I was thinking back to one my top 5 ever movie scenes, the opening scene in Fargo where Jerry meets the two criminals in the bar to solidify the job he’s hired them for – kidnap his wife.
The dialogue in that scene, while not as vibrant or quote-worthy as, say, a Tarantino scene, is still great. And the reason it’s awesome is because there’s so much tension in the interaction. Jerry wants something. The two kidnappers don’t like the way it’s being handled and are, therefore, putting up resistance. “Shep said you’d have the 40 thousand for us now.” “No,” Jerry says. “See, I’m going to give it to you later, in the ransom.”
More recently, I was watching a scene in the Amazon show, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Midge’s mother had left the family to start a new life in Paris. Midge and her father go there to bring her back. They find her in a run-down apartment she rented. Similar to the scene in Fargo, the dialogue doesn’t have any lines the college crowd is going to be quoting. But the dialogue throughout the scene is strong because they’re trying to get her to come back with them and she’s having none of it.
Around this point I had a minor revelation. One of the keys to writing a good dialogue scene isn’t just establishing a character objective. Yes, that helps. If you *don’t* give your character an objective, the scene will feel pointless and your characters will prattle on like a couple of homeless people discussing the CIA. The key is that in addition to establishing the objective, YOU MUST THEN MAKE YOUR CHARACTER WORK FOR IT.
I used to make this mistake all the time without realizing it. I would put two characters in a scene. One (usually my hero) would have an objective. Technically, the scene should’ve worked. But so many of my scenes were still dull. Every once in a while one would work and I’d wonder, “Why is this one good and all the others suck?” I could never figure it out and began to chalk it up to luck.
I finally realized that I was never making my character work for their objective. Instead, my “objectives” were “objectives in name only.” I inserted them because the screenwriting books said it’s something I had to do. But I never saw any of these as “real” objectives. They were thrown in there to make things interesting, to give the scene some extra pop.
That’s actually one of the biggest violations I see writers make. They write what can technically be described as “resistance” to an objective. But it’s not true resistance. The reader doesn’t doubt for a second that the hero is going to get what he wants. This “false resistance” is why scenes that technically should work do not.
It happened in Tenet a lot, which is probably why so many people found the film boring. There’s a scene about 30 minutes into the movie that highlights one of the better attempts Nolan makes at true resistance to the hero’s objective.
It occurs when the Protagonist (that’s his name in the film) has to impress a woman named Kat in order to get an audience with the Russian oligarch he’s trying to take down (Kat is the Russian’s wife). Kat is an art connoisseur so he brings her a famous painting, parlaying that into a dinner where he makes his pitch to meet her husband.
Kat tells the Protagonist it ain’t going to happen (resistance!). Her husband is too big time and his men are going to beat the hell out of you just for meeting with me so… sorry. There is resistance here, obviously. But I didn’t doubt for a second that the Protagonist wasn’t going to meet the Russian.
That’s the difference between true resistance and false resistance. With true resistance, the reader will have legitimate doubt that the hero will be able to achieve his objective.
One of the better examples of this occurs in Return of the Jedi. Luke Skywalker comes in to retrieve his old buddy, Han Solo, from Jabba the Hut. Even though Luke is a freaking Master Jedi, we still doubt that he’s going to succeed. The pivotal moment when that doubt sets in is when Luke waves his hand to Jedi mind-trick Jabba into giving him his friends and Jabba LAUGHS. He doesn’t fall for Jedi nonsense.
If you think about it, that’s one of the more memorable scenes from the film and I believe that’s why. They conveyed genuine doubt that the hero was going to achieve his objective. And think about how much Luke had to do to eventually save his friends and escape Jabba. It was a huge ordeal. The resistance was real.
Which brings us back to topic of the article.
If you want a scene to shine, you must not only introduce a character objective. You must make them earn the objective. Or else what are we doing here? We’re just handing out lollipops to our hero whenever he needs one. Where’s the drama in that?
You should not only incorporate this tool into the entirety of the scene but within the scene, all the way down to individual questions. If your hero is a detective investigating a murder and he meets a person of interest and asks them the question he needs answered – Who do you think killed Frankie? – do not, under any circumstances, have that character answer the question right away.
MAKE YOUR HERO EARN IT.
“I’m going to cut straight to the chase. Who do you think killed Frankie?” “I just started a pot of coffee. Would you like some?” “No. I want to know who killed Frankie.” “Be back in a second. Sit down. Make yourself at home.” She disappears into the kitchen.
You see what’s going on here? We’re making the hero earn the answer to their question. And you better believe when this woman comes back with three cups of coffee that she’s going to bring up anything but Frankie. Which is exactly what you want. You want your hero to have to steer her on course and get the answer to that question. The more doubt you can inject into the scene that your hero is going to get his answer, the better.
Remember, if characters are constantly conversing freely, that’s not going to read well. Because all they’re doing, then, is exchanging information. “This is what I think.” “This is what I think.” “That’s an interesting perspective.” “So is your perspective.” There’s no drama in that type of exchange. There’s no uncertainty. And while there are situations where you can get away with it (in a comedy with two funny characters, for example) it’s usually a recipe for boredom.
One final point. Boring dialogue is rarely about the words themselves. Sure, interesting words, clever phrasing, strong anecdotes – these things can help dialogue. But the main reason a scene of dialogue doesn’t work is because you didn’t set up a scenario that allowed your characters to talk to each other in a way that’s entertaining to a third party. And that’s what “Make’em Earn It” is. You’re ensuring that every time your hero goes into a conversation, they’re going to have to earn the outcome they want. It’s never going to be handed to them. That alone is going to improve your dialogue dramatically.
Give it a shot in your latest script and let me know how it goes in the comments!
Genre: Spy/Thriller
Premise: Two CIA operative former lovers meet for dinner and try to figure out what happened five years ago with a complicated hostage plane takeover in Vienna they were involved in.
About: Olen Steinhauer adapted this script from his own novel. The script just sold to Netflix with Chris Pine and Thandie Newton attached to star. Steinhauer has been writing novels since 2003. In 2011, he sold the rights to his “Tourist” novels to Sony.
Writer: Olen Steinhauer
Details: 124 pages
I knew absolutely nothing about this one other than when I saw “knives” in the title I wondered if Netflix was jumping on the Rian Johnson “Knives Out” trend. You know Netflix. They have all that behind-the-scenes algorithmining going on so it wouldn’t surprise me if they greenlit something based on the title’s similarity to another successful title.
More optimistically, I am a Chris Pine enthusiast. I love the guy. I think we would be best friends if we ever met. And check out this curiosity. Who would’ve thought, ten years after the Star Trek reboot, that it would be Pine with the big career and Zachary Quinto struggling?
Not me! I’ve heard some stuff about Quinto having an ego the size of the sun which he uses to club people he works with into submission so maybe that has something to do with it. It’s a reminder for when you hit it big to always be nice to people! Cause unless you’re kicking box office ass, Hollywood has no issue kicking you to the curb.
No idea what to expect from this, which is kinda exciting. Can Netflix totally redeem itself after The Devil Hates Your Pajamas? God, I hope so.
It’s 2009. We’re in a plane parked on a runway in Vienna. A raging lunatic Pakastani terrorist is taking a cell phone video demanding that prisoners from his country be freed. If they don’t, he’s going to kill the people behind him. Pan back to see an entire first class filled with children. The terrorists have brought them up here and told the adults back in coach that for every one of them who tries something funny, a child will be killed.
Cut to the American Embassy in Vienna where we meet Henry Pelham and Celia Harrison. They’re both horrified by the video of the terrorist they’re watching. But before we see the rest of this play out, we cut back a few days ago to see the two in bed together. They’re lovers. What they don’t know yet is that how this terrorist attack ends will split them apart forever.
Well, maybe forever is an exaggeration. More like five years (by the way, this script was written in 2014, so five years puts them in “present day”). Celia has since retired, marrying an older gentleman and spitting out two kids. Henry still works for the CIA and he’s looking to finally close the book on that attack. But first, he wants to ask Celia a couple of questions regarding what happened that have never been answered.
So the two meet at a restaurant near Celia’s home, in Carmel, California. There’s clearly still a spark between the two. But Henry isn’t here for sparks. Or, at least, he doesn’t think he is. There were a number of choices made that day that escalated a manageable situation into a catastrophe.
The main question is it’s suspected someone in that Embassy was feeding the terrorists information. Who might it have been? Where “All The Old Knives” gets interesting is that when each person talks about the past, we cut to the past and see it. However, what we see isn’t always what the two former lovers say to one another.
For example, we’ll see a flashback of Celia being told by one of her bosses that her handler that day, Bill, is selling secrets to the terrorists. But Celia doesn’t tell this to Henry at the table. This initiates a series of dual-but-opposing-clues that leave us wondering who’s telling the truth. Or why one of the parties is withholding the information that they are.
(spoiler) But things get real crusty when we realize these two didn’t come here to get back together. They came here to kill each other. Each of them believes that the other one is responsible for what happened that day. The only question left is which one of them is right. Oh, and will they be able to go on with their life knowing that there’s a chance, however slim, that their belief that the other did it is wrong?
This one did not start well. We begin with the dreaded bulk intro page (that’s when you introduce five or more characters on a single page – it’s literally impossible for a reader to remember who’s who) and followed that up with the triple time jump. 2009, now 2008, now 2014 – all within two pages!
But once I realized what the script was trying to do, I settled in and enjoyed myself.
That’s because Steinhauer makes the clever choice of using the dinner as a framing device around which everything else orbits. This decision grounds the story and makes, what is normally, a hard to follow spy narrative with lots of characters and reveals, a simple “Which one of them is lying?” plot.
All of a sudden jumping back in time worked great because we knew why we were jumping and that we were always coming back to that restaurant.
I love when sophisticated storylines like this one wrap things around a simple construct. Sure, we could run all over the world like a James Bond movie. But this is so much more interesting.
Another thing I loved was that, while it’s one long conversation between two people, the flashbacks keep injecting new information into that conversation. For example, we’ll flash back to Celia talking with her handler, Bill, who warns her about Henry, who is up to something.
Or Henry goes to the bathroom where we reveal that he’s secretly recording this conversation. Then, later still, we learn that Bill was the one communicating with the terrorists. This ensures that what is, basically, a two hour long dialogue scene, never gets tiring. Things are always changing.
It’s like this giant pot of dramatic irony soup. We know something about Henry that Celia doesn’t know. Then we know something about Celia that Henry doesn’t know.
And all of this is wrapped around two additional elements that keep the read really exciting. The first is that these two are clearly still in love with each other. So we have this additional layer of complexity running underneath their terrorist conversation.
Then, on top of that, Steinhauer makes a really good decision not to give away what happened on the plane til the very end. We know something terrible happened. But we don’t know what or how bad it was. So, of course, we want to read til the end to find out.
The only reason this doesn’t rate as an “impressive” is the final reveal. It *does work.*. The script holds together. But for all the secrets and double-crossing we experience, I was hoping for something a little craftier or a little more exciting.
That’s the danger with having any twisty narrative. It’s great to have all these twists in the moment because they keep the reader entertained. But, whether you know it or not, you’re setting up an expectation for an all-time great shocking final twist. And, of course, how many times in history have we had one of those? Ten? Fifteen? In other words, the odds are not in your favor that you’re going to win the twist ending lottery.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: There’s dramatic irony – the act of telling us, the reader, something that our hero does not know. And then there’s dramatic irony with high stakes, which is a whole different ballgame. If we know that Celia cheated on Henry but he doesn’t, that’s fun dramatic irony. But fun dramatic irony doesn’t write memorable scenes. It’s just fun. But if we know that Celia plans to kill Henry and he doesn’t know this, now we have dramatic irony with some real stakes. That tends to lead to great scenes.
What I learned 2: This is, maybe, the best example of how influential information is to a conversation. A conversation where two people are having a straight-forward conversation with each other is boring 99% of the time. It’s the information the reader takes into each conversation that makes said conversation entertaining. You have control of that information so use it. Before Ray talks to Stan, tell us that Stan has owed Ray money for over a year that he still hasn’t paid back. You can then have them talk about anything you want and I guarantee you their conversation will be more interesting than had you not revealed that information to us.
Million dollar spec Tuesday! wooooooo-heeeeee!
Genre: Spy Thriller/Period
Premise: The origin story of MI:6, Britain’s secret intelligence service, that came about out of necessity after the horrors of World War 1.
About: I’d forgotten about this script, which sold for a million bucks back in 2013. I was reminded about it recently when I saw that the writer, Aaron Berg, was in the news for his Atlantis project that sold to Netflix and is teaming him up with Batman director, Matthew Reeves. The reason Section 6 hasn’t been made yet is said to be that the Bond franchise is prickly about the similarities between the project and its own famous spy character. The two were going to go to court over the matter but Bond got cold feet when they realized that, by going to court, they would have to define exactly what makes James Bond “James Bond,” potentially offering a blueprint for other studios to “write around” those tenets and create a bunch of James Bond clones. We’ll see what ultimately happens but with the movement on this other Berg project, expect Section 6 to gain new life.
Writer: Aaron Berg
Details: 122 pages
Scripts like Section 6 aren’t easy reads. They’re sort of like mini-novels with the more extensive world-building, lots of history, and longer descriptive paragraphs. Outside of readers who love the subject matter, these scripts are often met with a groan because the reader knows the read is going to take twice as long.
Why?
Well-written spec scripts have a lot of white space. A lot of dialogue. This means your eyes fly down the page. There’s nothing anyone who reads scripts for a living loves more than their eyes flying down the page.
So what do you do if you’re a writer who likes to write this sort of stuff? How do you overcome this reader bias? Six simple words: Make sure your script is good.
We open on the British Embassy in Russia in 1918. World War 1 has recently ended. It’s a different world we’re told by many a character in Section 6. Ain’t that the truth. A Russian officer charges into the British Embassy being trailed by a bunch of mean Russian soldiers. Those Russians not only kill the officer, they kill all the British workers as well!
Not long after this, a British spy named Thomas Hawthorne heads to the Embassy to retrieve a secret piece of paper that’s been hidden. As soon as he gets it, though, the lights come on and standing there is this meanie named Ivan Vostok. Ivan grabs him to take him back to his torture den to get him to decode the message on the secret coded piece of paper.
Back in Britain, we meet Mansfield Cumming, a former soldier (who now uses a cane) who directs MI-1, the British Foreign Intelligence Service. Cumming is informed by a then spry Winston Churchill that the secret piece of paper Russia now has is a list of Russian politicians to assassinate for Russian revolutionaries (that’s what the opening Russian soldier was running from – he’d just assassinated a high up Russian politician)! If they figure that out, Russia will most assuredly attack Britain.
Cumming’s job is to find someone to infiltrate the Russians and get that piece of paper back before they decode it! There’s only one problem. Britain’s spies at this time were all spineless rich wimps. They were good at hiding and sneakily exchanging information. But they couldn’t do the dirty work. Cumming needs someone who can do the dirty work.
Enter 23 year old Alec Duncan, a soldier who’d been smack dab in the middle of World War 1. If there’s anyone who saw dirty, it was this guy. Currently making his living pickpocketing pedestrians and cheating at poker, Cumming collects Duncan from jail after he’s caught by a local policeman.
You know what happens next. That’s right: training! Cumming helps Duncan ditch his soldier impulses and approach things like a spy would. You have to be sneakier. You have to be faster. You have to be strong under pressure. The only thing Cumming is worried about is whether Duncan, a brute at heart, can hang with high society types. So he sets up a test at a local upper crust function that ends with Duncan crashing two 1918 subway train cars. I’d say that’s a success, wouldn’t you?
After his training, Duncan is sent by boat to Helsinki (this is around page 72) where he meets up with another spy, a beautiful woman named Nightengale, and they sneak down into Russia, find a badly tortured Hawthorne, and get him out. But the Russians don’t give up easily, pursuing them all the way to the sea. Will our tiny team be caught resulting in World War 2? Or will Section 6 be born?
Section 6 is a solid script.
I’m not the biggest spy film fan. But when I do like spy films, it tends to be when they’re doing something differently. I like this angle of a time before spies could be spies. And this was the transition to get them from these polite hoity-toity wusses who got mad if they spilled wine on their shoesies to dudes with a license to kill.
This is always a good thing to keep in mind when it comes to concept creation. You don’t want to just look for subjects. You want to look for subjects in transition. For example, you could make a story about the train industry in the U.S.. Or you could make a story about the train industry during the birth of the American highway system. Because the highway system is going to make the train industry irrelevant, you’ve got a much more conflict-heavy playground to play in.
Disruptive forces are entertaining. Polite spies don’t work in the post World War 1 era where hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ lips have been seared off from exposure to chemical weapons. You need a dirtier spy, someone with a more varied, nastier, skillset.
The reason the script doesn’t get higher marks with me is because of the structure. We don’t send our hero out on his mission until page 72. This creates a second half of the script that feels rushed. For example, we’re meeting this primary character in Nightengale on page 75. Considering how well we know everyone else by this point, she feels paper thin and never quite makes sense for the mission.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand the writer’s dilemma. This is essentially an origin story. With origin stories, you need to lean into the whole learning process. When Spider-Man first gets his powers, you don’t send him after Octopus Guy five minutes later. Spider-Man must first learn how to use his powers, as well as balance out how these newfound abilities affect other parts of his life. That takes time.
I guess it comes down to if you’re an origin-story guy or not. Some people like getting into the nitty gritty of the origin. I just found it hard to reconcile that time was “of the essence” with the Russians getting closer and closer to cracking Hawthorne, and yet we’re taking weeks to train Duncan here. I understand it’s 1918 but still. The whole timing of the separate plotlines didn’t organically mesh.
I did like, however, that by making this a period piece, we got a more interesting McGuffin. These days, the spy film Mcguffins are all the same. They’re some variation of “the nuclear launch codes.” I liked that this was a list of assassinations to be made.
You have to understand, as a reader, we’re experiencing what you experience at the theaters, times 20. So every time you see “nuclear launch codes” in a movie, I’ll read 20 scripts with “nuclear launch codes.” Which means I’m easily turned off by any highly used trope. In contrast, I value writers who change these tropes up. And one of the easiest ways to change tropes is to do it at the concept level. Take us to places we don’t normally go. Naturally, when you do this, you’re going to find things you don’t normally find.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens with this because it’s one of the better scripts I’ve read in the genre in a while. But it does seem to have this giant hurdle to leap in the looming Bond Producer Brigade who are at the bridge, 24/7, shouting, “Though Shall Not Pass.”
And yes, I’m thinking the same thing all of you are thinking. Which is that I should’ve had Scott review this. :)
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Section 6 has one of the more interesting Save The Cat examples. It’s “Befriend the Cripple.” Duncan is friends with a fellow soldier who got half his face blown off in the war and now wears a Phantom of the Opera type mask. It’s a bit cheap. But the love Duncan has for him is very effective in making us like him, especially because he’s a pretty harsh guy that isn’t the easiest to root for.
The Razzies have their winner! The Devil All The Time is the worst film of the year and it isn’t even close.
Genre: Southern Gothic Period Drama
Premise: Um, a group of god-fearing individuals weave in and out of each other’s lives after returning from the war.
About: If you ever see a bad movie, especially one with a weak concept, and wonder, “How did they get such a great cast?” The answer is almost always they landed a big fish first and the rest of the cast signed on because of them. Everyone wants to be in a movie with a hot or great actor. From what I understand (though someone can correct me if I’m wrong), director Antonio Campos socializes in the same circle as the Safdie Brothers and became friendly with Robert Pattinson while the Safdies were shooting Good Time. He got Pattinson to commit to “Devil,” and all the rest of the young buzzy actors (Tom Holland, Bill Skarsgaard, Riley Keough, and Sebastian Stan) followed suit. “Devil” was originally a novel written by a man with an inspiring story. Donald Ray Pollock spent thirty-two years employed as a laborer at the Mead Paper Corporation in Ohio, before enrolling in the MFA program at Ohio State University. His first book, Knockemstiff, would go on to win the 2009 PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship. It’s never too late to become a successful writer!
Writer: Antonio and Paulo Campos (based on the 2012 novel by David Ray Pollock)
Details: Too long
We’re in a really strange place with movies right now. I don’t know if The Devil All The Time gets made in any other era but this one. It has an indie sensibility that implies it could’ve been made by 1990s Miramax. But the cast feels too young for this type of material, which may be why it’s not rating high on Netflix’s most-watched ladder (it’s currently at #5 on its first weekend). Audiences aren’t sure what to make of it.
To the streamers’ credit, this is what a streaming service is able to do that movies beholden to the traditional distribution system could not. They can make stuff that doesn’t need to be “marketable.” But it’s becoming clearer that the more you throw these unproven creatives into the deep end of the pool, the worse the content gets.
I mean I watched 30 minutes of that new Netflix show, “Away,” about going to Mars. They crammed more melodrama into those first 30 minutes than that Fox show, “Empire” did in five seasons. That’s one of the more obvious indicators that a creative is a beginner. They go all in on the melodrama.
But Netflix seems determined – outside of the 2-3 big artistic names it recruits each year to win an Oscar – to embrace the quantity over quality approach. And, in doing so, figures that some of that quantity will rise to the top just by sheer odds. Let’s see what’s going on with its latest big feature effort.
A fair warning. There’s no plot to this movie so attempting to summarize it is impossible. But here’s my best stab at it. First and foremost, there’s a narrator who begins speaking gibberish that has nothing to do with anything. He’s a big part of the movie so get used to him.
A young man named Willard returns home to his small town after the war. I think World War 2 but if you told me it was the Civil War I wouldn’t be able to confidently tell you you were wrong.
Willard falls in love with a waitress and has a son with her but, uh oh, his wife gets cancer. Willard and his son, who I think is named Arvin, go down to a special place in the forest every night to pray like crazy for God not to kill off his wife. But God does not grant their wish. Poor Little Arvin is really upset but he’s about to get even more upset. That’s because, right after the funeral, Willard kills himself!
Meanwhile, there’s this young woman named Helen who marries this batshit crazy weirdo named Roy who’s super-religious, so much so that he does this little parlor trick whenever he goes to church and pours a box of live spiders over his face. So is anybody surprised when, after Roy has a daughter with Helen, that he stabs his wife in the trachea? Not me. Is anybody surprised when, after he kills her, he tries to revive her with God’s help? Not me!
A dozen years later we’re hanging out with Arvin again, except he’s in high school now. Oh, and he’s half-brother or step-brother to Lenora, Crazy Roy’s daughter. Have you tuned out yet? I know I have. This is a real movie. Like, people gave other people money to make this.
Oh, then we have the local preacher who preys on underage girls cause this movie is going to hit all the tropes so get used to it. The preacher takes a special liking to Lenora, Arvin’s half-sister or step-sister or step-uncle or whatever, and has sex with her. She ends up pregnant! When the preacher says to get an abortion, she’s devastated so she hangs herself.
Okay, stop. Stop stop stop.
Do I even need to go on?
Where does one begin with a movie like this?
I guess I’ll start with the narrator.
There are two reasons to choose a narrator for your screenplay. Reason one is that it’s an artistic choice you believe will enhance the story. Reason two is that you have no fucking clue what your movie is about and therefore you need a narrator to desperately keep your random wackadoodle movie on course.
That’s exactly what this narrator is for. Nobody knew what this movie was about. None of the characters had any actual purpose or goal. So we needed someone to trick audiences into believing there was actually a point to everything.
While I don’t believe this movie is good enough to warrant actual analysis, I’ve seen the following screenwriting mistake a lot so I’ll share this one observation with you. THE FIRST ACT OF THIS MOVIE IS BACKSTORY. It’s backstory. It’s backstory. It’s backstory. We don’t need to see ma and pa’s life for 30 (THIRTY!) minutes before the main character’s story begins.
How do I know this is backstory? Because we don’t see Tony Stark’s mom and dad’s story for 30 minutes before we meet him in Iron Man. We don’t see Bradley Cooper’s parents’ story for 30 minutes before we meet him in American Sniper. We don’t meet Mad Max’s parents for THIRTY FREAKING MINUTES before the nuclear war that turns him into the Road Warrior.
We COULD’VE written the parents story for all three of those characters. Why didn’t we? BECAUSE IT’S FREAKING BACKSTORY THAT’S WHY!!!! BACKSTORY BACKSTORY BACKSTORY. Maybe if I yell it enough times, someone out there who’s currently using half their screenplay for backstory will have an epiphany.
But let’s give the writers the backstory conceit. This is an artsy movie. The rules are different for artsy movies. You’re allowed to bore audiences more so why not take advantage of it. Okay, even if I give you that, someone explain to me the odds that you could murder your wife in the woods, try to unsuccessfully have Jesus resurrect her, and then, just ten short hours later, meet a serial killer couple who forces you to have sex with the wife while the husband takes pictures, and, when you refuse to, he kills you.
Give me the basic odds on that happening to someone in 1960. Would you think… 1 in 10 billion? 1 in 100 billion? My guess would be somewhere around there.
And yet, the Devil All The Time writers would have you believe this was as common as getting a flat tire.
By the way, this happens AFTER a woman dies of cancer and the husband kills herself. These writers pulled a DOUBLE-DEATH on us then a murder, then a SECOND MURDER less than 10 hours later.
That’s where this movie really bothers me. You can tell by the cinematography and the introspective monologuing by the narrator that this movie wants to be taken seriously. And yet every choice is so over-the-top that there isn’t a serious bone in the film’s body. It’s all inelegant clumsiness, like a 6th grader trying to write Moonlight.
I don’t know why I’m getting so triggered by this flick. I think I have issues when the writing is so bad that I don’t even know how anyone involved got this far in their career. I mean this is such trash. These writers would be struggling to come up with good soap opera material. Honestly, they would be lucky if the producer even gave them a call. But, the director is also one-half of the writing team so they don’t need their script to win over anyone.
And guess what? When you don’t have to win anyone over with your script, this is what you get. An incoherent poorly written melodramatic hodge-podge of dumb ideas that can only be called a movie because the editor cut them together in Final Cut. This is so bad. Like train-wreck level awful. I don’t know how anything like this gets made. I mean, I do. I understand logistically how people make the mistake of greenlighting something like this. But I’m still baffled that something this bad could be released to the public.
Wow.
[x] gothic trash
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Double-deaths are the embodiment of desperate writing – you have so little faith in your product that your only tool is hail mary story beats like repeatedly killing characters off (usually through cancer or murder – the two most cliche ways to kill characters off).
The word on the street is that Pascal is out. Gone. No longer a part of The Mandalorian. He left mid-season because they refused to give him scenes with his helmet off. Ya gotta give it to Star Wars. This franchise loves drama.
How weird is this development? Well, it comes after learning, in the first season, that Pascal wasn’t even around for the show. They had John Wayne’s son in the Mandalorian suit instead (this is real! Look it up!).
So you’ve managed to make someone quit… who wasn’t even officially on the show. Only Star Wars, man. Only Kathleen Kennedy.
But let’s get to the trailer for season 2. Was it any good? It was pretty good. The Mandalorian is the closest thing so far to the original trilogy so it’s got that going for it. I love Baby Yoda putting up his “stroller shield.” That was fantabulously cute. I like the opening shot of a damaged ship. Not sure I’ve ever seen that before in a Star Wars property (not done like that, anyway). There isn’t a money shot but the trailer is solid. All Star Wars trailers are solid.
If you remember, I soured on The Mandalorian for two reasons. The lack of story connectivity was frustrating. Making this a pseudo anthology series goes against the connective tissue that helps make Star Wars so great.
But more frustrating was this choice to recruit second-tier Star Wars concepts from such shows as the animated “Star Wars: Rebels.” You’ve got our series villain now wielding something called the “dark sabre” which is such a dumb weapon concept I refuse to beleive it came from anyone over the age of eight.
The Mandalorian didn’t market itself that way. This is the series that started off with storm trooper helments on stakes. This is the series that opened up with a decapitation scene in a bar. Now we’re importing ideas from shows where every other character chimes in with a “I’ve got a bad feeling about this” before commercial break?
Star Wars is better than that.
And yes, I realize this is the franchise with little booping robots, characters named “Dooku,” and a giant slug for a villain. How is the dark sabre any different? I don’t know. I just know it is. This is why Star Wars has been so hard for so many creators to nail down. There are these indefinable variables that each fan has worked into their own “This is what Star Wars is” equations.
I will probably watch the series because the episodes are short and there’s bound to be one or two good episodes in the mix. Oh, and since Pascal is no longer around and there’s a rumor that Boba Fett is back from the dead, it might be fun to have Boba Fett kill the Mandalorian and slip into his armor moving forward. Talk about dramatic irony! We know this is Boba. But nobody else does.
That could get me back permanently. :)
