We are fast approaching a moment when the first Mikey Mouse shorts will be in the public domain. I think 2024 will be it. So, logically, it would make a lot of sense for The House Of Mouse to become The House Of Simpsons.
No one listens to me.
What they should do is move all their Simpsons IP over to Pixar. The show should have been canceled a long, long, long time ago and Disney should bite the bullet and do just that. Then, after maybe five years, come back hard with a planned series of Pixar-produced Simpsons movies.
The Simpsons would be updated using the best of Pixar’s computer animation and storytelling. Then, every two years or so, there would be a Simpsons movie that would fuse the greatness of the Simpsons with the equal greatness of Pixar.
I have a lot — A LOT — of movie ideas rolling around in my mind. One concept that I think someone, somewhere should do is kind of like “Battlestar Galactica 1980” meets Star Wars: A New Hope. The story would go something like this — it’s the modern day, when out of the blue a rag-tag group of space aliens fighting some sort of Galactic government swoop in and settle on the planet.
You would have all the archetypes of Star Wars, only set in the modern world with our modern technology. You would have all these exotic space aliens doing their thing among humans, all along with idea that theGalactic government might at any moment attack earth.
lulz. meh
And, if you really wanted to make things interesting, you do all of this in context of Red and Blue America, with Red America doubting everything and Blue American embracing all the aliens and preparing for a fight. Or something. Something like that.
But the point would be it there would be fun aliens and just an interesting story. No “woke” effort to sell a message or toys to little kids. Just a story about an Iowa farmboy who wants to save his girlfriend who is kidnapped and is now on the other end of the galaxy. Or something. You get the picture.
Absolutely no one listens to me, though. I can’t even get a 1,000 unique views for this site. So, meh.
I keep ranting about this because, much like Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart, I was in the sweetspot for its intended audience. But, as with Booksmart, I bounced just about at the inciting incident. I fucking hate Booksmart for reasons similar to why I feel Don’t Look Up was a real missed opportunity.
While Booksmart was fucking preachy and caused me to feel attacked simply for being a “CIS white male,” Don’t Look Up was so hysterical and frantic in its desire to bang its message over my head that I just could not continue to watch it. This is not to say I won’t try to watch it again. Now that I know what I’m getting into, I may very well give it another go.
But let’s talk about why, despite such a great start, I found myself giving up on Don’t Look Up.
First, the movie seemed like liberal-progressive wish fulfillment. But, at the same time, it tried to hide this by couching everything in extreme bothsiderism. The POTUS in the movie seemed to be the some freakish Frankenstein’s Monster of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. This was done in to such a extreme manner as to cause me to first roll my eyes then later grow so frustrated that I gave up watching.
There was just too much going on with Don’t Look Up. It seemed a mish-mash of competing storytelling agendas. Was it supposed to be a political and climate change Mars Attacks or a modern day Network? Was it meant to scare the shit out of us about how we’re not doing anything about global climate change or was it just supposed to be an long SNL skit with better production values.
Here’s how I would have fixed it. I would given the movie a far more serious tone, something on a par with Arrival. I would shock the audience by how blase everyone was behaving about the end of the world until someone flipped out about it Howard Beale style.
Or, put another way, there was a Network-style drama to be had in Don’t Look Up. Not that there wouldn’t be humor in such a different interpretation of the concept, it’s just I would have preferred a mixture of Arrival, a Paul Thomas Anderson movie and, maybe Wes Anderson movie.
Something about how over-the-top and forced Don’t Look up in its humor I found very grating to the nerves. There was also just way too much screaming. I mean, cool it, folks.
Anyway. I’m going to try again to watch this movie. Maybe I can stand it more on a second go.
I did not finish watching the movie “Don’t Look Up.” But that has caused me to have strong opinions about it what I did see. The thing that bothers me so much about the movie is it could have been a modern day Network, but it totally blew its chance.
At the core of that failure was it’s social commentary was way too heavy handed and preachy. It was like a very long SNL skit, only the writers were hysterical about global climate change. Sometimes, less is more. Or, put another way, I would have made the movie more of a drama that was funny at times than a heavy handed, ham fisted extended SNL skit that swerved between comedy and dramas as it served the purposes of the plot.
There came a point, at least for me, when I didn’t care if anyone lived or died. After a great beginning, it just seemed like the movie became Mars Attacks, only about a comet-which-was-really-global-climate-change. I just didn’t care about the characters when they started screaming at each other. So, I stopped watching.
But there was a much better movie crying to come out of what was there. Like I said, I would have really tried to make the movie a modern day Network. In fact, I might even have started the movie much later than it was. Why not start the movie about where we are right now with global climate change — we all know it’s real and we’re not doing anything about it?
So, instead of going through the rote process of meeting POTUS, you start with a Network-like freak out by our Hero on TV. But, and this is the key issue, you play it for drama, not forced laughs. Then the rest of the movie would be about how everyone simply refuses to take the coming end of the world seriously. What I saw of Don’t Look Up had the air of liberal-progressive wish fulfillment, in the sense that I felt the producer really wants to scream his frustration live on TV (specifically Morning Joe.)
I’m embarrassed to say that I was not able — so far — to finish “Don’t Look Up.” So, you have every reason not to listen to me if I can’t even finish the movie I’m writing about. But this post isn’t really about the movie itself but rather how it could have been made so I was able to finish it.
First, I have to praise the movie for some subtle touches. What I saw was interesting in how it was able to indict both Blue and Red for not giving the crisis enough weight. And, yet, at the same time, it was just around that moment when the movie started to lose me. Don’t Look Up was really, really good up until about the moment they met POTUS.
It was all down hill from there.
How would I fix the movie, though? I think I would have not been so “wet” in my humor. The movie grows more and more hysterical to the point of it being both depressing, preachy and excretable. All it did was remind me of how global climate change is real and we’re doing jack shit to stop it.
I think if the writers had studied Network a little bit more closely, I could have finished watching it. I really liked Being The Ricardos and I think that vibe is closer to how I would have produced the movie. I would have laid off on the preachy, heavy handed social commentary and maybe found humor in how everyday life was being changed as it grew more and more clear the end of the world was coming.
Now, I did not finish the movie so, lulz, I don’t know how it ended. So maybe the movie turned out a lot better than it was at about the midpoint. I cared a lot for the characters in the first 15 minutes and then all that good will was promptly squandered by everyone screeching at each other.
I may try again to watch Don’t Look Up, but I’m going to have to think about it some before going into it this time.
I generally believe that there will, in fact, be a Singularity at some point in the 21 Century. As such, how humanity’s future in space is depicted in fiction really needs an upgrade.
Two things seem very possible to me — most life in the universe is probably machine in nature and it’s very possible that we haven’t gotten contacted by aliens because they just don’t care. They’re dreaming a deep, eternal sleep in planet-size computers and fuck you.
As such, it’s growing more and more difficult to watch tripe like “Lost In Space” which using the traditional humans-in-space tropes of spaceships and aliens. Ugh. Why not do some updating? Like, instead of a spaceship, humans are just zapped from solar system to solar system.
You could do a whole franchise where humans have to interact with planet-sized machine minds. This grows even more interesting if you flipped the script and said the “Galactic Empire” is really just a bunch of planet-sized machine minds that talk to each other and occasionally take a biological intelligence like humanity under their wing.
Or, put another way, Hollywood really needs to be a tiny bit more creative when it comes to how it imagines humanity’s future in space. They’re so busy strip mining 60 year old IP that that they are really letting the audience down. But the only way this is going to get fixed is someone product a Matrix-level flip-the-scrip style movie, only set in space, or something.
And, then, it would have to be really, really popular.
So, I suppose nothing as fun-interesting as this will ever happen anytime soon.
A lot of ink has been spilled by people complaining about Disney’s handling of the Star Wars franchise. They’re slowly getting better, but that improvement has come largely on the edges. The main franchise continues to be a shit show of half-measures and muddled movies that seem to be just crap put together in a hap-hazarded way.
The last few franchise movies have been so God-awful that I have simply walked out of them. The issue is not Kathleen Kennedy being “woke,” is that apparently Disney on an institutional level is not fans of the franchise and have no idea what to do with them.
For me, Disney has not one, but several existential problems they have to fix with the main franchise of Star Wars. All of these are extremely difficult to fix because of what Star Wars has become as a cultural and, most importantly financial standpoint.
Off the top of my head, the biggest problem of Star Wars is what you might call the “Bloatware Problem” Disney looks at Star Wars and sees dollah bills — selling toys — and also an opportunity to sell the “woke” agenda to a fan base of mostly center-Right men. Disney has done this to the point that the whole thing is unwatchable now.
But it gets worse.
Star Wars has always been camp for little kids. Despite the best efforts of middle-aged fanboys, Star Wars has no internal logic that functions. Things just happen for no fucking reason. They have begun to try to fix this problem by using the rubric “A Star Wars Movie” for some of the darker films, but Disney wants to sell toys, so it’s difficult to have sex or gore in a Star Wars movie.
There are no ready fixes to these problems.
I do think if they just would cool it with do ANY Star Wars movies for a few years, it might help to clear the air. Then I would really lean into using the massive universe that Star Wars has and explore the stories of lesser known characters.
Go to a planet that doesn’t have just one type of climate, for instance. Anyway, whatever. Until Star Wars gets its act together, I’m going to try to make my own interesting worlds for people to play in.
One of the core struggles I have with The Impossible Scenario is how many people would you need to successfully build out the planetary infrastructure for the, say, 1`billion people about to follow to the planet?
This, only on an livable planet and 1 billion people.
I have gone back from about 1 million to about 60 million over and over in my mind. Remember, a Galactic Empire has told humanity that it’s going to zap 1 billion humans to a new “homeland planet.” So, in this case, 1 billion people being saved from doomed earth isn’t as laughable as you might assume. No space ships would be involved. People would just wake up in some sort of re-animation pod on the other planet as if nothing happened.
The more people you use, the better the story telling because then you have the jarring image of people snapping back to normal life on a whole different planet. The fewer people, the longer it takes to colonize the planet and the less people have an emotion connection to the story.
Anyway.
I honestly don’t know.
And, what complicates matters even worse is if things were really all that existential, then the 10(ish) major nuclear powers would jump to the front of the line and demand they get more people to settle in the first few waves or they threaten to blow the world up.
Here’s my thinking — even though under the conditions of the scenario the first settlers to this new “homeland” planet would have to work their asses off, they would be in a position to become fabulously wealthy once all was said and done. And incredibly politically powerful.
So, there would be a huge crush of wealthy, powerful people who would, if nothing else, want their offspring to be among the first group of build-out settlers, no matter how many you might come up with.
Of course, if you’re writing the script, you find a way where your Everyman or Everywoman finds themselves among this first wave of settlers and the plot would be how they rise through the ranks to become a global leader.
This is a massive universe I’ve come up with, but there’s catch — it’s much more of a movie universe than a novel universe and I’m working on four novels right now. What’s more, I love those four novels I’m working on so much that I just don’t feel like pulling mental energy away from them to start from scratch to tell the story of all of this.
But I might at some point in the future. And I’m aware from my Webstats that people are growing interested in this scenario. I’m such a nobody that if someone scooped this idea up and made a movie or movies out of it I would be flabbergasted. I would be angry that they did it at first, but, lulz, I did explain it to them.
And, yet, I dunno.
Just because someone is interested in this doesn’t mean they’re willing to throw the huge amount of money at this idea necessary to create a Star Wars or The Matrix sized franchise out of it.
But, at least in my mind, the universe is fascinating. Imagine if we learn that not only are we not alone in the universe, but 1 billion of us can survive earth’s impending doom — if we’re just willing to work together.
It is slowly beginning to dawn on me that now that I know how *I* handle a huge creative storytelling project, that it’s easy for me to piviot from developing and writing four thriller novels to working on screenplays.
I don’t intend to stop working on these novels, but I definitely have my eye watching a lot of YouTube videos in the near future so I can figure out how to use Final Draft (even though, according to the way the guys on ScriptNotes talk, that’s now passe.)
The biggest thing I’ve learned about telling a great story is how important development is before you even write a single word. So, once I get to a point with the four novels I’m working on that I feel comfortable shaving off some attention from them, I’m going to begin to do development on a few screenplays to see what I come up with.
Screenplays are different from novels because by definition if it’s on the screen, people are nearly forced to accept it’s real. You don’t have to spend 20 pages explaining why this or that thing happened — you see it on the screen, it exists. As such, I feel like I can engage in more elaborate flights of fancy because I don’t have to spend on this time researching things. Also, with a screenplay I have a very strict number of scenes to work with — NO MORE THAN 120!
I know the general structure of good storytelling to the point now that it is at least possible that writing screenplays — after doing development — will be much, much faster than working on novels. There are certain beats that you have to hit during the course of your 120 scenes and as a trained journalists, I love, love, love tight structure.
It makes things a lot easier, at least in my mind.
You can be as creative as you like, you just have to stay within the established conventional wisdom of structure.
But this is all very speculative. I continue to be very hard at work on four novels. And I idly think about writing some short stories when I need to take a short break from working on the main project. And, yet, I’m so absolutely consumed with these four thrillers that I doubt anything will come of that.
I liked the newest attempt to film the Dune novel, but I found it boring as hell. I kept waiting for something to happen. It did finally happen, but for some reason, it didn’t feel like a big enough pay off for all the time I spent rolling my eyes and checking the clock on my phone.
Dune / From the Internet
It definitely was gorgeous to look at. And there were moments when it was engaging and it felt like just another big budget scifi movie. But then there was all the other time when nothing happened. There was a lot of exposition and build up….and you just felt restless.
But, for some reason, over all it was a good movie. I just wish they had played with the source material more. I wish they had juiced the story up so it had a lot more action and lot more there there.
And, yet, having said all that, I’m looking forward to a sequel. Hopefully, it will be more interesting. There is some sense from how Dune ended that any sequel would have a lot more going on.
And Dune universe is so huge — and so much actual action goes on within in — that I look forward to a Dune cinematic universe.
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