Conventional wisdom about writing is conventionally wrong.
Oh, there’s gold buried in here.
Scroll through this post on writing and you’ll find all sorts of useful bits.
Wonderful stuff. Also, reddit is the rabbit hole of the Series of Tubes and always, always entertaining.
Jessie the Ware is British and therefore can make things like “That’s all kinds of rubbish” sound incredibly smart and cultured. I believe, deep in my soul, that everyone should be required to pick between a British or Irish accent.
Either way, her songs and videos are interesting. Jessie never takes the safe way out. She’s not afraid to try something new with every video. For that, I salute you, Jessie the Ware. .
Summer means big, dumb summer movies, typically involving (a) cops and convicts shooting each other and making things explode, (b) cartoons from the ’80s being turned into $253 million wastes of good CGI and (c) members of AARP like Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone trying to prove they can still hang with the young Jason Stathams of the world.
However: There are some big, dumb summer movies that rise above the mediocre pack of Michael Bay wannabes and G.I. Joe retreads.
PACIFIC RIM is a beautiful B-movie. It’s not gonna win a single Oscar and it doesn’t try for that. What it aims for is simple, pure entertainment, and it does that job well.
Here’s the trailer.
The director of PACIFIC RIM is Guillermo del Toro, who directed HELLBOY and THE HOBBIT — basically, the man can direct anything he wants. He’s a movie-making muffin of stud who did PAN’S LABYRINTH, which is literary, beautiful and one of the most unique movies you’ll ever see.
PACIFIC RIM works because it goes big without getting ridiculous, and entertains without trying too hard. It’s the rare kind of movie where you leave the theater and wouldn’t mind seeing the thing again tomorrow, or even today. There’s so much to see and marvel at, and it’s a testament to Guillermo del Toro skill at storytelling.
So go see the thing. I bet you it’s two hour shorter and five times as entertaining as any random Michael Bay explosion-fest.
Bonus clips below. Enjoy.
An epic supercut of Godzilla smashing things.
Featurette about the monsters in PACIFIC RIM
Featurette about the humans and their giant robots
Like you, dear reader, I devour books. I eat them for breakfast, munch on them for lunch and blast through an endless buffet of books in bed, waiting for the Sandman — because books, they are THE BEST.
However: there are books, even famous best-sellers and literary masterpieces that eager graduate students dissect for their dissertations, that are simply unreadable. You start them, you want to be blown away by them and instead, you toss them through the air to test their aerodynamics.
Goodreads asked their peoples about books they started, and wanted to love, but simply couldn’t finish.
Some books at the top of their Couldn’t Finish List include:
So I agree with Goodreads about throwing most of these books on the ground.
They tell me it’s July, and summer, and I do see a burning ball of fire in the sky that confuses us here in the Pacific Northwest.
So: that means it’s the time of year where we all hit the beach, which means it’s also time for silly monster movies. Bring on the sharks, and the sharks crossed with an octopus. I kid you not.
To whet your appetite, I give you Snuffy the Seal — which you will watch six times, and show all your friends, because it is that good — and an epic round-up of every monstrous shark movie that’s so bad, it circles back to good.
SNUFFY THE SEAL
This is an instant classic, and I can’t think of any way to improve it. The roving reporter is perfectly perky, the anchor’s Hair Helmet and reaction is priceless, and the timing is comedy gold.
SHARKNADO
Shark movies were fresh and new, I don’t know, back in the 1970s, when Spielberg came out with JAWS.
Tornado movies were hot for a bit. Remember TWISTER?
So I give you SHARKNADO, because the only thing more terrifying than a gang of sharks in the water or a raging tornado is a raging tornado with its own gang of sharks.
SHARKTOPUS
Julia Robert’s brother is in this stinker. I’ve actually seen the whole thing. It’s packed chock full of cray-cray.
PIRANHACONDA
You’re sitting by the pool in Hollywood, drinking a pitcher of margaritas with your screenwriter buddy who’s written a bunch of B movies. And you think, what if there was an anaconda crossed with a piranha? YES!
DINOSHARK
JAWS meets JURRASIC PARK, and the offspring is ugly.
SWAMP SHARK
I love this movie simply for the crazy scene in the trailer of the shark jumping into the water to decapitate a man with a shotgun on land, then land in a different section of swamp. How can you top that?
Hollywood will waste $3 million on six different screenwriters to screw up a script for a $238 million CGI explosion-fest like TRANSFORMERS 16: OPTIMUS PRIME RESCUES MEGAN FOX FROM THE NURSING HOME.
I can sit through something like that — if you pay me — and it won’t move me one bit.
But here’s 3 minutes of film, something that didn’t cost a dime to produce, that will make you laugh and weep and maybe even stop to think about life for a second.
Also: I love Tim’s tagline for his restaurant. “Where breakfast, lunch and hugs are served.”
That’s pure gold.
Tim, you rock, and I salute you.
So this Jessie Ware, if you haven’t heard of her, is talented and different and old school mates with some singer named Adele and some other singer named Florence, as in Florence and the Machine.
If you like music, and music videos, you’ll like what she does here.
Many, many rock and pop stars tend to make videos that all look the same, and I mean that both ways: every video they make looks like (a) every other video they’ve ever made and (b) every other video made by similar artists. This has been true since Hair Bands put on their first pair of spandex pants in 1982 and will be true forever.
Jessie the Ware tries something different every time, and here she tries something simple and stark and interesting: just her, a plain background and a swiveling chair.
I like it, I love it, I want some more of it.
So I’ve found this genius band from the big honking nation known as Canada — which has provinces where you could fit Texas and Alaska inside and still have room for most European counties — and while WOTE is getting radio airplay know for Red Hands, they’ve done a zillion covers. Here’s the thing: those covers are often better than the originals.
Related: RED HANDS by Walk Off the Earth is music video goodness
Here’s one member of WOTE doing Bruno Mars, all by his lonesome. And he’s just messing around with a loop machine in his guest bedroom or whatever. Brilliant.
The original by Bruno the Mars:
Related posts: Music Video Monday’s Greatest Hits
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Reformed journalist. Scribbler of speeches and whatnot. Wrote a thriller that won some award (PNWA 2013). Represented by Jill Marr of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency.
As a non-fan of the Superman, I can honestly say this: MAN OF STEEL is far, far better than expected.
It’s like Zack Snyder took the only good parts of PROMETHEUS (cool spaceships and outfits!), stuffed it into a blender with INDEPENDENCE DAY (aliens are coming to blow up the planet!) and added with a dash of Wolverine (hairy shirtless tough guy wanders planet, doing random good deeds).
I mean all that in a good way.
HOWEVER: The world doesn’t need another review of Soupman’s latest reboot. What the world needs is a real discussion of a real problem that Superman and other heroes can’t seem to shake.
They’re invincible. And that, friends, is crazy boring.
Iconic heroes made of flesh and blood already have a serious problem, since everybody sitting in the seats, munching on $9 popcorn, knows they’re icons. We know the producers of James Bond movies would never wake up one day and say, “I know — let’s kill off Bond and start some other kind of film, maybe with a 200-year-old sparkling vampire who’s into whiny teeangers.”
Hollywood wants franchises, and you don’t kill off the foundation of billion-dollar juggernauts. Ironman will never die. Batman, Sherlock Holmes, Spock, Kirk (new young Kirk, not Shatner, who they did kill off), Wonder Woman — hey, they’re all safe.
But they’re not invincible. They can and do suffer. They can bleed and die. We know that.
Superman is never really in trouble. Stuff happens to him on screen and you shrug, because hey, that’s Superman.
It’s not the same with Batman, who’s been stabbed, knocked out, set on fire and generally abused. One of the great things about the Dark Knight trilogy is how much Batman really does suffer, sacrifice and grow.
MAN OF STEEL does a good job, and it’s a fun movie. The problem is the character of Superman, who’s a lot like Neo after the end of THE MATRIX, when Keanu Reeves can do anything.
Where do you go from there? Turns out you wander around and get lost for two movies that got progressively worse until something perfect turned into something meh. Which is sad. THE MATRIX was brilliant … right up until Neo went all Superman on us.
Here’s an ironclad rule of storytelling that I’m inventing right now: The villain has to be more powerful than the hero. Always.
Not equally powerful. Not less powerful. The villain has to be superior.
Otherwise, we’re sitting in a dark room watching Chuck Norris swivel around on his cowboy boots as he kicks 59 random henchmen in the face. Does it look pretty? Sure. Is it dramatic and exciting and good story? No. We know Chuck — or Jason Statham, or whoever — is better, and that our hero is gonna win.
When your hero is invincible, like Superman and Neo, the villain can’t be more powerful. It’s impossible.
Think about every Boring Action Movie you’ve ever seen: the villain is less powerful and scary than the hero, which is why he needs an army of thugs to protect him from the big bad scary hero, who starts out the story as an amazing tough guy and ends the story … as an amazing tough guy. Most of the bad Bond movies are like this.
Same thing with every Failed Comic Book Movie, like the lame Hulk films. The Angry Green Thing is basically invincible. Bullets bounce off him. Tank rounds go clang off his green skin. How can you worry about the guy getting in trouble, or having a tough time with a bad guy? This is why comic book movies tend to have hordes of villains. That’s compensating for the weakness of each villain, and it doesn’t work.
Two little movies we all remember reverse this beautifully. The villains in ROCKY and THE KARATE KID seem invincible to us, don’t they? Apollo Creed is the heavyweight champion of the world. He’s crazy strong, insanely fast, in incredible shape and everybody with a functioning brain cell in their noggin would bet the farm on him, not the slow, plodding loser they lined up for a publicity stunt of a fight. Johnny also seems like a teenage nightmare, a giant bully who pummels Daniel-san relentlessly.
Rocky and Daniel-san start out as serious underdogs, and they get their butts kicked in all sorts of ways throughout the movie. It’s only at the very end that they eke out a little moral victory. But we don’t care. That little moral victory is more important to us, the audience, than all the beat-downs administered by the tough guy in your average action movie.
Bigger isn’t better. It’s the distance traveled from the beginning to the end. And when you start out cranking it up all the way to 11, and end at 11, you’re not really taking us anywhere.
The Red Pen of Doom 