How Do I Blog?

Back to work! And what a week ahead, yesterday I had an all-afternoon meeting followed by a business dinner in the city, today is chock full of interviews for my assistant (mwahaha) and yet more meetings. Tomorrow is quiet, oh wait, there’s another half-day meeting and then I’m taking Friday off in lieu of the public holiday next Monday because I’ll be flying to bloody Perth for the week! Madness.

This is without mentioning I’ve just had a week off sick, which I’d thankfully recovered from to fully enjoy the long weekend. Played a bit of poker both live and online just for a bit of a change, cashed in both instances which is always a plus! Took Evie cycling in a local park which we found has been half sold off to some kind of development or construction so that was cut a bit short. Did some solid cooking on the weekend: slow-roasted lamb shanks in a rich tomato and red wine gravy and a carbonara rich with cream and carmelised onions. As if to compensate for this I then spent nearly 3 hours in the midday heat building a cross-trainer under the house for Clare - that may be the hardest workout I’ll do in the vicinity of it, but we’ll see. I’m keen to get my fitness back in the headlights.

Also attended a house-warming that ended in taking a detour to the local Germanic club where I, of course, sampled several of the House Schnapps. Quite delicious and powerful stuff, Sour Apple was great, Blackcurrent a little too sweet and one of them was a bit too much, Orange and Peppermint schnapps - apparently a cleansing drink (if you get my drift) - and I passed it to another who, after a sip, said: “Mmm… nice, do you mind?”.

I did not mind. He soon did however when he missed his face, poured it down his shirt (it was an unnatural shade of blue) and what little made it down his throat burned like the fires of Hades. First sips can be deceptive, ladies and gentlemen.

Speaking of first sips, I’ve come to a revelation that has forced me to revise an age-old stance of mine: tequila is not vile demon piss. The key seems to be to eschew every friendly looking tequila bottle out there, that means you Golds and Silvers can fuck right off, and anything with a plastic cap that’s been remoulded into the shape of a sombrero or has the remnants of any non-arthropod invertebrates lurking at the bottom.

I picked up a bottle of Anejo Tequila - gotta look up the brand when I get home - after having tried some in a margarita recipe at a friend’s which also contained Grand Marnier. I looked up recipes online and stumbled across the perfect margarita (also known as the Grand Margarita or the Cadillac Margarita). I took this recipe and padded it out a little with some simple syrup, which I think takes just enough of the edge off to make it addictively drinkable. Other tequila cocktails addicts feel free to throw in some reccs!

I tell you, it was such a bloody busy week that I somehow even managed to do some writing. In perhaps not a great move, I’ve started yet another script which means I currently have about four at several stages of development (all around the end of act 1 stage) but it was in my head and I just needed to get some of it out. This is the Weekend At Bernies meets Grosse Point Blank with a dash of Romancing the Stone thrown in there for good measure (… actually, not so sure if that’s good measure). I’ll try to keep the momentum on it and to aid in this I’ve bought a cheapo ex-work laptop to use that has no access to internet etc so I can just focus on the writing!

Anyway aside from all that, I watched a bunch of movies lately I thought I’d give some thoughts on:

Where The Wild Things Are: an insight into the mind of a child in the grip of their emotion. I’ve never read the book but I found everything about the film to be steeped in the mental imagery of a child’s sensations of the world around them. Everything was steeped in twilight or darkness, things could be simultaneously fascinating and terrifying, everything looks tangible and tactile. It sort of meandered as a narrative and I’m not sure what message a kid would take away from it, but as a parent more than anything else I found it an interesting movie.

The Squid and the Whale: this dramedy about the breakdown of a family in the wake of the parents divorce is a very watchable character study enriched by the lead performances of Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney, the writing packed full of brittle humour and quiet sadness regarding the acrimony that can ensue between former lovers.

Humpday: my first foray into the mumblecore genre was an extremely successful one. Two guys, a buttoned down married thirty something and his wandering vagabond buddy - who’s clearly trying to be Zach Galifianakis on Ritalin - get blasted at a sexually liberated hippy party and spawn the idea of creating an arthouse porn movie as part of a festival aimed at reclaiming the seedy industry for the artists. Their idea? Two straight guys fucking. Sounds ridiculous, but the grounded performances really make it work and the sense of these two buddies locked in a path they can’t turn away from for their own motivations made the story easily believable.

Zombieland: watchable but utterly forgettable action comedy, why it’s rated so highly on RT is beyond me. The funniest moment involved “zombie” Bill Murray and introducing some of the “rules” (an aspect they didn’t explore enough, in my opinion). It’s as though they started making a different parody take on the zombie genre than Shaun of the Dead then ran out of steam and just filled the rest of the running time with Woody mugging at the camera and lots of boring zombie fights.

Should you continue to pursue something as a hobby and on the very outside of your intentions, as a potential dream-job, if you know that getting there is extremely, extremely unlikely?

This question becomes especially potent when you combine it with the fact that finding time to allow for your natural drive to come through is difficult and your enthusiasm is somewhat dampened by the realities of what you are trying to achieve.

To contextualise this, I’m talking here about being a writer and that on a daily basis my brain is filled with imagery from fiction I’ve devised and I have a strong desire to get it out of my head and to share it with the world. I’ve long ago given up the ghost of being a writer of novels or stories, I don’t read enough any more to do that and to be honest, I think I was only acting out on my desire to put words to the images in my mind. Images that are inspired by moving pictures and cinema.

I am very passionate about film and what I love most about cinema are the enduring images, the scenes that stick in your mind, and the awe and spectacle that can be achieved by implication rather than outright manipulation and CG creation (though those things can be pretty fucking cool too when done right). I’ve been tinkering with screenplays and script format for about a year now and have a couple of hobby-horse scripts at various stages of development, I had the time to work on these during a considerable downswing at work where I had a lot of capacity to sneak in hobbies.

Outside of work, other desires and laziness factors creep into eating up my time - plus I’m so busy at work in my new role, and happy doing it too, to sacrifice the work quality to squeeze in hobby time. The reality that my ideas are ultimately Big Budget movies, not small independent cinema that I could perhaps struggle with on the fly and assemble projects with arty friends, and that cracking Hollywood isn’t exactly the easiest challenge.

So, do I give up on pipe-dreams and allow my natural procrastination to stop me from “wasting” my time writing scripts if they are ultimately too big for me to have a probability of converting?

Should I stop worrying, be happy, do what I can when I can and just hope that some day other people appreciate my natural genius?

le sigh

I am very conflicted.

Perhaps my discussion of the parallels between Dexter and my box-novel The Demons Within was prophetic in some sense, because not long after I started reworking the dubiously written book into a screenplay it didn’t feel right. It has classic movie hallmarks and moments, but it felt more like a TV show, multiple characters, a few subplots weaving around the grand arc, character beats that are smaller in nature and lead to a more progressive development as opposed to the major upswings of character that occur in movies.

So, considering as I’m having a bit of trouble getting my head back into the screenwriting space with “Cloverfield at Sea” and the other Aussie-based one I was playing with, I reckon I’ll have a stab at converting this into a TV show. This was prompted by tuning into half an episode of Lie To Me, a new cop show where the main hook is that some behavioural specialist who’s involved in the investigations can tell when people are lying via their facial mannerisms and gestures and so on. I guess that’s an okay gimmick on its own, however throughout the course of the fifteen or twenty minutes I watched they used it for comic effect, dramatic effect and driving the narrative - a hook with too much weight on the line is likely to snap.

I make no bones about airing my distaste for all formulaic cop shows, the CSIs and NCISs and Law and Orders of this world just eat up people’s time that they could potentially spend reading a book, doing something positive or constructive, or watching great shows that got cruelly cancelled like Deadwood or Arrested Development or Firefly.

There have been a few successful shows that eschew the formula, for example The Shield and The Wire among others. While I don’t aspire to the lofty heights of critically acclaimed TV shows, I reckon they nail something that the other shows miss - substance, smaller piecemeal character progression, the wider arc actually delivering a more satisfying experience and ultimately through the use of cliffhangers and carryover plotlines generate a far more captivating and compulsive viewing experience.

Even 24, which by all accounts is some of the trashiest shit ever made, can deliver the goods when it comes to hooking people - unfortunately its own gimmick has more than worn out its welcome also.

So, my proposal for the TV show - title not forthcoming in any creative moment of clarity thus far - is to aim for something a little bit different again, the entire arc being around one investigation, one case, but the case has enough twists and turns, subplots and characters, cliffhangers and questions to keep you watching one week to the next.

My aim over the next week or so is to reread the book, ignoring the horrible mistakes I made and just view it as a barebones structure to develop (because the plot and the characters, in essence, were very good, it was just the writing that sucked) and start thinking about how to turn that book into a ten episode season where each episode has 4 acts, a teaser and tagline for next week, and how that all comes together for a satisfying season finale as well as providing discrete chunks of entertainment that don’t really on a gimmick or empty forensic technobabble.

Let’s see how we go…