Thursday Review: Grumpy Bulldog Picks the Oscars

A couple weeks ago they announced who was nominated for Oscars.  So by now I think it's time to pick some winners.  Here's my in-depth analysis of who I think will win. 

Best Picture:  Zero Dark Thirty
(Every time I hear about this I wonder, how good can this movie really be if it came out less than 18 months after bin Laden died?  I mean except for splatterfests like the "Saw" movies or low budget, overglorified haunted house attractions like "Paranormal Activity" you need at least 18 months to make the thing.  I mean did they have the script already in production when bin Laden died?  Did they use some top secret government time machine to find out in advance?  Has bin Laden actually been dead for years and on ice all that time as some have claimed?)

Best Director:  Ang Lee "Life of Pi"
(I dunno.  Why not?  They didn't nominate Kathryn Bigelow for "Zero Dark Thirty" or Ben Affleck for "Argo" so it would seem like it'll either be Spielberg or Lee.)

Best Actor:  Daniel Day-Lewis "Lincoln"
(You know anonymous SEAL guys aren't going to win it, so this is a good fallback position.)

Best Actress:  Meryl Streep...wait, has she even been in anything this year?
(I just assume she'll win every year.  OK, she's not in anything so I'll go with Jessica Chastain from "Zero Dark Thirty" but maybe Streep will pull a Kanye West on her.)

Best Supporting Actor:  Philip Seymour-Hoffman "The Master"
(Because Hollywood has no originality, so let's just give all the awards to people who already have them!)

Best Supporting Actress:  Anne Hathaway "Les Miserables"
(This is just wishful thinking that she'll go up to accept and flash her vagina again.)

Best Screenplay:  Whoever wrote "Zero Dark Thirty"
(Because they worked really fast!)

Best Special Effects:  The Hobbit
(The best special effect being to stretch a 300-page book into 10 hours of films!)

Best Animated Picture:  The Avengers...wait, it wasn't animated?  OK, then whatever Pixar came out with this year.

Just for fun I decided to do a little research project from Tony Laplume's box office breakdowns from 1980-2011.  Just going back a few years I wanted to see what place overall the "best picture" of the year came in:

2011:  71. The Artist ($44 mil)
2010:  18. The King's Speech ($135 mil)
2009:  116. The Hurt Locker ($17 mil)
2008:  16.  Slumdog Millionaire ($141 mil)
2007:  36. No Country for Old Men ($74 mil)
2006:  15. The Departed ($132 mil)
2005:  49. Crash ($54 mil)
2004:   24. Million Dollar Baby ($100 mil)
2003:  1. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King ($377 mil)
2002:  10. Chicago ($170 mil)
2001:  11. A Beautiful Mind $170 mil
2000:  4. Gladiator ($187 mil)

Kind of an interesting trend that at the start of the 21st Century the Best Picture was actually a fairly popular and successful movie.  But after Lord of the Rings it's like the Academy decided enough of this populist stuff and started to go back to more obscure pictures, notably "The Hurt Locker" in 2009 and "The Artist" in 2011. It is often odd how the "Best Picture" of a given year will hardly be seen by anyone and only be shown in six theaters by the end of that year.

Speaking of movies, tomorrow is Week 4 of Box Office Blitz!

January Recap

It's the first-ever Recap post!  In case you haven't been paying attention to this blog at all the last month, here's where you can catch up on some things you missed.

From the number of views, the top 5 entries this month were:

1. How to Do a Wonder Woman Movie Without Even Trying
2. Thursday Review:  Movie Catch-Up
3. Thursday Review:  2012 Reads
4. Thursday Review:  The Night's Legacy (Sales generated by this?  Zero.)
5. Two-Cent Tuesday:  The Brave New World of Publishing

Yay, Thursdays! Also 1, 4, and 5 were all in the same week so people really paid attention that week.

In addition to that, here are some other things I've read/watched this month and want to share some thoughts on:

1.  Arkham Asylum:  The graphic novel, not the video game.  I don't have a PS3 or XBox 360 to play the game and it's probably too complicated for me anyway.  The game is slightly based on the 1989 graphic novel by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean.

The gist of the plot is that the inmates have taken control of the asylum and demand Batman go in to play with them.  Mixed in with this is the story of Amadeus Arkham, the founder of the asylum, who becomes one of the inmates.  That substory was actually more interesting than the main story to me; it would make a great standalone novel or a horror movie.  Unlike the video game, there's not a lot of action involved in the main story, except for the battle between Batman and Killer Croc.

I was glad I couldn't buy this online because the actual comic is very difficult to read.  Not just Morrison's story but the artwork by McKean is so murky and much of the lettering (especially for the Joker) is hard to decipher, especially if you have shitty eyesight like I do.  Really if you want to read this you have to get the 15th Anniversary edition that has Morrison's original script and even better some author commentary included with it.  That really helped to spell out a lot of the symbolic elements.  Plus there are a lot of interesting factoids in there.  Like me, Morrison didn't really like the 80s Frank Miller Batman, who was a violent psycho little better than the criminals he fought against, so Morrison conceived the story to create a different version of Batman.  His original concept for the Joker was to have him dressed as Madonna (the "singer" ick) but the people in charge nixed that idea.  There are also some deleted scenes in the script.  If you ever read Morrison's later Batman RIP series you can see where he reuses some of this material.

Anyway, while I didn't like the actual graphic novel so much the extras made it really interesting.  (And if you like extras, maybe go check out the Special Features tab sometime.  I'm just saying...)

2.  Archer:  Briane Pagel turned me on to this FX show a couple of years ago.  It's a hilarious and foul-mouthed spoof on James Bond.  Or like Austin Powers if it were rewritten by Seth MacFarlane and had an R-rating.  Season 3 came out on DVD not long ago so I bought that to rewatch it--that season wasn't on Netflix yet--which also included the "Heart of Archness" trilogy that I missed most of because it was aired between seasons 2 and 3.  This isn't my favorite animated show, but it is fun.  I just wish Jon Benjamin could do more than one voice.  I mean all his characters (Archer, Carl the convenience store clerk/Yoda on Family Guy, Bob's Burgers) sound exactly the same.  It's kind of distracting.  Though for the first episode of Season 4 it did lead to a hilarious bit where Archer thinks he is Bob's Burgers.  There is a lot of potty/sexual humor so it's not something to watch with your kids.

3.  Up So Down by Briane Pagel:  Speaking of Mr. Pagel, I read his Up So Down this month.  It was nearly as good as The After.  You can read my full review here, but suffice it to say if you liked The After you should read this.  And if you haven't read either, go buy them both because they're only 99 cents each!

4.  Ted:  This was funny, though pretty predictable.  Basically if you like Family Guy then you'll like this movie.  If you don't, then fuck it.

5.  Dredd:  This Judge Dredd has to be the least charismatic character ever put on screen.  He never once takes off his helmet, so we never see more than his mouth and stubble.  Does he even have a first name?  Did he grow up somewhere?  Does he have any backstory at all?  Ah, why bother making characters when we can just shoot people and blow stuff up?  Yeah, so there.  It's kind of like watching the Expendables movies (also by Lionsgate) where you go into it not really expecting much in terms of plot or characters, just lots of action.  And it delivers!  But since there was no Rob Schneider involved it by default is better than the 90s movie.

6.  TekWar:  Just to piss of Michael Offutt, I'm going to mention Bill Shatner's novel TekWar, which I got on sale from Amazon over the holidays and finally got around to read.  I was prepared for it to be really terrible, but it wasn't so bad.  It wasn't the greatest thing I've ever read either.  It's a serviceable sci-fi detective story, like a poor man's "Blade Runner."  The actual writing isn't great--see my entry on -ing verbs, of which Shatner uses many needlessly with phrases like "came running at" and so on.  I watched the TV movies at one point on Netflix but they are no longer there.  The book was actually better because it covers a bit more ground.  I have four more of the books to read at some point just to see how bad they get.

7.  Warrior:  This is the 2011 movie that starred Tom Hardy (of Inception and Dark Knight Rises fame) and some other guy as estranged brothers who end up fighting against each other in a big MMA tourney.  Most of the movies is a string of cliches:  the father was an abusive drunk, Tom Hardy ran away from the army, his older brother is losing his home but determined to win.  The older brother is basically Rocky combined with Walter White of "Breaking Bad"--basically if Walt had decided to be an MMA underdog instead of dealing meth.  The scenario is fairly ludicrous as no one figures out Tommy is a deserted until the end--and then the Marines let him fight yet!  (In the old days deserters got a firing squad, but now I guess they're more forgiving.)  The end fight where the brothers square off makes up for the shortcomings in the rest of the film.  And I suppose that beatdown saved on years of therapy.

8.  Total Recall (2012):  This was an exciting movie, but the plot was pretty ludicrous.  I'm not one of those who says they should have kept it on Mars, but the whole thing where people can only live on England or Australia and have to commute from Down Under to the UK everyday via high-speed train is pretty dumb.  Plus while the people in charge are all in England they all speak like Americans.  WTF?  Instead of stopping some invasion, it would have kept more with the original if there had been some way to revitalize the rest of the world that was being held hostage by the people in charge who didn't want to lose what they had.  But whatever.

9.  Premium Rush:  Joseph Gordon-Leavitt outruns a manic Michael Shannon on his bike, probably with the aid of PEDs.  It was another exciting movie, even if the plot is paper thin and character development almost nonexistent.  Here's a little superhero movie trivia:  you have Joseph Gordon Leavitt (Robin from the Dark Knight Rises) vs. Michael Shannon (General Zod in the upcoming Man of Steel) in a movie written/directed by David Koepp, who wrote the first Spider-Man movie, which contained a line where Tobey Maguire claims to be hit by a bike messenger.  Neat.

Tomorrow I make my Oscar Picks!

Two-Cent Tuesday: F-ing Ing Verbs!

My "editor" on A Hero's Journey did not make many suggestions, but the one thing she insisted on was to change -ing verbs to -ed verbs.  She's one of those who believe those are "stronger."  I've never really understood this belief.  I asked someone more in the know about grammar than I am but even her explanation didn't really convince me this needed to be done.

Anyway, this Grumpy Bulldog finally just grumbled, "Fine...goddamnit." and spent a whole day to hunt down -ing verbs and change many of them to -ed verbs.  Or in many cases from -ing to "to [whatever]".  In other cases I had to get more creative than that.

Here's a little primer on the kind of stuff I did:

Original sentence:

As she mounted the steps to her dream job, Emma’s main concern was not tripping over her own feet.  

The revised:

As she mounted the steps to her dream job, Dr. Emma Earl’s main concern was not to trip over her own feet.   

Original:

Emma needed a moment to remember that she was Dr. Earl now, the title sounding so strange from someone else’s mouth.    

Revised:


Emma needed a moment to remember that she was Dr. Earl now; the title sounded so strange from someone else’s mouth.   

Original:

As she felt her face turning red-hot, she summoned the courage to add, “Am I too early?”  

Revised:

As her face turned red-hot, she summoned the courage to add, “Am I too early?”

And that's only like half the first page!  For 300-plus pages in double space you can imagine how many instances of this there were.  I missed a few because I did it on the quick. 

The question for the sequels was whether or not to do the same thing.  Ultimately I decided I should be consistent.  So for weeks I've gone through the seven sequels to cut out as many -ing verbs as I can. 

It is a very cumbersome process.  First I print out the story.  Then I read through it and mark it up in red pen.  Then (the worst part) I have to make all those red pen changes on the file.  Seriously that step is so dull I need someone to stand behind me with a cattle-prod to keep me on task.  I'm not done after that, though!  Next I convert it to Kindle format on Smashwords (and charge an obscenely high price so no one else will buy it--or if they do I make an obscenely high profit!) and then I read the story AGAIN to see if I've missed any errors or (in many cases) made new errors.  I highlight those on the Kindle and then make those changes to the file.  It's slightly less tedious to make those changes because there are fewer of them.

I have to do that 7 times over, for about 3,000 pages (double-spaced) of text!  So you can see why I've really started to hate -ing verbs.  And more so the "editor" who said I need to eliminate those -ing verbs.  I have to go to all this trouble because some two-bit hack probably still in college read some stupid blog entry somewhere and decided it was LAW.  Argh.  I've gotten all the way through 2-5 and am up to the Kindle phase of Book 6 and am in the process of the red pen edits to Book 7.  Book 8 is not started at all yet and it's 570 pages so it'll take a while.

For the most part I don't think these changes make the stories better.  More often than not instead of "stronger" it seems to me the sentences are bulkier.  But there are a few good instances because I, like many people, often unconsciously misuse -ing verbs.

I might say for instance:  She entered the room, walking to the kitchen. [Only something less inane.]

That's not how you should do it because the enter room part and walking to the kitchen are two separate actions.  What I should really say is more like, "She entered the room and then walked to the kitchen."  That, to me anyway, is more grammatically correct.

Another good thing is sometimes it helps to eliminate a word I don't need.  Like if I wrote, "She left her purse sitting on the counter."  I would change it to "She left her purse on the counter."  As you can see, the "sitting" verb isn't necessary because if it's on the counter we know it's sitting on it, right?

Another bugaboo of mine is the expression "She couldn't help thinking" or "couldn't help feeling" where really I could just say "she thought" or "she felt" or whatever.  Simplify, man!

A good example of unneeded -ing verbs came when I read TekWar by Bill Shatner.  He constantly uses expressions like "came running" or "came charging" or "came dripping" where it could easily be "ran" "charged" and "dripped" respectively.

Still, on the balance it's a huge pain in the ass.  Most of the time I think it's an unnecessary pain in the ass too.  I mean, just look at other books and you'll see -ing verbs everywhere!  I think shortly after I did one of my books I read "John Dies At the End" and it used -ing verbs all the time!  And that's sold a bunch of copies and has a movie adaptation to be released this year so clearly the -ing verbs didn't matter to people.

However, when you do edit a story, you might want to reconsider some of your -ing verbs.  They might not be as necessary as you might think.

(If I did this right there aren't any unnecessary -ing verbs in this blog entry!)

Tomorrow is the first-ever Recap entry!