Bumping Around the Blogs
Billy Mernit provides this nice analysis of Duplicity, the Julia Roberts — Clive Owen rom-com that debuted last weekend:
Personally, I wish it had more of an emotional charge — I can understand how this kind of heady, brain-teaser of a picture can leave some people cold — but it’s a nifty ride: shamelessly glamorous, near-seamlessly constructed, and possessed of an unusual ability to keep one guessing up until its final moments. I have a feeling it’s the kind of durable, deftly-crafted feature that will inspire more affection over time. After Michael Clayton, my pick for The Great Underrated Classic of the 2000s, I had way too high expectations for Mr. Gilroy. But how much do we want to beat up on the guy for being… entertaining?
Blake Snyder with a provocative post titled “Sex Doesn’t Sell”:
Recent releases that have a sexual element in their concept such as F.U. and Miss March have failed to connect. The Jonas Brothers movie, noted for its attempt to titilate its Tween audience, fizzled after an initial modest premiere. And even high-brow fare such as The Reader received criticism for its subject matter.
What’s going on? Is sex at the movies dead or do we just all have a headache?
Christian Toto has this interview with movie critic and film professor Barry Wurst:
WWTW: What films resonate the most with students? What common reasons do they give for their choices? Any surprises?
BW: The titles they reveal are sometimes surprising, though most of the films are 15-years old, tops. Among of the ones I’ve heard repeatedly over the past couple of years include “American Beauty,” “Diary of a Mad Black Woman,” “Fight Club,” “Boondock Saints,” “The Lord of the Rings,” “Goodfellas,” “The Fountain,” “Scream,” “You’ve Got Mail,” “Donnie Darko”, “Gladiator,” “Hocus Pocus” and “The Matrix”.
Nikki Finke weighs in with her perspective on the recent dust-up between Ms. Finke and Peter Bart at the Daily Variety:
Since I did not sign a non-disclosure agreement, I am free to tell Hollywood the following: On February 27th, Neil Stiles, the president and publisher of Variety Group, called me saying Reed Business Information CEO Tad Smith was pushing him to discuss an acquisition of my site.
The situation has even hit the front page of Huffington Post.
John August takes a simple 10 word sentence and grows it into a 151 word monster per his post “Growing Sentences”. Here’s the 10 word sentence:
John said he wanted to play ball, but instead he sat on the couch and played videogames.
And here’s the 151 word expanded sentence:
When asked by his little sister Bella, a ginger-haired suburban cherub with two make-believe Lipizzaners and little yellow lepidopterae on her Old Navy jean shorts, John definitely said he wanted to play some ball — he told her where to find his well-oiled Nokona mitt and, specifically, his second-best athletic shoes (the Nikes) — yet seemed unaware that Albuquerque’s ghost-white sun was charting its ecliptic path across the sky and sinking below the foothills as he sat on the faded orange velvet couch and played Fallout 3, his left heel resting on the face of Kristen Stewart, who graced the cover of a month-old Entertainment Weekly which was in turn resting on Pottery Barn’s cheapest ottoman, John’s calf and hairy toes flexing at the most thrillingly perilous and/or maddeningly difficult showdowns with the Super Mutants of Vault 87 in pursuit of the Geck, a device he wasn’t sure he even wanted.
Read John’s post to see how you can shift from screenwriting brevity to novelistic overwriting.
With the farewell episode of “Battlestar Galactica” airing last week, Lee Goldberg takes a trip down memory lane and provides his list of the “The Best Finales”:
The Fugitive
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Newhart
MASH
Larry Sanders
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
Boston Legal
The West Wing
Cheers
The Paper Chase
Inspector Morse
Read Goldberg’s post to see his other list: Worst Series Enders.
Anne Thompson provides a pictorial overview of her coverage of the recent SXSW Film Fest in Austin, TX:
Alexander the Last was one of the SXSW indie standouts: co-star Amy Seimetz stands in line for St. Nick at the Alamo Drafthouse with Australian actor-director Matthew Newton of Three Blind Mice, which along with Alexander the Last was one of four IFC Films premiering on VOD concurrent with their March 14 showings at SXSW. IFC is now going to give Alexander the Last a run at the IFC Center to boost its post-fest profile. The NYT’s David Carr uses Alexander the Last to lay out the digital distribution scene. The NYT review of that movie sets a precedent for covering movies not tied to a theatrical opening. Most major newspaper critics can’t deal with the volume of direct-to-dvd or VOD releases.
Any Bollywood fans out there? Todd Alcott could use help:
A new project has crossed my desk, one which will require me to familiarize myself with the Bollywood musical, a genre which with I am utterly unfamiliar. And so I turn to you, my hip, multiculturally-saturated readers, to educate me. What are the landmarks of the genre, the key works, the inarguable masterpieces? Who are the undisputed masters, whose filmography is unmissable, which stars express the purest expression of the form? As James Cameron is to action movies, as John Ford is to westerns, as Vincent Minnelli is to musicals, who best represents Bollywood?
I thank you in advance.
And finally Robin Kelly posts “10 Steps to Writing a Horror Screenplay”. Here are the first three:
1. The Hook. Start with a bang. Step right into a suspense scene. (”Scream” opens with a terrifying sequence with Drew Barrymore on the phone with a killer)
2. The Flaw. Introduce your hero. Give him a flaw. Before you can put your hero in jeopardy we must care for him. We must want our hero to succeed. So make him human. (In “Signs” Mel Gibson plays a priest who has lost his faith after his wife died)
3. The Fear. A variant of The Flaw. The hero has a fear. Maybe a fear of heights, or claustrophobia. (In “Jaws” Roy Scheider has a fear of water. At the end he has to conquer his fear by going out onto the ocean to kill the shark)
You can view the original blog post here at Proof Positive.com.
Blog on!