ScreenRighter

Who made the original trilogy awesome?

2011-08-06T13:12:00.000-07:00

The Town

2010-11-11T18:09:00.000-08:00

I finally saw Ben Affleck's The Town. It's definitely one of my top ten favorite movies directed by Ben Affleck. I really did enjoy it, but I found myself thinking over and over, "Haven't I seen this already?" It's not a good sign when I leave a movie trying to come up with a this-meets-that which adequately describes it. In this case I was thinking something like Heat meets Good Will Hunting. It has common character arcs with both. And both are in my all-time top ten list, but originality is what makes a movie great, which is why Inception is my favorite movie of the year, followed by Scott Pilgrim.

Seven Pounds (spoilers)

2010-11-11T17:58:00.000-08:00

I can't figure out why I think the movie Seven Pounds is very good but not great. I really liked the dialog, the directing, the acting, and the premise/twist, but felt somewhat unsatisfied when the credits rolled. Does it have something to do with losing the main character? I felt the same way about Children of Men, which also had a bittersweet ending. The Empire Strikes Back has an ending far more bitter than sweet, so maybe I'm on the wrong track, since it's possibly the greatest movie of all time, but I'm a tad too young to remember the experience of that ending without the knowledge of what was to come (Ewoks and redemption and so forth).

I don't want to make whatever mistake Nieporte did that keeps it out of IMDb's Top 250, if he actually made a mistake.

Vonnegut Quotes

2010-06-24T16:22:00.000-07:00

Supposedly Kurt Vonnegut once said that the first three chapters you write are for you and not the reader, and that you should get rid of them. I like that idea, I think it applies to screenplays as well--though my problem is making the third act long enough but not ridiculous.

"Those who believe in telekinesis, raise my hand." -Vonnegut

asterisk

2009-04-11T20:53:00.000-07:00

Nobody at my office can pronounce the word "asterisk" and it's starting to drive me crazy. I'm becoming less of a grammar fascist as time goes by, but that's not bad grammar, that's just laziness.

Spec scripts vs Shooting scripts

2009-02-12T20:08:00.000-08:00

It really seems like 99% of the major-studio produced scripts that you can find online are shooting scripts rather than spec scripts. What's that all about?

Meatball Heroes

2009-02-10T16:50:00.000-08:00

If you're like me you've been watching Heroes since the beginning and have no idea why. I think I'm finally ready to give up on it. It's about 1000 times better in theory than it is in practice. It's not just that the storylines are either predictable or ridiculous, with completely unnecessary foreshadowing and time travel, etc. It's that the dialogue is unbearable. And it's not just that the delivery is poor (sorry Milo and Hayden, but you need help), the writing is really really bad. I will post examples when I have time.

Slumdog Millionaire (spoiler alert, sort of)

2009-02-07T16:27:00.000-08:00

I saw Slumdog Millionaire a couple months ago and I still can't decide what I think of it. I was a little annoyed by the music at times, but I enjoyed the scenery and poverty-specific themes that are often hard to find in major American cinema. Overall I would recommend the film to most people, but I feel like it's vey commercial in an interesting way... While the film is somewhat emotional, it lacks a certain soul, possibly because of the constant time shifts, but also maybe because for all its originality it remains formulaic in the end.

Incoherent rambling #1

2008-11-20T21:01:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking a lot about what makes a script successful lately. If I think about most of the big budget movies that have hit the theaters this year, a few things to come to mind. The word "junk" is one of them. Between Saw 12 and High School Musical 15 and Bond 22 (that's actually the real number), it's pretty obvious that a lot of scripts these days are not first attempts at completely original ideas from unknown writers (we can't all be Diablo Cody). It seems like most big scripts these days are top-down scripts, where orders come from studio executives to create a certain type of film (mainly horror, comedy, or kids stuff) or even a very specific film (like Bond 22) and then they either pick a writer or have a few writers make proposals.
Anyway the point I was trying to get to in a roundabout way is that in an ideal world masterful scripts would make the industry go round, rather than all this junk we have to deal with (or ignore, though sometimes the trailers are so good it's hard to know what to expect). Sure there are exceptions, and good new writers get good deals once in a while, but how on Earth do all these studios and producers and agents read scripts like She's All That and think to themselves "This could be a hit!" and not "How did I make it all the way through that script without falling asleep?"

Where to go for screenwriting info

2008-11-18T14:46:00.000-08:00

I've run into various books and websites over the last few years that I find especially helpful in the writing process. Here are a few of them:

Story by Robert McKee
Scriptologist
The Artful Writer blog and forums
Todd Alcott's blog
and a bunch of others

Welcome to my screenwriting blog!

2008-11-18T12:21:00.000-08:00

I've been a casual screenwriter for a few years now, but I only started devoting serious time to it in the past year. So I haven't actually finished any scripts yet, but I've spent a lot of time studying screenwriting, writing and rewriting outlines, and working on the first draft of a feature-length script somewhere between the action and drama categories.