Fun with MSPaint: Yes Man

'Nuff said.

What, When, Where this Weekend - The Wrestler, Seven Pounds, Despereaux, Yes Man

What, When, Where is a weekly guide to select screenings, discussions and events in the NYC-area of interest to screenwriters.

- The director of SCOTT WALKER: A 30TH CENTURY MAN is present at IFC Center screenings of the film this weekend.

- Kelly Reichardt is at Film Forum for a Q&A again tonight. Seriously - go see this movie! My review is here.

Opening this weekend...

THE WRESTLER, written by Robert D. Siegel, dir. by Darren Aronofsky


Premise: With his battle scars and failing heart, retired professional wrestler Randy "The Ram" Robinson (Rourke) jumps back into the squared cirle, climbing his way up the independent-circuit ladder, with his eyes on a showdown with his longtime rival.

Playing: Lincoln Plaza, Landmark Sunshine

This movie is a big favorite over here at League headquarters. Great script, great direction - it's got Mickey Rourke being badass and Marisa Tomei being hot. What else could you ask for?

Check out Cake Man's full review.


SEVEN POUNDS, written by Grant Nieporte, dir. by Gabriele Muccino


Premise: A professional man (Smith) who is close to suicide for his role in an auto accident that claimed the lives of seven people finds a reason to live, and to atone, when he falls for a woman (Dawson) who wants to help him deal with his grief.

Playing: Everywhere.

The trailer has me intrigued. Couldn't really tell what the movie was about without a little research, but I like the concept. And it's the writer's first feature. I'll check it out.


THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX, written by Will McRobb, dir. by Sam Fell and Robert Stevenhagen


Premise: Banished from his home for being more man than mouse, Despereaux is befriended by Princess Pea who teaches him the value of reading books (instead of eating them) as well as a fellow outcast, Roscuro the Rat, who is interested in hearing the stories Despereaux has learned. When Roscuro is shunned by the princess, however, he plots her kidnapping, putting Desperaux's human-sized bravery to the test.

Playing: All over.

It feels like it's gotten to the point in comics world that if your series doesn't star Wolverine, it must be about medieval mice. (See: Mouse Guard, Mice Templar)

It was only a matter of time before this trend hit movies, right? Looks cute, though.


YES MAN, written by Nicholas Stoller and Jarrad Paul, dir. by Peyton Reed


Premise: What happens when you agree with everyone and say "yes" to everything? Carl is about to find out when he chooses to become overly agreeable for an entire year.

Playing: Too many places.

They have been advertising this movie constantly since, like, September. I'm not kidding at all. Even if this movie were great, I couldn't forgive it for shoving itself down my throat for four months.

If I'm watching a football game, there are only three things that I should be seeing during commercial breaks: 1) big trucks, 2) beer, and 3) women holding beer. Jim Carrey making goofy faces while shilling for Red Bull isn't anywhere on that list.

Jim Carrey, please, you're better than this.

What are you doing/seeing this weekend?

A Place for History?

When I went to the Curious Case of Benjamin Button Screening, the producers stuck around to do a Q&A with the audience after. One of the things that they spoke about was the place that historical movies, in particular "historical epics," which they called Button, have in Hollywood today. Onyx, as our resident historical drama writer, you might want to cover your ears now.

The outlook was grim, to say the least. There was general consensus that historical films are now one of the hardest to make. This is due to a number of things, probably, including the immense budgets they demand, the often limited ability to compete at the box office (hmm... Victorian era couples playing "who gets who" or Batman 7?), and their often limited audiences - you know, because who wants to hear people talking funny and wearing weird clothes? (all my speculation). On top of all of that, many historical films, dare I say more than half?, are also long. Really long. BRAVEHEART and GLADIATOR are both long, but they're filled with action and blow my mind every time I watch them. But there are a number of other, tamer, more subtle historical dramas that are nearly as long as those, yet much quieter and about people and not fighting.

While the producers of Button were hopeful that their film could remind Hollywood not to drop this genre from future slates, I think I might have to disagree slightly that historical pieces are completely disappearing. There have been a number of celebrity driven epics tat take place before, say, 1900 recently. (How many times have you seen Orlando Bloom not dressed in something that you could only get at a costume shop? Once?) Historical epics are crowd pleasers, especially if current times are less than stellar. Not only can you escape to see people whose lives are far more difficult, but they also whack at one another with swords, and how great is that? The key is to keep the language contemporary enough, the action (if it's there) big enough, and the film star-studded enough. Can you make the argument that those "requirements" taint the genre? Yeah, probably, and you're welcome to do it in the comments section below.

But I don't think either audiences or filmmakers want to see the genre disappear totally yet.

MSPaint Movie Review: Wendy and Lucy

Girl loses dog.

Sometimes a film's premise can just be that simple and still knock you over with its depth. It's not that I'm oversimplifying all that much - sure, you could boil Lord of the Rings down to "Dwarf discards ring" but that hardly describes the story, does it? What makes Wendy and Lucy different is that you'd be hard pressed to find much else to say about the film's setup if you were being quizzed about it. That's really all it is.

A girl loses a dog and it's engaging as hell. Ah, the beauty of simplicity.

From the film's website:

Wendy Carroll (Michelle Williams) is driving to Ketchikan, Alaska, in hopes of a summer of lucrative work at the Northwestern Fish cannery, and the start of a new life with her dog, Lucy. When her car breaks down in Oregon, however, the thin fabric of her financial situation comes apart, and she confronts a series of increasingly dire economic decisions, with far-ranging repercussions for herself and Lucy. "Wendy and Lucy" addresses issues of sympathy and generosity at the edges of American life, revealing the limits and depths of people's duty to each other in tough times.

Director Kelly Reichardt and co-writer Jonathan Raymond (who also wrote the short story the film was based upon) are able to work magic with what amounts to one girl, a dog, and only a few other, minor characters. The key is in the emotional realism that's brought into the film, both from excellent performances all around and the slow but natural pacing of the film. It's like an artist painting a masterpiece with only a basic watercolor kit - they were able to build something amazing with so very little.

Bresson made films like this. Vittorio De Sica, too - but that was roughly five decades ago. It's so nice to see someone approach film in that style in this day and age.

Because this is what you're REALLY here for, my MSPaint Review of Wendy and Lucy:


Go check it out. In the meantime, add her last film, Old Joy, to your queue.

Writers' Warning - WGA Script Registration

WRITERS' WARNING

(Writers' Warning is a new section we're debuting here on ScreenwritersLeague.com where we post about suspicious and potentially risky services and companies. Not all practices mentioned are necessarily dangerous for writers - some might be completely legit and just sound fishy at first. We only report the facts and encourage comments from people who know better and can speak on behalf of the situations/companies.)

I recently had cause to call a number of entertainment lawyers, soliciting advice on something where I could. One of the things I spoke about with one of them was WGA script registration versus U.S. Copyright. (You'll remember we discussed this a bit before.) Well, the discussion, at least if you speak with this particular lawyer, is over.

When the lawyer asked if I had gotten my script copyrighted, I told him that I had done the WGA registration. He literally laughed. "That's absolutely worthless," he said. "I don't know why people even bother doing it."

I asked for clarification, and he explained that it offered zero legal protection on the material or, more importantly, the idea. Obtaining a copyright alone will potentially save a writer loads of headache (and heartache), according to him. for just $35 (compared to $22 for the WGA registration), a writer can apply for a U.S. Copyright. The whole thing can be done online, as it is with the WGA. It takes about 45 minutes - I did this yesterday - and is really pretty simple. There's a lot of filling in easy blanks (i.e. name, title of material, type of work, etc.). I've heard that it can take up to 6 months to receive the certificate of copyright, but the lawyer informed me that doesn't matter. "The date is retroactive form the day you register," he said, so though it might be June 2009 before I receive that certificate, to the best of my knowledge, it will have been effective beginning December 15th, 2008.

I'm no legal expert. (Don't take this post as solid legal advice - always get a lawyer of your own to look anything over or get advice.) Nonetheless, from now on, I'm at least urging each League member to get that copyright. I'm not going to say abandon the WGA registration (couldn't hurt, right?), but I'm certainly not going to rely on it as my only crutch from here on out.

Verbum Sap Sat, y'all.

The Writing Week part 50 - Know Your Characters

Last week, I'd written a page of a brand new screenplay because of an idea I had. I knew how to kick it off, I knew the basic premise, and I knew I wanted to get the ball rolling on it. But I didn't know something very important; I didn't know who I was writing about.

When writing action specs, it's easy to throw in a lot of shooting, a lot of explosions, a lot of naked women (sometimes for no reason), and a lot of tough guys. At the end of the day, though, we writers have to remember something very fundamental: every character (OK, at least every protagonist) must have a goal. Even if it's a Bruce Willis type goal - i.e. keeping your crumbling family together while you kill 300 people - there has to be something the character is working toward. (Don't get me wrong, I dig a lot of Bruce's work. However, if you look at 95% of his movies, I can guarantee you that not only will he be a rogue or former cop, but his marriage or relationship with his children (usually a daughter) will be on the rocks. Somehow, his family life ties into his need to shoot a dozen terrorists every five minutes.) Even the most basic of action movies has a character with some story line, however crappy it may be, and some need, however ridiculous it might seem in context.

My mistake with the script is that I hadn't bothered to think that through clearly enough. I was so eager to write that first scene, to lay everything out, that I wasn't prepared to follow up with what had to come next, namely the introduction of my pro- and antagonists. Rookie mistake? Probably. One I won't make again? Probably not. The thing is, sometimes as writers, we also need that jolt, that first spark of creativity to get us working steadily again. I might not be set to work on the pages to this spec yet, but it allowed me to do something else entirely, something just as important, if not more so. It allowed me to see what I really wanted to write.

After that night of page-length success followed by realization of 99 page impotence, I knew that I wasn't yet ready to work on that project. I popped open Word and set to work on another outline for another script (got a first page for that one, too). The difference? I knew my characters. They weren't running around blowing crap up or racking up body counts that Braveheart would be jealous of. They were just being themselves. And I knew them well. I was ready to write.

Sometimes if you run into a wall in your writing, the best thing isn't actually to bust your fists knocking it down, but to turn around and find another road around it.

40 Inspirational Speeches in two minutes

This has been bouncing around the internet lately, and it 100% rules.

40 inspirational speeches in two minutes:



Thanks for sending this, Joe!