We’ll still have daily movie news for you; it’ll be in a slightly different form that takes less time to regurgitate. But the best part will be the new features we have cookin’… I hope you’re ready to try something new. Cajun-style!

Riggs is the award-winning filmmaker of films such as Spaceboy and Portable Living Room. He is also a writer and blogger for Mental_Floss magazine. You can learn more about Ransom and his work at Ransomriggs.com.

PYITH: Is film your priority now? You stay pretty busy with writing.

Ransom R: Yeah, film’s my priority now. But I’m not making much money from it yet! I just got out of film school a year or so ago, so am still “breaking in” — while doing writing and such to pay the bills.

PYITH: If the money never comes … will you continue to be a filmmaker?

Ransom R: On some level, certainly. It’s hard to predict the future, but things are going pretty well at the moment. So I’m hopeful.

PYITH: Here’s a boring, but I suppose necessary question:  Who are some of your influences, who made you decide to be a filmmaker?

Ransom R: I saw The Shining when I was 12, and that’s the first time I remember thinking “Wow, who made that?” It had such directorial authority and power, I became fascinated with directing, and film in general. So I guess that’s where it started. Then there were all the usual 90s indie film suspects — Jim Jarmusch, Tarantino, etc, as well as the giants, Coppola and Scorsese …

PYITH: You were 12? And it didn’t make you cry?

Ransom R: I was always into horror for some reason. I read everything by Stephen King in a summer or two, and actually wrote some (super crappy) horror novellas early on in high school. (Which were read by nobody, which is a good thing.) But yeah, no, The Shining is still one of my favorites.

PYITH: Do you remember some of the titles?

Ransom R: The titles of — ?

PYITH: Your horror books.

Ransom R: It’s kind of foggy now … it’s been years since I went back and looked at those … but one was called “The Box,” I think … about a feral sort of half-man raised in a cage, who grows up, escapes, and takes his revenge. There were others, too, though I forget what they were about.

PYITH: Have you thought about going back and reworking them, with a little perspective? I mean you have perspective now. Because the feral half-man story sounds like a bestseller to me.

Ransom R: Nah, they were just pre-adolescent regurgitations of Stephen King ideas … but what’s interesting is that now, years later, I’m coming back around to the horror/supernatural genre as something I’m passionate about. I think there’s something about the stuff you liked when you were 12 — you continue to respond to that stuff for the rest of your life.

PYITH: Would you like your next project to be in the horror genre?

Ransom R: Yes, I’m writing a supernatural horror feature right now. So hopefully that gets sold!

PYITH: Can you tell us what your feature is about?

Ransom R: Sure — it’s the story of a haunting, of a girl from a small town who goes away to an exclusive private college (modeled more or less after my undergrad alma mater, Kenyon), and starts having disturbing nightmares. She’s on serious anti-psychotic medications, the side-effects of which are making it really difficult to concentrate and stay awake and compete, and rather than lose her scholarship, she goes off them cold turkey — against the advice of doctors. She goes from being semi-narcoleptic to a total insomniac — but the nightmares don’t go away — they start entering her reality. (That’s the elevator pitch, at least.)

PYITH: Does it have a title?

Ransom R: I’m still wrestling with the title.

PYITH: I know you said you’d been working on it since February, do you think you were extra hard on it because of your love of horror? Or did you just have other things that kept you away from it?

Ransom R: No, I’ve been working on it pretty consistently, sans a few weeks between drafts here and there to get perspective on the work. But it’s my first feature script — so it needs to be good!

PYITH: How do you feel about the state of the modern horror movie?

Ransom R: I think the horror genre (including horror fiction) has always been about 90% schlock, 10% good stuff.  It’s been the same ever since supernatural lit was just getting started — when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, it was considered schlock by a lot of people. HP Lovecraft, who’s so referenced and revered now, wasn’t considered a master in his own time.  Hell, even The Shining wasn’t worshipped like it is today when it came out almost 30 years ago.  Which is to say, people expect horror to be schlocky — which maybe is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and has something to do with why 90% is exactly that — schlock.  I think if one out of five horror movies that comes out is good, we as fans of the genre are doing pretty well.  (Off the top of my head, the only real standout of the past year I can think of is The Orphanage.)  Which is a roundabout way of saying that I think horror is more or less what it’s always been, and the ratio of good horror to bad horror has been pretty consistent for a long time.

PYITH: And how you feel about selling a horror film in the present market? Do you worry that it will be tamed down or gored up to sell to a wider audience?

Ransom R: I feel good about it!  The market will have its up and downs, just as the popularity of a genre will, but I think horror is relatively evergreen one. Much more so than say, the period costume drama genre or the historical epic genre.  I think there’s always a market for a great horror film.  And my script already has a fair amount of gore in it — but you never know what kind of notes you’re going to get!

PYITH: Two of your films, Skinny Leg Blues and Attack of the Parasites both use found footage, what would you say to people who think editing together other people’s stuff isn’t filmmaking?

Ransom R: I think editing is one of the most crucial parts of making a film. It’s like writing. And in a way, actually being on set and shooting the film is just creating material for the editor to use. So if that material already exists — and the editor uses it in some new and different way, to express something never intended in the original material — isn’t that filmmaking too?

PYITH: Skinny Leg Blues seems so personal . . . is that hard? Putting yourself out there like that?

Ransom R: It wasn’t, really. Making a film is weird — in the end it’s very public, but when you’re making it, or cutting it at least, you’re alone in a dark room, and it feels very private. I probably wouldn’t be very good at standing up in front of a lot of people and talking about my late father — but for some reason, making a film about him and showing it to people doesn’t feel as dangerous.

PYITH: Since a lot of your success in writing and film have stemmed from having the internet as a means of distribution, how different would things be if the internet just plain didn’t exist? What would you do differently, and more importantly, could you even feel accomplished creatively?

Ransom R: Well, several of my shorts have had healthy lives on the festival circuit and been aired on television, so I wouldn’t be totally bereft without the internet — but it’s definitely been a game-changer for a lot of independent filmmakers (and musicians, and writers). Sometimes I think about the filmmakers who came of age in the 90s, before the net, before non-linear editing and compact digital cameras, and I wonder how any of them did it! At the same time, though, the internet’s democratization of distribution channels (which is just starting) and digital’s democratization of production has made it so much easier for anyone who ever wanted to make a film to do so, and put it out there to some degree, that the competition is enormous. There are thousands of videos uploaded to Youtube every hour. Sundance gets more than 3,000 feature film submissions every year now. And there are more and more film festivals proliferating, so many that getting into them seems to matter less and less. So I think in some ways, the new opportunities are balanced out by the increased difficulty of just getting your voice heard over the din.

PYITH: Yeah, that does make sense. I’m going to take it in a little different direction and ask you about your role at Mental_Floss; how did that opportunity happen?

Ransom R: A good friend of mine in undergrad was John Green, and one of his first jobs out of college was writing for Mental_Floss. He was obviously super talented and they used him on everything — including at one point as the writer of at least two books at once. He was getting totally overwhelmed with it at one point, and asked me to co-write one of the books with him. That was ‘Scatterbrained.’ After that, I started getting offers from Neely Harris at the magazine to write articles, and eventually Mangesh [Hattikudur] asked me to write for the blog, as well. I was in film school at the time and needed the extra cash — and it sounded like lots of fun, which it has been — so I signed on without hesitation.

PYITH: How do you feel writing for the print magazine and blog are different for you? As in, with deadlines and even content?

Ransom R: Well, blogging is a lot more informal. On the other hand, it’s nice to see your work in print, and the magazine is really well put together. On the other other hand, the blog team is fantastic, and it’s really satisfying to write something at 9am and have 20 people respond to it and start a conversation about it by noon. It’s much more human and interactive. It was tough to get used to blogging at first because I was so used to writing for the magazine. It could take as long as a week to write a really good, in-depth magazine article– but if you’re spending more than a few hours on a blog entry, it’s just not economically feasible. So I had to get used to blogging quickly, every day — for a while, twice a day — and I think the discipline of doing that has made me a better writer. And the blog has gone from relatively obscure to getting millions of page views a month, which has been cool to be a part of.

PYITH: One of the first things you wrote for the magazine was a Masterpiece Section on Psycho. How cool was it to write about, what I’m assuming is, another one of your influences? And getting paid for it?

Ransom R: It was cool. Mangesh and Neely know what I like, and they try to steer my assignments toward that. I still had to do a ton of research — even though I’d seen Psycho a million times, there’s all this biographical info about Hitchcock I needed, and all the requisite mental floss trivia and tidbits …

PYITH: Where do you get your information?

Ransom R: Well, Wikipedia is verboten when writing for the mag (and rightly so), so I rely on the Britannica online a lot, and when doing the Hitchcock piece and a more recent piece on Allen Ginsberg, I read biographies. Did you guys see any of the shorts I did for Mental_Floss? That’s a parallel between the writing stuff and the film stuff.

PYITH: I saw the Attack of the Parasites.

Ransom R: Famous Last Words was better — and we’re working on one more, which should be pretty crazy. A 3D motion capture animation. With explosions.

PYITH: So working at Mental Floss and being a filmmaker are not mutually exclusive?

Ransom R: Not at all.

PYITH: I know you said you were friends with John Green, did his book Looking for Alaska inspire that short, or was that something you were also interested in trivia-wise, so it made sense to make a Famous Last Words short?

Ransom R: Mangesh and I had been tossing around ideas for shorts to make, and I was going through all the back-issues of the magazine for inspiration. I stumbled across a blurb John had written several years ago on famous last words — and then thought about how he had used them to such great effect in his novel, and figured I could twist the concept into a fun, tongue-in-cheek musical piece. 

PYITH: How hard is working in animation?

Ransom R. It’s hard — and slow. But the hassles are different — you’re not dealing with locations, equipment, etc — and my animators were great. (I myself cannot draw a straight line.)

PYITH: And of course, as a closing, closing question, what advice do you have for aspiring filmmakers? Do’s, don’ts?

Ransom R: Write a script. Lots of people can make a slick-looking short film. Not that many people can write a good script. And if you can do both — all the better.

The films “The Argentine” and “Guerrilla” will chronicle a few events in the life of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara (Benicio Del Toro). Release dates are sketchy, but right now both parts are expected to hit theaters sometime late ‘08 or early ‘09.

So Benicio reunited with the director who helped win him the Oscar. Sounds good. But, ooooh, just noticed that the screenwriter is Peter Buchman, the scribe of “Eragon” and Jurassic Park III.”

Whuh?

Nailing Your Wife

Normally I wouldn’t agree. I love DVD and MP3 and all the new technologies. But I gave him a chance and he makes some good points. He also looks like my friend Brian.

Now where do I find some charity shops?

Zooey: What do you see Mark? Wahlberg: Killer fucking trees!!!

BUY

“30 Rock: Season 2” (PG-13):
Alec Baldwin, Tracy Morgan, Jane Krakowski and Tina Fey (also the show’s creator and writer) return for the funniest show on TV.

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RENT

“The Happening” (R):
Not only the worst movie of M. Night Shyamalan’s career; I’m convinced this would-be eco-horror-thriller about what happens when THE TREES STRIKE BACK might be one of the worst films of all time. I say that somewhat affectionately. This is, after all the movie in which Mark Wahlberg tries to reason with a fake tree.
Worried about the economy? Watch this movie because, you know, it will put things in perspective. At least at least at least, the trees aren’t trying to kill humanity.

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“Paranoid Park” (R):
Moody, artsy filmmaker Gus Van Sant’s best pic in many a moon. Based on the young adult novel by Blake Nelson, ‘Park’ digs into the skate rat culture of Portland, Ore., and tracks a few months in the life of a teen boy after he makes a horrible mistake.
A beautifully shot, artistically wrought film about the secret lives of teens.

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WATCH ON TBS FIVE YEARS FROM NOW

“Don’t Mess with the Zohan” (PG-13):
Adam Sandler plays Zohan, an Israeili commando who pursues his dream of being a hair stylist in New York City. Looks mildly amusing, if a little too self-conscious.

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Kristen Stewart and Robin Pattinson both look, well, kind of yummy (though, one of them’s a little pallid).

I’m not expecting much from this movie. I read the first book in the “Twilight” series, well, half of it, and it’s a decent, atmospheric young adult novel. But Catherine Hardwicke, the director of “The Nativity Story” and “Lords of Dogtown,” is a tough sell. The movie might suck, but at least the leads look pretty.

Behold:

“Twilight” hits theaters on Nov. 21.

First of all, too much happens over the course of about 28-30 hours in this film. (WARNING: SPOILERS)Literally, everything that could go bad in Jim Stark’s (James Dean) life does. And it all happens in a believable timeframe. He gets arrested, his parents fight making him feel disillusioned and out of place, he starts at a new school, he pisses off the school bully, he befriends an outsider, he continues to piss off the school bully by pursuing a girl in his gang, girl in gang thinks he’s lame for about 20 minutes, girl in gang falls in love with him, he gets challenged to a chicken race, chicken race goes wrong, bully dies, Jim doesn’t know how to deal with this, Jim does know he’s not sad, Jim tries to tell his parents what happened, parents won’t listen, bully’s gang starts tormenting Jim and his family, Jim lays on stairs and gives “meaningful”/whiny speech, Jim sneaks out of house, Jim and outcast and formerly-unimpressed girl play house, outcast flips out and goes to hide in observatory, outcast flips out and waves mostly empty gun at police, police feel threatened by outcast/gun and kill outcast, Jim’s life goes on. (END OF SPOILERS)

Nonsense. Serious nonsense. My head wanted to explode after rereading the plot synopsis on Wikipedia. But not quite as much as when I was watching the film trying to process this bullshit. The actors and, most importantly, the audience never have time to process anything that happens in this film, especially the more traumatizing moments. Instead, the characters are shoved from one disillusioning moment into another without pause. What we’re left with, almost by default, is an emotionless love letter to teenage angst. Even powerful moments are stripped of there power because of just how much nonsense Jim Stark has to deal with on the day in question. And to be honest, it’s not all that coherent either.

Maybe it spoke to the disillusioned youth of the time. Maybe it speaks to the disillusioned emo kids of today. But what self-respecting adult can stand a single minute of this melodramatic snoozefest? That’s beyond me.

It’s true most of the people spouting off idiotic soundbites in Hollywood are liberal. Let’s not forget those studio heads raking in the cash probably play for the “right” team.

Liberal comedians seem to get more airtime just by virtue of being funny. Whereas the most popular of conservative “comedians” just get brushed off as offensive. But there is plenty on the left to make fun of. Liberals should be made fun of. It’s about time they got a taste of their own medicine.

I mean, we’re Americans; both sides should be made fun of equally and with equal hilarity. If the makers of An American Carol are wondering why the liberals get more laughs maybe they should look at their poster. Yeah, I guess Michael Moore being fat is funny . . . to a 2nd grader and Larry the Cable Guy fans. I guess that’s who this movie is aimed at though. Of course the GOP doesn’t have a constituency filled with bright and actually funny people. Nope, just racist dummies who love the sounds made by their butts.

Still, there are funnier people in Hollywood that could have made An American Carol good or edgy or something more than grating.

OK. I haven’t seen it. It could very well be everything I hope it to be. You know, it could be Team America: World Police.

I love Kelsey Grammer and I kind of feel bad that the one movie made ridiculing Democrats comes from David Zucker, who hasn’t made a good, funny or relevant movie since Airplane! Come on Kelsey, you are a smart, witty guy, couldn’t you get together with Bruce Willis and come up with something better? I even looked up “better” Hollywood conservatives you could cast. The Rock! Drew Carey! Adam Sandler?! Any would be better than Kevin Farley and Trace Adkins.

Now we have a movie that panders to one side and one side only. Sure a few people will get some chuckles, but nothing more will come out of what I am assuming is a forgettable flick. It’s too bad; even I get tired of laughing at Republicans. It would have been nice to laugh with them for a change.

Marvel Comics just released the first official plot synopsis for “The First Avenger: Captain America” movie (Release Date: May 6, 2011). And, well, no big surprises here. I think it’ll be nice, though, to have a comic book movie that doesn’t take place in modern times.

Thanks to JoBlo.com for the heads up.

“Born during the Great Depression, Steve Rogers grew up a frail youth in a poor family. Horrified by the newsreel footage of the Nazis in Europe, Rogers was inspired to enlist in the army. However, because of his frailty and sickness, he was rejected. Overhearing the boy’s earnest plea, General Chester Phillips offered Rogers the opportunity to take part in a special experiment… Operation: Rebirth. After weeks of tests, Rogers was at last administered the ‘Super-Soldier Serum’ and bombarded by ‘vita-rays.’ Steve Rogers emerged from the treatment with a body as perfect as a body can be and still be human. Rogers was then put through an intensive physical and tactical training program. Three months later, he was given his first assignment as Captain America. Armed with his indestructible shield and and battle savvy, Captain America has continued his war against evil both as a sentinel of liberty and leader of the Avengers.”

Casting rumors at this point are not to be trusted. My suggestion: Isn’t it about time they made Ryan Gosling a superhero?