The days of just firing up the laptop, typing in FADE IN:, and seeing what happens next are long gone. Time is finite. Enthusiasm will carry one only so far.

I’m trying to draw some comfort from John August, et al, about writing faster and smarter. And I shall not forsake the small voice of stubborn and wilful ignorance in my head – How hard can it be to [INSERT TASK/PROJECT]?

Yep.

The Rialto Channel have kindly agreed to show To’ona’i.

I’m chuffed.

Happy new year.

A nice mix of mainstream, European and indy this year.

  Asterios Polyp – David Mazzuchelli
  Britten & Brulightly – Hannah Berry
  Chance in Hell – Gilbert Hernandez
  Doing Time – Hanawa Kazuichi
  Fun Home – Alison Bechdel
  Hellcity: The Whole Damned Thing – Macon Blair and Joe Flood
  The Lagoon – Lilli Carre
  Maybe Later – Dupuy & Berberian
  Powers: Z – Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming
  Shaolin Burning – Ant Sang
  The Third Musketeer – Jason
  Walking Dead: No Way Out – Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard

Scripts

Hm. According to my reading diary, I read the average annual amount of these this year but very few have wowed me like I want to be wowed.

  Billy Elliott – Lee Hall
  The Good Wife: Pilot – Robert King and Michelle King
  Lone Star – John Sayles
  Manhunter – Michael Mann
  The Straight Story – John Roach and Mary Sweeney

Maybe it’s just me.

Books

Some ah, research led me to more non-fiction reading that I would previously readily admit.

  Armageddon – Max Hastings
  Nemesis – Max Hastings
  Striptease – Carl Hiaasen
  True Grit – Charles Portis

I’m tempted to try the Demi Moore vehicle that started out once upon a time as a film adaptation of Striptease but… ‘m afraid I mayn’t survive it.

Features

  13 Assassins
  Animal Kingdom
  Another Year
  Born into Brothels
  Buck
  Chugyeogja
  Contagion
  Frozen River
  Get Low
  Leaves of Grass
  Please Give
  El secreto de sus ojos
  The Social Network
  The Women on the Sixth Floor

Television

  30 Rock: Season 1
  Go Girls: Season 2
  Breaking Bad: Season 4
  Downton Abbey: Season 1-2
  The Good Wife: Season 3
  Justified: Season 2
  Monroe: Season 1

There were some shows that were real… curate’s eggs that I wanted to try and be objective about but then I remembered that Sunday School chestnut about pointing fingers and the other three pointing right back at you. (Yeah, I chickened out.)

The latest Mission: Impossible instalment is around the corner and I’m kinda interested, kinda excited, though not because I’m a fan of either the franchise or Tom Cruise hisself – it’s for the directors who’ve gamely signed on (and the first one doesn’t count because Nobody knew)*:

  –  M:I-2 by a post-Killer, pre-Paycheck John Woo;

  –  M:I:III by the insanely prolific J J Abrams;

  –  and now Ghost Protocol from Iron Giant and Incredibles maestro Brad Bird.

… Yeah, I’m in.

Although somehow, somewhen along the way, whenever I think of the M:I franchise, I always flash on this:

* Disclosure: I’ll watch anything by Brian De Palma. Anything.

(Fedora-tip: Lew by way of Dim-Post.)

The Children Teens ignored her aural query, preferring their online and cellular communications. I allowed the pause to lengthen until I finally said, “They were picketing with signs demanding No GST on Fruit and Veges and $15 Minimum Wage NOW, so I confiscated the placards and fed the buggers.”

The Goddess gave me a gentle peck of thanks. “A simple yes would have sufficed.”

Where’s the fun in that?

There’s more where that came from.

The key word above is moment.

At this very moment, I’m questioning every goddamned thing about a project I’m grinding through.

It’s a project I’ve nourished for some time now, we’ve recently survived the I’ve fallen out of love with you phase, but right now, I’m asking embarrassingly basic questions like:
- what’s my hero’s motivation?
- what’s the theme of my story?
- how best can I begin my story?

I know the answers to all of the above for this project.

But they’re not enough.

Not right now.

Five years from now, I’ll chuckle gently about this moment.

For now, I’ll take a deep breath.

It’s gonna be okay.

Oh, I’m still writing. For my sins.

But the blogging… even just thinking about what to post about, I’ve felt… unworthy. Questions I thought I’d answered in the early days of this writing gig and blog were pulling at my sleeve again:

– Who am I to brag and boast?

– What the hell do I know?

– Why am I blogging?

The answer to the first two are kinda covered by No more than some, much less than most but the last is a tricky one.

I’m still getting ideas of what to write about, but when I sit down and stare at the blank screen – hey, I’ve uninstalled all the Call of Duty games from the harddrive (having played them through to the end, of course) – I finish the first sentence or paragraph, and the whole post I had in my head becomes too much hard work to get down.

The blogging is no longer the escape it used to be. I confess: writing is no longer the joyous experience of discovery that it used to be. Actually: it was rarely ‘joyous’ nor illuminating in that ‘discovery’ kind of way.

Writing is hard work, always has been, and it’s what I do.

I’ve taken enough time-outs. You deserve better than abrupt radio silences.

So let’s meet half-way: my (once-)weekly posting will now be monthly, maybe, gods permitting, even more than once a month.

But let’s start with what’s achievable, rather than being aspirational and all that.

Let’s try that, yes?

This year, he accompanied me to the New Zealand Film Festival screening of Takashi Miike‘s 13 Assassins:

Oh.

(Following a budget-straining action set-piece in which our foolhardy hero cop shoots a mid-level baddie who tried to bushwhack him:)

Y’dig? The wounded hero cop whose only safe emotional place is with his partner, a female who is not a love interest, who’s always there to pick up the pieces, who’s really just a cop version of a 1950s housewife.

But what if…

Nothing groundbreaking here.

But I feel better now.

Do you?

So why’d I watch an eight-figure budgeted action comedy when I had the works of Tony Gilroy, Sidney Lumet, Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen brothers to choose from?

1.  It’s an eight- to ten-inch screen. It’s bad enough to watch movies on the laptop but to watch VHS-like-quality images on such a small screen is irresponsible because I’m sure a movie-magic fairy drops dead each time a film is watched on a screen that’s less than twelve-inches across.

2.  I’d started watching a couple of other films on the movie menu but all the swearing (even ass – ass!) was muted. I was scratching and scratching and scratching my head until I realised that flying Emirates might have something to do with the level of censorship.

So.

Ninety – ohmigosh! 120! – minutes later, here is what meagre enjoyment I dredged from the action comedy that played on the tiny screen in front of me:

1.  Having leads with a genuine chemistry can help. Would’ve helped. Although maybe not as much as it used to since I was watching part three of a franchise. But the memories of the previous instalments… okay, the memories of the first instalment can carry you some of the distance. Oh gods above, I lie: the memories didn’t help at all.

2.  Having supporting actors who can out-act your leads can give such a film some sorely welcome spots of genuine humour and/or pathos.

3.  For all of the studios’ squeals of dwindling cinema attendances and how the internet is stealing not just from DVDs but from the starving children of Africa, I can’t help but think that, at least for all of the creatives and technicians and support personnel involved, they all got paid.

It is, just like they say, only show business.

And maybe, one day, if/when I can afford to travel better than cattle class, I’ll have enough room to be able open up the trusty Powerbook and exercise choice.

Back in the day, I was an occasional watcher of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Thanks to Wiki, I know that I started watching from the middle of season two onwards, and I don’t know whether it was the vampire killer schtick, the witty asides and/or the realistic interactions that kept me tuning in.

And then… a character who seemed established and part of the Scooby Gang freakin’ died. I hadn’t experienced that in serial television in, like, forever.

What. The. Frak?

As I found myself mourning the loss of a character along with the characters on the little screen, I realised a couple of things:

- there’s some serious shit you could do with television drama (and a horror fantasy to boot); and

- they made me freakin’ care.

WTF, indeed.

Don’t the last six sentences of 50+ words make a lie of the second sentence?

Puh.

(All the items in ‘[' and ']‘ were initially for cheap laughs and some anonymity for the writer [and arse-covering on my part]. … No, ’tis neither funny nor anonymous.)

If by the third page I still have no idea what the boy looks like, I’m pretty annoyed. I’m not giving the script the attention it might deserve.

Little things like names and ages go a long way to helping your reader know – or make an educated guess at – who their guide is in your story. This isn’t prose where we can wait a few pages until all is revealed. The script may only be Courier 12pt on paper, but the finished product is visual, and you want your reader to see what your intended audience is going to see in as few carefully chosen words as possible.

It’s the little things that count.

The first sex scene does not begin until twenty minutes into the episode. Its a lesbian scene, and it only lasts one minute and ten seconds. The next sex scene happens some minutes later. Its a boy/girl scene and it lasts two minutes. Both sex scenes are shot and edited like an action scene from a Michael Bay movie. Nothing graphic happens. In fact, besides the nudity, they are just as tame as what you’d see on network television.

From a user review of Femme Fatale, a 21st century version, it would appear, of Red Shoe Diaries.

“I don’t see it as a competition,” said Deaver. “I hope folks can still afford two books, or go to the library and read them.”

It’s been a bit of an emotional journey, and you’ve invested in it willingly. The story is very near the end as the man goes to visit his father in hospital, and you look forward to something like this:

No more need be said, right? We’ve followed the son’s journey, both physical and emotional. That’s why we’ve found a hanky to cry into, to share the catharsis.

Alas, what you get is:

What is it that I like so much about the less-is-more approach?

I like ambiguity. It makes me feel like an adult, with a licence to read between the lines.

We’ve a terrible backlog of films and shows, but we’ve begun scraping away at that mountain.

– In Plain Sight Season One is interesting in that it doesn’t really work for either myself or The Goddess but I’m still watching it (alone from ep five onward). Nope, it’s not the blonde lead (hey it’s Whatshername from The West Wing!). I think, for me, there’s comfort in the cop show formula, and the twinkly dialogue between the marshals is sometimes entertaining. I’ll see it through to the end of the season at least.

– Sopranos Season One is a cracker. Someone has very generously lent us all six seasons of this sucker, and it’s great television. But not exactly must-see telly. I suspect the fact that the boxset sat almost forgotten under my desk for three months has given us a certain complacency in getting around to watching it.

– Go Girls Season Two is a hoot. Two years ago, if someone had listed the component parts of this show to me and told me that I would like it, I would’ve broken both their legs and laughed uproariously while doing so and yet… rarely an ep goes by without me chortling happily beside The Goddess. A great New Zild show. I’m looking forward to the third season which finished screening recently.

And that’s just the legit stuff. Speaking of which, I shan’t be listing any more shows which haven’t been officially made available in New Zild. Probably at year’s end as part of the annual round up, but day-in, day-out, as a citizen, It’s Not Really Legal, and as a scriptwriter, It’s Not Right.

Jus’ sharing.