Twenty-eight!
Dec/091
It’s getting kind of hard to believe things are going to get better.
I’ve been drowning too long to believe that the tide’s going to turn.
And I’ve been living too long to believe that things are going to get easier now.
I’m still trying to shake off the pain from the lessons I’ve learned.
(I always wanted to start a post off with a quote, makes me seem interesting.)
My “journey” to twenty eight years old was not exactly what I had in mind, but it’s not exactly one that I wouldn’t choose again if I had the chance. There’s really nothing I like more in my life than being proven wrong. For instance on Miller Park Drunk I have come out strongly against their new center fielder, Carlos Gomez, and that is something that I would love to be proven wrong on. It’s not fun if I am right about them not being good because of this guy. Being right about things isn’t really all it’s cracked up to be and that sums up my entire 27 years of life in a nutshell. I have always thought I knew better than what people told me, I have always thought I was the smartest and I have always thought I had it all figured out, yet time and time again I have been proven wrong. You’d think that would suck, but I’m really happy about it. If you’ve been around me for five seconds you can probably tell that I think my entire life is a movie and the tagline I’d have to use would be something ridiculous like “sometimes you have to lose everything to find out what truly matters” or “sometimes everything you ever wanted turns out to be not what you wanted at all” or even, my personal favorite, “sometimes what you’ve spent your whole life looking for turns out to be right in front of your eyes”. (It’s pure Oscar bait and I love it.)
GOALS
Nov/090
I have been thinking about the notion of having goals lately. I have never been a person who plans that far ahead in life or sets goals with deadlines. In my experience every time I have tried, it hasn’t worked out as I planned it to. This isn’t to say that I don’t have goals, just that they don’t really mean anything. Here’s a few goals that I have.
- Own a BMW: BMW’s are awesome, one of the finest cars you can possibly drive. I’d like to drive one.
- Buy a house.
- Take all my friends to Disney World: I have this memory of my whole family (my parents, my cousins and their parents) and a few of my parent’s friends all going down to Disney World when I was a kid and I just think it would be awesome to recreate that experience with my friends because, well, we are a lot more fun. Also, Disney World is awesome.
- Be a guest on the Adam Carolla Podcast: I think I’m a funny guy, but if this ever happened I would have undeniable proof.
- Sell a screenplay: This has been a goal of mine since I was 17 years old and it will remain a goal of mine until the day it is accomplished, no matter what.
Looking at that list these are all decent goals, right? Maybe a little farfetched, but definitely some things to strive for. The thing is if I were to accomplish #5, the rest would be pretty damn easy to accomplish because they are all tied into money and success. Without money, I am not going to get to drive a BMW and that’s just the way it is. Does that make these bad goals? Does that make me a failure if I never accomplish any of them? I don’t think so, but if I did accomplish them all it’d be pretty fucking awesome wouldn’t it? In the end that’s why I set them and set them so high because if I don’t accomplish them I can live with that and still be happy, but if I do accomplish them it will be the coolest thing ever and we’ll all go to Disney World.
The One Where I Say Too Much About Dating
Oct/090
In the past few months I have become INCREDIBLY anti-relationship. I think there are a lot of reasons for this. For one almost every one of my friends that is in a relationship is not around as much as they used to be. This is sort of a necessary evil to the relationship process. I understand it and I can appreciate it, but I don’t have to like it. What really bothers me though is the way that they change the way that they are after getting into a relationship. You like football? Get a girlfriend and all the sudden you prefer spending your Sundays at Michaels. Your favorite movie is 300? Get a girlfriend and your favorite movie suddenly stars Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson or, in other words, it sucks. You are probably reading this and thinking I am a moron for saying these things, but there is no way in hell my buddy watches Jon and Kate Plus 8 without a girlfriend. Carpenters don’t watch that sort of thing unless there is a girl making them watch that. It’s just a fact of life. So, yeah, not the biggest fan of the whole girlfriend experience.
Now, this isn’t to say that everyone in the world has a bad relationship or that I don’t think a good relationship exists. It’s just that they are very few and far between. I think that for it to work someone would need to inherently “get” me. For it to work in my situation we’d definitely have to be friends and you definitely wouldn’t judge me. To date, I don’t believe that this has ever actually happened. Well, except for that one time that it did.
Southland Tales
Jul/090
If there was ever a movie tailor made for me, it would be Southland Tales. The Rock, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake and Sean William Scott? YES and PLEASE. Honestly, if someone gave me $20 million dollars and told me to make a movie I am pretty sure I would call those four immediately (and maybe Mandy Moore if I needed another girl, who btw is in this movie too) and beg them to be in my movie. Yet, somehow someone managed to put those four (five) in a movie and it sucked. Bad.
I recently watched it for a second time to see if it was better and it wasn’t. It was still bad. Some people who saw this movie didn’t “get it”, didn’t get the point of the plot. I got it and I still hated it. It’s not a very good screenplay which actually doesn’t surprise me at all. Some people think that Richard Kelly is one of the best young screenwriters out there. Those people would be wrong. (For one, you can’t be considered a great screenwriter if you don’t understand how people talk.) Look at his history:
Donnie Darko: Beloved movie, which I think a lot of was due to people not “getting it” the first time they watched it. Like the Sixth Sense type of thing. This really had nothing to do with Richard Kelly because if you watch the director’s cut everything is explained a lot more clearly and some of the movie’s mystery disappears.
Domino: I actually read his draft of the script which had all of the characters from 90210 in it (the idea was that Domino, based on her history, should have been like a character in 90210 and not like she really was) and this was a pretty creative idea. Once that was taken away though, the movie doesn’t really have a great story to stand on. It has too many characters and too many intertwining plots to be what it aspires to me. It is my favorite of Richard Kelly’s movies though, but maybe that’s because it’s the one time Tony Scott’s crazy camerawork actually fit the material.
And finally, this movie. This movie is way too long, has way too many characters, has way too many plots and needs way too much narration to explain what is going on. Robert McKee, the screenplay guru, hates narration and in the movie Adaptation described it like this “God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends. God help you. That’s flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write a voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character.” Which is exactly the problem with this movie. For as visually stunning as this movie attempts to be, it doesn’t follow the one simple rule of film and screenwriting “show not tell”. If you got rid of Justin Timberlake’s character in this movie you would have no idea what is going on. This movie is BUILT on voice-over. It wouldn’t survive without it and that’s why it shouldn’t be a movie.
When the best way you can describe a movie is “this guy is found in the desert and he doesn’t remember anything so he hooks up with a porn star and there is this other guy and neo-Marxists and this drug/energy source called fluid karma and there are like all these crazy government rules and Republicans are bad and this kid who gets drafted and…”, it’s not a good movie. To describe this movie you need to say the word and about 40 times. I don’t really see how this movie got from pitch to production honestly. Just because Donnie Darko was a cult hit, doesn’t mean you give someone a ton of money and let them make whatever they want.
The crazy thing about Southland Tales is it might go from bad to okay if you cut about 40 minute off of it. Get rid of the Neo-Marxists for the most part, get rid of Justin Timberlake and make the movie almost completely about The Rock and Sean William Scott. Nothing else. Then you might have a good movie. Instead, Richard Kelly made this movie SHORTER than the cut he released at Cannes. Oof.
The sad thing about the whole deal is this is the movie that I want The Rock to be in. This is the kind of stuff that I want him doing. Crazy, creative stuff that could be awesome and allows him to show his full range of charisma, but after this epic fail he won’t do it. Not again. He knows where his bread is buttered and that’s at Disney so that’s where we’ll be seeing him for a long, long time. It’s kind of sad. For that, I will always hate you Richard Kelly.
PS: Sometimes I surprise myself with how much I actually know about screenwriting. I should probably get into that again since I am about a 500x better writer than I was five years ago.