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My Weird Uncle, Cutthroat Island
🕑 Added 2021-07-21 23:23:20 +0000 UTC
I was asked to join the lovely folks at the Cult Classic Callback podcast for an episode. Like it says on the box, they revisit favourite old movies and have a chat about them. I asked if there was anything in particular they wanted to watch, and Aaron presented me with a long list. I immediately spotted Cutthroat Island, and though I knew what sort of pain I would be inflicting on Aaron and Linsae, I chose it anyway.
If you've never heard of the movie, its Wikipedia article does a decent job of covering the basics. It came out in 1995, when I was a teenager, and quickly earned its status as an infamous flop, a total disaster of a movie. I never saw any of it until I caught part of it on TV one day, and whatever brief segment I saw must have convinced me: this is not worth watching.
Years later, once I'd started working on DD, I re-encountered Cutthroat Island in the context of "hey, this soundtrack is amazing." I remembered the movie was a bomb, but wow, the music is, indeed, a wonderful, iconic adventure score. I had previously heard the old Erich Wolfgang Korngold soundtracks to early-cinema swashbuckling films Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk, and Cutthroat Island's music is very much cut from the same sailcloth.
A few years ago, when I saw it pop up on Netflips (or something), I decided to give it a second chance, and watched it in its entirety for the first time. It must have been so bad that my brain erased it from my memory, because watching it now, to prepare for the podcast, I remembered almost none of it from that previous viewing.
I want to give this movie the benefit of the doubt for many reasons, but primarily because I love the music and because, by fate or circumstance, I somehow ended up making my own historically-set, swashbuckling stories about a sword-wielding lady, just like Cutthroat Island. Before I had begun work on DD, if I had understood how completely Cutthroat Island had salted the landscape for this type of work, would I still have started DD? I don't know. Cutthroat Island apparently made pirate swashbuckling films verboten in Hollywood until Pirates of the Caribbean injected some life back into the genre. (Say what you will about that franchise or its leading actor, I remember the first movie fondly. Jack Sparrow's introduction is particularly memorable.) I suspect, like a beached whale, Cutthroat Island's rotten stench still sours the genre in the mind of anyone who remembers that film.
And yet, here I am, trying to make new work in the same space. So, to me, Cutthroat Island feels like a Weird Uncle. I'm related to him—I can't deny it—but I can never condone his disjointed story, his awfully-written dialogue, or the perfunctory performances of his two lead actors. Geena Davis and Matthew Modine, both of whom I otherwise consider perfectly delightful, are—for whatever reason—lifeless and charmless in this movie. I would never ask you not to judge my Weird Uncle, but I might point out that he has all the colourful setpieces you might want from a swashbuckling adventure. Morgan's rescue of her father as he sinks, tied to an anchor, is a good visual. There are some nice compositions. The stunt where Morgan dives through a window, tumbles down a roof, and lands seated in a moving carriage—it's stunning and seems impossible.
All I ask is that you not judge me by association with my Weird Uncle. We're from different generations. We want different things. I like to think I know what half-decent dialogue sounds like, while he clearly does not, at all. I do not disown my Weird Uncle, but I also do not buy him Christmas gifts. He did what he did, and he made his offences known, and I work every day to counterbalance the effect he had on our shared genre. And I wonder if, to an outside observer, I can ever do enough to right the ship.
OKAY, BUT WHAT ELSE IS UP?
After a few torturous days, I succeeded in finding a new way to update the DelilahDirk.com site that will make it easy to make new posts when it's time to start doing that. I haven't updated the site yet, but it's ready to go as soon as I finish colouring Chapter One. I also re-learned CSS and redesigned the page-reading web pages so that, hopefully, that experience is ideal, both on computer monitors and on tablets or phones.
I've also been tending to grant-writing chores. I filed a report with the British Columbia Arts Council, who has supported this work, and I've prepared a new grant application for the upcoming deadline.
It's a unique challenge, writing grant applications. They ask you what is the artistic value of the work you want to do, and I'm never sure how to respond to those questions. I struggle, balancing between the bullshit artspeak I learned in Fine Arts school, versus speaking directly and honestly. I struggle because I always believe that the value of the work ought to be self-evident, and talking people into seeing that value feels disingenuous to me. But it is necessary, evidently.
The upside is that I do a lot, a lot, a lot of thinking about the work. What are the themes? What sort of ideas are going into the work? What are my goals for the characters, and for the story? How am I growing as an artist and how am I contributing to the broader artistic practice that I'm pursuing? I don't know if I've come up with satisfactory answers to those questions (it's hard to ever find out—the application assessment process is such a black box), but if nothing else, I've done some good work thinking about the story, which should manifest in some good ideas on the page and—more importantly—maybe a good joke or two.
Anyway, the deadlines are not until the beginning of Autumn. I have time to let my first draft of my applications sit around. Now, I have copies of BUBBLE to sign for people who ordered them, I have to prep the Patron Acknowledgement pages, and then it's time to start colour! Thank goodness.
Comments
Tealin
I wonder if this is why Muppet Treasure Island (1996) didn't stick in the collective memory nearly as well as Muppet Christmas Carol, despite being very very good ... Pirates of the Caribbean was in development as an animated movie in the late 90s, but kept chasing its tail until they moved it over to live action. Did you know Jack Sparrow's introduction comes straight from some piece of classical (I think Greek) literature? I can't remember what it was now, but I someone mentioned Character X appearing at the dock at the top of the mast of his sinking ship and I was like – HEY!
