The Hot Blog Archive for June, 2012

Review: Rock of Ages

Sometimes you eat the movie… sometimes the movie eats you.

Adam Shankman, whose work I quite like, gets eaten alive by Rock of Ages. And not to put too fine a point on it, trying to analyze the film feels a bit like trying to dissect diarrhea. I felt physically abused by the time the movie ended, like I had suffered a bad case of Jukebox Musical’s Revenge. And I am not exaggerating.

The movie stars in the film are generally unscathed. Tom Cruise does fine. So does Russell Brand. The great Alec Baldwin is, sadly, not funny in this film… probably because (read: All Caps) the script sucked. It could not suck any worse if thirteen, not three, people had rewritten it to within an inch of coherence. The three credited screenwriters of this film should seriously consider never trying to write a movie again. One guy wrote the book for the play… so he was probably pushed aside and gets a bit of a pass. Allen Loeb wrote a couple of good scripts, but is now on a long streak of bad. And the next Justin Theroux script that is any good will be his first.

The saddest part of this enterprise is that it is utterly soulless. It has no joy. It has no real passion. It has no theme, aside from “DUDE!”

Adam Shankman, like his movies or not (and I tend to), gets joy. His movies have energy. Not this time.

Not as lucky as their fellow thespians, Catherine Zeta Jones is embarrassed here, Paul Giamatti is a cartoon of a cartoon, Mary J Blige is the token enthnic (the only only person of color is a busboy at the club who is the butt of jokes) and shows up just to sing beautifully when no one else seems to be able to do so, and Bryan Cranston is completely wasted. Malin Akerman is game and seems to give it her best, but in the end, is just another woman who loses her restraint when confronted by the possibility of Stacee Jax’s cock and proceeds to throw herself on him.

The leads, Diego Boneta and Julianne Hough, can sing a little. But while both are conventional beauties, neither can hold the screen for a second. It’s brutal.

Early on, I thought that Glee had killed Rock of Ages, whose mash up and intercut songs are not as good as Glee’s and which Glee has made a cliche.

But it was much, much worse than that. The worst 15 minutes of the worst episode of Glee (Whitney Houston tribute?) was still better than this.

Nothing makes sense. The ladies in the church singing “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” simply made no sense… as THEY were planning to go on the attack.

This is a movie where the lead female’s character name, Shari, is said no less than 50 times… and they never sing a song with her name in it.

This is a movie where they have a monkey dressed in human clothes and the audience does not laugh.

This is a movie where plot lines, like contracts, taxes, mayoral elections in Los Angeles, burgeoning homosexuality, stripping, infidelity, being robbed, etc are all passing plot points that no one seems to care about for much longer than the time to tell another unfunny joke.

It’s not even good camp. Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is good camp. As Ted will soon remind, Flash Gordon was great camp. Broadway’s Xanadu was a brilliant camp spin on a movie as bad as this one. But this film doesn’t even take itself seriously enough to be funny the wrong way.

Really, it could not be as bad as it made me feel about it. If it was, I would have bled out on the drive home. And my expectations were so in check going in. It is unfair to compare it to Mamma Mia!, as Mamma Mia! had the courage of its conceit. This film does not. You really have to go back 30 years to find a movie musical this bad. And at least Grease 2 offered a young Michelle Pfeiffer. And Ms Hough, you may have many talents, but you are no young Michelle Pfeiffer.

Shellshockingly bad. Worst wide-release film of the summer so far, going away. Project X was more coherent. Such a total, horrifying waste.

The ONLY redeeming things in the film are, 1) the production design, which does a really interesting job smushing LA landmarks into a small area, and 2) the “We Built This City/We’re Not Going To Take It” face off, which showed, for a minute or so, what this film could have been.

Rock of Ages feels like a film from a another medium where development was so random, just changing any old thing in the script on whims, that you end up with a style exercise with no style the audience can hang onto for the over two hours of boringly recreated rock anthems.

And with that, I will put this film behind me and look forward to better films to come. I am just stunned that so much talent came to so little. Scene after scene, I just couldn’t believe what I was watching.

Tone deaf.

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20 Weeks Of Summer: This Year’s $200 Million Movies So Far

As you can see, I have included a few titles that are not at $200m worldwide yet, but are guaranteed to get there. (numbers from BO Mojo)

Seven of the nine studio wide releases to date this summer have achieved this mark. Six have or are highly likely to pass $300m worldwide. (If you are wondering what the two outliers are, they are The Dictator, which is over $125m worldwide, and Chernobyl Diaries, which is not.)

If you want to know why summer at the movies looks like summer at the movies now looks, this is why.

As you all know, a couple of the $300m worldwide grossers will/could still be money losers. But studios would rather gamble big. And the joke that is the slump talk remains glaringly false. When over 75% of your releases are grossing over $300 million worldwide in a season, there is no problem with getting people to the movies. There are often problems with spending too much to make these films or to get the audience to the theater.

It is an odd curiosity, however, that of six $300m worldwide grossers so far this summer, only The Avengers is likely to hit $200m domestic and only four seem headed to $150m domestic or better. And though I see it as wildly reductive to blame international numbers primarily on 3D, only two of the six $300m ww grossers are non-3D.

Will Men in Black 3, just passing the $500m mark, be profitable for Sony? I don’t know. If the deals they had in place for MiB2 are still in place, maybe not. A whole lot came right off the top for the Exec Producer and one of the stars… not to mention smaller pieces to the director and co-star. (Note that TLJ was also not as present in MiB2 as he was in the original, just as he isn’t in MiB3. Not a development choice.) So maybe the deals were more favorable to Sony this time. (I believe they also had finding partners this time out.) But yes, you could gross $500m+ worldwide and still not make money… or make very little. Let’s hope for Sony that this is not the case here.

Part of the urge to chase big grosses with big budget films is what I call “Dark Knight Syndrome.” When any movie earns those kinds of dollars, the urge to chase with a sequel is enormous. In the case of Batman Begins, it was a terrific movie that underperformed the stronger history of Batman movies ($375m ww) and there was a massive payoff with The Dark Knight. But hey… G.I.:Joe, which sucked, did $300 million worldwide. So did the Clash of the Titans sequel. So how can you leave that audience base hanging? Worst case scenario, you make another bad movie and gross another $300 million. (Of course, the real worst is that people smell it coming and you do $127m worldwide the second time around… but you avert your eyes.) Best case, the movie explodes. This phenomenon was accelerated by Fast Five, which added The Rock and blew every prior F&F movie’s gross out of the water.

Remember when the sequel normally earned less than the original?

You have a good memory.

Here is a look at the summer-to-date vs my projections…

9 Comments »

Unsinking Battleship (spoilerific!)

“Shouldn’t you at least be in a bikini, getting wet, in this part of the script?”
“Wait… they gave you a script?”

I finally got to Battleship today.

I saw alone in a multiplex theater. The vibrating seats were set up… but not offered or sold to me and not vibrating when I sat in one. Was the film in 3D? The ticket taker didn’t seem sure. (It wasn’t.)

Anyway…

It’s a really odd thing about art (or whatever you want to call it). Even when the idea seems stupid, when the idea connects to something real and recognizable – even a frickin’ board game – it has a shot at working. And indeed, Battleship started working, as a movie, about half way through… when it finally go around to having a connection to the board game that is its namesake.

The problem is, the first 45 minutes is so loaded with genre cliche, uninteresting actors, and other indulgences that by the time the movie is ready to grab you – with nothing that was in the trailers or TV ads, by the way – I imagine that most audiences had already checked out of caring and were trying to think of a good place for dinner, whether they had their parking ticket stamped, or how many drinks it would take to get their date naked.

The most frustrating thing for me, as someone who really enjoys Peter Berg’s directorial style and obsessions, is that there was nothing wrong with the movie – unless you dismiss it before seeing it as genre action or because of its title – that should not have been fixed in development. Easy stuff. Obvious stuff. Basic.

For instance…

You hire action hero Liam Neeson… and then knock out of 80% of the movie by design.

You hire the quite interesting and fun-to-watch Alexander Skarsgård… and you make him an uptight boring guy until you kill him at the end of the first act.

You have the idea that The Girl is going to be an active part in the film, but hire Brookyn Decker, who enters the movies as eyes, cheekbones, and tits and never really rises above that. (Especially sad as Berg has had great parts for strong, beautiful women, from Rosario Dawson to Jennifer Garner to Charlize Theron… but they could all act.) But more to the development process, her character is stuck in between… object of lust and marriage, but a therapist, but not strong enough to actually do anything.

The movie desperately wants to be Independence Day for the first half… but the cliches are so hackneyed I was wincing more often than anything else… and Taylor Kitsch, a good looking guy who is serviceable as an actor is, simply, not a real movie star. He doesn’t have that thing that Will Smith has. He is, at best, Timothy Olyphant… who is one of my favorite character actors… but not a movie star. Just doesn’t have the gear.

And then, once we know it’s an alien movie, the mystery of the aliens takes so very long to be solved, so that the soft underbelly can be attacked, without anything really giving us anything to anticipate, it quickly bores. Basic stuff… like when the old soldiers talk about attacking Oahu in the third act… great beat… but where was the set-up? The audience has no investment in Hawaii. We opened the movie in a generic bar in a generic town and go through a recreation of a YouTube video of a botched burglary to get to a burrito joke. Wha? And speaking of that terrible opener… is there a reason WHY the bartender won’t put a burrito in the microwave for a supermodel with her rack on exhibit in a shitty little bar? I was waiting for the joke that every time she eats a phallic burrito at his bar, a fight starts between wannabe suitors… or some such silliness. But no. Not even that. Just an excuse for Taylor Dane to break into a Quickie Mart. Oy. (Yes, I know that’s not his name.)

There was a kinda brilliant Movies In 2012 idea of there being an international gathering of warships, which the aliens will attack. But all the internationalism ended up reduced to one Japanese guy who seemed to speak better English than our lead. I completely get why, eventually, the movie is reduced to a no-electronics, limited-number-of-ships zone. And that was done in a very smart way. But couldn’t a couple of other nations and attitudes have swam over after being sunk?

There had to be a better way to have The Naval Forces Of The World trying to get involved before the last 3 minutes of the battle. As I mentioned, I really missed Liam Neeson – whose daughter and forces were all outside of his ability to take action – but also everyone else they had set up.

Loved Gregory Gadson and the other veterans that Berg enlisted to perform in the film. That one of those Berg-isms that I always enjoy. He is really strong on getting close to the real thing.

There are so many missed opportunities. For instance, when our hero touches and alien and “mind melds,” it leads no where. Why do it? The great Hamish Linklater is the Jeff Goldblum character… but with almost nothing to do. Complete waste. Same with Peter Nichols. (Don’t even ask about Turtle.) Rihanna is good, though her character apparently comes from nowhere and has nowhere to go. Jesse Plemons is wasted as The Hick.

And why did aliens who can’t stand being in the sun come to a planet, the entire eco-system of which is based on orbiting the sun? We knows that more would come to finish killing us all. But why?

Look… this wasn’t aiming at being Inception. But it could have been a great, big, fun genre movie. I feel like I could have cut the first 45 minutes in half and had a much better movie, because with the exception of a few thin plot threads, there is nothing in the Let’s Establish Taylor Kitsch As A Good Looking, Charming Fuck Up Who Really Wants To Bang The SI Cover Model section that connects to the Neither The Humans Nor The Aliens Can See The Other’s Ships So We’re Going To Try To Hit Them Where We Think They Might Be movie in a real way.

There is a lot of cool and clever stuff. And the finale’ works, in spite of the long journey to get there. But man, was that script ever too complicated and too lacking in commitment to core ideas (like the iconic characters of Neeson and Skarsgård)!

This could have been another Pirates, as Universal intended. But it just wasn’t as fun. I guess Ryan Reynolds or Jake Gyllenhaal would have been a cliche in the role now… Chris Evans was busy… Ryan Gosling isn’t going on the big rides right now… you need someone who can hold that space, especially if you want that space to be so in control of the film.

But it could have been okay with Mr. Kitsch. It was like there were too many ideas and no one reminding the team, as they got excited by this, that, and the next thing, that there had better be a good-looking, sense-making pony under that big pile of fun shit. Instead, it was a stage pony. And the ass was the first half of the film and the charming dancing front was in the rear.

27 Comments »

Another BIzarre NYT Story Angle

I really don’t get it.

I have nothing against People Like Us. I kinda like it, for the most part. Chris Pine is the best he’s ever been. Love Michelle Pfeiffer. But the trend story based on utter ignorance doesn’t seem like it should be the standard for The New York Times… a paper I pay for every day.

Every summer since CG started to take over the 4-quadrant movie, there have been a couple of “real world” movies that are big hits. It’s called counterprogramming.

1997 – Air Force One, My Best Friend’s Wedding
1998 – Saving Private Ryan, 3 There’s Something About Mary
1999 – Runaway Bride, Notting Hill, The General’s Daughter, American Pie
2000 – The Perfect Storm. What Lies Beneath
2001 – American Pie 2, The Fast & The Furious, The Princess Diaries
2002 – Signs, Mr Deeds, The Sum of All Fears
2003 – Seabiscuit, SWAT, Freaky Friday, Daddy Day Care
2004 – Fahrenheit 9/11, Collateral
2005 – Wedding Crashers, The 40-Year-Old Virgin
2006 – The Devil Wears Prada, The Break-Up
2007 – Knocked Up, Superbad, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry
2008 – Sex and the City, Step Brothers, You Don’t Mess With The Zohan, What Happens In Vegas
2009 – The Hangover, The Proposal
2010 – The Karate Kid, Gown Ups, The Other Guys
2011 – The Help, Bridesmaids, Horrible Bosses, Bad Teacher

And those are just the $100m+ domestic grossers.

Now, to be fair, I know that the spin on the story was more The Notebook and Eat Pray Love than broader comedies or action for adults. But even there, Hollywood has been pretty consistent.

1997 – Conspiracy Theory
1998 – Six Days, Seven Nights, Hope Floats
1999 – The Thomas Crown Affair, Eyes Wide Shut
2000 – Space Cowboys, Autumn in New York
2001 – America’s Sweethearts, Angel Eyes, crazy/beautiful
2002 – Insomnia, Unfaithful, About a Boy, Windtalkers, Blue Crush, One Hour Photo
2003 – Open Range, Whale Rider
2004 – The Notebook, The Terminal, The Manchurian Candidate, Hero
2005 – Cinderella Man, Crash, Kingdom of Heaven
2006 – World Trade Center, Little Miss Sunshine, The Lake House, The Illusionist
2007 – License to Wed, No Reservations, Mr. Brooks
2008 – Made of Honor, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Swing Vote
2009 – Public Enemies, Julie & Julia, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Funny People, My Sister’s Sister
2010 – Eat Pray Love, Letters To Juliet, The American, Charlie St Cloud
2011 – Crazy, Stupid, Love., Midnight in Paris. Friends With Benefits, Larry Crowne

Or is the Paper of Record a bunch of old farts who are so mired in the early 70s that they can’t see how much MORE of this kind of programming they have available than ever before in the history of entertainment, though theatrical release is not the primary outlet because older people don’t go to the movies in a short window, so bigger budget movies can’t afford to be released expensively in the summer and wait 3 weeks until someone shows up.

That said, there are only sixteen $1m domestic grossers so far this summer. And the ones “for adults” are led by The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel ($31m and counting), Moonrise Kingdom ($4m and just expanding wider), Girl in Progress ($2.6m so far, in spite of a soft release by Lionsgate), and the $350m worldwide grosser, just starting in the US, The Intouchables.

But the simple reality of People Like Us is that it hopes to be the next in the chain of female-centric, older audience hits, The Devil Wears Prada, Mamma Mia!, Julia & Julia, Eat Pray Love, Crazy, Stupid, Love, and this summer’s Meryl movie, Hope Springs. Nothing wrong with that. Don’t blame the filmmaker or the studio or the publicists… kill the messenger who can’t see too far past the pitch.

(Note: This story originally reflected my assumption that Brooks Barnes wrote this piece as I can’t believe someone as smart and experienced as Michael Cieply could have delivered such a mess.)

24 Comments »

Review-ish: Brave (Spoiler-Free)


Brave is a fascinating film from Pixar.

It doesn’t feel quite like what we have expected from Pixar. It’s full of humans. It looks traditional. It starts with a classic traditional tale of the young princess who wants to be free to love as she likes,

And then, it turns. Big time.

It’s pretty much impossible to explain the turns in Brave without spoiling, so I won’t try. But emotionally, we go from feeling very comfortable that we know what’s coming to really not knowing at all.

The hero of our story doesn’t learn passively, a female character who needs a charming prince to come fix her vulnerabilities. She gets herself into trouble… she’s going to have to find her way out. She isn’t offered, by the filmmakers, an easy out with the perfect edgy, but good-of-heart heroic man.

Yet, this is not “a feminist film.” It is a film in which the hero happens to be female. We’ve seen this film in reverse many times. The prince doesn’t want to marry the politically expedient princess from another realm. But as you might expect here, there is usually a great beauty under the veil, somehow making the sting go away instantly. Or the prince goes oak a journey to prove his manliness before returning home to fulfill his duty… and again, tends to be comforted by a great beauty and perhaps, wit.

Not so easy in Brave.

Thing is, the movie is not self-serious. It is not in love with breaking ground for women in animation. There is still hair on the witch’s chin. There is still some funny anthropomorphism. There is also a lot of very broad comedy. (And perhaps more nudity than in any Pixar or Disney film ever.) Belching, farting, drinking, fighting, screaming, dancing… it’s all there.

My experience of Brave changed as I watched the film. I liked it, but wasn’t in love in the first act. It felt a little simple and Disney-familiar. But as things turned, I got more interested. And by the time things were heading to the climax of the story, Brave grabbed me harder and harder,

No smart alecky Tangled this. This film has the emotional weight of great child/parent sagas. What parents want to know about their kids… what kids dream they could see other parents. Weighty stuff. And the pressure is on for each side to find its own answers.

Smart stuff. And I think it will just get better with multiple showings.

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Prometheus: SPOILER Conversation

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Weekend Estimates by Move It Move It Klady

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Friday Estimates by Prometheus For Now Klady

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Sir Ridley will be fighting himself, not only taking a record third spot amongst the top R-rated openings of all- time, but hoping to chase done his top R-opening, Hannibal, which opened to $58m (no 3D bump, 11 years ago).

Also in range is the #2 (or #3 or #4) opening of the summer to date.

Or maybe #5, as the film in the 2 spot Friday, Madagascar 3, will almost certainly win the weekend, with a big under-12 bump on Saturday. Already the top opener from DreamWorks Animation not named Shrek, this weekend should push the previous opening record by more than 10%.

Snow White got apple-slapped with an estimated 63% drop, Friday-to-Friday. No doubt, this will end up with a mid-50s weekend drop, which is not quite as ugly, but no thrill.

(more to come)

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If It’s Friday, It Must Be Seattle

We’ve been in Seattle for about a day and a half so far. I’ve seen 2 movies, attended a filmmaker dinner, dropped by the Gay La, and enjoyed an evening of tribute to a game Sissy Spacek, hosted by Richard Corliss… all in between Twitter fighting over whether “Film Critics” are assholes, heroes, or something in between. Not much news going on out there. Disney still believes in windows… kinda. Prometheus kicks ass, no matter how much nitpicking.

Typical June.

Seattle is wet and a bit cool and gray… which is still lovely, in a northwestern kinda way.

I do love it up here. It’s a sane and loving festival. Terrific fest staff. Tremendous host hotel. And great restaurants. Add Billy Friedkin, some K Fried C, and mix.

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The Silly Report Season: SNL Kagan & The Bizarre Notion Of Domestic Only

Another idiotic non-story.

Quick. Ask anyone who is paying attention whether anyone produced movies in 2011 expecting to get a even 50% or better return on those movies (with one or two exceptions… primarily comedy) from the domestic theatrical market alone.

To be (overly) fair, SNL Kagan (according to David Liebermann, who gets all these reports to promote because he doesn’t seem to understand them or care) included domestic Home Entertainment. Of course, by annualizing this, the study – guessstimates – confuse the basics. So this report about 2011 is focusing on Paramount’s 2010 release, True Grit. So does Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Paramount’s #2 owned release in 2011 exist in 2011 or do we wait to count than in 2012’s numbers? And by using the broadest numbers for Home Entertainment, how do they take distribution choices made by each studio?

As noted, I don’t trust Lieberman’s analysis of the analysis much, but it would seem, for instance, that they counted all of Paramount’s domestic theatrical as Paramount’s, but is also counting DreamWorks Animation separately. Huh?

But the most stupid notion is that SNL Kagan – or any independent analyst – can work through all these tortured numbers for a year and then come up with a percentage that anyone paying attention would consider legit… and then argue that there is an industry trend based on a 2% change in that tortured number the next year.

And what are they really saying? That the expanding international theatrical market is generating a higher percentage of revenue vs domestic? Is there someone who is deaf, blind, dumb and without taste buds who hasn’t known that for the last 5 years without a report? Is there anything here more valuable than the self-promotion for Kagan?

I’m sure there are very smart people over there spending months trying to get The Weinstein Company to tell them how much they spend marketing The King’s Speech in 2011. But these kinds of numbers are so overly broad as to be nothing but junk information… aka Silly.

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DP/30: Hysteria, director Tanya Wexler

Prometheus… The 1D Trailer

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The Hot Blog

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon