Mike King

downside

Neil Gaiman wrote this in his introduction to Jonathan Carrol’s website :

Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry.

As an aspiring writer of stuff, I’m unsettled by this. For me, it’s already happened to some extent with movies and visual effects.

I used to love just about every movie that came down the pike and all special effects were special. But after I got into the business, I grew more jaded and picky with each passing year. Now it’s hard for me to watch any sort of visual effect without unconsciously checking for flaws or thinking about technique. It’s that sort of thing that has helped me be good at what I do — that attention to detail. And while I can keep those thoughts in the background, they’re still there. Only on rare occasions do I find myself getting sucked into a film if there’s any sort of visual effects or CG taking the stage.

So I’m worried that what Mr. Gaiman says will come true. I read voraciously. I’ve been going to the library lately and bringing home a backpack full of books and plowing through them. (And Laura will be happy to know I’m finally reading more than just sci-fi and fantasy novels these days.) As I learn more about writing and and become more aware of technique– well, I’m a bit scared to think that trying to be a writer will destroy my refuge and sanctuary: enjoying a good book.

Oh, and on my last trip to the library I managed to find the graphic novels Sandman: Endless Nights and Sandman: World’s End. The upside: I am totally inspired to write. The downside: I despair that I will never write anything as good.

Angel writing duo

A profile of Angel staff writers Sarah Fain and Elizabeth Craft can be found here.

Harold Ramis

Harold Ramis can take the blame for shaping my idea of what a comedy movie should be. Stripes. Ghostbusters. Groundhog Day. The New Yorker did a feature on him lately. It’s a good read.

Returner

What do you get when you mix The Terminator, E.T., and The Matrix? You might get something like Returner, a Japanese live-action film released on DVD earlier this year.

Basic plot: The year is 2084 and Earth is at war with the Daggra, a mysterious race of aliens. A girl goes back in time to the year 2002 to prevent the war from happening. She meets a hitman, whom she coerces into helping her.

I had fun watching this movie. Be warned that it’s over the top and cheesy, so be in the right mood should you decide to watch it. The story is mostly predictable, but still entertaining. They won’t win any awards for originality, but the characters and details of the tale were engaging enough to have kept me watching.

I was surprised to find that the movie mixed Japanese, Chinese, and English throughout.
In the future, everyone speaks English, but you kind of wish they wouldn’t. Because everyone suddenly enunciates every word very carefully — even during a tense gun battle.

The cinematography is beautiful and the visual effects are done really well for the budget. The CG is easily better than most stuff we see on T.V., and as good or better than some major Hollywood releases. I’d place the quality somehwere in Battlefield Earth territory, but with much cooler flair. The Japanese love of design and style push these FX beyond the quality of execution.

The characters never quite break out of their stereotypes, which is a shame, but sometimes they come close. The action sequences are fun, well-choreographed, and they pull of some nice gun-fu.

Returner is anime done with live-action, right down to the psychotic bad guy with the funny colored spiky hair.

And I am curious what the budget was. Cause in the U.S., this would probably be a $30 million movie, even if someone like Robert Rodriguez made it.

busy weekend

A busy Easter weekend. Yesterday was pretty much just relaxing, eating good food, and hanging out.

Saturday I spent working on a screenplay with my brother. He’s trying to finish it under a pretty tight deadline, so we talked over a lot of plot points, character arcs, and structure. Got Act One outlined and some of the major events of Act Two figured out. Act Three is minimal, but we did figure out how we wanted things to resolve for the main characters.

Collaborating is a lot more fun than writing alone! It was still hard work, but was enjoyable to bounce ideas and possibilities off of someone else instead of staring at a blank page.

Wonderfalls scripts

Miss Wonderfalls? Nine of the scripts can be found here.

Elmore Leonard on writing

Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules for writing.
Full article here.

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…
5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

So far so good. But I need to work on rule number 10.

bloglines

Decided to try out bloglines.com to keep up with various blogs and news sites rather than having to visit each one individually. Right now the service is free, though it appears text ads are looming in the near future.

It works like a news reader, except that it operates through your standard web browser. You just subscribe to whatever blog feed you like as long as it’s RSS or Atom compatible (and most are). Then you get all the updates in one place. You can still click on the link for an entry and visit the original site.

So far I have to say it’s pretty cool and will probably keep me from compulsively visiting all these different sites throughout the day.

Review: Escaflowne the Movie

Laura and I watched Escaflowne the Movie last night. I’d heard mixed things about it, but was looking for a new anime to watch. This had a girl (Hitome) transported to a different world where she is to fulfill her destiny. I liked the first Fushigi Yugi series a lot, which had a similar premise. So I decided to give Escaflowne a chance.

From what I can gather, the original television series is much better than the film. By the time the film ended, Laura and I had devolved into MST3K commentary.

The visuals are wonderful, and you can tell that someone had a lot of fun creating the world. What there is of the plot is confusing and fraught with coincidence. One of the worst sins was that the major conflict set up between the hero and villain (Van and Folken) is resolved by a tertiary character pretty much out of nowhere.

And unfortunately the characters are flat and mostly unappealing. Hitome, the heroine, might as well have been a magic ring or sword for all she actually participated in the story. The dialog (or maybe just the translation) is trying to be weighty and profound, but ends up being laughably cheesy.

The movie waffled between loud, fast, but ultimately uninvolving action scenes and long boring scenes of characters spouting weighty philosophical dialog that ultimately means nothing.

Come to think of it, this movie reminds me a lot of Matrix Revolutions.

guilds in the news

Just saw some news that Robert Rodriguez has ran into a rough patch over directing the Princess of Mars for Paramount. Apparently he had to resign from the DGA in order to share a co-directing credit with Frank Miller for Sin City. The guild rules don’t allow a member to share credit with a non-member. Paramount’s agreement with the DGA requires it to hire only DGA members, and now Rodriguez is not a member anymore. Messy. It’ll probably get worked out just fine–the DGA will likely consider an exemption for Rodriguez in this situation.

In other news, the WGA is downplaying the possibility of a strike. The Writers’ Guild is currently negotiation for a bigger share of DVD residuals. DVD seems to be on a trend towards an alternate avenue to syndication. Writers would want more income from DVDs if studios decide to skip syndication for shows because that would remove one of their primary sources of income. For shows like Firefly or Wonderfalls that will never see syndication, DVD is possibly the only way they will reach their audience. To me it seems like giving writers their due is a good thing. But as an aspiring writer myself, I am a bit biased.