So, I work almost every day in some coffee shop or another (usually 2 or 3 with meals or bike rides in between). I am in a Starbucks right now. I have my *headphones on*. I have the Jerry Goldsmith CRANKED. I can still hear the LOUD people sitting behind me. I can't hear my music, but I can hear them yelling at each other. And they are not fighting - they just have the volume cranked to 11. It is really pissing me off, and I can not wait for them to leave so that I can get back to work. I've been working here all evening without problem until they sat down.
Okay. I've vented.
- Bill
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Terminator: Salvation
I had the same problem with this film that I had with STAR TREK - that kid is too young to play Kyle Reese!
The strange thing about TERMINATOR: SALVATION is that STAR TREK has all of the same problems - all of them - but for some reason got much better reviews and was more readily accepted by those people on message boards who bitch about movies. I do not know why this is - maybe because most of the past STAR TREK movies haven’t been winners, yet the first two TERMINATOR movies are classics that may be two of the best genre movies ever made. When you see a STAR TREK movie, if it’s enjoyable and in focus it’s good (though the lens flare thing still bugs me)... but with a TERMINATOR movie you can’t help but compare it to the first two - and almost any film compared to a James Cameron film is bound to suffer (unless you are comparing it to PIRANHA 2: THE SPAWNING). You just expect more from a TERMINATOR movie.
Though TERMINATOR: SALVATION has all kinds of problems, it’s still a fun, stupid, somewhat enjoyable action packed summer sci-fi movie... but as a TERMINATOR movie? Crappy. If there had never been any Terminator movies, or if this had not been connected to the franchise - would have been dumb summer fun. Problem is, the "baggage" of the past films means this has to be better than dumb summer fun - and it was not.
Though I do not know the whole script backstory, from press stuff I know that John Conner was a minor character in the original script - which focused on the Marcus character. When they hired Bale and he became the *star*, he had the whole script rewritten and (by Bale’s account) told the writer what he wanted to do. I think this may be the case of an interesting script being turned to crap in rewrites.
I think Marcus is the most interesting character - and all of the John Conner scenes undercut the Marcus story and undercut the film. Had this been all about Marcus, this guy who wakes up in the future after the world has gone to hell and tries to figure out what happened and figure out who he is now and what his place in this world is... that would have been involving and interesting. But when Marcus is often second banana to an emotionless dude who yells and makes speeches on the radio all the time - the film loses just about everything. (For instance - the big reveal scene becomes about how Conner was betrayed by Marcus, instead of how Marcus was betrayed.)
I liked the Road Warrior chase stuff - and was shocked that the kid from ROAD WARRIOR had a sex change and was now a mute little girl, and thought the different terminators were cool - but there wasn't that one cool thing... like the liquid metal T-1000 (or the T-800 in the first film). These different terminators were okay but not mind-blowing cool. The grabber one I liked best - it made me jump a couple of times... but haven’t I seen that in TREMORS? When you think about the first film - the concept of this completely unstopable killing machine from the future that can imitate the voices of your loved ones and repair it’s skin and pass for human... that was all amazing stuff back then. And it’s even amazing stuff now. When I rewatch that film, I forget how cool it is when the Terminator pretends to be Sarah’s mother on the phone... and lures her into a trap. And the cool factor of repairing itself - the exposed machinery under the skin is right out of that Matheson short story. T2 has the amazing shape shifting T-1000 - kind of the voice imitation taken to the extreme. These things are leaps of imagination that are not present in T3 and T4 - and that is a major problem with T4 as a Terminator film. It’s doesn’t have anything so amazing that you wonder how something even came up with that. Though the big *grabber* Terminators and their motorcycle attachments were cool - a great idea within the world of Terminators - there wasn’t anything that was outside what we expect... not a problem for a non-Terminator film, but the mid-blowing elements are what we *expect* in a Terminator film.
Just as STAR TREK had plot holes you could drive a whole convoy of trucks through, T4 has all kinds of plot problems.
The other three Terminator movies are chase films - with an unstopabale killer robot of some sort after a human character. In T1 we have Ah-nuld chasing Sarah Conner. In T2 we have Robert Patrick chasing Sarah and teen John. In T3 we have Kristanna Loken chasing John Conner as a young man. In T4? No one is being chased! No one is being threatened! The biggest problem with this film is that both the antagonist and protagonist have non-existent or hollow goals. Late in the game someone notices that it might be a bad thing for Kyle Reese to be killed - but that isn’t driving the story... nothing really is. And here’s the problem with the Kyle Reese thing - Skynet has a billion chances to kill him and is so inept it doesn’t act. What’s up with that?
Since the Marcus character and Kyle connect early in the film, I wonder if there was a draft of the script that focused on Kyle being the target of a chase, with Marcus protecting him... and eventually going into Skynet to rescue him? And I also wonder if the big reveal happened *near the end* in that Skynet scene that exists in the film?
The “machine stopping signal” thing - and even Michael Ironside (with both arms) in the submarine - undercuts Kyle Reese as a target. By creating a second plot that is all about destroying Sky Net HQ, we now have a second reason to go to Sky Net HQ. So, which is more important - Kyle Reese or blowing up Skynet HQ...
And it seems to be a regional HQ at that - not the thing that changes the fate of mankind, just a minor battle. Though we know this is the first of a proposed new trilogy, we still need to have the ending for a stand alone movie. McG has leaked to the press that he had a darker ending but decided not to shoot it - and even though that ending sounds interesting, it’s still a *crap* ending. It isn’t that big blow-up-the-Death-Star ending we need in a summer movie. Just more ho-hum crap... just more interesting ho-hum crap than the filmed version.
They needed to "build the legend" of the Sky Net San Francisco HQ - so that it is a really big thing, and no one has ever come out of there alive, and they steal people and... do something... to them there. Why do machines need people? Build that up into the thing that drives the story. Maybe there are other Skynet HQs, but none of them are stealing *people* and doing something with them... what could they be doing? There’s a great Philip K. Dick story (turned into the most boring movie in the world) called “Second Variety” about a future man vs. machines war where the automated machine assembly line has come up with a new type of killer machine... but nobody knows what it is. They only know it exists. The story is a quest to discover what this new type of machine is... and they discover it is an infiltration unit that looks and acts human... which leads to everyone pointing the finger at everyone else like in Carpenter’s THE THING and there’s a nice big twist end in the story *after* they think they have destroyed the man-machine. The initial mystery in that story about what the heck this new killing machine is could have been used to fuel T4. And even though *we* know what a T-800 is, and why they need human flesh to create them, the characters wouldn’t - which could be used to create suspense. We know they shouldn’t go in that old dark house where a bunch of people were killed in the first ten minutes, but they don’t. They could have given the characters clues to what happens in that factory, and the characters could have gotten them *wrong* - maybe thinking that they were peeling skin from people as a form of torture to interrogate these people and find out about the underground. That would have built some audience participation - we’d be yelling at the screen: No! They’re stealing people’s skins for T-800s! But they needed to **build** the legend and mystery of the San Francisco HQ so that it becomes the Death Star. It can’t just be some building, it has to be the biggest and most interesting thing in the movie.
Oh, and Marcus gets in too easy.
Oh, and the resistance isn’t ever the underdog in this film - making the story not work on a basic level. Hero must always be underdog. Here - people are constantly outsmarting the machines (oh, the old rope-across-the-street trick!) so that you wonder why we are watching this movie in the first place - humans are obviously going to win this.
Oh, and this was one of the reasons why people didn’t like *T2* - humans are at war against machines. So any time the humans use a machine, that’s stupid. It’s at odds with the concept. Giving the humans a huge airforce and all kinds of other helpful machines doesn’t just stop them from being the underdogs, it also has them collaborating with the enemy! BATTLE FOR TERRA has an *amazing* alien world where wind and wood have replaced metal. I think it would have been cool to create a post-apocalypse world where all machines were suspect, and humans *only* used non-computerized, non-metal, non-electronic devices. Let’s create a future where people actually *fear* machines!
You have great actress Jane Alexander, and she gets a couple of lines of dialogue? No way! I kept thinking she should be like the leader-woman from THE STAND - this could have been a great part! Instead I wondered why the hell she was in this film.
Thought Kyle Reese's speech after he was captured was good, and I liked the allusions to the war on terror in some other character's dialogue, much of the dialogue was OTN crap. Instead of finding ways to recycle some of those iconic lines of dialogue from the first two films, they needed to come up with *new* iconic lines. This is a major problem in the film biz right now - instead of trying to do something new and interesting and unique... a film that amazes us now - everyone seems to be picking through the bones of past films giving us a bunch of remakes that are more of the same. And T4's biggest problem is that it is nothing new - no amazing new ideas and no amazing new lines of dialogue. Find me an original quotable line of dialogue in this film! We can’t predict what is going to stick with the audience, but we can sure as hell write some amazing dialogue that gives them a selection of things they might quote. Give them bland, stale dialogue and they aren’t going to remember any of it.
Another big problem with the film is that it’s not emotional. The great thing about the first two Terminator movies... and even the third one... is that they were filled with big emotional scenes and big emotional decisions. “I now know why you cry.” Man, no line in film has gotten me to tear up like that one... and I was crying for a freakin’ robot played by the future Governor of Califlowernia. We can learn a great screenwriting lesson by tracing that line through the preceding movie - it was set up so well! The set up scenes were great scenes! There was *nothing* in T4 even close to this - the big emotional scenes all belonged to Marcus, and many were undercut by John Conner’s character. Conner had *zero* emotional scenes, and that is the biggest mistake in the film. By making the leader of humanity into this cold heartless idiot, they make me wonder why I should care whether the machines win or not. I mean, why would I want a world where humans act more like machines than the machines do?
I ditched the TV show when it became apparent that they had no idea what they were trying to do. The show jumped the shark in whatever first season episode that was when they jumped up in time - it became a dopey soap opera instead of a show about John Conner learning the skills he would need to lead the human race to victory. I don't think those are *fighting* skills - I think it's learning what makes us human. The first season ender was great - but second season was just more crap. They never figured out what the show was *about* - and that ends up being the problem with T4, too. What is this movie about? What are the big emotional decisions the characters must make?
Remember in T2 when Sarah goes to kill Dyson (the always great Joe Morton) who she thinks is the evil dude who will start Skynet... but he’s a nice guy with a family? And she realizes she still needs to kill him? That is one great scene without a single special effect. Hey, and if we *only* look at the character of Dyson, what an amazing journey that guy takes! How many big emotional scenes does he have? And his final scene - how haunting can you get? I can still hear his raspy breathing in my mind. Every character in T2 has *big* emotional scenes and *big* emotional decisions to make... And even in T3 we get some big juicy scenes - Kate and her father, John realizing he must step up to be the leader, and that ending... Plus, one of the fun elements of T3 was the bickering couple being chased - kind of like Hitchcock’s 39 STEPS - and even though they dislike each other, they are fated to be married. Doesn’t seem likely throughout the movie, until that big ending where we realize it’s inevitable. As much as you may not like T3, it still works as a Terminator movie, and it still has some great emotional moments and one hell of an ending.
T4 - what are the big moments? Where are the emotions? They squandered a great chance for -something- with the relationship between Marcus and the Moon Bloodgood character. A great place to put in those little detail moments that later pay off in “I now know why you cry” moments. But we got nada. And that relationship was nada. I really liked the idea of a hot kick ass woman, but they even squandered that! Hey, this was the CHARLIE’S ANGELS director - you’d think he could have at least got that part, right!
I liked that they brought back Helena Bonham Carter from the opening scene - but that scene was undercut by the earlier reveal. But it seemed like Bryce Dallas Howard (who is hot) is only in the film because her character was in T3... and they needed some way to make Christian Bale seem like less of a machine. And Common - who has one of the most interesting faces in the biz - is completely wasted as Conner’s pointless second in command. Why not give that guy something cool to do? This gets back to the “what’s it all about, McG?” thing - but why weren’t we given different characters with different theories about how best to *have* a future of mankind? Let Common completely disagree with Conner, let Jane Alexander have a strange theory that makes complete sense in this post-apocalypse world, create a *discussion* of what the future of mankind should be. A debate. Give us some *ideas* that we can think about later!
Problem is - I don't think McG knows why we cry.
The film seemed to fight any chance at being more than just summer action crap - it often seemed like they were on to something and then buried it - between Marcus discovering who he is and throblem is - I don't think McG knows why we cry.e signal going two ways (these things seem connected) it seemed like there was a better draft of the script somewhere that got destroyed in rewrites - where the intentions of things like this were not understood by the new writer... or maybe it was just the director who didn't get it.
Like STAR TREK, I think if you are going to do something in a beloved series you have to do something great... not something that just cashes in on the name brand. I still don’t understand why the stupid summer movie that is T4 is any worse than the stupid summer movie that is STAR TREK - they both have the exact same problems (Nero's loopy plot, only one big emotional moment, a massive amount of plot holes, crazy coincidences, how come Kirk & Spock can walk to the Fed Outpost when both had to hide in the cave from monsters earlier, etc, etc, etc). But since most of the previous STAR TREK films sucked, a silly summer movie version of STAR TREK is considered "good". TERMINATOR: SALVATION has to carry all of the baggage of the first two great fims, and the third okay film... and collapses under the weight. I liked the film as a dumb summer action flick, was disappointed in it as a Terminator movie.
Two more films in this proposed trilogy... but did this one terminate the last two?
Classes On CD On Sale!
- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Where's The Beef? and why act 2 should be easy.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Chicken Caesar salad.
Pages:
The strange thing about TERMINATOR: SALVATION is that STAR TREK has all of the same problems - all of them - but for some reason got much better reviews and was more readily accepted by those people on message boards who bitch about movies. I do not know why this is - maybe because most of the past STAR TREK movies haven’t been winners, yet the first two TERMINATOR movies are classics that may be two of the best genre movies ever made. When you see a STAR TREK movie, if it’s enjoyable and in focus it’s good (though the lens flare thing still bugs me)... but with a TERMINATOR movie you can’t help but compare it to the first two - and almost any film compared to a James Cameron film is bound to suffer (unless you are comparing it to PIRANHA 2: THE SPAWNING). You just expect more from a TERMINATOR movie.
Though TERMINATOR: SALVATION has all kinds of problems, it’s still a fun, stupid, somewhat enjoyable action packed summer sci-fi movie... but as a TERMINATOR movie? Crappy. If there had never been any Terminator movies, or if this had not been connected to the franchise - would have been dumb summer fun. Problem is, the "baggage" of the past films means this has to be better than dumb summer fun - and it was not.
Though I do not know the whole script backstory, from press stuff I know that John Conner was a minor character in the original script - which focused on the Marcus character. When they hired Bale and he became the *star*, he had the whole script rewritten and (by Bale’s account) told the writer what he wanted to do. I think this may be the case of an interesting script being turned to crap in rewrites.
I think Marcus is the most interesting character - and all of the John Conner scenes undercut the Marcus story and undercut the film. Had this been all about Marcus, this guy who wakes up in the future after the world has gone to hell and tries to figure out what happened and figure out who he is now and what his place in this world is... that would have been involving and interesting. But when Marcus is often second banana to an emotionless dude who yells and makes speeches on the radio all the time - the film loses just about everything. (For instance - the big reveal scene becomes about how Conner was betrayed by Marcus, instead of how Marcus was betrayed.)
I liked the Road Warrior chase stuff - and was shocked that the kid from ROAD WARRIOR had a sex change and was now a mute little girl, and thought the different terminators were cool - but there wasn't that one cool thing... like the liquid metal T-1000 (or the T-800 in the first film). These different terminators were okay but not mind-blowing cool. The grabber one I liked best - it made me jump a couple of times... but haven’t I seen that in TREMORS? When you think about the first film - the concept of this completely unstopable killing machine from the future that can imitate the voices of your loved ones and repair it’s skin and pass for human... that was all amazing stuff back then. And it’s even amazing stuff now. When I rewatch that film, I forget how cool it is when the Terminator pretends to be Sarah’s mother on the phone... and lures her into a trap. And the cool factor of repairing itself - the exposed machinery under the skin is right out of that Matheson short story. T2 has the amazing shape shifting T-1000 - kind of the voice imitation taken to the extreme. These things are leaps of imagination that are not present in T3 and T4 - and that is a major problem with T4 as a Terminator film. It’s doesn’t have anything so amazing that you wonder how something even came up with that. Though the big *grabber* Terminators and their motorcycle attachments were cool - a great idea within the world of Terminators - there wasn’t anything that was outside what we expect... not a problem for a non-Terminator film, but the mid-blowing elements are what we *expect* in a Terminator film.
Just as STAR TREK had plot holes you could drive a whole convoy of trucks through, T4 has all kinds of plot problems.
The other three Terminator movies are chase films - with an unstopabale killer robot of some sort after a human character. In T1 we have Ah-nuld chasing Sarah Conner. In T2 we have Robert Patrick chasing Sarah and teen John. In T3 we have Kristanna Loken chasing John Conner as a young man. In T4? No one is being chased! No one is being threatened! The biggest problem with this film is that both the antagonist and protagonist have non-existent or hollow goals. Late in the game someone notices that it might be a bad thing for Kyle Reese to be killed - but that isn’t driving the story... nothing really is. And here’s the problem with the Kyle Reese thing - Skynet has a billion chances to kill him and is so inept it doesn’t act. What’s up with that?
Since the Marcus character and Kyle connect early in the film, I wonder if there was a draft of the script that focused on Kyle being the target of a chase, with Marcus protecting him... and eventually going into Skynet to rescue him? And I also wonder if the big reveal happened *near the end* in that Skynet scene that exists in the film?
The “machine stopping signal” thing - and even Michael Ironside (with both arms) in the submarine - undercuts Kyle Reese as a target. By creating a second plot that is all about destroying Sky Net HQ, we now have a second reason to go to Sky Net HQ. So, which is more important - Kyle Reese or blowing up Skynet HQ...
And it seems to be a regional HQ at that - not the thing that changes the fate of mankind, just a minor battle. Though we know this is the first of a proposed new trilogy, we still need to have the ending for a stand alone movie. McG has leaked to the press that he had a darker ending but decided not to shoot it - and even though that ending sounds interesting, it’s still a *crap* ending. It isn’t that big blow-up-the-Death-Star ending we need in a summer movie. Just more ho-hum crap... just more interesting ho-hum crap than the filmed version.
They needed to "build the legend" of the Sky Net San Francisco HQ - so that it is a really big thing, and no one has ever come out of there alive, and they steal people and... do something... to them there. Why do machines need people? Build that up into the thing that drives the story. Maybe there are other Skynet HQs, but none of them are stealing *people* and doing something with them... what could they be doing? There’s a great Philip K. Dick story (turned into the most boring movie in the world) called “Second Variety” about a future man vs. machines war where the automated machine assembly line has come up with a new type of killer machine... but nobody knows what it is. They only know it exists. The story is a quest to discover what this new type of machine is... and they discover it is an infiltration unit that looks and acts human... which leads to everyone pointing the finger at everyone else like in Carpenter’s THE THING and there’s a nice big twist end in the story *after* they think they have destroyed the man-machine. The initial mystery in that story about what the heck this new killing machine is could have been used to fuel T4. And even though *we* know what a T-800 is, and why they need human flesh to create them, the characters wouldn’t - which could be used to create suspense. We know they shouldn’t go in that old dark house where a bunch of people were killed in the first ten minutes, but they don’t. They could have given the characters clues to what happens in that factory, and the characters could have gotten them *wrong* - maybe thinking that they were peeling skin from people as a form of torture to interrogate these people and find out about the underground. That would have built some audience participation - we’d be yelling at the screen: No! They’re stealing people’s skins for T-800s! But they needed to **build** the legend and mystery of the San Francisco HQ so that it becomes the Death Star. It can’t just be some building, it has to be the biggest and most interesting thing in the movie.
Oh, and Marcus gets in too easy.
Oh, and the resistance isn’t ever the underdog in this film - making the story not work on a basic level. Hero must always be underdog. Here - people are constantly outsmarting the machines (oh, the old rope-across-the-street trick!) so that you wonder why we are watching this movie in the first place - humans are obviously going to win this.
Oh, and this was one of the reasons why people didn’t like *T2* - humans are at war against machines. So any time the humans use a machine, that’s stupid. It’s at odds with the concept. Giving the humans a huge airforce and all kinds of other helpful machines doesn’t just stop them from being the underdogs, it also has them collaborating with the enemy! BATTLE FOR TERRA has an *amazing* alien world where wind and wood have replaced metal. I think it would have been cool to create a post-apocalypse world where all machines were suspect, and humans *only* used non-computerized, non-metal, non-electronic devices. Let’s create a future where people actually *fear* machines!
You have great actress Jane Alexander, and she gets a couple of lines of dialogue? No way! I kept thinking she should be like the leader-woman from THE STAND - this could have been a great part! Instead I wondered why the hell she was in this film.
Thought Kyle Reese's speech after he was captured was good, and I liked the allusions to the war on terror in some other character's dialogue, much of the dialogue was OTN crap. Instead of finding ways to recycle some of those iconic lines of dialogue from the first two films, they needed to come up with *new* iconic lines. This is a major problem in the film biz right now - instead of trying to do something new and interesting and unique... a film that amazes us now - everyone seems to be picking through the bones of past films giving us a bunch of remakes that are more of the same. And T4's biggest problem is that it is nothing new - no amazing new ideas and no amazing new lines of dialogue. Find me an original quotable line of dialogue in this film! We can’t predict what is going to stick with the audience, but we can sure as hell write some amazing dialogue that gives them a selection of things they might quote. Give them bland, stale dialogue and they aren’t going to remember any of it.
Another big problem with the film is that it’s not emotional. The great thing about the first two Terminator movies... and even the third one... is that they were filled with big emotional scenes and big emotional decisions. “I now know why you cry.” Man, no line in film has gotten me to tear up like that one... and I was crying for a freakin’ robot played by the future Governor of Califlowernia. We can learn a great screenwriting lesson by tracing that line through the preceding movie - it was set up so well! The set up scenes were great scenes! There was *nothing* in T4 even close to this - the big emotional scenes all belonged to Marcus, and many were undercut by John Conner’s character. Conner had *zero* emotional scenes, and that is the biggest mistake in the film. By making the leader of humanity into this cold heartless idiot, they make me wonder why I should care whether the machines win or not. I mean, why would I want a world where humans act more like machines than the machines do?
I ditched the TV show when it became apparent that they had no idea what they were trying to do. The show jumped the shark in whatever first season episode that was when they jumped up in time - it became a dopey soap opera instead of a show about John Conner learning the skills he would need to lead the human race to victory. I don't think those are *fighting* skills - I think it's learning what makes us human. The first season ender was great - but second season was just more crap. They never figured out what the show was *about* - and that ends up being the problem with T4, too. What is this movie about? What are the big emotional decisions the characters must make?
Remember in T2 when Sarah goes to kill Dyson (the always great Joe Morton) who she thinks is the evil dude who will start Skynet... but he’s a nice guy with a family? And she realizes she still needs to kill him? That is one great scene without a single special effect. Hey, and if we *only* look at the character of Dyson, what an amazing journey that guy takes! How many big emotional scenes does he have? And his final scene - how haunting can you get? I can still hear his raspy breathing in my mind. Every character in T2 has *big* emotional scenes and *big* emotional decisions to make... And even in T3 we get some big juicy scenes - Kate and her father, John realizing he must step up to be the leader, and that ending... Plus, one of the fun elements of T3 was the bickering couple being chased - kind of like Hitchcock’s 39 STEPS - and even though they dislike each other, they are fated to be married. Doesn’t seem likely throughout the movie, until that big ending where we realize it’s inevitable. As much as you may not like T3, it still works as a Terminator movie, and it still has some great emotional moments and one hell of an ending.
T4 - what are the big moments? Where are the emotions? They squandered a great chance for -something- with the relationship between Marcus and the Moon Bloodgood character. A great place to put in those little detail moments that later pay off in “I now know why you cry” moments. But we got nada. And that relationship was nada. I really liked the idea of a hot kick ass woman, but they even squandered that! Hey, this was the CHARLIE’S ANGELS director - you’d think he could have at least got that part, right!
I liked that they brought back Helena Bonham Carter from the opening scene - but that scene was undercut by the earlier reveal. But it seemed like Bryce Dallas Howard (who is hot) is only in the film because her character was in T3... and they needed some way to make Christian Bale seem like less of a machine. And Common - who has one of the most interesting faces in the biz - is completely wasted as Conner’s pointless second in command. Why not give that guy something cool to do? This gets back to the “what’s it all about, McG?” thing - but why weren’t we given different characters with different theories about how best to *have* a future of mankind? Let Common completely disagree with Conner, let Jane Alexander have a strange theory that makes complete sense in this post-apocalypse world, create a *discussion* of what the future of mankind should be. A debate. Give us some *ideas* that we can think about later!
Problem is - I don't think McG knows why we cry.
The film seemed to fight any chance at being more than just summer action crap - it often seemed like they were on to something and then buried it - between Marcus discovering who he is and throblem is - I don't think McG knows why we cry.e signal going two ways (these things seem connected) it seemed like there was a better draft of the script somewhere that got destroyed in rewrites - where the intentions of things like this were not understood by the new writer... or maybe it was just the director who didn't get it.
Like STAR TREK, I think if you are going to do something in a beloved series you have to do something great... not something that just cashes in on the name brand. I still don’t understand why the stupid summer movie that is T4 is any worse than the stupid summer movie that is STAR TREK - they both have the exact same problems (Nero's loopy plot, only one big emotional moment, a massive amount of plot holes, crazy coincidences, how come Kirk & Spock can walk to the Fed Outpost when both had to hide in the cave from monsters earlier, etc, etc, etc). But since most of the previous STAR TREK films sucked, a silly summer movie version of STAR TREK is considered "good". TERMINATOR: SALVATION has to carry all of the baggage of the first two great fims, and the third okay film... and collapses under the weight. I liked the film as a dumb summer action flick, was disappointed in it as a Terminator movie.
Two more films in this proposed trilogy... but did this one terminate the last two?
Classes On CD On Sale!
- Bill
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Where's The Beef? and why act 2 should be easy.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Chicken Caesar salad.
Pages:
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Compulsive Kindness
When I was a little kid, my mother would always get compliments from other people on how well behaved my brother and sister and I were. When we were in public we never raised our voices, let alone ran around and roughhoused. He stood in a straight line. We didn’t touch things that were not ours. We might fight like cats and dogs at home, but in public we never pushed each other or hit each other or even raised our voices. Actually, that was part of it - we didn’t speak unless spoken to. My parents raised us well. We did unto others as we would have them do unto us. None of this had anything to do with religion or threats of being whipped with a belt - it was just good behavior. When we were out in public, we had a code of conduct to follow.
Back then I believe most kids had a code of conduct to follow when they were out in public. I know our friends the Holloway kids did... though I don’t remember them standing in a straight line - that may have just been something my mom came up with. Though some kids were little hellions, most behaved when in public. That’s what was expected of kids at the time. We always said “please” and “thank you” and “excuse me” and “may I be excused” when we had finished dinner. We had to ask permission before doing anything unusual - and if all of this sounds like we were some sort of Stepford Kids, nothing could be farther from the truth. We built forts and dug fox holes to play army and often played in the forbidden creek behind the house if mom was busy doing something and we didn’t think we’d get caught. We were normal kids, who had some manners and did unto others.
The mind set of doing unto others and considering other people has stuck with me into adulthood. So has saying “please” and “thank you”. When I’m working in a coffee shop and they put my drink on the counter, I always say “thank you” even if I am across the room plugging in the laptop. It’s only polite. And this got me thinking about all of the things that I do that are traces of those childhood lessons in being polite.
1) I always say “please” and “thank you” and “you’re welcome”.
2) I always try to have a genuine smile for people. I hate those plastered on fake smiles, and I have been guilty of wearing them every now and then. When I smile at people, 99% of the time I mean it. I also try to be positive - and trust people and be nice to people as my default. I know people who start out suspicious and angry, I don't want to be one of those people.
3) I clean up after myself - I always try to leave things where and as I found them.
4) When I’m at a stop light, I always look *both* ways before turning right or pulling out. I also look both ways before crossing a street - or doing just about anything. Always good to know what's around you - instead of not caring.
5) Probably because I’m often on a bicycle, I stop my car behind the limit line, not in the middle of the cross walk. You know, that extra foot doesn’t get me there any faster. When I'm driving, I go with the flow of traffic - rather than race to the next stop light. Oddly, I get there the same time as the car that races through traffic.
6) When squeezing past someone or crossing in front of their sight line or any number of other things, I say either “excuse me” or “pardon me”. Since many people in Los Angeles speak Spanish as their primary language, I usually say “pardon me” because I think it is easier for everyone to understand. I don’t say “pardon me” for me, I say it to be polite to others.
7) I park within the lines, and as straight as possible. This means it may take me an extra minute to position my car - but that makes it easier for people parked on either side to open their doors and pull their cars out of their parking spot.
8) When I am paying at a cash register, I make sure my money is faced when I hand it to the clerk. When I worked retail I had to face my money at the end of the day, so I know what a pain it is to get a wad of messy money. It takes a second to put all of the bills face up and rightside up before handing it to the clerk.
9) I look before moving. If I’m going to take a step to the side or a step back, I look at the spot where I’m moving to *before* moving so that I don’t step on anyone. Saves me from having someone else's coffee on my clothes.
10) I am patient. Okay, not always - never at the post office - but I try to be patient most of the time. Whether I’m in a rush or not will not change how fast things happen or how fast other people move. Better to just take it easy.
11) By the time I get to the front of the line, I am completely ready to order. I know exactly what I want, and the answer to any of the normal question I might be asked (“Soup or salad?” “Do you want fries with that?” “Room for cream?”) I don’t want to waste the time of the people behind the counter or the people behind me because I am not prepared. By the time I stand in line, I know exactly what I want.
12) When I am walking on the sidewalk, I walk on the right side - never in the center. I want to make it easy for people behind me to pass me, and people coming in the opposite direction to get around me.
13) When I step off and escalator or through a door I continue to walk several steps to make sure I am not blocking people behind me. I usually keep walking and survey my surroundings to see where I want to go, rather than stop and look around. That way I’m not holding up traffic.
14) When I am next in a check out line, I have money in my hand as well as a selection of change, so that nobody has to wait for me to dig into my pocket to find that nickle. I’m *prepared* to pay for my purchases. Oh, and because I’m strange, I often add up my items in my mind and figure in tax and have a pretty good estimate of what the total is going to be. I’m usually within a dollar either way, and that helps me know what kind of bills I should have in my hand when I get to the checkstand.
15) If I’m talking on my cell phone in public, I try to use a quiet voice or go outside - I don’t want to bother other people with my conversation... and I kind of like privacy.
16) I try not to kick a man when he’s down. Once I’ve made my point, I back off. Though I’m sure I’ve kept hammering away at somebody a few times on message boards, I usually back off. Also, when someone has a bad day, I don’t make it worse... even if I hate them and my evil side would love to destroy them. It’s not fair.
17) I always go to the restroom or go outside to blow my nose. It’s gross to do it somewhere people are watching or listening... let alone trying to eat a meal.
18) I gauge traffic when I am merging, and pull out in an opening with enough distance between the car in front and in back of me... and at the same speed they are going. I don't stop to merge - that's silly. I don’t want to cause anyone to jamb on their brakes or have to swerve - I want it to be a smooth blend of my car into the stream of traffic.
19) If I am walking with friends on the sidewalk and others approach us in the opposite direction, I step behind or in front of my friend(s) so that we are walking single-file, allowing those walking towards us half of the sidewalk to pass us. This isn’t always easy - I have some friends who don’t get it, and if I fall back, so do they.
20) When I’m wrong, I apologize, and I mean it.
21) My cell phone ringer is either set low or on vibrate - the rest of the world doesn’t have to know my phone is ringing, and I really don’t care if you hear my cool ringtone or not (it’s the Peter Gunn theme - which is used in a bunch of commercials, and I often reach for my phone when it’s just a Chase Bank commercial on TV.)
22) I don’t block other people in an aisle or a store or a walkway or anyplace else - and I try not to stand in front of things other people might want access to.
23) If I make a mistake more than once, I try to make sure I don’t make it a third time. You are supposed to learn from your mistakes, not keep making them over and over again. Sometimes, if it’s some sort of bad habit, I find some way to punish myself if I keep doing it. I’m too old to have my mom spank me, so sometimes I have to spank myself. Not literally. But I do not reward myself for failure or making mistakes - I take away some pleasure until I stop screwing up.
24) I do not talk on my cell phone when I get to the front of a line - that’s when I need to be focusing on paying or ordering or talking with the person on the other side of the counter. It’s rude to the person behind the counter, it's rude to the person on the phone, and rude to the people standing behind me when I fumble through trying to hold two conversations at once.
25) In the grocery store, I push my cart down the right side of the aisle, and either stay on that right side when grabbing items off the shelves or move far enough away from my cart that I am not blocking both sides of the aisle - one side with my cart and one side with me shopping. I always leave half the aisle empty so that other people with carts can get past me.
26) If I am crossing a street as a pedestrian (or just walking across a parking lot entrance) I look at traffic in all directions - some times it’s easier to wait for one car to pass even though I have the right of way. If I have to wait a minute so that things run smoother for everyone else, no big deal And if cars are waiting for me to cross the street, I walk *fast* - I don’t take my time when I’m also taking other people’s time.
27) I try to be aware of everyone around me and stay out of people’s way. If I’m blocking a bunch of people from getting where they want to go because I’ve got my head in the clouds thinking about something or talking on the phone or whatever - I’m holding up the whole danged world!
28) When I pick a table at a restaurant or a coffee shop, I try not to pick one that would be of better use to someone else - I’m one person, so I don’t take a large table that might be better used by a family or a group, I don’t take a table designed for handicapped access or might be more convenient for an elderly person. Sometimes these are the only tables available, so I have no choice - but I always think about others when I select a table.
29) If I’m walking in a shopping mall or hallway or sidewalk and need to stop, I move to the side (near the wall) and *then* stop, so that I am not suddenly stopping in front of someone and am out of the way *before* I slow down or stop.
30) I try to help people whenever possible - not because of some sort of karma thing where what goes around will come around back to me (that would be nice, but I’m not sure that’s really how the world works), but just because it usually takes the same amount of effort to help people as to put them down or even ignore them. There are all kinds of people who seem to go out of their way to be mean or dismissive to people - and that’s a lot of work just to be negative. Usually it takes the same amount of work to help people - and that makes the world a little better. I don’t go out of my way looking for people to help, I just help anyone whose path crosses mine. That may be holding the door open for someone with their arms full or answering a question on a message board I visit or helping somebody find something if I know where it is (a street, a business, or even an item in the store). Most of these are silly little things that are part of our day-to-day lives, but my “default setting” is helpful. One of those things I learned from my parents.
By the way, I think one of the reasons why my brother and sister and I were so well behaved in public is that my mom encouraged us to *think about playing* and imagine what we would do when we got home and were allowed to run around in the yard and have fun. Or think about our toys and hobbies (my brother and I would think about Hot Wheels, my sister would think about Barbies - Mattel Toys won either way). Or think about our favorite televison shows or the book we were reading. We would sort of play in our minds... and entertain ourselves. No need to be little hellions in the grocery store. Those good manners, and thinking of others as well as ourselves, have stuck with me from childhood into adulthood.
(This was going to be called "Compusive Manners" but that didn't have the same ring to it.)
Thank you for reading this.
Classes On CD On Sale!
- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Strange Heroes and why cops and FBI agents don't work in screenplays.
Yesterday’s Dinner: City Wok sweet & sour chicken.
Movies: Saw T4 on Friday night, and the review is coming.
DVD: LAID TO REST - watched it for my Horror Class - absolutely awful. Written and directed by an FX guy, so the kills are interesting and gory to the extreme... but there is no story to hold them together. A woman wakes up in a coffin with complete amnesia (she doesn’t even know the word for “coffin”) and escapes into a funeral home filled with dead people and a maniac with a chrome skull mask, a video camera mounted on his shoulder, and a large assortment of knives. She wounds him, escapes, gets picked up by a guy driving down the road who takes her back to his house where his wife wonders what to do with this nameless woman who seems to have the mind and vocabulary of a 2 year old.
Not only does “Chrome Skull” find them and start killing anyone around the house, forcing the amnesia woman and the guy to escape (wife is a gross casualty) - this has got to be the only psycho killer in the history of cinema who has *personalized license plates* on his car with his psycho killer’s name! That’s so a character can know it’s the psycho’s car when it’s parked somewhere. That’s the kind of completely stupid script this is.
And to say that none of the characters have any character is an understatement - these people make the lunchmeat characters in the FRIDAY THE 13th movies look like Hamlet! The amnesia woman never becomes anything other than a 2 year old with a smokin’ body - which probably tells us something about the writer-director. The amazing thing here is the cast - practically everyone from the TERMINATOR TV show is here, and a bunch of others you either know or recognize. No suspense, downright stupid plotting and zero in the way of characters - even the psycho killer is so unmotivated he seems completely unrealistic!
When people ask if the killer needs to be motivated, this is a great example of what happens when there is no motivation at all and the whole film falls apart. Jason in FRIDAY THE 13th was getting revenge against the type of kids who allowed him to drown, Freddy Kruger is chasing the children of the people who burned him alive in NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, Michael Myers is triggered to kill by strange sexual urges in HALLOWEEN - every psycho killer in every good movie has a *reason* to kill and a specific M.O. for how and who he kills... here we just get random kills that make no sense. It’s complete crap... with good FX.
I have no idea why film makers who have no storytelling talent either write their own scripts or want to find some typing monkey to write up their bad ideas. They should find a good finished spec script, buy it and make it without making any changes that screw it up. Let the writers do the writing and keep your nose out of it. If you can’t find the kind of script you want to direct out there - maybe there’s a reason for that? Maybe you have bad taste and the scripts out there are *well written*? Directors direct, FX guys do FX, and writers write. That’s the way it should work.
- Bill
Back then I believe most kids had a code of conduct to follow when they were out in public. I know our friends the Holloway kids did... though I don’t remember them standing in a straight line - that may have just been something my mom came up with. Though some kids were little hellions, most behaved when in public. That’s what was expected of kids at the time. We always said “please” and “thank you” and “excuse me” and “may I be excused” when we had finished dinner. We had to ask permission before doing anything unusual - and if all of this sounds like we were some sort of Stepford Kids, nothing could be farther from the truth. We built forts and dug fox holes to play army and often played in the forbidden creek behind the house if mom was busy doing something and we didn’t think we’d get caught. We were normal kids, who had some manners and did unto others.
The mind set of doing unto others and considering other people has stuck with me into adulthood. So has saying “please” and “thank you”. When I’m working in a coffee shop and they put my drink on the counter, I always say “thank you” even if I am across the room plugging in the laptop. It’s only polite. And this got me thinking about all of the things that I do that are traces of those childhood lessons in being polite.
1) I always say “please” and “thank you” and “you’re welcome”.
2) I always try to have a genuine smile for people. I hate those plastered on fake smiles, and I have been guilty of wearing them every now and then. When I smile at people, 99% of the time I mean it. I also try to be positive - and trust people and be nice to people as my default. I know people who start out suspicious and angry, I don't want to be one of those people.
3) I clean up after myself - I always try to leave things where and as I found them.
4) When I’m at a stop light, I always look *both* ways before turning right or pulling out. I also look both ways before crossing a street - or doing just about anything. Always good to know what's around you - instead of not caring.
5) Probably because I’m often on a bicycle, I stop my car behind the limit line, not in the middle of the cross walk. You know, that extra foot doesn’t get me there any faster. When I'm driving, I go with the flow of traffic - rather than race to the next stop light. Oddly, I get there the same time as the car that races through traffic.
6) When squeezing past someone or crossing in front of their sight line or any number of other things, I say either “excuse me” or “pardon me”. Since many people in Los Angeles speak Spanish as their primary language, I usually say “pardon me” because I think it is easier for everyone to understand. I don’t say “pardon me” for me, I say it to be polite to others.
7) I park within the lines, and as straight as possible. This means it may take me an extra minute to position my car - but that makes it easier for people parked on either side to open their doors and pull their cars out of their parking spot.
8) When I am paying at a cash register, I make sure my money is faced when I hand it to the clerk. When I worked retail I had to face my money at the end of the day, so I know what a pain it is to get a wad of messy money. It takes a second to put all of the bills face up and rightside up before handing it to the clerk.
9) I look before moving. If I’m going to take a step to the side or a step back, I look at the spot where I’m moving to *before* moving so that I don’t step on anyone. Saves me from having someone else's coffee on my clothes.
10) I am patient. Okay, not always - never at the post office - but I try to be patient most of the time. Whether I’m in a rush or not will not change how fast things happen or how fast other people move. Better to just take it easy.
11) By the time I get to the front of the line, I am completely ready to order. I know exactly what I want, and the answer to any of the normal question I might be asked (“Soup or salad?” “Do you want fries with that?” “Room for cream?”) I don’t want to waste the time of the people behind the counter or the people behind me because I am not prepared. By the time I stand in line, I know exactly what I want.
12) When I am walking on the sidewalk, I walk on the right side - never in the center. I want to make it easy for people behind me to pass me, and people coming in the opposite direction to get around me.
13) When I step off and escalator or through a door I continue to walk several steps to make sure I am not blocking people behind me. I usually keep walking and survey my surroundings to see where I want to go, rather than stop and look around. That way I’m not holding up traffic.
14) When I am next in a check out line, I have money in my hand as well as a selection of change, so that nobody has to wait for me to dig into my pocket to find that nickle. I’m *prepared* to pay for my purchases. Oh, and because I’m strange, I often add up my items in my mind and figure in tax and have a pretty good estimate of what the total is going to be. I’m usually within a dollar either way, and that helps me know what kind of bills I should have in my hand when I get to the checkstand.
15) If I’m talking on my cell phone in public, I try to use a quiet voice or go outside - I don’t want to bother other people with my conversation... and I kind of like privacy.
16) I try not to kick a man when he’s down. Once I’ve made my point, I back off. Though I’m sure I’ve kept hammering away at somebody a few times on message boards, I usually back off. Also, when someone has a bad day, I don’t make it worse... even if I hate them and my evil side would love to destroy them. It’s not fair.
17) I always go to the restroom or go outside to blow my nose. It’s gross to do it somewhere people are watching or listening... let alone trying to eat a meal.
18) I gauge traffic when I am merging, and pull out in an opening with enough distance between the car in front and in back of me... and at the same speed they are going. I don't stop to merge - that's silly. I don’t want to cause anyone to jamb on their brakes or have to swerve - I want it to be a smooth blend of my car into the stream of traffic.
19) If I am walking with friends on the sidewalk and others approach us in the opposite direction, I step behind or in front of my friend(s) so that we are walking single-file, allowing those walking towards us half of the sidewalk to pass us. This isn’t always easy - I have some friends who don’t get it, and if I fall back, so do they.
20) When I’m wrong, I apologize, and I mean it.
21) My cell phone ringer is either set low or on vibrate - the rest of the world doesn’t have to know my phone is ringing, and I really don’t care if you hear my cool ringtone or not (it’s the Peter Gunn theme - which is used in a bunch of commercials, and I often reach for my phone when it’s just a Chase Bank commercial on TV.)
22) I don’t block other people in an aisle or a store or a walkway or anyplace else - and I try not to stand in front of things other people might want access to.
23) If I make a mistake more than once, I try to make sure I don’t make it a third time. You are supposed to learn from your mistakes, not keep making them over and over again. Sometimes, if it’s some sort of bad habit, I find some way to punish myself if I keep doing it. I’m too old to have my mom spank me, so sometimes I have to spank myself. Not literally. But I do not reward myself for failure or making mistakes - I take away some pleasure until I stop screwing up.
24) I do not talk on my cell phone when I get to the front of a line - that’s when I need to be focusing on paying or ordering or talking with the person on the other side of the counter. It’s rude to the person behind the counter, it's rude to the person on the phone, and rude to the people standing behind me when I fumble through trying to hold two conversations at once.
25) In the grocery store, I push my cart down the right side of the aisle, and either stay on that right side when grabbing items off the shelves or move far enough away from my cart that I am not blocking both sides of the aisle - one side with my cart and one side with me shopping. I always leave half the aisle empty so that other people with carts can get past me.
26) If I am crossing a street as a pedestrian (or just walking across a parking lot entrance) I look at traffic in all directions - some times it’s easier to wait for one car to pass even though I have the right of way. If I have to wait a minute so that things run smoother for everyone else, no big deal And if cars are waiting for me to cross the street, I walk *fast* - I don’t take my time when I’m also taking other people’s time.
27) I try to be aware of everyone around me and stay out of people’s way. If I’m blocking a bunch of people from getting where they want to go because I’ve got my head in the clouds thinking about something or talking on the phone or whatever - I’m holding up the whole danged world!
28) When I pick a table at a restaurant or a coffee shop, I try not to pick one that would be of better use to someone else - I’m one person, so I don’t take a large table that might be better used by a family or a group, I don’t take a table designed for handicapped access or might be more convenient for an elderly person. Sometimes these are the only tables available, so I have no choice - but I always think about others when I select a table.
29) If I’m walking in a shopping mall or hallway or sidewalk and need to stop, I move to the side (near the wall) and *then* stop, so that I am not suddenly stopping in front of someone and am out of the way *before* I slow down or stop.
30) I try to help people whenever possible - not because of some sort of karma thing where what goes around will come around back to me (that would be nice, but I’m not sure that’s really how the world works), but just because it usually takes the same amount of effort to help people as to put them down or even ignore them. There are all kinds of people who seem to go out of their way to be mean or dismissive to people - and that’s a lot of work just to be negative. Usually it takes the same amount of work to help people - and that makes the world a little better. I don’t go out of my way looking for people to help, I just help anyone whose path crosses mine. That may be holding the door open for someone with their arms full or answering a question on a message board I visit or helping somebody find something if I know where it is (a street, a business, or even an item in the store). Most of these are silly little things that are part of our day-to-day lives, but my “default setting” is helpful. One of those things I learned from my parents.
By the way, I think one of the reasons why my brother and sister and I were so well behaved in public is that my mom encouraged us to *think about playing* and imagine what we would do when we got home and were allowed to run around in the yard and have fun. Or think about our toys and hobbies (my brother and I would think about Hot Wheels, my sister would think about Barbies - Mattel Toys won either way). Or think about our favorite televison shows or the book we were reading. We would sort of play in our minds... and entertain ourselves. No need to be little hellions in the grocery store. Those good manners, and thinking of others as well as ourselves, have stuck with me from childhood into adulthood.
(This was going to be called "Compusive Manners" but that didn't have the same ring to it.)
Thank you for reading this.
Classes On CD On Sale!
- Bill
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Strange Heroes and why cops and FBI agents don't work in screenplays.
Yesterday’s Dinner: City Wok sweet & sour chicken.
Movies: Saw T4 on Friday night, and the review is coming.
DVD: LAID TO REST - watched it for my Horror Class - absolutely awful. Written and directed by an FX guy, so the kills are interesting and gory to the extreme... but there is no story to hold them together. A woman wakes up in a coffin with complete amnesia (she doesn’t even know the word for “coffin”) and escapes into a funeral home filled with dead people and a maniac with a chrome skull mask, a video camera mounted on his shoulder, and a large assortment of knives. She wounds him, escapes, gets picked up by a guy driving down the road who takes her back to his house where his wife wonders what to do with this nameless woman who seems to have the mind and vocabulary of a 2 year old.
Not only does “Chrome Skull” find them and start killing anyone around the house, forcing the amnesia woman and the guy to escape (wife is a gross casualty) - this has got to be the only psycho killer in the history of cinema who has *personalized license plates* on his car with his psycho killer’s name! That’s so a character can know it’s the psycho’s car when it’s parked somewhere. That’s the kind of completely stupid script this is.
And to say that none of the characters have any character is an understatement - these people make the lunchmeat characters in the FRIDAY THE 13th movies look like Hamlet! The amnesia woman never becomes anything other than a 2 year old with a smokin’ body - which probably tells us something about the writer-director. The amazing thing here is the cast - practically everyone from the TERMINATOR TV show is here, and a bunch of others you either know or recognize. No suspense, downright stupid plotting and zero in the way of characters - even the psycho killer is so unmotivated he seems completely unrealistic!
When people ask if the killer needs to be motivated, this is a great example of what happens when there is no motivation at all and the whole film falls apart. Jason in FRIDAY THE 13th was getting revenge against the type of kids who allowed him to drown, Freddy Kruger is chasing the children of the people who burned him alive in NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, Michael Myers is triggered to kill by strange sexual urges in HALLOWEEN - every psycho killer in every good movie has a *reason* to kill and a specific M.O. for how and who he kills... here we just get random kills that make no sense. It’s complete crap... with good FX.
I have no idea why film makers who have no storytelling talent either write their own scripts or want to find some typing monkey to write up their bad ideas. They should find a good finished spec script, buy it and make it without making any changes that screw it up. Let the writers do the writing and keep your nose out of it. If you can’t find the kind of script you want to direct out there - maybe there’s a reason for that? Maybe you have bad taste and the scripts out there are *well written*? Directors direct, FX guys do FX, and writers write. That’s the way it should work.
- Bill
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
I was a *Thespian* in High School!
So, over the holidays I had drinks with an old friend from High School, Janet Englebert. We were both in drama class and all of the shows together. She not only had a program from one of the shows - she had *pictures*! Of me at 16 years old! When I was working almost full time, going to high school, and working on or being in all of the plays. No time to eat - so it was one of the few skinny periods in my life.
The Program...
Cast List...
The Star's Bios (I remember this play, have no memory of Gloria Mundi)...
Here is a scene with Janet and me...
And me with a very sharp knife...
And Janet and the very sharp knife...
And Patty Loveland after she sees what happens through the rear window of her apartment...
And my *favorite* part of being an actor in High School - the chance to see girls in their underwear. That's Nora in her bra reflected in the mirror.
My goal was to see every girl in class in their underwear... and maybe even topless! That could happen when there were quick changes backstage.
We did a haunted house every year to earn money to put on plays. That's my severed head...
What a strange thing to see myself that young - and people who were my closest friends at the time... now, just memories. I wonder what happened to them all?
- Bill
The Program...
Cast List...
The Star's Bios (I remember this play, have no memory of Gloria Mundi)...
Here is a scene with Janet and me...
And me with a very sharp knife...
And Janet and the very sharp knife...
And Patty Loveland after she sees what happens through the rear window of her apartment...
And my *favorite* part of being an actor in High School - the chance to see girls in their underwear. That's Nora in her bra reflected in the mirror.
My goal was to see every girl in class in their underwear... and maybe even topless! That could happen when there were quick changes backstage.
We did a haunted house every year to earn money to put on plays. That's my severed head...
What a strange thing to see myself that young - and people who were my closest friends at the time... now, just memories. I wonder what happened to them all?
- Bill
Monday, May 25, 2009
Green Latern Trailer
This fan made fake trailer is amazing. It makes me want to see a movie that doesn't exist, and makes me want to ask my friend Paul who is stunt-double for Nathan about all of the behind the scenes stuff (which obviously hasn't happened... yet!).
Things like this make me feel like a thawed out caveman - some danged kid probably made this on his laptop... and I can't figure out how to get my VCR to stop blinking 00:00.
AND: My friend Scott who does coverage for producers for a living, also offers his services to screenwriters. Find out what the studio reader thinks of your script - for $60. Sixty Buck Notes.
- Bill
Things like this make me feel like a thawed out caveman - some danged kid probably made this on his laptop... and I can't figure out how to get my VCR to stop blinking 00:00.
AND: My friend Scott who does coverage for producers for a living, also offers his services to screenwriters. Find out what the studio reader thinks of your script - for $60. Sixty Buck Notes.
- Bill
Saturday, May 23, 2009
I'm on Twitter
As if I didn't have enough to do already.
wcmartell
It's connected to my Facebook page - so you can get all of my tweets there. Trust me, it's not like I'm going to have time to tweet much (and most of the time I'm doing something boring like writing).
HITCHCOCK: Because I was facing a deadline on an emergency article and was only half done with DIAL M and for many folks in the USA Friday was a half day, I decided to postpone that Hitchcock entry until next week.
PLUS: Go over to *Also, I Can Kill You With My Brain* (blog linked in that endless messy stream of links on the right ->) and check out Shakespeare's Star Trek.
- Bill
wcmartell
It's connected to my Facebook page - so you can get all of my tweets there. Trust me, it's not like I'm going to have time to tweet much (and most of the time I'm doing something boring like writing).
HITCHCOCK: Because I was facing a deadline on an emergency article and was only half done with DIAL M and for many folks in the USA Friday was a half day, I decided to postpone that Hitchcock entry until next week.
PLUS: Go over to *Also, I Can Kill You With My Brain* (blog linked in that endless messy stream of links on the right ->) and check out Shakespeare's Star Trek.
- Bill
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