14 Reasons You Don't Want To See This Stupid "Endless Love" Movie On Stupid Valentine's Day

So for whatever reason I saw a preview of this movie Endless Love that is coming out today, on Valentine's Day 2014. I want to encourage you all, if you have plans to see it tonight, to abort those plans. Romantically speaking, you'd be better off re-watching Silver Linings Playbook. Spoiler alert.

1. It steals everything that can be stolen from the far-superior teen romance film Say Anything, mainly the plot.

There's a girl with good grades who doesn't have any friends. A dude from the wrong side of the tracks has a crush on her. Despite his friends' warnings, he pursues her. There's a wild graduation party which validates her and makes her feel one with the normal kids. He has dinner with the family and the dad interrogates him awkwardly. Her dad has a dark secret. The big problem is she is going away to a fancy school at the end of the summer. They eventually end up on a plane. The only plot beat that deviates from Say Anything at all is the part where a house catches fire, and the main characters are, unfortunately, not consumed by an inferno.

2. It steals actual dialogue from Say Anything.

Before they make love for the first time, it's raining or cold or something, and the gal says,"You're shaking." He replies, "Good shaking." This is basically exactly what they say in the car-consummation scene in Say Anything, except somehow in Cameron Crowe's film it conveyed a true moment of happiness, and in Endless Love 2014 it is just some crap that two idiots say before hooking up.

3. The screenplay was written by someone who has never loved anyone.

The movie is not even about love, exactly. It is much more about gender role definition via the Cosmo/Details magazine school of male/female fantasy ideals. The guy is handsome and tall; complicated without being intelligent; deferent but he punches anyone who disrespects his girl; good with cars. The girl is blonde and rich, and that's pretty much all we know about her. (We are asked to believe that she is smart because her father pulls strings to get her into medical school.)

4. The writer of the original novel doesn't like it.

Scott Spencer, author of the novel Endless Love (credited as the source material for this film as well as the 1981 Endless Love, starring Brooke Shields and Who Gives A Hoot) writes eloquently on what happens when Hollywood makes your book into two movies in The Paris Review.

5. It stars a British guy doing an American accent who has a black sidekick doing an Ebonic accent.

We know the hero's okay because his best friend is black and funny and is named "Mace." He also is a good singer and dancer and way more charismatic than the lead character. Somehow, Mace does not die. But neither does he truly live.

6. It is kind of white privilegey.

It is a white-privileged idea that love can include pursuing a girl to the point of stalking, and she will somehow interpret it as dedication. I mean, this also happens in Say Anything, but there it's more cute.

7. The music is terrible. 

The song "Endless Love" doesn't happen. "In Your Eyes" doesn't happen. Honestly I would've settled for a song from fucking Dawson's Creek.

8. It isn't enough about the two fathers. 

The only potentially interesting part of this flick is the conflict between the two fathers, played by Bruce Greenwood and Robert Patrick, a.k.a. Captain Pike vs. the T-1000. Here are two men, caught between the indignant stupidity of their children and their own personal grief, who must make hard decisions regarding the future of their families. You could make a good movie about that. Or you could make Endless Love.

9. The two lead actors are way too pretty.

They are that kind of pretty that is not even good-looking. They are like schematics for how to draw a person. After a while you kind of want to shoot them.

10. It gives you really bad advice for life.

Many films perpetrate the convenient idea that "you must fight for love, because love is all that matters." A good film makes you believe it. Looking at you, Slumdog Millionaire.

11. At one point there is a joke where the dad confuses Hulu for Uber.

It's cute until you realize that this will be the high point of witticism for the entire movie.

12. It will make you angry at women.

Because evidently all women want is a dull hunk of meat who will punch their dad.

13. It will make you angry at men.

Because apparently all men want is the bland rich girl they never talked to in high school.

14. Because, love.
Love is still important, as Michael Jackson said. ("Love, L-O-V-E.") Love deserves films like Say Anything and Wall-E and Punch-Drunk Love and Love Actually and Broadcast News. Love is a thing that happens between people, not Hollywood-composite perfect-hair androids. So, in the name of love, let Endless Love bomb.

20 Thoughts While Watching a Chinese Bootleg of The Avengers 37 Times Over the Weekend

1. The imperfections in Whedon's writing make his work even more wonderful in this soulless focus-grouped time. Some jokes are contrived, the Galaga reference is super-dated, and no one, even evil aliens, should use the actual phrase, "cowering wretches." But the glitches, to be sure, are human mistakes, not marketing miscalculations, and through them you can see the mind at work, a mind tasked with this inconceivable action/comedy/sci-fi/fantasy/origin/ensemble/mass appeal/fanboy problem of a story. And he clearly wants it to work.

2. Yeah, I'm watching a Chinese bootleg. So what, Marvel? I bought about 300 Avengers-related comics with cash money, back in the day when you were almost bankrupt, before you were a money-making juggernaut. I read those paper comics until they were falling apart at the binding, all so I could grow up to be a resource of Thanos information for my other friends who have real lives with girls and babies. I bought a single issue of A vs. X at ComicCon, just so I could feel one in my hand. So really, you can spot me the cost of one DVD.

3. Avengers could conceivably surpass Star Wars as the greatest nerd myth. And by myth I don't mean "something that Kari Byron busts." Star Wars reached a generation through a no-duh formula of heroic myth and archetypal characters within an exciting robust universe. Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter sort of have this, but are too stuck in sword and sorcery tropes to grab us with that freeing leap of imagination. The Avengers bring the Game of Throniness via Thor, but they also bring the sexy technology, modern-world intrigue, and most importantly, characters with rich, tactile histories, embedded in them by crafty writers over generations. (Harry Potter, expansive and voluminous though he is, was basically invented last Tuesday after a quick read through the Dungeons and Dragons Beginner's Manual. True fact.)

4. The relationship between Iron Man and Hulk is really cute. Savvy tweaking of the "Rich sexy guy coaches the loser egghead" bromance motif.

5. Scarlett Johansson does a very good job. She is with Maggie Q and Sigourney Weaver on a very short list of women actors who make you believe they're going into a fight with something at stake. (As opposed to say, Jennifer Garner, who aims a gun like she's deciding which latte to order.) Also nice is how Black Widow fights in a thigh-intensive style both Spider-y and Emma Peel-y. I can't say if she is speaking Russian well, but with that throaty voice she could sound good speaking Ewok. Leering aside, compare, for example, her part in that idiotic Island movie or even in Iron Man 2 with her tactically saucy work here; it's the difference between sexy and sexualized.

6. If the story is going to go on, they are gonna need a lot more out of Captain America. Cap is often kind of a dud on his own, and has always shined best as a guest star (since he is, at his most poignant, a kind of guest star in his own country). Hopefully before the next movie comes out, someone involved will read Daredevil #233, in which Cap shows up and is sullen and conflicted in an appealing Ryan Gosling-ish kind of way.

7. The Hulk is used to better effect here than in any Hulk iteration in Hulk history, a testament to Whedon's cleverness. Ruffalo's strained voice is a poem for every quiet man with a monster inside.

8. Thor...has always sucked, and within that limitation, Chris Hemsworth distinguishes himself just by maintaining the accent and gruffing out a few charming grunts and bellows. I mean, you do believe he is Thor, whatever Thor is.

9.  I like how Hawkeye spends a lot of time recovering his arrows, as if to mollify the funless people who will rightly point out that he shoots three thousand arrows out of his slim little Sharper Image quiver.

10. Iron Man is played by Downey Jr. with marvelous, uh, consistency. He's the Han Solo that could make the Supassing-Star-Wars thesis work. "Hey...it's me."

11. Whedon's sole weakness in his nerd storytelling skills is a penchant for generic mushy-faced alien/demons/villains that are underdesigned and no one cares about too much. We saw it in Buffy and in Astonishing X-Men (come on, we really needed to go to that whole planet with the skill-saw-fist guys?) It's fine here, since, as per Thanos, a lot of Avengers villains actually look like that.

12. That one big shot of zooming around the city, lingering on all the different Avengers fighting, is the greatest shot of the CGI-Replaces-Everything era. It's about as good as the Millennium Falcon flying through that swarm of TIE fighters in Return of the Jedi, which was the craziest shot of that SFX era.

13. Everyone, with the possible exception of Captain America (who, to be sure, is a medium actor in an unexciting role) gives a generous performance. Generous to us nerds. (Well, okay, Cap does make nerd boner with that "Got a suit?" line, but apart from that he's usually on the verge of exposing the invisible wires.) Downey Jr., Renner, and Johansson are all pretty big Hollywood people and have every reason to just put on the costume and phone it in, yet they all seem convincingly invested in, uh, saving the city from aliens. (If you need a template for "phoned in," meaning "functional but lifeless," see the performance of every actor in every X-Men film except for Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, and Ellen Page) A few false notes come from Samuel L. Jackson, who is probably just tired from being in a thousand movies.

14. They should have used the ubiquitous blue metal mesh from Spiderman and Superman's new outfits on Captain America, who actually wears chainmail in the comics, yet his movie outfit looks like it's made of felt or something. Weird.

15. It's classy, the festishy lingering in extreme close-up over the gear of the Avengers in the end credits. Someone definitely put a lot of work into making those practical props, and to both them and us gadget-heads, it's all important, the stitching on Cap's shield straps, the gears inside Hawkeye's arrowhead-dispenser, the shape of the cylinders on Black Widow's bracelets.

16. Whedon's appreciation for every movie that nerds like (from Star Trek to LOTR) maintains the movie at the perfect temperature of a little silly, but not stupefyingly stupid. That's all we want, Michael Bay, Brett Ratner, Zack Snyder. A movie that does not make us stupider.

17. On the other hand, as evident from small moments like Black Widow's innate terror at the threat of the Hulk emerging, or Iron Man's basic inability to shut up, Whedon is still clearly a WRITER, that is, is a guy who watches how people act in the real world. As opposed to a hack sheltered Ivy Leaguer who paraphrases other things that have made money. (This one thing is so important to the health of the art form that I will surely weep.)

18. Fanservicey references that I like: Star Wars, in the sound design for the Speeder Bike chase scene. For gamers: Ultimate Alliance fusion attack combo move with Cap and Iron Man. Bruce Banner wandering solo around in the countryside like the guy in the Hulk TV show used to do.

19. "Watchmen" could have been as satisfying as the Avengers if that Zack Snyder guy (who is now directing the ultimate unrelate-able stiff, Superman) knew one thing about human interaction (to be fair, he does know exactly one thing about the human eye's interaction with boobs and muscles). Marvel has done really well employing directors like Favreau and Branagh, who are actorly and interested in the human component of the craft. DC has been fucking up by using film-school types who are mainly interested in atmosphere (Snyder) and pretentious ideas (Nolan). Yeah, the Batman movies were good but they were like the movies we need, not the movies we deserve when we live to die to become the hero to our own legend of our fall from darkness and yadda yadda bridge explodes.

20. Larry Hama, a great comics writer, said at this year's ComicCon (re: G.I. Joe), "the fantasy is that Snake Eyes will come and get you." He was talking about camaraderie, which is the essential comic-book fantasy. It's not really about having unnatural power, which is just an extrapolation of every introvert's unexpressed id problem (dig deep into a nerd and you find that he does, in fact, already believe he has mutant powers, usually that of superior intelligence). The truly seductive fantasy is that you, an ordinary person, matter enough that someone with unnatural power will arrive and intervene in your time of disaster. (They have also built a few religions on this premise, I gather.) This is why we read superhero comics; to imagine that timely teammate, our ideal self projected, a friend who can fly to whereever you are.

What If People Died, a short comedy about love and death.

Here's a short film I made which is completely not a short film, it's actually kind of a longish video, but in the biz there's nothing to call it except "short film." If it was a book it'd be a novella. Originally conceived as a feature, but hella things happened along the way, and this is the version I'm rolling out with. It's the more-or-less final version, give or take some color correction and titles, at a youtube-friendly medium resolution.

It's about a buncha hipsters who die suddenly and then come back to life after three days like it was no big deal. Please enjoy....

WHAT IF PEOPLE DIED, PART 1


WHAT IF PEOPLE DIED, PART 2
What If People Died (Part 2) from dominic mah on Vimeo.

The Justice League Movie, if it were exactly like The Avengers Movie.

In honor of ComicCon 2012, here is an abridged screenplay for the Justice League movie, modeled entirely after The Avengers movie, because that seemed to work very well.

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA

a superhero team screenplay 

by dommah

EXT. DC UNIVERSE
Near Martian rocks, some MARTIANS plot. 

MARTIAN LEADER

We're going to attack Earth.

MARTIAN SOLDIER

Why?

MARTIAN LEADER

Ah, the H'ell of it. Give them something to do.

INT. BATCAVE
AMANDA WALLER recruits BATMAN.

AMANDA WALLER

Come join the team.

BATMAN

I'm sulky and complicated...my father....

AMANDA WALLER

Bitch, can you just get in the jet? I've got like six of these today.

The Avengers: A Brief Film Guide For Non-Nerds, Hipster Cineastes, and (Generally Speaking) Women (AMENDED)

A) I wrote a guide to the Avengers film for the You Offend Me You Offend My Family blog, aimed at viewers unfamiliar with the Avengers. In it, I forgot to mention one very important point of potential confusion.

THESE AVENGERS ARE NOT THE BRITISH AVENGERS FROM THE 60's TV SHOW, AND BLACK WIDOW IS NOT EMMA PEEL.

Uma Thurman as an Avenger and Scarlett Johansson as an Avenger. 

Although one could easily see how they'd get confused.

B) Read the rest of the guide here.

C) In theory my guide is a little less sexist than the similar "Girls' Guide" that Moviefone has here. (Also, it's more accurate.) Of course, many girls are Avengers fans. No informed person would claim otherwise. It's just safe to say that it's not most of them.

Diana Rigg as the original Emma Peel from the British spy show, '"The Avengers."
Like Black Widow, she was good at disabling foes with her pincer-like thighs.

Bambi vs. Godzilla II: Bambi's Revenge

INT. BAR - NIGHT

Godzilla and Bambi, talking in a bar.

GODZILLA: How's it going?

BAMBI: Why? What do you mean? Are you some kind of stalker? Don't you have anything to say? DON'T TRY TO HAVE SEX WITH ME! WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM?!?

GODZILLA: I'm lonely. And I'm an Asian monster.

BAMBI: Both those things are unattractive, demographically speaking.

Pause.

BAMBI (unsolicited): I feel really comfortable around you. For example, I've never told my boyfriend about the six months I spend in a Turkish prison. There were no daisies there, only rats. Have you ever eaten rats?

GODZILLA: Grrrraaargh.

BAMBI: Before you growl further, let me set down the ground rules: I want to subvert the oppressive gender roles that over the years have raised my defenses to this nigh-impenetrable level of apparent insanity.

GODZILLA: What if--

BAMBI: DON'T TALK!! It's NOT SEXY. God, why can't I find any good guys?

GODZILLA: I'm a very good guy. Why do you treat me like a monster when I'm always defending you and your city from the real monster threats? And then after the Ghidrah or Hedorah the Smog Monster situation is taken care of BY ME, it's back to, "Oh no, it's Godzilla, he'll destroy everything!"

BAMBI: You know you love it.

GODZILLA: Grrrraaargh.

BAMBI: Well, at least you're tall.

CUT TO:

Bambi Vs. Godzilla I:

talking about the Beatles is like talking about love

The Beatles came up in conversation twice on Valentine's Day, in two separate bars in two different non-datey social situations... I think because for better or for worse, the Beatles have sort of branded "Love" via the Cirque show and their million unmatchably excellent songs on the topic...so talking about their music is a kind of tangential way of talking about the uncomfortable subject itself with people with whom you aren't necessarily comfortable dropping the "L-bomb."

And then, OK, I've seen Yellow Submarine a thousand times, watched it today, it's one of my favorite movies, but I'd never seen this until twenty-six minutes ago:

Happy Lunar New Year, Mardi Gras, Valentine's Day, etc....

dommah's linked-up top 10 list of the 00's!

Not songs or films, but personal and public events of note:

2000. I left the coolest job in the world to move to LA and get into filmmaking. The ex-job was translation/adaptation editor for a startup comic company doing online English versions of Japanese comics. The whole day was thinking about the best transliteration of "sound of heart thumping" or "sound of head smashing into pavement." Here's the first book of one of the cool titles we did, Tomie by Junji Ito. It really was an excellent gig, but oh well, following dreams, all that, and anyway that company folded with the burst of the dotcom bubble.

2001. Around 9/11, I got a new job as a professional card player and learned about a whole new world of scum and villainry, resulting in some of my more popular blog rants. Oh, and 9/11 happened. That seems like it should be on the list...

2002. I have no notes on this year. I think I spent most of it hanging out with my girlfriend. Girlfriends can be great in that they keep you from knowing what's going on in the rest of the world. Seriously, if there was a nuclear explosion this year, I've forgot about it, 'cause we were probably deciding which Indian restaurant to go to.

2003. There was a special recall election that made Arnold Schwarzenegger the governor of California. I still have difficulty believing that happened.

10 More Things That Seriously Totally Happened This Decade And Now You're Like Over It: Friendster, Facebook, the poker fad, the Tsunami in Thailand, Hurricane Katrina, Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, Bush & his Oil Buddies invade Iraq for why?, same-sex marriages, Ipods, text messages. I just want to say that again 'cos it's funny: TEXT MESSAGES.

2004. I shot an independent science-fiction movie and had a run-in with the Department of Home Security. The short version is: never ever park your unmarked grip truck next to a government property during the Age of Terror, even if you have a filming permit.

2005. The last Star Wars movie came out this year. That was a big deal just because it threw into sharp focus that being 30 was gonna be a lot less fun than being 5. My review here.

10 Best Films of the Decade: Brick, Half Nelson, Iron Man, The Savages, Macross Frontier, Michael Jackson's This Is It, Day Night Day Night, 40-Year Old Virgin, Donnie Darko, Primer. (OK, Macross Frontier isn't quite a movie, but there is a feature version released in Japan, so by a technicality.)

2006. I can't remember much of this year except there was a lot of pining and casino douchebags. Also, somehow this year I got the brilliant idea to buy a condo on an adjustable-rate loan. I spend much of this year and the next sweating through attacks of cold panic and depression.

2007. The Warriors won a playoff series. I mean, if you remember how much the Mavericks killed everyone that year, and how not very good the Warriors generally are, that was pretty awesome.


2008. It's hard to pick out of all the important stuff from this year (getting out of the ill-advised condo, script-doctoring gig, leaving the Bicycle Club, the Olympics in Beijing...) but I think the best thing was we got Obama, and more importantly, got rid of George Bush and the GOP-run Congress. To all the Obama-haters...look, the Justice League couldn't undo all the Bush-era evil shit in a year. The Bush people were titanically evil and lame. I mean, really, everything they did was evil. They couldn't even go on a hunting vacation without shooting a friend with a rifle, that's how dedicated they were to evil. The world is a much better place now.

2009. Newly laid off by jerkoff investor-employers from casino job, I complete my profile as an Economic Collapse Anecdote: bought crappy home, lost crappy home, lost job, check all. But, just in time, the screenwriting projects picks up. I write some scripts I'm very excited about, one of which won a few nice awards from Tribeca and Sundance. Life changes for the better, if not the richer.

2010.  My big resolutions are to make my movie (you can help!), develop my Asian-casino-action screenplay, keep pushing on the "Look For Water" movie, eat more green vegetables, get a better pillow, and watch every Natalie Tran video in existence. As the guy says in the movie, something wonderful is gonna happen.

adaptation

So the day after I mused about getting stuck with the Harlequin-romance-novel era of movie adaptations, it comes out that they just gave all 150,000 books in the Sweet Valley High series to Diablo Cody. Ha.

I remember the Sweet Valley High books. I wouldn't feel one twinge of anything if they were made into movies. I know a few girls who might.

ALL the American Anime Adaptions are going to fail HUGE. Probably financially, absolutely artistically and conceptually. Only the Japanese should be live-actioning their own anime. "Akira" isn't even a good movie for chrissake, it just looks so cool because it's drawn cool, ya know?

The only one that has a chance is Robotech, because its story has been fine-tuned into the Western soap opera milieu, and still only if they do a few things exactly right, like Max & Miriya, Yellow Dancer, songs by Kelly Clarkson, and making it a two-parter skipping the Southern Cross.

...Don't get me wrong, it would be great to work on....almost any adaptation project...but getting put on "Connect Four" or "Care Bears: The Movie" would be basically like getting the Beta fighter, pictured here. It's great because it's an amazing space fighter that transforms and has like 188 missiles and you can blow things up with it....but it's not the cool jet-looking one that has sleek lines and transforms into the sexy-looking battloid that, let's face it, has even more missiles and takes the point against shock troopers. The Beta fighter is not that thing; it's useful but kind of lumpy.