Um...Thanks. Yeah, that's my son in the top left corner.Kudos to
Sony Pictures for making a movie that's marketed to kids that's so fucking scary I had to walk out with my son after the first 15 minutes.
Here's what happened in the first 15 minutes of
Monster House. The movie opens with a little girl riding her tricycle down the block. Her wheels gets stuck in the grass of said house and this insane scary old man comes running out, grabs the bike, and literally rips it in half. Then the two main characters are playing basketball and the ball accidentally rolls onto the crazy guy's grass again. Well, crazy old man comes running out and actually tries to grab the kid!
And then he actually does grab the kid! He then hoists him into the air while screaming, "
I'll kill you! Do you want to die?!" And uh, then the old guy starts to have a heart attack.
Seriously.
Wanna know what happens next? He falls down dead...on top of the goddamn kid. I repeat, a dead guy falls on top of a little kid. In which the movie spends a good 10 seconds on the dead guys eyes.
That was the first
7 minutes.
The next 8 minutes consisted of the introduction of a mean and bitchy babysitter, her soon to be rapist boyfriend who gets drunk at the kids house, and then his eventual death. Did I mention the boyfriend tried to rape the babysitter?
Now my son thinks I'm an asshole for taking him to this movie.
Thanks, Monster House!
--Tenspeed
AND THE LAUREL TO THE STORY IS...
Well, first of all I'm gonna have to go ahead and apologize for the awful, awful pun.
Ok. Fuck humility.
WE WON!!
Serial has not only won for Best Supporting Actress (Lauren Velez, in a truly amazing performance), but we just won for Best Story! This is the very first festival that we entered and we couldn't be more happy. I've been involved in a lot of films but I can honestly say that I have never been more proud. A special thanks to Larry Strong, my co-writer and co-director. You're weird but I love 'ya (see, if you say "ya", it's not so gay).
If you don't know what Serial is about, feel free to click the link 8 words ago...
You can also check out the trailers here. Go ahead. Click "Large". Everything will be ok.
--Tenspeed
Greetings from the SLUSH PILE... I am pasting below a response from this agent to a query I made .
I love agents, they all sound like they just saved a school bus full of school childern from going over a cliff with
ALL THE QUERIES they have to read!!!!
I am SO SICK of hearing how many queries and scripts they see
EVERY DAY ... BOO HOO... Like I dont already know I am completely insignificant.
Get over it- it's part of your fucken job.
You read shit.
Crank up the air conditioner, enjoy your decaf skim soy latte and hope to GOD you never have to really work...
(I should mention that I of course immediately sent them a treatment.)
I took out the persons name...
*****I'll be happy to look at a 2-3 page, double-spaced narrative outline in 12 point Geneva or Times New Roman font (with all of the major story beats, leaving nothing for me to guess at) and let you know if I want to read the full script. Please e-mail it to me at this address and if sent as an attachment (I use a Mac and can open Word, Appleworks, Adobe and Final Draft files), be sure to include your name and e-mail address on the attached doc. Many writers fail to follow these simple instructions and their work is lost in the huge volume of emails I receive daily; thus, I will not respond to any queries which do not include the contact info on the outline. Thanks.No, Thank you!! - Brownshoe...
Brownshoe here Pretentious prick that I am - to say It's not just Hollywood that makes the words,
"
You've go to be kidding me," spill from my trembling lips.
All I ask is greatness.
It's no secret that Broadway has reinvented tacky spectacle... make that
INvented it. But even back in the day of Zigfield and Jolson... Shit they had class, they had talent they had... a few catchy numbers.
Well, fuck me and put my boots back on, becaus here it comes...
*** If you are drinking milk you should stop NOW lest it shoot out your nose. Okay Go ahead...
XANADU The Musical - Is coming to Broadway.
I'm going to a bar.
Why the World Needs Superman...or at least people who care about adapting him correctly.So, this post is really about ADAPTATIONS. More specifically, adapting comic books to the screen. This is a subject that's close to my heart since I'm a well known superhero geek. And it pains me to sit through these horrible and unnecessary adaptations.
One of the most common complaints about these comics to screen adaptations is the loss of faithfulness to its graphic paper counterpart. Now for the record, it's almost impossible to be 100% faithful to the comic book. Some of the more popular characters were created 40 years ago and much of the fantasized world around them just wouldn't play on screen. A good example of this and a great adaptation is
SPIDERMAN. One of the most important aspects of Spiderman are his webs. I mean, how else is he going to swing from rooftop to rooftop? In the comic book, after Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider, he creates not only a man-made web fluid but also a state of the art web fluid delivery system he dubs "web shooters".
Yeah.
Filming something like that just wouldn't work. Sure, we're talking about a kid who becomes a wall crawling superhero but to make a decent film you just can't film that. It's too ridiculous and it would break that thin wall between reality and fantasy. And it really wouldn't be entertaining for the audience. Because then you would slip into that realm where the bad guy has invented the
Super Techno Insane Gun that's making people go crazy and then good guy hightails it to his lab and invents the
Super Techno Sane Gun to counteract the bad guys affects. It's too much.
I can't really go into all the superhero adaptations because that would take forever. I would, however, like to discuss
Superman Returns and explain what truly drove me crazy when I saw it. Careful now...There are SPOILERS BELOW:
When it was announced that Bryan Singer would take over the helm of Superman I was less than excited. Not because I think he's a bad director. In fact, I think he's a very good director and I can watch
The Usual Suspects every day. But when it comes to his casting choices for his superhero movies, I always cringe. Singer commits a HUGE crime when he unnecessarily and incorrectly makes the main characters a decade younger than they should be. If you've seen X-Men, most people wondered why he made Rogue and Iceman into teenagers and basically told the story of Kitty Pryde and Colossus, when he simply could've just told that story. Please, don't tell me about recognizability because Iceman really ain't burnin' up the popularity charts. It was just an unnecessary adaptation.
Man, I'm a geek.
But I had hope for Superman Returns because all I kept hearing about was how faithful Singer was going to be. All I kept hearing about was how faithful the writers Dan Harris and Michael Dougherty were going to be. Every interview regarding Superman Returns had the word
faithful in it. Faithful, faithful, faithful. For a second I thought that Bill Clinton was going to direct the film. And then came the first boom when 24 year old Brandon Routh was cast. Believe it or not, Routh is actually younger than Tom Welling of
Smallville.
Whoops.
Actually Christopher Reeve was probably around the same age since he was only 26 when the original Superman came out. But truthfully Routh just doesn't look like the 30 year old Superman that he's supposed to be. Reeve looked like a man. Routh looks like a boy playing a man. There's a difference.
Next came the suit. The Latex Suit. Superman has a
latex suit? Weird but pretty easy to get over. But seriously, a latex suit?
Here's the most ridiculous and outlandish aspect of Superman Returns that almost made me scream in the theatre:
Superman is a daddy. Superman--
excuse me--knocked up Lois Lane. Um...what? WHAT THE HELL WERE THEY THINKING? Do you know what the best part about that was? After the film, all I could hear in the lobby was parents trying to explain to their kids what and why and where and...
fucking how that was possible. That's when I knew the film probably wouldn't be as big as I originally thought.
Their unfaithfulness to the comic was a huge flaw. And it was entirely unnecessary. There are literally hundreds of stories that you could've done for Superman Returns. Hundreds. Why nobody ever consults with
Bruce Timm, producer of the
Superman/Justice League animated series is beyond me. If you've never seen the series, watch it. It's perfect for adults and kids. Entertaining and poignant at the same time.
Thank God for movies like
Batman Begins and
Spiderman. These are comic book movies done right. That goes for Blade and Blade II as well.
I absolutely can't wait until Spiderman 3. And before Singer starts
Superman 2: Father's Day, I hope he consults with one of those directors and or screenwriters.
P.S. Go see
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. I already saw it once and I'm gonna see it again today.
Best Movie of The Year By Far.
--Tenspeed
Los Angeles baby!
First of all, my deep apologies for not posting in so long. I've been incredibly busy with my
film that's premiering next week and with my new television show, which was my primary reason for going back out to LA.
As promised, here is my other installment of that New York vs. Los Angeles thing....
You know you're in Los Angeles When...
You ask someone for directions and they tell you to get on 3 different highways when your destination is only 3 miles away.
Because nobody fucking works, It's 11am and you're sitting in traffic...
...unless you're on Olympic Blvd., which apparently, no one drives on.
You've been driving for 30 minutes and you realize that no one's beeped their horn.
Hollywood Blvd. is exactly like
Times Square. In the sense that you want to line the streets with gasoline and light a match.
The women don't look like Pamela Anderson anymore. Now they all look like Mischa Barton which is just as gross.
Hey look! It's that guy, from that show, like ten years ago! And he's parking my car...?
Jessica Simpson is walking out of some store on Robertson Blvd. pretending she doesn't want to be photographed...even though Robertson Blvd. has pound for pound the most photographers on planet Earth. It's like vacationing in Israel and expecting not to get blown up.
Ryan Seacrest's picture is everywhere. Like EVERYWHERE.
Scraggly beards are cool!
Long hair is cool!
Women wearing thirteen different types of shirts at the same time is cool!
And then wearing those shirts as dresses is
really cool!
So that's pretty much LA. I'll leave you with a poignant moment. This is something I realized on my 3rd day there:
The Superman Guy in front of
Mann's Theatre would totally get his ass kicked by
The Naked Cowboy in
Times Square.
--Tenspeed.
