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ONE HAND CLAPPING

By Chris Ryall

August 11, 2003

GETTING SOME PLAY, BOY
In which Chris Ryall gawks at C-listers at the Playboy Mansion, drinks down the indie film THE FIVE STAGES OF BEER, watches FREDDY and JASON go at it and announces some recent additions to the Web site.

There is no way to maintain journalistic objectivity when you go to the Playboy Mansion. Luckily, since this column is never used for “objectivity” in place of “subjectivity,” I wasn’t overly burdened by that thought at a recent trip to the Mansion.

This was actually my second trip to that storied old place in Beverly Hills (Hef and I actually live pretty close and yet WORLDS apart). The first time, a fete for Marilyn Monroe’s 75th anniversary (she wasn’t there) was pretty tame, but talking to folks like George Lucas made that one memorable (as did the regulars there, of course).

This time, the occasion was a night of boxing matches on the eve of the Espy Awards. I don’t know if they do regular “fight nights” at the Mansion or if it was scheduled as counter-programming for the MLB All-Star Game or just as a decent event to attract all the athletes in town for the awards show the next night. Doesn’t much matter, I guess.

As we did last time, we park at UCLA and are shuttled over to the place. The set-up was basically the same as last time (I think they could throw parties at the Mansion blindfolded at this point) – bar to the right, just off the pool. Being the first thing you see when you walk in, you let Hef buy you a drink, of course.

The thing about parties at the Playboy Mansion is, even if they’re not the most exciting events (honestly, the LA Film Festival party a couple weeks ago was more “fun” in terms of actual fun, but just being at this grand olde manse raises its cool factor beyond just about any other place or party. I mean, there we were, me and the girlfriend, at a party at the Playboy Mansion. It’s tough to not be taken in by that idea alone.

These parties always seem to threaten sensory overload (well, of the two I’ve been to, I mean) – there’s celebrities milling around, there’s bars and food stations and here there was a boxing ring and Playboy bunnies (in full old-fashioned Bunny regalia) and more, and you realize that once you start scanning the crowd and trying to take it all in, it can overwhelm you. So instead, we eased into it and took a walk down the stone path that leads through the grounds (it’s a truly amazing piece of real estate, making the difference between a huge house and a “mansion” very clear in your head). The path, patrolled by wandering peacocks and other birds, leads to an array of monkey cages. (Note: I have no idea what kind of monkeys they are, but they’re squirrel-sized and hop around like crazy—they’ll also take grapes out of your hands and…wait, why am I spending so much time on the monkeys? Back to the party.

Now we felt like we could stand around and people-watch. Of course, I have to say that most NFL players are tough to recognize. Beyond the big interviewees like Keyshawn Johnson, who knows what most guys look like without their helmets? But Keyshawn had a lot of guys with him, anyway, all with builds and clothing commensurate with today’s NFL players. I did see Joe Theisman (an interesting shade of orange) standing nearby, but the sighting that really caught my eye was Kato Kaelin. Might have been his ridiculous frosted hair or his prancing about every time a woman paid attention to him (and too many were, unfortunately. Who ever heard of sleeping on someone’s couch as being a direct route to getting laid by Playmates?). Yeah, Kato Kaelin—He’s a Celebrity…get him out of here.

On par with Kato, “Nat” from 90210 was holding court with a young woman most of the night. Yeah, that’s right, Joe E. Tata, another one of those names that you have no good reason for knowing and desperately want out of your head. (I know most of you are saying “who?!?” The old Peach Pit guy, the glorified extra who would give Donna an extra scoop of advice or old-man-creepy TLC whenever she was down (weekly).

The last Mansion party came and went without a James Caan sighting, so it made me wonder just how different things were now compared to the DNA-stained `60s parties. But luckily, here he was, wearing a pair of boxing gloves (?) and mock-sparring with Hef.

Hef. I know we’d all like to find fault with the guy, or make the Viagra jokes, or say that he must be close to death right now and doesn’t appreciate all the young blondes who follow him around like pilot fish attached to a dottering old whale, but…the man is still Hef. He sat front and center for the fights, with both hands on a different thigh all night long. See, when the girls went to the bathroom or whatever, they just kept rotating seats, so a different young thigh got the Master’s hand on it. All night long. He looked great for his age, smiling and vibrant. Ponce de Leon, you were looking for the wrong thing, my friend. One man has discovered the key to youth, and it ain’t a fountain.

The fights themselves were varying degrees of good, but really, who cares? I didn’t know who was supposed to be fighting, but just being up front near the ring, hearing the blows and seeing the crusty old trainer with the big Q-tips in his mouth and the spit bucket…it was like watching Mickey come to life…was worth watching. And, of course, you’ll never see better ring-card girls than at the Playboy Mansion.

We said hello to ring announced Michael Buffer, whose skin has been polished and colored into an orangey-tan suede, but still, hearing “Let’s get ready to rumblllllllle” in person gives a pretty good charge.

I walked by Gary Payton, probably hours from making his signing with the Lakers official. He stood back from the real action but had a nice smile on his face the entire time. Gave him a little nod, he nodded back, and there was no doubt that the pay cut he took to get out of Milwaukee was worth every lost penny.

Again, it was a pretty debauchery-free party, but I’m pretty sure that all went on after us plebians left. Or it carried back to the Mondrian Hotel, where the bulk of the athletes seemed to be staying (their shuttle bus looked fit to explode, while ours back to UCLA was very tame and quiet).

A short bus ride home and then we were doing more prep for the Comicon. Which somehow never felt so wrong…

The Five Stages of Beer

Dances With Films is a six-year-old film festival designed to help struggling filmmakers the world over. Sure, there are numerous other festivals that profess to do the same, but many have taken on sponsorship deals with studios or have other business- or political-minded interests driving them. DWF bills themself as the only festival suplying the true independents. While I'm sure there are numerous other fests that would contest this, the fact is that this festival celebrates projects that were made comletely independently of and without assistance from Hollywood. They only accept sumbissions, they never "invite" anyone, and they don't care that these movies have no "name" above the title. Which sounds admirable to me. Or maybe I'm just inclined to like the idea of the festival because they got a cease-and-desist order from Orion over the similarities in their festival name and the Costner pic DANCES WITH WOLVES (our own cease-and-desist from KFC's parent corporation over the use of the bucket logo still brings a smile).

At any rate, the festival ran from July 25 through July 31. I got an invite from the makers of the closing-night movie to check out their flick, THE FIVE STAGES OF BEER. First, the official press release on the film:

FIRST-TIME FILMAKERS SHOOT DIRECT TO HARD DRIVE, GET ACCEPTED TO LOS ANGELES FILM FESTIVAL
The Five Stages of Beer is Small On Budget, Big On Technology

SANTA MONICA, CA July 28, 2003 - Working with virtually no budget and only nine days of shooting for a feature-length movie, Binary Film has seen their efforts rewarded as their project, The Five Stages of Beer, is chosen as an Official Selection of the DancesWithFilms Film Festival (DWF).

Self-funded, The Five Stages of Beer was shot digitally "direct to hard drive" and had only six weeks of pre-production time, nine days of shooting and was financed on what can be honestly called a micro budget. The film premiers at 7:15 pm on July 31 at the Laemmle's Santa Monica theater, and will be immediately followed by a question and answer session with the filmmakers.

"We're very excited about being selected for the DancesWithFilms Festival," said Brian Mix, the film's co-writer and director. "We all worked very hard to bring this project to light, and are honored to have been selected for our efforts."

Binary Film's The Five Stages of Beer chronicles the romantic trials and tribulations of Dennis, a man trying to get back on his feet after his wife leaves him for a clown...literally! With the help of his best friend Mick and the patrons of his local watering hole, Dennis embarks on what is sometimes a disastrous, but in the end telling, foray into the dating scene and life.

Dennis arrives home and finds his wife has left him. Which isn't all that different an opening for a movie, except for the fact of whom she left him for: a clown. When your life leaves you for a clown, an honest-to-goodness clown, you don't bother with therapy or alone time or hard work. No, you head to a bar. If ever there was a reason beer was invented...

Luckily, Dennis's best friend Mick owns a bar, so he can be amongst friends as he drowns his sorrows. He talks to Sunny, the bartender, and like all good bartenders, she's wiser than her clientele. She's seen enough people go through break-ups (maybe not to clowns, but...) so she knows that, essentially, there are Five Stages (of Beer) that everyone has to go through:

Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. And with each of these, she assigns a different beer (this movie has changed the way I look at myself and my love of Guinness). If only Dennis can survive the various other beers, raspberry wheat (Denial), Guinness (Anger), Bargaining, which I'm blanking on and light beer (Depression) and survive to that Budweiser (Acceptance).

Mick is Dennis' Drinking Buddy as well as the bar owner. True to that station, he recommends Dennis adopt his "chick-of-the-week" lifestyle, which of course goes nowhere if your heads not in the game, and Dennis's isn't. But eventually he lands a date with a beautiful firefighter (it's a movie) named Audrey while Mick hooks up with the singer in his bar band. They go out. Mick, true to form, makes his lifestyle work for him. Dennis, meanwhile, pulls a Favreau-in-SWINGERS and talks about his ex.

At the post-game recap at the bar the next day, Dennis gets suitably mocked for his inability to adopt this lifestyle and, you know, close the deal. He gets mocked by everyone but Staci, the bar-band singer, who finds it charming. She and Audrey pull the swap (unbeknownst to each other, of course) and end up heading out on dates with each other's guys. Dennis's date ends as successfully as Mick's did previously, and Mick has a Dennis sort of night.

Things seem to be going okay for Dennis, right? Comeuppance time. Talking to his ex-wife, he refers to Staci as a bimbo (he actually yells something worse, in the middle of the bar, just as Staci stops singing a song she wrote for Dennis) and things head south for him again. This time, a beer or glass of vodka doesn't quite quell his anguish. Which leads to, of course...the bender. This movie doesn't just express the five stages everyone goes through, it basically mirrors events in just about every guy's life. Minus the actual clown in my case, that is.

Dennis proves himself more and more deserving of having his wife leave him for clown with one bad move after another. Even as it becomes clear that he's now living the "chick-a-week" lifestyle, it's even more apparent that he sucks at it. Meanwhile, Mick's single-guy mojo, passed on to Dennis, has left him and now he's fallen for Audrey. All of their actions are running counter to what the bartender Sunny said they'd be. But she also says that a leopard can't change its spots, and the guys tend to believe that, too.

When Mark Yturralde, the movie's writer/producer, and Brian Mix, the writer/director, originally told me about the movie, they said it was basically "CLERKS in a bar." And it has a CLERKS feel, mostly in the raw performances of untrained actors (this is a good thing, by the way--more on that soon). It also has somewhat of a SWINGERS feel (characters adhere to a certain period of time before you can make an apologetic phone call).

After the movie was over, the co-writers fielded questions from the audience. I asked about the movie being shot in sequence, because it really felt like the actors came into their own as the film progressed. It turns out that, yes, the movie was shot as much in sequence as possible. But it was also shot in NINE days total. So regardless of the order of scenes, that's not a lot of time for the actors to truly grow into their characters. Which makes it all a bit more impressive. The opening scenes have the rawness of CLERKS, where you realize this is the first movie for some guys who might not be as polished as they're eventually going to be (contrast Mewes in CLERKS and JAY & BOB to see what I mean). Around the time Dennis and Mick head out on their first dates with Staci and Audrey is when it all just sort of clicked for me. That scene, which kept checking in on both dates, used some nicely contrasting music and pantomimes to show the progress of each.

The performers felt "right" in their respective roles. Frank Lauria, who played Dennis, never looks comfortable being the "chick-a-week" guy, nor should he. And Sam Upton's Mick (who looks like SAY ANYTHING-era John Cusack) has the same easygoing charm of SWINGERS-era Vince Vaughn. Staci, played by Stacy-with-a-"y" Burnham, was very cute in the movie (and even moreso in person) and played vulnerability as a charming trait when sometimes it can feel like too high-maintenance. Around the bar scenes, Sunny the bartender (Mau Barclay) and especially Buck (Vince Cuseo) dole out the matchbook wisdom. Buck, an older guy than the rest of the cast, is kind of the "Whimpy" of the piece, always jockeying for his next free beer but also delivering some of the movie's funniest lines.

Brian Mix, the director, admitted that they shot anywhere from 14-18 pages of script every single day for the nine days. The movie, shot on digital and transferred straight to hard drive for editing, is impressive when you know how quickly it all came together. It's a fun if trifling movie regardless of the duration of the shoot, the kind of film that jokes about relationships and interaction between men and women and yet still makes you think, "hmm, good point." But just the sheer force of will that got this movie done so quickly and competently makes you hope it succeeds even more. The thing with small little releases like this is, it always makes you wonder what else the filmmakers have to say. Like, a running commentary on relationships is great -- after all, "write what you know" -- but it does make you wonder what else is on their minds. The biggest impression you get from this Dances With Films festival is that the people involved really love movies. Hopefully people as passionate as this continue to make more movies so we can see these voices develop.

More information, images and even storyboards from The Five Stages of Beer are available at www.5SOB.com. Visit the Dances With Films Web site here.

Twin Killings

I've always been a Jason guy. The first two FRIDAY THE 13TH movies were among the first horror movies I remember seeing--in fact, the graphic violence and full-frontal nudity of F13 PART 2 made that movie just about perfect to my preteen mind. So when I went to see FREDDY VS. JASON last week, I was totally pulling for the little hockey mask-wearing Voorhees boy to dice up child-killer Kreuger. Only...something happened. Ten minutes in, I switched my loyalties.

Everyone can admit that even before SCREAM, the FRIDAY, and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, movies had grown old and tired. They were hair bands in a grunge society, relics from the `80s that just have had nothing new to say for years. Horror movies themselves have changed. And yet...for years, ever since New Line acquired the F13 movies, fan buzz for a team-up between these two characters has been strong. There've been numerous scripts reviewed, stops and starts and controversies over the casting of someone else in Kane Hodder's "Jason" shoes. But all that aside, the movie is finally upon us (it opens on Friday). And...?

I love the feeling the opening burst of Freddy's, and then Jason's, music gives you. Of course, it also gets you to expect the movie to recapture that same feeling, which of course it can't. But this burst of nostalgia is much more effective at reminding you why these old movies were so much fun than, say, the STAR WARS prequels have. The movie handles things properly in that it realizes that these characters really aren't threatening to audiences any more. The whole movie treads a fine line between self-mockery and self-awareness.

While it's harder to take the title characters too seriously, you are there to see them do what they do. And luckily, cheering for a child murderer and a victimized hockey mask-wearing serial killer is made easier by the fact that all the characters surrounding them are pretty much designed as nothing but fodder for their respective blades. Pretty much every character in the movie spouts off sub-SCREAM dialogue and is just asking for a machete (or finger claws) in the gullet. In fact, whenever any character did buy it in some gruesome way, the audience cheered. The movie, given a rather simple plot, follows the easy conventions of the old movies on which it is based--the girls all have huge boobs, the guys all have bad attitudes...it really didn't matter who survived until the end, they were all pretty much idiots.

Jeff Wells' column last week talked about the fact that the behind-the-scenes struggles to get this movie going had gone on for so long that it just got to be time to do the actual movie, good script or no. And the script does feel like a retread of every other horror movie. But so what? Anything else involving these two characters teaming up would have been over-acheiving. We got to see 1428 Elm Street, we got to see into Jason's dreams and we got a climactic fight at Camp Crystal Lake. That was really all I wanted out of this movie. And in between those things, we got some pretty violent murders, too. Violent murders, nudity...ahhh, it's like the mid-80s all over again, if only for a little while.

As for the title characters, they were also handled fine--Freddy was comical and with more than a hint of menace, like in the old days. Jason...somehow seemed a little off, but then again, so did the last few Jason movies. I mean, you might laugh at Jason and his hockey mask after 20+ years of seeing him die and come back ad nauseum, but there's still something to seeing a spooked kid discover an open back door in a darkened house blowing leaves inside to give you those old chills all over again.

The movie does go too far, of course, in its insipid characters, with a complete "Jay" (Mewes) knock-off. Of course there's a teen stoner who seems blase about what's going on around him and makes stupid and crude comments while getting high, but throwing a beanie on him and giving him long, dirty blonde hair and even a Jay-like delivery? Wow, was I hoping he'd get axed soon (it happens but not soon enough...I fully expected him to shout "Snoogans!" as he was dying).

At any rate, the movie gets Freddy out of Hell, has him bring Jason back to life as his puppet to remind the people of Elm Street about his existence and then have to take on Jason, in his dreams and out, when the puppetmaster loses control of his puppet. There's a brawl between the two characters in Jason's head and then the finale at Camp Crystal Lake that should satisfy fans of either character.

Robert Englund is, of course, the star of the show. I remember Freddy as becoming a bit of a joke in his last few movies, but here, he comes close to recapturing the old vim and murderous vigor he had in flicks like DREAM WARRIORS. Like I say, ten minutes in and he had me switching loyalties. FREDDY VS. JASON isn't a great flick by any means, but aside from too humorous turns in some places--for the most part, the idiocy and callousness of the teen characters is welcome and funny until people like "Jay" push it too far--the movie is much better than expected. It's funny, violent and entirely reminiscent of the best parts of both of the old movie series. But see it on opening weekend if at all possible--this is definitely a flick that needs to be shared with a rambunctious audience.

In other news, I just wanted to rave about the new KILLING JOKE CD. Released on August 5th, it's good, hard and politcally minded. I admit I've never really listened to KILLING JOKE before, and it took Dave Grohl drumming on this new disc to even get me interested in hearing it, but man, is it refreshing. The band, which blends a driving punk beat with lyrics that protest corporations, government and the erosion of personal freedom, reminds me of the last BAD RELIGION disc--reformed punks return after a lengthy hiatus older and no less angry--but much harder and aggressive. Grohl's power drumming fits the band's sound perfectly, too--as good a frontman as he is with the FOOs, he's really only completely free when he's pounding the skins. Jaz Coleman and orginal members Geordie and Youth sound like age has only made them angrier about the state of the world, not any slower or calmer. So while I've been spinning THE MARS VOLTA most often lately, I have to say, this JOKE disc is gonna be fighting it for space. Kind of like Freddy and Jason but without the big-breasted teens.

Site Business

Well, we've rolled a few new things the last week or so, and I'd just like to mention them to people who might not have caught up with everything here.