Date Night and Comparitive Reading
Rachel and I decided we needed a night out on the town, which in this instance meant Universal Citywalk for dinner and a movie we actually pay for.
There are bunch of restaurants at Universal and we've been to most of them, so when Rachel asked where I was taking her, I offered up one that we had not been to together, but I have had good luck with in the past. Apparently I've never been there on a Friday night before... it was, different. We waited in the bar for about 45 minutes, drinking expensive drinks and riding a chain of conversation that started with some drunk girls trying to pick me up at the bar ("I like your hat, are you here with a girl?") wandered around topics such as strip clubs and porn. Mother would be so proud. We spent most of our time at the leaning post near the back, close to the fresh air, because the place smelled just like a bar that had not been hosed down for at least a good month.
When we finally got to eat dinner, the service was actually must faster and the waiter was cool. Plus, there was a whole other bar inside, so we didn't have to stop watching the Drunk People Show while we ate. By the end of the dinner, the waiter had comped us a couple of shots and dessert, which was nice of him, but left us wondering if we were complaining too much or if that's just their style around that joint. We'll never know probably as I doubt Rachel wants to try the place again.
The movie that we actually paid for? Max Payne. To sum it up, it's actually kind of sad that with all the great free movies we get to see, when we actually pay for one these days, it has to suck this bad. What's worse, it's the kind of movie that you walk out of wondering how they pulled all these names into this mess of a movie. Basically, just skip it, I wish I did.
* * *
Every now and then, I like to read the book of a movie I just saw as a comparative study in adapted screenplays. Most of the writing I've done of late has been adaptation, so I always like to look and see how certain things came out in the wash. The thing I'm leaning, there are no rules here and I don't care what the UCLA Writers classes say about it all.
The thing is with adaptations, some take a lot of work to wrangle a movie out of a book and some are basically just changing the format from book to screenplay... as Capote would say, "that's not writing, it's typing."
I actually had two going at once this time around, one is still in progress, and for good reason... it's a bitch of a read, yet still good. The first I started and am still laboring through is Blindness, which I saw a few weekends back and liked, but never need to see again. The other, believe it or not, is Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist... that's right, young adult fiction and if you don't like it, you can get fucked because there's a first time for everything... I didn't bother reading the stuff when I was a young adult, so I'm due.
Blindness is a long ramble of a book that made up its own punctuation and paragraph format, so it feels like you're reading something before an editor got to it and put in the quotes around the dialog and the paragraphs. However, the movie that it became is actually pretty obvious, despite the fact that when I read an interview with the screenwriter, he made it sound like he did the translation and had to piece it together from notes stuff under a prison cell door. All the characters were nicely laid out, the plot was made for a movie, and the hardest part was probably writing actual dialog rather than narrative.
Nick and Norah, on the other hand, got turned on its ear a bit, and it was better for it in the end. Not that book wasn't good... if I were a young adult, I would be swooning over it and using it as a reference guide on how to be a punk rocker in New York. However, it needed some work before it could become a screenplay. In the book, you get dropped right into the first club scene that you have to wait 10 minutes for in the movie; the movie instead runs you through some character introductions and history that you usually get in the form of late teen internal ranting and raving in the book. Plus, one of the characters is really expanded out in the movie from just an occasionally mentioned character to someone who had her own really funny (and sometimes gross) sub-plot in the movie. Additionally, Nick and Norah's exes in the book are only somewhat evil, but move to completely fucking evil in the movie. I guess sometimes you just have to spell it out for people.
By the way, if you're ever looking for great examples of "typing", compare and contrast the movie vs. book versions of The Maltese Falcon or The Andromeda Strain. Outside of some cuts for the sensors for the first one, these things just fell out of the book and onto the script. I'm trying to think of some examples of the opposite, but nothing is coming to mind... let me know if you think of any.
J.
There are bunch of restaurants at Universal and we've been to most of them, so when Rachel asked where I was taking her, I offered up one that we had not been to together, but I have had good luck with in the past. Apparently I've never been there on a Friday night before... it was, different. We waited in the bar for about 45 minutes, drinking expensive drinks and riding a chain of conversation that started with some drunk girls trying to pick me up at the bar ("I like your hat, are you here with a girl?") wandered around topics such as strip clubs and porn. Mother would be so proud. We spent most of our time at the leaning post near the back, close to the fresh air, because the place smelled just like a bar that had not been hosed down for at least a good month.
When we finally got to eat dinner, the service was actually must faster and the waiter was cool. Plus, there was a whole other bar inside, so we didn't have to stop watching the Drunk People Show while we ate. By the end of the dinner, the waiter had comped us a couple of shots and dessert, which was nice of him, but left us wondering if we were complaining too much or if that's just their style around that joint. We'll never know probably as I doubt Rachel wants to try the place again.
The movie that we actually paid for? Max Payne. To sum it up, it's actually kind of sad that with all the great free movies we get to see, when we actually pay for one these days, it has to suck this bad. What's worse, it's the kind of movie that you walk out of wondering how they pulled all these names into this mess of a movie. Basically, just skip it, I wish I did.
* * *
Every now and then, I like to read the book of a movie I just saw as a comparative study in adapted screenplays. Most of the writing I've done of late has been adaptation, so I always like to look and see how certain things came out in the wash. The thing I'm leaning, there are no rules here and I don't care what the UCLA Writers classes say about it all.
The thing is with adaptations, some take a lot of work to wrangle a movie out of a book and some are basically just changing the format from book to screenplay... as Capote would say, "that's not writing, it's typing."
I actually had two going at once this time around, one is still in progress, and for good reason... it's a bitch of a read, yet still good. The first I started and am still laboring through is Blindness, which I saw a few weekends back and liked, but never need to see again. The other, believe it or not, is Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist... that's right, young adult fiction and if you don't like it, you can get fucked because there's a first time for everything... I didn't bother reading the stuff when I was a young adult, so I'm due.
Blindness is a long ramble of a book that made up its own punctuation and paragraph format, so it feels like you're reading something before an editor got to it and put in the quotes around the dialog and the paragraphs. However, the movie that it became is actually pretty obvious, despite the fact that when I read an interview with the screenwriter, he made it sound like he did the translation and had to piece it together from notes stuff under a prison cell door. All the characters were nicely laid out, the plot was made for a movie, and the hardest part was probably writing actual dialog rather than narrative.
Nick and Norah, on the other hand, got turned on its ear a bit, and it was better for it in the end. Not that book wasn't good... if I were a young adult, I would be swooning over it and using it as a reference guide on how to be a punk rocker in New York. However, it needed some work before it could become a screenplay. In the book, you get dropped right into the first club scene that you have to wait 10 minutes for in the movie; the movie instead runs you through some character introductions and history that you usually get in the form of late teen internal ranting and raving in the book. Plus, one of the characters is really expanded out in the movie from just an occasionally mentioned character to someone who had her own really funny (and sometimes gross) sub-plot in the movie. Additionally, Nick and Norah's exes in the book are only somewhat evil, but move to completely fucking evil in the movie. I guess sometimes you just have to spell it out for people.
By the way, if you're ever looking for great examples of "typing", compare and contrast the movie vs. book versions of The Maltese Falcon or The Andromeda Strain. Outside of some cuts for the sensors for the first one, these things just fell out of the book and onto the script. I'm trying to think of some examples of the opposite, but nothing is coming to mind... let me know if you think of any.
J.