Learn Writing From Wince Inducing Comments About “Blade Runner 2045”

9 10 2017

There is nothing wrong with loving without qualification. It opens your heart, lowers blood pressure, extends endocrine life, whatever. As I seem to be a wet blanket with in rare exceptions, I rarely have that rosy glow of fan-a-vision to distract me from a media’s problems.

How do we know that rosy glow of fan-a-vision is blocking our critical eye? Have you used these phrases?

“It was fantastic for the first two parts, but fell apart in the last third.” The last third of anything falls apart because of the first two parts. A resolution falls apart because the conflict had flaws. In Blade Runner 2045 (BR2045), the world was so complicated it stumbled over itself.

SPOILERS ON

Let’s work backwards: The MacGuffin chick was going to procreate and lead the Replicants…with a immune system that makes skin-to-skin contact impossible. Deckard’s body wasn’t going to be found…in a world where a drone can locate a box buried 30 feet. Quasi-Rachel had the wrong color eyes…after Jared Leto could have double-checked her DNA off the original’s skull. There’s more, but I’m bored.

SPOILERS OFF

You’ll note that none of these details had direct bearing on the plot. The immunity, the location technology, the skull, were all details which could have easily been fixed. But the plot was so damn complicated, the details tripped up the cohesion. One can overlook a few sparkles, but in a 2 hour 40 minute film, the sparkles become a haze.

“The artistry of (actor/director/whoever artist) stood out.” In a work of art, nothing is supposed to be a darling. The previous comment was applied to Jared Leto’s villain. Jared Leto did a great creepy job. He was a great creep. He had to be exceedingly, noticably creepy, because the script gave him absolutely nothing else to do but sit and be creepy. In the first BR, the genius scientist played chess, day-traded stocks, explained genetics, and was understated in creepiness. (In real life, company CEOs are dynamic and involved with their corporation.) Here in BR2045, Jared Leto had nothing to do except two acts of ewww, forcing the director to have Leto overact. Again, a weak script.

“Such a beautiful movie!” How much money was spent on this movie? It better damn well be pretty. Again, dazzling doesn’t help a weak script.

You know how you’re not supposed to let your darlings in, no matter how pretty? The Rachel’s Eye scene could have been a flat-out rejection of artifice instead of eye-color. The Zen CEO could have been deleted and the heavy lifting given to his henchwoman. McGuffin Chick could have been healthy.

All of those fixes would have smoothed out the wrinkles in the plot. But man, their scenes sure were pretty, SFX laden set-pieces.

I’m guessing this movie will fare better than Prometheus in movie history. But not by much.

Use darlings sparingly and avoid screwed up plots.

 

 

 

 

 





“Write Your Novel In a Month”! hahahahahahha….

13 04 2017

I am a sucker for titles like this, because I want to increase word rate, brain speed, income, and become a Singularity of Slack.

However.

Once again, I fell for a title — this time a podcast — making the very claim in this post title.

Once again, the writer said something like: “I was stuck in my writing and questioning the value of my very Krebs Cycle. Then I joined up with the ______________ Method. I got it my novel done in fifteen days!”

Then: “I-spent-the-next-several-months-rewriting-because-it-was-a-first-draft.”

Yeha-NO.

Hell, I’ll even mention the method, because it’s getting such promotion

CHRIS FOX “Write 10,000 Words An Hour!” Method!

I’ve heard three people on podcasts including Fox describing the method. Just from the description there are obvious flaws in the method. Namely:

  1. Dictation into Dragon software or into a recorder is not “writing”. You still have to spend time deciphering your yammering into a transcript.
  2. If your 10K words are crap, it’s good you can write another 10K words of revision tomorrow — oh wait, that needs proofreading and rearranging and imposition of structure. Which takes time.
  3. Kevin Anderson can do the dictation into novel stuff because he has years of practice, a secretarial staff, and an editor employed exclusively with him.
  4. Lastly, I’ll go here: take a moment and read a bit of Chris Fox’s fiction on Amazon’s Sneak Peek. His finished novels read like treatments of other people’s novels. How does he support himself? Living off savings from his Silicon Valley job and you already figured it out by selling books promising 10K Word Output yadda.

Do not fall for this “Novel In A Month” crap. I’m a lazy, unreasonable ass and I haven’t found anything that works and creates anything signing your name to.

Keep writing, friends.





Why Your Fantasy Novel Sucks

28 03 2017

http://www.profawesome.com/?p=306





Why I Walk Out Of Movies…

7 01 2014

When my prior experience with a director annoyed me…
Or my friends or reviewers I respect say something will annoy…
I am leery of wasting my time with it. The world is full of stuff and I need filters to help me sift through it.
Here’s the first fifteen minutes of “Helix”, the new series starting on SyFy. I applaud SyFy for actually putting on actual, well-funded science fiction. So I watched…

When you can say key dramatic dialogue before the characters, this is bad. I said “progress” and “his brother” in the first seven minutes.

The first scene with is a direct lift of “Don’t Fear The Reaper” from that version of “The Stand” with Rob Lowe.

Then the stereotypical butchy-lookin’-woman-saying-libtard stuff who was maybe lifted from the original movie of “Andromeda Strain”? At minute nine, the woman said “frack”.

Then I read: Ronald Moore, producer.

I hate Ronald Moore. I hated him on Star Trek. I hated BSG for its entire handwavium premise: Half-cylon? How does that happen, BSG fans? Anyone? I hate that he tries to make Deep Significant Points and screws up so badly.

I respect that he tries. God how he tries. He believes in what he’s doing. Unlike say, the asses behind “Prometeheus” who after dozens of drafts and millions of dollars still got the distance to the nearest star wrong and left the mistake in.

Ronald Moore is a light-weight. This show? God, it’ll have to do a lot to keep from being another squandered opportunity.








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