Derry, Northern Ireland

Derry, Northern Ireland
A book I'm working on is set in this town.

Sunday, July 6, 2014

Of course...

I went through the printout of CK with a red pen, today, mainly to get a feel for the flow...and sure enough, I forgot something. I learned years ago from a couple of men who'd actually written and worked in film and television is that there are certain scenes which are just plain obligatory in your project. They may not be the same from one to the next, but once you read the script you'll know if it's missing because anything after that will fall flat.

Well...the obligatory scene I neglected, and by deliberate intent, was the one explaining exactly why Carli goes after these guys. Not her verbal explanation, but an actual visual representation of it. She has a video on her phone of what happened that night, but it's incomplete. I thought I could get away with hinting at it here and referring to it there...but that didn't work. I need a scene where Carli finds out she didn't know everything about that night that drove her sister to suicide, and that it's worse than even she imagined.

In short, I need to show it. Otherwise the whole revenge thing becomes lame.

Of course, that meant adding a couple more scenes in to set up the revelation better. So I noted where they need to go. The nice thing about having a hard copy of the script is being able to quickly jump back and forth on the pages. Maybe it's old-fashioned, but it worked. Now I'm letting it sit overnight.
I had a ton of ironing to do so watched Magic Mike. I'm a big fan of Steven Soderberg's naturalistic style, and I figured any movie with Joe Mangianello, Alex Pettyfer and Matt Bomer would be fun to look at (I bought it on special at a truck stop, about a year ago). OMG, it has the same storyline as Saturday Night Fever, which I thought was trite in 1977. It even has the same damned ending shot!

I'll grant that Channing Tatum's good-looking, but he's too Wonder Bread for me. And I stopped liking Matthew McConaughey when he did that series of dumb-blond-boy-man movies, years ago. It struck me his manner of acting has become "open mouth or close mouth or grin." Unfortunately, they got the lion's share of the naked torso shots. Plus Alex Pettyfer came across as a lot older than 19, even though he was only 22 at the time...and his acting was very surface. And here we have a movie about male strippers but not one of them is gay, nor are there any gay characters in it, at all.

What's really sad about this is, I didn't believe a minute of it. There's one huge deal concerning drugs and a sorority that was handled so unrealistically, I damn near turned the DVD off. This is from Steven Soderberg, who did amazing films like The Limey and Traffic and Erin Brockovich and Ocean's Eleven. Maybe I was expecting too much from him doing a male-stripper movie; it's rather like Orson Welles doing The Sound of Music -- interesting, but no way in hell could that work.

Damn, I wish he hadn't.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

You turn me on ;)

JamTheCat said...

Nice I do that for somebody. Too bad she's not Joe Mangianello.