Author Archives: Michael Arce

Cine

First of all, my God it’s been a long time.  My ideal plan was to write at least once a month.  That hasn’t been working out so well due to a plethora of other priorities in line.  In any case, life is life and we all must continue to write on.  And, for the sake of writing on, let’s touch base on something you all may already know that is near and dear to my heart – films.

It’s unfortunate that due to lack of free time I don’t watch as much film as I once did.  I no longer have the will to watch anything and everything, and my ability to the be attentive and study each film has become rusted and dull in the toolbox.  The result – my taste in film has greatly evolved and I’ve become highly selective and picky with what I choose to watch.  There’s several layers of security for a movie to be able to pass and get to my eyes, ears, and feels, and the the biggest one is (still) the director’s chair, and who’s name is on it.

While the Zemeckis, Chan-wooks, Nolans, Tarantinos, and Smiths of the world will always hold high spots on my shelf, there’s been a more recent and modern wave of film directors that possess my golden ticket.  If their name is on a poster then I’ve got to see what they’re putting together.  And the first name on this short list is Adam McKay.

McKay has the spotlight for this year’s Christmas Day opening for his latest film, Vice, starring the excruciatingly intense Christian Bale, who will be playing former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.  Vice also reunites McKay and Bale, who’ve previously teamed up in The Big Short (2015) which happens to be a top 5 film of mine.  McKay has an obvious skill for comedy (Anchorman and Step Brothers), but his style for storytelling, pacing, and timing is what wins a ticket.  If it wasn’t for Avengers: Infinity War, McKay’s take on Cheney would have topped my 2018 list for my most anticipated film.  Speaking of Avengers –

The Russo brothers also hold two of my golden tickets.  The currently unknown title of Avengers 4 will likely be 2019’s biggest draw, closing the book on the first decade of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films that will (likely?) allow the fans to say goodbye to the original cast.  The MCU is not only a once in a lifetime experience in film – it’s the first of its kind in cinematic history.  While other studios struggle to replicate their intertwined universe, the Russos continue to evolve the MCU with their knack to flesh out painfully compelling antagonists, which eventually pushes the protagonist(s) to make the most difficult decisions.  Appealing villains combined with the fallibility of heroes tend to make the best cinema.  This has been apparent dating back to their initial entry – Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) – where many fans regard this as MCU’s greatest film.  Sadly, Avengers 4 could be their swan song from the MCU, but it may not get any bigger come May 2019.

If the answer ‘Studios that struggle to create their own superhero cinematic universe’ showed up Jeopardy, ‘Who is Warner Bros?’ would be smart reply.  In fact, bet the farm because you’ll be right – Warner has failed DC Comics and its extended universe as hard as I’ve failed at taking Anne Hathaway out on a date, which is every single day for the last 12 or so years since I saw Ella Enchanted.

They have one successful entry in Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman (fight me if you think there’s more than one right now).  And, speaking of betting farms,  I’m betting that James Wan’s Aquaman releasing in a few weeks will be not only a fun film, but a great film.

James Wan has a golden ticket, and no it’s not because of Furious 7, albeit a few creative action set pieces and one of the most heartfelt tributes at the end.  I have a love/hate relationship with paranormal horror films – I hate watching them, but if I do, I end up falling in love with its (sometimes true) mysteries and the efforts on how to both tell and shoot that story.  Wan’s The Conjuring was as much of a masterpiece as it was terrifying.  Combine his keen sense for suspense with filming action, Aquaman could completely alter the landscape and finally give DC something to look forward to and build upon.

Other notable directors with golden tickets include Lee Unkrich (Coco) Jordan Peele (Get Out), Paul Feig (Spy), aaaand whomever directed Bumblebee.  Looks like they finally decided to make a real Transformers movie.

Standard

Vino

Sips.

Another night, another glass of vino.  It’s a fairly new habit I’m trying to keep up with.  For the record, it’s not due to the possible health benefits that have been associated with drinking a glass of wine every night.  Rather, it’s a simple and easy reminder to consistently flirt with vulnerability.  If that sounds scary to you, you’re right.  If it doesn’t, then you’re lying to yourself.

It’s scary as shit, but that makes it a good thing.

Sips.

Throughout our lives we’ve been protected with careful rules and recommendations designed to keep both physical and emotional harm at bay.

Look both ways before you cross the street.
Be sure to visit your doctor often.
Don’t put foreign objects or substances in your mouth.
Don’t like Instagram photos more than four weeks ago.
Don’t do drugs… but didn’t Steve Jobs create Apple Computers from one or several trips to LSD? I’m just sayin’.

Meth. Definitely don’t do meth. Or heroin.

Sips.

Many of these rules are in place to control and prevent chaos, and I’m not oblivious to the fact that these are required to be in place to reach and maintain a good quality of life.  I’m also not insinuating that you go completely rogue on society and start sprinting through red lights while sucking on Tide pods as you continue to light up hearts on photos from that girl’s (or guy’s) posts from March of 2017.

I merely want to emphasize balance – when playing it too safe you’ll feel unfulfilled, and if you are vulnerable for too long you’ll probably die from eating the detergent.

Sips.

And as I get closer to meeting the bottom of this glass of vino, I can tell you this – I feel a healthy sliver of imbalance and drowsiness, increasing the frequency of typos.  My judgment, however, is very much intact; I just misspelled judgment (initially judgement) but immediately corrected this.  My mathematical prowess also remains flawless.  Check this shit out:

Sips.

To solve 31! you must multiply 31 (x) 29 (x) 28 (x) 27 (x) 26 (x) 25 (x) 24 (x) 23 (x) 22 (x) 21 (x) 20 (x) 19 (x) 18 (x) 17 (x) 16 (x) 15 (x) 14 (x) 13 (x) 12 (x) 11 (x) 10 (x) 9 (x) 8 (x) 7 (x) 6 (x) 5 (x) 4 (x) 3 (x) 2 (x) 1, which is 8,222,838,654,177,922,817,725,562,880,000,000.

Sips.  Damn I’m good.

My mental foundation is drilled into a bedrock of euphoria.  There’s a warm blanket of elation draped over my body and mind, making me impervious to bad thoughts and feelings.

Most of all, I’m poised and willing to fail.  Matter of fact, there is not a flying fuck on this planet that I give.  It’s like traveling back in time to assassinate Overthinking so it longer exists in the present.  And that’s where there is true magic in vino – rules that are scary to bend or even break in vulnerable situations no longer seem so scary at all.  Life is good, life is all right, and regardless of the outcomes from scary decisions made within that hour or so of drunken haze – whether you land on your feet or flat on your face –

Sips.

Everything is going to be perfectly okay.

One last reminder – do you know what overthinking is?  It’s a game of chess between a mind reader and a clairvoyant – it’s always one without a winner.

Don’t be stale, mate.

Sips.

Standard

Stupid

“You know, you have to be a little stupid.”

It may not sound like much, but let me tell you the who-what-when-where-why of one of the most compelling, impactful, and important things anyone has ever said to me.

INT. GYM/WEIGHT ROOM – AFTERNOON

We’re somewhere in 2008 of the timeline.  I’m at the gym working out with my two good friends Joe and Chris. They’re a lot bigger than me, and to give you a visual of that, picture the standard icon of the strength of your signal on your cell phone.  There’s five bars, and if I’m the middle bar, Joe and Chris are labeled to the right respectively, aptly giving you the best possible signal on your phone for crystal clear conversation.

Many times I wondered why they let me train with them.  Maybe because I made them laugh – not because I told jokes so good that they could be exchanged for pure gold, or wit so sharp it made you say cheddar, no.  They laughed because I couldn’t lift weights for beans, and understandably so, that holds a lot of entertainment value.  Fair enough; I laughed at myself, too.

We’re doing burnout sets, which means we’re flirting with death until we decide it’s okay to come back to life.  More technically, we’re doing one exercise – repeatedly – toward the brink of utter exhaustion at the end of a series of exercises that were performed in a more standard x reps for y sets.  You can imagine it’s only fun if you’re crazy.

Or in this case – stupid.  But, in a good way.  Let me explain.

For the burnout set we’re doing push ups – a classic exercise with the right amount sadism.  Naturally, I burn out first.  I can’t even tell you how many I did (couldn’t have been much), but I can tell you how hard my body flopped to the floor at the end of it.  Have you ever seen someone try to run through a glass door they didn’t see was there?

Harder than that.

Chris, the tallest bar of the cell phone signal icon, actually burns out second.  That leaves Joe as the iron man of the burnout set, and my jaw drops watching him keep at it.  One after another, he pushes himself up, and descends down, then back up, and repeat.  I didn’t lose count, because I wasn’t trying to keep one.  At this point, I was awed and inspired.  Chris, drenched and dripping with his own sweat, turns to me and says these words I’ll never forget, and words I have and will continue to live by:

“You know, you have to be a little stupid, you know?  You have to be stupid to just keep going.  That’s all pain right there, why wouldn’t you just stop, you know what I’m sayin’?  Like, stupid to the point that you can’t even register what pain is.”

Joe is still going – one push up after another.  Grunting, muttering expletives under his heaving breaths.  Just when I think he’s going to burn out, he pushes right back up.  His determination was so heavy it felt like you could gather chunks of it from the air, pack it up in tupperware and save it as a post-workout snack for later.  Joe finally burned out his set, but even after a gutsy display of tenacity I still thought he could have easily kept on going.  I was convinced he felt more tiresome of Chris and I staring at him with jealous eyes.

While it seemed like an insult (albeit a playful one) at first, there is something powerful to be grasped from Chris’s genuinely honest observation about Joe – what we all understand as an innate human reaction of instantly pulling your hand away once you touch a hot stove was something Joe seemingly didn’t have.  In this case I took this not as a lack of intelligence, but rather a strong indication of mental toughness.  Only in the specific manner in which Chris diagramed his view of Joe did I conceive strength in a completely different light:

“Stupid” people won’t know how to quit, even when they’re burnt halfway to hell.
“Stupid” people take on challenges that are already labeled as impossible.
“Stupid” people go toe to toe with adversaries that will beat them to a pulp, and “stupid” people will find a way to get back up.
“Stupid” people avoid using excuses, especially the most valid ones.
“Stupid” people find ways to be vulnerable, in order to stay humble.

Joe is pretty stupid, in fact one of the most stupid guys I’ve ever met.  Chris is no different, and I’m lucky to have met and befriended several other people that can be just as stupid.  I want to be the same, if not even stupider.  In fact, I try to be the most absolutely stupidest person in any given room I walk into.  I want people to say about me, “That guy?  Michael Arce?  That’s one stupid motherf—-r, man.  So stupid he *willingly solves math problems when he’s completely inebriated with alcohol.”

So, Joe and Chris used to call me Mikelovin’.  There’s absolutely no point to me mentioning this at all, I just wanted to say it because I’m still the shorter end of this cell phone signal metaphor, I have zero appeal going for me so far, and we’re already at the end of this story.  I needed appreciate the ego boost.  I’m the one writing it, and I can do so.  Do somethin’.

I’m with stupid.

*true story

Standard

K

In previous New Year’s Eves, I’ve frequented a top 3-10 list usually involving films I’ve seen in the last 12 months.  It’s unfortunate that this year has provided me significantly lesser time to visit the cinemas, and I am reluctant to put together my own favorites based on the very little choices I have.

Instead I took an alternate route for my year-end list for 2017.  But first, I needed a letter, any letter, and relied on a random contact on my phone to provide me with such.  Let me send out a big thank you to one of my longest tenured friend and brother, Greg Gilvison, for providing with the letter K.

I will now present you a Top 5 list of my favorite films, starting with the eccentric 11th letter of the alphabet:

5. Kindergarten Cop (1990) starring California’s former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Directed by Ivan Reitman.

Honestly, the only reason this movie makes the list are for two of Arnold’s lines – “We are going to play a wonderful game called who is your daddy, and what does he do?” and “It’s not a tumor!”  Both lines in the same scene, no more than 13 seconds apart.

4. Kill Bill Vol. 1 + 2 (2003) starring Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah, Vivica A. Fox, David Carradine, martial arts genre legend Gordon Liu, and many of Quentin Tarantino’s usual suspects.  Directed by Quentin Tarantino.

One upon a time, Kill Bill actually ranked into my own personal Top 5 list of all time.  But, as time goes on and tastes continue to evolve, it barely cracks my Top 5 list that start with the letter K.  This doesn’t signify drop in quality; I can watch Kill Bill vol. 1 – 2 right now and still be just as entertained as my first viewing.  Tarantino continues to prove that he is like wine, and his films after his kung fu revenge saga (Inglorious Basterds, Django Unchained) were simply just better.

Tarantino and I have this in common – we are huge fans of the martial arts genre – everything from Shaw Bros, Jackie Chan, and Akira Kurosawa films.  KB was everything about his love affair with the genre and more, combining great sets, action pieces, amazing cinematography and unforgettable dialogue (see: Carradine’s Superman speech) into his traditional nonlinear storytelling.

3. Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) starring Colin Firth, Taron Egerton, Samuel L. Jackson, and Mark Strong.  Directed by Matthew Vaughn.

I’m a sucker for highly stylized, action spy thrillers, and this one combines humor, social commentary, and fun performances from those involved.  The scene with Colin Firth vs. a church full of racists to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird is – while beyond violent – worth the price of admission alone.

2. The Karate Kid part I (1984) starring Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita.  Directed by John G. Avildsen.

Kid moves to new city.
Kid gets bullied.
Kid meets karate master.
Karate master makes kid paint the fence, sand the deck, and wax the cars (but really he was teaching him the basics of karate).
Kid enters karate tournament.
Kid beats bullies in tournament.
Kid gets the girl.

Seriously, that’s the story of my life… okay everything except for ‘kid meets karate master’ and after.

1. A Knight’s Tale (2001) starring (gone way too soon) Heath Ledger, Shanynn Sossamon, Alan Tudyk, and Paul Bettany.  Directed by Brian Helgeland.

Truth be told, I’m not the biggest fan of any flick done in the medieval time period (this might explain why I rip apart Lord of the Rings and have avoided Game of Thrones).  It was just never my cup of tea.  Maybe I hated the idea of living in the woods and having a short lifespan because you forgot to wear your metal sweater vest one day and got stabbed in the back.  Or you died because you sunk in the lake trying to swim in your chain-linked pants.  Those are just the worst ways to go, man.

However, A Knight’s Tale was interpreted with such a great modern twist, and done so well that you even accepted Ledger’s out-of-place Australian accent.  From the first minute to last, this is just a blast.  And is there a better hype man than Paul Bettany in the history of film?  I’ll wait.

Actually, I’ll save you the time.  The answer is no.

Notable K films that didn’t make the Top 5 – Kick-Ass (2010), Knockaround Guys (2001), and Kate and Leopold (2001).  What?  I’m a sucker for time travel.

Standard