For an epic Super Bowl–which the Seahawks will win–I give you Bad Lipreading, the NFL Edition.
Super Bowl goodness: Bad Lipreading, the NFL edition
Author: Guy Bergstrom
Reformed journalist. Scribbler of speeches and whatnot.
Say hello to Teddy Bear the Talking Porcupine
YouTube is packed chock full of videos where owners think their cat is saying something, or their dog is barking hello.
Most of the time, the owners are goofy for their pet who simply says one thing, over and over, that sort of sounds like a word.
And yeah, birds can blow them all out of the water.
But here’s something different: a porcupine who isn’t a one-word pony. Teddy the Talking Porcupine seems to have entire conversations.
Teddy is impressive and funny. He belongs on this BBC show, which you need to fire up if you haven’t seen them all. They rock.
The Red Pen of Doom harpoons MOBY DICK by Herman Melville
Now, this classic book is so ingrained in our culture that movies can get all deep and interesting simply by alluding to a metaphor–which is like a simile, only different–that refers to this doorstop of a book.
Like this: “Maybe I’m Ahab and he’s my white whale” uttered by Bruce Willis in DIE HARD 17: THE HAIR DYES HARDEST could change that movie from just another 120-minute shootout in a nursing home into a penetrating examination of the purpose or life, or lack thereof.
Does that make editing the first page of this thing any harder?
Not really. Bring it, Melville.
MOBY DICK
by Herman Melville
Call me Ishmael. (People have been riffing off it for so many years that those three words are invincible. Can’t touch this.) Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. (This second line is also good. It makes the narrator a smidge unreliable, which is always interesting, and gives him a motive that everybody can relate to: being poor and wanting to see the world.) It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. (On your third swing of the bat, Herman the Meville, you whiff. Nobody cares about other peoples’ spleens and such. Kiss those words goodbye.) Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul;, whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. (Whenever I read a ginormous sentence with five zillion semi-colons and commas, I reach for the red pen and turn it into a nice, short sentence with one comma.) This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. (Another semi-colon, but this is the last one that gets to live.) There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs–commerce surrounds it with her surf. (Hate this sentence. It’s like our friend was talking to us about an interesting story, then started reciting beat poetry. Rewrite follows.) The city of Manhattoes is belted with docks and ships, like an Indian isle is encircled by coral reefs. Right and left, the streets take you waterward.
Verdict:
The fact this book is a classic doesn’t mean page one is perfect.
Herman the Melville is wordy on this page and he only gets wordier later on in this book, where he stops the action entirely to devote entire chapters to lectures about whale tails and such.
There’s a lot of fluff to kill, and I was pretty gentle with the word slaying. You could kill more.
Compared to most first pages, though, he does a good job of setting things up. Ishmael wants to see the world and that means sailing, because he’s not rich. So we’re in for an adventure.
How could we improve this? More foreshadowing. Maybe he mentions a friend who’s a sailor, the one who told him stories that got him interested in a life at sea, and this friend just served on a whaling ship that limped into port after getting attacked by a big whale. A ghostly white one. But his friend was drinking a lot of rum and tends to make up stories…
Why WORLD’S END ended with a wimper
On four different British Airways 747’s to India and back, I watched many, many movies. And it’s worth talking about them not in a “hey, this is out on DVD, so should you fire up Netflix?” kind of way, but in a storytelling way.
Did it work? Why or why not?
WORLD’S END proves that talent doesn’t always equal success. This is a movie with great comedic actors, yet a structural problem kills it. Because it’s truly two different movies slammed together.
The first movie is a comedy about five mates in England getting back together for an epic pub crawl they didn’t finish as college kids.
The second movie involves robots from space, which comes as a huge surprise, and not a good one.
Simon Pegg is brilliant, and he teams up with his sidekick once again, like in SHAWN OF THE DEAD and HOT FUZZ. Brilliant!
This movie had potential but is not up to Simon’s usual snuff. The thing is, fixing this film wouldn’t take much.
While the Simon Pegg character is talking his buddies into returning to their home town for the crazy pub crawl, he could’ve dropped hints about drunken fights in pub bathrooms with possible robot imposters. A single line like that could’ve saved this movie.
But instead, we get an orphaned payoff with no real setup.
Bonus: Simon continues the stunt casting of former James Bonds with facial hair playing villains. Timothy Dalton with a Tom Selleck mustache was in HOT FUZZ and this time we’ve got Remington Steele with a goatee. Loved this.
Billy Squire wrecks his career with ROCK ME TONITE
If you don’t remember Billy the Squire, probably because you weren’t born yet, he was kind of a big deal for a while. A rising star.
Then this video came out and smooshed him faster than you can say Milli Vanilli.
And yes, he started out by getting creative with the spelling of “tonight,” because that’s the revolutionary rebelliousness of a true rock star, though he didn’t go as far as Prince, who uses an entirely different alphabet.
Let’s ask ourselves, for the sake of history: Why was this music video so deadly?
It’s not the music. This isn’t some 11-minute long art film with a soundtrack that some rock star thought would be a killer idea. And yeah, that happens. Somebody gets famous and they think every idea that pops into their head is brilliant.
Close your eyes and listen to the song. It’s not terrible. A decent rocker with nothing to really complain about.
The lyrics aren’t inspired, but they aren’t completely insipid, either. Let’s go with banal.
Here’s the problem: people didn’t have their eyes closed. If this song simply hit the radio, Billy might have kept on rising up and making scads of money.
The visuals are simply awful.
Billy oozes uncool out of every pore. If there’s matter and anti-matter, there’s cool and uncool. Billy does not come off as cool in this video. He doesn’t seem like a cocky, confident rock star. It feels like he’s trying too hard, and failing.
There aren’t that many rock stars who look good dancing. The smart ones keep it low key. Billy Idol doesn’t dance — he pouts and pumps his fist. Bruce Springsteen never really dances. Bono, Sting, even Mick Jagger doesn’t really dance. He does a funky chicken and that’s about it.
Billy the Squire kept trying aerobic instructor moves, which did not look good on film.
When his band finally showed up, I kept swearing they cloned Billy, or shot multiple takes with him playing all the instruments. Every band member but one dude had the same outfit and over-permed hair. IT WAS CONFUSING, and not in a good way.
So all in all, this is an epic train wreck of a video.
Also: Bonus points to whoever digs up what happens to Billy Squire.
BREAKING BAD music video mashup is pure gold
It’s almost as if Weird Al wrote this song for BREAKING BAD.
The maker of this compilation deserves serious props for matching up the lyrics with the right scenes from the epic show. I tip my Heisenberg fedora to you, good sir.
This is how you do a White House Xmas card
THE WOLVERINE proves Writing Law #1 – Less is More
Hugh Jackman has played Wolverine on the big screen 873 times so far, and I love the man. Does a great job in the role.
However: Even the charm and acting chops of Hugh the Jackman weren’t enough to salvage the hot mess of the first solo Wolverine movie, which I believe was titled WOLVERINE: A TRAIN WRECK OF A SCRIPT.
So it is with pleasure that I say this latest Wolverine flick, now out on DVD and BluRay and 3D smello-vision and such, is far more watchable than the first hot mess. Check out the trailer:
But hear me now and believe me later in the week: even with the same director and a SMALLER BUDGET, you could have made this latest movie infinitely better. (Spoiler alert: I’m going to fix the movie while revealing big plot points and plot holes.)
Here’s how to fix it: Cut out every possible character. Show no mercy.
Because less is more.
There’s a long list of people who get screen time, which goes for about $1.7 million a minute these days in Hollywood, yet the screenwriter and director spend tons of time on side characters that don’t really matter. The current script on screen has the following major characters:
- Our hero, Hugh the Jackman with mutton chops and retractable claws
- The Silver Samurai, our villain, except he’s really the Adamantium Samurai, which doesn’t sound as cool
- The sidekick bodyguard, a red-headed woman who’s amazing with a sword
- The wispy love interest, heir to the Yashida company fortune
- The love interest’s father, who seems like the possible secret villain … until he’s killed by Wolverine early on, so nope, he’s not
- The love interest’s fiance, an evil defense minister politician type, who’s too wussy to be the real villain and gets thrown out of window by Wolverine
- Mr. Ninja, who was the love interest’s first boyfriend and still pines for her until he dies
- Viper, an evil blonde expert in biochemistry and such, a bit like Poison Ivy without the plant fetish
- Mr. Yashida, now a dying tycoon, who Wolverine saved during WWII when the bomb dropped
- Five zillion Yakuza gangsters and other people I’m forgetting
All these characters are hard to keep track of, and the screen time would have been better spent on the hero (Hugh the Jackman!) and the villain (the Silver Samurai, who we only see for a tiny bit at the end).
From the trailer, I thought the villain (the Silver Samurai) would have shown up earlier, and torn up Tokyo like Godzilla on a bender. And when he did show up, he was an awesome villain, and a great foe for Wolverine … for the five minutes or whatever he was on screen.
Instead, we got a huge dose of random Yakuza gangsters, who are not exactly a match for Wolverine, even if he’s weakened and such.
We also got endless scenes with this wispy love interest, and yes, she’s pretty, but she’s got relationships and backstory with just about every other character on this list. Her dad, her grandfather, her fiance, the ninja boyfriend, Wolverine, the redheaded bodyguard. Everybody is tied to her.
But guess what? The story doesn’t need her. At all.
Doesn’t need her or the ninja boyfriend, who only confuses things when he’s good, then bad, then good again.
Doesn’t need her fiance or her father, who dies so early in the script that he’s pointless. Whenever the love interest was on screen with Wolverine, teaching the caveman table manners and how to use chopsticks, I expected Peter Cetera to start belting out The Glory of Love.
Also: we don’t need the random Yakuza gangsters, who are more for comic relief in the end with that fight on top of the train.
So who are we left with, after killing off these unnecessary characters?
1) Hero: Wolverine
2) Villain: The Silver Samurai (hint: he’s also Yashida the tycoon)
3) Viper as a secondary villain, because she was scary and good
4) The redheaded bodyguard, since unlike the love interest, she was interesting every time she popped up on screen
That’s it. Four characters that we really get to know are far, far better than 10 characters we can’t keep straight. (Note: This is true for all forms of writing. As Stephen the King says, you write a mountain of words, then carve away the bad ones, like a sculptor, until only the best ones remain.)
Give us the Silver Samurai causing damage early, in Act 1, and show us much more dangerous he can be in Act 2.
Let the sneaky blonde Viper chew up more scenery and set her up against the redheaded bodyguard early and often. And if you really need Wolverine to kiss a girl, let it be the redheaded bodyguard (though that wouldn’t be a shock) or, more interestingly, Viper.
Setting up Viper as an ally at first, then showing her betrayal at the end, would’ve been a great reversal. As it was written and shot, you knew she was bad from the first second she popped up on screen.
What say you? Would you cut different members of the cast instead, saving the Lovely Model Who Was Boring, or would you expand the scenes of Wolverine in Alaska, playing with bears and rednecks in bars?
A montage set to music: The best movies of 2013
Movies are all around us. Kind of like the Force, before George Lucas ruined it with all that claptrap about midichloridians or whatever.
Films live inside your TV, your iPhone, your laptop. They’re sitting on shiny metal disks and even being celebrated in these insanely large and dark stadiums where you pay $12 for popcorn and a Diet Coke that costs 20 cents.
And if you’re anything like me, movies are something magical.
So there’s this professional movie critic, David Ehrlich, a man you’d think only takes joy in ripping apart SMURFS 3: ARE WE THERE YET, PAPA SMURF while praising some black-and-white existential French movie where the hero finally kisses the girl and promptly gets hit by a bus–well, you’d think critics like him wouldn’t create something so joyful and beautiful as this.
Except of course he would. Why does anybody become a movie critic, book reviewer or rock journalist? Because they love nothing more than movies, books and making fun of Axl Rose and Vanilla Ice trying to stage a comeback.
THE AMAZING SPIDERMAN 2 skips right to three villains, which is nuts
So, it’s the second movie in the series that already had three movies in its previous incarnation. Let’s skip the usual insane pattern of having two villains and go straight to three: Electro, the Green Goblin and Rhino. Seriously?
This is getting a smidge ridiculous. Will we see four villains in the third movie and five in the fourth? The original trilogy of Spiderman movies starring Tobey Maguire went like this:
SPIDERMAN: one hero, one villain (Green Goblin, played by Sergeant Elias from PLATOON). Well done.
SPIDERMAN 2: one hero, two villains (Doc Octopus and James Franco, who likes to write novels while going back to college, plays the angry Son of Green Goblin by using all of the acting range of that dude who played Anakin Skywalker).
SPIDERMAN 3: one hero, three villains (Sandman, Venom and grumpy Son of Green Goblin).
THOR also followed this silly formula, with one villain in the first movie (Loki) and two villains in the second (angry pasty space elf plus Loki again).
The first movie that started our current comic-book movie craze, the original Batman directed by Captain Crazypants (love you, man), had one hero (the Batman, by Michael Keaton when he had hairs), one villain (the Joker by that dude from THE SHINING) and Alec Baldwin’s ex-wife No. 2 or whatever as the girl for Batman to kiss.
BATMAN RETURNS had two villains: Danny Devito in a fat suit, munching on raw fish, plus Christopher Walken with crazy hair, while the love interest was Michelle Pfeiffer rocking a catsuit.
BATMAN FOREVER featured Val “Top Gun” Kilmer as Batman, some man from Grays Anatomy as Robin, Jim Carrey going insane in a green bodysuit as Riddler and Tommy Lee Jones trying to camp it up as Two Face–so yes, so technically, this third movie in the series didn’t have three villains, but it’s a hot mess of a reboot directed by Joel Schumacher, so all bets are off.
BATMAN AND ROBIN gave us two sidekicks (Robin again and a Clueless blonde famous for being in Aerosmith videos) plus three villains: Arnold in a neon suit spouting his worst one-liners ever, Uma Thurman wasted as Poison Ivy and Bane as a walk-on. This film was also directed by Joel Schumacher and is an even bigger mess than his first one.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
The rebooted and awesome Christian Bale-Christopher Nolan trilogy of Batman movies wisely veered away from the Hollywood formula of “For every new movie in a superhero series, pile on more villains and sidekicks until we have to reboot this train wreck.”
BATMAN BEGINS had two villains: Qui-Gon Jinn as Ra’s al Ghul (nobody can pronouce either name, so don’t even try) and Mr. Pretty Face himself, Cillian Murphy, doing an amazing Scarecrow, and yes, he was rumored to be in the running to play Bruce Wayne in the first place. Keanu Reeves would say, “Whoah,” except guess who turned down THE MATRIX to do some other movie? Will Smith. DOUBLE-WHOAH.
THE DARK KNIGHT gave us the two best acting performances for comic book villains ever, with Heath Ledger nailing the Joker and Aaron Eckhart rocking as Two Face.
THE DARK KNIGHT RISES could have three villains, if you count the cameo by Scarecrow, but let’s go with two and say Bane plus the sneaky Miranda Tate, daughter of Qui-Gon Jinn, and let’s give credit to Anne Hathaway as the best love interest ever for Batman.
So what can we learn from all this?
Hollywood executives, please pour your energies and not into hiring three different screenwriters for $2 million apiece to rewrite these train wrecks, but focus from the start on a simple truth: the more villains and sidekicks you throw into a script, the less you get out of them.
The Red Pen of Doom 