Folks who claim they like me... ;-)

All,

As we press forward through the traditional holiday season it is easy to get caught up in all of the trappings, or become overwhelmed, or become grumpy in an attempt to avoid the whole affair...all perfectly acceptable feelings as far as I'm concerned. Our community has always been an amalgamation of ideas, values and personalities, and I often find it is our greatest strength and asset.

As we round out the year I just wanted to impress upon you how great a year we've had as an organization and what that means to me. For the first time ever we have had all three of our national events come in the black, all while restructuring a lot of the behind-the-scenes work; bringing on new staff in the areas of marketing, event coordinating and volunteer coordinating; taking on the National Poetry Slam entirely in-house; recovering from great financial distress...all during the worst economy most of us have ever seen in our lifetimes.

As an organization comprised of poets, SlamMasters, staff members, volunteers and executives we realized the mission of PSi in Detroit, Berkeley and West Palm Beach through our national events, and regionally through all of our local shows. As a community we have bonded together to make things happen that people said couldn't be done, and seated powerful champions into the ever-growing history of Slam. Collectively we brought poetry into places it has never been, and proved our worth in the heaviest of times. People who sit in our ranks and who have walked our path in the past have graced the White House. Poets we know and love have gone on to great academic achievement, literary success and paved the way for other poets to realize their dreams through our powerful art form. We have lost and loved and fought and at the end of the day, won...together.

These are all things that you should be proud of, that you should be proud to have been a part of. These are things that, without your direct influence at your local shows and PSI’s national-level events, may not have occurred when they did. At this time of year, when there is so much to reflect on in such harsh times, we have this - Slam - to be thankful for. We have our communities and our venues to be thankful for. We have people crafting flyers and emails and online forums to be thankful for. We have organizers and people who work doors and people who pick out door prizes to be thankful for. We have bartenders and waitresses and back-up musicians to be thankful for. And we have poems – thousands and thousands of poems – to be thankful for.

I am thankful for all of you. And I am proud of you, and I cannot wait to see what you do next year.

Your president,
Scott Woods
Columbus, Ohio

Here is a trend in movies that I hate I feel like talking about to cap off the weekend: I hate when movies strangle themselves.

"Strangling" is when a movie introduces elements that it forcibly resolves to its detriment.  Example: every thing that was introduced in, oh I don't know, Avatar, had to find its way back into the movie later in some way, even when no one cared or it didn't help the story.  The old village tale, Michelle Rodriguez's entire character...you get the idea.  It's like if a coin showed up in someone's pocket it was going to get used later to deflect an energy beam that would destroy a tank and save the day. 

A lot of movies do this nowadays because they think audiences are stupid.  Many audiences are and cry when they don't get the whole story, even if it would make the movie worse.  We've simply been conditioned to want to know it all, and now, dammit, now.   And you can tell this kind of movie from its trailer with some practice.  When you see the trailer and you pretty much know not only what the film is about but how it's going to end, there is every likelihood that it's a film that's tied everything together too much, that strangled the magic out of the film.

That magic is key.  It's what keeps us going back to a film, keeps us talking about what made it cool.  It's the stuff we want to see more of but the film only gives so much and we're left writing the story in our heads the rest of the day.  You'll see what I mean when I give you this list of things in cool movies you don't know what they mean (or you can't prove its meaning) and made it a richer, better experience for all involved:

- The cause of the destruction in The Road
- What some of the ghosts in The Sixth Sense were saying
- What the Blair Witch looks like
- What the Oracle told anyone else in Morpheus's crew in The Matrix
- The cause of the scar on John Connor's face in The Terminator
- Much of The Hangover
- Why the aliens crashed on Earth in District 9; what was wrong with the ones on the ship; what happened to their leaders; why South Africa...pretty much the whole of District 9
- What Abe from Hellboy is
- What the demon looked like in Paranormal Activity (a movie I didn't like, but appreciated this much of)
- How Rorshach's mask works in Watchmen
- Whether or not Max is bad or genuinely disturbed in Where the Wild Things Are
- Much of Dark City until the last act, but even then...who knows?
- What planet the Alien alien comes from and what it must be like

This stuff is magic, things that, left to their own worlds, can leave wonder in an audience.  Kill the voice overs, don't shoot that back story about their mom...leave us something to take home.

Since we're talking movies anyway, how about The Road?

I needed to wash Avatar off of me, so I went to see what is probably the anti-thesis to Avatar: less than two hours, cheap by comparison, muscular acting, and largely devoid of cliche. It's a film based on the 2006 Pulitzer winning novel by Cormac McCarthy, which means I would probably never read it but I would go see a movie of it in a heartbeat. The story, such as it is, is about a man (Viggo Mortensen) who wanders a post-apocalyptic America with his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) trying to avoid cannibals, find food without resorting to said cannibalism (the high road!) and make it to the coast, where things are hopefully better.

Because I like this movie and want some of you to go see it, I won't give you any spoilers. The movie is extremely well-made, leveling strong senses of dread, fear and hopelessness with little more than acting to pull it off. Sure, there are some scenes of end-of-the-world carnage, but it's all static and dead. In most of the scenes the only thing moving are the two lead actors, and that is most of the scenes of this film. They shot some of this on New Orelans Katrina land and at Mt. Saint Helens. Desolate, son.

If you aren't into character studies like this (which is an interesting kind of film to make with a cast of unnamed characters), you might find the film kind of boring. It's not, but I must slap the wrist of the filmmakers for cutting out some of the more horrific scenes. I know they shot some of them - they admit they shot some of them - but they cut some of them because they thought it would be heavy and redundant. I assure you that while it might have been horrific, it would not have been redundant. Without that horror, there is some punch missing here. You don't need to leave it ALL up to the imagination of the audience. Give us a little juice. McCarthy did, and if it was good enough for an Oprah Book of the Month (c) selection, it's good enough for your already R-rated film.

I liked this movie a lot. I wouldn't recommend it for everyone, but I would recommend it for everyone that I think reads books or that enjoys a little thinking in their films (as opposed to the friend who gushed over Avatar who I now have to scratch out of my phone book).

By the way: you could have made 15 The Roads with the money it took to make Avatar.

1. Can I also mention the 3D glasses?

I didn't want to see this in 3D, but based on the times it was showing at the theater I was willing to go to, I got stuck watching this in 3D. I'm not sure why this cinematic option has made a comeback, but it really takes away more than it offers. If you wear glasses, then you have to wear these things on top of your glasses, and they barely fit. So you're uncomfortable. Also, the lenses are dark. So you’re seeing the film with a tint. So all of the color and detail that went into the film is cut in half by 3D glasses. The difference in lighting is staggering.

Also, the ticket costs $3 more for half the experience. Even going by myself it's more than I wanted to spend on a movie I wasn't sure I was going to like. Fortunately I had to sit next to three very talky white girls, so I never felt alone (and I point out their race only to illustrate the point that everyone talks during movies, not just black folks. White folks just use "inside voices", black folks obviously use "outside voices" and mullatos must use "trapped in the cat door voices").

2. You want a drinking game? Take a shot every time there's something in this film that was already done in another film that didn't take $300 million dollars to make, wasn't blue and wasn't by James Cameron. You'll be drunk in fifteen minutes.

3. And before someboy gets on their high horse to joust with my high horse to make the point that it's just a popcorn movie, consider this: Hollywood is in the worst economic lurch in the history of film. Production companies - the people who determine what films get made - are closing left and right or firing so much staff that they can't greenlight anything. Half of the CEOs in Hollywood have been fired or turned around in the last six months...HALF. Thanks to the gestation period of making a film, the industry is still reeling from the hiatus of the writers' strike only to be hit with economic armageddeon. Movies that have name actors in them are being cancelled. People are leaving the film industry and going to TV, not to make good art, but to survive.

What does this mean to people who aren't actors (ie. us)? This means that the only types of films Hollywood will be releasing are sequels to previously well-performing films regardless of quality (yay...another Transformers film. Whoopee.) and cheap comedies (yay...another riff on relationships by Rudd and Rogan. Whoopee). You think The Road is depressing? Find an interview with its director and see what depressing really is.

What does this have to do with Avatar? At a conservative $300 million Avatar cost twice as much as all three Lord of the Rings films. You know what else you could make with $300 million?

- 2 The Dark Knights
- 3 The Departeds
- 4 Inglorious Basterds
- 4 Surrogates (talk about avatars!)
- 5 The Matrixs
- 6 Sweeney Todds (I don't even like musicals and I liked this)
- 6 Changelings
- 8 Burn After Readings
- 9 Sevens
- 10 Million Dollar Babys
- 10 9s
- 12 Mystic Rivers
- 15 Silence of the Lambs
- 30 Dogmas

All of these films are better than Avatar.  Think about the cool scenes, the awesome dialgoue, the powerful effects...then think about Ava-fucking-tar. I would want to see more of all of these types of films (done right, not done like the clones that did indeed follow some of them). It takes an enormous amount of hubris to commit a dying industry to an enterprise like this, especially when that enterprise is wack. Cameron is a dick. He could have made any film he wanted, but opted to make a film that clogs up the coffers for anywhere from 3-4 huge budget films to 30 or more low budget films.

I find it impossible to spoil a movie that essentially reveals itself in a 30-second trailer, but for the crybabies out there: spoilers follow.

If Cameron did one thing in this movie that is worth noting besides spend 300 million dollars on it that one thing would be that he has made the most realistic-looking cartoon to date.

That's it. It revolutionizes movies in no other way than the CGI is extremely well done, to the point of really fine-tuned interaction with actors and the human eye. But that's it. No original plot, no serious acting, no engrossing theme, no new points to share...nothing. It is Dances With Wolves mixed with a dash of The Smurfs. The movie so blatantly relies on Dances With Wolves Cameron should be getting sued for stealing someone's story...AGAIN.*

I cannot express enough how gut-wrenchingly predictable this movie is. The dialogue is stock. The character types are stock. The casting is stock. The story arcs are stock. You have seen this movie a dozen times in the last year. It may have taken Cameron ten years to "make" this film, but it only took him ten minutes to come up with the story. He just watched Dances With Wolves, cribbed some military styles from thirty year old anime, flipped through a few issues of Heavy Metal for design notes, and shit this story out. No one dies that you don't see coming in the first twenty minutes, no one says one surprising thing, and generally the movie comes off hackneyed and boring. I already know the female alien is going to fall for the human-pretending to be an alien and that she's going to be the princess of the tribe and that the human-pretending-to-be-an-alien is going to fight against the humans who come to run the docile Native Americans off of the their oil-rich plains. You get the idea. You had the idea before you even saw the commercial. The idea came rushing back to you when you saw the 30-second trailer. You farted this idea yesterday.

How evil is this movie? This movie is Tyra Banks: a perfectly-constructed beauty designed from the follicle to entice, only to discover that all of her insides are vapid and base and empty and downright stupid. And just like having to spend two months with Tyra might start off awesome (sexually anyway. I mean really, how else?), eventually you want more. And sitting through two hours and forty minutes - TWO HOURS AND FORTY MINUTES - of this movie is like sitting across a dinner table from Tyra Banks after a couple of weeks and realizing this woman doesn't read books, doesn't know anyone who would tell her no, and has been making you do all the work in the sack so she doesn't mess up her hair...and you have a month and a half to go. The movie is a mannequin. It's too long to be dumb fun, too predictable to be good, and too empty to watch more than once no matter how impressed you are by the effects. You could skip this film entirely and get everything you might like out of it when it's on DVD. You can even use it to judge the intelligence and value systems of your friends. In fact, I encourage you to do so; it might save you some money on Christmas gifts.

So skip it.

* - Any day-one nerd already knows what I'm referring to.

Heads up: I'll be featuring at First Draft in January!

As you know, the rules are that all material be new.  And since it's traditionally a haiku show (complete with deathmatch), all feature material must be haikus.  So I need to come up with an engaging 15-20-minute set of brand new haikus.  

I'm chomping, son.  What better way to kick off a new year than by kicking poetry in the nuts?

I got a very cool gift from my buddy/co-worker Megan. I love this comic, and she got me volume one.  You can read it at the link for nothing, but *I* get to take it home and lay on the couch with it. tahmthelame is dreamy.  Thank you, sis!

Sou MacMillan holds a special place in my heart and every time I see her I consider dropping cyanide in Bill's coffee more and more. Then I remember Bill's given up coffee.

She got me through a rough patch before we even met (get the story here) and I'll never forget it. Happy birthday Sou!

There is a very short list of people the Writers' Block crew would hand the reigns of their night over to, but this cat is on it.

Everyone's favorite British person named Chris - British Chris - will be hosting the open mic tonight! He is leaving to return to the land of the Queen in a few days and we figured we'd send him off with a bang!

So cherrio, tut-tut and all that rubbish, come on out and see what manner of bizarro unfolds tonight as we are once again colonized by the English. Or get a picture taken with the closest thing Columbus has to James Bond! Or Doctor Who. Or The Prisoner. Or Prince Charles.

Writers' Block Poetry Night
@ Kafe Kerouac
2250 N. High St.
8:00 $5
www.writersblockpoetry.com