Tag: Hollywood

Seven movie clichés that must be NUKED FROM ORBIT

Posted in 3 Tinseltown TuesdayTagged , , , , , , , , , , , 42 Comments

Now that going to the movies more than once a year involves taking out a second mortgage to buy $9 popcorn and $7 Diet Coke and $11 tickets, you must pick your flicks wisely.

I’ve already skewered my favorite genre with Top 10 Thriller Clichés.

Then I went after the Top 10 Action Mystery Clichés — but it goes deeper than that.

Peoples of Hollywood, please stop spending the gross domestic product of Paraguay to make movies with these seven stupid clichés.

7) Romantic comedies starring Matthew McConaughey

We get it: he’s cute, and his Texas drawl is charming.

HOWEVER: He is not required, by federal law, to be in every romantic comedy on the planet.

6) Macho action heroes walking away from explosions really, really slow

Wussy little bad guys are thrown through the air by explosions.

Explosions only make macho action heroes slow down and stroll.

5) Romantic comedies where the man is a bumbling, lovable loser while the woman is a hot neurotic mess

The man is a 40-year-old virgin (Steve Carrell), a chauvinist pig (Russell Crowe) or a nerdy writer type (Woody Allen).

The woman is a beautiful mess (Jennifer Aniston, Kate Hudson or, God help us, Sarah Jessica Parker) who is far more educated, cultured and successful than the man.

So, she naturally hates this loser at first, then she slowly molds this wreck of a man into a real human being worthy of dating and / or marrying.

Please.

4) False alarms in Every Horror Movie Known to Man

Enough with the cat / boyfriend / little brother nonsense, and the scary music is just cheating.

3) Romantic comedies starring Kate Hudson

Though I have to say this: it’s better than Sarah Jessica Parker.

2) Movie villains who carefully explain their plot instead of KILLING THE HERO ALREADY

Why does every movie villain feel the need to talk to the hero?

Look, the villain always has hordes of minions who are completely motivated to listen to his stupid monologues. He can give speeches that make Fidel Castro look like the king of brevity.

A villain’s minions are the best listeners ever. They must not only nod and smile, but be entranced by his every syllable. The villain is their employer and visionary leader, and there’s a good chance that not listening with your entire body and soul will get you thrown into the tank full of sharks with lasers.

Chatting with the hero makes no sense.

Here’s one villain who gets it right.

1) Romantic comedies starring Matthew McConaughey AND Kate Hudson

And you thought I was making that up.

Psycho killer raccoons terrorize Olympia … and Tacoma, and Seattle

Posted in 5 Random ThursdayTagged , , , , , , 13 Comments

Many moons ago, when the Series of Tubes was young, the Associated Press ran one of the best headlines IN THE HISTORY OF MAN.

Here it is:

Psycho killer raccoons terrorize Olympia

Now, since this is where I work, and my buddy Larry of the Palouse lived in this neighborhood at that time, we lost our minds. Because it was funny and insane and somewhat scary, if you had little pookies, puppies or cats.

This gang of raccoons was truly bloodthirsty. I could picture a horror movie, PSYCHO KILLER RACCOONS, being far more scary and realistic than 90 percent of the teen slasher films Hollywood pumps out.

Now, not far from Olympia, we have this story from THIS MONTH, where a woman was savagely attacked by more psycho killer raccoons.

They had her on the ground and gave her something like 100-bazillion puncture wounds before people chased them off. Here’s that story:

And now we have a column by Peter the Callaghan about the raccoon PR problem, a column that deserves its own column, because it’s just that good.

Read it here by clicking with your mousity mouse.

I am in Psycho Killer Raccoon heaven.

Bonus: apparently, chicken-slaying raccoons like donuts for dessert.

Writers: Cross-training is essential

Posted in 4 Writing Secrets WednesdayTagged , , , , , , 6 Comments
writing meme spiderman dear diary

Just like “playing professional football” isn’t one solitary skill, but a set of separate skills, you don’t study and practice “writing.”

There are dozens of separate skills involved.

  • Structure and storytelling, which is done best by the screenwriting peoples of Hollywood
  • Hooks and headlines (which you learn from ink-stained journalists and smooth-talking copywriters)
  • Taglines (Hollywood) and pitches (publicity peoples)
  • Speeches, opeds and persuasive writing (the rarely seen speechwriter, often riding fleet unicorns while fleeing from trolls)
  • Small-bore editing (grammar, copy editing and all that)
  • Dialogue (playwrights and novelists)
  • Big-bore editing (destroying a piece with your wicked red pen, then stitching it back together: better, faster, stronger)
  • Design and layout (book designers, cover artists, photographers, web designers)
  • The use and abuse of photos and imagery (photographers, journalists, photo-journalists
  • Publicity, sales and marketing

It’s a lot like the 53-whatever guys who play on a football team. Want to learn how to kick a field goal? Don’t ask the quarterback – bribe the kickers after teasing them about how clean their unis always are.

Need to become a better tackler? Talk to the linebackers. Want to run faster? Work out with the wide receivers and cornerbacks.

Because if you don’t cross-train, you’ll wind up looking silly. Like this.

Same thing with MMA fighters. They’re so well-rounded now, mixing striking with wrestling and ju-jitsu. Nobody who fights for money would think of spending all their time on one skill while ignoring the others, because they would get crushed into powder … and no longer pay the bills as a professional fighter. Delivering pizzas, maybe. Fighting, no. Unlike the bad old days of boxing, there isn’t a market for tomato cans that up-and-coming fighters match up with to pump up their record.

As a writer, I’ve learned the most from cross-training. Journalism and speechwriting are completely different, just like writing screenplays happens on a different planet from writing novels.

You can’t learn the other things while you play around in your favorite sandbox — but the skills you learn from hanging out in other writerly sandboxes has gargantuan payoffs.

Storytelling: Some random man on Facebook takes tired, bored SUPERMAN and nails it

Posted in 3 Tinseltown TuesdayTagged , , , , , 7 Comments
tinseltown tuesday meme morpheous

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.

This man is smart. Somebody hire him.

Difficult doesn’t make it good

Posted in 4 Writing Secrets WednesdayTagged , , , , , , , 4 Comments

While in the Belgium, home of the world’s finest chocolate and 250 types of beer — 250! — I saw something that made me think.

No, it was not the beer. Though the beer was excellent.

This is what made me think: a concert on BBC or PBS or whatever with a violinist doing an insanely difficult piece.

Now, that wasn’t the exact piece. This YouTube video is something close, though it’s far less technically difficult and far more enjoyable. You should’ve heard the crazy thing, and seen her beat that violin like a dirty rug.

Was her technical skill amazing?

Oh yes.

Did she make faces like she was passing a kidney stone?

You have no idea.

Did the music move me at all?

Not one bit. Hated it.

The forest for the trees

Here’s the thing: creative people tend to focus on developing the most difficult technical skills WHILE IGNORING THE BIG STUFF.

  • Journalists learn all about headline counts and press law, but nobody questions whether the inverted pyramid is the right structure for the next 12,023 stories they’ll write.
  • Writers spend months or years cranking on novels, but if you put a 9 mm to their head and counted down from five, they couldn’t boil that novel down into four-word pitch — or logline, tagline or headline.
  • Figure skaters put all this time and effort into triple-axles and whatnot, despite the fact that only professional skaters and judges can tell the difference between a triple toe loop and a triple lux-whatever. The only thing we average people know is  (a) whether the skating is fun to watch and (b) how many times they fall down. Also, (c) how you can consider this a sport when the winner is determined by faceless judges, not who runs the fastest or scores the most points?

Now, I’m not saying that you should ignore your technical skills, whether you’re trying to break into Hollywood with your zombie high school musical or become the next Johnny Rotten.

The point is, technical skills come into play late in the game. Without working on the stuff that nobody teaches you — the short, pithy, publicity side — nobody will see your amazing technical wizardry with words, film or electric guitars hooked to amplifiers that go up to 11.

Here’s little kids playing Metallica, with far less technical skill. (Metallica is secretly easy to play.) Yet I enjoyed the heck out of this and would happily listen to it again, while you would have to deliver suitcases stuffed with purple euros to get me to listen to the violin craziness again.

 

Movie trailer madness: WILD WILD PLANET

Posted in 3 Tinseltown TuesdayTagged , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Before the invention of YouTube, you’d only find gems like this at estate sales in Hollywood. And the only way to play such treasures would be if you owned a 8mm projector, eight-track tape or some other obsolete technology brought to you be the number 8.

HOWEVER: We have the technologies today, and just like Christmas in July, they give is insane film clips and trailers of things that Should Not Exist, But Somehow Do.

The trailer to WILD WILD PLANET is awesomely, ambitiously bad. Take a peek.

My favorite bits:

  • the four-armed thugs who look like offspring of a Terminator-Matrix union
  • the women who know kung fu and how to disappear
  • the twisted plan by some man to transmorgify into a half-man, half-woman using transporter tech stolen from the U.S.S. Enterprise or whatever

The ’90s and ’00s (oughts? oh-oh’s?) brought us movie after movie where the heroines are tough women in black leather catsuits with guns. Maybe this all started with Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman, but it’s taken off ever since.

As this movie proves, tough women (good or bad) in ‘the ’60s and ’70s movies didn’t wear black leather catsuits. No. They wore red flowing polyester. If red flowing polyester wasn’t available, they wore bright orange or green.

If anybody actually WATCHED this movie, as in paid actual monies and rented it or whatever, please shout.

Also: if you are brave or crazy enough to fire it up on Netflix or whatever, please report back on what happened to the crazy man with the mustache.