Go see it.  Now.  Turn off your computer.  Get in your car or a cab or on the subway, and get you and your loved ones to the nearest screening.  Unless you’re reading this on your iPhone or Blackberry inside the theater waiting for the movie to start, you are doing something wrong.  That is all.

5 comments | posted in Film

I finally saw this movie just before it left theaters in Phoenix, AZ.  It never came to the tiny Eastern Canadian berg where I used to reside, and the weekend it opened everywhere else, the one theater in town was still showing All About Steve.  I kid you not.  Before going into the movie itself, full disclosure.  I liked Whip It before I saw it simply because it was a movie clearly marketed towards women that wasn’t about getting married, finding a man, or proving that women who’ve gone through menopause still want to have sex, ie. nearly every movie Diane Keaton has starred in for the last five years.  For no other reason, I wanted to give this film my money, and I wish that more people had done the same because it’s sad that movies like this are few and far between.  Moving on.

Once we were introduced to the all the great characters in this movie, I was hooked.  It was just fun and smart enough, that the clumsier moments were easy to ignore.  Kristin Wiig was brilliant as the roller derbying single mom, and even when she said lines like, “Be your own hero,” she felt absolutely one hundred percent genuine.  The jean cut off wearing coach named Razor was another favorite.  His sheer frustration with the stoners and girls just out to have a good time who ignored him and his game changing plays was one of the funniest parts of the film.  It seemed like Ellen Page was trying very hard not to play Juno, but I found her character endearing anyway, and she and Alia Shawkat were great as loner best friends (oxymoron?) who worked part time at the Oink Joint. Jimmy Fallon’s character, the announcer at the roller derby rink, however, is the source of the one the most awkward and forced segments of the movie. (more…)

5 comments | posted in Film

The second issue of the comic I’ve been working on, The Sky Pirates of Neo Terra, came out this week, and it’s as pretty and awesome as the first if not awesomer. But don’t take my extremely biased word for it.  This issue got a glowing review over at comic book resources.  If you’re too lazy click the link, here’s my favorite part:

“This is a comic about children trying to save an adult from diabolical forces, but the kids are savvy — not cutesy savvy, but just good at what they do — and the character designs and clean storytelling make the whole thing a pleasure to read.”

Literally, since I was about seven, these have been my favorite kind of stories:  savvy as hell kids saving adults.  I think I may have to read The Talisman again.  Anyway, go buy it!  Go buy it!

no comments | posted in Comics

From what I’ve been hearing and reading over the past few days, the general reaction to the pilot episode of this re-boot is “Meh.”  I’m not saying I agree exactly, especially because I feel like the last ten or fifteen minutes really redeemed a lot of the episode’s early clunkiness, but I do think this hour of television was full of missed opportunities.

For one, I think that instead of resorting to cliches to quickly communicate characters and their relationships–the working single mom who’s teenage son blames her for driving his dad away because she wasn’t around, the guy trying to propose to his fiance while running from his dark past, the smarmy politician/journalist looking out for number one–they could have simply taken their time.  This is a show where aliens from another planet park their massive hover craft over every major city on earth and plan to gain the trust of earthlings through miracle cures and insane technology only to blow us to bits with their floating ball machine guns thingies.  If the script does a good job of introducing and setting all that up, we’ll tune in for a few weeks to learn who these people are.  (more…)

2 comments | posted in TV

Because writing compelling scripts is just too easy (I kid, I kid), I’m participating in this year’s NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month for those unfamiliar with this insane endeavor.  World wide, 100,000 masochists and dreamers attempt to pen a 50,000 word novel in a month.  What appeals to me about this is that the point is to get the words on paper without editing, censoring, second guessing, or any rewriting whatsoever.  Get to the end as quickly as possible and then see what you’ve got.

Script writing, for me anyway, is vastly different.  I easily spend a month on a one page outline before writing actual pages.  I just finished a half hour spec script, and I’m now sifting through premises and outlines for the next script.  But between trying to figure out what project makes sense to tackle next, figuring out the logistics of buying a car and finding an apartment when I need the car to apartment hunt and I need the address for the car insurance to get the car, and recovering from the jet lag that accompanies a move from the Canadian Maritimes to the American Southwest, tackling a new script feels a tad overwhelming.  While writing a 50,000 word novel doesn’t exactly sound easier, it seems the perfect thing to do to shake things up during these tumultuous times.  I have no outline and no idea where it’s going, but I get to write a couple pages of prose a day instead of cutting prepositional phrases just to get an act break to happen on page 12 instead of page 13.

Either it will be incredibly rewarding, or I’ll get so frustrated that I happily dive into the next script.  Or perhaps like the PhD student I know who’s participating in NaNoWriMo while working on her dissertation, I’ll try to do both at once.  I like coffee.

1 comment | posted in Writing