After all the classes and workshops and seminars, after all the bullshit about craft and structure and the elements of style, here’s what it boils down to: Words and time.

Words are your money. Words are your future. Time is roasting your ass on a spit and the clock literally never stops working against you. As such I find myself increasingly less motivated to write any kind essay or article unless someone is paying me for the time it takes away from my other projects to do it. It’s just necessity, plain and simple.

I found myself moved, however, to bust out the following.

By now you’ve all seen that live-action Halo: ODST commercial (“We Are ODST”). They’re streaming it before and/or during every video on Hulu. At first I was just so taken by what a truly badass piece of filmmaking it is that I was inspired to revisit all the other live-action shorts the Halo marketing machine has produced in the last few years. I mainlined them in one shot, strictly for my own personal enjoyment.

Then they got me thinking…

You know what we don’t see anymore? The original Alien franchise. You remember those flicks, don’t you? They came before some very original concepts and ideas were reduced to who would win in an extra-terrestrial smackdown and entrusted to directors who couldn’t hold the latter-day auteurs’ jocks. Ridley Scott’s survival horror masterpiece, one of the definitive genre films of all-time. James Cameron’s military sci-fi classic, in virtually every way a perfect movie. Even the abortive effort that was Alien 3 had merit (it just didn’t have a script). David Fincher should have, and could have been a worthy successor to Ridley and Cameron.

Talented filmmakers lending their voice to an idea and using it as fuel to go on and create their own pieces of unmitigated awesome. That simply doesn’t happen anymore. Consider directors like Sam Raimi and Christopher Nolan, two purely talented motherfuckers who cut their teeth and our minds making indie films in vastly different genres. Look where they’ve both found themselves. Raimi’s on his third Spider-man sequel, and he’s remaking Evil Dead YET AGAIN. He’s shot one original screenplay this entire decade. Two Batman flicks deep, Nolan will eventually succumb to the pressure and the dump trucks of money they park along the curb in front of his house, re: another sequel. Ridley Scott made Blade Runner; Nolan had to settle for making Batman his version of Blade Runner.

Even Rob Zombie, to a lesser extent, has taken up residence in their gated community with the new Halloween franchise. The sad part is I can’t blame him. The dude wants to make horror movies. Pure and simple. He’s found a niche in that genre a studio is willing to put money behind and he’s making the most of it.

It’s happening to everybody. It seems like you either go big or you fall from grace. Carpenter fell from Grace, Gilliam seems to me to finally be breaking under the system he bucked for so many decades. The promising eyes can’t seem to deliver and aren’t even getting the chance to pick a direction to plummet. Aronofsky tried to make 2001 and ended up making The Fountain. Richard Kelly… fuck, I’m not even delving into that, as it would require an entirely separate blog post.

You find a rare gem like my man Dave Deprave, but even he’s lost something in the translation from cerebral blood and guts to cerebral drama.

So, are big budget properties the only place these filmmakers can express themselves, and do they have to sacrifice any kind of original vision (yes, I’m using the word “vision.” Fuck off) to do so?

No. As I bit into the live-action Halo shorts I realized there are still next-gen Ridley Scott’s and James Cameron’s finding there way in a similar fashion out there.

Case in point: South African filmmaker Neill Blomkamp (the District 9 guy who isn’t Peter Jackson) and Rupert Sanders.

Blomkamp, in addition to making the awesome short film that became District 9, directed the first canon live-action films based on Halo. He did three, “Arms Race,” “Combat,” and “Last One Standing.” Dig them collected below into a single short feature, Landfall.

Halo fans were creaming over the possibility of seeing this become the Halo movie, and rightfully so. I don’t think up to that point anyone had done military sci-fi better since James Cameron, and Blomkamp brought a grit and a realism all his own to the table.

Then came Sanders, picking up where Blomkamp left off in this futuristic military landscape populated by fearsome aliens (remind you of anything?). I want you to check out the full-length version of the aforementioned Halo: ODST ad. If you’ve only seen the truncated television version, then you haven’t seen it.


Not only does it file down into a slick kinetic commercial for the viral video generation, it is a borderline brilliant piece of filmmaking. Look at the way it’s end-capped by the funeral sequences, by the fresh-faced soldier looking on. Look at the way it tells this kid’s entire life story without dialogue in little more than two minutes with richness and depth. The music, the flow, the singular imagery. It fucks me up every time I watch it.

Sanders was also heavily involved the “Believe” campaign that sold Halo 3 and produced five live-action shorts, “Museum”, “Hunted”, “Enemy Weapon”, “Gravesite”, and “Believe: The John 117 Monument.”







Check out the artistry, the music, the realism in the atmosphere and the acting, the high-production documentary style (as opposed to that jerky, camera-man-having-a-seizure cinema vitesse vibe). I feel like I’m watching that “Band of Brothers” special on The History Channel.

You might say maybe it’s easy when you’re working in the short format. You don’t have to deliver on most of the concepts and ideas you introduce. I guess a lot of that, at least in this case, depends on what you thought of Blomkamp’s translation of District 9 from short film to feature.

The fact remains I so rarely see a feature film that moves me the way these short film/commercials have/do. I am seeing it more often in television (thanks to folks like “Sons of Anarchy” creator Kurt Sutter who are actually bringing some auteurism and balls to the medium), but the good storytelling is parceled out among such an overwhelming glut of absolute schlock the medium itself is still hard to get behind.

I see a culture where more creativity and more storytelling craft is being poured into video games than is being intravenously dripped into Hollywood feature films. You might make the argument that it’s always been that way, but I think the modus operandi has become “sell” rather than “create.”

I want you to check out another video. This is a commentary on the actual video game itself Sanders “We Are ODST” short is pimping.


And that’s the rub. All of that ambition, all of that scope and execution, all of that talent, the sole purpose of it is consumer anal rape. It’s all designed to sell you shit you don’t need for a product you’ve already bought several times. The argument could be made that this concept destroys art, despite the artistic byproduct of it.

Hollywood has the same philosophy, only they’re making bank on the actual movie. So the entire flick becomes one feature-length trailer for itself. If you have trouble wrapping your head around that concept, I have an easy way to abstract it for you: Transformers 2. It epitomizes everything I’ve been writing about. It’s a two-hour sound-and-fury trailer for a Transformers movie rather than an actual feature film.

This is the mentality that has to be overcome, first by the directors themselves. Somebody needs to relearn what Ridley and Cameron figured out when they transitioned from schlock and commercials into making viable, important, and just plain fucking good works of art and entertainment. Somewhere along the way that disconnect got fried on the motherboard. Industry rewired our circuits to bypass it entirely, repurposing our creative impulses for itself rather than the filmmaker or film fan.

Somebody, anybody, needs to dig into the guts of this fractured operating system and burn all of that away. And so I am, in essence, as I believe many of us are, waiting for the soldering gun of the gods.

I’m not arrogant or up my own ass far enough (yet) to believe it’s me. I’ll do my part. The only thing I’ll sell is myself and my story. But it’s going to take a lot more to shift our collective gears.

It’s definitely going to take you.