Remake Despondency

Reasons to make a remake:
1. If the first one was bad but the story had potential
2. If the first one was good but too loaded with pop culture from another time or place to make sense for this audience
3. The first one was good for its time but the special effects sucked and you can do better

But why in the world would you try to remake something that's already good?

I put to you the example of Death at a Funeral, which is a modern British comedy that Americans remade with Chris Rock. What was wrong with the first one?

And now my current peeve, Arthur. Can you really cast anyone but Dudley Moore as Arthur? I'm not saying the new movie is going to be bad even if it does star Russell Brand, but what in the world do they hope to accomplish in making another one? (article)

And what about State of Play? I just rented the British one from the library and it's really good! I had low expectations. I only rented it for the reason I bought Tuesday--Life on Mars sentimentality as it is John Simm and Philip Glenister together again. But even though the genre is not my cup of tea--a political thriller--it's actually really captivating. And what a cast! You've got the chief of police Philip Glenister versus head of the newspaper Bill Nighy. What a combo. And then you get the stars John Simm and David Morissey, plus Kelly Macdonald from The Merry Gentleman, James McAvoy from Wanted, and Simm's buddy Marc Warren. What do you need to remake it with Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck for?



Film Industry, we know you've already sold your soul, but just stay away from Hitchcock and Jimmy Stewart movies, okay?

ohmygod new technology. wot?

What is this magic software that can do this? I am in awe. But I am in awe about most technology. Yesterday the guy that does all our tech work came in and made my computer run faster and made it so it logs me in instead of the girl who doesn't work here anymore like it used to do and oh yeah made it so I can access my work computer from home. I don't understand but I am in awe.



Rules like punctuation and capitalization and run-on sentences have gone out the window for this post because style is meant to reflect state of mind, yes?

A Social Media Blog

A lot of people have been asking my opinion about WordPress lately. I've never actually used it. From what I could tell, it is more involved--you can basically do whatever you want with the code to create your own look--and you have more freedom. But I decided I should try it out myself and I found I was right. It's very complicated because there's just so much you can do, and it uses a lot of terms that WordPress has made up. I was a little lost at first, but then I read the instructions and it makes perfect sense now.

So, I started a blog on WordPress called socialmediaforauthors.wordpress.com aka Spirit Guide 3.0. There's not much on it, but I have a list of things I want to cover. That way, when authors (either at work or if I start freelancing) have specific questions, I can send them a link to a specific post on my blog that explains everything.

Stuff on TV

Torchwood news. More details are coming out about next season's characters. Speaking of Torchwood, just found out that Naoko Mori (Tosh on Torchwood) is going to play Yoko Ono opposite Christopher Eccleston (the 9th Doctor) in the upcoming Lennon Naked movie.

It looks like OUTCASTS will be airing on BBC America at the same time as it's on the BBC in UK. It's sort of an Earth 2 meets Firefly. I hope it's good.

Dead Like Me creator Bryan Fuller has just signed on to adapt John Christopher (author of The Tripods novels) novel "The Lotus Caves" into a tv series for SyFy Channel.

An Idiot Abroad premiers Sept. 5 in UK. New promo:

My first Broadway play

Stanley Tucci's taller than me. What gives?

I got a 50% off coupon to see Lend Me a Tenor from a co-worker. It was still expensive, but I knew it must be a sign because I wanted to see this show since it first came out. Our high school did it, so I know the story's funny. Also it stars Tony Shalhoub and Justin Bartha! I'm really glad I went. It was the funniest show I've ever seen. The biggest applause came when Shalhoub backward kicks a chair and it slides across the stage and right into its spot under the desk. Shalhoub goes "You're too kind." And he gets a bigger applause. So he finally glances back to see where the chair landed and then turns back to us and goes "I know." A riot of a show. So much talent. This was Justin Bartha's first show and he carried it so well, from weasely sounding Max to Italian opera singer impersonator. Bravo all!

After the show, I went to the stage door. There were already a bunch of people there, so I wasn't very close and therefore completely missed getting an autograph or picture with Justin Bartha. How devestating! But then it started raining and the crowd thinned a bit. The other actors came out and I got some autographs from them.

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Then to everyone's shock, Stanley Tucci comes out and starts signing autographs! How amazing is that?

We had to wait an hour after the show before Tony Shalhoub came out. Real nice guy, but I could tell he was tired, and I think his voice needs a rest, so I didn't try to get a photo with him like everyone else. I got his autograph though!









Top: Anthony LaPaglia
Left: Brooke Adams
Right in purple: Stanley Tucci
Bottom: Mary Catherine Garrison

Tony was smart enough to sign inside the playbill because it was raining.

Who is this person in this picture. Squint real hard. Can you tell?

It's only Eddie Izzard. Not kidding. He brushed past me on his way out and hardly anyone reacted! Very strange.



More pictures on my FACEBOOK ALBUM


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New Story: A Rose for Grandpa

I finally was able to complete a story. It's inspired by that news story I read a few weeks about about the oldest man in Tokyo. I'm really excited about it, probably because I've had writers block for SO LONG. The last thing I wrote was Burbank with a Baedeker, and I finished that months ago. Since then, I've been starting and stopping novels and short stories, always seeing the flaws in either plot or style and getting tired of it. Finally here's something accomplished. Here lies Writers Block. Stay dead.

Anyway, you can read my story (first draft) on my writers blog. Enjoy!

New Utter Shambles episodes

Two of my favorite comedians Robin Ince and Josie Long have a podcast together. Their first season was called Show-and-Tell. The second season was called Robin Ince's Utter Shambles. And now a third season is called Robin and Josie's Utter Shambles. I'm excited that they've chosen to do a third series. Episode one just went live yesterday! You can listen to it for free on Comedy Central Online.

The premise of the show is Robin, Josie, and their guest bring in an artifact which inspires conversation. This rarely happens as they all tend to get sidetracked and don't get around to anything they planned to say. But it's funny to listen to. I still stand by that the best episode is episode 6 of Show-and-Tell.

Episode one of series three wasn't the best episode ever, maybe because I had high expectations. It guest starred Alan Moore of the comic world: V for Vendetta, Watchmen, etc. They started by talking about something I didn't understand. I generally don't know Robin's references anyway. I don't know if this was a cultural gap or a generation gap. But eventually the topic moved on to how do you define whimsy, people pretending to be you on the internet (Alan said someone online pretended to be him and said he hates children and he had an identity crisis, wondering if he was really Alan Moore at all), and parents buying you things you don't want that are loosely related to your interests (like Robin's mom knew he liked comedy, so she got him a white knitted sweater with a picture of Charlie Chaplin's face on it).

The best bit was when Alan says "When you invited me onto this show, I was worried you wanted me to be your Karl Pilkington. You two would discuss something and then go 'Alan, what do you think?' and I'd say [puts on Northern accent] 'Do you think a crocodile could evolve from a stapler?'" (I love that Karl Pilkington is a household name now.) To which Josie responds, "I'm perfectly aware of my role in this podcast." As Robin has pointed out, all she really did in the last series was occassionally say something random and eat fruit loudly.

What's up, Torchwood?

Here's a bit of news this week on the TV series Torchwood. Earlier this year, FOX was going to remake Torchwood for American audiences, but still produced by Torchwood producer Russel T Davies and starring Torchwood star John Barrowman. However, in April FOX dropped the idea. With such an extremely liberal show, can you blame them? This is a relief.

However, next summer there will be a fourth season (10 episodes) that takes place in the US and other parts of the world. It's still produced by Davies and co. and still starring John Barrowman, Eve Miles, and Kai Owen. Title at the moment: The New World. Is it normal for people to put a title on a season? I understand that season 3 was Children of Earth because it's a mini-series. Sounds like this is a 10-hour plotline as opposed to stand-alone episodes. Sounds epic. But they're playing it on Starz. Don't you have to pay for that? :(

Here's the article.

Good things and bad things

Bad Things

• Spending Sunday night watching the Director's Cut of DayWatch only to find they didn't change a dang thing. What, do you have to watch it in Russian to see the differences? I may not have this film memorized shot-for-shot, but I know it pretty well.
• Some teenager trying to run me over with his car and then laughing about it
• Waking up at midnight last night to the sound of the cat rolling a tampon under my door. wtf, mate. But I did laugh pretty hard.

Good Things

• Church picnic
• Watching some guy standing in the doorway at work struggling with a full-size plastic skeleton
• After a long writers block, I'm writing again
• I just bought 50% off tickets to see Lend Me a Tenor on Broadway (closing night) starring Tony Shaloub (Monk) and Justin Bartha (National Treasure) for this Sunday.

NightWatch Director's Cut

I watched the director's cut of NightWatch, a favorite film of mine. I'll probably watch the director's cut of the sequel DayWatch tomorrow.

The differences were interesting. At first, I wasn't thinking the changes warranted a special release, but then we started getting characters and full scenes that weren't in the original. Here are some of the bigger changes:

• Anton has visions of the future. In the theatrical release, we see inside his head when he has these visions (like when he's on the subway and sees Sveta for the first time, we see that he has a vision of a plane crashing). In this version, all we see is Anton screaming a lot.


• However, when the data analyst is looking up the weather, he sees a future version of the website and reads that a plane will crash, so this is how we get that information. In the theatrical release, he saw on the weather page that there was a tornado warning. There is only one mention of a tornado warning later in the movie, but there is no real tornado, just the vortext which looks like a tornado of crows.


• We continuously come back to a married couple who are on the plane. These characters were not in the theatrical version. I don't know how necessary it is, but it helps us connect and care about the safty of the plane more.


• Yegor is watching some cartoon show instead of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I think it makes sense that he's watching Buffy because in the next scene, you can see he's widdled himself a stake.


• Ignat. Ignat is a character in the books that is just as important as Seymon or Tigercub and Bear. He's not in the theatrical release at all. This entire subplot was missing, but they never really wrap it up in the director's cut, so maybe that's why they left it out. Ignat is this magician who seems to make people better just by being near him. Women fall in love with him a lot. In the movie, he's already given up the world of others, planning to get married to a girl, but Seymon practically kidnaps him to make him go woo Sveta and find out who cursed her. This scene is straight out of the book. He attempts to get close to her, but fails. In the movie, he fails because he is thinking about his fiancee. As soon as Sveta finds out he's engaged, we see the plane's power go out. This shows a direct connection between Sveta's mood and the safty of the plane, which we didn't really get without this scene.


• Also, in the grocery store, we see something from the books that isn't in the movie anywhere else: Ignat uses low-level magic to shift a shoplifter's morals slightly in the Light's favor, which is mostly prohibited. I did get a kick out of that the shoplifter was an elderly man stealing grapes instead of some kid.


• The biggest difference is that Anton knows that Yegor is his son right from when he finds out that his ex-wife is his mother. In this version, he had overheard the others saying to the fortune teller "Why did you lie to him. You knew it was his child." So Anton's known for 12 years he has a son? In the theatrical version, he hadn't heard that. He doesn't hear that until watching a video clip on the computer later on in the movie. This makes way more sense because I don't think he would have left Yegor alone if he knew he was his own son and not the son of his ex and her lover.


• The music in the credits was in Russian, but I think it was a song specifically about NightWatch. I could hear the repeated words like "Gorodetsky, vampire, Svetlana, Zabulon, and other character names." I wonder if there's a translation in lyrics somewhere. [edit: yep, here it is.]
  
• There are other differences, but mostly just the way scenes are cut together.

There was also a making of on this disc that I had not seen before. It's interesting to hear that they were all worried about this film because a lot of people's reputations were on the line. And then it turns out to be a box office smash. Also, it was interesting that so many actors took the good/evil thing so seriously. Daria actually said that if her character was a fraud fortune teller, she'd do it, but if she was a real one, she wouldn't do it because what if she says these magic words and something really did happen in real life? And the reason they picked Zhanna to play Alica, the evil girl, was because she wasn't an actress, but a pop star, someone who is a "seductress of the masses" so she could play evil and not have to worry about it. What a strange thing to say! And I didn't know this was her first acting gig. She gives an awesome performance in DayWatch.

Come on, you know this trailer is awesome:

Tuesday

So, I finally watched Tuesday, a movie I've been waiting for for years, and overall, I was disappointed. The acting was fine, the directing was fine, but the writing? Now, don't get me wrong: within the scenes, it wasn't too bad. Dialogue was believable, etc. But A) We didn't get very in depth with the characters and B) What was that ending? I'll get to the ending in a minute.

What's it about: Three...well technically four...groups of people all decide to rob the same bank on the same day at about the same time. We know from the start someone stole the emerald, but we don't know who until the end.

Structure. The movie is set up to allow little twists to show up every time we see a scene again. It jumps around in time a lot. Mostly that doesn't get confusing. Each time we see a scene again, we see it from a different person's perspective and get another piece of the puzzle, like the movie Vantage Point but not quite as repetitive. We know they're all trying to steal the emerald, but we're not sure which one got away with it. We get each character in the police interrogation room, we see each of them planning their scheme, and we see each one on the crime scene. So it's a good structure to that extent.

However, this is the shortest movie ever. No wonder it only cost 4 pounds. They have a three-act story here and they stop at the end of act 2! Things were just starting to take shape. The ball never drops. We find out who has the emerald, but not if he/she gets away with it, what he/she does with it, if the others get blamed, etc. There's all these loose ends--Will Silver and Angie ever confess to each other that they're bank robbers? What's the deal with Billy and Angie--is there jealousy there? WHAT'S GOING ON?

Also, I mistook this for an action movie. I assumed because it was a heist movie, it would be action and a bit of comedy like the Italian Job or something, but there's no action and no comedy. I mean, on the whole, it's okay--I wasn't annoyed while the movie was going on. I wish they would have...you know...finished writing the script.

But I have to say, the cover art on this movie is probably my favorite cover art. Actually, the whole movie's quite arty if you look. The first scene is done in stills and voice overs. Have not seen that before, at least not for such a long length of time. But it was kind of cool.

And it stars John Simm and Philip Glenister. Sam and Gene back together again, even if this time they're on the other end of the law.

Just today and things

Work is very fast-paced, which is good. I had literally 50 things on my Things to Do List that I just started yesterday. But good stuff is happening. Today we found out we're getting one of our authors on TV to talk about John Lennon's death. I chatted with one of my authors who is also a sci-fi writer. We're trying to select a famous comedian to write a forward to one of our books. Oh and I had a nice long conversation with the delightful guitar tech for Pink Floyd. Never a dull day.

I showed up to my first meeting at the local writers group (this is a different one than the one I go to in Manhattan). They seem really nice and really in tune with working hard to become better writers and legitimately supporting each other in it. Click here for my thoughts on our poetry workshop tonight.

I ordered stuff off Amazon.co.uk. I don't understand why it's so cheap. I think I got 3 movies for under $15 and the shipping wasn't that bad. Came in the mail today. Anyway, so you'll be getting reviews soon from me on Tuesday, a movie I've been dying to see for like two years, as well as the director's cut of NightWatch and DayWatch, and Robin Ince's new book.

Playlist.com

I've just discovered playlist.com, which I THINK allows you to listen to any playlist I create without you needing an account. I'm not really sure, so let's try it. Click play and see if it works. If it does, you have some great music to listen to that I just put together for you. These songs are good, I know already, but I'm using the site to create playlists of music I haven't heard before, which is quite exciting because it's free. And legal as far as I can tell because like Pandora, you can listen to music, but you can't download it for free.