Genre: Horror?
Premise: Three Korean girls who have been adopted by American suburban families have their friendship tested when they conjure up a spell that releases their “mother.”
About: Today’s short story sold at the end of last year after being involved in a bidding war. Five offers came in, with Fox 2000 and 21 Laps winning the grand prize. The short story was written by Alice Sola Kim who won something called the “Whiting Award” in 2016. This short story was published on tinhouse.com and can be read here.
Writer: Alice Sola Kim
Details: Equivalent of 15-20 pages long

The inclusion of Searching’s Michelle La is nothing short of a guarantee.

Is the short story the new spec script?

Maybe not. But nothing’s gotten closer to replicating the spec sale in the last two years than the short story sale. They’re all the rage, with a couple of new ones picked up every month.

While I know nothing about today’s writer, I suspect from her name (Alice Sola Kim) that she is of Korean heritage (Kim) adopted by American parents (Sola). If that’s the case, this appears to be a personal story. Isn’t that what they say to do? Write what you know? Or, the R version, “Work your personal shit out through your writing?” I’m excited. If Kim is using her own life experiences to tell this story, doing so through the marketable genre of horror, I’m betting it’s going to be an emotionally moving portrait of adoption that can be marketed to the masses. Let’s check it out.

Teenagers Mia, Caroline, and Ronnie are Koreans adopted into American families. That’s how they met, actually, during a gathering for Koreans adopted into American families. These three understand each other in a way the outside world couldn’t possibly comprehend. Mia is the fun alternative one. Caroline is the sophisticated one. And Ronnie is the misfit.

One day, as teenagers are wont to do, the three chant a spell in a parking lot, only to later realize they’ve unleashed their mother. Not their adopted mother. Not their birth mother. But some nebulous afterlife creature who refers to herself as their mother.

This “mother” communicates to the three of them by taking over their brains and speaking through their mouths. The things she says make less sense than your average homeless man on Santa Monica and Colorado (“THIS IS A SONG MY MOTHER SANG TO ME WHEN I DIDN’T WANT TO WAKE UP FOR SCHOOL. IT CALLS THE VINES DOWN TO LIFT YOU UP AND—“). It’s not clear what this mother is trying to accomplish other than be annoying, which she’s an expert at.

As “Mother” is passed around between the girls, we impatiently wait for some sort of plot to arrive. It never does, unfortunately, making you wonder just how frivolously this was written. Eventually, to teach the girls a lesson, “mother” crashes their car into a tree one night. However, just when we think something substantial has happened in this godforsaken story, we cut back to the car, still driving, to learn that they’re all safe, and that “mother” was just teaching them a “lesson.” The End.

Before I get to my reaction, I want to make something clear. I don’t blame Alice Kim for this. It’s not her fault that she wrote a story that’d be dismissed by 99% of college English professors, yet still was able to sell it. Good for her. We should all be so lucky as to sell our weaker material. I don’t blame the original producer, who did an amazing job conning Hollywood into thinking this story was worth buying. That’s what a good producer does (A famous Hollywood agent once said, “Sell a good script? Pfft. Anybody can do that. Sell a bad script? Now that’s when you know you’re a good agent.”).

I blame the production company and studio that purchased this. If you’re trying to figure out who made the mistake here, they’re the one you point the finger towards.

There are two reasons why this sale annoys me so much. The first is it confuses aspiring writers. Writers read this glorified writing exercise, see that it sold, and believe that this is the bar. When it isn’t. It’s an outlier, a purchase that was likely inspired by reasons that have little to do with the story’s quality. Second, it’s taking the place of material that’s ACTUALLY good. There’s a lot of stuff out there that’s so much more deserving than this. But instead the winning lottery spot goes to Rambling Teenage Girls and Their Ghost Mom.

I mean here’s a typical paragraph from “Daughters.”

Imagine 20 pages of that.

While the rules for short stories are definitely different from screenwriting, there is one commonality. There needs to be a plot. There needs to be a point to it all. The opening to “Daughters,” which dives into our friends’ lives, does so messily. “At midnight we parked by a Staples and tried some seriously dark fucking magic. We had been discussing it for weeks and could have stayed in that Wouldn’t it be funny if groove forever, zipping between yes, we should and no, we shouldn’t until it became a joke so dumb that we would never. But that night Mini had said, “If we don’t do it right now, I’m going to be so mad at you guys, and I’ll know from now on that all you chickenheads can do is talk and not do,” and the whole way she ranted at us like that, even though we were already doing and not talking, or at least about to.” And that’s fine. When we’re meeting our heroes, you can be messy as long as we’re getting to know the characters who will later lead us on our journey.

But at a certain point, you have to introduce the reason the story exists. What is it our characters are trying to achieve (their goal)? Only then does your story have purpose. Doing so here would’ve been easy. You bring in the mother character. You have her do something awful, and now they need to get rid of her. But, instead, “Daughters,” focuses more on the positive aspects of “mother.” Her appearance is championed, her words idolized.

It’s only at the very last second that the group decides Mother is bad, as if the writer realized that she needed to end her story somehow and, oh yeah, if the mother is bad, then they would have to eliminate her. Instead of being a major plotline, however, it’s relegated to the last 500 words of the story. And this is how I know this was written at 3 am with not a lick of rewriting. It’s a story that was thoughtlessly blasted onto the page so it could be turned into a professor before sunrise.

And who is this mother ANYWAY??????

You all have different birth parents. Why do you only have one mother? Why don’t any of them realize that if someone’s claiming to be their unique mother, she can’t be everyone’s mother? Am I speaking alien here? That makes sense, right? And this is what bothers me about this type of writing. The writer doesn’t want to do the hard work of figuring out the answer to that question. It’s easier to keep it raw, place the onus on the audience to do the work, and in the best of circumstances, trick everyone into believing they’ve made some profound statement about motherhood.

So is there a movie here? That’s the only question that matters, right?

The answer is no.

But if I were paid a million dollars to come up with an angle, I guess I would have these girls unleash an evil mother that starts killing those around them and they have to figure out how to put the genie back in the bottle before there’s too much death and destruction. Which is just like every other horror movie but, hey, they paid all this money for the rights. They need a movie. That’s as good as they’re going to get.

[x] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: No story can be saved through prose. No story can be saved through internal monologue. No story can be saved through shock tactics (it’s revealed that Ronnie’s involved in a incestual relationship with her brother late). You need a character goal to drive the plot. Without it, you’re just talking to yourself on the page.

Genre: Horror
Premise: Trapped in a strange house, a young woman with a phobia of dogs must escape the jaws of a bloodsucking hound and its master.
Why You Should Read:I find phobias fascinating. The crippling impact they can have on a person’s life. I wanted to take that fear to an extreme level. There seems to be room in the horror universe for an update on Cujo (other than a remake), pitting a protagonist against a vicious, bloodthirsty beast. I set out to write something simpler and more contained than my last work with 100x more blood. Hope you enjoy sinking your teeth into this one!
Writer: Katherine Botts
Details: 91 pages

Katherine is back. If my memory is correct, she’s 3 for 3 on winning Amateur Offerings. When a Katherine script comes in, a Katherine script tends to win. That’s my rhyme for the day. However, there’s some backstory here. Katherine’s been sending this script in for awhile and I wasn’t keen on featuring it. Not because I didn’t believe in her. But because the idea didn’t excite me. A mean dog after a person in a house? It sounded like the most straightforward predictable movie ever. I man Cujo is one of the only Stephen King books I haven’t read (for the same reason). Scary dogs don’t scare me. So I was going into this one with some prejudice. Would the script look up at me with puppy dog eyes and make me fall in love with it? Or would it bare its teeth and run away? Grab the leash and let’s walk this dog together to find out!

17 year old Blair is scarred for life – both literally and figuratively. When she was 7, a dog attacked her at a pool. She’s never been the same since. Also since that time, her father passed away. Her mom’s moved on with some lame-o named Nathanial. Blair’s plan is to save up enough money so she can fix her car and drive away from this place.

So when she gets a last second opportunity to house-sit for some richie riches, she grabs it. She arrives at the remote southern mansion where she meets the strange family – mother, father, son – who are leaving town because the mom’s father has fallen ill. Just before they’re about to leave, they blindside Blair by letting her know that, oh yeah, she has to take care of their new rescue dog, Jumper. Blair tries to back out of the job but gives in when they beg her.

As soon as they’re gone, Blair recruits her goofy boyfriend, Collin, to come keep her company. Collin, a dog lover, bonds with the rescue dog, encouraging Blair to give her a shot. No chance, Blair says. Dogs are evil. After the two raid the fridge, Collin falls asleep, and that’s when Blair sees it. Big scary eyes outside the window. A dog. And not just any dog. A huge beast of a dog.

Blair tries to shake Collin awake but there’s no response. She glances at the leftovers. Could they have been… drugged? As she yells at Collin to wake up, the beast-dog starts banging on the doors and windows. It’s only a matter of time before it gets in. She drags Collin to the old house elevator just as the dog breaks in, and they go up to the attic. It’s there where they meet old man Arthur. But wait, I thought the family was going to visit Arthur. What’s he doing here in the house?

It turns out Arthur is a vampire. That beast-dog thing is his servant. It finds him people, brings them to him, and he drinks their blood. Blair is able to escape this freakazoid, but now she’s right back in the bowels of the house, easy prey for Beast Dog. Blair will need to, ironically, depend on rescue dog, Jumper, to help her defeat this thing. But as the night unfolds, she realizes this entire family has planned everything to make sure she doesn’t leave alive.

First question that, no doubt, everyone will be asking after yesterday’s article. Does Blood Hound pass the First 10 Pages test? It’s hard for me to answer that because I knew I was reading this all the way through no matter what. So I was trying to imagine what I would’ve done if I had no obligation to the script. The answer is I probably would have stopped. But it wouldn’t have been an easy decision.

The opening scene is fun. Little girl at the pool. She wants a dog from her daddy. Sees a dog hiding in the bushes, goes to pet it. It attacks her. It was enough to keep me turning the pages. But I think the suspense could’ve been introduced earlier and drawn out more. The first part of the scene is her in a pool with her dad joking around. It’s not a bad scene at all. But if we’re grading the scene on the “Every word matters” curve, we could’ve hinted at danger earlier, which would’ve, in turn, allowed for Katherine to sneak in the character introductions via a more exciting scene wrapper.

The second scene (“10 Years Later”) is okay but it’s the very definition of “resting on your laurels.” You know you’ve started with this shocking opening scene. So you think, “I can relax now. They’ll allow me to be boring for a few pages while I set the characters up.” You can never rest on any laurels. I’m not asking for two teaser scenes in a row. But you should still be attempting to construct entertaining scenes after your first one.

But as the script goes on, it gets better. Katherine does a great job adding specificity to her world. Things happen because that’s how they would happen, not because the writer needs them to happen. An example would be the house-sitting. A lazy writer would make that a given. Blair’s housesitting tonight because she has to for the movie to exist. Katherine, however, explains that Blair wants out of this town. She needs money to fix dad’s car so she’s taking as many odd jobs as she can. The housesitting job, then, is a crucial step towards meeting that goal.

I also liked that the family had history. They were weird and mysterious. One of the things I worried about when I originally read the logline was that Blair would go to this house and then a dog would appear out of nowhere and start harassing her. It sounded too simplistic. But from the moment we get inside this house, the family seems interesting. There’s something odd going on with them and you want to keep reading to find out what it is.

The peak of the script for me was when I realized Jumper wasn’t the dog that was going to face off against Blair, but rather food for a bigger dog. That’s when I leaned in and really started reading with an invested eye. Once I figured out that she, too, was meant to be dog food, I was all in. At that point, the script was a double worth-the-read for me.

But then a controversial choice is made that people are either going to love or hate. I didn’t like it. And it comes down to “double mumbo-jumbo.” When I realized the old man, Arthur, was a vampire, my head fell. I thought I was reading a killer dog movie. Now it’d become a killer dog vampire movie. It was a bridge too far. After that, it was impossible for the script to win me back. I thought what Katherine had before this was plenty. It didn’t need a vampire kick.

With that said, I loved one other subplot in the script, which was Jumper going from enemy number one to best friend. I love any well-executed character arc. And Blair’s arc from being the last person in the world who would connect with a dog, to trusting her life to Jumper, was really heart-warming. Kudos to her for pulling that off.

But man, I really disliked the vampire thing. It felt like a writer who didn’t have the confidence that their idea was enough. So they had to add something extra. The irony is that I didn’t think the idea was enough when I started it either. But Katherine did such a good job building up this family and this house, that the original concept DID end up being enough. I mean, that’s some freaky shit. A family lures people into their house and then has their psycho dog eat them. That’s a movie right there.

Script link: Blood Hound

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Be careful with tropes, even if they’re well-regarded. An early scene has Young Blair crawling through the bushes to pet a dog. The dog growls at her. We sense the big attack coming. Then we cut to: “BLOOD flecks onto the old ball.” Yes, the cut away to blood splatter is a more “artful” way to express a violent attack than showing the violence. But if we’ve seen that trope a million times, is it any less lazy than showing the attack itself? I say this because I’ve read three scripts THIS WEEK that have used that trope. So push yourselves. Do something different. Maybe even show the attack. That might be the unexpected thing that makes the scene memorable.

Save the Cat. The phrase sounds so innocuous and yet it’s become the most popular screenwriting tip in history. More popular than even GSU! For those who don’t know, “saving the cat,” is a term the late Blake Snyder coined that refers to a moment early in the screenplay when your hero does something nice, endearing or helpful to someone or something else. As long as it’s not too generic or too on-the-nose (would we believe that Ethan Hawk would stop running from the bad guys to help a little old woman cross the street?), it’ll make us like your hero. Why has the Save The Cat scene endured for 20+ years? The reason is important so I want you to pay attention. One of the most crucial aspects of making a story work is the reader connecting with the main character. And the easiest ways to solidify that connection is to make them likable. What’s more likable than “saving” someone?

Well the other day I stumbled across one of the best movies ever, The Shawshank Redemption, and I came across a scene that, in retrospect, was the scene that made me fall in love with Andy Dufresne. The reason this particular scene is so important is because Andy Dufresne is considered one of the most likable protagonists in cinema history. After that scene, myself and millions of movie fans liked this guy more than we liked our own friends. So if we can identify what made us fall in love with Andy, we can harness that power to use in our own screenplays. I know all of you are scrambling to figure out which scene I’m talking about. Shawshank has so many good ones, it’s hard to keep track. But before we get to the scene, let’s break down the explanation.

I would argue a more impactful scene than even saving the cat, is a hero’s ability to cleverly out-maneuver the bad guys in the face of adversity. The more clever the character is in the moment, and the more intense the adversity, the better this tool will work. For those of you who’ve read my book, you’ll remember me highlighting one of these scenes. This was before I realized how powerful this scene was so I didn’t give the weight it deserved. But the scene occurred in Terminator 2 at the psychiatric ward when Sarah Connor is running away from the guards. She reaches a locked gate, opens it with her stolen keys, then, as the guards are approaching, reaches back through the bars, inserts the key and then RIPS the top of the key off. When the guards get to the gate, they find that their key is worthless, as the bottom half of Sarah’s key has jammed the lock. This is the epitome of being clever in the face of adversity.

Let’s get back to Shawshank. Now that you have this extra information, do you know what scene I’m referring to? Well, you can watch it right here. Yep, it’s the famous rooftop tarring scene. Now there are a few things going on in this scene but the part I want you to pay attention to is the moment Captain Hadley is running to throw Andy off the roof. This is the highest level of adversity a character can face. His death. Andy then yells out the line that saves him – “Cause if you do trust her, there’s no reason you can’t keep that $35,000.” Captain Hadley stops at the last second, demands an explanation. Andy goes on to inform him of a tax loophole that will allow Hadley to keep his inherited money tax free. After some back and forth, Andy says he’ll even do the paperwork for him, so he won’t have to hire a lawyer. In less than 60 seconds, Andy’s gone from public enemy number 1 to the Captain’s new best friend. You gotta be mighty clever to pull that off. And because Darabont is such a genius, he doubles down! He buttons the scene with a Save The Cat moment – Andy getting beers for his fellow inmates. Is it any wonder, now, why Andy Dufresne is one of the most liked characters ever?

An important distinction I want to make is that being clever is good. Being clever will always make your hero likable. Ferris Bueller was clever. He was always outsmarting everyone. But what turbocharges this tool is being clever in the face of adversity. Real adversity. When we see someone who’s doomed reach into their back pocket and outsmart the bad guys, that’s when the audience feels the warmest and fuzziest. It’s that energy that allows you, the writer, to reach out and join hands with the audience. The both of you are now interlocked as presidents of your hero’s fan club.

Now it’s important to note that the action your hero performs must actually be clever. It has to be something that surprises the audience, something they wouldn’t have thought of themselves. For example, your hero palming a paper clip he later uses to discreetly unlock his handcuffs with won’t do the job. We’ve seen that so many times that we could’ve thought of it ourselves. It must be an act that we wouldn’t have thought of.

Ever wonder why Wesley, from The Princess Bride, is one of the most popular characters of all time? It has a lot to do with William Goldman giving him three scenes IN A ROW where he’s clever in the face of adversity (first the sword fight with Inigo Montoya, second the brawl with Fezzik, and third a duel of wits with Vizzini). One of the reasons The Martian became such a huge book (and later a huge movie) is because Mark Watney is handed a series of obstacles, each of which would ordinarily kill a man, that he cleverly overcomes. First is lack of communication. Next is food. Next he’s critically injured from the air lock explosion. The more we see characters overcome these moments using their intelligence, the more we love them.

So why don’t we see more of these scenes in movies? Because they’re hard to come up with! It’s much easier to save the cat. Have your hero toss a twenty into a homeless man’s cup, follow it with a conversation between the two to show that our hero knows and cares about him, and boom, we’ll like the hero well enough. But that’s child’s play. I can teach a sixth grader to do that. Creating a scenario to show off how clever your hero is is much harder. Which is why, I’d argue, it’s more powerful.

So Carson, if coming up with these scenes is so hard, how do you do it? You do it by identifying your character’s biggest strength. What are they known for? Once you figure that out, you can build a scenario that allows them to show off that strength. Sarah Connor spent a decade preparing to survive. She’s a survivalist. So it would make sense that she’d have a few tricks up her sleeve to outrun pursuers. Andy Dufresne is a tax lawyer. So of course he’s going to know about tax loopholes. Wesley spent years pirating on a ship. He’s spent a decade fighting people. So he’s going to know a few things about sparring with opponents. Find the strength, then create a scenario to highlight that strength.

The reason this works is because it’s built on the concept of us liking people who are good at things. It’s why we can’t look away when Lebron James drives the lane. It’s why we wait with baited breath when Neil deGrasse Tyson is about to answer a question about the universe. It’s why people loved watching Bobby Fischer play chess. We’re drawn to people who are great at things. All this tool is doing is placing that expertise to the most extreme test, when it matters most. And even though it’s complete fiction, we’re entranced by it. We love to see the people we love overcome adversity with their wits.

Sadly, I haven’t been able to come up with a catchy nickname for this type of scene. I’m not clever enough (heh heh). So, I’ll leave that up to you guys in the comments. Whoever comes up with with the best nickname, I’ll give you a free logline consultation. So go at it!

Pop Tarts Cereal will be my go-to writing food in 2019. What will yours be?

Welcome to 2019!

It snuck up on us, didn’t it?

I had this whole list of things I wanted to get done before the end of the year. Didn’t get to cross anything out. Not to worry, though. This is going to be a great year for screenwriting. I can feel it. And it’s gonna be an even better year on Scriptshadow. Here’s a breakdown of things to come.

Tomorrow, I’m going to post an article on the most underrated scene to write in all of screenwriting. This scene is so powerful, I would place its impact above saving the cat. Unfortunately, I don’t have a catchy “save the cat” like name for it yet. So we’ll have a little competition to see who can nickname the scene tomorrow.

Friday, I’ll be doing a script review. For the weekend, we’ll be having the first Amateur Offerings battle of the year. Let’s start the year off right and find a gem! If you’d like to partake in Amateur Offerings, send a PDF of your script to carsonreeves3@gmail.com with the title, genre, logline, and why you think your script should get a shot.

Monday, I’ll be reviewing Escape Room, assuming it doesn’t have a cataclysmic Rotten Tomatoes score. Why Escape Room? Simple. It’s the perfect spec script premise. If you’re writing a script to sell, you’re not going to get much closer to conceptual perfection than this. Tuesday and Wednesday, I’ll be reviewing scripts. And next Thursday, I’m writing up a First 10 Pages Article, as well as introducing the First 10 Pages Competition. You’ll definitely want to tune in for that.

So a month ago, on a pleasant 70 degree Los Angeles afternoon, I was reading an amateur screenplay. As I finished up the first act, I sat back and sighed. I was bored. Bored bored bored. It wasn’t that the script was bad. Bad implies incompetence. The script was… there. It existed. But that’s all it did. And that’s when a profoundly simple question struck me. Why is it so hard to write a good screenplay? We all love movies. We’ve seen hundreds of them. We know how to BE entertained. But for some reason, we don’t know how to reverse the process and entertain others.

In my opinion, the first problem is effort. I don’t think screenwriters put nearly as much effort into their screenplays as they need to. If you want to write something good, you have to do the boring stuff. You have to do research. You have to outline. You have to do more rewrites than you’d like. You have to write giant backstories for your mythology. You have to have higher standards than the average writer (not settle for “okay” scenes or “okay” characters). Something that drives me BANANAS is when I read a script about a particular subject matter and I know more about the subject matter than the writer! That tells me the only research they did was a cursory glance around the internet. That’s not how good writing works. Not only is a deep dive into your subject matter going to make the journey more fascinating, but the more you know about your subject matter, the more ideas you get. But we live in a time – sigh – when people only do the absolute minimum required. That’s fine. As long as you’re okay with the absolute minimum reaction.

Next, you have to have a good idea. This means a concept that feels larger than life (The Meg), that contains heavy conflict (Fight Club), that’s clever (Game Night), that’s ironic (Liar Liar), that taps into the zeitgeist (Crazy Rich Asians), that’s controversial (Get Home Safe). It takes most writers 6-10 scripts to finally recognize a good idea. Before that, writers write selfishly. They don’t recognize that their idea must appeal to an audience beyond themselves. This results in a lot of nebulous wandering narratives where the writer erroneously believes that just by letting the world into their head, they’re entertaining them. they’re making deep statements about the world.

Actually, one of a writer’s biggest ah-ha moments is when they see an advertisement for a boring movie that nobody’s going to see and they think, “Who in their right mind thought that was a good idea???” It’s only in that small window of time where, if they look at their own script through that same lens, they realize, “Ohhhhhhhhhh. Nobody would want to see this either!!” It’s then when they finally realize this is a business. They now go into the idea-creation process with a new tool – The “Is this a movie people would actually pay to see?” tool. One of the reasons so few writers make it in Hollywood is because they never have this ah-ha moment.

Finally, it’s about execution. Execution is bred from knowledge and practice. How many screenplays you’ve written. How many times you’ve encountered specific scenarios. It took me 10 lousy screenplays to recognize that movies don’t work if the hero isn’t active. For some of you, it will take less. Or, you can simply take my word for it and it won’t take you any screenplays at all. But that’s the case with this medium. You need to repeatedly fail at scenarios in order to know what to do when you encounter them again.

For a long time, I couldn’t figure out the second half of the second act. My scripts would always run out of steam before I got to the third act. That is, until, I read about the “lowest point” second-to-third-act transition. That being when your hero falls to his lowest point (“point of death” some teachers refer to it as) right before the third act. Now that I knew my hero was headed to this “point of death,” I could write towards that.

This is the part no writer wants to hear. But when it comes to writing a good screenplay, a pivotal variable is “time put in.” You have to write a lot. Then you have to write a lot more. Then more. The people who aren’t serious about this craft will fall to the wayside during this period. Just by the fact that you continue on, you increase your chances. At a certain point, you’ll know enough to pass the threshold by which Hollywood identifies professional writing. And assuming you’ve got a good idea with strong execution, you’ll make it. But make no mistake, it’s a long and trying journey. Here’s to conquering that journey in 2019!

Scriptshadow may be on a break til the new year. But that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking of you! Is anyone doing the 10-Day Writing Challenge? How are you holding up? Don’t think, just write. That’s the key to defeating WR (Writing Resistance).

I’ve used this time to relax and catch up on some entertainment. I saw Bumblebee. It was surprisingly good, even if it took the screenplay for E.T. and copy-replaced every instance of “E.T.” with “Bumblebee.” Oh stop. I kid because I love. It was nice to have a director who actually cared about character this time around. A huge upgrade over the original Transformers movies for sure. Another movie I saw was Predator. Oh boy, that was a rough one. For the first 30 minutes, I was convinced I was watching the worst movie of 2018. I mean we have the autistic genius child trope, the Tourette Syndrome trope, the wise-cracking comedy relief trope. If there’s a trope that didn’t get used in this movie, I’m not aware of it. To the film’s credit, it gets better as it goes on. But not by much.

As for Netflix viewing, I tried to watch that John Grisham True Crime series, The Innocent Man. It’s pretty good. If good means boring. An episode and a half in and I know two women were murdered and confessions were made. I knew these things before the show started. Move faster please. I tried to watch that Black Mirror choose-your-own-adventure episode but pressing play informed me that my technology wasn’t up-to-date enough to watch it. Figuring this was part of the fun, I pressed play again. Same message. And again. Same message. Eventually I realized this wasn’t part of the show and that I really did have old technology. I guess no Black Mirror for me.

This turned out to be a blessing in disguise because it led me to check out Escape at Dannemora, the Showtime show that Ben Stiller directed. Ben Stiller is one of the most underrated directors in the business. He’s really really good. And this show doesn’t even utilize his keen directing eye. It’s all about character, acting, and story. I’ve only watched one episode but this may be the best TV show I’ve seen all year. I may do an article on it in the future. So check out the show!

Finally, someone told me about this writing program called Hemingway Editor. It operates within your browser so you don’t have to download anything. The program’s hook is that it assesses your writing on the fly, showing you what’s weak via various highlights. It also tells you (in real time) what level your writing is. I copy and pasted some of my writing on there for fun, and found that the majority of it hovers between 3rd and 4th grade level, lol. Um, can someone say, ego boost? Here I was this whole time aiming for kindergarten. Convinced it was faulty, I copy and pasted some famous works in there, such as a page of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and her writing is at a 12th grade level!

I’m trying to figure out how it assesses this grade. I suspect big vocabulary words (which Shelley likes to use) may be contributing to the number. Maybe you guys can play with it and help find out. It’s kind of like a video game. What do you do to get your score up? Let me know what you come up with in the Comments Section!