Tag: #TrashyTuesdayMovie

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

What Writers Ought to Know About Die Hard, Part Three

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series What Writers Ought To Know About...

So I’ve been meaning to write the last three Die Hard posts for a couple of months now, transforming my raw notes into something readable, but my life was basically mugged by putting together the GenreCon program, then chairing panels at the Brisbane Writer’s Festival, then coping with the fact that GenreCon’s attendance kinda exploded, then actually running the con, then going to the UK, then watching my deadlines go boom, then moving then, then… Well, shit, I guess I’m out of excuses, and it’s time to finish this series off, albeit nearly three quarters of a year after it started. WHAT WRITERS OUGHT TO KNOW ABOUT DIE HARD, PART THREE Since it’s been a while, it might be worth going back to taking a refresher look at the posts regarding Die Hard’s Ongoing Metaphors and my notes breaking down The First Act. In fact, even if you remember the second post, go back anyway. I adore first acts. They’re some of

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

What Writers Ought to Know About Die Hard, Part Two

This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series What Writers Ought To Know About...

So my friend Kevin was in town this weekend to talk about a project he’s putting together, which meant we spent a lot of time talking about narrative structure and the way character works and how to do a lot of effective storytelling without wasting too much time on things. Die Hard, unfortunately, wasn’t in the list, but it’s amazing how much you start noticing when your reading of an episode/movie moves from the passive to the active. I do this kind of thing for fun, since I’m kinda obsessed with structure, and even I start noticing different things when I have to actively explain how things work to someone else. What follows is a pretty close examination of the Die Hard‘s first act, which means we’re going to spend a whole bunch of words looking over what’s effectively just twenty minutes of film. This post will probably stand alone, but it builds on some of the things I mentioned

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

What Writers Ought to Know About Die Hard (Part One)

This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series What Writers Ought To Know About...

Normally, when I sit down to write a Trashy Tuesday Writing School post, it’s because I’m trying to redeem some element of sitting down and watching a terrible movie. Films like the Josh Kirby series, which started badly and ended badly and reached a high water mark around number 3, or Speed Racer, which is a triumph of style but a massive failure as a script, or Robot Jox with…well, you get the picture. I should not that trashy isn’t applied to these films as a statement of quality – I adore the Speed Racer film for its ambition, and loathe Josh Kirby for…well, reasons that will require a blog post of their own. Trashy is instead used as an aesthetic judgement, a way of categorizing films that are unified by a sense of pop-cultural kitsch and the ability to seep into the popular consciousness. True, not all trashy films are good. In fact, most of them are pretty terrible;

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Pick Your Poison: Upcoming Trashy Movie Writing Schools

Every now and then, my flatemate and I argue about whose responsible for the ongoing #TrashyTuesdayMovie phenomenon. I say the blame is entirely his, since he’s the one who maintains the schedule and the associated wiki and generally makes sure that we have copies of the movie. He blames me on account of the fact that I continue to show up and tweet every week, and I keep talking it up among people I know. Also, that people I know keep adding fucking films to the list. I think, with the creation of a banner graphic to accompany this post, I have officially lost the argument. Not that it’s a great banner, nor even likely to be the final version, but I was having a slow evening and felt the need to crack open photoshop. Tonight we’re going to kick off the first of Six goddamn Josh Kirby films, which I gather are actually one long film that’s been broken up

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

So every Tuesday I get together with my flatmate and a random assortment of other people to live-tweet a trashy movie with (usually) some kind of SF-nal flavouring. We’ve been doing it for over a year now and, due to some weeks off on account of work, finally clocked up our fifty-third film when we tweeted our way through Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Turns out this was a particularly fine choice of film, for all there are folks who wail when you label Bill and Ted as “trashy.” For starters, it turned out Kathleen Jennings had never seen this particular stain of late-eighties awesomeness, so we lured her along for the screening. For another thing, it’s one of those films that ’caused a whole bunch of the #TrashyTuesdayMovie regulars to fire up their DVD players and join in, which makes this the second time one of our movie hash-tags has done the trending thing. Apparently, when #WyldStallyns trends, it

Journal

This is what I’ve done this Sunday eve

When I got back from the Gold Coast, it was time to take a walk. When I got back from my walk, it was beer o’clock. When I went to the bottle-shop, they had Mango Beer. And really, that’s all you need to know to figure out how I reached this point of the evening. # So here is one of those things that I discovered this weekend: when you read something aloud to my father, particularly if it’s non-fiction, the text isn’t really a text so much as the beginning of a conversation. We discovered this on Friday night, when my mum was going through the copy of the second Women of Letters anthology I got her for Christmas (This, in and of itself, is something worth writing about, ’cause I’ve spent years trying to figure out how to buy books for my mum and it’s only occasionally that I get it right outside of the cook-book genre). My

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Reasons to Watch Speed Racer

The Speed Racer movie fascinates me. Not because it’s a good movie – it’s not – but because it’s made by people just smart enough to do interesting things and just dumb enough to make some very simple mistakes. As a writer, this is a combination that keeps me looking at something, wondering what the hell happened and why it all falls apart. I’ll be honest for a second – Speed Racer should be the kind of glorious failure in the style of films like Southland Tales. The Watchowski Brothers remake has a lot going for it in terms of a really strong aesthetic, a willingness to be stylized rather than naturalistic, and a moderately strong cast. It was never going to be a successful film because the choices they were making ran up against the basic demand for pseudo-realism in cinema, but at the very least it was ambitious and willing to take chances. Sadly, this is coupled with