Conventional wisdom about writing is conventionally wrong.
David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Glenn Frey–it’s been a rough week.
Rickman was always an actor’s actor, somebody who didn’t care about the fame or the movie, about being a star. You could tell he only cared about the work.
His work was excellent. Loved him on film, even in little roles. I hear he was great on stage and am sad to have never seen him up there.
The latest 007 film misses the target—despite having the same ingredients as SKYFALL: great actors, great director, great action scenes.
Here’s why:
Whether it’s a novel, a movie or a speech, one rule is absolute: End things with your strongest punch.
The biggest fight scene in SPECTRE is a train battle between 007 and that green shirtless guy from GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY.
So when the climax comes, the final confrontation is between Bond and the supervillain, who’s crippled and crawling away from his burning helicopter.
It’s a non-fight with no tension or suspense. There’s a 0 percent chance the villain will find a way to win and a 100 percent chance Bond is triumphant.
If a super villain keeps trying to kill me, and just sent a ginormous assassin on my train to say hi, why would I show up at his secret lair expecting dinner and a drinks?
This is exactly what Bond does. He has no plan other than to rely on the villain’s generosity and stupidity.
In SKYFALL, Bond does travel to Silva’s secret lair, but in that case he does have a plan: find the man, then activate Q’s tracker beacon to bring in special forces in helicopters and capture Silva.
When 007 manages to escape and blow up the entire desert lair in SPECTRE, it feels cheap. It’s also premature. The First Law of Secret Super Villain Lairs is, You can’t blow up the lair until Act 3.
In SKYFALL, you saw what happened when Bond gets shot and loses faith in his job. He’s not the same. He’s not even qualified, physically and mentally, to go back in the field.
And when he goes out there, he does suffer and sacrifice to win. Silva destroys his family home and M dies.
In SPECTRE, Bond breaks the rules by breaking half of Mexico City, and getting sacked by M doesn’t affect him at all. Q and Moneypenny help him out. He still gets his cars and gadgets. To win, Bond doesn’t suffer or sacrifice one bit.
There’s a great stinger ending in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE where the femme fatale, a Russian spy, has to choose between shooting her mentor, the evil woman with the poison-tipped shoe, and shooting Bond.
There’s real suspense there. It matters.
SKYFALL had a wonderful femme fatale, and I’ll always remember the tremble in her lips as she tried to smoke a cigarette and keep it together once Bond asked about Silva.
SPECTRE has no femme fatale.
Any movie or TV show can have amazing special effects now. What made SKYFALL so good was the beautiful colors and framing of every shot and the mood created. Cinematographer Roger Deakins made that happen.
Deakins is also the cinematographer for THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. Check out this story for how Deakins worked magic in ten iconic shots.
Every 007 film costs $250 million or so, right? Spend an extra couple million, every time, to hire Deakins.
Great cinematography is also the secret behind the success of MAD MAX: FURY ROAD.
Great actors + a brilliant cinematographer = a classic film, something you’ll happily watch again and again.
And that’s my acid test for any movie: Would I pay to watch it again?
Thrillers are about betrayal. Always have been, always will be.
Half the fun is trying to figure out who the traitor is and how the hero will escape the trap.
They stole Moriarity for the betrayer in SPECTRE, and he was great standing up to Benedict Cumberbatch. In this movie, though, he’s obviously a bad guy from the first seconds you see him, and he’s not scary at all.
In the end, Bond doesn’t take him out. Voldemort does. Always a bad story decision, having a sidekick do the work.
Average 007 movies split up roles: (1) a smart villain with an army of minions, (2) a tough killer and (3) a traitor from within.
Once you watch Bond slay the tough killer, you know it’s a cakewalk to mow through the army of minions, punch out the nerdy super villain and blow up his volcano base.
Bad 007 movies split up those roles and divide them even more, with two villains, three different killers, four femme fatales for Bond to sleep with and two different traitors from within.
Brilliant 007 movies combine those roles into one juicy package for the villain.
Silva from SKYFALL was the criminal mastermind, the deadly assassin and the traitor from within.
006 from GOLDENEYE (Sean Bean dies again!) was the main villain, just as tough as Remington Steele and a traitor you didn’t see coming.
Both those movies saved the biggest fight for the end, with Bond versus the villain in an even fight. Doing this right is the difference between ending the film with a shrug or a bang. I believe 007 deserves to end movies in style.
More goodness about 007:
So I’ve never seen WALKING DEAD, and they’re playing a marathon–and the barn chock full of zombies is the Best Surprise Ever.
Why does the old farmer have them locked up, and why feed them? Bizarre. Love it.
Love this. And it rings true.
AGE OF ULTRON was an expensive monster that didn’t scare of thrill me. And I adore Josh Whedon as a writer and director. The first AVENGERS movie was great.
It’d be fun to see a director’s cut on Blu-Ray, knowing that studio execs had heavy hand in the editing room. Show us what got cut, Josh–give us the good stuff you had to leave out.
George the Lucas may stink at dialogue. And all humans with a microgram of taste hated the first two prequels.
HOWEVER: The man is a genius when it comes to visuals. I love how this fan stitched together all the imagery that echoes through both trilogies.
Beautifully done, good sir. Give us more.
Why is this cheap, terrible trailer from a movie that was never released 8,594 times more entertaining than a modern film, released in 2015 with a huge marketing campaign and enough CGI to turn your Toyota Camry into a silver Aston Martin with an ejection seat?
1) This trailer is so bad, it circles back to good
You’d watch this. I’d watch this.
It’s insanely bad enough to turn into a cult classic, the kind of thing where people dress up in horrible costumes and sing along to the bad dialogue.
This trailer alone could give birth to 29 different drinking games. Think of 120 full minutes of this on a big screen. We’re talking comedy gold.
2) The special effects are extra-special
Put a gun to my head and I would’ve said this movie was made in 1964.
Put another gun to the other side of my head and I’d say they borrowed the 2nd unit special effect apprentice for the Star Trek series. You know, Assistant Prop Master for Styrofoam Boulders and Green Lizard Alien Masks.
But no, this was made in 1994, when the art and science of special effects had already given us STAR WARS (in the ’70s!), ALIEN, TERMINATOR 2 (liquid metal! Come with me if you want to live!) and JURASSIC PARK (lifelike dinosaurs!). So yeah, you have to try hard to be this bad.
3) It jumps the shark, then dives into the ocean and rides that shark all the way to Loony Land
Everything you see violates seventeen different laws of screenwriting, dialogue, storytelling, cinematography and acting. This thing is amazing.
My favorites: (a) the CU of Dr. Doom’s gloved fingers doing the “I’m a diabolical villain” dance, (b) the Invisible Woman turning invisible right before minions smash into her, except she’s invisible, not a ghost, so they should’ve still smashed her and (c) the random man with a hat and eyepiece who thinks this movie is Shakespeare and recites the deep, deep dialogue in the grandest possible way.
I want that Shakespeare man in more movies, because every good villain needs a minion that, instead of shooting people, tries to make grand statements about profound things. Reminds me of the announcer character in MAD MAX: BEYOND THUNDERDOME who kept saying things like “Two men enter, one man leaves” and “Break a deal, face the wheel.” Beautiful. Somebody find the man in a hat.
4) This trailer leaves you wanting moar, moar MOAR
And that’s the whole point of a trailer, isn’t it? Teasing you. Making you want more.
Raise your hand if you’ve been in the local megaplex lately, or flipping through YouTube, only to see a trailer that seems to last for fifteen minutes and gives every twist of the plot away.
Yeah. Happens all the time. They gave away the big surprise in the trailer for the latest TERMINATOR movie, and when that didn’t satisfy their inner spoiler, they splashed that plot twist all over the poster for the movie. I believe the director of that film is in jail now for punching five different studio execs.
This trailer, now, is confusing. Can’t really predict the plot from it. In fact, I bet you’d couldn’t you’ll fully understand the plot of this classic without watching it three times with a yellow legal pad to take notes, then tracking down the screenwriter to find out the exact drugs he was taking in 1994.
It’s a brilliant piece of trash, wallowing in its pure trashiness, and to whatever studio has this unreleased movie, please release it. I guarantee more people will pay to watch it than the current FANTASTIC FOUR flop.
Note: No, I haven’t watched the new movie. Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent. After every living critic spat upon it, kicked it to death and set it on fire, I took that as a sign. You couldn’t pay me enough to watch it. Okay, that’s a lie. I think $985 might do the trick, and I’d go as low as $817 if there was dinner and drinks beforehand. But no lower than $817. Life is too short.
Seen it yet? Go buy tickets and eat insane amount of popcorn. Everybody on the planet is required to do so.
I’ll wait. Don’t want to spoil the ending for you.
Actually, I want to improve the ending. And the beginning. Maybe the middle, too.
Not that this is a bad movie. It’s summer popcorn fun and will make bazillions of dollars. Chris the Pratt is a great actor, our generation’s Harrison Ford, an action star who makes you laugh.
HOWEVER: there are four easy ways to radically improve JURASSIC WORLD, especially compared to the last two Chris Pratt movies, which were structurally sound.
This is more important than you think. A solid story is the difference between “Yeah, that was fun” and “Even though we just saw it, I’d happily pay another $15, keep this dorky glasses on and see this in 3D again right now.”
Despite my dislike for Tom Cruise, an amazing story structure is why I paid cash money to see THE EDGE OF TOMORROW in theaters three times and bought the Blu-Ray to see it twice more.
Want the easy way to see if a movie has story problems? Count the number of writers. One is great. Two might work if they collaborate a lot, or if they’re the Coen brothers. Three means trouble.
If you see four or more writers when the credits roll, that says “People gave us $389 million dollars for a film about transforming robots, lightsabers or mutant dinosaurs, so we spent about half a percent of the budget on script rewrites until we had a story that would thrill the high tastes and standards of 9-year-old boys sitting in theater seats as they drink 72 ounces of Mountain Dew.”
On to four easy ways to improve JURASSIC WORLD: Continue reading
Now, I enjoyed AVENGERS 2: GIVE DISNEY ANOTHER BILLION DOLLARS and it’s perfectly fine as another piece of the Marvel movie assault on the galaxy.
It’s just that I wouldn’t happily head to the theater tonight to watch it again, while I will go back to see MAD MAX: FURY ROAD with friends who’ve yet to see it.
And I’m not alone: critics are going nuts for MAD MAX, with 98 percent of them loving it on Rotten Tomatoes vs. 74 percent giving the thumbs up for AVENGERS 2.
The New York Flipping Times wrote a glowing review of MAD MAX. That’s nuts.
Why is the Australian underdog kicking the pants off the greatest collection of box-office superheroes ever assembled? Continue reading “Top 6 reasons why MAD MAX crushes AVENGERS 2: AGE OF ULTRON”
Bruce Wayne and the Batman may or may not die in BATMAN: ARKHAM KNIGHT.
(Google that and the volume of fanboy speculation will make your head implode).
But he’ll die soon enough. It’s guaranteed.
So will Superman, Spock, Wolverine, Captain America, Sherlock Holmes and 93 other major fictional characters you know and love.
Why will Batman and other great characters die when Jar Jar Binks is apparently invincible?
Because of reasons.
Let’s get into the guts of why this works while still Bothering you, and the answers will involve dead poets, the suspension of disbelief, the quarterly earnings reports of corporations and The Three Movies = Reboot Rule of Superheroes. Continue reading “Top 6 reasons why Batman must DIE!”
Unless you live in an ice cave, you know that AVENGERS 2 opens on May 1.
When it does open, all your friends will go see it, then ask what you thought about it, and What This Movie Means for the next 10 Marvel movies. Those films will feature Thor, Iron Man, Loki, and 16 other characters, and they will make $18 billion dollars.
Let’s get you educated on the whole Marvel shebang, then talk about why Marvel, against all odds, has taken over movie theaters for the next century.
Before you spend $42 on Imax tickets, 5800 calories worth of popcorn with fake butter drizzled on it and 72 ounces of Diet Coke, watch this video to refresh your knowledge of all things Marvel:
And now I’ll get serious for a moment.
Why have the Marvel movies rocked the box office so hard? Continue reading
The Red Pen of Doom 