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Showing posts from August, 2008

Inglourious Basterds, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Grammar and Love the Story

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

Two fun examples of dialogue-less storytelling

Any day is a good day for zombies. The best day for zombies will be when Left 4 Dead hits the PC. On that day I will be transported to Zombie Heaven. Ironically, Zombie Heaven is right here on Earth: the Land of the Living. Where the warm-fleshed, juicy-brains-carrying humans are abundant and conveniently packaged into cramped apartment blocks with no exit strategies. Where humans fear the night and zombies do not fear the day. Where humans still believe a zombie holocaust can happen only on screen. And so, I present for your viewing pleasure two animated short films featuring zombies. The stories have a beginning, middle, and end and are told completely without dialogue. CHAINSAW MAID Beyond the wonderful claymation, I love, love the Casio-quality sound effects in this one. And there's a chuckle early on that would feel right at home in any Wallace and Gromit move. ZOMBIE ZOMBIE - DRIVING THIS ROAD UNTIL DEATH SETS YOU FREE This delightful riff on Carpenter&#