Stan Has Issues™

June 30, 2009

The A.V. Club on Woody Allen

I don’t usually write long, ranty responses to articles unrelated to Juno, but I read one yesterday that really stuck in my craw. This will possibly sound obnoxious, whiny, and defensive, but deal with it — this article offended me deeply, on a personal level. (Note: I’ve included the article link, but feel free to not waste your time reading it, since I plan to quote from it extensively and respond to each of their “points.”)

Longtime readers know of my deep and abiding love for Woody Allen. Despite the oddly inconsistent quality of his movies over the past, let’s say, 20 years, his body of work from 1969-1989 more than makes up for a few dark spots. Even now, he still occasionally makes great movies; mostly, they range from “decent” (Small Time Crooks) to “unwatachable” (Scoop). So defensive though I may be, I’m not blind to the man’s flaws (both personally and artistically). Keep that in mind if what I write after this sounds insufferable.

I guess I feel compelled to respond because it’s hard enough to get people of my generation to watch Woody Allen movies without a complete hatchet job of an article discouraging them from ever taking the plunge. Typically, I enjoy A.V. Club’s reviews and articles, but this is just a flaming turd.

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Posted by Stan at 5:24 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Random Musings | Digg It
Tags: A.V. Club, Alfred Hitchcock, Alice, Annie Hall, Another Woman, Anything Else, Blood on the Tracks, Bob Dylan, Britain, Broadway Danny Rose, Cassandra's Dream, cocaine, Crimes and Misdemeanors, CSI, Deconstructing Harry, driving, drugs, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), experience, Federico Fellini, Francis Ford Coppola, genres, George Lucas, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Hannah and Her Sisters, Hazelle Goodman, high, Hollywood, Hollywood Ending, Husbands and Wives, Ingmar Bergman, Interiors, Inventory, jazz, John Cassavetes, Juno, Los Angeles, Manhattan Murder Mystery, marijuana, Martin Scorsese, Match Point, Melinda and Melinda, Mia Farrow, music, Psycho, Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino, Radio Days, Reservoir Dogs, rural South, Sam Raimi, Scoop, Se7en, September, Sidney Lumet, Sleeper, Small Time Crooks, Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, Sweet & Lowdown, The Maltese Falcon, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, violence, Whatever Works, Wild Man Blues, Woody Allen

June 28, 2009

Comedy Bronze

Hey, remember The Webmaster? Good, because I…basically forgot about him. Per that last entry, we left off with me deciding I’d wait a week before asking him to remove all my content, plus my login/password, and then I’d post them all here. That was on May 2nd, and I haven’t posted any of that stuff here. Why? I…basically forgot. That, I guess, illustrates how much that crappy film-review site means to me in the here and now.

Thankfully, my friend Mark decided to jog my memory by e-mailing me a Craigslist posting featuring the following hi-larious “job posting,” written by The Webmaster:

[Website name redacted] is looking for interns to review films and TV shows on DVD then write reviews. There also exists opportunities to attend press screenings and perform interviews with filmmakers and celebrities via telephone or one-on-one.
This is part-time work which typically only takes up roughly three to four hours of your time per project.
This is a non-paying internship.
Anyone who tells you they can make money off the web is either lying to you or does not understand how the web works. Only a handful of sites make any real money. We have been in business online for 13 years and have yet to make a profit. We do this because we love what we do, and you should, too.
If you’re interested, send writing sample and level of interest. Be honest; if you cannot meet deadlines then you probably should not try this - deadlines are a part of any writing job.

Bitter? Nah…

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Posted by Stan at 10:53 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Job Shit, Stories of Hilarity and Humiliation | Digg It
Tags: ClipArt, Craigslist, database, film-review site, graphic design, irony, Mark, MySQL, Photoshop, redundancy, sabotage, shit, The Webmaster, TV column, unnecessary, Web 2.0, web design, worth

June 25, 2009

Out of the Moment

I always tend to worry about this problem, which I’m sure I’ve complained about before: novice writers reading shooting drafts. Everybody knows the phrase “development hell,” but few seem to realize that, even if a script doesn’t spend a decade or more in development, all scripts go through a process of development between their selling and shooting drafts. Even ones with largely apocryphal “we told them to shoot it as-is, because it was perfect!” stories attached to them. I worry that certain writers don’t know this, and as evidenced by one of the comically ignorant comments I received for my Fuckbuddies analysis, I have a basis for my concern. (This is not to ignore the fact that many scripts even change between the shooting draft and he actual, finished film — but that issue has little to do with what I intend to talk about today.)

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Posted by Stan at 11:11 AM | Comments (1) | Permalink | Print-Friendly | How Not to Write a Screenplay | Digg It
Tags: assistants, audience, changes, development hell, Hollywood legends, pass, Raymond Chandler, readers, recommend, selling draft, Shane Black, shooting draft, spec draft, William Goldman

June 20, 2009

Bad Twist 2: Twist Badder

When I last ranted about awful twist endings, I focused mainly on the “twist for the sake of twisting” problem that plagues so many screenplays — twists that not just come out of nowhere but actively undermine the story and characters. Lately, I’ve come across something infinitely worse: scripts that actively telegraph some of the world’s most misguided Shyamalan twists (more misguided than murderous trees, even).

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Posted by Stan at 4:15 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink | Print-Friendly | How Not to Write a Screenplay | Digg It
Tags: angel, bad, business, Chinatown, inevitable but not predictable, M. Night Shyamalan, purpose, Robert De Niro, Samhain, Screenwriting 101, The Road Warrior, twist, why

June 17, 2009

Attachments

I’ve mentioned this before, but I hate sycophancy. I especially hate it when I get yelled at for not being sycophantic enough. I’m much more willing to bend to the whims of those paying me money for my opinion, but I’ll never figure out why some people think pointing out writers and attachments will suddenly impress me. Usually, it just makes me lose a little respect for those involved.

Here’s a little background: over Memorial Day weekend, I was sent a script with no title page and no suggestion of the author’s name. This is not uncommon. I read it, hated it, and shit all over it. Almost immediately, I received an e-mail from my boss at Murdstone & Grinby, Jim, who snidely pointed out who wrote the script and asked me to include more details if I was going to crap all over such a genius’s script. I’m keeping the details as vague as possible, but shrewd readers can piece together the truth: the writer won one Oscar and received another nomination for writing several years later. In between, he wrote a whole bunch of shitty movies. So, awards and nominations or not, his bad scripts outweigh his good ones, so the fact that this one, whose title rhymes with Stink, stunk should shock no one.

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June 14, 2009

A Movie for Cat Ladies

Here’s where I live up to my reputation as a misogynist film blogger. This week, for the first time, I read a script where I kept having one thought repeatedly: “This is the first script I’ve read that seems to want to capture the cat-lady demographic.” It’s not so much that they want to hit this demo — it’s that they want to exclude everyone else from possibly enjoying this movie.

First, let’s take a step back and ponder what I consider the “cat lady” personality type. I know it’s harsh and stereotypical, and as a dude, I’m opening myself up to obvious accusations of sexism, but I’ve spent a lot of time reading television forums, and it’s impossible to not notice this small but vocal group of people — the kind of people who hate some people for being fat hos and hate another because she needs a sandwich, the kind of people who rage against bad parenting while glorifying rapists as misunderstood and quietly pondering brother-on-brother incest.

I don’t care if these people are lonely save for their 25 cats, or if they’re married with five kids and no pets. They’re all cat ladies, based more on personality type than actual cat ownership. To put it bluntly, their defining trait is not so much possession of a certain domesticated feline. In fact, I know women who own cats but don’t fall into the “cat lady” category. It’s more about the type of person who has some kind of damage causing them to not simply enjoy a work of entertainment, or to not level any valid criticism. They watch, and they judge characters in shockingly simplified terms: if they’re good-looking men, they can do no wrong no matter how many women they rape and/or beat; if they’re good-looking women, they can do no right even if they devote their lives to all manner of saintly deeds; if they’re dowdy female sidekicks, they’re abused and mistreated by their beautiful friends; if they’re dumpy, unattractive male sidekicks, they’re obnoxious and need to get off my TV screen.

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Posted by Stan at 12:05 PM | Comments (2) | Permalink | Print-Friendly | How Not to Write a Screenplay | Digg It
Tags: awful, cat ladies, Gilmore Girls, Grey's Anatomy, Korean films, screenplay, story, structure, television, Television Without Pity, tone, Twitter

June 12, 2009

The Fake Fiancé 3: Not Fake But an Incredibly Confusing Simulation

Check out the first two volumes in this epic trilogy.

Immediately after intensifying my investigation, I hit a roadblock in the form of Kelly. We started to talk, to bond, and it seemed like old times — what remained suspiciously absent was talk of the fiance, wedding plans, living arrangements, etc. She limited herself to either old stories about high school or new stories about teaching high school. As usual, whenever I steered the conversation in a wedding-related direction, she changed the subject. I tried to rationalize — maybe she didn’t want to bring it up because the plans weren’t to her satisfaction, or maybe she knew I was trying to score an invite but knew she couldn’t — but it looked grim.

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Posted by Stan at 5:44 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em | Digg It
Tags: confused, deceit, engagement, evidence, Facebook, fiance, fictitious, fraud, friends, guilty, homosexuality, Kelly, lies, Lucy, MySpace, photos, Sarah, snooping, vacation, wedding

June 10, 2009

Online Dating

All right, everyone. I’m back to beating the dead horse of believability once a-goddamn-gain. Here’s a tip for budding screenwriters out there: problems don’t arise from a far-fetched premise, plot, or even characters. There’s a little something called “suspension of disbelief,” without which no work of fiction could succeed. Assuming it’s a work of fiction that does succeed. At any rate, the writer bears the burden of making their audience suspend disbelief. It doesn’t happen by magic.

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June 5, 2009

Line-Jumping

The past month should have been agonizing, but frankly, both of my shitty jobs kept me too busy for me to stay in suspense about my imminent career launch. Also, I made a conscious effort not to think of it, on account of knowing (a) I did not submit my absolute best work, and (b) I could generously estimate the chances of success at one in a million. At the end of the day, I have no qualifications other than scripts, and scripts aren’t enough.

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May 9, 2009

…Not to Be

So there’s this script floating around by John “How the fuck did I get nominated for an Oscar twice?” Logan that adapts Shakespeare’s Coriolanus into modern action-movie context. Except for one little detail… It keeps the language. Here’s what the script reminded me of:

Now, I’m not terribly familiar with Coriolanus, but I think it’s safe to blame the scripts flaws more on the adaptation than the source. Shakespeare scholars can feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I have the strong suspicion that Logan cut massive reams of dialogue in favor of long sequences of modern street warfare. If you’ve ever seen Death Wish 3, you’ve seen these action sequences. Except Death Wish 3 has guys getting stabbed in the head with a knife duct-taped to a loose floorboard, which puts it a little ahead of Coriolanus.

Because of the focus on action, and the strong desire to keep the story in a two-hour feature timeframe, dialogue has to get cut. Only problem: all Shakespeare had to work with was dialogue, so in cutting scenes, story and character development fly out the window. The entire second act is a clusterfuck of bizarre, rushed plot twists and double-crosses that, I assume, are properly set up and fairly dramatic in the play.

To me, the problem hinges on the choice to keep Shakespeare’s dialogue. Who do they want to come see this movie? Shakespeare fans, who will hate the poor adaptation even if they dig the action (which they probably won’t)? It honestly seems like they want this movie to be seen by teen boys who like watchin’ shit get blowed up.

As a former teenage boy, I can think of two problems with this decision:

The Shakespeare dialogue. I spent all of junior high and high school trying to avoid reading Shakespeare and watching Shakespeare adaptations, before developing a vague appreciation of him in my senior year and flat-out loving him the first time I read King Lear in college.
Now, in my youth, I was this movie’s theoretical audience. I saw every horrible action movie that came out, and more importantly, I got HBO, which meant I got to watch stuff like Point Break roughly 480 times a week. If somebody had come out with an action-movie version of a Shakespeare play, I don’t care how balls to the wall it is, I don’t care if it starred Bruce Willis and Patrick Swayze, if I heard them talking in imabic pentameter, I’d skip it. The end.

The title. You’re making a raucous action movie geared toward teens and maybe college students, and you think a title with “anus” in it is a good idea? Especially a title that easily converts to, let’s say, “cornhole anus”? Look, I’m not an idiot: it’s adapted from a play, it’s the title of the play, and the title is named after the main character. I get it, but it’s still a horrible idea.

Now, in 1996, a little movie called Romeo + Juliet came out. A terrible yet wildly successful modernization of the play’s setting that still retains the Shakespeare text. A precedent! If you ignore the fact that other updates like the Ethan Hawke-starring Hamlet bombed like hell, a slick writer/producer could convince someone to back it. Except they’re appealing to the wrong audience. Teenage girls, who have more patience with the dialogue and are more attuned to the emotion (and they’d have to be, considering how horrible Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes are in that piece of shit), made Romeo + Juliet a success. At best, teenage boys accompanied their girlfriends on a date in the vain hope that they’d get some action.

Anyone involved in the greenlighting of this project is high if they think they could somehow convince 13-to-25-year-old males to sit still during this movie. Whenever people aren’t getting shot, they’re talking in Shakespeare! The horror! Maybe they think it’d serve as a date movie: guys would come for the action, girls would stay for the delectable rhythm of the text. Does anyone think that has any chance of working? This isn’t even the type of story where a Shakespeare-loving girl would drag her disinterested boyfriend, who would find himself surprised by the spectacle of the action. It’s just a movie with no audience.

So why not just do what screenwriters have done for decades: rip off the plot of what’s arguably a lesser known Shakespeare play for an action movie that’s entirely modern? What does retaining the language add, other than pretension? Especially in relation to what it takes away — plot coherence, character depth — because Logan can’t replace the soliloquies with terse, rapid-fire banter. Just call it Corey and have it star a taciturn ex-Green Beret named “Corey Storm” and call it a day.

I’ll point and laugh when this fails on both a creative and commercial level. Otherwise, you all can feel free to point and laugh when my prediction is wrong and it makes $5 billion and wins every Oscar (including Best Animated Feature and Best Documentary).

Edit: I was a little punchy when I wrote this, so I must clarify. Yes, it takes place in the modern world, but it takes place in what I can only describe as a moronic parallel universe where the Roman Empire still reigns supreme. This is essential because Logan retains Shakespeare’s dialogue (which is all “Rome this” and “Rome that”), and honestly, it’s yet another reason why it should be changed and updated.

May 2, 2009

Communication Problems

Here’s the deal: this is the first free time I’ve had since my last post. Now, I had some free time prior to that post, but not much. The combination of work and my own writing led me to abandon you, lovely readers, and then, approximately 30 seconds after I published the last post, a deluge of horrible scripts forced me to work, on average, 850 hours over the past 10 days. I have not had time to do anything that I enjoy. Okay, technically I enjoy scripts, but only when they’re good, and of the 738,243 scripts I’ve read this year, four of them have been good, and one of those was not a script I read for work.

In other words, over the past 10 days I’ve been busy exclusively with work, but over the past few months, I’ve divided my time between an increasingly busy work schedule and writing projects that I hope, someday, will lead to me getting paid. That’s the key part of the story I’m about to tell: I need money, and I’m sick of doing shit for free. You guys are lucky I need to vent, or I would have abandoned this blog two years ago.

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Posted by Stan at 4:06 PM | Comments (3) | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Job Shit | Digg It
Tags: Ain't It Cool News, college, Craigslist, film criticism, film reviews, invasion of privacy, Mark, money, obnoxiousness, text messages, The Webmaster, time, TV coulmn, Twitter, websites, YouTube

April 23, 2009

Flotsam and Jetsam

Let me start by getting the pretentious bit out of the way:

I don’t consider myself an “artist.” I have no interest in creating art; I just want to entertain. If it happens I get some art in my entertainment, I’ll roll with it, but it’s never a primary goal. With that in mind, it might come as a bit of a shock when I tell you about a character I’ve created who I can’t shake. To me, it seems like a weirdo-artist thing to create a fictional character for a story and have him take on a life of his own, to the point where I can almost feel him living his life as I live my own — little more than an endless stream of fresh ideas.

What can I do with that? Well, it started with a screenplay, which turned out to be the best thing I’ve ever written (in the opinion of myself and, more importantly, everyone who’s read it except one person), but that wasn’t enough. When I came up with a harebrained scheme to get “published,” the screenplay I adapted into a novel was this one. But this was no mere novelization — this was a full-on, THE BOOK IS NOW THE MOVIE adaptation of a living, breathing work of fiction. It allowed me to add depth both to the moment — gasp! directing on the page! — and the past, really digging deep to understand this character, his friends and family, and the world that surrounds him.

But that wasn’t enough. I wrote a first draft, set it aside while I worked on some scripts, came back to it for a rewrite, but suddenly this story was in the character’s past. What kept entering my mind was what happened after — where did he go from there?

I came up with a solution: a fictitious blog chronicling the character’s misadventures, which I worked on as I rewrote the novel. When I got too busy, the blog fell by the wayside, and I’ve been meaning to get back to it.

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Posted by Stan at 3:23 PM | Comments (2) | Permalink | Print-Friendly | How Not to Write a Screenplay | Digg It
Tags: Amelia, Axl Rose, Being John Malkovich, characters, comedy, commercial, flotsam, jetsam, mainstream, Mitch Michaels, novel, pilot, producer, satire, screenplays, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, The Big-Shot Producer, TV, unique, weird, writing

March 20, 2009

Busy Doin’ Somethin’

I don’t have anything to say. Just explaining the mysterious, two-week absence by saying I’ve been busy. Believe it or not, podcasts tend to require more time to complete than just writing a post. In addition to the recording time, they require a lot of editing — which requires me listening to the entire thing, multiple times — because I do these extemporaneously, with no preparation other than a few thoughts in my head and, rarely, a beat sheet reminding me of what I wanted to talk about. As a result, I sometimes go off on tangents that stray too far from what I actually want to talk about, or they’re just boring and/or ill-conceived. I pause, gather my thoughts, and start over.

So it takes me about three hours to make a podcast, as opposed to 30-60 minutes for a regular blog post. It’d be different if I had more brief, minor rants like my grocery store-based rage, but I tend to gravitate more toward long-form… Well, rambling, basically.

I hopefully have some exciting things on the horizon, but I don’t want to talk too much about them just yet.

March 6, 2009

Podcast: Worst Moviegoing Experiences

Today’s podcast is brought to you by this article. As usual, excuse the choppy editing. The unedited cut ran over 50 minutes, and let’s break it down: if you listen to this version and think, “It’s kinda boring,” imagine how it would sound if it were nearly twice as long.

In case you decide to skip around or break it up, here’s the “table of contents”:

1:16 – Paulie
9:19 – Apocalypse Now Redux
16:24 – Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
25:07 – Death to Smoochy

Be warned that this podcast contains a rainbow of obscenities, so consider this not safe for work.

Click the Play button to listen to Podcast #6: “Worst Moviegoing Experiences” (64kbps MP3, 28:42, 13.1MB)

Posted by Stan at 5:12 PM | Comments (6) | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em, Podcast, Stories of Hilarity and Humiliation, Stories of Pain and Humiliation | Digg It
Tags: AOL, Apocalypse Now Redux, bad times, confusion, dating, Death to Smoochy, fear, friends, high school, Lucy, movies, Paulie, Revenge of the Sith, shit, shoeshine boy, Star Wars, threats

March 5, 2009

Podcast: The Good Script

Be warned that this podcast contains a rainbow of obscenities, so consider this not safe for work.

Click the Play button to listen to Podcast #5: “The Good Script” (64kbps MP3, 21:16, 9.7MB)

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