden manuscript.

“Well,” the barber answers, “I’ll tell you. That fortune-teller said one more thing to me. She said, ‘You’ll be a bestselling author. But not until after you’re dead.’ And you know what? I’m not in any great hurry to die.”

[This has been a mostly true story. Had this been a story I made up, there would likely have been some twist at the end where the barber took off his face to reveal a mass of quivering alien flesh underneath, and my dad would have melted him away with that gel stuff barbers keep all their combs in. But this story was true, apart from the things I made up, so none of that stuff happened. You'll have to settle for this.]

Say Hello to My Little Friend: the Wonders of the AlphaSmart 3000

There isn’t any special equipment required to be a writer. There’s no super secret pencil and paper combination that makes the best stories, no ultra exclusive word processor of the gods that you must use in order to craft a gripping tale.

But let’s be real here, you’re not going to be chiseling your work into stone tablets anytime soon, and neither am I. Few of us write our stories with pen and paper anymore, and the image of the writer hunched over his typewriter, keys clacking is largely an anachronism. We use computers for the most part, because they’re both versatile and powerful.

I’ve been writing on my laptop from the very beginning, mostly because it was portable and it served my needs well enough. But over the last couple of months I’ve had my eye on something a little different.

See, I like to take my laptop to work with me, so that I can write on my lunch breaks, but it can be a pain to lug it in from my car and then back out again when I’m done always slightly terrified that someone might crowbar open my trunk and steal it. I swear to you, every time I get home and open the trunk (that’s a boot for those of you who don’t live in Awesomeville aka America) there’s a tiny moment of terror when I’m sure it will have been stolen. Also, the battery life on that thing sucks. I get MAYBE half an hour out of it before it beeps at me once and promptly shuts off without giving me so much as the chance to save my work.

So yeah. Not the most ideal piece of equipment in the world. Well today I’m here to announce that my troubles are over, and to introduce you to my little friend:

Okay, okay, stop laughing. Yes, I know it’s like a ten-year-old piece of technology. My wife  told me she used to use one when she was in grade-school.

But you know what? This baby is AWESOME. Shall we go down the list?

How about a 72 hour battery life? Check.

Ultimate portability? Yeppers.

And the best part? The twenty-five dollar price tag.

I’m telling you guys, this is my new writing machine right here. I’ve been wanting one of these babies for years. Ever since I saw an article in Popular Science about how they were being used in the jungles of Africa by scientists who were away from civilization and without power for long periods of time.

But the best part about the AlphaSmart 3000 is this: it has no wordcount feature.

Now I know what you’re all thinking. “Albert, wordcount is essential. Wordcount is god. How will we ever be able to chart our progress without the manifold blessings of wordcount?”

Well believe me when I say that at first I saw it as a drawback too. And then I started writing on the thing.

And I’m here to tell you that knowing exactly how many words you have written isn’t nearly as important as you think it is. Because once you know, then you start to set goals, and once you start to set goals, you start to feel obligated to complete those goals, and once that happens there’s a hint of drudgery starts to sneak into your writing. Or at least that’s how it was for me.

But with the AlphaSmart 3000 I don’t have to worry about all that stuff. All I have to focus on is telling the story, and so far my daily wordcount hasn’t suffered at all. If anything it’s actually gone up a little.

Bottom line, if you write on the go, I’d highly recommend this little machine to you. If you do your shopping you can find a decent price for one on ebay, and it offers a convenient and distraction free writing experience.

Overall a super piece of equipment.

Bizzaro Film Review: Primer

Today we’re diving into the world of celuloid stories again to talk about one of my favourite movies ever. It’s definitely up there in the top three duking it out with Brick and The Fall.

Primer is a movie about time travel. No, that’s wrong. Primer is the movie about time travel.

This is the setup: a group of engineers are working on decreasing the effect of gravity, when two them discover that the machine they’ve invented actually makes things become “untethered” in time. This means that things inside the machine swing back and forth through time like a pendulum for whatever duration of time that the machine is turned on. If a person enters the machine he can time his exit for the back-swing and come out in the past.

But this ain’t your granpa’s time machine. There are rules. The machine won’t let you go further back in time than the moment that it was switched on. For instance you could start the machine now, and two days later get in it and travel back to now, but you can’t go beyond those limits, which means no going back to see the dinosaurs. Also, travel backward in time is just like travelling forward, ie if you want to go 24 hours into the past, you have to sit inside the machine for 24 hours.

This is a film that will make you think. You will not understand it all on the first viewing. You won’t understand it all on the second viewing. I recently watched this movie for the fifth or sixth time, and I still saw something new, something that made me rethink everything I thought I knew about the story. This is that kind of movie.

But more than just being a thinking man’s movie about time travel, Primer is a study in power, because ultimately that’s what the ability to travel through time represents. The person who made the most recent “revision” to the timeline is the one holding all the cards. This subtle struggle for power creates an ever-increasing strain on the friendship of the two engineers who designed the machine.

However, for me at least, the story contained within the film is only half as interesting as the story of the film itself, and the making of Primer is a fascinating tale in and of itself. If you look at the film’s budget on Wikipedia, you will see that it was made for a scant six thousand dollars. Basically the only thing the in the budget was the film. All the acting, filming, and everything else was done by the friends and family of the director.

And it looks great. In spite of the limited budget, the visual aesthetic of the film is strikingly beautiful. The “actors” all portray their characters perfectly. This is the film that you watch and wonder how that Hollywood with all of its millions still manages to get it wrong time after time.

Bottom line, if you like to think, you should watch this film. It’s an incredible example of the power of storytelling and a reminder that anyone with a vision to share can create something wonderful.

The Soul of the Story [Guest Post by Don Whittington]

[Today I've got something super special for you guys. I'm all psyched up about it. I'm doing my little jumping up and down dance that always drives my dog crazy. That's how excited I am.

Why am I so excited? Because today it is my pleasure to present to you a guest post by one of my favourite bloggers ever. Don Whittington writes The Automat, a breathtaking blog about art and life. If you haven't heard of The Automat, you're not alone. In my opinion, Don's work is criminally under-appreciated. Seriously. Someone should go to jail. If you like art even a tiny little bit you should go and check out his blog. But first, read this.]

Albert asked if I would do a guest spot here, and I admit that I am somewhat reluctant to write about writing. Part of what I believe to be wrong with the current state of fiction is that so many people are writing about writing they never get around to writing a decent story. But equally, I know from having been a beginner myself once upon a time, there are certain questions that never get answered, and if someone would just answer them for you, you could get better.

I am going to answer them for you. Sort of.

Myth number one: Writing must be good to sell well.

Are you kidding me? We have all read best-selling books filled with ham-handed sentence constructions, grammatical errors, misspellings, and glaring errors of fact. It should be apparent to anyone not born this morning that good writing is not the issue. The fact is, your use of language can be perfect and the world will yawn. Your plot construction can be a masterpiece of scene and sequel and everyone will ignore you at once and with spectacular harmony. This happens when you suffer from SPW: Shitty, Pretty Writing. You are reading SPW when everything seems extraordinarily well written, but you are still bored out of your mind. Most people, once aware of it, can get beyond this stage and conquer SPW, but sadly, some never do.

Language is important; language is integral to how your story functions even as your car’s parts contribute to its handling on the road. But people don’t buy fuel injectors, they buy Porsches. Here are things no editor cares about: “I wrote 3,000 words today!” “I have fifteen Chapters!” “I wrote a great log line!” “I framed my outline and hung it on the wall!” Here is what they do care about: “My protagonist is in so much trouble.” “That choice has destroyed her marriage.” “I killed my child!” “Timmy fell down the well.”

Story, story, story, story, story…(repeat 3,000 times and say, “I wrote 3,000 words today!”)

You’ve written 110,000 words but do you have a story? A real story and not some mood flecked throwaway crap destined for the mountain of forgotten New Yorker pseudo-intellectual-paeans-to-solipsistic-omphaloskepsis. Here’s how you tell.

Drum roll:

A real story can only occur when characters, about whom the reader has come to care, experience change or growth.

High hat!

I made that up years ago and it borrows heavily from everything everybody else made up before me, which is to say, I may well have stolen it. Hope so. It works.

Other things matter in that they help satisfy these conditions. Drama occurs when good people make bad choices. Pinocchio is like a little lesson in how to tell a story. He makes the wrong choice again and again and again. But a bad choice is not enough by itself. Something has to be at stake. Pinocchio can only redeem himself if he saves his father who is about to die because of Pinocchio’s poor choice.

Other details should be seen to. Does your protagonist have obstacles appropriate for his challenge?

John wanted pickles with his sandwich, but he knew that if he opened the jar, the dragon would devour his neighbor, Mrs. Jennison. “You can live without a pickle, John,” said his practical yet secretly tormented and surprisingly stunning wife Jane. “Never. I need only fashion a spiny armor from these bits of artichoke…”

In writing classes people practice exercises in which they ask the “What if?” question to arrive at story ideas. This is a great exercise, but remember to follow it up with the “So what?” question.

“What if everyone in the world suddenly had good breath?”

Remember that a story does not have to be complicated to enthrall. It simply has to be honest and effective. You get your readers to care about your character by caring yourself, as the writer. But readers have expectations. If your character suddenly steps out of character because that’s how you outlined the story, your reader will drop you in a heartbeat. People are subject to cause and effect, just as things are. During the telling of your story, you have probably rendered your outline obsolete. When characters begin to live, they sometimes do things you didn’t expect or want. Tough. That’s the briar patch we all want to be thrown into. Send your outline to sit in the corner with the people who count “was’s” and “POV” slips. Meanwhile, you follow your now grown-up, three-dimensional character who is changing the world, baby.

Don’t get too worried about how complicated your story is. That is a plot question, and those bits of business are plot points. Plot serves story, but it is not story by itself. People are stories. Plots don’t buy books, people do. (Though people also sometimes buy plots for when they’re done being people, but that’s another story.) Anyway, complications are not that important. At the end of the day, the vast majority of stories can be ground down to three types:

Kicking someone’s ass.

Winning someone’s heart.

Living with the consequences of having failed to kick someone’s ass and/or win their heart.

Simplistic? You bet, and thank God, because deep down we writers often are just not very smart.

Myth number 2.

Myth number 2 is that when you start out numbering things there have to be others.

[My thanks to Don for so graciously writing this post. And if you're too lazy to scroll up to the top of the page to click the link to his blog, here it is again. Go. Read. You will be amazed.]