TOP TEN DRUG MOVIES

10. Spun - The Best Point of View Type of movie ever
9. Dazed and Confused - The best thing about high school girls is...
8. Pulp Fiction - Right in the heart
7. Trainspotting - should be #2. it was much better and bigger than the other movies
6. Blow - Blinded by the light

5. Half Baked - Your not a fish
4. Friday - It's Friday you aint got no Job
3. Scareface - The World is mine
2. Requiem for a Dream - Ass to Ass
1. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - The best of all time

Creating Stand-Out Characters Using a Specific Distinctive Trait

A very good excerpt from the Mind of Your Story March 28, 2008
In the article we will learn about

* How to introduce multiple characters in a way that will be memorable for readers

* How to choose the perfect “telling” details that reveal setting, character, and plot simultaneously

Whether you’re dealing with just a few characters or a cast of thousands, creating what I call a “specific distinctive trait” for each will help your readers remember who each character is without you having to remind them in narrative. This means that instead of writing “Jean’s sister Emma” whenever Emma appears on the scene, you can instead illustrate something about Emma that readers already know to jog their memories.

Perhaps my favorite example of a writer employing this method occurs in Susan Minot’s Evening. Because most of this novel unfolds at a wedding, it includes an ensemble of characters. Minot helps readers remember who’s who by “tagging” each character with something that will remind readers of that character’s specific distinctive trait.

This approach allows Minot to place five or even ten characters in one scene without the reader losing track. To illustrate, here are two of the characters in two different scenes. In the first excerpt, we meet these characters for the first time.

The [car] doors were open and she saw in front Buddy Wittenborn and in the driver’s seat Ralph Eastman …. When she got close Ralph caught sight of her and jumped out of the car and Buddy looked over with a lazy smile.


This second excerpt takes place the morning of the wedding about halfway through the book.

Pacing down near the pink mallow was Ralph Eastman holding a piece of paper, gesturing with his hands, practicing his toast …. When she came out of the trees she found the small round lawn occupied by Buddy Wittenborn lying asleep on his back with his bare feet crossed and with his hands folded on his chest ….


What can you deduce about Ralph Eastman and Buddy Wittenborn from these brief selections? Do you see how using a specific distinctive trait “on the run” helps you “see” a character?

The Telling Detail
This brings us to one of my favorite aspects of character, the telling detail. E.M. Forster notes that a novelist “may not choose to tell us all he knows—many of the facts, even of the kind we call obvious, may be hidden.” Beginning (and some not-so-beginning) writers often feel as if they must give every detail about a character, but if you do this, not only will your reader be frustrated, he still won’t see what’s in your head. I’m not saying you shouldn’t note everything in your first draft—after all, a first draft is a wonderful way to find out what you’re trying to say. Ultimately, though, it’s the telling detail, and only the telling detail, that you’ll want to hang on to. I’ve co-opted the Greek term synecdoche (sin-NEK-toe-kee), a linguistic term that means the part stands for the whole (“bread” for food; “soldier” for army), to represent how the right telling detail insists the reader fill in what he doesn’t know. A good telling detail performs double—no, triple—duty, revealing setting, character, and plot all in one tidy line.

For an example of how this works, let’s get in someone else’s car. No, wait—we can’t get in, not yet, because first we have to pick up the various books and papers on the passenger seat and toss them in the back. Okay, now we can slide in … But, no: Now we see that the footwell has become the resting place for fast-food soft-drink cups, crumpled napkins, CD covers, even a hairbrush.

Okay. What do you know about the driver of this car from what I’ve just told you? The answer is that each of you will have conjured a different car and a different driver, based on your—you guessed it—resources of experience.

Getting Inside Your Reader’s Head
My attempts to explain how a telling detail leads the reader to fill in what he doesn’t know were made much simpler the first time I drew the following on a whiteboard:

Imagine the circle is your reader’s brain. When the right detail (the arrow) breaks through, it will explode in your reader’s head so he fills in all sorts of details you haven’t shown.

In a successful synecdoche, every reader will imagine a different picture of that car based on the telling details you choose to reveal. This is a good thing, because it means you’ve captured your readers’ imaginations. It’s also why, when we readers go to the movies, we’re almost never as happy with the film as we were with the book. Unless the character the director imagines segues perfectly with our own picture (an astronomical unlikelihood), we’re destined to be disappointed.

EXERCISE
Character Walks Into a Room
How do you codify the information you receive? Think about it: So much information comes our way every day that we have to have some way of quickly deciding what goes where. When it comes to people, you may use a method you’re not even aware of, such as the Myers-Briggs personality-type indicator, astrological signs, or even ethnic or racial stereotypes. We all need such systems, though we don’t always share them with others.

Whenever my dear friend Joanie walks into a restaurant, she immediately looks around the room to see who she knows, then stops to visit with each person. However, when I walk into that restaurant (with her, let’s say), I take in the whole room—what it looks and feels like, how many people are there, if it’s smoky, if it’s hot or cold. Then, as quickly as I can without drawing attention to myself (because the last thing a writer wants is to draw attention to herself), I find a quiet corner where I can watch everyone. My husband Bob, meanwhile, will be examining the construction materials, while another friend will likely already have noted what could stand improvement.

Quick now, before you think about it, what do you know about the four people I’ve just described entering this restaurant? This exercise combines almost everything we’ve discussed in this chapter: what you know about your character, the telling detail, and the specific distinctive trait.

Now it’s your turn. Walk into that restaurant yourself. What’s the first thing you notice? How about your partner? What does he or she see? Try it out with a few friends. (I’ve asked quite a few of mine since I came up with this, and I’m always surprised by their answers.)

Then, have a character walk into a restaurant. What does she notice? What does she miss? And where in the restaurant does she head as soon as she can?

What have you learned about your character from this exercise? It may well be just the telling detail your fiction needs.

(Writer's Digest Books, 2008).

Turkey Day / Film Review : Changeling

Happy Turkey Day to All who par-take in such a wonderful food filled day. I spent the first half of the day smoking and watching the lousy Detroit Lions get there asses handed to them. I'm one who will say that you cant fuck with tradition but the Lions need to be yanked from the Thanksgiving Day line-up. Please for the love of Jah! Then I went to my sisters house on the outside of town on the edge of suburbia and fuckin nowhere. My sister went on a date last night yea but what she wasn't expecting was for this guy to just show up today around noon and invite himself to diner. He had a good reasoning behind it being he was crazy enough to join the military and he is stationed at Buckley as an "Analyst" whatever that means. And to top the night off my cool ass brother n law Chuck had some friends come over to help eat the 10 pies that my mother slaved hours over the stove last night and with them was a very sexy young lady who just so happen to have the same phone as me and me being a little slow with cell phones she helped me though a few things. All in All a good Day




Clint Eastwood's Changeling is a riveting drama about a missing boy and the undying constancy of a mother's love. Angelina Jolie excels in a powerful performance as Christine Collins, whose nine-year-old son, Walter, disappeared in 1928. Five months later, police returned to her a boy they said was Walter; Christine alleged that the boy was not her son.

At the time, the Los Angeles police department was under considerable pressure due to the efforts of a Presbyterian minister, Reverend Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich), to expose corruption within the police force. Captain Jones (Jeffrey Donovan), who heads up the investigation, doesn't particularly care whether the boy is or isn't Walter Collins; he has a publicity campaign to manage that's all about making himself look good, so he tries to convince Christine to accept the found boy as her son. When she fights back by going to the press, Jones has her committed to the psycho ward.

The movie is based on a the true story of the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders in the late 1920s; Gordon Stewart Northcott molested, tortured, killed and dismembered 20 young boys on his farm before his nephew and accomplice confesses to police what was taking place. Because the film is based on real events, we know going in how it's going to end; the film's tension rides, therefore, not in the destination but in the journey to get there. Eastwood controls the film's pacing with a careful touch, letting us feel Christine's anguish, and taking us all the way down into her dark night of the soul before granting the emotional release at the film's somewhat redemptive end.

Jolie portrays a classic tragic heroine in the film; a single mother abandoned by Walter's father, she's raised her boy alone, and he's all she has. Her reaction to Captain Jones's refusal to accept that the boy the police have brought home to her is not her son goes from earnest insistence to stark disbelief to anger. The police captain, unwilling to acknowledge the failings of his department, makes her the enemy rather than the victim, alternately painting her in the press as a negligent mother who simply doesn't want to take responsibility for her son now that he's found, or perhaps a hysterical woman with delusions of paranoia.

This is a case of real life being stranger (or perhaps, more horrific) than fiction. If a screenwriter had written a script like this that was purely fictional, audiences would find it hard to accept. It seems rather fantastic to imagine that the police wouldn't simply believe a mother who says, this is not my child. Of course she would know her own child; I'd know any of my kids in a pitch black room, by the outline of their profiles, the feel of their hair, their unique scents. It's important to keep in perspective, though, that the film takes place in 1928, during a time with corruption on the police force was rampant, women were viewed as emotional and prone to bouts of hysteria, and people could be locked in a mental hospital to get them out of the way of those in power.

Anytime a film centers on the idea of a child in peril, the dramatic tension stakes are raised accordingly, but the conflict in the film works on many levels: in Christine facing the police captain; in the captain versus the preacher; in good cop versus bad cop; and, of course, in the broader theme of Christine facing the challenges women of that time faced in society generally. Watching that very real history play out -- the whole, "there now, be a good girl, keep your mouth shut and just do as you're told" mentality, rankles me to my very core, as I expect it will to most modern women watching it.

Eastwood relies largely on the strength of Jolie's performance to carry the film, playing up the bully-victim relationship to the hilt to create a sense of opposing forces crashing into each other. Jolie's mama-lioness performance is powerful -- she plays Christine as both strong and vulnerable, a woman who is both tethered to the restraints of the society in which she must maneuver, and fiercely resilient in her search for the truth about what happened to her son. Jolie's performance evokes her stylistically similar performance in A Mighty Heart; she spends most of the film wrenched in anguish that resonates to the core. In the latter third of the film, Christine undergoes a dramatic shift from the tragic woman who's lost a child to a heroine who must advocate for the rights of other women in similar situations, and one can't help but draw parallels to Jolie's own personal activism.

Donovan, as corrupt and dictatorial police captain, is infuriatingly smug, which is just as he should be for the role of a man who will stop at nothing -- not even the life of a child -- to protect his own sorry hide. John Malkovich sizzles as the preacher-with-a-cause, arcing his character nicely; Malcovitch's Brieglib starts out feeling like a grandstander, but his sympathies for Christine's plight ultimately shift his priorities. Amy Ryan sneaks in a nice supporting role as a former prostitute and fellow psych-ward detainee.

My one beef with the performances was with Jason Butler Harner as the murderer; this is a wretched, morally abysmal character, yes, but Harner kind of looks and feels like Kyle Maclachlan if he went on a really bad lost meth weekend and never came all the way back. His hysterical craziness is just a bit over-the-top and detracts from the film, but I suppose when you're playing a man who tortures little boys and chops them up with an ax, it's hard to find a middle-ground.

Regarding the other elements of the film, J. Michael Straczynski's script is first-rate; he's an excellent storyteller, and does a solid job of translating true events into a dramatic story. There's no jarring wooden dialog here, no overt exposition;

Character Discovery

I've been reading the great sceenplay writer Barry Parsons' blog on www.createyourscreenplay.com and it has a lot of very informative articles scatted throughout the site....

ONE CHARACTER IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR


Thoughts about screenwriting come from unexpected places.

During the Clinton Administration, I happened to listen to a radio interview with Gail Sheehy, who was then currently on tour touting her new book about Hillary. Sheehy made a comment about the relationship between Hillary and Bill that has dogged me ever since.

But not for the obvious reasons. Oon its surface, the comment appears banal. What Sheehy said about America's first couple was, "They know everything there is to know about each other."

I got to thinking, no wonder there's no drama in the lives of Hillary and Bill. They "know everything there is to know about each other." And the public knows everything there is to know about them.

If Bill and Hillary were a movie, the country would want to get out of the theater and go home. Two characters who know everything about each other -- the worst thing for a story.

Proven by the fact that successful screenwriters typically begin with the opposite situation. They create two very UNLIKE characters at the center of their story, a Hero and a Bonding Character, who know very little about each other.

Wouldn't you think that Bill, caught "in flagrante delicto," ought to be good dramatic fodder when his wife finds out? Not on the Bill and Hillary show. Because Hillary knows that Bill always forgets to get rid of the trash. She's expecting it. And so is the audience.

But there has to be a story there somewhere, doesn't there? Sure. The story of Bill and Hillary happened when they knew nothing about each other. When they first met. When through some event (and I'm not sure what that might have been) they were forced together.

As fascinated as I am by Presidential power, and marital infidelity, the thing that fascinates me more is the question, what is a story? "The King died, and then the Queen died." That's not a story, I'm told. But "The King died, and then the Queen, overcome by her grief, died of a broken heart."

That's a story. An old example. And one that suggests that a story needs two essential elements: events related by cause, and a situation that evokes emotion.

Some people vow that a story is always a conflict between Good and Evil. Others swear that the paradigm is David and Goliath. Still others claim that every story is a love story, or a journey, or a reworking of a myth, etc., etc. There are probably hundreds, maybe thousands, of views of what constitutes a story. Perhaps they all possess a part of the truth.

This much I know. Most screenwriters build their stories around two unlike characters. The writer creates a desire in the audience to see these characters "get together" in some way, which will happen at the end of the movie, usually (the writer hopes) in an unsuspected manner.

Sometimes the two characters marry, sometimes one defeats or overcomes the other, sometimes they agree to part--there are thousands of variations, but, unlike Bill and Hillary, the major characters never start out "knowing everything there is to know about each other." You don't have to look too far to find the real life screen story in the years of the Clinton administration.

Two unlike characters? Well see, there's this President, a little bit roguish, ladies' man, plays fast and loose with the truth, and then there's this Prosecutor, by the name of Starr, religious guy, bit of a zealot. These two guys are worlds apart temperamentally, and morally. They know squat about each other, really, and the Prosecutor's out to put this President in the tank...well, you COULD write the story, except that CNN already got to it. Great ratings, so I'm told.

by
Barry Pearson

Top 10 Villains of all time

1. Tyler Durden – Brad Pitt – Fight Club
2. Hannibal Lector – Anthony Hopkins – Silence of the Lambs
3. Darth Vader – James earl Jones – Star Wars
4. Clurella De vil – Betty Lou Garson – 101 Dalmatians
5. Mommie Dearest – Joan Crawford – Mommie Dearest
6. Annie Wilkes – Kathy Bates - Misery
7. Max Cady – Robert De Niro – Cape Fear
8. Chigurgh – Javier Bardem – No Country for Old Men
9. Joker – Heath Ledger - Batman
10. Jack Torrance – jack Nicholas – Shining

Those who fell short
11. Agent Smith – Hugo Weavin - Mtatrix
12. Bill – David Cariden – Kill Bill
13. Dr Evil – Mike Meyers – Austin Powers
14. Kaiser Soze – Kevin Spacy – Usual Suspect
15. Lord Voldemort - Ralph Fiene – Harry Potter
16. Bill the Butcher – Daniel Day Lewis – Gangs of New York
17. Freddy Kruger – Robert England – Nightmare on Elm Street
18. Frankenstein Boris Karloff - Frankenstein

Film Review: Zach and Miri Make a Porno

I had my daughter today. And since i only get to see her for several hours at a time we usually check out a movie. No I didn't take to go see this movie i watched it after she left. Nothing makes me smile more than a child laughing. Any child for that matter could laugh and it would make my day. A close second to smiling is any Kevin Smith movie and he didn't let me down with this soon to be Classic.

Believe the Hype ----The movie starts out a little slow with best friends and roommates Zach(Seth Rogen)and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) pissed off about going to there 10 year high school reunion. The are reluctant about attending but both do so. Before they go Miri is changing her clothes in the back of the coffee shop that both work at full time While changing her clothes two punk kids capture video with there cell phone of Miri in a pair of big white granny panties and nothing else. The video is a instant internet sensation. Meanwhile Miri ultimate goal at the reunion is to find a old bully Bobby Long (Brandon Routh) that used to call her names and she will show him how she has turned out(and she has turned out very nice if i don't say so myself). She finds the bully to be very handsome and with some very clever Kevin Smith dialogue the two hit it off nicely while Zach is by himself in the corner drinking on a beer. Zach starts talking to a man at the bar who turns out to be s gay porn star and he tells Zach of the riches in those kinds of movies and he is also Brandon Long's gay lover.

Sooner rather than later, stacks of overdue bills comes into play as the dejected Zach and Miri make their way home and lose their water, then their power, then seemingly any rational means to erase their debt. Fearful that they will ultimately lose their apartment(This movie is filled with soon to be great one liners) they eventually decide to parlay their new found internet fame (that of the granny panties and bare ass) into dollars by making, yes, an adult feature. Zach's reasoning, which Miri eventually agrees with, is that they can at least sell it to the 850 people on their high school's alumni mailing list (obtained from the disastrous reunion). The solid understanding the two have about having sex together for the first time after being life-long friends is shot straight to hell when it turns out they can't separate those buried feelings for the sake of cashing in on their filmed physicality.

The side characters; Jay - Kenny from Kenny and Spenny and a few others are all well suited for the movie and score some laughs though out the flick. One question i have is i didn't see Kevin play any parts in the movie. DID HE?

Kevin Smith is brilliant as he nails the comedy aspect right on the head but then Zack and Miri garner some funny feelings for each other, and then you have to try and give and hoot about their relationship, and the comedy turns into a funny rom-com.You want them to fall in love. Kevin even adds another brilliantly funny scene at the end where the audience is lead to think that for sure Zach will never get the girl.

The movie just line after line of nasty and hilarious dialogue that you can quote with your friends for the next couple of weeks.

And in closing if I've learned anything from Zack and Miri, it's that everyone should dabble in porno at least once in their life.

Quentin Tarantino's new Script

I read a article of 'Inglorious Bastards’ the new script by the man himself Quentin Tarantino that i thought that i would like to share and keep around. It was online at NYMAG.COM It has a very interesting premise behind the movie. Lets have a look at the article

------------------------------------------------------------------------
We’ve Got Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Inglorious Bastards’ Script

and it is exactly as batshit over-the-top insane as we hoped.

The copy we acquired includes a handwritten cover page which we think might actually be in Tarantino's handwriting, reading, "INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS." This misspelling of "bastards" continues through the screenplay, suggesting we were right when we guessed Tarantino was writing really, really fast. He doesn't even have time to spell-check if he's gonna get this movie turned around by Cannes!

The script is 165 pages long and follows a squad of American soldiers called the Bastards — a guerrillalike force who travel behind German lines in 1944, striking terror into the hearts of Nazi soldiers. The Bastards are headed by Lieutenant Aldo Raine — the role we'd imagine Tarantino is hoping to land Brad Pitt for — described by the script as a "hillbilly from the mountains of Tennessee," who has around his neck a scar from where he survived a lynching. ("The scar will never once be mentioned," Tarantino writes.) In a parallel story, Inglorious Bastards follows a French Jewish teenager named Shosanna who survives the massacre of her family and flees to Paris, where she winds up running a movie house during the Nazi occupation.

The Bastards' and Shosanna's stories intersect when a gala premiere of a Goebbels-produced propaganda film is put on in Shosanna's theater, with Hitler and most of the German High Command scheduled to attend. Both the Bastards and Shosanna launch plots intending to end the war a little earlier than anyone expected.

The script's divided into five chapters:

Chapter One: Once Upon a Time … Nazi Occupied France

Chapter Two: Inglorious Basterds

Chapter Three: German Night in Paris

Chapter Four: Operation Kino

Chapter Five: Revenge of the Giant Face

The first chapter, set in 1941, introduces Shosanna and the film's antagonist, a Nazi officer named Landa who's known as the "Jew Hunter." The second chapter introduces the Bastards and their tactics: They kill Nazis on sight, take their scalps, and — when they let one go — carve a swastika into his forehead. The third chapter, set in 1944, reintroduces Shosanna in Paris ("This whole Chapter will be filmed in French New Wave Black and White"). The fourth sets up the Bastards' attack on the theater. And it all comes together in Chapter Five, which plays fast and loose with history, to say the least.

The script is definitely the ur-text of Quentin Tarantino's career up to now; it combines his love of old movies (war movies, Westerns, and even prewar German cinema), his attraction to powerful female protagonists, his love of chatter, and his willingness to embrace the extreme — visually and in his storytelling. (The flashbacks have particularly Tarantinoian flourishes: a thought bubble pops out of a character's head to introduce one, while another is shot spaghetti Western style.) All in all, it reads like Kill Bill meets The Dirty Dozen meets Cinema Paradiso.

We wondered at times if this script was a fake, and it's still possible that it is — but if so, it's such a skillful fake that the author has even mastered Tarantino's ability to write moments that seem almost like parodies of his own tastes. Such as, for example, our favorite moment in the screenplay, with a mix of fetishism and inspired comedy that feels authentically alive. Late in chapter four, the Nazis are preparing Shosanna's movie theater for its big premiere, and Goebbels tells her that he appreciates "the modesty of this auditorium." Then he suggests sprucing the place up a bit, with a chandelier from Versailles and a couple of Greek nudes from the Louvre scattered around the lobby. A quick montage shows this happening, and then Tarantino describes the result:

We see Workers trying with incredible difficulty, to hoist the huge, heavy, and twinkingly fragile chandelier, in Shosannas auditorium, which now resembles something out of one of Tinto Brass's Italian B-movie rip-off's of Visconti's "The Damned".

If anyone is crazy enough to fund it, this movie is gonna be awesome.

Film Review: Kung Fu Panda

Time well spent.... In the movie by DreamWorks The Kung Fu Panda, Jack Black is the voice of Po, a clown-eyed, sheepishly neurotic panda of no visible athletic ability. Black gives Po a slightly abashed suburban-couch-potato sweetness.

The story starts off with Po, who works in his father's (Mr.Ping played by the very funny James Hong) noodle shop but he dreams of becoming a Kung Fu master one day. The day the great Dragon Warrior is to be named Po as usual is running late and he didnt make it in time to attend the ceremony in the Jade Palace, So he devises a crazy contraption where he ties a huge firework display to a wooden chair and lits the wick . He flies though the air landing hard in the middle of the area where the Furious Five - Tigress (Angelina Jolie), Crane (David Cross), Monkey (Jackie Chan), Viper (Lucy Liu), and Mantis (Seth Rogen) - are showing off their Kung Fu skills. Po interrupts the ceremony where Oogway (Randell Duk Kim) who is the wisest in all in the land a giant tortoise is speaking and he decreed Po to be the great Dragon Warrior. That's when Kung Fu Panda ignites.

As Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) starts to train Po he notices the total lack of skill and he finds it quite funny - he's such a flabby sack of wrong moves that even his screwups have a bass-ackwards logic that is nearly balletic. But then being the great Master that he is Shifu figures out how to teach this hopeless case the art of kung fu. He uses a bowl of dumplings, which Po is so eager to eat that he'll scramble anywhere, at any speed, to get at them. Kung Fu Panda is light and goofy, yet the fight scenes, which are the heart of the film, are mad fun. Just about all animated movies teach you to Believe in Yourself (the rat who finds the courage to cook! The ogre who learns to love!), but the image of a face-stuffing panda-turned-yowling Bruce Lee dervish is as unlikely, and touching. TWO BIG THUMBS UP. A-