I watched Kick-Ass last week (Big Josh: it doesn’t suck), but left it out of my Monday Movies gig because I was short on time and I had this exercise in mind. A screenwriter’s “beat sheet” is a list of significant moments – less detail than a list of scenes, more detail than three-act structure. I’ve been in screenwriting classes where we were asked to do ten-point beat sheets. Screenwriter Blake Snyder, known for Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot but better known for his screenwriting manual Save The Cat!, compiled a fifteen-point beat sheet, believing that the exact same beats should fall not only in the same order but arriving at roughly predictable page numbers of a screenplay. (For better or worse, his work has moved from observation to prescription.)

Below the fold, I’ll read the Kick-Ass screenplay by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn (downloadable via Simply Scripts) and see how it matches up to the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet, a/k/a the BS2. Each beat says what page Snyder believes you should find it on in parentheses next to it, and I’ll indicate in my discussion where it actually falls. The rule of thumb for translating screenplay pages to screen minutes is 1 page = 1 minute and I’ll indicate how far apart the film and the screenplay get.

(I’m not going on record saying that this or all movies should follow the BS2 exactly — I’ve been trying to internalize the lessons of Scott Myers’s Narrative Throughline and Christopher Vogler’s Writer’s Journey as well, both of which could be used to look at the structure of this and many other movies. I have not been trying to internalize this horse pill. Also if you have my copy of The Writer’s Journey I’d like it back.)

THE BLAKE SNYDER BEAT SHEET

PROJECT TITLE: Kick-Ass
GENRE:Superhero

1. Opening Image (1)

A costume-clad figure stands atop a skyscraper… and plummets to his death. The imagery clearly states that we’re playing with the superhero myth here.

2. Theme Stated (5)

Dave Lizewski’s monologue brings in the theme starting from page 1 with

Then follows six pages of establishing how unexceptional he and his life are, leading to this exchange on page 7:

This debate is the theme of Kick-Ass. It doesn’t quite get stated as a thesis until page 14, when Dave gets his first costume:

3. Set-Up (1-10)

According to Snyder, these pages should introduce every main character in the A story, and suggest that there are “Six Things That Need Fixing” about the hero. It’s a “full-fledged documentation of the hero’s world labeled ‘before’.” In Kick-Ass, we get Dave’s friends Marty and Todd. We see Chris D’Amico, the mobster’s son who will show up as Red Mist. We actually get a good set-up of the romantic B-story, watching Katie Deauxma look right through Dave. Dave’s main problem is that “like most people my age, I just existed.” He’s also incurably horny, and since his mother’s death, he and his father drift through life without too much connection. (In the script, the scene where they talk about cereal ends with the presentation of tickets to “Spiderman 8” – the film wisely cuts out the gift to emphasize that “life just goes on.”) Lastly, he’s an easy mark – he and his friends get their cash and comics boosted by thugs in the alley behind the comics store.

The first 10 pages all belong to Dave. The bottom of page 10 brings us our first look at the D’Amico operation, and our first allusion to Big Daddy and Hit-Girl: “This would be the guy who looks like Batman.” We don’t get to see Damon/Big Daddy and Mindy/Hit-Girl until page 14.

4. Catalyst (12)

Is the catalyst – known elsewhere as the inciting incident – when Dave gets the Kick-Ass costume in the mail on page 14? It’s unusual, because it’s an action of his own choosing. One hypothesis is that Hit-Girl is the protagonist, and Kick-Ass’s viral video is the inciting incident that gets Hit-Girl in the game. I like a provocative reading as much as the next guy, but I don’t buy it, not least because the video may accelerate Hit-Girl’s trajectory but it doesn’t really change it. I think there’s a non-traditional catalyst — the change in Dave’s life comes from within, from his idea. After all, “the comic books had it wrong.”

5. Debate (12-25)

From the moment he puts on his costume, Kick-Ass starts training. On page 22, he crosses the Rubicon: Dave spies the two thugs who laid him out in the set-up, and decides to take-them on. (In the movie this lands at minute 17, reinforcing the Page 17 Rule.)

6. Break into Two (25)

This is pretty clearly the moment where Dave, having almost lost his life to the thugs, decides to intervene on behalf of another man running from two thugs (page 33, minute 30). This leads to the Kick-Ass video going viral, bringing Hit-Girl and Big Daddy into play.

7. B Story (30)

Katie’s renewed interest in Dave starts on page 40, when she asks him to coffee. His friends assure him that it’s only because she thinks he’s gay. In the film the first date is here, but the underlying problem with the relationship gets set up in the debate section – a smart choice, because the mixed success (a girl finally notices him, but only because she thinks he’s gay) reinforces the disunity that helps move Dave into action as Kick-Ass.

8. Fun and Games (30-55)

This is the section of the movie that pays off “the promise of the premise.” The media attention to Kick-Ass falls under this (pp36-40), as does Kick’Ass’s first encounter with Hit-Girl and Big Daddy (pp46-52), though it’s not exactly light-hearted.

9. Midpoint (55)

The midpoint is the middle of the script and the middle act of two (most three act structures imagine a roughly 30-60-30 divide in the three acts. Which totals 110 pages. Keep up.) Here, the stakes are raised: it’s either an “’up’ where the hero peaks (though it’s a false peak) or a ‘down’ when the world collapses all around the hero (though it’s a false collapse).”

The victory, aided by Hit-Girl, against Rasul’s men is definitely a “false peak”. And directly following on page 53:

10. Bad Guys Close In (55-75)

Chris D’Amico hatches a plan to catch Kick-Ass (p61, m57). There’s a setback (due to Big Daddy and Hit Girl’s interference, p68-70 m63-70), but Chris persists in using the Red Mist ruse to find Big Daddy and Hit-Girl (p81, m80) leading to…

11. All Is Lost (75)

Big Daddy’s death (p 93, m91) definitely qualifies. According to Snyder, movies from Star Wars to Elf introduce “the whiff of death” here (Obi-Wan bites the dust in the former; in the latter, Will Ferrell ponders leaping from a bridge).

The whole script is only 104 pages (the film 111m), so we’re running late – my screenwriting teacher George Melrod once explained that he likes to think of movies as three acts followed by a finale, which may make more sense here.

12. Dark Night of the Soul (75-85)

This exchange (p94-97, m92-95) anchors this section:

13. Break into Three (85)

On p.97/m.96, Hit-Girl knocks on the bad-guys’ door (to a great Ennio Morricone riff), then cut to:

The script shows Dave finally jumping off a rooftop, aided by the jetpack. The film keeps the jetpack hidden.

14. Finale (85-110)

The assault on D’Amico’s office, p97-101, m96-107.

15. Final Image (110)

(p104, m110): With the Joker quote, a final ironic twist on the theme that reinforces an age-old comic book theme: if ordinary people become superheroes, ordinary people will also become villains.

Kick-Ass takes a while to get started, then has a compressed first half of Act II, a long second half, and a compressed Act III. Much of the structural idiosyncracies come from the Hit-Girl/Big-Daddy plot, which has much greater development than that of an typical ally. Strong scenes for the romance B-plot and the D’Amico/Red Mist characters also shape the structure.

Here’s why I don’t think the Hit-Girl plot qualifies Kick-Ass as a dual protagonist vehicle: while Hit-Girl’s problem is obvious — she’s been turned into a killing machine by her father at the cost of her childhood — the movie doesn’t really make that a problem for her. Instead, it’s part of Dave’s final puzzle: he has to be physically courageous enough to help her win the final battle, but the normalcy that he carries around for the entire movie is the even-greater gift he’s able to give to her at the end.

In the romance plot, Dave goes from invisible to wrongly perceived by Katie. When, on page 79, he comes out to her as both Kick-Ass and as straight, he’s really happy, and he’s achieved a great false victory — he’s stopped lying to Katie about his identity (on two fronts) and he’s finally getting laid. But that truth comes at the cost of one more lie, to himself: he promises her that he’ll stop being a super-hero, breaking the promise to himself that catalyzed his adventure.

Hit-Girl and Katie highlight what Scott Myers likes to talk about as the protagonist’s move from Disunity into Unity. Dave’s initial attempts at physical courage fall apart because they’re based on lies, and his journey requires him to accept be Kick-Ass while insisting on the value of his true, unexceptional self.

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In general, Bluestone’s Law as I understand it secondhand is based on the idea that deviation from the original is more respected when the original is not beloved. We’ve largely gotten past that whole problem of “deviation” when it comes to novels, but we haven’t with comics, and I think it might be instructive to consider why.

Most people, I think, still see comics and movies as really pretty similar. Comics are the closest one can get to a movie on the page, goes the subconscious expectation. Both tell stories with dialogue supported by visual depictions of action, and comic book authors have adopted many visual storytelling tricks from movies. Comic book scripts and movie scripts even look a lot alike, and many TV screenwriters have dabbled in comic book writing.

The fact that their comics have not generally been very good should give a hint, though, that the visual support to dialogue works pretty differently in movies and in comics.

Art in comics must be very simple. It has to convey an action in a space maybe two inches tall by two inches wide. Artists will pack only as much into those small spaces as can be intelligible.

But within those limitations it can be extremely evocative. It activates the imagination when done well, leading us right into the  “vivid and continuous dream” that John Gardner names as the action of all good fiction. We see movement and emotion in our heads.

Because that movement and emotion is linked to specific visual cues, however, we believe mistakenly that it’s all there on the page. Beloved comics get transferred to the screen by directors who want nothing more than to reproduce what everyone loved so much in print, and they sit there, visually dead.

When comics do work on the big screen it’s usually because directors find ways to make them look great there. Vince Locke’s art in A History of Violence the book is forgettable, so Cronenberg was free to go his own way. Harvey Pekar works with different artists in every story, so Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini were similarly free in American Splendor.

Which brings me to James Gunn’s Super, just out on DVD, and its contrast with last year’s Kick-Ass. Like Kick-Ass, Super is based on the idea of an ordinary guy dressing up as a superhero.* Unlike Kick-Ass it was not preceded by a comic, and when I try to imagine it as a comic I can’t see it translating well.

Rainn Wilson plays The Crimson Bolt, aka Frank D’Arbo, a guy who finds himself adrift when his wife abandons him and returns to heroin. A vision from God and some late-night Christian superhero TV convince him to become a costumed hero, and when he visits a comic book store to do research on heroes without superpowers he accidentally picks up Ellen Page as a sidekick, Boltie. Because he doesn’t have powers he settles on hitting his villains with a wrench. Or shooting them when necessary.

All the way to the bloody climax Gunn rides the line between comedy and despair. He lets the actors play their roles with absolute seriousness, and doesn’t ever try to undercut how messed-up and deluded Frank is supposed to be. He and Boltie are crazy people, and when he bashes a guy in the head for cutting in line at the movies, it’s appropriately horrifying.

In the same moment, though, the violence is undercut by a slapstick visual tone. Not Three Stooges slapstick where the violence doesn’t hurt, Troma slapstick, where the gore is extreme and doesn’t feel quite real.

That specific tone simply wouldn’t work in a comic. I’ve tried to imagine some of the most arresting images in Super as comic panels, and I think they’d either be unleavened horror, or else that nasty, mean-spirited visual slapstick that characterizes most of Mark Millar’s work (including Kick-Ass) and Garth Ennis titles like Crossed. There simply isn’t enough space in a panel for most artists to enact that uncomfortable middle ground where Super lives. All of which means that while Super may be a far better movie than Kick-Ass, I’m not sure it’d be half as good a comic.

*It’s weird that in neither of these movies do the protagonists bother to learn about the Real-Life Superhero movement. The Kick-Ass 2 comic book series offers something along these lines, but in this day and age it’s hard to fathom anyone doing non-Internet-based research, as Rainn Wilson’s character does in Super, and when they did wouldn’t they immediately stumble on the RLS phenomenon? Plus both movies assume RLS’s would be vigilantes, whereas in truth they seem to be motivated more by an endearing concept of heroism. Less crimefighting, more soup-kitchen fundraising.

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But because his power allows him to absorb and control limitless energy, he easily shoots their firepower back at them.

Time Bandits: Evil is surrounded by the time cavalry: cowboys, hoplites, the odd space cannon. They give him everything they’ve got…

…and back it comes.

I think it’s a deliberate quote.

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I liked Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are, but I also wished at the time that it hadn’t been the definitive take — even that they’d have let a couple of other writers and directors use the costumes and sets to film their own takes on the material.

The industrial strength of a film adaptation has a way of establishing itself as the canonical vision of a printed work. It’s healthy for a print work, especially a classic, to be allowed more than one crack. Imagine how great it would be if, some years down the line a Watchmen adaptation came out that was as different from Zach Snyder’s take as Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight was from Danny Elfman’s?

Given the giddy pasticheworks of Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge, and given the prima facie senselessness of telling a muted work like Gatsby in 3-D, I can’t help but be optimistic about this. Maybe, perversely, it will even have a touch of Hemingway’s apocryphal rebuttal in it.

x-posted at Alyssa Rosenberg.

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Spoilers, big blocks of screenplay, and the c-word all below the fold…

Blue Valentine makes its bed in the grim end of the marriage. The joy of the relationship is long gone in the present-day scenes, which unfold in Aristotelian compactness in a very bad 24-hour period that include a badly fumbled attempt at sexual connection (in the wake of a dog’s death!) and a raving, violent blow-up. But the “happy” early days, spread over a long courtship, already crack under the weight of foreshadowed misery. Even at his most charming — for example, persuading Michelle Williams’ Cindy to dance to a Tin Pan Alley tune on the ukulele — Ryan Gosling’s Dean is obviously  a bad bet.

Dean is slippery and defensive, using apparent vulnerability as a shield and a weapon to always maintain an advantage. Another Peter Pan figure, his playfulness captivates Cindy, but even at the start there’s an edge: he starts off with a classic neg, “In my experience the prettier a girl is, the more nuts she is. Which makes you insane.” She sees right through it, saying “I like how you can compliment and insult someone at the same time. In equal measure,” but he’s in. His manipulations don’t let up –

This is Dean at his worst — he presents himself as a kind of open-minded “new man” while he’s really arguing in bad faith to avoid uncomfortable emotional connection.

This scene also brings out one of the least discussed aspects of the movie, which is both microscopically intimate and impressively social. However, the critics I’ve read have avoided the social parts of it. Dean’s stew of self-loathing has a base of uncertain masculinity. There’s something honorable in his rejection of masculine expectation, but without a model to replace it, he’s an asshole.

In a long interview in Salon after the publication of Indecision in 2005, Rebecca Traister and Uncle Kunkel riffed on the situation Dean finds himself in, investigating a “broader sense of male apathy” that “has to do with the difficulty of finding something that seems meaningful to do in the world.” Kunkel sees men foundering in the gains of feminism:

I suppose because the fact that nearly the whole universe of jobs is open to women is a tremendous gain in possibility for them. For men, there’s been no corresponding gain. In fact, we live in this world that for reasons that are kind of hard to explain, [though] I think Hannah Arendt has gone some distance in explaining them, it seems that meaningful action is harder to take than it has been in previous historical times. I think this is the sense even of people who have no historical sense. It’s something that they feel.

and Traister wonders about

a crisis of masculinity in our generation, a generation in which opportunities were truly available to at least middle-class women. We weren’t just told we could do anything; we were expected to do everything. But we were always told how difficult that would be, that we would confront challenges and pay high prices for our satisfactions. I don’t know that men of our generation were sent the same message. So when things get tough, women don’t enjoy it any more than men, but they are not surprised. Whereas men — at least some of the ones I’ve known — have been paralyzed by life’s hardships.

Kunkel:

To really aggrandize these generalizations we’ve been making, you could claim that a great historical crossover has occurred, that a sense of tragic, dignified realism has become the [mark] of femininity while men have become head-in-the-clouds dreamers who want things to be ideal if they’re to be at all.

This is precisely what’s going on here. Critics have raised eyebrows at Dean’s ukulele playing, a fashionably hipster choice pasted on a character who’s supposed to be genuinely working-class. Blue Valentine explains it reasonably well — Dean’s father was a janitor who loved music. It’s not hard to imagine this father as a paragon of an earlier, stoic manliness, a union member with health benefits who could support a family in a blue-collar, menial job and add music to his head-of-household duties to fashion a self. But Dean can’t.

And Cindy knows it:

Blue Valentine shows a couple lost in the swirl of unstable gender roles. Dean struggles to tailor manliness to his own needs with a patchwork of semi-responsible stay-at-home fatherhood, intermittent employment, vague artistic gesturing, and violent aggression. It’s a bad fit.

Cross-posted slightly more concisely at Alyssa Rosenberg

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I remembered the first movie vaguely but fondly from my youth; Netflix obliged On Demand and I took another look at it last weekend.

What struck me immediately is how strongly the 1981 film plays against the tagline “don’t you wish you were Arthur?” Watch that trailer; Moore’s bray is as grating in the movie as it is there. Impressively, Moore’s drunk antics are rooted in frustration and imprisonment, and for the first ten minutes of the film (much of which is in the trailer) it’s obvious that he’s the only one laughing at his jokes and everyone pretends to like him because’s he’s rich. When John Gielgud arrives the following morning, we get to meet Arthur in a human relationship for the first time. It’s a complex relationship that forms the heart of the movie, and it’s impressive that we spend as much time with Arthur before we see him through the eyes of someone who cares for him beyond what he’s paid to do.

I can see Russell Brand playing unlikable, but I have a hard time thinking he’ll stay unfunny for that long. Brand on a rising arc of world comedy domination; when Moore made Arthur he was long past his sketch-comedy heyday (his early 60′s group Beyond The Fringe was the acknowledged ur-Monty Python). His Arthur lands somewhere between a dramatic role and a comic showpiece, and it’s stronger when it’s the former. I suspect Brand’s will be funnier but more slight.

I do like that the Brand trailer sets up his betrothed as too sexually forthright for Peter-Pan Arthur, and it’s of a piece that his object of desire would be the comparatively undersexed Greta Gerwig. (Think of her wonderfully awkward turn with Ben Stiller in Greenberg.) Jill Eikenberry’s Susan Johnson is WASPily frigid. It feels contemporary and insightful that Arthur would fear sex, although it may just be played as a cartoon.

Cross-posted at Alyssa Rosenberg‘s joint.

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For me, one of the remarkable aspects of The Wrestler was how it showed Mickey Rourke’s character as feminized — his body as much the property of his audience as Marisa Tomei’s pole dancer. On this level, Natalie Portman’s vomiting ballerina Nina Sayres is a more familiar figure. Perhaps aware of this, Aronofsky goes to great lengths to show us just how unfamiliarized this body is becoming, using sly, shifting CGI to portray her creeping body horror.

Heightening the tragedy for Rourke’s wrestler was the way the movie dangled the possibility of human connection in front of him, either with his daughter or Tomei’s character. In Black Swan, it’s pretty clear from the beginning that Nina has nowhere to turn and no means of connecting with the compromised lifelines in front of her. She lives in a claustrophobic Manhattan apartment with a domineering mother. Her director regards it as a high priority to toy with her sexually. The film makes it pretty clear that both of these aspects of Nina’s life are in her favor as an artist. Mila Kunis as a sometime-fellow, sometime-rival dancer makes overtures of friendship, and while Nina can use her to rouse her dark urges from within her repressed shell, she can never spin together enough strands of connection to grow as an artist and a human.

I enjoyed Jason Bellamy‘s take on Black Swan’s themes of repression and sexuality. They are familiar territory covered with frightening, high-test surrealism. Again, though, sex as women’s main problem is well-trod ground. Black Swan is an engrossing, terrifying psychosexual thriller, but The Wrestler felt newer to me.

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…looks like Chicago.

(Click on the images for more.)

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Cryptic spoiler ahead. I just watched Let The Right One In and I think its innovation to the vampire canon is this: vampires, it turns out, are born, not made.

One character gets bitten by the vampire and feels the lust for blood gurgle up inside. Another character longs for retribution against bullies and learns a valuable lesson in how to stand up to them.

Not at all obvious, from those descriptions, which one is ready by the film’s end for a long life of murder.

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