DC Comics – The Red Pen of Doom

I like it, I love it, I want some more of it. So why does this short bit with zero special effects work so well?

Let’s take it apart.

Comedy is incredibly hard. Even the pro’s at Saturday Night Live fail more often than succeed. The tough part of a short skit like this is variety.

Saturday Night Live and other skit shows tend to find one joke that does work, then beat it to death, making a five-minute skit feel like five hours.

The other path–multiple jokes that may or may not work–is much harder to pull off.

You won’t know if it works while writing or rehearsing it, and unless you film in front of a live audience, you won’t get feedback until you put that short film out there for the world to embrace or trash.

This bit about Thor works because they don’t rely on a single, repetitive joke. They had the guts to try a ton of different jokes, big or small, and to include little details that reward multiple viewings. Continue reading “What Thor was doing during CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR” →

Every time that Hollywood reboots the SUPERMAN franchise, they hire some hot-shot screenwriter, who pens something the hot-shot director hates, leading to some OTHER screenwriter taking a stab at the page 1 polish (rewrite) until studio execs get involved and bring in five of their favorite screenwriters to add their spices to the awkward stew.

This is a certain way to spend $300 million on an epic failure.

HOWEVER: some random man, posting on the Book of Face, just told a better story than anything I’ve seen from any Superman movie in the history of mankind.