Here’s a classic song with a video that proves singers should sing, and actors should act.
What’s not to love here?
John Waite‘s hair is pure ’80s gold, with feathery blow-dry action in the front and a sneaky pseudo-mullet in the back. It’s a Don Johnson-punk mullet. Plus he rocks the standard One Dangly Earring look that every lead singer was required to have for about two years.
HOWEVER: What’s most interesting to me is how the lyrics clash with the video.
The lyrics avoid being “on the nose,” which is Hollywood screenwriter slang for people saying, or singing, exactly what they mean. Nobody in real life does that. It’s not realistic, not good for a story and not fun for the audience.
People avoid coming out and saying directly what they truly feel.
A hero doesn’t say, “Hey, I’m really scared, and I don’t want to die, so maybe you could drop that gun and let me handcuff you, seeing how I don’t want to get shot or get stuck with piles of paperwork if I shoot you first.” He says, “Do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do ya?”
A villain doesn’t say, “Being locked up in this dark basement next to low-level lunatics is beyond boring, and I would rather stick needles in my eye than communicate with these beasts, but pretty young FBI agents are something I never get to see, so I hope you stick around and talk to me for hours, Special Agent.” He says, “A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”
So while the acting and the visuals in the video are completely on the nose, with zero ambiguity or subtlety, the lyrics are great and full of subtext.
John Waite misses his girlfriend / lover / wife, but he doesn’t say, “Hey baby, I miss you a lot, and I’m a wreck, and I wish you’d come back.”
He sings, “I ain’t missing you” and follows that up with “I ain’t missing you at all” and seven other variations of the same thing.
This isn’t science fiction, or something dreamed up by Stan Lee back in 1962.
An artist teamed up with scientists to (1) weave artificial spider silk, (2) grow real cells around that scaffold then (3) look for firearms.
So what happened when Bulletproof Skin 1.0 got shot by a low-powered .22 bullet?
Yeah, it bounced off.
A full-powered .22 pierced the skin, though she thinks doubling the strength of the spider silk weave would buttress the skin and make it tough enough.
Science is magic.
Then there’s this CEO, who sells stab-proof vests and stands behind his product by letting an employee, or a dude who really hates him, hit him with a metal baton, slash him with a box-cutter and stab him with a knife.
But for full-on crazy, you need to see the Canadian man who’s been trying to build an anti-bear suit for years. He lets himself get hit by logs, Ewok-style, and thrown off cliffs, hit by cars, whacked by a gang of men with baseball bats, all to demonstrate the strength of his latest version of the suit.
You can’t make this stuff up. And because I can: 41 other brilliant (or insane) inventions from around the world.
HOWEVER: shooting great photos with a Nikon of Infinite Beauty is insanely simple compared to what this man did with an iPad, his finger and talent on loan from the gods.
Now that the Avengers have assembled into a giant machine that prints dollar bills, the X-Men are getting rebooted and Batman/Superman are teaming up to create billions more for an entirely different set of studio executives who live across the street from the Marvel folks, there’s something we need to discuss.
Because there’s a common problem with all of these movies–except for Batman, and we’ll get to that.
The Invincible Hero problem.
I’ve seen all three movies involving Thor and his hammer, and yes, the hammer has some crazy Norse name, and even though I’m a Swede nobody knows how to really pronounce the thing. IT’S A HAMMER.
Those movies are fun, and great, but tell me this: how do you hurt Thor, or kill him?
Because I don’t have a clue.
So there’s hundreds of millions of dollars in CGI explosions happening, and Iron Man grabbing Thor to fly him into trees and a cliff and such, but all amazing special effects that cost more than my house and your house and every dollar we’ll ever make in our lifetime, well, they don’t really move me, because I’m never worried about Thor being injured or killed.
You can throw the man around, blow him up, stab him with Loki’s sneaky dagger, punch him with the Hulk, and none of that really matters. The only proven way to hurt Thor is to remove Natalie Portman from the picture.
The first Thor movie was better than the sequel because for a good chunk of it Thor didn’t have his powers. He was just a man who could get hurt, lose a fight or even die, and it was his willingness to sacrifice himself and die that made Odin restore his powers.
See, when a hero is invincible, you don’t worry about them. And when you don’t worry about them, you stop caring about bullets and thugs and whatever else the villain is throwing around.
Superman is the worst offender. When you look at heroes on the screen like Wolverine and Captain America, they don’t seem to get hurt, since both guys regenerate and such. But they’re powers aren’t crazy like the boy from Krypton, who can (a) run faster than a speeding bullet, (b) fly, including going into space without needing to breathe, (c) shoot heat rays from his eyes when they’re not (d) busy taking x-rays of your bones, (e) ice anything with frost breath, (f) move so fast he GOES BACK IN TIME and (g) 17 other powers I don’t have time to list.
When you’re so powerful and invincible that tank shells bounce off your skin (Superman, Hulk) or armored suit (Iron Man), it’s hard to ramp things up without jumping the shark. Should we have Hulk get hit by a comet, or throw Superman into a black hole to see what happens? Also, no barber could cut Superman’s hair or trim his beard, right? He’d look like the lost fourth member of ZZ Top.
Batman is a better, more interesting hero because he’s simply a man. You know his bones can break, that the villain can truly hurt or kill him. It matters.
Hollywood could fix this problem, if it cared to, by setting up in each of these bazillion-dollar stories not just how cool the hero is and what amazing things he or she can do.
Tell us, up front in Act 1, what the hero can’t do. Show us a few weaknesses and how they can get hurt or even killed. Because then in Act 2 and 3, we’ll care a lot more about those CGI explosions and bullets as part of the story instead of eye candy that doesn’t really affect the story.
These days, Axl Rose is just another rock star who fell off the top. He’s trying to claw his way back up, and yes, taking 5.923 billion years to produce your big solo album, which lands with a thud, isn’t the way to do it.
So I say this not as a fan of Axl Rose, but as a hard-core skeptic: NOVEMBER RAIN is a masterpiece.
No question. Start to finish, it’s brilliant.
Everything comes together: the orchestra, Axl on the piano, Slash wailing on his axe, the drums, it’s all clear as a bell rather than the mush you get with some bands today that’s less Wall of Sound and more I Can’t Tell Which Instruments Are Playing.
Each major instrument gets left to do their part, even the piccolo-whatever, which fits in perfectly.
And yes, this video clocks in at 9-plus minutes but you don’t care, because it is telling a story that fits the music.
Well shot. Well produced. Perfectly put-together. Axl, I salute you and hope you put this on an endless loop in your mansion for six straight days until you get inspired to try something as ambitious, and good, as this.
This has every element you could possibly want from an ’80s music video:
(1) a thumping synth beat,
(2) a lead singer with a vague accent (Montreal!) who looks like Adam Ant’s less insane cousin,
(3) some kind of ren-fair Hobbity goodness instead of the usual music video of the band preening while they lip-synch and pretend to play instruments,
(4) the best band name I’ve heard in forever, PLUS
(5) as a special bonus packed chock full of irony, nobody, not even the friends of the lead singer who professes his love for dancing, can dance a lick.
I won’t include all the lyrics, because they’re not that complicated or subtle. There’s nothing to interpret here.
HOWEVER: It’s worth dissecting the four lines everybody knows.
We can dance if we want to
We can leave your friends behind
‘Cause your friends don’t dance and if they don’t dance
Well they’re no friends of mine
Those lines are so easy to remember because they’re well-built, structurally. The first two lines start the same — “We can” — and have seven syllables exactly. The singer isn’t talking about himself, but “we,” and he gets the audience involved more by making you think of “your friends.”
All the ideas come together. You’ve got three lines of setup for the payoff in the fourth line. It’s short, it’s simple and instead of using rhymes (none of these lines rhyme), the singer links the lines together using concepts and repetition. A nice little interweaving that pays off.
Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. So come closer and listen to what I’ve learned from experience: Editors are a writer’s best friend.
Not when they’re patting you on the back, because anybody can butter you up.
They’re your best friend when they take a red pen and blast through your complicated writing pets, when they check your wildest instincts and find order out of the natural chaos that comes from banging on the keyboard to create anything of length and importance.
So it’s wrong to say that every writer needs an editor.
You need more than one, if you want to get serious about any sort of real writing.
It’s like building a house. As a writer, you’re trying to do it all: draft the blueprints like an architect, pour the foundation, frame it, plumb it, siding, drywall, flooring, cabinets, painting–the whole thing.
Every step is important. And getting the right editors is like hiring great subcontractors.
My bias is to think of structure first, because if the blueprints are bad, it doesn’t matter how pretty the carpentry is, and how great the writing is line by line.
This is why every professional architect hires an engineer to do the math and make sure the foundation is strong enough to hold up the house, that the roof won’t blow off and your beams are big enough to handle the load.
So you need different editors for different things. The best possible professional editor for the structure, the blueprints. Then beta readers to look over the whole thing another time, looking for medium-size problems. A line editor to smooth things out and make it all pretty, and finally a proof-reader to take a microscope to the entire thing and make it as flawless as possible.
That sounds like a lot, and most pro editors can wear different hats. But I’m going to argue for dividing it up, because when you’ve been staring at the same thing for weeks, or months, you stop seeing things. A fresh pair of eyes is always smart.
Even though I’ve always had editors, starting way back in college when I was putting out newspapers, there’s a natural inclination for writers to screw this up, to see using editors as some kind of sign of weakness. The thinking goes like this: “Hey, I have (1) a master’s degree in creative writing or (2) have been cashing checks as a journalist for years or (3) am far too talented to need the crutch of a professional editor, which is for wannabes who can’t write their way out of a paper sack if you handed them a sharpened pencil.”
I’d did editing wrong by having friends and family beta read, or asking fellow writers who yes, wrote for money, but cashed checks for doing something completely different.
And it was a waste of time.
Here’s how I learned my lesson, and no, I am not making this up: On a whim, I posted a silly ad to sell my beater Hyundai and romance authors somehow found my little blog that started from that. Pro editor Theresa Stevens got there somehow and I started talking to her, and on a whim did her standard thing to edit the first 75 pages of a novel, the synopsis and query letter. Didn’t think anything of it and expected line edits, fixing dangling modifiers and such.
But she rocked.
I learned more, in the months of editing that entire novel, than I could’ve learned in ten years on my own. It’s like the difference between a pro baseball player trying to become a better hitter by spending six hours a day in batting practice, alone, versus one hour a day in hard practice with a world-class batting coach. I’d pick the batting coach, every time.
As somebody who used to lone-wolf it, let me say this: I was wrong.
And so on this Friendly Friday, I want to plant a big smooch on editors of the world, and encourage writers of all backgrounds and specialties to see editors in a different light. That having an editor isn’t a sign of weakness, but of strength. That it says you’re crazy serious about what you do and not afraid of working with the best of the best rather than a cheerleading squad of yes-men who think your 947-word epic about elves with lightsabers riding dragons is the best thing ever.
That it’s not about you, and doing whatever you want, but about making the finest product you can give to readers.
So I want to give a shout out to Theresa the Stevens, who has taught me much, and Rebecca Dickson, my uncensored female doppleganger, and to great beta readers and editors like Alexandria Szeman, Julia Rachel Barrett, Anna Davis, Mayumi, Donna — because just like a single person can’t be expected to build a beautiful house alone, a smart writer gets help and advice from the smartest people possible.
Find one of those smart people with a red pen.
Hire them, hug them, listen to them, buy them flowers when you succeed. But use them, if you’re serious.
Have you ever heard a song on the radio and flipped out?
I don’t mean “Yeah, they were playing Swedish death metal on 107.7 and it created a Hulk-like rage in me, so I rammed my Ford Ranger into an abandoned warehouse and took a sledgehammer to all that rusty sheet metal until the cops hauled me off and put me in the drunk tank next to this dude who keeps telling me how drinking Nyquil is way better than downing Mad Dog.”
What I’m talking about is the radio comes on, and instead of madly flipping stations to find somebody playing a song that’s not by (a) Miley “Train Wreck” Cyrus, (b) a folksy rock band trying to copy Mumford and Sons or (c) Mumford and Sons, you get (d) a song so complete and perfect that you want the DJ to go nuts, lock himself in the studio and endlessly loop the thing until they meet his ransom demands for a box of Crispy Cremes, a better headset and coffee that doesn’t double as engine degreaser.
I LIKE THE WAY YOU WORK IT was that song for me this week.
Heard it on the radio. Immediately fired up the Series of Tubes and found the video. Played it. Played it again with the sound cranked up to 11. I’m playing it again RIGHT NOW.
Here’s the video, which new artists should slow down and dissect like Jon Gruden freeze-framing a fade route.
Why is this so great? Not just the excellent song. The video makes it better, sexy without crossing the line to vulgar, cool without trying to hard and funny with the little doll versions of the artists playing piano and singing.
Also, the cinematography is top-notch, whereas most music videos look like they grabbed the nearest roadie who looked semi-sober, handed him an iPhone and said, “Hit record while we prance around and lip synch.”
Hear me now and believe me later in the week: OBLIVION is an interesting and beautiful movie that could have been classic.
Why did it flop?
Let’s look at the prime suspects:
5) Tom Cruise fatigue
This is an easy target. Cruise has gone from “Biggest Movie Star on the Planet” to “Incredibly Excited Actor Jumping on Oprah’s Couch” to “Scientologist Who Gets Divorced a Lot.”
As a huge fan of Lee Child’s Reacher novels, I have to say that Reacher is something like 6’5, 250, blond and quietly sarcastic, while Cruise is short, light, dark-haired and loudly cocky.
HOWEVER: I will give the man his due, because Cruise did a fine job of acting in this movie. The average sci-fi apocalypse movie would have a hot new 20-something actor mumble his way through the thing looking stoned while trying to seem macho. Cruise was an upgrade from the typical New Action Hunk.
You could’ve put Matt Damon, Ryan Gosling or George Clooney in this sucker and it wouldn’t solve the problem. Cruise gets a pass.
4) Double mumbo-jumbo
Screenwriter Blake Snyder (may he rest in peace) says in SAVE THE CAT that audiences will buy one crazy piece of magic or sci-fi. They’ll buy a giant robot assassins with heavy Austrian accents or they’ll buy witches with real magic powers–but they won’t suspend disbelief to see a movie featuring magical witches battling a robot assassin.
Audiences might buy sci-fi techno stuff mixed in with a little magic if you distract them with lightsabers and don’t try to over-explain the magical stuff. But if you start talking like an idiot about the magic being caused by science, say something insane like “midi-chloridians,” they will turn on you, and hate you for ruining things forever.
OBLIVION throws all kinds of stuff in here: an apocalypse, an alien invasion, evil robot drones, massive human cloning, frozen astronauts who are 85 years old or whatever plus and a serious fetish for spiffy helicopter-things.
All of this, however, is under the happy umbrella of technology. Even the craziest stuff seems plausible given the setting of the movie. Also: Cruise should spend his salary from this movie to make a working replica of his helicopter-jet thing, which I’m gonna call the Tom-mobile.
3) Insanely confusing plot
This is a good suspect. While the movie technically avoid the double mumbo-jumbo trap because it’s all science, there are enough plot threads to weave a throw rug.
We’ve got dream sequences in black-and-white, Morgan Freeman channeling Morpheus by way of Mad Max, some Minority Report flavorings and a dozen other subplots thrown into the blender.
Even so, the director holds it together. You understand it. So the confusing parts of the plot aren’t what keeps this movie from being an instant classic.
2) Happy endings are for suckers
The ending is happy, which fanboys never like. Tom Cruise Clone #1 and the dying Morgan Freeman blow themselves up in the mothership of the aliens, saving the world, and later we see Tom Cruise Clone # 2 finding his wife and baby daughter.
Reunited and it feels so good. Except it doesn’t feel great.
1) The villain
There are three parts to a villain, which I’m making that up right now.
Let’s call it Guy’s First Law of Villainy, which states villains must be motivated, fascinating and scary.
Motivated: If your villain is simply doing bad things for no reason, it’s nonsensical.
This is a huge problem with OBLIVION, since these aliens invading Earth go through all kinds of trouble to (a) find Earth in the first place, (b) travel a bazillion light years to get to our precious rock orbiting the sun, (c) wage a long and brutal war to gain control of the planet so they can … (d) suck up all the water in our oceans to create nuclear fusion or whatever.
Hold up.
Water is no big flipping deal. Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. Oxygen isn’t exactly rare. You can find water on asteroids, comets and planets. There’s some moon orbiting Jupiter or Saturn that we think is a giant ball of water with a frozen crust of ice on top.
I don’t buy aliens going through massive amounts of trouble to steal our water. Sci-fi needs to make sense, because sci-fi fans are smart people who care about this stuff. So this is a huge problem.
Fascinating and scary:
If you’re going to have an alien invasion movie, don’t forget the aliens.
OBLIVION has no aliens. I kid you not.
It has all kinds of drones, which look like angry flying cousins of Pac Man, yet tiny little drones aren’t scary of fascinating. Give us big, threatening bad guys, not cute little ones.
Who is the ultimate villain of the movie? A big faceless computer.
That’s not fascinating or scary. At all.
To make this movie work, we needed amazing aliens, the kind that are incredibly fun to watch. ALIEN got this right, as did ALIENS.
PROMETHEUS forgot about this rule, and therefore wasted the gross domestic product of Paraguay on Michael Fassbender and special effects for no good reason.
This is the reason OBLIVION failed as an alien invasion classic: no aliens. You can’t expect audiences to go wild for a boring, faceless computer as the bad guy.
It’s the same trap that doomed THE MATRIX sequels. We never saw Neo battle the ultimate bad guy in charge of the machines. He died playing anti-virus cleaner for the machine lords, which put the B in Boring.
The Red Pen of Doom 