Pleasant surprises

Got an email from a potential employer today, asking me to confirm that I'm still interested in being considered for the job. The job and its government benefits.

Why on earth would I say no?

Still, though, I'm waiting until I've calmed down a little to respond, and I have until noon on Monday to do so. Getting this far in a hiring process is weird. I have no idea what I'm doing, but I know I have to keep going.

And here I was, all ready to just keep plugging away at a couple spec scripts I've been working on in hopes of getting one of the screenwriting fellowships in L.A. The question now is this: do I want to keep working in libraries and archives, using skills I've developed over three years of archives work, or do I want to pursue something in which I have an actual interest and ambitions, but very little experience and nothing to recommend me?

Aie. The real world is a scary place.

Shiny, new things

Some fun new things chez Impermanent:

I won a First Reads giveaway from Goodreads! (Ignore the crap from my desk in the photo...I was too lazy to clear it off.) I've entered about a frillion giveaways (because, really, what's better than free books?), but this is my first win. The book is The Painter from Shanghai by Jennifer Cody Epstein. I'm looking forward to reading & reviewing it, but I've got a stack of books from the library to finish first (a handful of screenplay and writing books, The Man Who Loved Jane Austen by Sally Smith O'Rourke, Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra, The Charlemagne Pursuit by Steve Berry). Hopefully it won't take too long to get through everything...I'm plagued by that age-old problem: so many books, so little time.


On the tech front, I just got a new HP Mini 1000 Netbook:

It's adorable. Only about 10.5" x 6.5" and about two pounds, I've had it for all of 24 hours and I already love it. (I threw my first-gen iPod mini in the pictures for scale.) There was a bit of frustration when trying to get online for the first time, but Qwest tech support walked me through the whole thing (I got very decent service with the internet customer service guys; I've heard the phone service reps are impossible, though) and everything is good to go now.

There's no disc drive on the netbook, so I'm trying Open Office's word processor instead of MS Word; I've heard it's totally compatible and some folks even prefer it to Word. We'll see what happens. I'm going to have a hell of a time getting Final Draft on there, though. Aie. Also, it's probably a good thing I'm young and don't need bifocals, since the screen is 8.9" (diagonal) and a 1024x600 resolution means things get pretty small; my mother couldn't read any of the text online and I had to make most images on Flickr full screen before she was happy.

All I need to do now is sew up a padded sleeve for carrying it around and we'll be completely portable. At the moment, I'm chained to my desktop whenever I want to write, which inevitably makes me less inclined to do it. This is going to do wonders for my productivity. (Famous last words...)

We're heading into a cold, rainy weekend in the Twin Cities, so I'll have plenty of opportunity to 1) read and 2) use my netbook while hiding out indoors. Silver lining and all that, right?

The state of things

1) Waiting to hear from the U.S. Navy about an archives job. I was rated "Qualified" (as opposed to, I believe, "Best Qualified" or "Well Qualified") for the position, so not holding out much hope.

2) Woken up two hours early this morning by not one, but two absurdly loud jackhammers in the parking ramp across the street from my apartment. My roommate slept straight through them. She was woken up instead by the sound of my typing. (?!)

3) It's officially patio season in the Twin Cities. One of the best things about summer is enjoying your food outside on not-so-windy days with a pint and piped-in contemporary pop music. Oh, yes. Summer is good. I'm looking forward to Brit's Pub's Bastille Day celebration and some cider (what? I don't particularly like the way beer tastes) on the rooftop lawn. Even the restaurants along Washington Avenue in Stadium Village (just off the U of M campus) have squeezed a few tables out onto the sidewalk for those who enjoy bus exhaust with their meals (it's really not that bad, particularly at Sally's, where the patio is set back from the sidewalk). Goal for the summer: eat + get vitamin D at the same time.


Until next time...

To boldly go

I was fortunate enough to attend a free Paramount-sponsored screening of J.J. Abrams’ rebooted Star Trek a couple weeks ago in the Twin Cities area, and with the film coming out on Thursday/Friday (depending on who you believe), it seems like a good time to share my reactions (now that I’ve stopped bouncing around like a kid on Christmas morning…TWO WEEKS LATER).

Fans of J.J. Abrams’ other work will know that, many times, he likes to jump right into the middle of the action after a deceptively calm opening. On Lost, it was Jack stumbling out of the all-but-silent jungle into the chaos of the plane crash on the beach. Mission: Impossible III opens with an engagement party and then segues into a rescue mission to save Ethan Hunt’s protégé. Similarly, Star Trek opens with the crew of the U.S.S. Kelvin checking out a mysterious outer-space lightning storm, then finding themselves suddenly bombarded by an enormous, seriously freaky-looking ship, the Narada, that turns out to be captained by a bitter, ever-so-slightly unbalanced (read: completely insane) Romulan named Nero (Eric Bana). Long story short, the Kelvin’s captain bites it (sorry, SPOILER), the acting captain, a young man named George Kirk, orders the ship’s crew to evacuate, and sends the Kelvin on a collision course with the Romulan ship. Meanwhile, Winona, George Kirk’s wife, is giving birth to their son in the medical shuttle. The boy is named James Tiberius Kirk after Winona and George’s fathers, respectively, and then George dies when the Kelvin crashes into the Narada.

Welcome to the new Star Trek.

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The thing I like about Abrams’ version of the oft-mocked camp and kitsch of the original Star Trek television series is that he doesn’t take the hard line that so many remakes and “reboots” have been doing lately—Battlestar Galactica went dark and gritty for its makeover (as brilliantly parodied in the CSI: Crime Scene Investigation episode “A Space Oddity” that aired April 16); James Bond, Jason Bourne, and Batman have been reinvented as gritty action heroes, the camp of early Bond and the Batman TV series nowhere to be found; even the revived Doctor Who takes a darker look at its universe than classic Who (I’m still a little terrified by Stephen Moffat’s “Blink”). There are endless remakes coming out on television and at the movies in recent years, and it seems like the majority of them chose to turn the source material into very dark iterations of what came before. This new Star Trek finds the middle ground—not everything is hunky-dory, but it’s not all despair, either. Kirk bleeds when he loses a bar fight—boy, does he bleed—and so does the child-Spock when he’s bullied back on Vulcan, but nobody horrifically loses an arm or gets a compound fracture (like Montand and John Locke on Lost, respectively…and ew). This is a universe where planets can get blown up and people can die, but not one where utter devastation is the status quo. Frankly, I find it refreshing.

The dialogue doesn’t make me want to cringe—quite an accomplishment, given the scripts from the original series and from the two Trek films I’ve seen that feature the original crew (Wrath of Khan and Search for Spock)—and yes, they work in lines like “I’m a doctor, not a physicist, damn it” and “I’m givin’ her all she’s got” in a way that doesn’t make me roll my eyes. (I saw the movie in a theater full of Trekkies, and they got a genuine kick every time something familiar popped up. It was fun.) The effects are great, the redesigned Enterprise is fabulous inside and out, the Narada is terrifying in the best possible way, and the cast?

The cast is GORGEOUS.

Chris Pine plays Kirk with the right amount of careless charisma and recklessness, and my female and male friends at the screening were big fans by the end (I know him from Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, so I was somewhat prepared for his aesthetically-pleasing face); Zachary Quinto (also known as the reason I watch Heroes) is an amazing Spock, and very believable as the younger Leonard Nimoy—you can definitely see how Quinto’s very controlled Spock grows into Nimoy’s slightly more relaxed Spock through his relationship with Kirk. Rounding out the Enterprise crew are Zoe Saldana as Uhura, John Cho as Sulu, Karl Urban as McCoy, Simon Pegg as Scotty, and Anton Yelchin as Chekov, plus any number of redshirts and women with weird hairdos. (And yes, there’s a green Starfleet cadet who gets up close and personal with Kirk because he is, as always, a total letch.)

The other thing about these actors is that they’re not only easy on the eyes, they’re funny. Really funny. And the whole movie (written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman) is surprisingly—but not overwhelmingly or inappropriately—funny. Only twice (maybe three times) did I feel like the comedy could be construed as a little over-the-top, and those moments will be easy for anybody to spot. I think it’s to the credit of everyone involved (from the screenwriters to the actors to the director) that the scenes that could make a purist throw up his/her hands and declare that they’ve made a farce of his/her beloved franchise instead garner laughs from Trekkies and Trek newcomers alike (at least, they did at the screening I attended).

The new Trek makes a few departures from the original series, but I think they work and they make sense for a franchise trying a fresh start in a new century. Even as a relative bystander to the phenomenon for most of my life, I could tell that some of the Star Trek media started to inhabit the uncharted wilds of Ridiculous (oh, I’ve read the plot summaries on Wikipedia), and even though I watched a lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation with my mom when I was kid and really liked Voyager and Captain Janeway when I was in junior high, I think this is a well-deserved and well-executed makeover. Kudos to J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (because writers deserve much more credit than they get!), the cast (including a voice cameo by Abrams’ lucky charm, Greg Grunberg!), et al for a job well done.

(I’m not going to lie: I’m probably going to see it in theaters at least three times.)

(And like it more each time.)

(I am such a nerd.)

Such a heavenly way to die

Just the other day, my friend Sasha and I were lamenting the fact that 500 Days of Summer wasn’t going to come out until July. July, ARGH. How could we possibly wait that long to see the adorable Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the “anti-romantic comedy” that’s been getting solidly positive reviews from Sundance and SXSW? Did I mention it’s directed by Marc Webb, my all-time favorite music video director (he did “Helena” and “The Ghost of You,” among others, for My Chemical Romance, Regina Spektor’s “Fidelity,” Evanescence’s “Call Me When You’re Sober” and “Good Enough” and a whole host of other videos amazing three-minute movies). Seriously, if you watch only one of those videos I linked, watch “The Ghost of You.” It’s possibly my favorite music video of all time.

Anyway, this showed up on my Twitter homepage yesterday as the “secret of the day” from Secrets of the City (@secretsday):

Today's Secret: Film Fetish: The MSP International Film Fest http://tinyurl.com/cprc9w

As I said multiple times yesterday, I’m so glad I clicked on that link. Turns out 500 Days of Summer was slated to open the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival last night, some three months before it comes out nationwide. UM, YES PLEASE. (By the by, the fest’s website might be down from time to time if lots of people are using it; I got a “bandwidth exceeded” message when trying to check info before the screening yesterday.)

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Here’s the setup: Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a romantic. Summer (Zooey Deschanel) is not—she doesn’t even believe that love exists. So you can imagine how things play out when Tom sees Summer and immediately believes she’s The One (even though she doesn't want to be anybody's girlfriend). We see their relationship play out as we jump forward and backward through the titular five hundred days, with a counter bringing us from awkward elevator chitchat to pancake dinner breakup and up and down again.

The beginning of the film is the middle of the story: immediately following the breakup, we see the emotionally destroyed Tom dispassionately smashing dinner plates while his concerned friends (Geoffrey “Snozzberries” Arend and Matthew “Supervisory Special Agent Doctor Spencer Reid” Gray Gubler) and full-of-legitimately-good-advice little sister coax him down off the metaphorical ledge. Only after Little Sis tells Tom to “start from the beginning” do we get the beginning of the story. The back-and-forth timeline is a dangerous thing and could so easily have backfired and gone horribly wrong, but Webb and the writers (Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber) execute it perfectly. Geoffrey Arend, who was at the screening and did a short Q&A afterward, said that Webb had a huge scroll mapping out the timeline precisely the way it appeared in the screenplay and how it subsequently translated to the screen, which is one of the best behind-the-scenes factoids I've heard.

The interweaving timeline was much more interesting and dynamic than a straight-line narrative would have been and it was a nice way to move between the very heavy emotional weight of the post-breakup days and the light, happy falling-in-love days (including the musical number!) without getting overwhelmed by one or the other.

Speaking of music, I loved the way Webb used it to drive the film. It's not surprising that the guy who directed basically every music video I've loved in the past ten years would incorporate music seamlessly into his first feature film (plus, most of his videos look more like mini-movies than, say, McG's brand of frenetic flash). There's a great soundtrack including Regina Spektor, The Smiths, one of my favorite Feist songs (“Mushaboom”), and even a song by Carla Bruni (yes, First Lady of France Carla Bruni Sarkozy). /Film has the full list here. There's some great drunken karaoke scenes that 1) are hilarious, and 2) make me glad I have yet to get so drunk I'm willing to do karaoke. (And yes, Zooey Deschanel does some singing.)

The acting is uniformly good—Joseph Gordon-Levitt is funny and heartbreaking and all kinds of good things as Tom; Zooey Deschanel conveys the right blend of cute and hesitant and a little sad (and has a touch of the inflection sister Emily Deschanel uses as Dr. Temperance Brennan of Bones when explaining Summer's nickname “Anal Girl”); Arend and Gubler are good as Tom's friends and Chloe Moretz manages to stay on the right side of the precocious/creepily precocious line as little sister Rachel.

On a different note, I want all of Zooey's outfits from this movie. Well, except the high-waisted pants. But everything else was gorgeous.

To make a long story short (all together now: too late), I really, really liked the movie. I may have even loved it. It made me laugh, it made me care about the characters, it made me ooh and ahh over the great art direction and set dressing. Like the narrator says at the beginning: this is not a love story. It's a story about love. That distinction makes it different (the anti-romcom, see?) and interesting: that Hollywood ending almost never happens, but what does happen so much more often is lovely and worthwhile and important all on its own, and that's the story that 500 Days of Summer tells.

Strongly, strongly, strongly recommended.



Some general info about the film festival (MSPIFF) itself: the full catalog of films being shown can be found in PDF format at the website (or here, but it's infinitely easier to read in a hard copy, which you can find at the Oak St. Theater if you're on or near the U of MN campus, or they'll probably have copies at screenings (most of which are at St. Anthony Main in Minneapolis). I'm going to try to hit a couple screenings, if only because it supports Minnesota Film Arts.

I haven't taken a close look at everything, but I know the ridiculously hard-to-track-down How to Be, starring RPattz, is showing on Monday at 7:15pm at St. Anthony Main with the following note: “Cast and Crew Present for Screening and After Party!”

Now, I'm 99% certain that Pattinson is in Canada shooting New Moon/Eclipse (are they shooting simultaneously? I don't know), so I'm also 99% certain he won't be there. Downside: no getting to see The Hair in person. Upside: probably fewer squeeful teenage girls and more tickets available. But the movie looked interesting anyway, so I might go.

Having written all that, I feel a little like a pretentious hipster.
Oh, God, what if I am a pretentious hipster?


I hope not.

Opening remarks

Here's the status quo:

I am...

• A college grad with a B.A. (summa cum laude!) in English
• (sort of) supporting myself with temp jobs at my university's archives
• trying to figure out what I'm going to do with my life
• looking for a full-time job I won't hate and getting passed over at every turn

This blog will be intermittently updated with dispatches from the front while I job-hunt and fill my idle hours. The title here, Impermanent State, means I'm in transition from student to real adult, from part-time temp positions to (hopefully) a full-time job, and the constant flux of modern life.

So, to begin...

What I'm watching:

Heroes on Hulu: I just started watching Heroes about a week and a half ago and--thanks largely to the strike-abbreviated second season--I'm almost caught up. Rather than the all-too-common system of putting only the five most recent episodes online, which is the case with most network sites, Hulu has the entire third season of Heroes up, which is marvelously convenient for those of us just getting into things.

What I'm reading:

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes

I'll be updating my Goodreads page with books more often than this one here, I imagine.

This is what this unemployed person does with her time, I suppose.

(More news as it comes...)