Mel at the Movies: talking dollars and sense

What a nice outcome at the Oscars! A sorta-kinda gay movie right there in the spotlight ... the award for Best Actor bestowed upon a performer in a gay role -- and richly deserved. Is the cinema-going public changing? Is there a shift in the mindset of your average popcorn-muncher in the fourth row?

Could be. Here's an interesting quote:

Jim Carey and Ewan McGregor play love interests in the upcoming movie I Love You Philip Morris which is based upon a real life incident about a man who falls in love with his cell mate while in jail and escapes four times in order to be with his lover. Some critics worry that the film will be a problematic sell given that it is an overtly gay love story. However, they do like the film.

Several straight actors have played gay, lesbian or trans characters over the last few decades without incident, and without any problem in their careers.

For Carey, this movie makes his first foray into doing so, but McGregor is an old hand at playing gay characters. Adding into that list are Tom Hanks, Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman, and a much longer list. The notion that audiences may not like a movie due to a gay, lesbian or trans story line may be old thinking. While Milk has not been a blockbusting success the same way, say, The Dark Knight has been, it certainly has achieved a certain amount of commercial success, and a great deal of critical acclaim.
http://lezgetreal.com/?p=922&cpage=1

From what I've learned about Philip Morris, I have a feeling the movie might be a tad bit too explicit for the average audience -- and this would explain the reticence of distributors to be involved. It costs a ton of money to strike the prints to get a movie out on the road; exhibitors have to believe they can break even or better.

Now, sometimes it's impossible to second-guess movies. Australia was initially supposed to rival Titanic, and then it was supposed to be the world's biggest ever flop, and now -- hey, it's showing critics and audiences alike that it has enough staying power to be out there earning, long after it was supposed to be getting stamped into the surfaces of a few million DVDs. However, it's not going to magically transform itself into a boxoffice success, though it might break even -- in which case, all the DVD dollars are frosting on the cake. And like The Man From Snowy River, his one will probably "go platinum" on disk.

Why? Well, because Australia cost the grand total of $130m to make, which is a fleabite these days, by comparison with the budgets of "big movies" like the Pirates of the Caribbean films. In the days of yore, it used to be that $1 in $3 of the boxoffice made its way home to the studio that put up the financing, so a movie that cost $130m to make would have to earn $390 to break even...

These days it's very, very different. To begin with, it's $1 in $5 of the boxoffice that dribbles back to the investor ... but increasingly, the studio, the distributor and even the exhibitor are all branches of the same company which, in any case, is owned by something like Gulf Western, Coca Cola, whatever.

So while various divisions of the company might be showing a loss, the parent "machine" that drives this multi-national juggernaut is sitting pretty ... and it gets better.

The DVD revenues associated with movies can, and do, outstrip their boxoffice potential. You have global boxoffice to think about; plus the network TV premier; cable TV; pay per view; the DVD release; the BlueRay release; the TV rerun(s); the Netflix subscription service; and whatever merchandizing you've been able to scare up along the way.

Any way you slice it, movies are huge business, even though box office figures the world over are far from attractive. There's a site which makes fascinating browsing: BoxOfficeMojo.com ... enter in, and prepared to be astounded.

Russel Crowe in A Good Year ... directed by Ridley Scott, himself a legend. Total boxoffice gross: just under $7.5m ... you're not reading that wrongly. Nor did I mistype it! $7,459,300.

Kathleen Turner in her absolute hay day in V.I. Warshawski -- if she can't put bums on seats, who can? $11,128,308.

Johnny Deep and Charlieze Thieron (and I wouldn't be in the slightest surprised if I don't know how to spell that!) ... same bums-on-seats remark. The Astronaut's Wife. $10, 672,566.

Let's face it: if only the top 2% of movies ever broke even, Hollywood would have collapsed by now! The truth? Boxoffice is only part of the picture, and not even a large part.

Australia is at just under $50m, and still earning at the boxoffice before they get stuck into all the rest. Hey guys ... it's not that bad, really.

Little is happening in this neck of the woods. The big news (and terms are relative!) is that I did two posts to Legends today, and here they are:

http://mel-keegan-legends.blogspot.com/2009/02/chapter-nine-conclusion.html
and
http://mel-keegan-legends.blogspot.com/2009/02/oracle-knows.html

I haven't been able to look at Digital Kosmos for a week, and in this week I'll have to make a decision: gee, do I get five titles up on Amazon Kindle, or do I post to the photo blog. Duh. I'll get back to DK when time permits. Till them -- bear with me, guys!

Ciao for now,
MK

Writers beware: it's just another scam

Everyone has a pet peeve, so it's no surprise MK should have one too. They're more ubiquitous than poodles, cost less to feed than gerbils and don't bite the way hamsters are inclined to. So, naturally, everybody has at least one pet peeve; some folks have several. I have ... a few, I admit; but the one I want to talk about today lives in the closet like Binkley's Giant Purple Snorklewacker, and periodically beats on the door and demands to be let out in broad daylight.

Like today.

And here it is: it's the "I can teach you how to be a successful writer in 12 easy lessons, no matter if you've never put pen to paper before, and instantly you'll be a successful, published, paid writer. All you gotta do is pay me US$49.95, and you can start living the life of your dreams."

There are SCORES of these offers on the Internet at any one time, and HUNDREDS of them cycling through in any two-year period. And one presumes that there enough takers out there, each with the IQ of linguine, for the publishers of these courses to make their hundred grand or quarter mill, and skeedaddle out of the field before rampaging armies of glazed-eyed, torch-wielding, would-be writers come storming up the driveway demanding their refund.

At this specific juncture in the unfolding of this particular universe, the whole industry is epitomized by one specific page, in which every single rotten, lousy stunt is pulled. I was sent the URL for it, and I am disgusted to the point where I'm extremely tempted to just paste in that URL and let you have the whole thing.

However, I fully expect to be sued if I did that, so ... taking a deep breath, we'll do it this way: I'm not going to name names, I'm not going to give any URLs. But I am going to tell you what to Google to pull up the page -- and probably 50 pages just like it.

Google something along the lines of "write for quick cash," and "write get published get cash" and "zero effort writing quick cash" ... and you'll find your way there. You'll know it when you see it. It's the one screaming this heading: "Earn BIG MONEY for 5 MINUTES of WRITING!"

Yeah, sure.

The above high-density keywords should speak volumes to you. Writing ... zero effort ... quick cash ... get published.

And here is my pet peeve: I've spent thirty years honing my skills. I'm editing my own latest novel right now, and after thirty years of experience, I'm still turning my work inside out in the editing to make it not just good, but as close to flawless as possible. After three decades of writing everything from poetry to film scripts, I can tell you that virtually everything on this entrepreneur's "squeeze page" (as they're called because they're designed to squeeze money out of you) is balloon juice.

One of this entrepreneur's "hot tips" is that you can make MOVIE PITCHES. "Write three lines" and get your name on the next blockbuster movie. Seriously -- I'm not having you on here, this is an actual "tip" on this squeeze page!

It might have been true forty years ago -- I doubt it. ("From an idea by" would have been your credit.) Here's the cold, hard facts: in today's Hollywood, YOU CAN NOT MAKE MOVIE PITCHES without having an "in" at a studio. You cannot make movie pitches even if you HAVE an "in," without being INVITED to make the pitch; and most producers and directors won't even look at a letter which doesn't come from a reputable agency.

How do I know this? Because I *do* make movie pitches. I've been making them for 15 YEARS. I'm part of a writing partnership that *has* a reputable agency and *is* invited to pitch. I've lost count of the number of scripts that have "done the rounds" in the last decade. If we'd sold something major, you'd know about it.

It's like selling a book to a major publisher. Your chances of breaking in and getting a sale worth significant money have recently been estimated at one in nine hundred thousand. It's that proverbial one in a million shot.

This entrepreneur spends considerable percentages of his "squeeze page" space talking about selling "letters to the editor." Such magazine inclusions routinely pay $5 to $50, if you're lucky ... 99% of magazines and newspapers pay nothing. Those that do pay are inundated.

The next recommendation is to look at writing jingles, little poems, for greetings cards -- Hallmark and John Sands, that kind of thing. However, these companies have STAFF WRITERS ... you'll find that you're selling your little verses to much lesser companies who will pay about $1 per line. A four line verse -- $4.

And as for the next tip, "writing captions for photographs" ... editors do this themselves, on the fly, when they're setting type. Next: writing captions for your own photos. Go right ahead ... and then climb aboard another treadmill -- now you're trying to sell your photos. Have you ever tried?! Have fun.

The steam really starts to explode out of my ears when this entrepreneur gets onto the subject of short story writing (not to mention articles and reviews), and then selling comedy to TV.

All I can say to you is, if you believe this spiel ("How you can turn your sense of humor into a STEADY STREAM of PAYCHECKS!"), then go ahead and try it. Take a shot at selling your comedy sketches to television or radio. You'll come back down to earth so hard, people have been known to break their legs.

And I'm going to close on something so stupid, I'm speechless: "A Web site where you can SUBMIT any number of MOVIE IDEAS for a modest one-time fee and get them pitched on your behalf to Hollywood producers."

Believe me (or not, if you don't consider thirty years in the business is enough to know what I'm talking about), Hollywood producers get pitched about 100 scripts PER DAY, via agencies who take them to lunch, to dinner, for drinks, on vacation ... via writers who have already sold movies and TV series, by directors who have STAFFS of writers online ... and by actors who own their own production companies (like Brad Pitt and his Plan B). Movie studios do not, nor have they ever, nor WILL they ever turn to amateur websites for movie ideas.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. Every writer gets 100 for every one we write; every producer sees 500 scripts for every one for which he bids for the rights. And very often, the producer, director and writer are the SAME PERSON.

What burns my cookies is that there are people out there in the world who work for the minimum wage (maybe $5 per hour), eat noodles for a month, and pay US$49.95 to an Internet entrepreneur for an ebook full of complete drivel, and then try their hearts out and maybe get $10 here for a published letter (where the bloody magazine cost them $11.95 to buy a copy, in order to get the submission info!!), and maybe $8 for a verse sold to a greetings card company -- where the cost of postage on the paperwork, and maybe an interstate phonecall to get the sale, exceeded the income.

There, I feel better now. Pardon me for letting off steam. You can tell this is something I feel very strongly about. Strongly enough to be thinking seriously about having a second blog -- an actual "writing blog" where the focus of the whole thing is ... writing. They do say that you oughtta blog about something over which you can get passionate.

[The cartoon is from the Bloom County comic anthology Penguin Dreams and Stranger Things, by Berke Breathed. All rights acknowledged to BB and Little, Brown.]

Ciao for now,
MK

As through a lens ... that needs cleaning

This post was supposed to go up late yesterday, but things came up and I lost the opportunity to post again. (No, not computer headaches, or Invasion of the Rellies; I think I swallowed a Thai chili. My upper digestive tract may never be the same again.)

So here is the post, maybe fourteen hours late. I'm up to my eyeballs with politics for the time being, so I'm going to talk about something else this time.

They way we view the world is interesting in so many ways, not least of which is how the world is presented to us for viewing. That statement might seem to have the qualities of a palindrome, but think about this.

What do you really know about ... oh, say, the Battle of Britain? I use this as an example because the anniversary just went by: September 15 ... 915, if you will ... the date when Britain could reasonably be said to have won its freedom from Nazi Germany in an air war, and like 911, it's never likely to be forgotten ... so long as you're British or have the connections).

Now, about one in a million people will say, "I know everything about it, son, I bloody fought in it, you grew up in a free country because kids like me were up there in the Spitfires and Hurricanes, giving our lives to keep Hitler out of this country." An unfortunate percentage of people will say, "What battle, of where?" They can find Britain on a map (or, I hope they can!), but they're just as likely to think of the Spanish Armada as World War II, when pressed on the subject --

And by far the majority of people will say, "I saw the movie."

And a very good movie it is. Michael Caine (The Dark Knight), Christopher Plummer (National Treasure; The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus), Robert Shaw (Swashbuckler) Lawrence Olivier, Ralph Richardson , Ian McShane, and a stellar cast all elbowing for screen-time, because everyone wanted to be in this movie. Okay, it's true that Hollywood "did a number" on it: the facts had to be folded, spindled and mutilated to fit the timing, pacing and length of a motion picture -- if movie makers didn't do this, the audience would fall asleep or walk out and say, "What a rotten movie." So, sure, you can criticize the film for having been "Hollywoodized" ... but I can guarantee to you, the audience stayed awake!

The gist of this post is actually in the above paragraph. Our own history, the world, foreign cultures, other people's lives and loves, religions and traditions, are caught on film (or tape, or flash cards. Makes no difference), and then the whole "raw" capture goes through the editing process. It's digitized, color graded, edited into a sensible sequence according to a script (even documentaries have scripts; and they're often incredible complex. It can be harder to script a doco than a feature film -- ask me why, if you're interested). Parts are cut out; other parts are dramatized; old film is colorized; the sound is re-recorded; voice-over narration is added, Foley and ADL are performed...

Every part of this process is necessary to make any film -- documentary or fiction -- watchable to an audience. You can't afford to be boring; and you can't (often) afford to serve up material that's too gross, too explicit, too radically outspoken on sensitive themes, because you don't want your movie to be rated right off the screen and into the realm of under-the-counter disks sold at dark, sleazy little stores with backstreet entrances.

So the lens through which we perceive everything beyond the range of our own physical eyes (and that's 99.999% of everything) has been cut and polished by teams of professionals. The world as we see and know it is ... a presentation.

You ever notice how characters in the massive historicals have good teeth? The truth is, the heroes of Gladiator and Troy, Alexander and Kingdom of Heaven would have had teeth like the scurvy scum in Pirates of the Caribbean ... but who's going to come over all wobbly-kneed and romantic over a hero with bad teeth?

That's a really, seriously, horrifically callow case to make, isn't it? Teeth. But it makes the point fast: reality has been skewed. Of necessity.

And the same is true when you get out of the callow examples and start looking at "meaningful" presentations of the world.

What do you know about the Chinese occupation of Tibet? The movie, right? Bradley ... yum. How about your mental images of Apollo 13? Tom Hanks was great in that one. The Vietnam War? Oh, I never missed an episode of Tour of Duty ... Terrence Knox was such a hunk. (Wasn't he, though?!) Or did you see First Blood 14 times? (Woah, Sly had great pecs...) What do you know about New Zealand? Seriously! Well, for a start, you know what it looks like: Middle Earth (you saw the movies). But one would hope and pray you don't think Ancient Greece looked like a cold rainforest full of Maoris! (Though Xena and Hercules were loads of fun, with muscles, great teeth and fabulous hair galore, trust me, Greece don't look nuthin' like New Zealand.) Your take on Vikings? Antonio Banderas was terrific in that one ... or can you remember back to Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis? (And if you're saying, Kirk and Tony who? Well ... phooey.)

It's as if your windshield is so smeared by bugs, you're seeing little snippets of the world, history, culture. A Chinese movie came out recently (a foreign language film; it might not have played theaters in the States, but it did here). Mongol purports to be a bio of Genghis Khan ... and (honest) they found a way to portray him as a hero, a loving husband, devoted father, and all around staunch character. They simply left our the millions of people who were slaughtered, the enemies boiled alive, the legion of wives and concubines, and the rape victims who were so numerous and commonplace, virtually everyone whose roots are back in Europe is descended from these guys!

Creative editing puts a new and interesting face on history. Here's the problem: what you can do for Genghis Khan in 2008, you can do for Adolph Hitler in 2308 ... and in the public mind, the presentation looms large. Larger than reality, which has been lost in time. Asked, in 2315, "What's your take on Hitler?" Someone is going to say, "Oh, Manfred Schroediger was fantastic in that, I saw it eight times."

Uh huh.

So many Hollywood shows were made in British Columbia in the last 20 years, today's kids can be forgiven for thinking Peru and Turkey both look like the wooded hills right outside Vancouver ... but we'll forgive that one, cuz Richard Dean Anderson was so cute, with the long blond hair and the shy grins, right?

Now, it's perfectly true that documentary filmmakers knock themselves out to achieve Truth, and for this, I applaud them. Personally, I love documentaries; I just don't get the chance to watch very many, because few other people can watch dodos and call it a night's entertainment. (That was a barfing sound I heard from your direction, wasn't it? Admit it!)

So: how many documentary films have you seen in the last month? One? None? Right. You watch the monster feature films, as do we all, and the snazzy TV shows.

You know what the Himalayas look like: you saw Vertical Limit three times. (Chris O'Donnell was superb in it. So cute. And incidentally, it was shot on a glacier in New Zeland!!) You know much about Mahatma Gandhi? (Well, you know Ben Kingsley must wear dentures, because he took some of them out to play the part of the older Gandhi, who was missing a tooth or two. Yeh. we're back to teeth.)

What's your take on Ned Kelly? (Heath Ledger. Right? Or did you prefer Mick Jagger?) Let's stay in Australia for a second ... you know much about Australian colonial history? (You know all you need to: Magnum PI shot it with a Very Big Rifle. Seriously, Tom Selleck was great, and Quigley Downunder is one of my favorites too. But you should have watched Against The Wind instead, or as well, if you wanted to know a bit about Aussie history.)

Okay, Keegan, cut to the chase for godsakes!

The chase scene: at least as far as the vast, VAST majority of the population of this planet is concerned, we're rewriting history with good teeth and great hair; we're redrawing the map with scenic locations; we depict the religions and traditions of other regions and people in presentation form, adapted and polished to be acceptable to modern audiences ... because movies have to make money, and the censorship ghoul is breathing down the director's neck.

But, who wants to see Christian Bale as Robin Hood, with a set of rotting teeth? And Geronimo scratching his fleas? Come on, get real! Heroes have terrific teeth and no fleas, everybody knows that. Just like the the Andes and the Anatolian Plateau look like British Columbia, and Genghis Khan was as wholesome as George of the Jungle. (Woah, Brendan was sweet eyecandy there...)

Pardon me while I go watch a documentary or two.

Give 'em the Vulcan tusch pinch

Got a link for you: Play it again, Jim...

Yep, you guessed right.





Tell me someone who was there during the days of Project Apollo who didn't watch Trek. I mean, it's horses for courses, and in 1966-69 Trek was hot stuff.

The used to paint near-nekkid chicks bright green. They had aliens of indeterminate gender. They had geniuses who were overwhelmed by the urge to rut like mountain goats. They had great, big spaceships and space battles. And sadistic Klingons mowing 'em down. And slave girls. And a bed-hopping skipper who didn't look too bad at all with his shirt in the laundry hamper. And this dude with the ears and the eyebrows. And a black chick (woah -- black, my gods, I don't believe this!) actually on the crew. And weird drugs. And cloning, and androids. Slave planets, giant intelligent lizards, chicks in glued-on costumes, hunky guest stars with great legs, in skimpy Ancient Greek kilts (!), tribbles, tricorders, time travel, exploding planets, immortality, religion-busters, insane computers, mindgames, empathym telepathy, mind-melds, sadism, masochism, adultery, murder, sabotage, revenge --

It was hot stuff way back when. It's just that four decades takest he spit-shine off of anything, and sooner or later you have to polish it up again, or archive it.

(I had a firsthand taste of this when I went through the NARC books, from the early 1990s, to bring them up to date ... and I'm even yanking AQUAMARINE firmly into the twenty first century: it's in the nuance of the technology. How far in the future is the world of Eric and Russell? In their day, who in hell will be using disks? Yet, 10years ago disks were cutting edge and flashdrives, jumpdrives, ramsticks, where a "Say what?" item. In the universe of Jarrat and Stone, they use "datacubes," which one imagines to be something like a 10 TB flashdrive too small to see, which is housed in something about the size of a die, to make it big enough for blunt human fingers to handle without breaking or dropping and losing.)

It had to happen, sooner or later. You KNEW the adventures of Jim, Bones, Scotty and Spocko would HAVE to be brought back up to spec. All writers do this, if they're given the ghost of a chance, and when you're in possession of a Hollywood franchise like STAR TREK, you don't wait to be given chances, you make your own. (George Lucas paved the way. Can you imaging what he'll be doing for the next update on STAR WARS?)

Of all the TREK series, I do believe I kinda liked ENTERPRISE the best. It had the "down and dirty" look about it, to which I gravitate. The original series is just too quaint now ... sorry, guys. It's the 1960s jingoism, sexism, racism, whatever "ism" you want to look at -- they come through the old scripts loud and clear, and they make 2008 nerves jangle. I say this sadly, because I also know Trek was one of the front runners in the field of equal opportunity ... but they also had an uphill battle with Hollywood producers who were in the business of selling a very expensive product to existing marketplaces. The best the 1966 Trek could do was go out and break trail. They did well, in their day; but that day is long past.

NEXT GENERATION had some excellent ideas and designs, but to me ... well, their universe is so squeaky clean that I have (and have always had) reservations. Don't get me wrong: the show was extremely well done, within its own parameters; but Picard's cosmos doesn't even get dusty. (Compare this scenario with ALIEN RESURRECTION, which is happening in the same approximate, and just as hypothetical, time frame. I can *believe* the ALIEN movie inside and out; I simply enjoy the hell out of the Trek show as an interested onlookers. There's a big difference.)

VOYAGER ... I was traveling when this went to air down here, and I missed most of it. I think there's 3 - 4 seasons I still haven't had the chance to see. (Same story with FARSCAPE, incidentally: nothing personal, just a clash of time, work and place). And DS9 ... I lost track of it about two seasons before the end, so I have no idea how it finished up. It's on the "gotta see one day when I have the time" list.

So, I guess I have more than a nodding aquaintance with Trek, even though I wouldn't say it influenced my own science fiction much at all. (For example, even when I do get into the military aspect, "my" Starfleet and DeepSky Fleet are built on the Air Force, not the Navy. For the life of me, I can't see how the Navy will get itself into space. Sure, by now you (the viewer) are well accustomed to seeing the space-going Air Force model on STARGATE, but (he he he) Keegan got there first! I was doing this stuff in the early 1990s, years ahead of SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND, and any of the STARGATE incarnations, including the James Spader and Kurt Russell movie.)

And I, for one (and I'm starting to think I'm just about the only one!) am actually looking forward to seeing the old Trek scenario polished up, dragged into the new millennium, albeit kicking and screaming.

From what I've seen on a Google surf (admittedly not in any obsessive depth), when you get past the official sites, the games, the merchandising, the magazine sites, Hollywood sites, etc., etc., etc., and see what the "hard core Trek fans" are saying ...

Wellllll, here's the part where Keegan gets to play Nostradamus.

Get ready for a big stink in the Old Guard, who are going to hate the new movie with a passion. They're going to take it as a personal insult that Bill Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and our erstwhile heroes have been recast (read: replaced) with new faces. Meanwhile the new movie will score big with the vast "gray area" of the audience which likes Trek well enough but doesn't live and breathe the original show. (For those fans, Shatner, Nimoy and company ARE the show, the characters, the magic; take them away and, they won't know what you've got left, 'but it sure as hell aint Trek.')

But the vast "gray area" in the middle of the audience will like the movie, enough to make it a financial success. Way on the other side of the audience is the Glittery end: folks who are maniacal fans of the the new movie, won't hear a syllable said against it, and will go to e-war with anyone who disagrees ... all of which usually means these new fans have fallen like a tonne of bricks for one or more of the new actors, and the cosmos is revolving (however temporarily) around their (current) magnificent obsession.

Get ready for the Trekker Wars of 2009. I predict blood. They'll make any atrocity committed by the Klingons, Romulans, Borg, Predators, Aliens AND the Go'aould (all cemented together into an alliance focused on hammering the humans into extinction) look like Walter and Grommit.

Meanwhile, Nostrakeeganus, he say, the new movie will be a great financial success; they'll do several more movies which go over nicely at the box office -- quite nicely enough to rationalize doing a TV series, which will premier in the fall of 2015, when the publicity campaign will read, "Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Gene Roddenberry's immortal Star Trek..."

Write this down somewhere, and when it happens -- in 2015 -- I shall officially hang out my shingle and charge $25 per squint into my crystal ball. Because by that time you'll know I'm psychic.

So, give 'em the Vulan tusch pinch, and enjoy the damned movie!

Sonnets from the peanut gallery

I was asked a strange question a while ago. "How do you write a sonnet?" As a person who's been known to rattle off the occasional sonnet, I suppose I was as qualified as the next bod to answer ... and I assume the question had something to do with a college paper.

What jogs my memory about this is that I was juggling the type for the new eBook version of FORTUNES OF WAR yesterday, and of course there are two sonnets from Shakespeare himself quoted in the book. Which got me thinking about Shakespeare, and about the upcoming Macbeth movie (with Sean Bean as Mac). If they do it justice, as is understood by moviedom in 2008, it will be bloody indeed. I'm thinking of both 300and PATHFINDER: Legend of the Ghost Warrior. I imagine Macbeth will be a gore-fest ... and appreciating Sean Bean as I do, I expect to have a ringside seat at the carnage! Yet I ask myself, do I really need to see a guy's head get cut in two, to afford a high-resolution view of his bare brain? Hmmm.

A long time ago (must be ten years; I was in Alaska at the time), I got myself into some coniderable trouble by starting to talk about the violent aspect of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. I was actually going somewhere important with the argument, but didn't have long enough to get there before a complete stranger, who'd overhead what I was saying to a friend, rounded on me and put me very firmly in my place for having the temerity to say I didn't need the gore the movie had loaded up into my memory cache. Acording to this stranger, I DID need it, and DO need it. All right, let's look at this soberly.

Now, for all I know that stranger might be a film director; he might have gone on to work on the GHOST WARRIOR movie, which is even more gruesome than RYAN by a factor of about ten years' Hollywood development. That stranger was certainly an advocate of movie violence -- and to a point I do understand his argument, which goes like this: In order to appreciate the suffering, trauma and horror undergone by soldiers in the field, civilians have to see the real deal, in gut-leaking, brain-spattering detail.

And herein lies the real question. Do we need to actually see it? Are we so dense that we don't know, on an instinctual level, what it's all about?

And, as valid as the stranger's point is, it's deeply problematical. There's an inescapable downside to brutalizing the audience. Psychiatrists call it desensitization. You can think of it as habituation, or acclimation.

It happened to yours truly, even INSIDE (and well inside) the running-length of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN itself, and it's a big problem. In the first reel, one was shocked and sickened by the dismemberment depicted in stark, raw, detail. One felt the crawling skin, the odd hot-cold sensation, the prickling scalp and rapid pulse --which was the exact reaction Steven Spielberg intended. He scored, big time.

But 90 minutes later, I (and the rest of the audience with me) was so habituated to the gore, the effect had faded away. I watched the last-reel dismemberment without turning a hair. Ten years on, PATHFINDER: Legend of the Ghost Warrior, didn't upset my equilibrium at all --

And it should have. Seeing a guy's head cut open and his brain laid bare should make any normal person retch. Seeing, in closeup, the tip of a blade slice right through someone's face and take out his eye, and then the eyeball falls out, kersplat, into the muddy puddle at his feet, in another closeup shot, should make a normal human being shudder, or maybe even heave.

My point is this, kids: we're habituated now. We got used to it. It's a decade since PRIVATE RYAN, and in that time, the audience has been 'educated' to PhD level in realistic battlefield violence ... we've seen it all in closeup and technicolor. And the horror factor is so diminished, scenes that should be traumatizing bounce off even the most sensitive of us.

I ask myself, is this a good thing? The stranger who put me down at the cafe in Anchorage, AK, in 1997, desperately wanted to have the civvy audience 'educated' ... exposed to the real deal, in clinical detail. One would hope his motives were pure -- ie., so that they know at firsthand the horrors of the battlefield.

Hollywood obliged, over and over, in always-increasing detail, until we're now face to face with a kind of cynical 'yeah, so what?' attitude.

I look back on the mystique of the warrior, at whose bloody secrets the civilians could only guess, and who was revered, nursed of his wounds, even worshipped, by lesser beings like we, who fully believed we would have folded at the knees if we were faced with such horror.

Right now, there's a whole generation of kids out there to whom the soldier's trade, and his trauma, have been demystified, and they know for a fact what denuded brains and torn-out eyeballs look like ... and they ain't bothered by it.

I ask myself, this is a good thing? And you have to wonder, just a little bit, about the next generation of soldiers coming of age just now...