Archive for the 'Rave' Category

• e  9 Movie speak

  Terms that will save you some embarrassment on set, unless — writer — you start throwing them around like you know what you’re talking about.

• e  22 The new Kindle is pretty solid

  After playing around with it for an hour, I’m pretty happy with the Kindle 2.

• e  19 Best Mac Ever

  With the Macintosh now 25 years old, several sites have been discussing which was the best Mac ever. I made up my mind fully before clicking through, and was happy to see so many people agreed with me.

• e  Comments Off Presidential punctuation

  After eight long years in hiding, the semicolon’s glorious return.

• e  7 Terminator Forever

  Kudos to the National Film Registry, who just added Terminator to the permanent collection at the Library of Congress. Years from now, when Skynet is defeated, humankind will be able to look to Cameron’s masterpiece and realize, shit, we shoulda known.

  Other laudable additions include Deliverance and A Face In the Crowd. If you haven’t seen [...]

• e  16 Dr. Horrible is pretty damn great

  The first episode of Joss Whedon’s three-part web series, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, is available on iTunes, and definitely worth checking out. It’s goofy and specific and huggable.

• e  50 Lessons of the summer, so far

  Let’s look at what we can learn from the first batch of summer movies.

• e  30 Failed his last saving throw

  Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, died this morning at age 69.

  I haven’t played the game in 15 years, but it remains the single biggest influence in my career as a screenwriter. And I’m not alone: a quick poll of my writer friends revealed a huge number of teenage rangers and [...]

• e  16 Manhunter = awesome

  Stuff tends to stack up in the August household.

  We have systems in place to optimize magazine readership and recycling,1 but printed objects of which I am the sole reader — comic books, scripts, serio-comic novels purchased on an Amazon spree — have a tradition of piling up on the corners of desks and counters.

  I offer [...]

• e  11 Michael Clayton

  Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton is fantastic. Move it to the top of your must-see list.

• e  5 Remembering the Alamo

  The Alamo Drafthouse is what you wish every movie theater could be: laid-back, but on its game, and run by people who genuinely give a shit about movies. Plus beer! My thanks to them for hosting The Nines last night. (And every night onward, as long as people keep coming to see it.)

• e  16 Cannon fodder

  I’ve previously written about my little World of Warcraft problem, which cost me a summer. My latest, greatest productivity killer is called Tower Defense.

  It’s not one game really, but rather a genre of videogames in which the objective is to place and upgrade a series of automated kill-bots (towers) in order to obliterate wave after [...]

• e  51 All-new MySpace beta

  I now fully regret my earlier ambivalence about MySpace. As it turns out, the site is only lame when you have 600 or 700 friends. Having crossed the magic threshold of 1,000 MySpace pals, I truly understand what all the fuss is about.

  The difference is MySpace Advanced, and you can only access it [...]

• e  27 Trusting your audience

  Kudos to the writers of HEROES for letting the audience connect the dots.

• e  6 Best editors

  In this morning’s Oscar nominations, I was delighted (but not surprised) to see Doug Crise and Stephen Mirrione nominated for Babel. Stephen Mirrione cut Go, and Doug Crise followed up his work on Babel with a little movie called The Nines.

  Huge congrats to both of them.

• e  20 I heart WriteRoom

  For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on the production notes for The Nines. The document will end up being about 20 pages, detailing the backstory of how the movie got made, from inspiration through editing, along with everyone’s bios. It’s part of the press kit for the film, helping the journalists [...]

• e  24 Movies look nothing like reality

  The disorienting effects of movie magic.

• e  10 I Heart Shortbus

  I saw and loved John Cameron Mitchell’s SHORTBUS over the weekend. I’ll spare a few hundred words of praise and say I pretty much agree with Moriarty’s review — though I’d hope my readers are a little less eww-gross-boys-kissing! than the average AICN commenter.

  Mr. Mitchell and I used to eat lunch at the same [...]