Scott Pilgrim & Kick-Ass Vs. The Movies

I have a deep love of the Scott Pilgrim books; it's actually one of the few stories I've read that I would love to musicalize. Of course, there was no way I'd get the rights to that even if there weren't a movie coming out, so instead I've had to content myself with re-reading the books every few months and daydreaming of the Scott Pilgrim tour of Toronto I will embark upon the next time I'm back there. (I've been in love with Toronto since I was there for barely 24 hours a year and a half ago, and Scott Pilgrim has only made it worse.)

But there IS a movie, and its official trailer was recently released and it looks awesome. There's so much going on in those books: there's the beautiful, genuine way the characters and their relationships are written; the way Bryan Lee O'Malley celebrates Toronto while establishing the city as a character; the fantastic yet natural use of video game and classic comic book conventions; the expert and delicate balance of Scott's straightforward mission (to defeat Ramona's 7 evil exes) with his more subtle mental journey and, similarly, with Ramona's own internal arc.

I was concerned that a lot of those things would get lost in a movie, causing it to end up as yet another indie romance. This trailer, however, has me confident that the movie won't disappoint. It's not always wise to judge a movie by its trailer, but there are so many little things in this one (such as the comic-book style sound effects and the integration of the video game elements) that to me are enough to show that the movie has got it right. The tone seems perfect; it's taking itself seriously, in that those weirder aspects aren't cartoonish and are taken in stride, but it's not by any means a heavy film, and watching the trailer is fun.

I don't want to get my hopes up, but it seems like the movie does full justice to one of my favorite series. I can't wait to see for myself.



I am also extremely excited/apprehensive about the Kick-Ass movie, for somewhat similar reasons. I love graphic violence in my comic books as much as the next person (...maybe a little more than the next person...I'm a big fan of Warren Ellis and Garth Ennis, after all...), but for me, Kick-Ass is more about...well, kicking-ass. It's about the role comics in general and superheroes in particular play in our lives; it's about the consuming loneliness that drives a high school kid to put on a wetsuit and face off against mobsters, even after being beaten to a pulp. It's about hating who you are so much only a mask lets you be who you want to be.

I hope all that's in the film. Letting the awesome action sequences and the premise overshadow the pain at the root of the story would be really too bad, and a missed opportunity.

Regardless, I'm thrilled that there have been so many comic book movies lately, especially since lately some of them have veered away from bigger, more mainstream ones. I never would have thought Scott Pilgrim or Kick-Ass would be adapted to film, so to have them both coming out so close to each other makes it even more amazing. And, like with musicals, anything that gets people to read comics is fine by me--even if it's not perfect.

Too Much Heaven On Their Minds

I didn't grow up with musical theatre, which is another post in itself, and my love for theatre came gradually, with a few show pushing me along until a weekend in New York six and a half years ago tipped the balance. The first musical I discovered on my own that I actually liked was JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR when I was in seventh grade.

My parents, who are neither into musicals nor into rock music, somehow had the concept album of JCS on record. I don't know which of them had bought it in the early 1970s--both being practicing Catholics, it could have been either of them, since I assume the title is what caught their attention--but it was there in the study amongst my dad's folk music records. Back then, my sisters shared a room and we kept our one computer in the study, so I that's where I wrote all my middle school and high school papers. We had dial-up until the early 2000s (late high school for me), but even though the internet wasn't really a distraction back then, music certainly was. There was a whole stereo system up there (and still is, when that room was converted to a bedroom for one of my sisters), complete with CD, cassette, and record player, so I used to search through my dad's CDs and records when I wanted new writing music. In seventh grade, I was starting to get into rock and heavy metal, so I would look through his record collection in hopes of finding an album by The Doors or Jimi Hendrix. Instead, I found an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.

I don't remember why I tried listening to it--probably because of the title, since I certainly hadn't heard anything about it before--but when I did, I was floored. The only musicals I had heard up to that point were movies of a few Rodgers and Hammerstein (which were all right, but felt stuffy and unrelatable...except for THE SOUND OF MUSIC), HELLO, DOLLY (which I hated), Muppet movies, and Disney movies. JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR sounded nothing like any of those movies. It was rock music--early '70s rock, but rock nonetheless--and it put the gospels, which I had been reading my whole life, in an entirely new context. "Heaven On Their Minds" quickly became one of my favorite songs for how it concisely and beautifully depicted Judas as someone who did love Jesus, but whose concern for the bigger picture and persistence in viewing Him as simply another radical led to that Thursday night in the garden. I loved how it focused on Mary Magdalene and Simon Peter, two figures I'd always particularly liked for their sheer humanity. While I still don't really like "Gethsemane," I loved how the song gave voice to Jesus' doubt and reluctance to follow through with His crucifixation. And I loved how so many of the lyrics were directly from the Bible.

I was obsessed with that album, listening to it over and over every time I had to write a paper for school. I soon discovered that we had the movie version on VHS, which I loved for how deliciously campy it was. And for Carl Anderson's incredible performance as Judas (who honestly gets the best songs--I mean, "Heaven On Their Minds?" "Damned For All Time/Blood Money?" Seriously). Years later, when I was a freshman in college, I saw the tour with Carl Anderson a few months before he died. Seeing my favorite Judas in my first time seeing that show staged during Holy Week was tremendous. By that point, I'd also gotten the 1996 recording (with Zubin Varla, who I loved a Judas and would later love as Freddie in CHESS), and knew all the lyric differences between the tour, the '96 recording, the concept album, and the movie.

I don't listen to JCS that often, but I do listen to it every year during Holy Week, when I also usually watch the movie (and the video of the 2000 production). I have probably six recordings of JCS (my favorites are the '96 one for its completeness and for Zubin, and the Australian cast recording for its amazing, rocked out arrangements), which I cycle through during that week.

I'm much more of a Sondheim/LaChiusa fan now than a Lloyd Webber one (though there are some shows of his I love), but "Heaven On Their Minds" is still one of my favorite theatre songs--and once I started writing theatre myself, I realized just how complex that song really is. For one thing, there's no real hook. The structure is verse intro/AABAA/abbreviated A, but the As don't all share the same phrase--the same lyrical place to rest. Most, but not all the A sections start with "Listen, Jesus," but musically that's not a hook; it moves too fast and is too unresolved. That's pretty unusual, but it makes perfect sense given Judas' character and the tension he feels between his loyalty to Jesus and his deep concern that Jesus is attracting the wrong kind of attention. "I Don't Know How To Love Him" is a much more standard AABA song structurally and lyrically, with the hook in the first line of each A.

The other weird thing about "Heaven On Their Minds" (which is AWESOME) is the time signature. Most rock and pop music is in 4/4 (four beats per measure, with a quarter note getting one beat). Musical theatre songs are much more varied; A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC is largely in 3/4, for instance. But "Heaven On Their Minds" is in 7/8--seven beats per measure, with an eighth note getting one beat. Writing lyrics to a song in 7/8 is a little crazy; I can't imagine what learning a song in that time signature must be like.

And of course, there's a lot going on lyrically, as Judas switches from addressing Jesus directly to talking about him ("Table, chair and oaken chest/Would have suited Jesus best"). Judas moves from expressing his fear that if the other apostles knew Jesus really was just a normal guy, not the Son of God, they'd turn on him, to his concern that the Roman authorities will think Jesus is a revolutionary and crack down on them. It's an honest, harried message that, though misguided, is clearly well-intentioned. Which is probably the only way you can introduce Judas, whose name has became to basically mean "traitor" over the past two thousand or so years.

So today and tomorrow, I'll be listening to a lot of JCS, and probably watching the movie. It wasn't the show that addicted me to theatre, but it cracked open the genre for me, so listening to it (in addition to having Easter significance) reminds me who I write theatre for: those kids growing up without really knowing what theatre is. If one of my shows can do for someone what JCS did for me, I'd know I'd done my job.

To Life

Friday night, Linda and I saw What If? at La MaMa, a show that takes musical theatre songs and reinterprets them. I'd never seen anything there before, which is weird because it's practically around the corner from where I went to grad school and I walked by there a zillion times, so right away I was excited to see the space. The show was in their smaller space, and I liked it a lot. It had this weird kind of part warehouse, part barn feel to it that I thought was really interesting, and it was kind of exciting to think about what kinds of shows would really work there.

You can read about the show overall at Linda's blog; I just want to talk about how moving I found their version of "L'Chaim" from FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, which was done in a slow, Cuban style.

I'm probably the only Brandeis alum who will say this, but I'm not much of a FIDDLER person. I think the book is a lot stronger than the score, but overall the show doesn't really speak to me. I absolutely loved the recent revival, though--I thought David Leveaux's staging was brilliant, and it was the first time I felt anything emotional from the material. I actually became mildly obsessed with what I thought the show's potential was (not in a pretentious way!), so much so that I even wrote a play adaptation of it, which I set in a Korean-American family living in Vermont soon after 9/11.

So there's something about FIDDLER that touches me, but the material alone doesn't really bring it out. And "L'Chaim" is one of my least favorite songs from that show, right there with "Wonder of Wonders, Miracle of Miracles." The arrangement I heard Friday night, however, was amazing. They played it once through without vocals, then again with two singers, and listening to the song slowed down significantly--especially without vocals--allowed me to focus on the music in a way I never had before. I was surprised by how beautiful the melody became at that tempo; the song felt like a prayer, rather than a rousing celebration as it is originally. There's some really cool musical things going on that I hadn't noticed, too. The melody in the hook, for example, does this really awesome, kind of unexpected thing where it goes a little flat (I think, I'm not a composer!), and it's so satisfying. I think its corresponding lyric is "L'Chaim, to life." I think it's actually the notes "L'Chaim" sits on that I really love.

Hearing the song in that style also created such a vivid scene for me. As much as I enjoyed the other reinterpretations, none of them conjured up a whole story the way this version of "L'Chaim" did for me. I felt like I understood the character singing and that I was there, in some kind of factory in Cuba, listening to someone trying to inspire a crowd by paying homage to God. It was honest and simple and beautiful, and I know I'll never hear that song the same way again.

Let Me Rest In Peace

I watched the Buffy musical episode, "Once More With Feeling," the other day to write this piece on it for work. A college roommate of mine was a huge fan of the show, so I've seen a few episodes (including this one), but that was easily six or seven years ago. I've never been able to get into the show, even though everyone tells me I'd love it and thinks I'm insane because I don't.

It's hard to evaluate an episode from such a late season when you don't watch the show, but even from a musical theatre standpoint, I didn't like the episode. I found it really boring--there were a LOT of ballads, which made the episode drag for me, and I found most of the lyrics heightened to the point of being ridiculous, especially in Buffy's big number at the end ("Something To Sing About," I think it's called). I don't mind that the vast majority of numbers are about character, rather than plot--especially since the revelations in those songs feature hugely in the storyline overall--but those songs didn't tell me anything about who those characters are, except that Spike and Buffy are angsty. The songwriting in Dr. Horrible, which I'll write about later, is much better in my opinion.

I don't think the episode is bad; I say a lot of good things about it in my article. I just don't see what's so great about it, and I certainly don't think it's the best musical episode ever. A lot of my dislike may simply stem from my dislike of Buffy overall. The show is too precious, takes itself too seriously, and tries too hard to be funny and weird for my taste. I know this is just a personal preference thing; again, I know a ton of people who love Buffy. It's also possible that I just don't like Joss Whedon's TV shows, since I couldn't make it through the Firefly pilot.

(Although I hear the show gets better, and if I judged all shows by pilots, I wouldn't like True Blood or Battlestar Galactica.) I like Dr. Horrible a lot, though, and as I've mentioned before, I LOVE Joss Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men, so I'm willing to say that my taste is just weird and leave it at that.

Why I Don't Understand Movie Awards

I didn't grow up watching movies, so I just don't think to see movies the way most people do. I also find it hard to sit through movies when I watch them at home--I get distracted really easily, and it's hard for me to sit still for more than an hour at a time unless I'm writing. It's weird; I have no problem seeing movies in the theatre (although again, I don't that often) or seeing shows, and I can watch a lot of T.V. episodes back to back. I think I'm suited more to T.V. than to movies in general (although I don't watch very many shows), but that's another post.

So because I'm not really into movies, I've never been into the Academy Awards--or any awards, really, other than the Tonys. It seems weird to me; I don't understand how you can compare EVERY SINGLE MOVIE RELEASED IN ONE YEAR to each other when they can have totally different resources, intentions, styles, and techniques. Looking at this year's list of nominees, it really seems like the Oscars are about standard Hollywood films, with a few foreign and indie ones thrown in. It's hard for me to understand what the point is. But that's because I don't really watch movies and that whole world is very foreign to me, I guess.

I think a lot of why I find it kind of confusing is because I'm looking at it from a theatre perspective. The Tonys have their share of problems, but they look at a set number of shows: just the ones that opened on Broadway in that given year, which limits the number of shows enormously. It's definitely possible for everyone on the nominating committee to see every Broadway show, but there's no physical way anyone could see every movie ever released in one year. I mean...maybe you could...but there must be so many!

I also have a hard time understanding how you can compare like, an action film, a romantic comedy, and an animated film. It's true that musicals and plays can be very different from each other, but at least they have the same basic space and tools to work with. The script mattering more in theatre than in movies makes a difference, too. I honestly don't know what criteria people use to evaluate movies objectively. Direction, I guess...but I have a hard time understanding directing in terms of film, so I'm kind of at a loss with that, too.

My boyfriend is a huge movie nerd, and he tried to explain all this to me the other night. It must be so frustrating trying to explain stuff to me when I haven't seen 90% of movies that everyone else has seen...and when I don't understand how a movie can win Best Screenplay and Best Direction and not win Best Picture. It's a strange, fascinating world, and I'd like to understand more of it. Which means I need to watch more movies.

She'd Be Fabulous At The Tonys

YES. Lady Gaga has the kind of in-your-face theatricality that most theatre people find hard to resist--and it's exactly the kind of theatricality that musicals have a long history of embracing. Although I'm a lyricist, it's Lady Gaga's music and arresting images and choreography in her videos that grab me. There's something about her music and her image that makes me feel like it tells some kind of story, or that it can at least be used in a narrative sense. I've long been a proponent of artists in other genres working in musical theatre, and (especially) of musical theatre artists drawing from other art forms. I think everyone working in theatre, particularly writers, can learn a lot from someone like Lady Gaga.

Ultimately, it may just be that Lady Gaga understand spectacle and emotion and how to balance the two. I find the opening notes of "Bad Romance" just as exciting as the opening words of Sunday in the Park with George. They're as different as they could possibly be, but they both have story and emotion at their core. That doesn't always happen in pop music, but it's thrilling when it does. And if Lady Gaga ever wrote a musical, I'd be there every chance I got.

Be Italian

I know I'm very much a minority on this, but I really enjoyed the Nine movie. I thought the cast overall was incredibly strong, and I liked how they rearranged the song order, even though I really missed "The Bells of Saint Sebastian" and "Be On Your Own." There were things that weren't perfect--and maybe I'd feel differently if the musical were a favorite of mine--but on the whole I think it's worth seeing.

My biggest complaint is with the use of musical numbers being Guido fantasy sequences, like in the Chicago film. That worked well there because Roxie wants desperately to be a vaudeville star, and those songs are very vaudevillian anyway. That doesn't make as much sense for film director Guido, which makes the songs come off seeming kind of gimmicky. I would have preferred a lot more singing and for the songs to be really integrated book songs, the way they are in the show--I totally buy the world of Italian cinema being heightened and intense in that way.

But if the songs had to be more an expression of Guido's psyche, I would have liked to see them occur within the real world, not in their own limbo musical number space. During a naturalistic scene, we could suddenly go into Guido's head, seeing real life the way he sees a movie set. Maybe then the fantasy sequence could be Guido "directing" the character in question, and her song would be what Guido wants her to sing (the way it actually is in the movie), while it's clear that she feels otherwise. That would be a slightly different movie, but I think that structure would get at Guido's particular issues more than using Chicago's structure did.