There’s an excerpt from The Journals of John Fowles in The Guardian about the making of the movie The Collector, based on Fowles’s novel. It sounds like nothing much ever changes in Hollywood, no matter how much everyone always thinks it does:

The awful American-English language problem. Anything that wouldn’t be comprehensible to the average American moron Willie objects to. We had the line: “I did it to exorcise you from my life.” “Exorcise, exorcise,” said Willie. “Who’s ever going to be able to say that – we need another line.” “I did it to get you out of my system,” I suggested. Yes, that was fine. But Willie kept on saying it over and over again. “Out of my system, out of my system, OUT of my SYSTEM. That sounds kind of peculiar.” About 20 minutes later, we ended up with “I did it to get you out of my mind.” Everything has to be mish-mashed to a smooth banality.

(During one of my first classes at USC, we would read out one another’s scripts in class, so we could hear what we’d written. I used “schadenfreude” at one point; the classmate reading it had never heard the word before, let alone had a clue how to pronounce it.)

What’s amazing, of course, is that the filmmakers even had Fowles on the set to begin with. Whatever were they thinking?

(Apropos of nothing: it cracks me up that you can use the Seven Dirty Words (whatever they are) in British papers and American papers still insist on using dashes, as though the people reading don’t immediately have to stop and mentally fill in the blanks, thereby paying more attention to the word than they otherwise would. The funniest one is when the dashes don’t seem to correlate to any bannable word that I know of, and I have to stop and think what they possibly could have meant.)

Short version: Darin and I give it two thumbs up.

Pirates, cursed gold, swashbuckling, Johnny Depp as a completely bonkers and wonderful pirate, and Orlando Bloom finally, finally, finally a brunet. (Blonds have zero appeal for me. I don’t know why that is, but it’s always been true.)

It’s overlong but hilarious. We had a great time. Johnny Depp is wonderful as the pirate who’s described as being not unlike Keith Richards, but since I don’t know what Keith Richards is supposed to be like, I don’t know what that means. I do know that Captain Jack Sparrow is one of the most fun characters to come down the pike for a while.

Damn, it’s so much fun to watch a movie where there’s an actual story. And how depressing is it that those movies are few and far between?

(And if you’re wondering which exchanges were in the movie and which were ad-libbed, check out Ted Elliott’s post on Wordplay about it. Short answer: 99% of them were in the script.)

Dude, I don’t know. More serious reviewers than I have analyzed this movie in-depth. You want discussion of the philosophy behind this flick, be my guest. Maybe this is the most amazing presentation of Gnostic philosophy ever. Maybe it’s all commentary on reality and corporate hype.

All I know is, during the very long and technically marvelous action scenes, my main thought was, “I wonder how they did the CGI for this one.”

Probably not the reaction they were looking for.

Also: tired of the whole black trenchcoats and sunglasses thing. But maybe that’s me.

But I did notice the same makeup of the population of Zion that this guy did. Gotta mean something. Guess the next movie will explain it all.

By the way, you totally need to refresh with The Matrix before seeing Reloaded. Took me a little while to get with the program (heh) and figure out the rules.

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We were able to see The Matrix Reloaded because Darin’s brother Scott and his girlfriend asked to babysit on Friday night. Yes, you read that correctly. They told us they’d like to babysit.

Maybe we do live in the Matrix…