Point & Click

Hurm.

  • 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.

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Welcome to Josh Sully’s World

It must be a decade since I first read those words.

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.

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