Rage Against The Page

I can't take it any more. I just can't. Quantum of Solace was the last straw. It's the latest 'blender-cam' action film to confuse rapid cutting with excitement. Fast editing does not equal excitement. Oh, it does... sometimes, when used sparingly the way a surgeon uses special-purpose forceps or when a flutist uses a particular breathing technique. Over the last decade, when it comes to the art of film editing, the word 'sparingly' has been gradually pushed further and further back into a dark corner of the dictionary, somewhere behind 'acrocephalic' (having a pointy head) and in front of 'zenzizenzizenzic' (a number raised to the eighth power) . Before anyone knew, the word had disappeared entirely. No one realised it has been taken out back and quietly shot in the head by a secret society of Hollywood editors. There is no correlation between excitement on screen and cuts-per-second. I don't care if you're an editor and your...

Cinema hasn't been around all that long. What are we talking? A hundred years and change? Close enough. At the turn of the century in 1900, not long before Captain Nemo piloted his steampunk submarine through the perilously narrow underwater corridors beneath Venice ( work with me, people ), motion pictures first bumped into the concept of 'continuity' -- that individual shots could be strung together to create cinematographic narrative. No longer limited to showing a single shot of a puppy crossing the road, now filmmakers could show a series of shots in an edited sequence, eliciting a much stronger emotional reaction from the audience: Shot of man driving a 'motor wagon' Shot of puppy playing on road Shot of man driving a 'motor wagon' Shot of puppy playing on road Man driving a 'motor wagon' Puppy playing on road Man driving Puppy playing Man... Puppy... Puppy explodes Man explodes ( Think I'm making this up? Go visit the Wikipedia article , ...

Whenceforth Comes This Shabby Creature Of The Night? Fake. Had to be. The grammatical horrors waiting between the covers were solid proof of a novice writer at the keyboard. Surely. I read the first 10 pages: the linguistic horrors multiplied and then multiplied some more. Ask anyone: screenplays this unpolished don't escape unscathed when crossing a Studio Reader's desk. Screenplays this unpolished earn extra wrath from Readers. A well-presented screenplay (good spelling, punctuation, formatting) with poor structure or story is inoffensive; a Reader will dutifully appraise it with the minimum amount of effort and then set it aside, perhaps concluding the writer knows their screenwriting craft but not their art of storytelling . If this screenplay did not have QT's name on it, and it fell into a Studio Reader's hands, you'd better believe the Reader's red pen would be boiling over with invective. That Reader would likely cancel lunch to devote themselves wh...

This post title appeared on digg.com : US official: Blackwater hit car with kids to avoid traffic It hit a car with kids? Impressive. But why resort to hurling children at the enemy? What we have here is another case of failure to communicate. More murderous grammar. This is the story : The kids in the back seat looked back in horror, mouths agape at the sight of the heavily armored Suburbans driven by large, armed men in dark sunglasses. The poor Iraqi driver frantically searched for a means of escape, but there was none. So the lead Blackwater vehicle smashed heedlessly into the car, pushing it into the barrier. Yes, that's an awful situation. One of many, many awful things going on over there. Putting the content aside for a moment, let's consider the form. Is the sentence ambiguous? Yes it is. Is that a problem? Yes. Ambiguous is to writing what a Stop sign is to driving. No, it's more. It's a Go Back sign. Ambiguity forces the reader to backtrack, reread, and fig...

Murdered Minister's Wife Confesses to the Crime ... was the headline that caught my eye and had me clicking through to shortnews.com . I really wanted to know how the deceased wife of a minister managed to confess to murdering herself. It sounded like some kind of delicious time-travel scenario, or perhaps a ghostly confession from the spirit world. I mean, are we talking about a cryptic suicide? Did she have multiple personalities and go through a sudden and awful Jekyll-Hide struggle while chopping carrots for the evening meal? No. The wife is safe and well. And headed for jail. You guessed it: she was the one doing the murdering and her minister husband was the one doing the expiring. But that's not what the title says. The title is horribly ambiguous. Both readings are valid: that the victim was the minister or that the victim was his wife. Now, ambiguity is a wonderful tool for writing comedies. Audiences love to be fooled by clever use of language (so long as you don...