R.I.P. Nancy Wake

Move over Rosie the Riveter. Nancy Wake would've kicked your ass.

This inspires me. Everything about this woman is fascinating. There is an amazing film in here somewhere. Though there have been miniseries, I don't think anyone has seen them, and the subject could be covered again.

I don't know why, because this obituary was awesome, but reading about Nancy made me think of Sucker Punch. Yes, I just put the White Mouse and Sucker Punch in the same sentence, and I apologize. But I couldn't help thinking while reading that the story of those elite British women trained to go behind enemy lines during WWII should have replaced the burlesque babes wielding samurai swords. If I was Zack Snyder, I know which movie I would've made.

Captain America: The Mediocre Beginning of Another Hopefully Uncrappy Franchise

I haven't seen any comic book movies this summer. Not even X-Men, which was well-reviewed, and I loved the first X-Men movie, so I've been upset at myself for missing it. Since all the critics seemed to enjoy CA, I thought it would be a last ditch effort to see a good summer popcorn movie.

Okay, it's been a long summer season, and I think the critics' brains have been fried. My expectations were raised due to all the good buzz, and boy was this disappointing. I don't think I've ever seen Chris Evans in a movie, and I know all the young hot guys in Hollywood competed for this part, so I expected his charisma to just leap off the screen at me. Nope. Not that he was bad, but I didn't feel like this guy was a star. (Oh, I just remembered, he was in Scott Pilgrim, not that it matters.) And Hugo Weaving doing his best Werner Herzog! All I could think of was Werner Herzog reading Go the Fuck to Sleep (the best celebrity reading so far). It was so hard not to get the giggles every time he was onscreen.

The movie starts out slowly, ahem, boring. Just as it gets interesting, it becomes a montage. Captain America is never, not even for half a second, ever in danger. There is no tension at all. No big obstacles for him to work around and outsmart. No suspense. Isn't that what action movies are all about? Halfway through the movie I turned to Hubs and said, "I set my expectations way too high." He thought the movie was even worse than I did.

I will keep Captain America in mind when writing action in the future. Your protagonist needs to be in peril. Preferably more than once. The audience shouldn't be able to figure out how he/she is going to escape. There must be tension. The opening scene should be awesome in some way that's unexpected. The last scene should be solid and feel like a real ending. The best part of the movie shouldn't be a trailer for another movie.

Game of Thrones

Okay, I'm officially caught up on Game of Thrones. I was really excited about this show when it premiered. The promos were beautiful. I'm all for any medieval show that doesn't revolve around Merlin-type magic. I thought the first episode was a little meh, but the second episode got better, and the third episode was a little better still, and then it pretty much tapered off.

There are a couple major problems with the show that violate basic screenwriting rules taught in every beginner screenwriting class in America, which is why I find these problems so irritating. I'm going to try and keep spoiler-free. I'll list some plot points, but not give away any twists and turns. And there are 800 characters on this show and I can't remember any of their names, so there won't be any of those either.

Basic Screenwriting Knowledge Violation #1: Show, don't tell.

This is the most exposition heavy show I've ever seen. We're in this beautiful world, and all everyone does is stand around and talk. It is freakin' boring. The whole show starts with the inciting incident of someone noteworthy being killed. But the person is already dead, and everyone just stands around talking about how the person is dead and who killed him. And they somehow all figure out who did it (still don't know how they got from A to B on that one) and then they tell the guy who did it they know he did it and he admits to it, and nothing comes of it. Um, then why couldn't we have just seen that person kill the guy as the first scene of the show? The whole thing would've been a lot less confusing. We would've known the killer was a bad guy right off the bat, and we wouldn't have been wondering who the guy was who got offed that everyone kept talking about for three episodes.

On a recent episode, a major character was attacked by a boar during a hunting expedition. Sounds interesting, right? But GoT would choose the least compelling way to have a boar attack. The seqence went something like this:

Character announces he's going hunting. Character's friends race back yelling that Character was attacked by a boar. Character lies in bed and tells how the boar attacked him and how he still killed the boar.

Wow, that was exciting, wasn't it? So much more exciting than seeing Character kill the attacking boar. The show could've used a little CGI boar, all I'm saying.

GoT clearly knows its exposition is boring because it's now trying to hide it instead of just getting rid of it. For example, during a particularly graphic sex scene, someone just happens to be talking about his past love throughout the entire scene. Awkward. And, hello, no one is listening because we're distracted by the, um, showing and don't care so much about the telling when there's naked people going at it. On GoT people also like to have deep conversations while bathing. And in two scenes in last week's episode, dead animals were being butchered during conversations to make it seem like something was happening. Yeah, we weren't fooled. It was still all just talk, talk, talking. Thanks for thinking that I'm dumb, GoT. Speaking of dumb people...

Basic Screenwriting Knowledge Violation #2: Characters make stupid decisions for no reason.

Ned Stark, the lead character, doesn't seem like a stupid guy, but he makes dumb decisions all the time. And it makes no sense! I don't even need to go into this because BuzzFeed has done the work for me and it's very funny (contains Spoilers): Introducing: Stupid Ned Stark.

GoT, please cut down on the exposition, and make Ned Stark a little brighter. And try to put Peter Dinklage in every scene. He's so, so good, easily the best part of the show.

Gettysburg & an Idiot

In observance of Memorial Day, Hubs and I watched the much advertised Gettysburg documentary by the History Channel. I don't know what I was expecting, maybe I thought it would be more like the promos with expensive-looking slow-mo reenactments and Kate Bush covers. Hubs summed it up perfectly when he said, well, they did a good job of making the promos look like it wasn't some regular History Channel show.

That's exactly what it was, a regular History Channel show with maybe a little more money to throw around and the Scott bros. names tacked on. I guess I thought there would be more in depth explanation of the strategy. They didn't bring anything new or special to the table. Unless you count the historian who got way too excited about all the damage that the different cannonballs inflicted on the soldiers. The whole thing really made me miss Shelby Foote and want to go out and buy Ken Burns' Civil War.

I'm also curious to see Gettysburg with Jeff Daniels. I sort of watched it in high school. My American History teacher decided to show my class the movie instead of teaching us that chapter. But he had a short attention span and whenever the generals would meet in the tent to strategize he would exclaim, Too much talk! And then fast forward to the battle scenes. Not very educational.

This was the same American History teacher that would leave the room for ten minute stretches and return with bloodshot eyes. The same teacher that played Birth of a Nation and rewound the part where the little sister jumps off a cliff to avoid being raped by a black man over and over and over again. You know, because it was hilarious. And yes, he was right, it kind of was funny the first and second times. The next five times, not so much. The same teacher who realized a week before the A.P. test (yes, this was an A.P. class) that we were still in the 60's, and "covered" the 70's, 80's, and 90's in one week. Yeah, didn't do so well on that test.

In another example of piss poor American history, Sarah Palin made the news this week when she rewrote the journey of Paul Revere and his famous ride through Boston during her am-I-or-aren't-I-running-(of course I am)-bus tour. Fine, who cares, right? She's dumb, really bad at answering softball questions, and too easy to make fun of, so not worth my time. However, it is infuriating how when being interviewed by Fox News, her own mothership, she was asked about the Paul Revere screwup and still claimed that everything she said was accurate. Okay, when you are given the chance to right your wrongs and you stick by your incorrect version of the Paul Revere story as the truth, you only prove one thing, and that is that you are crazy. Cray-cray please pack it up and go home. And home will never be the White House.

So in honor of Paul Revere, and belated Memorial Day, here is Stephen Colbert's reenactment of the revised ride of Paul Revere. Quite funny.

Humor in Hollywood

This is one of the most entertaining pieces of literature I've read in the last decade, courtesy of Josh Friedman, a very successful screenwriter. Enjoy.