Lessons Learned: HIGH MAINTENANCE (“Olivia”)

Instead of a straight review, this series of posts looks at what can be learned from watching with a critical, writing-focused perspective. First up, the fantastic web series, HIGH MAINTENANCE, created by Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld. In my estimation, this is the best web series being produced right now. And you should probably watch the episode below. It’s free! And, ya know, that’ll make the rest of this more coherent.

The episode with the Assholes. And they are assholes. Insufferable, asshole-y boors. That’s established repeatedly and humorously before and beyond the title. Variations on a theme. A dozen ways of painting the same still-life. It’s entertaining, but I want to take a closer looks at the cut that comes at 1:41 in the episode. The juxtaposing cut. The Assholes are doing asshole things and then, boom, we cut to The Guy playing with a giggling toddler.

There’s a loose bridge between the shots with the Male Asshole saying, “Just use your face to cover my face,” and The Guy pushing on the toddler’s face which makes the kid laugh (almost everything’s novel when you’re 2.5 years old). “Face” to face. Is it a stretch to apply a little Eisenstein-sauce and say that the idea that these juxtaposing shots elicits is that the Assholes are really children? Nah. I like it. The idea stays.

The juxtaposition also creates a contrast that cleanly divides the Assholes into the bad-guy camp and The Guy into the good-guy camp. The casual pettiness and ill-will of the Assholes is doubled when it collides with the euphoric laughter of a toddler. We also know immediately who the “Assholes” that pop up on The Guy’s cell phone caller ID are.

The use of the toddler to contrast with the Assholes and set The Guy up as a white hat would feel a bit cheap if The Guy didn’t then admit that he was upset about the kid screwing up his income stream because, ya know, he can’t sell pot to the parents anymore. With that, we’re off into another slice-of-life HIGH MAINTENANCE dialogue exchange.

Which brings us to the third thing this cut does: keeping a speedy pace. One of the things this series does best is keep up a heady pace. It covers a lot of character-building ground quickly and pretty much blazes through the slight plots. I could talk about in media res and how HIGH MAINTENANCE illuminates this concept like a goddamn lighthouse every episode. With this cut, we’re jumping into the middle of conversation in a new location with new characters. Bang.

For those keeping score, that’s 1) equating the Assholes to children; 2) using contrast to express the gulf between the “good” guys and the “bad” guys; and 3) pushing the pace by dropping us in media res into a new scene. That’s a lot of work for a single edit. That edit gets a gold star. Stuff like that is why the series is so good.

Other eps, other reviews:
“Stevie”
“Heidi”
“Jamie”
“Trixie”

Lessons Learned: HIGH MAINTENANCE (“Trixie”)

Instead of a straight review, this series of posts looks at what can be learned from watching with a critical, writing-focused perspective. First up, the fantastic web series, HIGH MAINTENANCE, created by Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld. It also happens to be one of the Top Five Things I Watched in 2013.

A fairly lightweight episode, “Trixie” deals with NYers dealing with their Air BnB customers and their (weed) dealer. The Guy has little impact on the plot — mostly he gives our female protag (Candace Thompson) an opportunity to tell a flavorful little tale about waitressing and Appalachian white trash. But it’s tasty morsels like this that are the most striking things about this episode. Specificity like the details in this story carries us through the episode. They pave over the plot gaps, making the episode less of a story and more of a brief burst of character study.

There is a sparse constellation of plot points: couple opens apartment up to AirBnBers, female protag implores male protag to crack down on increasingly rude/bizarre AirBnBer behavior, stress-relief pot smoking, male protag finally tells loud AirBnBers to shut the fuck up. But it’s really the tiny specific off-hand details in the dialogue that kept my interest.

Things like the male protag’s nickname being “Papi”, the couple calling sex “teety”, the female protag claiming she’ll have to live in a trailer next to her grandma in West Virginia unless they get a grip on this AirBnB thing. We’re dropped into the middle of a relationship with in-jokes, histories, and lingering conflicts. It’s a good relationship to watch. These minute specific details are delivered off-handedly and accumulate quickly, animating the relationship into a living breathing thing.

And, of course, the episode is funny. The duck-duck-goose* structured joke with the weird Q-tip guy is a good bit, and the insensitive marriage therapist The Guy visits is a funny plot diversion. But the protagonists’ relationship, as it’s built by those specific details, is the engine that drives the episode. They have clear goals they’re reaching for (make rent, handle renters) but the episode isn’t about overcoming these obstacles. It’s a rich snapshot. Considering that the episode is almost 7 minutes, which is already on the long side of the webisode spectrum, it’s a neat feat.

Other eps:
“Stevie”
“Heidi”
“Jamie”

* I’m using duck-duck-goose here in reference to the “rule of three” but where the last thing is kind of a curveball. The Q-tip guy example: (duck) he surprises one protagonist by standing behind them awkwardly swabbing his earhole while watching them, (duck) he surprises the other buy doing the same thing, then (goose) they find two disturbingly waxy Q-tips left in mug.

Lessons Learned: HIGH MAINTENANCE (“Jamie”)

Instead of a straight review, this series of posts looks at what can be learned from watching with a critical, writing-focused perspective. First up, the fantastic web series, HIGH MAINTENANCE, created by Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld. It also happens to be one of the Top Five Things I Watched in 2013.

Using objects for character development:

For the last episode, I focused on brief shots in the opening montage and how they built character development. We had that lovely stack of books. We had some retro SLR cameras. This episode takes the idea of using objects to build character and pushes it further by implementing those objects into the action. Rather than quick static shots.

This episode still uses this technique by flashing to a framed Occupy Wall street handbill, but it folds the rest of objects into the storytelling in a more organic way.

“Jamie” is located in the kitchen of a couple–two spare-time gourmets who complain about the price of kombucha, then defend its “alkalizing” powers, then complain about hating themselves for spending so much on it, then plan to make it themselves like “bootleggers”–all in almost the same breath. There is probably some kimchi fermenting in their refrigerator next to a stack of tofus in varying levels of firmness.

What I love about this episode is that it briefly reaches a moment of madcap farce when the women are trying to figure out how to dispatch or free or inadvertently torture the eponymous mouse. They read about freeing the mouse from the glue trap using vegetable oil and Molly reaches for a bottle of oil…

“No no no no no! Sarah Greenfield brought that back from the vineyard in South Africa! You are not using that.”

Then she reaches for a different bottle of oil…

“NO! It’s chili-infused! It’ll hurt Jamie!”

Then she finds a can of Pam…

“What?! Why do we even have Pam?”

Then, when Our Dealer FINALLY kills the mouse with a cast iron skillet, their only response is…

“I just seasoned that pan.”

Not only is the frantic search for an appropriate lubricant to free the mouse funny, it also highlights a kinda complex attribute of these characters. They don’t view objects practically, with an eye toward utility, they see them as either representing a sentimental or ideological viewpoint. We see what the objects MEAN to them, why they’re important, and that develops their character in kinda subtle ways.

And their hypocrisy is awesome. Brenna claims that their apartment is “a place where things live … we do not torture and we do not kill.” Yet they laid down a glue trap. And freeing the mouse isn’t worth using a tablespoon of the special South African oil. All life is precious! Just not as precious as this cooking oil…

Then they agree that the mouse should die but instead of just doing it themselves, they ask Our Dealer to do it. Then they critique his methods.

It’s funny and it’s clever and it’s these tangible objects the characters handle that launch these little character developments.

So that’s something to remember for future writing. Not just having very specific objects in a script, but also spending time noting both what those objects mean to the character AND how they use them.

Bonus objects that are not commented on in the episode but are either telling or intriguing:

1) This is the first time I noticed Our Dealer’s wedding band. It has nothing to do with the episode (or any other episode that I’ve seen) but it intrigues me.

2) The tote bag they hotbox Jamie in is for New York Public Radio. They donated to an NPR fundraising campaign!

Catch up with Lessons Learned reviews of the first two episodes, “Stevie” and “Heidi”.

Lessons Learned: HIGH MAINTENANCE (“Heidi”)

Instead of a straight review, this series of posts looks at what can be learned from watching with a critical, writing-focused perspective. First up, the fantastic web series, HIGH MAINTENANCE, created by Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld. It also happens to be one of the Top Five Things I Watched in 2013.

Two things that stand out in “Heidi” are montage and brief detail shots:

Montage: In this, the second episode of Cycle One, the filmmakers are already creeping toward a more ambitious execution. Whereas the first episode mostly just aimed the camera at the characters talking, this second episode experiments with overlapping dialogue and a panning dollying tracking camera.

It’s smart. And efficient.

The first two minutes of the episode are a montage that establishes a budding hipster romance. Is using the long-maligned montage a necessary evil to bring the viewer up to speed in a 7-minute episode? I dunno. But it works here BECAUSE of the restlessness of the camera and overlapping dialogue. The filmmakers are just as itchy to get into the story as we (the laptop/smartphone gazers) are. So they make that montage active and packed with character-building minutiae. My favorite of which is…

Brief Detail Shot: …a brief shot of a stack of hipster/college books. They are:

The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Fight Club
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
The Art of War
The Complete Home Bartender’s Guide
The Complete Manual of Woodworking

Wanna try to be a worldly-ish 20 year-old? Throw these titles on your bookshelf. These are your cultural touchstones.

I LOVE this detail, these artfully stacked books. Because in a single shot, it pegs who this guy is. And he is the upper-middle class white kid with a bachelor’s degree from a private liberal arts school. Probably in English or History. Basically everyone I went to college with. I remember those years, living with those kids, BEING one of them. Reading those books and thinking, “HEY! I know how shit works now!” But really just staying pretty much as naive and dumb as before.

(Because wisdom comes from experience, right, not reading pop-lit and pop-psych best-sellers in your dorm room? That just gives you a veneer of wisdom, a faint scent of knockoff wisdom perfume. And more painfully “enlightened” drunk/stoned conversations. Those were the worst.)

I probably would’ve been duped by a cute, high-fashion homeless girl too. That’s why HIGH MAINTENANCE resonates with me. Because I’m the ideal audience, probably. It’s about me. Or enough facets of “me” that I connect with it. That specificity is amazing. Because while network or cable shows kinda have to aim for a large swath or the population and often hit no one, a web series can aim for a smaller specific audience. And nail it.

If you missed the review of episode one (“Stevie”), catch up here.

Lessons Learned: HIGH MAINTENANCE (“Stevie”)

Instead of a straight review, this series of posts looks at what can be learned from watching with a critical, writing-focused* perspective. First up, the fantastic web series, HIGH MAINTENANCE, created by Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld. It also happens to be one of the Top Five Things I Watched in 2013.

You probably should watch it before reading on. Or else, you know, it won’t really make sense.

I love the roughness of this first episode. Some out-of-focus shots, an unnecessary title sequence, the shots making it feeling a bit confined. It’s got that low-budget, two people talking in a room, not-great lighting webseries feel. But you can already see how nicely constructed the episodes are, especially through three things that are almost hallmarks of the series: set-up and payoff, character reversals, and a tight ending.

In this initial episode, all three are tied together. The plot, as it is, has a Frantic Personal Assistant trying to buy pot for her demanding “bitch” of a boss.

If I was going to describe this web series in TV terms, it has a cold open. In it, an off-putting guy watches porn while Our Dealer deals. The guy notices that they both have the same shoes–those Vibram Five Finger toe shoes. Or, as some of my former students termed them, “gorilla ninja” shoes. (Yes, I wore them to teach one day.) ((Yes, they are super hideous. But comfortable.))

The customer is kinda a gross guy. I mean, he’s blasting porn on a big screen when people are around. The only other significant detail in the scene is that he notices they have the same shoes. So it kinda infects the shoes with grossness. This is the set-up. It happens so quickly that you pretty much forget it as soon as you move into the next scene.

The payoff is the last line, when the Frantic Personal Assistant, notices Our Dealer’s toe shoes and says, “Those shoes are disgusting.” It’s a simple bridge between scenes, but it’s effective. And not only is it the pay-off, it also creates the tight ending.

The reason why this ending stands out is that it immediately follows a beat where the Frantic Personal Assistant accidentally chucks her phone into the toilet–then gets a high five from Our Dealer for escaping her boss. It’s a nice moment, but “those shoes are disgusting” tempers it and feels like a better ending. Because it gives us that satisfying mini-payoff. It’s also more reflective of the series than a simple triumph.

It’s also a small character reversal. My** first initial impression of the Frantic Personal Assistant is not a good one. Especially when she says, “I’m a little uncomfortable because this is my first time doing this and I expected a more professional experience…” But instead of letting the Frantic Personal Assistant stay as a frantic personal assistant for the entire episode, the next scene has her accepting Our Dealer’s offer of pot and shooting the shit with him. Telling him real personal things. So she’s kinda cool. Then she shits on his shoes. And we’re out. Bang.

The only real constant in the series is Our Dealer and his even-keeled, expressive-eyed, wild-bearded ways. The series loves to set up expectations for a character and then reverse them. Or tweak them. Or destroy them. It’s great character work in small doses.

* I’m using “writing” kinda loosely here. Since I don’t know how much is scripted or ad-libbed or whatever.
** Initially I had “our” instead of “my” but then I realized that’s assuming too much. Maybe you love frantic personal assistants and really relate to them and their neuroses and semi-rude ways.

Top Five Things I Watched: Tyler RE Smith

Just like Mr. Peltier’s more impressive list, this is a quick gathering of 5 things I watched in 2013–not necessarily 2013 US theatrical releases. It’s also a cross-platform list that’s sensitive to where I watched what I watched. Because watching LAWRENCE OF ARABIA on your iPhone doesn’t hold a candle (or match) to watching… see numero uno.

One common thread to my picks–all of them pay close attention to the specificity of their settings. I love when something puts me there, into the world of the show.

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA on the big screen!

Surprisingly, I missed this whenever it was played at the Normal Theater, but I finally caught it at one-day screening at a Baton Rouge multiplex–part of an on-going classics series. Peter O’Toole. Omar Sharif. David Lean. I don’t remember a whole hell of a lot of plot specifics, but I do remember being pressed back into my seat by the endless beautiful desertscapes. Gorgeous. And a viewing experience not likely to be repeated in the near future.

MOONE BOY on Hulu+

A good blending of sweet and mean, this perfectly-cast Irish sitcom from Chris O’Dowd takes place in a very specific time and place: Boyle, Ireland in 1989. The series hits its stride after dumping some of the more fantastical elements of the first episode. Bonus points for introducing me to Wheatabix.

GRAVITY at Alamo Drafthouse in Austin Fuckin’ Texas

Pure popcorn spectacle from Alfonso Cuaron. A shipwreck story with Sandra Bullock doing her best sad nerd and George Clooney doing his best George Clooney. It’s a simple story bolstered by ratcheting tension and some pleasing technical wizardry. Also the first movie I saw at the Alamo Drafthouse–so it gets an unfair bump due to the Drafthouse rebooting my faith in the movie-going experience. Suck it, all other theaters.

HIGH MAINTENANCE a webseries on Vimeo

The webseries, elevated. The episodes are tied together by the appearance of a nameless pot peddler. Outside of our bearded dealer, each ep has a different cast and a monster of the week feel–only the “monster” is something plaguing young urbanites. Suffering through a passover seder. Being an AirBnB host. Cancer. Hey, it ain’t all jokes. Sharp sharp sharp.

TOP OF THE LAKE on Netflix

A moody Kiwi import from Jane Campion that features one of my favorite actors David Wenham. A big city cop played by Elisabeth Moss comes home to small-town New Zealand and gets caught up in the disappearance of a local girl. Unpredictable, cool, twisty, and twisted. Big characters and incredible scenery. I wish my regular running route took me past sublime craggy coastlines and primeval rainforests. But I’m glad it doesn’t take me through the misogyny, incest, pedophilia, and murder that haunts the inhabitants in the series.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

The last 20 minutes of CAPTAIN PHILLIPS. Stunning filmmaking and acting.
ARCHER. Forever sploosh.
BESIDE STILL WATERS. Shit title, great movie. Fave of Austin Film Fest.
CRACKHEADS. Another AFF fave. I met up with the filmmakers–accessible, enthusiastic, and funny filmmakers.