Holy cow!

I can't linger because I'm in the middle of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but I had to drop in and say that our little movie won "Best in LA" at the 48-Hour Film Project! They screened 17 films as the "best of", and some of them were seriously clever and well-made. Ours was dead last in the lineup and a totally different tone than just about all of the rest of them.

They were giving out awards, and a couple were given out that we thought it would have been nice to have won -- our friend who's a great sound designer (among other talents) won the editing award for his film... so we were resigned to having been in the screening and that being enough. Right before they announced the last award, it vaguely crossed my mind that maybe I should touch up my lipstick, in case we had to go onstage. Then I dismissed that as silly.

When the guy called the name of our movie, I gasped really loudly. It was the only sound in the auditorium. Then the three of us who were there (the husb, who directed; sister-in-law, who produced; and I, who wrote it) went onstage and briefly babbled some nonsense.

It was so crazy! Very cool for the husb to get the recognition he deserves.

The super crazy part?

Ten teams each from New York, LA, and San Francisco are invited to participate in another round for Visa... We have to do the whole thing again in September!

Glorifying the tendency to victimize.

I once joked in Robin's blog (in fact, I think it was the first comment I ever left there) that my book has no sex, drugs, or drinking -- only violence.

The memory of this came to mind when I watched a Quicktime trailer for the new Elisha Cuthbert (don't worry, Mary, if you don't know who she is) movie Captivity. As far as I could tell from what I watched of it (not much) and the ginormous billboard on my way home from work, the title pretty much says it all. Somebody captures Elisha Cuthbert, and then proceeds to do terrible things to her for probably something like 108 minutes.

Uh...

Is it just me, or do we not need movies like this? More specifically, do teenagers not need movies like this? This and Saw and its two sequels, and apparently some gorefest called Hostel, and its sequel...

These aren't stories about fighting FOR something. These are stories of sadism -- grotesque, exploitative, lowering-the-common-denominator sadism.

When I use violence, I like to think that (1) it's a last resort for my character, and (2) she is actually fighting for something. She is fighting on the side of good, because fighting is what good people do when they must do it.

(This is not about the war, by the way.)

I feel very prickly and old-fashioned today, thinking about that movie. I mean, lately I have been horrified by stories of people abusing animals, abusing children, abusing one another. Acting out the principles of senselessly mindless violence that have somehow always found an audience.

I don't know. It just seems strange that a nationful of people who thought the sight of Janet Jackson's breast was worth a $550,000 punishment are sitting idly by while their youth, already saturated with marketing and advertisements, are now being spoonfed a sadistic story where the creativity glorified is the ability to cause and create pain, humiliation, and suffering, rather than finding ways to conquer it.

I mean, sure, the girl probably has a Very Empowering Scene at the end where she stands over her tormenter and says some Very Serious Things in a Very Harsh Voice, and then she probably shoots him or something, but I'll bet the majority of the film isn't spent tracking the development of a clever and ingenius plan to thwart him.

I can't help the feeling that thousands of people are going to come out of that movie a trifle less human than they went into it.

Bah!

Gadget love and film festival notes.

Item #1: My iPhone.

"Sue" (should I say her last name is "Donym"? Get it? Get it? Huh? Huh?) and I left the house Friday at approximately 12:20 pm. We arrived at the mall at 12:40ish. I immediately started worrying because there were SO many cars pulling into the garage. Sue was pointing out how most of them were blue-haired old ladies, or tarts, and trying to calm me down. We went inside to find a pretty long line. Much longer than I had expected. We found a spot at the back, next to a woman with an adorable 9-year-old daughter, and Sue went to count the folks ahead of us -- 133.

I have no idea what we did all day. I spent a lot of time anxious that at 5:59 p.m., one minute before the phones officially went on sale, four hundred billion people would join their friends in line ahead of us. My anxiety was quite wasted, though, because not only were mall security peeps on the lookout for people giving frontsies and backsies, but at one point, the police showed up and ticketed lineskippers for disturbing the peace! People who attempted to jump into line also earned the loud derision of the crowd behind them, and a walk of shame down the line after being expelled.

(Did I mention that Sue didn't even WANT one? She just came with me for support, and to buy two for my friends? What a gal.) So we got the iPhones, came home, tried to hook them up, and encountered the same activation glitches as all the millions of other iPhone users across the country. We told ourselves that it would work soon enough, and left to attend to...

Item #2: 48-Hour Film Festival.

The screening was Friday night. They'd divided the 80-some entries into groups of 10, made up of various genres. I am pleased to report that ours held up very well. The festival producer found the husb at a bar later and was very complimentary. We also had a great showing from our cast and crew, lots of audience support. Here are a few observations, which also function as the advice I promised Miss Scarlet I would post.

* Almost every film, regardless of genre, descended into a kind of slapstick. Our film was Sci-Fi, and very serious from start to finish. I'm not saying the slapstick wasn't funny, or that the seriousness made ours sooo much better, but it really stood out.

* Cheesy things: Guns (every time). Spy movies that are just about one event, like "stealing the jewel". Female vamp characters played by women who don't really know how to vamp. Dream sequences, especially when the locations don't support it (e.g., the "running to one another through a field of wildflowers" bit, but played at the local playground or in someone's teeny backyard).

* Stuff I'm glad we did: Had an original score, thanks to a some musician friends. Shot the very first scenes almost last, after the crew and actors were in the groove. Minimized the fake blood on set. Kept all of our shooting locations fairly close to home base. Had people fill out their paperwork early, before things got insane. Incorporated the prop (a bumper sticker) in a way that supported the story -- some people just had bumper stickers stuck on shirts or butts, etc. Had a boatload of extras ready to help us. Had really great actors pre-booked.

* Stuff we didn't do that we should have: spent some time Friday night breaking down the script. Created graphics we knew we would need early on, because you will never ever have time to do it later (we didn't really). Had more clearly delineated jobs on set.

We went into it with a vague story idea, thinking we would completely (probably) ditch it when we found out our genre. What we ended up making actually was a variation on that original idea. So if we did it again, I would have a set of vague ideas that I felt strongly about -- not necessarily all fleshed out, but a germ I know could grow.

Another thing I would do is figure out what "types" my actors could play. We ended up using two of ours as government agent-type people. They did a great job, and it actually works very well (in my humble opinion), but as we were shooting, I found myself wondering how I had ended up writing two such stereotypical characters. I think because in fiction, you have the power to take any stereotypical character and either make him part of the scenery, or give him quirks and lessen the stereotype -- I just didn't think about how quickly a visual type is established when a character is seen onscreen. And had we tried to go for a quirk, in a supporting character, it would have pulled too much attention away from the A storyline. Happily, the actors and the editing elevated the characters above what I had written.

Lesson learned, I hope.

The screening was fun, and I'm all amped to write more scripts for the husb to direct. He is very talented and swoonworthy, if I do say so myself.

Item #3: back to my iPhone.

Saturday noonish I called the Apple 800# that had been out of order the previous night. Shockingly, I got through, and after spending maybe a minute and a half on hold, I spoke to a human who told me he was putting my activation through. Sure enough, the phone started working soon after. I did a bunch of hoodoo to get the husb's phone working as well, and then I started playing.

Syncing is SO easy. You can choose playlists of music, albums of photos, groups from your contacts, calendars from iCal, email accounts from Mail. I got a Yahoo! address, which is the kind that lets the phone act as a Blackberry, where you get the email as soon as it arrives. I put my zip codes into the weather widget, loaded up a little album of Winston photos, a couple gigabytes of music, and voila...

It's a really beautiful thing.

Next task -- create a bookmarks menu of blogs that are not just the RSS feeds. The iPhone is not necessarily friends with RSS just yet.

But I heart it, bad. Especially for Mac users -- if you are about to spend a couple hundred dollars on a phone, and another couple hundred on a Blackberry, just get an iPhone instead. It is seriously fun and cool.

All right, my brother and sister-in-law are in town and will be back from their walk soon, so I'd better go get dressed. We're going down to funky Melrose Avenue for lunch and boutiquing.

Here's a photo taken with the iPhone... as you can see, he is not quite as enamored with this new gadget sibling as the husb and I are...