August 8, 2008
Trip to the Post Office
I had to go down to the post office to mail a small package. What should have been a 10-minute errand (including drive time) turned into a 30-minute disaster, the likes of which haven’t been witnessed on this planet since the sinking of the Lusitania.
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Posted by Stan on August 8, 2008 1:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Stories of Hilarity and Humiliation | Digg It
August 6, 2008
Hollywood Endings
So, okay, this is kind of an oldie-but-goodie, and it’s not what I’d call a “real” review, but I’m putting it in that category, anyway, just because it sorta is. I watched the 2004 movie The Final Cut today. For those who don’t remember or haven’t heard of it, it takes place in a not-too-distant future where people have biomechanical implants inserted into their brains at birth (or possibly before birth — it’s kind of unclear, which is one of my complaints) that turns every moment of their waking lives into video. Upon their death, editors cut pieces of your life into a nice, feature-length “rememory” (this is the movie’s word for it, not mine) for grieving friends and family members.
A nice concept with a shitload of moments that kinda rip off The Conversation, but at least they’re ripping off a good movie in the service of an interesting sci-fi premise. Unfortunately, as stated above, writer/director Omar Naim could have done a better job fleshing out the conceit of the film. He gives us the impression these chips are implanted after birth, yet on multiple occasions he treats us to footage of births (from the point of view of the baby). Although he shows us that the implant categorizes life moments (in helpful folders like “sleep,” “hygiene,” and “masturbation”), I found myself wondering how Robin Williams’ “cutter” character dealt with people’s faulty memories. Early in the film a grieving brother asks Williams to make sure to include a particular fishing trip. Is there a “fishing trips” category? All the brother can say is the summer the trip occurred. This isn’t like a three-month film shoot, which might yield 100 hours of footage; excluding eight daily hours of sleep, Williams would have to wade through about 1500 hours of footage to find this one particular trip
You’re lucky I watched this movie a week ago and don’t remember much more to nitpick about; I remember feeling a lot of frustration, but I can only distinctly remember one more nitpick with the premise. And that is: we know these chips are very expensive, but we never get a reason why Williams’ parents would take out a loan to pay for one for their son. We don’t get enough of the outside world — aside from some cartoonish protesters — to understand how this implant has changed things. Aside from a few vague references (like a hellion who turned her life around the day she found out Someone Would Be Watching), we never get a sense of this implant as a status symbol or that it’s perceived as so useful that a middle-class family would go into debt to buy one. Him having a chip is portrayed as a Big Twist (even though it’s obvious from the first scene), but nothing about the movie convinced me that he would or should have one.
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Posted by Stan on August 6, 2008 3:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Reviews | Digg It
August 4, 2008
Pitched
Last week, Preity sent me a series of e-mails that went from interesting to scary faster than anything I’ve experienced recently. If you’ll remember, I’ve known her for awhile — so long, in fact, that she was a main character in this story before we were what you’d call friends, and definitely before she received an officially sanctioned Stan Has Issues™ fake name — instead, she got the less impressive Stan Has Issues™ generic description. Observant readers will also note that yes, we know each other personally, although obviously we haven’t seen each other personally in a few years. In fact, the bulk of our contact has been through e-mail, for no other reason than its convenience. We exchanged phone numbers while I was in L.A., we exchanged phone numbers once again when we reconnected after I’d love, and we exchanged phone numbers a third time that I don’t remember. So the phone never seemed like a scary thing…
…until now.
Posted by Stan on August 4, 2008 5:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Career-Based Rambling, Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em, Fumbling Attempts at Relationships | Digg It
August 1, 2008
Bad Education
One principle of medieval warfare I’ve taken to heart is, “Know thy enemy.” Since I am a seething cauldron of hate, I’ve gotten to know quite a few people. Since the advent of Google (I’m no search-engine Johnny Come Lately, but in the pre-Google days, Internet-stalking was little more than a recipe for failure; say what you will about their indexing algorithms, they have hit the chewy nougat center of information-gathering for future serial killers) and the increased popularity of blogs and social networking sites, I’ve gotten to know more about certain enemies than I ever thought possible. I once found Owen’s DeviantArt page and, as such, was able to digest his alarming short stories. I’ve found more about The Manager than I ever thought possible. More importantly, I’ve dug deep into the world of the stupid blogger and have come out on the other side hating her more than ever.
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Posted by Stan on August 1, 2008 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Random Musings | Digg It
July 30, 2008
The Poochie Problem
Here’s something I can’t stand: watching a movie or television show where it occurs to you that the writers have become so enamored of a certain character, all supporting characters exist to do nothing more than talk about that character. They don’t appear to have lives of their own — from a dramatic perspective, they have no goals, no nuances, no arcs. In every scene, they offer either a plot point that will affect the central character or lines of dialogue that allow for the central character’s development. Or, even worse, they populate scenes that exist to do nothing more than talk about the main character.
I call this The Poochie Problem, for one of Homer Simpson’s suggestions for Poochie the Rockin’ Dog, the new character he voiced on The Itchy & Scratchy Show: “Whenever Poochie is not on screen, all the other characters should be asking, ‘Where’s Poochie?’” It tends to happen more frequently in television — the medium of wheel-spinning — but it also happens in plenty of movies, especially action movies and shitty comedies.
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Posted by Stan on July 30, 2008 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Career-Based Rambling | Digg It
July 28, 2008
Beat Mega Man
I would love to say I skipped a week of blogging because my quest to beat Mega Man had so consumed me that I sat in an obsessive daze, eyes glued to my old TV, as I endlessly and repetitively reset and played over and over and over until I crushed Dr. Wily like so many ants…
…in reality, I just beat it about five minutes ago, on a single playthrough (and a shitload of continues). The problems I had with the occasional, old-school NES freezing or the “didn’t quite blow on the cartridge hard enough” artifacting didn’t affect me this time, so I just kept going until I won, and let me tell you: Wily’s castle is fucking impossible, infinitely more difficult than the big man himself.
In fact, the reason/excuse for my absence goes a little something like this: I have a novel, and I want to be done with it. I want to be done with it so I can get the ball rolling on that fake publishing company idea and iron out all the difficulties. Look at the date on that post — it’s been over a year since I came up with the idea, and all this time I’m mainly dragging my feet because the fucking thing isn’t done. So now that things with The Big-Shot Producer have basically broken down, what am I left with? An inconsistent reader job, a drawer full scripts ranging from half- to whole-assed, and a novel that I poured — and continue to pour — far too much effort into, to make it the best thing it can possibly be.
It occurred to me that I’m past the halfway point on revising and editing the novel. It’s in better shape than I thought (there’s one major section that I will rewrite from scratch, but otherwise it’s all just nipping and tucking and proofreading), so I just wanted to keep going on it as much as possible. But something else — even stranger and, perhaps, even better — happened, something that’s never happened to me before with my own writing. Look, I wrote this novel from about November 2006 to January of 2007, and since then I’ve convinced myself I’ve been “rewriting,” even though I didn’t even look at it again until August of 2007, and then I got about a third of the way through before I got busy with work and screenplays and bullshit bullshit bullshit. So I put it aside again and picked it up in February of this year, started from the beginning, didn’t get much farther before The Big-Shot Producer came calling again, and I distracted myself with screenplays.
So I’m back on the novel, and it’s been so long since I’ve read anything beyond the first third that something miraculous and a little terrifying happened: I started to get really into the story. That’s not me trying to sound arrogant — believe me, I’m as surprised as anybody — but it shows me that I’ve written exactly the kind of novel that I like reading. Whether or not I’m the only one remains to be seen, but at the very least I can feel confident that I’ve written the very best novel I can.
I don’t know if the ruse will work or what will happen once I finish. I’m just glad it’s working.
Posted by Stan on July 28, 2008 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Random Musings | Digg It
July 18, 2008
Flattery Will Get You Nowhere
My friend Mark usually writes horror/suspense stories. I could never write shit like that, but he does it really well. When he sends me short stories, they remind me of Night Shift-era Stephen King (and if you know King’s work, that’s pretty much the sweet spot for him in terms of quality short stories); when he sends me screenplays, they remind me of a slightly-less-schlocky Brian De Palma. The only exception to this is when he sends me comedies. He’s a really funny guy, but somehow it just doesn’t end up on the page. It’s like what happens when I try to write suspense.
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Posted by Stan on July 18, 2008 9:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Creative Works!, Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em | Digg It
July 16, 2008
Getting Shit On
For nearly a year now, I’ve been writing a weekly column about television. Similar to Zap2It’s TV Gal, but way less retarded, it’s basically an uncompromising look at the TV shows I waste my time watching. It’s not a big thing; mostly, it exists to lend enough legitimacy to myself to apply for the TCA, get in, get invited to the upfronts, then hobnob until I can get a good job and shake off the dust of this shitty review website. It’s a sound plan.
Now, I’ve mentioned this site and the occasional run-insI’ve had with the site founder, but man did he rile me up last week — and he tried again this week.
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Posted by Stan on July 16, 2008 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Job Shit | Digg It
July 14, 2008
Defeating Childhood
As a lad, my favorite series of video games was Capcom’s Mega Man. I didn’t much get into the SNES X series, but those original games — I don’t know, maybe it was my childhood love of robots and futuristic sci-fi, but for games with such simplistic stories, they opened a world of imagination that you don’t always get with modern, “realistic” games.
I couldn’t tell you if it was the announcement of a new Mega Man 9 in the classic, 8-bit style that did it, or just happening to coincidentally find a YouTube instructional video at around the same time, but I fixed my old, worn-out NES. It didn’t take quite as much effort as I thought; just a lot of screwing and unscrewing. Probably the hardest part was leaving a certain level of looseness to the screws; strangely, the spring that keeps the cartridge-holder depressed will fail to work if all the screws are hand-tightened to their tightest.
Once it worked again, the first game I popped in was Mega Man 2 — still, for me, the series’ peak. The game features some of the greatest music ever created (not just in video games!); stages, weapons, and bosses that are clever but not “we’re running out of ideas” silly (Top Man?!); and overall, it feels like the perfect length. The stages are a little longer than the first game, and they’re more challenging but not in the punishing way that is still the first Mega Man’s trademark. Unlike later games, the stages don’t go on so long that they wear out their welcome. Later games may have had better graphics or neat new moves (the slide!), but nothing ever topped Mega Man 2.
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Posted by Stan on July 14, 2008 5:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Stories of Hilarity and Humiliation | Digg It
July 13, 2008
‘Monk’ and ‘Psych’ Return
Following last week’s Burn Notice premiere, two more terrific USA Network shows will return this Friday (July 18th). Here’s an early look at each.
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Posted by Stan on July 13, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Reviews | Digg It
July 11, 2008
What’s Wrong with Being Sexy?
For the moment, I’ve abandoned Rolling in It: The Movie. It’s still there, waiting to be completed, but a new idea has hit me. Idea-wise, I work in two different ways: either I have a vague notion that I have to pound and force into something resembling a story, or I have a swarm of vague notions that all amount to a story that’s, basically, fully fleshed out. That is rarer for me, but in the cases that it has, the scripts have required the fewest number of rewrites. They just kinda pull together—no story problems, no character problems, just a lot of minor nudges.
This new idea is a swarmer.
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Posted by Stan on July 11, 2008 11:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Career-Based Rambling, Creative Works! | Digg It
July 9, 2008
Overkill: My First Bit of Coverage
In honor of that reader job, I’m going to share something with you that I didn’t even think still existed. Here’s the backstory:
In 2001 or 2002 (or maybe earlier, but I didn’t pay much attention until 2002), Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope Studios launched an interactive component of their website. A social networking site in pre-social networking days, it allowed writers — and later all manner of other film-industry wannabe-creative-types — share their work in an honest, encouraging, semi-anonymous forum. It surged in popularity because of a (most likely bullshit) carrot dangled at the end: legend started to spread that Coppola himself was known, on occasion, to download the most popular scripts on the site and take a look at them. I believe Pumpkin was a Zoetrope.com find, and how you feel about that movie might gauge how you feel about the whole project.
It shared the same problem as a lot of screenwriting contests; I would say it was worse because it didn’t cost anything to submit a script, but at the same time you didn’t “win” anything for writing a good script, so maybe it broke even. Point is, people will pick up Story or Screenplay or just write a script on a whim and send it to a contest. I don’t want to denigrate those people, because I’ve long been of the opinion that the only formal training needed to write a good script (or make a good film, for that matter) is to watch a shitload of movies. But watching a shitload of movies and/or reading a book on screenwriting doesn’t guarantee the screenplay won’t be a piece of shit.
I can’t tell you how many “amateur” screenplays have loglines like this: “A waitress/single mother struggles against adversity in the small town where she grew up. Based on a true story.” This was especially true when I browsed the material available on Zoetrope.com. While it follows a basic “beginning-writer” tenet — “write what you know” — and could make for a good movie (last year’s Waitress was pretty great), it also ignores another basic “beginning-writer” tenet: the things that happen to you in your day-to-day life are not necessarily the stuff of great drama. Never say never, but I know my day-to-day is boring as shit, so when I write I take the emotional truth of what is happening or has happened to me in reality and apply it to something that is 100% fictitious.
There’s also the Hemingway-Cézanne philosophy: if you have something that’s real and true but isn’t quite dramatic, change it until it is. So many beginners fall into a pattern of writing “what they know” while neglecting basic principles of drama because, in their reality, “it didn’t happen that way.” So, to go back to the waitress/Waitress example: the arc of that story is centered around the effects of a pregnancy on an unhappy marriage. Meanwhile, your “based on a true story” waitress has crafted a supremely uninteresting story in which she leaves her husband around the time her kid is six. What’s more dramatic — leaving your husband because you don’t want him to destroy the life of your newborn baby, or leaving him because, eh, you just got kinda tired? You try to explain this to the writer, and they come back at you with, “But that’s not how it happened!” Who cares?
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Posted by Stan on July 9, 2008 3:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Career-Based Rambling | Digg It
July 7, 2008
The Joke Thief
When you’re a comedy writer, you can get away with a lot of crap — a structurally unsound story, cardboard-cutout characters, overly expositional dialogue — because the prime goal is: be more funny. Not that I, personally, want my script to suffer from those problems. I just happen to know from experience that plenty of nuts-and-bolts problems disappear if the reader is laughing his or her ass off. When your goal is maximum comedy exploitation, there’s really one ethical code to follow: don’t steal jokes.
This hits on an ethical tricky gray area similar to one I’ve dealt with before: the writing equivalent of, “If a tree falls and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Certainly, but if some half-assed screenwriter writes a terrible script that no one above my bottom-feeding level will ever read, is it appropriate to swipe their work, make it kick ass, and try to run with it?
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Posted by Stan on July 7, 2008 3:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Career-Based Rambling | Digg It
July 6, 2008
‘Burn Notice’ Returns
One of last summer’s best shows returns for its second season on Thursday. USA Network’s Burn Notice follows ex-spy Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan), who has been “burned” (hence the title) by his former employers. That means they’ve stranded him in Miami with no money, no job, no contacts—he has to make due with the support of an old friend (Bruce Campbell), an ex-girlfriend (Gabrielle Anwar) and, sometimes, his mother (Sharon Gless). Since Michael has no other skills to fall back on, he finds himself doing odd jobs to help ordinary people solve extraordinary problems.
The first season did an excellent job of combining comedy and spy thriller. Creator Matt Nix has crafted some great characters, well-played by the cast (all of whom have great chemistry with one another—put them in any combination, and the scene will make you laugh). More than that, Nix and his writers look at the human side of spycraft. In voiceover, Michael makes observations and explanations about how, for instance, spies are trained to spend hours waiting around or utilize specific kinds of ammunition for different tasks. I don’t know if any of these insights have a basis in reality, but they feel authentic.
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Posted by Stan on July 6, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Reviews | Digg It
July 2, 2008
Pressure
So Preity sent me an e-mail yesterday. I know she had the best of intentions, and really, when it comes down to it, this is good news. Turns out, she was supposed to help in finding four other readers to cover their busy season. Her boss canceled this order when he saw how good and fast I was. Remember how I said writing coverage is an endurance test, and you have to show you can be the fastest? Apparently I was a little too fast.
But, come on. I’m unemployed. What else did I have to distract me?
Posted by Stan on July 2, 2008 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Career-Based Rambling | Digg It
