With Hanukkah almost over, LA seems headed for a dark Christmas this year with the writers’ strike solution apparently nowhere in sight. (These things have a habit of changing on a dime, however.)
My own (ongoing) contribution to the Hollywood Heart of Darkness continues on Pajamas. Meanwhile, Guild members themselves occupy themselves by making parodies of their adversaries. I don’t think the level of satire here is na great advertisement for its authors. (It’s not The Onion by a long shot.) Nikki Finke feels differently.
Re your Paul Haggis piece at PJM…
As a writer myself, I’ve noticed this collapse into ineptitude before, when otherwise talented writers make crude political statements.
For me, I think it’s simply that good drama requires characters to make difficult moral choices. A difficult moral choice is one where any possible option will involve some pain for the protagonist. But once you step into the black and white world of political agitprop, that complexity disappears, because in the agitprop world, there can only be one answer to any given moral question. Characters in the agitprop world are faced with either a fork in the road where one path is obviously ‘good’ and the other obviously ‘bad’ (no drama there), or they’re just pawns trudging through a dreary world of pre-determined morality toward predictable conclusions, with no apparent power or will of their own to be able to change things.
My general rule is that if the writer’s politics are obvious from the film/TV show/book, it’ll usually suck, no matter how talented the writer.
JMS,
I concur completely. Politics openly expressed kills art.
Roger,
I really liked that piece on Paul Haggis.
Jamie Irons