Just Effing Entertain Me

Musings on Romance Writing

If you’re just jumping in, I’ll save you a mouse-click – we’re having a discussion about romance writing. Catch up HERE.

Meg made a comment that I began to respond to, about not wanting to judge romance writing. My comment was so long I thought I’d just post it here. This is an interesting conversation, no?

***

I feel the same way, Meg. I don’t have a high opinion of the genre but then I feel bad about that. How can I possibly judge? If someone likes it, they like it. Just because you write it, doesn’t mean you aren’t smart and literary, either. It is what it is. For me personally, it doesn’t satisfy because I get hung up on what feels like cheesiness. I like romance to be a lot more complicated and sophisticated and EARNED. In a romance novel, the romance doesn’t feel earned; the terrain is too predicable for me personally.

But on the other hand, I will boldly contradict myself and lay down a more honest opinion of romance writing:

Something that bugs the hell out of me in society today is this dichotomy between a proliferation of absolute online RAGE and, on the other hand, a politically correct hesitance to really state your opinion on anything. We soft shoe and tippy-toe in case we could possibly offend anybody.

Here’s what I really think. I think that romance novels are a simple type of entertainment with a place and a purpose but that they are in no way, shape or form on par with really great, transformative writing and by that I don’t mean dead white men literature but writers like Sherman Alexie, Russell Banks, Anne Lammott, Joyce Carol Oates, Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and I could go on for weeks.

But then, I’m not sure romance writers would equate themselves with writers like that, either. I really don’t know. They might read and enjoy great writing too. Romance writers might write other stuff that IS on par with truly great writing. But romance novels are romance novels.

Maybe it is the mark of a great writer that you could put on that hat and write romance but be equally adept at writing something much more sophisticated. Maybe there is a preconception that romance writers just aren’t good writers. How can we know that based only on romance novels? We don’t know what else they write. But this sells. So they are making money writing what would appear to be “low-brow”. Maybe some judgment or prejudice comes from professinal jealousy. These writers are making money hand-over-fist. They sell to the masses. How can anything populist have actual merit?

Well – waitta gol darn minute – aren’t movies populist? Are screenwriters not good writers? Well, they surely don’t make money hand-over-fist, by dint of statistics alone, but who’s to say what good writing is or isn’t? None of the writers I mentioned above are making two million dollars a book. Is making less money the mark of a great writer? That seems to be an elitist conclusion, to say the least.

I guess the question for me is this: to write anything well, you have to have some kind of passion for the subject and for the act of writing itself. So it follows, then, that romance writers really feel a passion for the contrived, simplistic, cheesy, over-the-top stuff they write. Or do they? Maybe the joke’s on us.

The bottom line is that in the world of writing, there is a great spectrum, from serial, boilerplate romance and detective stories (three words:Mary Higgins Clark) to intellectual and sometimes inaccessible literature (two words: Don DeLillo). Who among us has not been on a plane or on vacation and read something we got at the airport and enjoyed it but later threw it away with some embarrassment? And the bar may be different for each of us: for me, M.H. Clark is a no-fly zone. I just can’t read her writing, it’s too awful for me. Steven King used to be considered about one notch above Clark but over time, has risen to a much more respectable position. He ain’t no literary writer but damn can that man tell a story. And I like him because he doesn’t take himself too seriously.

But who am I to say? For some, that itch-scratching is exactly what they wanted and needed in that moment or during that time in their life. When I was a kid, I consumed Nancy Drew books. Total serial writing by a number of writers. I was ten, I liked it, it worked for me. Who am I or anybody else to judge what scratches an itch for a reader? Isn’t it all bread and circus?

Here’s what for me is the entertaining question: Do romance writers take themselves seriously? Or do they know full well that they are scratching an itch and laughing all the way to the bank?

Romance Writing – Is it For You?

I found this article online at SFgate – which is, inexplicably, my home page. Because I lived in San Francisco for 12 years and it still feels like home, I guess. Anywho, interesting article by Chris Colin.

****

Drea Rousseau was contemplating her creamy white silk lounge outfit while Rafael Salinas conducted business with the assassin he’d hired. She should have gone with shell pink, she thought. The assassin made an indecent proposal and looked at her with that cold, unblinking gaze. Icy fingers of sheer panic laced around her spine and -

At this point I closed the book and shook hands with its author, the sweet and unfathomably bestselling romance novelist Linda Howard One feels dirty immediately reducing an author to numbers, but Howard’s are remarkable. Her books, which she spends eight weeks writing, bring her as much as $2 million apiece, according to other authors I spoke with. By my count, that’s about $35,000 a day, if she worked continuously during those eight weeks. I wanted to know what being a romance writer in America was like.

I was in luck. Howard was one of a great many women — plus a handful of men — who’d descended on San Francisco for the annual Romance Writers of America conference. Like, say, NASCAR, the industry is roundly dismissed as low-brow, and like NASCAR, the romance industry cries its way to a very large bank. Last year its 8,000 or so new titles constituted the largest share of the consumer book market, with revenue estimated to be $1.375 billion. By comparison, classic literary fiction brought in $466 million. If you read a book in 2007, there’s a 20 percent chance it was a romance novel.

“I speak Southern,” Howard warned me as we sat down. “I like” was “ah lahk.” She’s lived in the same Alabama county all her life, in a town of 4,000 people and one traffic light. She raises cattle and llamas when she’s not typing.

How do you get to be Linda Howard, a legend up there with Danielle Steel and Nora Roberts? Step one, apparently, is to drop out of community college and start working for a trucking company at 18. Howard controlled 100 truck drivers and married one of them. Her husband is now a professional bass-tournament fisherman. They dote on their two golden retrievers and are in the midst of building a new vacation home in the Smoky Mountains. The last vacation home kept filling up with relatives.

I wanted Howard to talk to me about the romance genre in big-picture terms. How flexible are its rules? In what direction was the form heading? Are its messages good or bad for women? But she says she doesn’t think about it in that way — “I just write my stories,” as she put it. So I asked how she did that.

“There’s the thinking process, and that’s the longest part,” she explained. With her most recent book, “Death Angel,” the idea began with the vision of a plane crashing into water, and a woman drowning — then coming back to life. It morphed over time, and soon the woman was involved with a drug lord — Rafael Salinas.

“Usually something about one of the characters becomes clear to me: an expression, a line of dialogue,” she says. “I get to know them for a few weeks or months. Every time I meet them I learn more. Then it reaches critical mass and I realize they know me well enough to tell me their story.”

Next, she starts researching “the peripheral stuff.” For her time-travel book, she had to learn physics. Howard has no use for outlines, synopses, or rules for how many words she writes each day. Here we get into more of those remarkable numbers. She might produce 30 drafts of the first chapter. The last two weeks of writing, she works 20 hours a day. The last couple days, she doesn’t sleep at all. “I’ve topped out at 96 cups of coffee in a day.” Her husband receives strict instructions not to bother her “unless blood or death is involved.”

Somewhere in there, she reads, too — 30 to 50 romance titles a month. She reads while she cooks, she reads at that stoplight, when it’s red. Let me type that again: She reads 30 to 50 books a month. I was beginning to suspect Linda Howard was actually the android creation of the publishing industry until I ran the numbers by another writer.

“No, that sounds about right,” said Allison Lane. The former computer programmer and classical piano teacher has been writing romance novels — hers the traditional Regency subgenre, mostly — for 14 years. Like Howard, she writes fast, sometimes as many as three books a year. Unlike Howard, and far more representative of the field, she does not support herself on these books, even after more than two dozen of them. Her husband, she says, has a good job.

I was glad to have stumbled across Lane. The RWA group was a cheerful bunch, friendly, too — unlike, say, all other writers in the world, the ones I met here enjoyed a genuine-seeming camaraderie. Authors heaped praise on one another at every turn, and it was the pure kind, unpickled with envy or resentment. Still, I knew that not everyone here had it as good as Howard. I wanted to hear what it was like to be a more typical romance novelist.

“Many of these writers barely make anything at all, year after year. You do it because you enjoy it,” Lane said. You have to, she added, because the number of publishers is shrinking fast. Popularity aside, the publishing industry as a whole is in decline.

At this point you’ll notice that I haven’t once used the words “bodice ripper.” If that phrase is scrolling through your head now, take a moment to frantically delete it. As Lane and others hastened to explain, this was a dismissive and offensive term used to describe a small and short-lived type of novel from the ’70s. The enormous variety of books today, from historical to suspense to paranormal, should put that phrase to rest — and yet it persists.

“We are writing for the masses. Each book is looking for hundreds of thousands of readers. Literary fiction doesn’t have to do that. They often consider themselves too elite,” Lane said, explaining what she perceives as routine condescension. “They like big words and long, flowing sentences. They look down their noses at us. If I’m reading anywhere near San Francisco, they’ll see me and literally sniff, and say, ‘I would never read that trash.’”

“Literally?” I asked. I’d never seen someone actually sniff.

“Literally. That’s exactly what they do.”

What a strange predicament for these writers — as disparaged as they are beloved. I decided to sit in on the convention’s annual general meeting, perhaps glean something about their way of being in the world. Or at least see what a huge room full of romance writers is like.

The meeting consisted of 21 women at a long table with microphones, facing a sea of golden chairs under florescent lights. To generalize about the crowd: White, glasses, highlights, a few Southern accents, one leopard blouse. No heaving bosoms, though one woman sneezed a lot.

The proceedings were just slightly more official than a meeting of the UN General Assembly:

“Madam president…quorum…discretionary proxies,” I scribbled in my pad. “If there is no objection…adoption of the standing rules…your president is pleased to report verbally to you at this time…”

One British writer went to the front of the room and asked the board to consider adding an erotic romance category to one of its contests. A current ran through the room: Some don’t like that dirty stuff, others feel that good writing is good writing. Another writer, from Virginia, took exception to the amount of space left for answers on a recent survey of RWA members. Another found the website to be user-unfriendly. The writers seemed happy to be together for their annual gathering. But there was also low-level stress. When we filed out, I heard a good number murmuring about the consolidation of publishing houses, and the difficulty of finding a good agent.

I phoned Lane some time after the convention. She’d explained to me why readers like romance: “It’s an escape,” she said. But slaving away on the author’s end for years, only to see advances shrink and markets whither — what was the pleasure, exactly?

“It allows you to play God,” Lane laughed. “You can pretty much write what you want. If you develop an interest in something, you can slip it in, and suddenly skydiving’s a business expense!”

Being free to write what you want — doesn’t that gloss over a central component of genre fiction? The romance genre means there are rules, most centrally that the book must be a love story with a happy ending.

“If you ask me, everything’s a genre,” Lane replied. “Literary fiction is a genre just as much as romance — it has its rules. It likes to take a problem and explore it from all angles. It often likes to have a complicated, unsatisfying ending. I find that genre depressing … Human nature likes to see something good happen. That’s just how we are.”

***

So what do you think, Wavers? How do you feel about romance writing? Do you hold it in contempt or secretly read it? Did you know that romance novels are consistently the best-selling genre in the US? Can anyone here confirm my suspicion that Danielle Steele has a Jeff Koons thing going on and actually hires ghost-writing Oompa Loompas to churn out her books? Why is it that everytime I open the NY Times Book Review I see an ad for yet another Steele book? How is this possible?

My personal two-cents – I would write this genre and reap the rewards if it didn’t make me a little ill. I just – can’t – get – into it. It’s goofy. It’s not that I don’t like romance – I love, love, love romance and love in life and in the movies. But to me romantic is when that Sikh character in THE ENGLISH PATIENT unraveled his turban and invited what’s-her-bucket into his candle lit tent. Or when Richard Gere picks up Debra Winger at the end of AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN or, or, a million examples. It’s great. I love it. I’m no jaded person. Love is great. Love is all you need. But – Drea Rousseau was contemplating her creamy white silk lounge outfit while Rafael Salinas conducted business with the assassin he’d hired – arghghg I just can’t go there. What do you think, Wavers?

The "T" Word

Recently, as all good Wavers know, The Wave-inatrix started an interesting conversation about talent. Or – it – as it is sometimes colloquially referred to in the biz. The post sparked a healthy debate and dialogue. Is talent necessary to succeed? Who decides if you have “it”? Can talent be cultivated, taught or habituated? Most importantly, is talent some kind of mysterious word bandied about to keep the competition out? Don’t bother – you don’t have “it”. Talent is a mysteriously arrived at, exclusive quality that only writers of the highest caste have.

My opinion – and it is only an opinion – is that yes, having that mysterious facility with words and story herein referred to as “talent” is crucial to having a paid writing career. And I define paid writing career to encompass novels, short fiction, essays, journalism, screenwriting and no doubt a couple of other mediums that are at the moment escaping me. Writers who lack talent are not, in general, published for public consumption. Because editors, agents and managers of all stripes receive too much for the slush pile to pay someone who ain’t got that thang.

Does determination and perseverance matter – oh god yes. But if you don’t have talent, perseverance is meaningless. If you got it, you got it and you always had it. If you don’t, you don’t.

I think that thought is absolutely terrifying to aspiring writers.

And it is complicated by the fact that while I do believe talent is inborn from day one, it does need to be identified and groomed. If Michael Phelps had grown up in a Bedouin family with no access to a swimmable body of water, perhaps his talent would never have blossomed into more than a great eye for a distant oasis. Or perhaps like a character in a sweeping novel, he would have traveled great distances seeking open bodies of water, mysteriously drawn ever forward by a desire and dream he couldn’t articulate only to later write a clumsy novel about the experience that is picked up by a publisher with an eye toward a clearly unique story, who then hires a ghost-writer to tell the Wandering Erstwhile Swimming Bedouin memoir in an entertaining way. And that, Wavers, was what they call in school a run-on sentence. But I digress.

Here’s the reality – everybody has talent. For something. Music, cooking, teaching, ping pong, diplomacy, animal husbandry, organizing, motivating, salesmanship, growing stuff, making stuff, swimming – something. Everybody has a talent. But not everybody has writing talent.

And it is a matter of great curiosity for me and some indignation, that consistently, the general public seems to feel that writing is somehow easy. Maybe it’s because of the way we look, or the way we often work at home in our socks, or maybe we’re just so cool we make it look easy. But the perception that what we do is somehow easy and can be learned by purchasing a few books on the topic is maddening and when I’m in a bad mood – demeaning. So many writers were outsiders growing up; the freaks, the geeks, the homebodies and we were misunderstood and abused for it. And now we’re cool? And now our talents are instantly accessible by dilettantes and pretenders?? That the occasional indignation that arises like hot lava. And dilettante, by the way is the word we writers use when it’s gettin’ ugly and we’re pissed. Oh yeah, we fight with words. Gol darn it.

The thing with talent that makes it a fun and provocative topic is that it is as elusive as hell and almost impossible to define. Which is why, ironically enough, “it” is a fairly accurate word for talent. Although of course, “it” is generally used when referring to actors and entertainers meaning they have a certain indefinable charisma and magnetism.

Do you have writing talent? Maybe. Maybe you do but you don’t know it because you never tried. There are plenty of stories of successful writers who started writing much later in life. The fact is that there is just no end-all, be-all definition of writing talent, who has it, where you get it and whether it can be cultivated, taught or picked up at Walgreens on sale.

Well – Walgreens is always selling out. Try Target.

Do you have talent? Yes of course you do. At something. It might be writing. It might be wood carving. You can’t really find out until you try. The only thing I can note, from my experience, is that writers who claim to have it boldly and flatly and with pride, consistently give me scripts that don’t reflect that. The hallmark of a talented writer seems to be – again, from my experience – a great neurotic fear that they do not have talent at all. I cannot explain why this happens. Do I have talent? I think so. But I also think writing talent – like all talent – is on a spectrum. In the blogging world, Nikki Finke is quite talented, in my opinion. There are a lot of bloggers who just blow my mind. I love this new, Wild West of blogging, a path that was laid long ago by great journalists, critics, essayists and thinkers like Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, Kenneth Turan and more recently, Christopher Hitchens, James Wolcott and Anthony Lane. To leave out about a thousand others that are eluding me at the moment.

The thing with blogging is that while it is an exciting Wild West, with saloon doors flung wide open by the notable absence (in many cases) of the gatekeepers – editors – the doors flung wide open thing is a double-edged sword. Resulting in numerous belly-button gazing blogs with little literary, entertainment or educational value. Anyone can blog. Writing has become a populist notion now more than ever before. No longer is it the exclusive purview of tweed-clad, pipe-smoking editors and writers imbibing at the Algonquin Round Table.

Movies are by definition populist entertainment and it is the proliferation of movies as popular entertainment which has, in my opinion, created a sense that anyone can write one and that it’s fun and easy – liking taking up golf or knitting. Is Tiger Woods talented? Incredibly. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t go enjoy a game of golf for the sake of the game. It just means that you probably won’t receive the accolades and earn the accomplishments that Woods has. If that’s okay with you – go play golf. Maybe – just maybe – you are that Wandering Erstwhile Swimming Bedouin who just hasn’t had a chance to try writing but in fact, that talent was nascent within you all the time. You can’t know until you try. And if you want to try – then you should.

Here is my short list, in no order, of the necessary supplies to have in your travel bag if you want to be a successful (read, paid, produced, appreciated) writer:

Determination
Perseverance
Talent
Social Skills on a spectrum from charismatic to an ability to speak to people at all
Intelligence
Curiosity
Heart
Individualism aka “voice”
Luck

It is a provocative subject, this talent thing. I have no doubt that everyone possesses it. In one form or another. Anyone – and I include myself in this – can be taught to do math. But not everyone can be a super string theorist or Albert Einstein. Anyone can be taught to swim, but not everyone can be Michael Phelps. God I’m tired of the Phelps-worship running rampant right now but he is a great example. I’m a swimmer. I love to swim. I more than love to swim, I lurve to swim. (Woody Allen reference, people, keep up with me!) but I will never, ever be an Olympian swimmer. I don’t care because for me, it’s just the love of the water itself. If you love to write – you should WRITE. And write and write and write. Of course there are examples of successful screenwriters who are less talented than other successful screenwriters who got lucky, who knew the right people, who were in the right place at the right time. But they have talent. Every single one of them. This I believe to be true.

Do You Have "it"?

What is “it”? Where does “it” come from? Can you learn “it”? Can you buy “it”? Does everybody have “it”? If you do have “it” when do you know you have “it”?

It is talent. And no, you cannot buy it. And you cannot be taught it. And of course not just everybody has it. It is a treasured, ephemeral, wild thing. If you think you have it, you probably don’t. If you know you have it but find that a very uncomfortable thing to admit even to yourself – you probably do.

Way less people have it than think they do.

People who really have it know it down deep but would never, ever boast about or even admit it. It’s like being a magician during the dark ages – people both fear and envy it. You don’t know how you got it. You feel slightly odd about it. Your mom recognized it right away and that was both thrilling and embarrassing.

It lives inside of you and may not make itself apparent in scripts or stories one through four. But it’s there. And when you finally relax into your voice and your rhythm, it will emerge, unbidden. You will learn how to coax it out to play when you trust it. Sometimes it doesn’t want to come out and play. You wait patiently.

If you don’t have it, you cannot get it – anywhere. It’s not like sea monkeys or chia pets – just add water. You either have it or you don’t. If you do have it, it was within you all the time.

I can tell if you have it on the first page of your script, or in the first paragraph of your essay or story.

What if you don’t have it and you know it? Should you stop writing? Well – no. But you should definitely re-frame your expectations. A lot of people like to swim but not every swimmer has it like Michael Phelps. Doesn’t mean you should stay out of the pool but it does mean you need to downscale your Olympic hopes and repurpose them toward a local championship.

To be a successful, paid writer – you have to have it.

Would anybody be honest with you and tell you that you don’t have it? No.

So how do you know whether you have writing talent?

Here are some hints that you might have talent:

*You have been writing from a very early age and have always delighted parents, teachers, friends and relatives with what you wrote. You started to believe them and kept writing. It was a thrill.

*In emails, letters and birthday cards, your words delight people. Not people you put on the spot and ask, but people who tell you that for no reason whatsoever.

*You love to read and you consume books voraciously. You mark pages that have beautiful passages and read and reread them. You think about the green light at the end of the dock.

*You obsess over words – you love to define and understand them. You will stop writing something for 20 minutes until you find just the perfect word for that sentence. Then you’ll change it six more times before you’re satisfied.

*You really don’t care where you write or what you write with. You get strangely lost in your writing and don’t hear the call to dinner or the train coming.

*Words have colors and sounds to you. You love to say “willow” and “ululate” and “melancholy” and “hot, humid gardenia-scented summer”.

*You freak out when other people use or spell words incorrectly.

*You are never satisfied with your writing.

*You read writers who have it and get a sort of plummeting thrill. You wonder if you’ll ever be as good as them.

*Sometimes you feel like a freak.

Here are some hints that you may not have talent:

*You compare writing to needing to breathe. You make much of this, wear a beret and have a poster of Ernest Hemingway in your bedroom.

*You ask other people if they liked your writing. This does not embarrass you.

*You are really, really sure you have talent and tell people that frequently.

*You are convinced that you will rush to the top of the heap once your talent is recognized and think bitterly about the fact that it hasn’t yet. This fundamental unfairness bothers you a great deal.

*You love what you write immediately. You move on and you don’t look back. You pride yourself on this. Any word will do. You are after speed and efficiency.

*You are so sure you’re talented that you feel you don’t have to read the classics, take a class or otherwise do any work. Your talent is natural, inborn and incorruptible.

* You think that writing is easy and fun.

*You don’t think anybody else has it. Writers who are said to have it do not impress you. You think they got a lucky break that should have been yours.

*You feel like such a lucky rock star that you have talent and feel sorry for all the other poor saps who don’t yet realize how untalented they are and how very talented you are.

Aging Gracefully

You know those horrible pop-up ads that show a beautiful young woman and then the cursor moves over her face and suddenly she’s a hag? I hate that ad. Talk about a scare tactic. The truth is, no matter how much you spend on products, some people just don’t age well. Now, Robert Downey, Jr. – he has aged well. Has anybody seen him on the cover of Rolling Stone this month? Sweet mother of god. Why is it that some men just get more and more handsome like that? Totally unfair.

Someone commented on the Rouge Wave the other day that HIGHLANDER (1986) is very dated. Man was he right. But STAR WARS (1977) doesn’t feel dated to me. Either does ORDINARY PEOPLE (1980). Or CHINATOWN (1974). But BEVERLY HILLS COP (1984), with its awful synth, 80s incidental music gives me hives. Not THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1985) or BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985). To me, those movies still stand up.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971) – has got that gritty, fast-paced 70s thing going on but I don’t find it distancing. The movie is still powerful, even if it is definitely marked by the era during which it was made. Like NETWORK (1976) or TAXI DRIVER (1976). Time and place movies don’t make a movie feel “dated” in my experience. I love PILLOW TALK (1959), REAR WINDOW (1954) and GILDA (1946).

BLADE RUNNER (1982) feels a bit dated to me but I still enjoy it. HAROLD AND MAUDE (1971) and THE GRADUATE (1967) also fall into the category of kind of dated but I don’t really mind. BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969) is hopelessly dated although still a classic. THE STING (1973) holds up like nobody’s business. Or does it? How much subjectivity is going on here?

What do you think, Wavers? What makes a movie feel dated to you and why?

REMINDER

The deadline for the Pineapple Express Short Scene Competition is 12am, Pacific Daylight Time – that’s only 8 hours from the time of this posting. Quite a number of Wavers have submitted but there’s still time!

SUPERBAD: Worst Movie Ever

I have been on a weird, elliptical mission for many years now. If there is a movie I haven’t seen, I make a point to see it. It’s frustrating because the more movies I watch, the more movies I realize that I haven’t seen. So it’s like some kind of exercise in a weirdly fun frustration. Sometimes it’s an exercise in self-flagellation – I see a movie, realize how very great it is and beat myself up for having missed something so good when it first came out and other times it’s punishing – really? REALLY? This is what everybody has been talking about?

That doesn’t happen with older movies as much but sometimes you watch something like, say, Grand Hotel, with Greta Garbo and it kind of bursts a bubble – she actually says “I want to be alone” so many times in that movie that it becomes slightly funny. Or you watch, say, Gilda and you think DAMN Rita Hayworth was a beautiful woman, even in black and white! The thing with older movies is that I truly have pretty much seen almost every good one so now I’m down to the ones I haven’t seen because they pretty much sucked. So that’s never fun. People think that older movies are always classics but know this – for every HARVEY or TWELVE ANGRY MEN there are like a thousand SHE ATE HER PARENTS RAW!

Wait – major digression – in screenwriting-land, we all-cap movie titles so I should have written GRAND HOTEL – and, as you have noticed, I usually do. In coverage reports, the movie title is not all-capped. I suspect because it there is a slight caste-system judgment going on – this is not a MOVIE yet, it’s just a script. I don’t know man, I don’t make these rules up, I just follow the conventions. But in magazines such as EW, movie titles are generally italicized. So what’s a Wave-inatrix to do? Fine. I’ll keep all-capping since we’re all used to that.

So anyway, here is a short list of movies I’ve been catching up on lately:

BEOWULF – The story took massive liberties and it looked like a video game but loved it!

AUDREY ROSE – 70s reincarnation movie has not aged well. Not scary and not even campy.

THE DESCENT – Wow, I loved this movie! Girl power! Clever! Simple! Scary as hell!

THE INVASION – Great build up, Kidman is beautiful, but not as good at the 70s remake with Donald Sutherland.

IN BRUGES – I absolutely freaked out with joy. What a great movie. Plus I met Colin Farrell once, on the set of S.W.A.T. I’ll always have that sweet five minutes on the set of S.W.A.T.

RAT RACE – Okay I’m lying, I’ve seen that one before. What an underrated, high-larious movie.

HIGHLANDER – this falls under the category of REALLY?

10,000 B.C. – yeah you read that right. The Mini-W and I thought it would be a hoot. Not even.

SUPERBAD – Ah. And now we come to the subject of this post. Woops, I kind of gave away the store already, in the blog post title. Damn it!

Here’s the the thing, I loved 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN. I liked KNOCKED UP. I can’t wait to see THE PINEAPPLE EXPRESS (where are the short scene submissions, by the way, are we holding out?) and TROPIC THUNDER. FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL is on my list of hall-of-shame-I-should-have-seen-that-by-now. (See how annoying the all-caps get?) I secretly have a crush on Seth Rogen. Michael Cera is the best – loved him in Arrested Development and in JUNO. I’ve loved Paul Rudd for years but particularly after CLUELESS not to mention ANCHORMAN. I want to be as cool as the Apatow guys, I really do.

But SUPERBAD was an awful movie. I’m not going to go all Betty Friedan, Susan Faludi, Naomi Wolf, Camille Paglia on you here but – yes I am. Misogyny, anyone? How about a little side of contempt for women to go with that? And a nice dollop of dehumanizing objectification right on top. How about some nice, deep fried, completely unfunny, uncharming little-boy whining and freakish obsession with getting laid? Yeah, yeah, I know that all men, regardless of age are obsessed about getting laid. I’m from Planet Earth too.

I have a good friend who is – no nice-ing this up – a prude. She walked out of SUPERBAD. When I sat down to watch it the other evening, I did so thinking I was ever so much cooler than she is. Walked out? Hello? Welcome to the 21st century, babe! We can talk about sex at the movies! It’s life, man! I’m a woman of today, I can laugh right along with the boys. Damn straight.

My laughter died in my throat. Quickly. Yeah, yeah the McLovin thing is funny. Ba-dump dump. Tish. But the rest – the rest was offensive beyond the pale to anyone with a vagina. I’m sure there were women who laughed along, I am not making a sweeping generalization (well, kind of) but what bothers me about this movie is the Emperor’s New Clothes thing. Apatow reigns supreme (though I suspect, like anything and anyone in Hollywood, his time is limited) and nobody can just speak the truth about this awful, unfunny movie. All things Apatow are not funny. I know that my secret rush, Rogen, wrote Superbad, not Apatow. In fact, in IMDB I don’t see Apatow directly related to SUPERBAD at all. But you know he was – somehow. So let’s not finger (aha! ha.) Apatow but I do blame him for opening this can of unfunny, juvenile man-boy worms currently enjoying box office take at the theater.

Did I take offense x1000 because I have a teenaged daughter, who is, in theory, the generalized object of this kind of tripe? Of course. Because it’s the same shit, generations later. Women are for screwing. And it’s funny, right? Adolescent boys are funny. Right? Look, you have to give teen sex movies their due – they scratch an itch and they always have. But this is one woman who is going to just say it – Apatow and his crew need to grow the hell up. It’s not funny anymore. I think Apatow has a daughter. Can’t remember. But he does have kids and if one is a girl, I give him about 8 or 10 more years before he looks back in abject shame.

The Hathor Legacy
Women and Hollywood

The Emperor’s New Clothes

As the Wave-inatrix is approaching full flower in the summer of my life (wait – note to self: summer is the new spring) I find that have fewer and fewer judgments about other people; it’s all such a big, messy stew, this life, how can we judge anybody? How can we really understand what lies within the human heart? But I will say this – the new frontier is not space, it’s human consciousness. And I do wonder – collectively, what is going on in the consciousness that we humans need to worship celebrities? Why do you bring this up, Wave-inatrix? Well…I’ll say it:

Heath Ledger – bravura performance – but Oscar worthy? I was as sad as anyone at his untimely death – really sad – and certainly substance abuse is tragic – but does it elevate a performer into some kind of sainted realm? When is a performer responsible for their personal behavior? Heath was a gifted actor and he clearly had a lot more go give. It’s a loss for all of us but the bottom line is that he cheated us (not to mention, primarily, his young daughter and family) by being irresponsible – personal demons or not. Hey- we’ve all got ‘em. But some of us don’t have multiple residences, million dollar paychecks and private jets. Fame can be a terrible thing – as Ava Gardner once said: Fame gave me everything I never wanted.

But when is foolishness foolishness? Can we not call a spade a spade? Or a joker a joker? Enjoy his performance – it is haunting given what we know happened next for him personally. And certainly, feel the pain of loss. But really – really? Don’t we have more important things to obsess about?

And now Shia LaBeouf and this car accident thing. And of course, much more famous examples like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Kurt Cobain. Then there was the whole Lana Turner thing – wait, that actually WAS a pretty fascinating story. Angelina and Brad and their new twins? Really? This is news?!

And what, Wave-inatrix, does this have to do with screenwriting? It doesn’t. Not really. It’s just my opinion that having a social conscious rather than a celebrity consciousness is a better use of time if this world and humanity along with it is to evolve into its next iteration.

One of my favorite social action organizations is One Kid One World. Don’t worry about Heath, he’s in a better place now. One would hope. And I really think the Jolie-Pitt clan is going to do just fine. How about helping a child in Sudan get an education?

It’s a Mac, Mac, Mac, Mac World

So in the informal poll here on the Rouge Wave, 60% of respondents said that they used Mac rather than PC. And the Wave-inatrix was curious – why is that?

I used a PC for years and years but in the past couple of years, I noticed that to a one, all of my writer friends used Mac. So last fall when my computer belched forth smoke and spaghettios, it was clear it was time to switch. I went Mac and I’ll never look back. I’m not sure why I love my Mac so – because all the writers have them? Because they’re cool looking? Because there’s a manufactured patina of hipness about everything Mac and I am a marketing researcher’s wet dream?

Or – as Apple would have us believe, because Mac’s are more user friendly? Of course, when you first switch, Mac is anything but user friendly. It’s a freaking nightmare. But once you get acclimated, it is a more intuitive computer to use, I’ll say that. And I think I even know what that means. It just makes more sense than my PC did. Cute little icons. Fancy gadgets that take your picture and the way my icons GET BIGGERthensmaller when I roll over them with the cursor. The Ical function. The spotlight function. And the super cool carrying case I got for mine – baby blue and plaid, thank you very much.

Now, 60% to 40% here on the Rouge Wave is hardly a scientific sampling and also not a landslide for Mac. But it was as I suspected – the majority. The Wave-inatrix is no staticisian but in my day to day observation, I have noticed a very strong trend among creatives to use Mac and for accountant/eggheads to use PC. Now calm down you riotous 40% – I’m not calling you square eggheads, throw-backs or hold-outs. You go right ahead and use your boxy, square, black or grey rat-a-tats. I for one am busy using my Photo Booth to take super cool pictures of me with googly eyes.

*oh and by the way, the title of this refers to a classic, very silly movie, the precursor to the most excellent Rat Race, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

The Mini-W Reviews: The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight, starring Christian Bale, Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and the late Heath Ledger, was possibly one of the most anticipated films of 2008. Naturally I was SO excited to see it, and even though I got a seat at the very back row of the theatre (it was completely packed even at a matinee) I was pumped up as hell.

The results, however, I was not as happy about. As much as I respect Christian Bale as an actor, when he put on his Batman mask and his tough guy voice, I kind of wanted to laugh. On the other hand, Heath Ledger’s performance was great. The part of the Joker is written in such a cheesy way, that it takes a great actor to turn it into something dark and creepy. Almost like Kathy Bates’ performance in Stephen King’s 1990 film Misery.

Although I quite liked Ledger’s performance, I strongly disagree with the Academy Award buzz that he’s getting. Yes, it is sad that he had problems, and yes, it is tragic that he passed away, but honestly, that performance was not Oscar material. A friend of mine compared Ledger’s possible nomination to Johnny Depp’s nomination for best actor in 2003 as Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean The Curse of the Black Pearl but in my opinion Ledger wasn’t nearly as good as Depp.

In this installment of the Batman franchise, Batman fights the Joker and all these bad guys that I lost track of over and over again. The story doesn’t have much going on or if it did it was confusing which made it hard for me as a viewer to pay attention (my generation supposedly has a very low attention span). I think that there was a great cast, great special effects, and great action, but overall this movie was more publicity and less quality. I’m looking forward to the new Mummy movie. I give Batman a 2 out of five jelly beans rating.

The Mini-W Reviews: Hancock

Hancock, starring Will Smith, Jason Bateman and Charlize Theron, is packed with fun and excitement. Although the story is not your average generic plotline, and the special effects show just how far Hollywood technology has gotten these days, the film was overall mediocre and disappointing. My mom didn’t agree with me but she’s old.

The story starts out with a burnt-out alcoholic who just happens to have superpowers. As he saves people while causing damage, the crowds sneer at his sad efforts to help. One day, Hancock saves a grateful man (Jason Bateman, who I really liked) and is introduced to his family. He eventually agrees to let Bateman help him with publicity. Hancock reluctantly enters jail, and works on “cleaning up” The movie started to get so boring at this point that I got some money from my mom and got some candy and came back.

Finally some action comes when Hancock is released and learns that being a superhero isn’t as easy as it seems. The aspect of the movie that most disappointed me was the twist. It almost ruined the whole story, and was not well thought out. It was like suddenly I was watching a completely different movie. Hancock is okay, definitely not as good as Wanted, but definitely something to think about seeing if you’re a Jason Bateman fan.

I saw Hancock in The Cinerama Dome at the Arclight Theatre in Hollywood which is cool because it’s right by Amoeba Music. The Cinerama Dome is leftover from a million years ago in the 50s when they tried to make movies go completely around you or something. That’s what my mom told me but I don’t get it because it makes you dizzy so whatever. We also saw Pan’s Labyrinth there last year and I was so traumatized.

Unless you are a big Will Smith fan, which I am not, I would wait to see this movie on dvd. I want to see the Dark Knight but my mom hates crowds so we have to see a stupid matinee. But we’ll see it this week and I’ll review it next. I’d give Hancock a two out of five jelly bean rating, overall.