I Am Iron Man

E and I recently snuck away to a weekday matinee, the first movie we've seen in a theatre since a certain baby girl took over our lives. And while it was a fun little getaway (thanks, Opa!) it reminded me why I'm loathe to go to the theatre. Granted, it was a Silver City megaplex, but by the time all was said and done it cost us about fifty bucks! If Hollywood wants to lure people back from their home entertainment systems I'd suggest that they start by lobbying theatre chains to reduce the prices at the concession stand. We were even in a mood to splurge. But come on, $4.99 for a small popcorn, (49 cents extra if you want real butter), and $3.69 for a Diet Coke?! The film of choice begged for big-screen viewing though, so we sucked it up.

Anyway. After sitting through six or eight commercials, the previews finally came up, and half an hour after the posted start time we were finally treated to the opening credits.

What did we see? Iron Man. Which was awesome. Seriously. Good enough to salvage the afternoon of consumer gluttony and have us leaving the parking lot with smiles on our faces. It's been getting good reviews, and I've always loved Robert Downey Jr.'s acting (his performance alone worth the price of admission) and Jon Favreau's direction. But it was surprising to see both of their work in a summer, tent-pole blockbuster like this.

On the heels of its $100 million opening weekend, Marvel Studios, fresh from having pissed all over itself, announced the sequel for April 2010.

Oh, and the song over the closing credits, even though the lyrics have no relevance whatsoever to the plot of the movie? Black Sabbath's Iron Man, natch.

Bill C10

I'm admittedly playing catch-up, not having kept up to speed on the Senate hearings on Bill C10 over at Parliament Hill. But I have been following Sarah Polley's thoughts on the matter because, well, she's fantastic. Well spoken, passionate and after distinguishing herself as the Oscar nominated writer/director of Away From Her, one of our finest filmmakers. And she's, what, all of twenty-eight years old?

Anyway, I digress.

Jennifer MacMillan had a nice piece in the Globe and Mail earlier this week, here's an excerpt:

Oscar-nominated actor/writer Sarah Polley arrived on Parliament Hill on Thursday to protest against a provision now before the Senate banking committee that could cut off tax benefits for film and TV productions that contain graphic sex, violence or other content that the government finds offensive.

'If there's something artists fear, it's censorship,” Ms. Polley said Thursday at a press conference.

'Part of the responsibility of being an artist is to create work that will inspire dialogue, suggest that people examine their long-held positions and, yes, occasionally offend in order to do so.'

And then there's the niggling little problem of American productions being granted a pass, which would effectively increase the divide between American and Canadian content and make it even harder to compete against corporate Hollywood.

Equally upsetting to Canada's cultural sector is the fact that the legislation, criticized as a "morality hammer," applies only to Canadian TV and film projects. Hollywood and other foreign productions that apply for tax credits get a free pass.

And for those of you out there who think spending tax dollars on films and television is a waste of money anyway, how about spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on months of Senate committee hearings when the end result seems like a foregone conclusion?

Check this out at Dead Things ON Sticks... unbelievable, indeed.

Think I'll go back to bed now.

Lost in Translation

Consider this the launch of what will become a recurring feature here on Staring Out the Window. Lost in Translation will showcase particularly tricky or absurd lines culled directly from the Japanese-English translation scripts I work from. For the sake of discretion, (and respect for my Non-Disclosure Agreement), I won't reveal which show the line is from, or which character it is attributed to. Believe me, it wouldn't make much of a difference if you knew anyway.

So, without further ado...

'Aiee. The final day is passing like another day?
Gee with. Where did my princess go?'

Fallout

Reports are just coming in about the fallout from the writer's strike which ended last month. Seems like there's lots of ugliness and uncertainty, particularly on the TV side of things, what with the pilot season being pretty much obliterated.

This from an article entitled Recession, post-strike blues grip town in Variety earlier this week:

Thunder Road producer Basil Iwanyk said that the overall level of anxiety and stress around town is "very high," and that anyone who claims otherwise "is lying."

"Everybody is shocked there wasn’t a barrage of scripts," he said. Iwanyk, who also works in TV, said the small-screen biz is "a complete catastrophe."

A little further down the column, Canadian writer Hart Hanson attempts to set the record straight about the feeling that producers are wreaking vengeance, intentionally screwing writers and sabotaging deals.

"Nobody’s getting a big fat raise, at least not easily or automatically," he said. "I feel I have to justify expenditures even more than usual. I have to say, though, I don’t get the sense of the companies ‘taking revenge.’ The strike hurt their bottom line, and they are trying, as corporations, to mitigate the financial hit they endured. There’s not the feeling of personal vengeance behind it."

Vengeance can be a tricky thing. And expensive. With the recession looming, everyone's watching their bottom line. Or at least the bottom line of their shareholders. Sounds like business as usual if you ask me.

Of course it looks like the studio bosses might well be in for more of the same in June, when the Screen Actors Guild contract expires.

Day Job

In previous posts I've hinted at and alluded to various projects on the go without taking the time to explain them properly, mostly because I either didn't have the time or the freedom to do so. But as I sat down to write a blog about my afternoon yesterday, much of which was spent in a studio in front of a camera recording DVD extras for an anime series I've been working on called Hunter X Hunter, I realized a little housekeeping was in order.

The first thing people always ask me when I tell them I'm writing for a Japanese animation series is if I speak Japanese. And the answer is always the same. No. I don't. I work from translated scripts. What I do is called ADR (Additional Dialogue Recording) writing. The company I work for does post-production for Japanese animation that's being redistributed in English to North-American audiences.

This is my day job, so to speak. The thing that pays the bills. And, like a lot of day jobs it can be a real grind at times. But let's face it, I'm essentially watching cartoons for a living, so I have no reason to complain. I've done a lot worse. A lot worse.

So basically what I do is take a direct-translation line like this:

The world is filled with mysteries.
A hunter is a person to pursuit those mysteries and precious items that are hard to obtain.

And rewrite it to become something like this:

The world has many mysteries and hidden treasures...
And a Hunter is someone who goes out to uncover them.

It's not as easy as you might think. If you're paying attention you might've noticed that the original lines and the rewritten lines are different lengths. That's because in addition to making the line coherent and palatable for North-American audiences, I also have to make it fit the pre-existing mouth flaps on screen. Those don't change.

Hunter X Hunter is an adventure story in which a young boy goes on a quest to become a Hunter in order to find the father he never knew. 'Hunters' in the context of this series, are members of an elite society of people with super-human skills, like ninjas. Or Jedi. Come to think of it, our hero's not unlike Luke Skywalker in Star Wars in many ways, a gifted young kid being raised by relatives who discovers he's part of a world he never knew existed.

So back to me, sitting in a dark studio in front of a camera answering questions for the Hunter X Hunter DVD extras with a little cover-up on my face.

Q: What's the biggest difference between writing an original screenplay and writing ADR on a show like Hunter Hunter?

A: They're very different in that when you're writing an original screenplay...

Q: Excuse me Angelo, begin your answer by restating the question, please.

A: Right, sorry, I keep forgetting...

The biggest difference between writing an original screenplay and writing ADR for a show like Hunter Hunter is that when you're writing an original screenplay you're creating the entire world - the characters, the story, the dialogue, everything. But when you're writing ADR you're just focusing exclusively on the dialogue. Sometimes there are ways to enhance the story through the dialogue, and in that sense it's not unlike re-writing an original screenplay. You're trying to make each and every line as good as it can possibly be.

Q: Cut, print. That was brilliant!

A: Gee, thanks!

Unwarranted Nostalgia

Okay, i have to admit, nostalgia compelled me to turn on the TV at nine o'clock last night for the return of Knight Rider. I could've cared less that KITT (Knight Industries Three Thousand instead of Two Thousand, clever huh?) had been upgraded from a Trans Am to a Mustang Shelby. I was more interested in seeing how David Hasselhoff would get shoe-horned into the new plot as Michael Knight while his vigilante burden fell on the shoulders of the younger, sexier, roguish "ex-Army Ranger and failed race-car driver", Mike Tracer! (Michael - Mike, clever huh?)

It started out okay with a tasteful modern rendition of the old theme song... and KITT taking off on his own to find the daughter of his murdered creator.

Well, I didn't last past the first commercial break. It was brutal. I don't even know who she was or how she fits into the plot, but one of the main characters was introduced surfing at dawn before she proceeds to strip off her wetsuit in an outdoor shower scene before returning to her bedroom and her one-night-stand lesbian lover to suit up for a day at the office as... an FBI agent. Get it? Young. Tuff. Sexy! No, I'm not making this shit up.

Cut to Mike Tracer, (our hero remember?), being woken up in the middle of the day by a couple of thuggish money collectors bashing down his door... oh, wait, there are two women in his bed! What a guy! He's young. Tuff. Sexy!

CLICK.

Struck

All weekend people were telling me the strike was over. And it looks like they may be right. There has been a lot written and reported on with regard to the writer's strike, a lot of it hyperbole. I followed much of it.

The shift in perception seemed to come after the Golden Globes went from being an orgy of red-carpet arrivals and celebrity self-aggrandizement to a perfunctory press conference awards presentation with poorly written jokes. Which raised the spectre of an Academy Awards show cancellation. No one wants that.

TV writer Denis McGrath has a nice analysis on his blog, Dead Things ON Sticks. His observation that 'The weary inevitability the screwing of writers has always garnered has lifted.' may be our most significant, hardest-won gain.

Think

One of the best things I did for myself and my career last year was to buy myself a decent chair. When you spend as much time sitting at your desk as I do, the importance of a good chair cannot be overstated. But it wasn't easy. I looked for this chair for a long time. Years.

When I first started writing and wanted to be Jack Kerouac, I sat on a wooden stool. Just like him. Or rather, like he had, since he was already long dead by that point. He said it kept him grounded, kept him awake. That and all the Benzedrine. I loved the monastic asceticism of it. But those of you who know me know that I don't have a lot of meat on my bones, and after a couple of hours sitting on that stool I began to worry about pressure bruises on my ass. But I kept that up for a couple of years. Mostly for lack of a viable option. We didn't have a lot of furniture at that time. I kept the bruising at bay by taking a lot of breaks, which wasn't so good for the writing in the end.

My last chair wasn't much better. It was one of those old oak steno chairs from the 1950s. It had wheels, and even swivled, but the seat was hard as... well, oak. I think it's a chair Kerouac would've approved of. It was left in the house by the previous tenants, and I loved the way it looked. There was a certain purity and simplicity to it. And I appreciated the irony of working on a modern laptop while sitting on an ancient chair. But I still had to get up and walk around a lot.

I had long been dismayed by the pathetic gaggle of chairs on offer at Staples or any of the big office supply stores. It's like they keep them in the back of the store out of embarrassment. They are without exception, overpriced, plastic, disposable, ugly and uncomfortable. I've sat in many of them in the various offices I've had the displeasure of working in over the years, and not one of them ever inspired me to go out and buy one.

Then one day along came the Aeron chair. I read about it somewhere, probably in the New York Times, but I can't remember now. After doing a bit of research (Google) I knew I'd never be able to afford one, but hoped that since they were so immensely popular, someone somewhere sooner or later would build a more economical version that employed similar technology and ergonomics. Or, at the very least, that manufacturers of office chairs would start to give some serious thought to their product.

And so it was, years later, that I found the Think chair (pictured above). I first saw it in a photo on the side of a moving truck for an office supply store. A week later I had the Think chair in my office. It's simple, and elegant, and awfully comfortable but not in a soft, gooey way. It's firm and efficient. The arms are adjustable, not just for height, but forward, backward and side to side by way of an ingenious swivel built into the arm cap. One brochure I read claimed that the chair would increase productivity by 70 percent. I'm sure it's done at least that for me.

Anyway, I'm not trying to sell the thing. I'm just sayin'.

Benny's Gift

It being Sunday morning and all, I thought I'd catch up with my favourite televangelist.

The Season

Between l' enfant, writing ADR on a new sixty-two episode classic Anime series, having the metaphorical dust blown off of an old feature project and thrust into preproduction, and a rewrite on a more recent feature... the headlong plunge toward the holidays has been particularly harried this year.

I'll take the time to expand on all of the above here in the near future. I promise. But until then, Happy Holidays to you and yours.