Only Mostly Dead

Just finished reading Wildcard the Top 3 revised version.

It’s another case of slight tweaking. They changed the con at the beginning and a few details through the rest of the story. They also dropped one of the subplots about the female cop’s relationship with her lover. In this version they have the girlfriend in one scene just so we know she’s a lesbian before there’s dialogue about it. I think the script’s better for it – there were too many threads before and the relationship isn’t central to the story.

So they’ve tightened it up slightly but there’s no massive changes and no massive improvement either – but no worse either. So that’s still

8/10

Feast

This has changed a lot less than Does Anyone… – They’ve changed the beginning and the end, one of the characters but not a lot else. It’s pretty much the same structure as it was. A couple of the deaths – human and monster – have changed – for the better actually, in a movie like this you want interesting deaths. The character who gets all the good lines and who therefore you tend to like despite yourself – now survives to the end of the movie rather than dies 3/4 way through as in version 1 – so that’s more satisfying.

Overall – it’s an improvement, but not by much. 7.75/10

Ok so thanks to a nice man at PGL website technical support I now have all 3 revised scripts.

This entry is about Does Anyone Here Remember When Hans Gubenstein Invented Time Travel?

Well this is a major re-write. A lot has changed. The basic concept is the same but I only recognise a couple of scenes from the original. They’ve added the love story so maybe it is Groundhog Day mk II after all 😉

I have to say though that this change does make a big difference. Not just because everyone likes a love story – but because it gives the main character an arc. Before we had a series of ‘do-over’ time-travel episodes – many humourous – but just a series of scenes really. By giving the main character a love interest that he eventually learns to give it chance with – we have a sense of progress rather than just a series of funny scenes and then an end.

One thing – in the new version the bad guy gets killed when he tries to destroy the time machine. This causes a time loop feedback thingy which results in him getting fried by radiation and leaves him a smoking burnt husk. Which leads to this

Sid bends to inspect the SMOKING HUSK. Hanz’s TIME DEVICE perched ON TOP of it.
HANZ GUBENSTEIN (cont’d)
Don’t touch it. It’s evil stuff.

Ahem.

Well ok, I accept that this is an hommage rather than a steal. But if you’re writing a time travel comedy do you really want to compare yourself Time Bandits? It’s gonna hurt ya.

So anyway I think they’ve improved it significantly. If this is executed well – with likeable actors in the main roles – it could be a pretty decent movie.

8/10

Well results are in for the top 3 (have been since tuesday but I’m only now getting around to writing this up). They picked the same three as me.

Also I got the timing wrong. The re-writes were for the top 6 and were part of what was used to choose the top 3. The revised scripts are now on the website – at least they are for Wildcard and Does Anyone…? The version of Feast seems unchanged – but that’s probably just an oversight on the website management rather than an indicator that no changes were needed.

So I’m re-reading the two I’ve got and will publish thoughts here when I’m done.

So here’s my list of the 3 scripts I think should make top 3. In order they are

1. Wildcard
2. Feast
3. Does Anyone Here Remember When Hans Gubenstein Invented Time Travel?

For me Wildcard was head and shoulders above the rest. It had characters I cared about and actually made me laugh and surprised me. It could use work – as they all could – but if you could bring the whole script up to the level of the best parts you’d have something quite special.

Feast was just a lot of fun – or at least could be, done right – I enjoyed the dialogue and the sensibility of the piece. It could be the next Tremors – or it could just be another low-budget horror flick.

Does Anyone Here Remember… is a fun idea, definitely has its moments and could be developed into a really good script/movie. I dithered between this and Maneater for 3rd place but finally the humour in this script won me over.

So that’s my choice – what I think should win. Do I think what will win will be any different?

Hard to say since I don’t have any experience of making movies. I think if practical concerns i.e. budget, come into play, it’s possible that the top 3 could be

1. Wildcard
2. Maneater
3. Sixth Street Boyz

which in my – lay-man’s – opinion are the easiest/best to produce.

We’ll see. I’m off to check the PGL website to see if they’ve been posted yet.

(btw – for those of you wondering – there was no theme of horror required, rather it was suggested that the script be a ‘genre’ piece – horror and thriller given as examples. So in the top 6 we have 3 horror, 1 sci-fi and 1 thriller – fair enough eh?)

Well I’ve now read all 6 screenplays, and as today is the day they post the top 3 – I’d like to get my final 3 reviews posted before I look at the site. Since resisting temptation was never my strong suit – probably best to get them out of the way asap. So without further ado here’s

Does Anyone Here Remember When Hans Gubenstein Invented Time Travel?

So you remember the part in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure where they use the time machine to change the present by planting useful stuff in the past? Well that’s pretty much the whole movie. It’s a sci-fi time-travel comedy. It’s a bit like Groundhog Day without the romantic sub-plot. A physics professor and his engineer sidekick invent a machine for sending messages back in time. This provides them with a way of changing things. The movie is basically a comedy series of attempts to change the present for the better.

So, this wasn’t that bad – but in a growing trend – it wasn’t that great either. I didn’t mind that the premise wasn’t 100% original – but the trade-off for that has to be that it’s funny and this wasn’t as funny as it needed to be. Having said that it was kinda fun and if executed well it could be an ok movie.

7.5/10

Sixth Street Boyz

Sixth Street Boyz is a vampire story. Would it surprise you to know that a vampire movie with ‘boyz’ in the title borrows heavily from ‘The Lost Boys’? Well this does – in plot and structure if nothing else. It doesn’t quite do the humour and pop-culture references that Lost Boys does but it does have a single parent re-locating to a small town where there’s a surprisingly high incidence of gang violence. No wonder when the main gang – the eponymous Sixth Street Boyz – are vampires.

Again this is an ok script – but I was hungering after something better in the way of dialogue or originality. The word ‘competent’ springs to mind. Well executed it could make an entertaining if predictable movie.

7/10

Wildcard

Wildcard is a story of a couple of con-artists. The male-female pair, on the run from a failed con in San Francisco, move to Oregon and their next mark. Unfortunately he’s something of a wildcard and things are not as straightforward as they appear. Meanwhile a cop from SF is on their trail and working with the local police to bring them to justice.

So, OK, maybe this only looked good by comparison but I did enjoy this. Characters I actually liked, banter that was actually funny. The plot managed to surprise me in places. Dialogue that was more than just cliches. Not that this was perfect but I did l like it. Bearing mind that part of the top 3 is an assignment to see how they respond to notes on the script. I’d go for an uneven script where the good parts are good, like this, rather than a more consistent piece that’s pretty pedestrian.

8/10

Taken me a while to get around to getting back to this. I was halfway through reading this script and I got a little disheartened.

Not because it was so awful – but because it was just ok. The 3rd script of 6 and none of them were really that great. Which is a bit odd given that these are the finalists in a competition of thousands of scripts. I’d also read some stuff online slagging off PGL – that it’s just an excuse for a reality show and that the winners are more or less set up to fail. I guess that took the shine off it a little. Someone also suggested that because in the early rounds competitors have to review each other’s scripts that there’s an inherent reason why the mediocre rises to the top – people don’t vote for stuff that’s better than their own work.

So having put the script down halfway through it was hard to pick it up again.

But then I checked the website and the 6 are reduced to the final 3 this Tuesday.

And so –

A Bedtime Story is a story of love, witchcraft, wicker men and other monsters. A couple are just getting ready to go out, the baby-sitter has just arrived to take care of their two kids. The house is attacked by monsters – wicker men and some kind of giant bug. The kids manage to trap the bug under the bed but the parents are killed. During this action the young girl is reading from a storybook written by her aunt who we find out later is a witch. The storybook magical changes to describe the action going on in the house.

We forward to years later – the girl Samantha has become obsessed with the events of that night and the book. It predicts that if she doesn’t find her true love before her 25th birthday bad things will happen. She tracks down the baby-sitter from that night – cos she believes he’s the one. Slight problem – he’s now a priest. Meanwhile the monsters start to attack again – but now we have a new kind of monster – ‘buckle eyes’ – a human with a leather face mask and buckles where the eyes should be. So we have the wicker men, buckle eyes, Sam’s now a witch and some mysterious force behind it all.

So as I hinted at the top – this was another ok but not great script. Again I felt the tone was muddled. I couldn’t help feeling the writer wanted to write a romantic comedy and fit the horror aspects in because the competition required it. In the end we’re left with something that’s not that funny, not really romantic and not that scary – though it probably succeeds most in the later category. It’s got the most complicated mythology of any of the scripts so far and so there’s quite a lot of exposition – which is not helped by the fact that I found the dialogue flat and uninspiring – in particular what should have been witty sexy banter between Sam and the priest wasn’t.

I do think that the writer had a strong visual imagination and some of the monster sequences were well described. Also it’s the one so far that I can most easily imagine being made on the PGL budget.

6/10

The next script is call “Does Anyone Here Remember When Hans Gubenstein Invented Time Travel?”

Well I must’ve missed it on the website but now it’s obvious – this year’s PGL has a theme: horror.

Before I get into that let me just review the previous 2 PGLs. I got into it when I watched it on Sky Movies a year or so ago. That was the first competition – in which the winner was both writer and director. The winner Pete Jones made his movie, Stolen Summer

The show was a fascinating insight into the movie biz and it had the soap opera elements of the best reality shows. When I finally got to see the movie it was a little disappointing – it was shmaltzy and sentimental – not a terrible movie, but not a terribly good one either.

PGL 2 they introduced the separate writer and director contests. I haven’t seen the show for this one – but I read the script for the winner – not that that was quite the version that was filmed. It was a light teen rom com – not bad but again not great. I read some stuff on the web about it while it was showing in the US. There was some interesting stuff being posted. It sounds like the show was good – and the movie apparently turned out like the previous one – ok but not great. I have seen the trailer and it does a good job of making you wanna see it.

You can actually buy a DVD boxset of PGL2 which comes with all the TV episodes as well as the movie. So I’ll probably get that.

So anyway…

The second of the scripts I read was MANEATER – and it does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s about 3 women who eat men. Actually they’re like vampires – undead, super strong and fast, only able to come out at night and needing to feed on humans – only instead of drinking blood they must eat human flesh. In fact the more I think of it the more I think that this script would work just as well with vamps as we traditionally know them – I could believe that it’s only there to make the title pun work. It does I suppose provide a bit of a twist on the usual formula – and it does allow for some wacky grossness.

Having said that the plot is fairly predictable – one of the vamp-girls is beginning to rethink her lifestyle – all the killing – and she gets romantically involved with one of her intended victims – which leads to a confrontation with the leader of the little group. No real surprises there then.

The tone of this movie is a little muddled. We start with a scene that reveals the canivorous habits of these ladies – snacking on a guy they’ve lured back to their factory home whilst discussing Feng Shui. So straight away I’m thinking this has pretentions of Buffyness – but it’s not in that league when it comes to witty dialogue. Or for that matter any deeper meaning or subtext. It’s the usual lonely, melancholy creature of the night stuff. To live others must die – is this who I want to be. A hundred vamp movies have done it before – many better. Which is not to say it doesn’t have it’s moments. In particular the older lead vamp, Regina, is a nicely drawn character – I immediately thought of Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger. But it’s neither that stylish, cooly noirish – nor as turn-on-a-dime genre-twisting as Buffy.

Add to that the third female lead – vamp as disturbingly gleeful serial killer and you’ve got at least 3 different moods and they don’t mesh. Plus there’s a romantic subplot in there which doesn’t have time to develop properly. Also – in what’s fast becoming a trend – the ending is a little weak. It suffers from the same schizophrenia as the rest of the movie – it doesn’t know whether it wants to end happily or not and takes a stab at both. Odd.

It is however at least as entertaining as Feast and with the right cast and a few re-writes I think it could be kinda fun.

I can see a couple of places where Miramax might want to trim it to reign in the budget – a couple of historical flashbacks which would be costly for little on-screen time. It’s got more locations than Feast but they’re more generic and it doesn’t go for the gradual trashing of an entire building the way that movie does. Now that I know the theme is horror I can see that they (PGL/Miramax) must’ve factored in the cost of effects etc and/or are prepared to school the winners in the art of low-budget gore etc.

I’ll give Maneater another 7.5/10 – the dialogue’s not quite as good but the characterisation is clearer and the type of exposition is more to my style.

Next up – A Bedtime Story

So I was going to write something about online communities, why they may or may not be important to me and about Ship of Fools specifically. But… that’s a long involved subject and I wanted to do this instead.

I’m a fan of a US TV program called Project Greenlight – basically it’s a script-writing and directing contest – the winners get to make an actual movie. The process of making the movie is filmed for a documentary show. Well the contest for the 3rd season is nearing the end stages. They’ve whittled the scripts down to the top 6. Since they’re available for download I intend to review them on here.

The first, which I picked more or less at random is FEAST.

Feast is a monster-movie. A group of people are besieged in a bar by a ‘family’ of ravenous flying beasts. As the night wears on they make various attempts to escape whilst their numbers are depleted by these killing and eating machines. I won’t be giving anything away if I tell you that not all the group survive – firstly because Feast follows the usual conventions for these kinds of movies and secondly because we get a freeze-frame caption introduction to all the main characters at the start of the movie – including the information Name, Age, Occupation and Life Expectancy. However the fact is that they are still able to surprise us since some of the captions are ambiguous (and in at least one case sarcastically incorrect). I liked the captions they helped create a certain attitude for the tone of the movie.

There are a lot of characters – I counted 18 speaking roles in the movie itself (there’s a pre-titles teaser introduction of the monsters) – but then they tend to get killed off in ones and twos at regular intervals – leaving us with a small band of survivors – like I said before about par for the course for this type of movie. All the characters except two waitresses and two kids – have roles instead of names – bartender, hero, good guy, bossman etc. A sly recognition of the fact that with so many characters and so much action they’re never gonna be much more than types anyway. Actually there is as much characterisation as can be expected under these conditions and it’s done well. The dialog has a breezy, always on the edge of being tongue-in-cheek style – it reminds me of From Dusk Til Dawn or Tremors. So you end up rooting for the group – which as it should be – but not too gutted when the characters are, well, gutted – which is also for the good.

I’m still not sure about the monsters. They are huge, white, furry, winged jackals – or at least that’s as near as I could visualise it. They move very fast and they rip, tear and eat their victims. They show intelligence – laying traps, searching for weaknesses. They also act as a family and have individual personalities. We even get monster-sex and monster-reproduction – the gestation period is in an order of seconds! The script never really tries to explain where they’ve come from or why they’re here – but I don’t see that as a huge weakness – it would be nice to know, but the main point of the movie is the human-monster battles not the back-story. They also are unable to come out in the open during the day – giving the movie it’s natural direction – the group must survive until morning when they can escape.

As you’d expect the pace rattles along fairly briskly – building to a climax at the end. Although the actual ending – which I won’t spoil – I think needs work. I think the ending to a movie like this is like the punchline to a joke – so you need to get to it quickly and deliver it confidently- I think in this case they take too long and then ‘fluff it’ slightly.

I also wondered whether some of the action being described was plausible on-screen as opposed to on the page. Monsters flying in enclosed spaces, people throwing bodies around as a weapon.

Having said that it was entertaining and though there’s nothing here we haven’t really seen before – it still has the potential to be a lot of fun.

I do have to wonder if it’ll disqualify itself by being too expensive though. Most of the action takes place in 2 or 3 rooms of the bar but there are 20 characters – i.e. 20 actors to pay. Making the monsters fly is going to be expensive, as could be the effects/make-up they’d require in any case. PGL has a minimum budget of $1M and Miramax who fund the movie haven’t in the past wanted to push it too much higher than that. If this script wins then I think they’ll need some creative people capable of doing effects on a budget. I’d also expect there to be pressure to re-write with less characters, less monsters, and possibly monsters which are more conducive to stuntman-in-a-suit rather than stuntman-in-a-suit-and-a-harness-and-possible-CGI (which they won’t get money or time for).

Purely on the merits of the script itself I’d give it a 7.5/10. Whether it should be or not – practical concerns of whether they can make it for the budget or not will hamper it’s chances of getting picked – for that reason I’d say chances of winning are lowish.

But I intend to re-visit the “who should win?” and “who will win questions?” when I’ve read all 6 scripts.

Next up is MANEATER

…and dreams and ideas.

I’ve tried writing again recently but I’m still too critical of my own work to ever finish anything.

I find the newsgroups tiring at the moment. Mostly ‘cos I seem to keep getting involved in stupid arguments.

I don’t care about plot-holes!!!!

Just had to get that off my chest.

The spoilers for Angel look interesting. Even though I’m not a Spike-aholic I think he’s going to be good for the show.