The Disturbing Persistence of Star Wars

Listen, I'm a mega-huge Star Wars fan. It hit me at a very formative time of my life, and I've basically measured every other movie--consciously or unconsciously--against it.


But come on, man. All six movies in 3-D? Really?


Ok, I'll admit: it would be cool to see Episodes IV and V in 3-D. I can't deny it. The space battle scenes would be sick--I can just imagine T.I.E. fighters flying straight at my face. And it gives me chills.


But what about the massive pile of stinking wreckage that is Episodes VI and I-III? Does Lucas think the visceral outpouring of bile against these movies was just a fluke?


I mean, I didn't even really like "Jedi" when I first saw it, and that was 17,000 years ago. It has not gotten better with time. And the prequels were just unwatchable. I don't care what anyone says about Ep. III: it stunk to high heaven and lowest hell.


It is no mistake that Hayden Christensen has faded from public view. He's an absolutely atrocious actor, and I will not--NOT NOT NOT!!!--sit through watching his massive dopey pouting-lipped head on screen anymore.


OK, the CGI in Ep. III was OK. Granted. But the story was so derivative, so transparently thrown together as a ploy to make piles of cash, that I welcomed Darth Vader's silly "Noooooooo!" the end as validation that George Lucas had lost his friggin mind.


I have no larger point in writing this. I just barfed a little in my mouth when I saw the preview for Phantom Menace in 3-D during the Super Bowl (can you possibly imagine a more huge waste of life than seeing that movie again?).


But I guess once you get as rich as Lucas, you can surround yourself with vaccuous sycophants who tell you how great you are, even when you clearly lost your mojo around the time of the George H.W. Bush administration.


I'm convinced that we'll be seeing different incarnations of this once great trilogy in every new film format that's introduced over the next hundred or so years (just wait for the hologram version of Star Wars where you can actually get inside of Jar Jar Binks and walk around).


This, folks, is the definition of too much of a good thing.

Getting Smacked in the Face by Woody Allen

That's what watching Allen's latest film, "Midnight in Paris" , was like. A big old right cross. If you're an artist of any kind, do yourself a favor and watch it. You won't be the same afterwards.


On one level, the movie unfolds like a typical Woody Allen hobbyhorse: the main character Gil (played brilliantly by Owen Wilson) is unsatisfied with his very cozy life: he has a beautiful fiance namede Inez (Rachel McAdams), he's a rich Hollywood script rewriter, and, as the film opens, he's visiting his favorite city, Paris. All to the good. But he quickly makes clear that he's bored being a "Hollywood hack" and yearns to finish a novel he started, wanting to give "actual literature" a try.


It becomes obvious early on that he and Inez are ill-suited for each other--she loves the glitz and glamor of Paris, the shopping for expensive $18,000 chairs and dining in chic restaurants, while Gil wants only to walk the city streets in search of that je ne sais quoi that has infected French-based artists for centuries.


And he finds it. While strolling home alone after a dinner date with Inez's former professor Paul (a super-duper annoying Michael Sheen), he's whisked away by a car-full of Parisians dressed like they're straight out of the twenties. From that moment on, Gil goes back in time several different times, meeting some of his greatest literary heroes--Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald--along the way, eventually gaining the confidence to take a shot at his dream.


I like Woody Allen. Ever since I saw "Manhattan", I've been hooked. But this movie takes the cake. I've been in desperate need of artistic inspiration lately, and this film smacked me in the face with it. It's so real-seeming, you so feel Gil's angst over the competing interests of making lots of money and artistic satisfaction, that after the final credits roll, you cannot wait to get back to work on your novel.


Have you seen it? Let me know what you thought of it if so.

R.I.P.

The Horrible Danger of Boredom

More than anything on this blog, I want to give you encouragement. Not give you advice so much: mostly I want to inspire and reassure you. Most of my language will be sheathed in writer-speak since I'm a writer and I don't know how to give, say, a firefighter encouragement to do a good job (other than, you know, avoid the fire). But you can take what I say and apply it to any number of jobs, hobbies, what have you.


I try to avoid giving you preachy advice because I've found that everyone approaches writing differently. I've cobbled together my approach over years of trial-and-error, so how can I expect you to take what I say as the end all, be all?


That said, I want to give you some advice.


I was watching Sofia Coppola's movie "Somewhere" last night, and from the first frame, my writer brain started blowing steamboat whistles of disapproval. Literally one minute into the movie, I was so bored that I wanted to turn off the TV. Three minutes in, I was locked in the fetal position. Five mintues in, I wished the house would crash down on me, ending my suffering.


What could be so bad, you ask? I kid you not, for the first five minutes of the movie, Stephen Dorff (the weirdly-cast star of the movie) gets into his Ferrari and drives around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around a dirt track. There's no music. No effects. Whole stretches of dead time where all you're staring at is a blank sky. It's the stupidest five minutes in film history, and it comes right at the beginning. Honestly, after that point the movie could've been Star Wars and I would've hated it.


It called to mind some wise advice a professor once gave me: he said that if I ever depicted a character being bored a story, I should NOT let the reader be bored by it. As academic as my teacher tried to be, some little speck of him understood that fiction writing, at bottom, is not neuroscience or astrophysics, it's not geology or anthropology: it's entertainment. To allow a reader to get bored is the worst mistake a writer can make.


"But if I want my book to be realistic, I have to include pockets of boredom," you might argue. "That's how life really is." Exactly! And it's from those pockets of boredom that we're trying to escape when we open a book. So don't, for crying out loud, let boredom seep into what is meant to be a form of escape.


This is what Coppola got hugely wrong with her movie. According to IMDB, the film is about a movie star named Johnny Marco (Dorff) being bored between projects. He takes care of his daughter, but a big priority of his is to stave off boredom between movies by partying and driving around in his fast car. Can you imagine pitching this film to a studio exec? "See, this movie is about boredom. That's why it's revolutionary!" No. A movie about boredom is bad enough: at least make the character's attempts at fighting it interesting. But no, this is cinéma vérité, where we have to feel Johnny's tedium, get inside his ennui and, in the end, wish for oblivion.


No, no, NOOO! All this does is make the audience bored. It's not deep, Sofia: it's just a waste of time. Which you never want your audience to come away thinking! I only watched 20 minutes of the movie, but within those 20 minutes, Johnny was shown either falling asleep or conked out in bed half a dozen times. Ugh. Stephen Dorff seems like a nice enough guy, but I don't want to watch him chain smoking and zonked out in his jeans for two hours.


Never, ever, on any account bore your audience. They have waaaaaay too many other things to be doing than reading your boring-ass book. If you want to be experimental, then have at it. Be the next Dos Passos or Gertrude Stein. Just don't expect anyone outside of a small, insular group of brainiacs to appreciate your work. For my money, you should want your reader to identify with heart-pounding moments, not moments of extreme boredom. Give this movie a pass, and please, please learn from it.

The Trap of Being Too Clever

Finger Wag Alert Level: 6


I just saw a trailer for a new Justin Timberlake movie (he's not annoying enough in music and on SNL, now he thinks he's an actor?) that has my head spinning. It's called "In Time" and it also stars Amanda Seyfried. From what I can gather, it's a near-future dystopian film where everyone has a cap put on
their lives of 25 years of age. After that, they kick it. So that people can gauge where they are in their life, each human has a digital-hologram-like countdown clock implanted on their wrist, and the numbers are ever descending. Once you hit 25, you can buy more time if you have the money, or you're dead meat.


Ok, mildly interesting. But here's where it gets dumb real fast.


In the interminable trailer I watched (note to trailer-makers: please keep trailers under 2 minutes; this one lasted a whopping 4 minutes!!), Timberlake (ugh) is a poor man who can't extend his life, and he's on the eve of his death birthday. So he runs away. Then he somehow meets a guy who has bought himself a century of more time, but some other bad guy wants that time, and Timberlake finds himself helping the century guy escape. *Pauses to take a breath* Ok, then the random century guy uploads his time to J.T. and then throws himself off a bridge.


Why? I guess because he doesn't want to be hounded by the bad guy. I don't know; the audio was bad.


Now J.T. has a century to live, but not really, because all these bad guys want to steal his time, including Cillian Murphy (who I happen to like). Did I forget anything? Oh yeah, J. to the T. ends up kidnapping some rich guy's daughter (Mamma Mia Seyfried) for some reason and holding her hostage so that people don't steal his life or whatever.


Ok, timeout. This has already gotten out of hand, and we're just talking about a trailer. Can you imagine sitting through a whole movie of this, trying to keep track of what the hell is going on? To me, this movie seems to have all the makings of the next "Inception", a movie I'm not afraid to say I hated from minute one. I know it makes you sound like you're not smart if you didn't enjoy it, if you didn't just love love love it, but I found Inception incredibly talky and, yes, totally impossible to follow. I felt like I was doing homework the whole time, and it wasn't fun.


As I said in an earlier post, don't be an imagination dictator. There's so much explaining in the "In Time" trailer that I almost fell asleep. "I'm kidnapping you because you'll help me to stay alive," J.T. intones at one point, trying really hard to seem deep and troubled (dude, you were in N'Sync--get over yourself). And there are a bunch of other expository lines like this that made me cringe.


Bottom line: it's too clever for its own good.


Remember "Blade Runner"? Sure there were some talky lines in there, but by-and-large, Ridley Scott trusted enough in the intelligence of his audience that they'd figure out what he was doing. He didn't feel the need to explain every little thing. And the movie is brilliant because of that.


This is a lesson us writers can take away from a pre-tragedy like "In Time": trust your audience. You don't have to explain every little thing. If you do, your reader will hate your guts. Because you're implicitly saying, "You're too dumb to get what my world is all about, so I'm going to run you through all of the bullet points."


Instead, let the drama speak for itself. Instead of Timberlake saying in his narration "I just want to wake up and not have to worry about my life winding down" or whatever dumb line he says, just show the clock on his arm. Show people--young people--dropping dead when their clock expires. Bang! You've just communicated to your audience that once people reach a certain young age, they die. And you didn't tell them. Show, don't tell--remember your third grade teacher telling you that?


Anyway, now I'm getting overly talky, so I'll leave you to the rest of your day. Good luck!

The Fighter

Why can't I stop thinking about Mark Wahlberg? There are a billion people without access to clean water, there are old widows being burned alive in India, and yet what does my mind keep gravitating to? That's right: Marky Mark. I just saw The Fighter the other day. It started out slow, I didn't really like it at first, but man, did it close with a bang. It's right up there with Rocky and Hoosiers and Raging Bull for me as one of the greatest sports movies. I've only seen it once, but holy smokes.

In the end, it was the "making of" portion of the DVD that put me over the top. Just the dedication involved in making the film baffles my mind. They spent four years on it from start to finish. Wahlberg made all of these other movies while he developed it as producer, namely "Max Payne", "The Lovely Bones", and a few others. The dude trained EVERY DAY for two hours, waking up at 4 A.M. in the morning and finishing at 6 A.M., and he did this for FOUR FRICKING YEARS!! In the behind-the-scenes snippets, he says he subjected himself to this regimen because they kept starting and stopping production, so at all times he wanted to look physically like he could be a world-class boxer. He even built a boxing ring at his house to train!

Wow, that's serious dedication. It inspired the hell out of me. It made me want to write and write until my fingers bleed. Seriously, do yourself a favor and see this movie. I thought it looked kinda dumb from the previews so I never saw it in the theaters, and now I'm kicking myself. It will inspire you, seeing where the character Mickey Ward (and his brother Dickie) came from and all they accomplished.

The Fighter

Why can't I stop thinking about Mark Wahlberg? There are a billion people without access to clean water, there are old widows being burned alive in India, and yet what does my mind keep gravitating to? That's right: Marky Mark. I just saw The Fighter the other day. It started out slow, I didn't really like it at first, but man, did it close with a bang. It's right up there with Rocky and Hoosiers and Raging Bull for me as one of the greatest sports movies. I've only seen it once, but holy smokes.

In the end, it was the "making of" portion of the DVD that put me over the top. Just the dedication involved in making the film baffles my mind. They spent four years on it from start to finish. Wahlberg made all of these other movies while he developed it as producer, namely "Max Payne", "The Lovely Bones", and a few others. The dude trained EVERY DAY for two hours, waking up at 4 A.M. in the morning and finishing at 6 A.M., and he did this for FOUR FRICKING YEARS!! In the behind-the-scenes snippets, he says he subjected himself to this regimen because they kept starting and stopping production, so at all times he wanted to look physically like he could be a world-class boxer. He even built a boxing ring at his house to train!

Wow, that's serious dedication. It inspired the hell out of me. It made me want to write and write until my fingers bleed. Seriously, do yourself a favor and see this movie. I thought it looked kinda dumb from the previews so I never saw it in the theaters, and now I'm kicking myself. It will inspire you, seeing where the character Mickey Ward (and his brother Dickie) came from and all they accomplished.

What I Learned from Last Night's Bachelorette

Whatever. Laugh at my post's title. I don't care. I watch the ABC show "The Bachelor/Bachelorette". A lot of you watch it and are too ashamed to admit it. I get that. My significant other got me into it a few years ago (I hated it at first, wanted to barf at the screen, but, much like Stockholm Syndrome, I have come to have empathy and even a little love for my captors). God help me, I enjoy watching fleets of men humiliate themselves for a shot at marrying a woman who inevitably reminds me of that girl I dated in high school and then, one week in, started faking illnesses to avoid.

For the uninitiated, last night marked the first episode of the 7th season of The Bachelorette. I'm not going to go into any more detail because, well, my grandkids may see this post someday, and I want them to have a shred of dignity left by the time they finish reading it. So anyway, here's my point: this guy Jeff, one of Ashley Hebert's (that's "Hebert" with a silent "H" and "t") potential love interests, entered the "mansion" last night wearing a facemask.

Not a SARS facemask. Or a catcher's mask. I'm talking a full-blown, Mardi-Gras-meets-Batman black mask that obscured half his face. It seemed creepy to me at first, as it did to several of the other men in the cattle herd. But as the night wore on (somewhere in the second hour of the show), I started to see his point. As guys bent themselves into pretzels pouting their lips and waxing faux-philosophic, Jeff lurked in the background, taking it all in.

During his confessionals, Jeff kept saying that we live in a society that puts so much emphasis on appearance that he wanted to take his own appearance out of the game. If he got a rose at the end of the night, he implied, it would be for the right reasons--because he's a person of substance--and not because he's some smoking hot GQ model. Which, judging by his hangdog cheeks and stubble, I doubt he is anyway.

Fast forward to 11:00 and Batman did indeed get a rose. I know it's stupid, but I felt good for the guy. I don't know if he'll take off his mask during the show (part of me hopes he doesn't, just because of how much it creeps the other stiffs out), but he made his point loud and clear.

And, even though there are a million more intellectually noble things I could be devoting brain space to, Jeff's stunt got me thinking. When indie authors pay to have a beautiful cover made, when they mount a well-designed marketing campaign, when they say all the right things on their guest blogging tour and post funny entries to their super-sleek website, to me, that's akin to what all the other Bachelorette contestents did last night: they gave Ashley gifts of wine bottles, they picked her up to show how manly they were, they recited (lame) poems to her as they furrowed their heavy brows. But not one of them said much of substance to her. They were just pretty ephemera.

But not Jeff.

Though the dude didn't say much (he pretty much just held up a mirror to the asses who panicked at how weird he was), he articulated exactly what a good book should do: he was different and he had a purpose for being different. You should do everything you can so that your book stands out, but make sure that once you've achieved the "standing out" part of your grand plan, the reader is rewarded by reading something spectacular. I only hope Jeff doesn't turn out to be Bruce Lame.

What I Learned from Last Night's Bachelorette

Whatever. Laugh at my post's title. I don't care. I watch the ABC show "The Bachelor/Bachelorette". A lot of you watch it and are too ashamed to admit it. I get that. My significant other got me into it a few years ago (I hated it at first, wanted to barf at the screen, but, much like Stockholm Syndrome, I have come to have empathy and even a little love for my captors). God help me, I enjoy watching fleets of men humiliate themselves for a shot at marrying a woman who inevitably reminds me of that girl I dated in high school and then, one week in, started faking illnesses to avoid.

For the uninitiated, last night marked the first episode of the 7th season of The Bachelorette. I'm not going to go into any more detail because, well, my grandkids may see this post someday, and I want them to have a shred of dignity left by the time they finish reading it. So anyway, here's my point: this guy Jeff, one of Ashley Hebert's (that's "Hebert" with a silent "H" and "t") potential love interests, entered the "mansion" last night wearing a facemask.

Not a SARS facemask. Or a catcher's mask. I'm talking a full-blown, Mardi-Gras-meets-Batman black mask that obscured half his face. It seemed creepy to me at first, as it did to several of the other men in the cattle herd. But as the night wore on (somewhere in the second hour of the show), I started to see his point. As guys bent themselves into pretzels pouting their lips and waxing faux-philosophic, Jeff lurked in the background, taking it all in.

During his confessionals, Jeff kept saying that we live in a society that puts so much emphasis on appearance that he wanted to take his own appearance out of the game. If he got a rose at the end of the night, he implied, it would be for the right reasons--because he's a person of substance--and not because he's some smoking hot GQ model. Which, judging by his hangdog cheeks and stubble, I doubt he is anyway.

Fast forward to 11:00 and Batman did indeed get a rose. I know it's stupid, but I felt good for the guy. I don't know if he'll take off his mask during the show (part of me hopes he doesn't, just because of how much it creeps the other stiffs out), but he made his point loud and clear.

And, even though there are a million more intellectually noble things I could be devoting brain space to, Jeff's stunt got me thinking. When indie authors pay to have a beautiful cover made, when they mount a well-designed marketing campaign, when they say all the right things on their guest blogging tour and post funny entries to their super-sleek website, to me, that's akin to what all the other Bachelorette contestents did last night: they gave Ashley gifts of wine bottles, they picked her up to show how manly they were, they recited (lame) poems to her as they furrowed their heavy brows. But not one of them said much of substance to her. They were just pretty ephemera.

But not Jeff.

Though the dude didn't say much (he pretty much just held up a mirror to the asses who panicked at how weird he was), he articulated exactly what a good book should do: he was different and he had a purpose for being different. You should do everything you can so that your book stands out, but make sure that once you've achieved the "standing out" part of your grand plan, the reader is rewarded by reading something spectacular. I only hope Jeff doesn't turn out to be Bruce Lame.

Indie Vs. Legacy Publishing Video

Here it is: indie publishing's effect on legacy publishing in one easy-to-follow video:

Indie Vs. Legacy Publishing Video

Here it is: indie publishing's effect on legacy publishing in one easy-to-follow video: