There’s more in this cool Esquire interview with the 5′ 11″ Sigourney Weaver, including:

(Fedora-tip: Dan Slevin.)

The Chicago Tribune has a few fond reminiscences about shooting The Blues Brothers in Chicago. Remember the car chase through the mall? The arrival of the Blusemobile, at least three hundred bodies, fifteen horses, three Sherman tanks, three helicopters and three fire engines at the Daley Centre? All in Chicago.

My favourite reminiscence: two Cook County commissioners* buttonholing then Mayor Jane Byrne at, I presume, the local premiere:

(Fedora-tip: the LA Times‘ Patrick Goldstein.)

*  New Zild readers: those county commissioners are the equivalent of local body councillors.

There is some common ground. Queen, Maisey Rika and Phoenix Foundation. Better Off Ted, Modern Family, Breaking Bad, The Good Wife and Mad Men. (Yes, these last coupla years have been big box-watching years.)

She likes relationship stories while I like kill-my-dog-and-I-shall-lay-waste-upon-the-land-until-vengeance-is-mine stories. Her viewing threshold is a lot lower than mine – q.v. The Cult – but my excuse is that all viewing is a learning experience.

So we like different things. So what.

Were it not for Her, I would not have had the pleasure of Grand Designs, the River Cottage series, Pieces of April, and King of Kong. And were it not for me, She would not have had the pleasure of Mad Men, The Good Wife, Lars and the Real Girl, and In Bruges.

I suppose it evens out in the end. And because I do like to quote the good doctor,

  It is important to always try new things.

The same goes for whenever I rewatch films like The Constant Gardener or television shows like The Shield where the endings are not happy.

Why do I subject myself to this torture?

It’s the execution. It’s the characters. It’s being taken by the hand for a half-hour or hour or ninety-plus minutes or days and returning to the real world short of breath, my heart thundering in my chest and a lump in my throat.

This is not a new discovery. Romeo and Juliet will never grow old. Rick will always have Paris. Rachel and Deckard will never have certainty.

And I think to myself:

  Someone wrote that shit.

  I lapped that shit up and begged for more.

  I want to write like that.

Last weekend, Mr Ebert very generously posted the script from that moment in time. Oh, what coulda bin.

I don’t know how but The Goddess and I watched one earlier in the year – I can’t remember what – and even though it was a pleasant enough experience as the two leads got into a clinch, the music rose and credits rolled (and I coughed to cover my swallowing my tears and blinked rapidly so as not to give Her the impression I enjoy this genre) my Beloved turned to me –

• Screenwriter J D Shapiro apologises for Battlefield Earth.

  (Fedora-tip: WGGB Blog.)

• This. Is. SHATNER!

  (Fedora-tip: Alex Epstein.)

• Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire scribe and producer, David Mills died suddenly last week. I didn’t know – I should’ve, really, but I didn’t know – that he was the one who penned the Homicide “Bop Gun” ep (the one with Robin Williams and a teenage Jake Gyllenhaal). This forty-plus minutes of free-to-air television truly opened my eyes to just how much more you could put into a police procedural.

  His and David Simon‘s latest television series Treme opens in a few days. I can’t wait to introduce The Goddess to teevee a la Simon et al.

Peace out.

• This is spot-on:

  

  It seems to be cool at the moment to bag Avatar – something akin to the derision that accompanies Titanic, perhaps? – but I enjoyed it. Not only was I familiar with the original scriptment from way back but it transported me to a different reality for a couple of hours. That takes real story-telling and filmmaking, regardless of the tools and bells and whistles at the filmmakers’ disposal.

  (Fedora-tip: Alex Epstein.)

• Some other backlash: on the BBC Writersroom blog, Dominic Mitchell lays into writers holding forth about writing at the Guardian website:
  Get lucky. Stay lucky. – Ian Rankin

  Stop reading fiction – it’s all lies anyway, and it doesn’t have anything to tell you that you don’t know already (assuming, that is, you’ve read a great deal of fiction in the past; if you haven’t you have no business whatsoever being a writer of fiction). – Will Self

  When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else. – Zadie Smith

  Yeah, some of them are a bit pointy-headed and a lot of them prescriptive but everyone’s different – particularly writers – and writers should remember can always cherrypick advice at their leisure.

  (Fedora-tip: WGGB Blog.)

• Heartened by an October 2005 revised draft of Terminator: Salvation, I watched the finished film recently.

  I should have taken the hint:

  CHRISTIAN grabs a HELICOPTER, which results in a CRASH that somehow leaves him unscathed. A CRIPPLED TERMINATOR chases him, but it is killed by BULLETS. Plain old, regular BULLETS. The kind that couldn’t kill TERMINATORS in the other movies.

I rilly rilly enjoyed the Star Trek reboot recently so: Go forth and prosper.

(The poster neglects to show the shotgun and rocket launcher/pod that are part of his kit. Maybe the PR elves thought it all a little overkill or something.)

When it comes to writing, I haven’t been picky with my kit. All of my handwritten notes are consistent in their random ink colours – and occasional pencil – because I don’t care for my writing implement (and because I lose pens on a regular basis). As for the electronic records, they include Word, text-only, rich-text and Open Document formats – although that last one has been the standard since 2007.

A couple of years ago, I started playing around with Celtx and, well, nothing has been the same ever since. I use Final Draft now. I understand now the zeal of the convert: FD makes (screen)writing so much easier. But it’s only a tool.

Commando will always have a special place in my heart but it’s been a quarter-century already, and in this post-Bourne world where a rolled-up magazine is as handy in a fight as a Rambo knife, it’s no longer about suiting up for every possible situation. Save the montage for a flashback or Michael Bay homage.

Use whatever you have to hand to put words on the page or screen.

• The last swords-and-sandals epic I saw was Gladiator. Since then, Troy, Alexander, Rome and 300 have come and gone with nary a flicker of interest on my part. But The Incomparable‘s review of Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi‘s Spartacus has sparked a guilty, pulpy, what-the-heck kind of interest:
  …Spartacus won’t win any awards for the originality of its premise. Hunktacular warrior dude loves his superhot wife, but is reluctantly called away to battle for the good of his people. Hunktacular warrior dude is betrayed by sleaze-weasel Roman general and branded a deserter. Hunktacular warrior dude escapes and is reunited with his superhot wife just in time for them to be captured (notably, while in the altogether) by sleaze-weasel Roman general. Sleaze-weasel Roman general sells hunktacular warrior dude into the employ of agreeably amoral gladiator owner. Hunktacular warrior dude must wage a muscly, well-oiled, tiny-pantsed struggle up the ranks of the gladiator circuit to find his beloved wife and gain his whoa that guy just took a giant axe to the face!
• The always excellent xkcd webcomic has this heads-up for those writers out there putting the final touches on their denouement:

  

• And go here – now – for the rest of this brilliant bat-take on Memento:
  
  

It’s been so long since we’ve rolled into 2010 I won’t bore you with -0

This is my blog – and in the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Hooah.

2009 was really a year for the goggle box –

– but cinema had some new – and old – pleasures –

– and when not glooed to a flickering screen, there was always –

I won’t be disclosing stats because they’re pitiful and I have no excuse. But if you break my run of comment spam (three figures and rising this past month) and ask nicely, I’ll consider it.

2009 was an okay year for watching and reading – a better year for writing – and 2010 awaits my conquest domination attention.

Overall rating: Satisfactory – but must try harder.

It being a rainy afternoon, I’ve just finished watching Rambo and enjoyed it tremendously. Was I flashing on my teen years where I grew up with the first three instalments in the franchise?* Rather likely.

And I can’t help thinking: does my unalloyed enjoyment of Rambo make me a Bad Person? Or just Naughty? Time may tell.

* I laughed out loud when, asked about the intervening forty years between being drafted for the Vietnam War and his current situation in Thailand, Rambo says, It’s complicated.

I’m at a similar place with my slate. Having reached my writing objectives for the year, I’m now trying to raise my film and TV viewing stats (59 finishes and 33 walk-/turn-offs to date, compared to 2008′s 94 and 19, respectively), as well as my reading stats (there’s a gaping hole from July to September that I don’t think I can make up for). I’ve completed Delta Force: Black Hawk Down (snore) and Close Combat: First to Fight (grin)* but… surely I could be doing something more useful?

We’re chortling through Glee. The Banana Boat writing group is ending the year with a bit of a bash. Only 24 sleeps until Avatar.

And after a few weeks of staring at my development file for the next project and not being inspired… I’ve just had a brilliant idea for my next project, totally out of the blue**.

Suh-weet.

* Not that you asked, but I’m currently chugging through Aliens vs Predators 2 and finding it rather tedious – I think I might join Monty and the boys in their North African campaign sooner rather than later.

** “Out of the blue”. What a crock. It was a fortuitous intersection of: people I know and want to work with; an achievable production budget; and a perfick location.

• Phill Barron has an excellent parable about being a writer for hire. (And if you’re reading this in… wherever Mr Barron lives in the UK, he has a car for sale.)
• Why aren’t there more interviews like this, hm?
• I just have to share this:

  
  
  (Fedora tip: Jill Golick.)

• And having shed a tear or few over the season three finale of Mad Men, these articles from Vanity Fair and American Cinematographer make tremendously fascinating reading.

  (Fedora-tips: The Goddess and Gareth James, respectively.)

Sst. There will be a screening of To’ona’i at the Academy Cinemas in Auckland on Saturday 31 October at 12:30pm.

It’s a cast, crew, friends, family and supporters screening, and being the inclusive kind of guy that I am, you’re welcome to come for a gander and maybe a natter.

• Local producer Matthew Horrocks has some cogent articles on the state of New Zild film at his Reservoir Films. Go – go read them now.
• The Incomparable Christopher Rywalt reviews Sex Decoy: Love Stings, a reality show about… about…. I can’t. But here’s an extract:
  
  … when a ridiculously gorgeous woman — or even a skanky stripper — comes on to you out of nowhere, your choices explaining what’s going on are a) you’ve inexplicably, suddenly, and surprisingly become vastly more attractive to the opposite sex or b) she’s an alien/vampire/killer robot who’s going to eat you before you come.
• Screenwriter Josh Olson (A History of Violence) explains why he will not read your fucking script. ‘S nothing personal. And totally understandable.

And now I’ve seen the trailer. The Boy watched it with me – he was a little bemused by my admittedly reverent whisper of Awesome. Mr Ebert has seen a fifteen minute preview (twice, the lucky sod) and has reserved judgement on the finished product.

That’s okay – I’m a little jealous of their innocence.

The Avatar scriptment has been a treasured D F Mamea Script Library item for the past ten years, something I often referred to in my early writing career as a kind of ‘how-to’ bible.

Yes, the finished product will be whatever it will be. But until then, anticipation and expectations are high.

Postscript: Late in 2008 Motorbike Steve asked what I was looking forward to in the new year. I shrugged and mumbled that maybe there was Watchmen but otherwise… nah. My outlook didn’t really change until around last month. Besides, obviously, Avatar, there’s Michael Mann‘s Public Enemies I want to find time for, and Pixar’s Up next month. ‘S nice.

I think I’ll wait until it’s on DVD for a buck a week before I sneak a look (like I did the first one).

Meantime, this made me laugh out loud:

Fedora-tip: Roger Ebert.

As an audience member, the film or television series or theatre piece that I derive the most pleasure from is the one where I have to work hard at keeping up with the story, busily making connections not spelt out, and putting the pieces together. It makes me feel smart.

Imagined ego-stroking aside, I like the experience where I’m not a passive observer of events, where I have to read more into the nuances and subtext of what I’m seeing and hearing.  I don’t have to be sitting on the shoulder of the protagonist throughout. It’s like I’m… physically in the middle of the action wherever it takes – still invisible, still passive – and I have only the information available to the characters around me, and… discovering the story as it unfolds.

I feel… involved.

It’s a mean trick to do that.

So I’ve got this wee film that’s had a bunch of test screenings from rough cut to a graded and mixed cut, and the feedback and the comments I’ve received have been pretty consistent while I, for my part, have been just a leetle myopic in taking it all on board.  After each screening, I’ve swung tended one way or the other in trying to appease imagined audiences minimise narrative confusion.

Have I done too much?

Or not enough?

I don’t know.  I’ve written the dialogue with subtext and whatever it is that’s described as it’s what’s not said.  Its structure is classic – the finished product may require some concentration but the execution is consistent.  Amit says that I’ve hit the emotional beats.   James is sneaking in all sorts of filters, having quickly established how technically and aesthetically blind I am.

And thanks to the generosity and honesty of the test audiences, I think I’ve done all I can to tell the story the way I want to. I have to get over myself. How the audience watches the finished product is out of my hands.

I’ve got fifteen minutes spare.

How quickly can I cut and paste and make sense?

• How about ten best film endings? (Fedora-tip: Infinite Monkeys by way of The Incomparable.)
• I’ve been a fan of Dylan Horrocks since Hicksville (a phase of forcing myself to try some homegrown comics fare). He’s got a blog. With serials and stories, too! Recommended for civilians and comic aficionados alike.
• PhD student Gareth James is very generously sharing some of the fruits of his research into the history of HBO original programming, 1997-2007 at Gareth On…. (Fedora-tip: Lynden Barber.)

Time’s up already. Must be a slow linker.

I vaguely remembered the excited reviews of Paul Abbott‘s series a few years back. I’d read them too late – they’d already screened the first couple of eps – but to be honest, at the time, I would’ve been too entranced in The Shield and The Wire to consider anything else seriously.

After the first ep, I found myself hunched forward, bunched fists at my sides. After the second ep, I looked wild-eyed at The Goddess: I’m all wound up and there weren’t even any bodies! After the third ep, a Voice beside me said, despite the lateness of the hour, Can we watch the next episode?

You get the picture.

I’m glad I didn’t try jumping in mid-season way back when: the pace is unforgiving. Never was there anything as crass as a character reminding another of what they’d discovered in an earlier episode. There were no genre white lies of Shh, everything’ll be okay to hold on to. I was never given the opportunity – the breathing space, even – to think, Okay, this is the bit where they do something stupid but a handy deus ex machina will save the day – because that shit just didn’t happen.  That’s how freaking good the writing is.

We lapped it up.

And I am so not going to the big-screen adaptation.

• Screen Junkies has an excellent selection of kids’ letters to Michael Bay, my favourite being:
  
  
  
  (Fedora-tip: The Big Picture.)
• Ken Levine has his 2009 Summer Movies preview, with all-time classics like:
  
  • Ghosts of Girlfriends Past – A new spin on the single most tired premise in RomCom history — hire a leading man who is an enemy of comedy. Stars Matthew McConaughey and the lovely but not-exactly-hilarious Jennifer Garner.
  • Whatever Works – Woody Allen’s 285th movie, the 247th with the same theme: older neurotic Jew in a relationship with hot young girl who could be his granddaughter. Larry David as Woody Allen. Reviews are mixed. Middle-aged Jews love it, young girls are appalled.
  • The Time Traveler’s Wife – “Where were you last night and don’t tell me the Middle Ages, you bastard!?”

  (Fedora-tip: The Big Picture.)

• Forget Robert Rodriguez and his Ten-Minute Film School. I give you Mark L Lester‘s Commando is the Best Film Ever (with parts 2 and 3).
  
  [This] film wasn’t an accident, just like Jesus wasn’t an accident. It took real vision to pull off, starting with the theme of a parent’s love for his child, and the lengths he will go to to get her back from a wily South American dictator. Also, it has explosions, and a rockin’ saxophone-driven soundtrack that really gets the people moving in their seats.

This year, I networked at it.

Yes: I hate networking. It feels false:

(I really should just let go of such exchanges – it’s just -, it’s not often that I want to smash someone in the face [half an hour later because it didn't register with me at the time].)

What I meant to illustrate as false was something like this:

What was different this time around was that I knew more of the faces. Familiarity breeds confidence.

Now for some rampant name-dropping:

• TV and feature writer Oscar Kightley;
• I got snapped by playwright Gary Henderson;
• visual and performance artist Shigeyuki Kihara;
• playwright and producer Makerita Urale;
• film and TV director Sima Urale (and Makerita’s sister);
• film and TV director, and reluctant producer Justine Simei Barton; and
• actor and theatre director Nancy Brunning.

It wasn’t all about the laying on of hands – forum attendees were treated to works in progress:

• Ali Foa’i‘s MindSex;
• Victoria Schmidt‘s Then Sings My Soul;
• Jonathan P Riley‘s Makigi;
• and Chetan Patel & Eric Smith‘s I Don’t Do Coconut.

(A first draft of this post had one-word adjectives for each of the above. I’ve changed my mind, obviously: you can stew in anticipation.)

My plan to be in the right place at the right time has yet to bear fruit. But seeds have been sown. The competition has been reconnoitred and noted.

I am patient.

And this excerpt is for the benefit of The Goddess who wondered what the heck the story was with Bubastis the wondercat:

This link/post is dedicated to Mr Molloy.