I’m in the final stretch of a rewrite so this week’s post’s an ultra-quickie.
Allow me to direct you to Cory Doctorow‘s site, craphound.com, in particular his downloadable short stories. Enjoy.
Point and Click
- Mr T over at Unkreative has finished – well, 98% finished – principal photography on 5. Onwards with post it is. Don’t forget to cruise some nice pics here.
- Writer and director of Narc and the Ticker segment of BMW’s uber-cool The Hire ad series, Joe Carnahan, has a feature coming out: Smokin’ Aces. He’s pluggin’ it aplenty at Smokin’ Joe Carnahan. Looks fun – it’s my first must-see film of 2007.
- The boys at How to Write Screenplays… Badly have given notice. Goddamnit. They were merciless. They were hilarious. I’ll miss the bastards.
- After some period of silence Josh Friedman has a heartfelt post at I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing.
- And I’ve tripped over a couple of UK blogs to recommend: Lee Thomson‘s The Light, It Hurts is a humorous and very personable blog about screenwriting around a full-time job; and Danny Stack‘s Scriptwriting & Script Reading in the UK is a resource rich site on the nuts and bolts of screenwriting.
It’s a New Year, Blah-blah-blah
Having enjoyed Christmas day with family of choice (aah, nothing like the silly season to bring familypolitik to the fore), s(l)ee(p)ing in the New Year with a ten-ish bedtime on New Year’s Eve (the kids being with their other biological parents, The Goddess and I can do what we bloody well like, thank you), and relaxing on the days in between, it’s now time to gird the loins for work. Getting up early in the morning for a run and then some writing is quite a struggle, but it’s the only way to Get Things Done.
Over the last couple of months, I’ve rediscovered the joy of reading. I mean, I’ve always read – but I’m kinda devouring books, scripts and comics at the moment. And believe it or not – I’m reading non-fiction as well. Non-fiction! And enjoying it!
On the viewing front, The Goddess and I have settled on a viewing arrangement: the half of the rental DVDs I select on her behalf I safely watch with her, and the other half – yes, replete with wall-to-wall gratuitous action/tits-and-ass/profanity/narrative-black-holes/subtitles – I squeeze in during the day. It’s terrible, I tell you, working from home, having to find time to watch DVDs, but I manage it, by crikey, I do.
I Heart “The Shield”
I’d spent almost half of my life in thrall of Dick Wolf‘s Law & Order (at least, as much as the local broadcasters allowed) before Shawn Ryan‘s The Shield arrived and pissed and shit all over the television police procedural genre. Cop shows haven’t been the same since then.
Described as a James Ellroy-infused procedural, The Shield shows cops as flawed human beings, most of them driven by some core need to do The Right Thing, each with their own methods and morals, each looking out for their own interests, and each leaving a trail of emotional, psychological, emotional, sexual and physical destruction. I’m a dirty little voyeur for enjoying their mis/adventures for those reasons. (It’s those same reasons why The Goddess won’t watch it with me.)
The fourth season ended recently. Glenn Close‘s Captain Rawlings gets shafted but good by her superiors; I’ll miss her. An Internal Affairs investigation into the Strike Team appears about to change up a gear. And to see the Strike Team end a season with beers and esprit de corps aplenty was a discomfiting sight indeed.
Shows like The Shield and David Simon‘s The Wire have reinvigorated the genre, elevating it above mere ‘procedural’ to give us true ‘police drama’.
And about bloody time.