Tag: Trashy Tuesday Movie

Stuff

Morning Shift

So this is pretty much how my morning went: Peter gets up fifteen minutes before his alarm goes off at 6:00 am Peter sits down to write a half-hour ahead off schedule Peter finishes the 1,300 goal he set for his morning writing shift forty-five minutes early. Peter wombles around the internet for ten minutes, then realise everyone else is asleep or on their way to work. Peter gets bored. Peter goes back to writing. And that, folks, is why I’ve missed getting up early to get writing done. It wasn’t possible for much of the last year, courtesy of the apnea and my tendency to sleep through alarms, so I gradually cut back my morning writing to a bare minimum of getting up a half-hour early and getting a couple of hundred words done (and, even then, there were mornings it didn’t happen). It’s nice to be back. # Speaking of things coming back, tomorrow night will see the

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Six Things Writers Can Learn from Highlander (1986)

Highlander is a terrible movie. I wanted to get that out of the way early, because it’s the films sequel that famously earns the franchise the vast majority of its grief. People remember the second Highlander film as this massively disappointing experience, an incoherent mess compared to its predecessor, and truthfully it is all those things, but to lay all the blame on the various sequels of the film is a little unfair. You see, the first Highlander is godawful as well. Actually painful to watch, when you force yourself to sit down and pay attention to everything, rather than just tuning in for the bits you remember fondly. This truly surprised me when we re-watched the film as part of the Trashy Tuesday movie series. Like most gents of a geeky persuasion, both my flatmate and I had seen the film when we were teenagers and remembered it being all kinds of awesome. There were sword fights. There was Queen.

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Five (Well, Six, Actually) Things Writers Can Learn From Watching Wing Commander (1999)

Our work offices are located in the State Library of Queensland, which means I’ll occasionally walk past signs for upcoming library events on my way into work. Last week, one of those signs advertised the library’s classic movie screening of the German submarine classic Das Boot and I was…well, mildly interested. Unfortunately, the screening was during work hours and I missed it, so I went home and made do with the next best thing – Das Boot in space, AKA the cinematic adaptation of the Wing Commander computer games. Fans of the game hate this film. Like, passionately hate this film. My former flatmate, who reveled in the shittiest of films during our #TrashyTuesdayMovie run, chose not to sit through Wing Commander when it was scheduled. My friends who love the games claim that it fails as an adaptation on multiple levels, but I can’t really speak to that. I never actually played the games, so I was forced to take the film on

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Four Things Writers Can Learn From The Josh Kirby Films

So we spent a couple of weeks making our way through the first few films in the Josh Kirby, Time Warrior series for the #TrashyTuesdayMovie. After the first week I more-or-less swore I wouldn’t do a Trashy Tuesday Writing School post about this series until we hit the end, but the contrast between the first film (which was dull and awful) and the second film (which was an batshit crazy and awful) was marked enough that I kinda changed my mind. The first Josh Kirby film, Planet of the Dino-Knights, probably ranks among the most god-awful films we’ve watched on a Tuesday night thus far. It’s not quite bad enough to slip into my bottom five, but it’d certainly earn its spot in the bottom ten. The second film, The Human Pets, is better, but it’s greatest strength is being not-quite-as-poorly-made as its predecessor. In this respect, they’re actually an interesting duology in terms of the lessons they hold for

Works in Progress

Nine Things Writers Can Learn From Watching Robot Jox (1989)

Robot Jox is a fucking awful movie. It’s got an average review rating of 4.9 on IMDB, which is actually pretty good for something we watch as part of the Trashy Tuesday Movie series (and if you’re interested in seeing my immediate reactions to the film, the twitter stream is archived over on the TTM wiki), but it doesn’t change the basic problem. This film is a mess. A glorious, glorious mess. Personally I think people on IMDB are rating the film too high. Of course, I personally don’t really think Robot Jox deserves to be called a film, since it utterly fails to achieve all but the most basic requirements. I mean, it is filmed, and I suppose we could call what’s happening on the screen acting if we’re being generous, but that’s really about it. And yet, I’m going to suggest you go find a copy of this absolute dogs breakfast of a movie if you’ve got an