Last Dying Wish BA #5

I thought this piece would be appropriate to share as one of my last required pieces of writing.

My last dying wish was always to write something that would please others and change the world for the better. My teen years were largely about impressing other people, and I was always pleased when a smile would follow the reading of my work. It was in college that I discovered pleasing others didn’t necessarily help my story, and my first film production class taught me the consequences of attempting to do so. The learning method, one in which I'm sure the various Deans of the School of Cinematic Arts has agonized over for years, included a screening of a three minute film made by us, followed by a class discussion where every single person would tell you why it didn’t work. A new film was due every three weeks, and every week consisted of brainstorming, shooting, and editing. By the last assignment, my brain was racked for ideas, my patience had ran out with my Sony camera, my nerves had been thinned in the editing room, and my flaws also laid bare when it was time to screen my final project. I questioned why I ever chose my major to be screenwriting. I didn’t sign up for this. I just wanted to write. I had no idea how much I would learn.

My first movie entitled “Church Mouse” was about a mouse that gets into a church and is chased around by a couple of boys. (I bought a little mouse from Petco which actually moved if you pulled the string). My next movie was about a girl who loves chocolate and checks herself into Chocoholics Anonymous. The third masterpiece was a stop motion project about a princess who becomes unhappy with her sheltered life, and the fourth was a documentary I chose to do on a friend who was a Cambodian refugee. None of them were supposed to be “emo” or depressing, which I found to be a common theme among my classmates. I was there to lighten the mood. The documentary -- my final project -- was screened on the last day of class.

I remember the day vividly. It was May and everyone was completely burned out from the work we had done all year. Final projects had been screened, and the class of twenty-something students was waiting for the minute to walk out of the door and never reenter. Before we could, we had one last judgment. The people who had screened that day had to sit in the middle of the room as each class member gave them one last piece of advice. I watched my classmates squirm in the hotseat, but was relatively calm about comments on my work.

The professors called my name last and I bravely went to sit down . I thought I was prepared because I had heard their mostly positive feedback throughout the semester. Nothing could have prepared me for what they would say.

“Fiona, I loved almost all of your movies. They were definitely charming and delightful to watch,” one of my classmates said. My face flushed with pride.

“I agree, whenever I saw one of your movies I would always feel like a better person afterwards.” Excellent. My dream was coming true. Then it got squashed.

“You never had a problem telling a happy story. It was looking at the darker side of characters that you never quite got,” was the feedback from another student. That was one student’s viewpoint, but I was convinced no one would agree. I hadn’t heard that from anyone all semester. My professor piped up after I had received twenty-four more comments similar to the last one:

“Your classmates are right. Your stories didn’t have much conflict. What you need to understand is that the character can never realize true happiness unless they’ve gone through really dark times.”

I graciously thanked everyone and walked back to my seat, lambasting myself for the childish influence in my work and the unwillingness to have ever gone to the darkest places in my imagination. Even though I wanted to charm the class with my movies, the consensus was that my work was saccharine. I had always wanted to stay in a safe place where the worst complication for the characters was that Rosy the Rabbit and Harry the Hedgehog would get sick from the cabbage in the garden. I knew the struggle had to be worse now, and I suddenly knew why I couldn’t write endings. There could be no resolution of the problem if there wasn’t a problem to begin with. Where I had thought my short attention span as a child was the reason for poor writing, I should have known that I was just too afraid to venture into the gloom. I was afraid of the dark.

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House: The Show I Hate to Love

This semester I enrolled in CTWR 421: Writing the Hour-Long Drama. I chose the show "House, M.D" on Fox, quite stupidly it turned out, because I admired the show and thought it was complex and gripping. Believe me, that is the best reason not to write for a show, because however hard I tried, I couldn't match the intellect of David Shore's masterful creation. I should have paid attention to this feeling in my gut that told me this semester would be difficult, but I didn't. I proceeded to create the worst medical mystery ever.
I recently got a message from a friend who was reading my blog (thank you, friend!) and they were surprised at my pessimism towards my writing. Keeping that in mind, I think I'll try and remain objective in this posting rather than focus on the blood, sweat, and tears I poured into each and every revision.
The assignment: to write an episode of an hour-long drama of our choosing. My classmates chose Mad Men, Friday Night Lights, Brothers and Sisters, and House.
My reasoning behind choosing the show: It's just so amazing! There are so many possibilities for a story!
The pitfalls: trying to write for a medical show when you know nothing about medicine (and I mean NOTHING), nor had watched that many procedurals before, is difficult. Collectively, I have probably spent a week on wrongdiagnosis.com. My difficulty in putting the facts behind the storyline because I tackled so much with words like olivopontocerebellar something-something, caused me to focus on the medicine way more than the character.
What I've learned: focus on the character. The plot comes next. This is the writing division at USC's biggest mantra.
How it will change my writing: I will never ever ever ever ever write for House again. Except, maybe, if I feel that I need to prove that I can do it. Actually, I have this nagging desire to write a whole new episode as soon as school is out for the summer. But that's pride talking.

Children of Men- My Humble Critique

This movie was directed by Alfonso Cuaron and written by a laundry list of screenwriters...

Alfonso Cuarón		(screenplay) &
Timothy J. Sexton		(screenplay) and
David Arata		(screenplay) and
Mark Fergus		(screenplay) &
Hawk Ostby		(screenplay)

...as most big movies are, I have observed. The new Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is written by five people, also. I think producers want to make sure this big movie has many eyes to look over it and make it completely watertight. Unfortunately, I felt that any number of writers on Children of Men would make it any better. I just wasn't impressed.

Maybe futuristic thrillers just aren't appealing to me, but I found Children of Men almost laughably ridiculous. It deals with an interesting concept: what the world would do if women became infertile, but I just don't think it covered all the bases. Ok, so the world might not be a very happy place, schools would be obsolete, and war may break out, but it really overdramatizes violence, and seems very pretentious at times (i.e. when Kee reveals to Theo that she is pregnant does she really have to be standing in the middle of a barn surrounded by cows under a spotlight?).

The movie begins when the youngest person in the world, Baby Diego, is killed after not wanting to give an autograph (yeah, that's a great reason), but the fighting in the streets and the look of the war-torn buildings gave me the impression this fighting has been happening for years. There is not much dialogue because we're listening to gun shots most of the time, and when there is dialogue, it's painfully expositional. I had an incredibly hard time stomaching anything. Instead of adding to, I think the swear words actually take away from the strength and color of the sentences, and I got very tired of watching people run around like headless chickens.

I don't like giving bad reviews, but I wanted to share what kinds of things intelligent moviegoers don't want to see on screen: gratuitous violence, and exagerrated acting. Sorry.

Please someone post on here whether you agree with me or not.

Wandering the paths of America BA #3

Into the Wild (2007), directed, written, and produced by Sean Penn, is about the journey of Christopher Mccandless, a college graduate, who is seeking the more meaningful things of life in Alaska. The story is told in segments rewinding and fastforwarding whenever it chooses, which seems to make more sense than telling it in a linear fashion.

The beginning of the movie starts somewhere at the end of Christopher’s journey, then skips forward to his leaving his parents after a stilted and unhappy graduation dinner. His departure looks more to the audience like an act of selfish rebellion, but with the help of flashbacks to Chris’ past, and the voiceover narration by his sister explaining their home-life, our perspective of Chris and the necessity of his journey changes. Un-wanting of material gifts (“things, things, things, things,”) Chris burns the cash in his wallet, abandons his car, and gives the rest of his savings originally intended for Harvard Law to Oxfam America. His parents have no idea that he is gone, and as soon as they catch on, he is already two weeks into his adventure.

Based on a true story, the movie captures the haunting reality that some people’s lives are more than they can bear, and it takes re-investigating nature in order to feel right again. The camera acts as the eye of an observer, which Chris sometimes even breaks the cinematic “fourth wall” to look at, and is supposed to create a rugged and natural point of view, which to me, seemed distracting and achieved quite the opposite. Regardless of that, though, the film also featured beautifully spare music, which set the tone perfectly for his journey through the modern-day wilderness of America. Coupled with breath-taking cinematography, I was left feeling touched and very pensive after the movie had ended.

We get a sense of his character and wild desires for adventure, and we truly root for him, but I was forced to question my own point of view on this extremist method of discovering oneself. At the end he discovers from a nice old man that once you forgive you start to love, but I discussed the implications with my fiancé, Scott, of throwing away all that your ancestors had achieved, the cyclical nature of success, and the level of selfishness just to discover that.

I always love movies that get me talking afterwards, but despite the good discussion, I decided it wasn’t my cup of tea. The cinematography was good, the quiet dialogue was excellent, but the length of the movie (it runs two and a half hours) and the fact that I had to watch such a lonely character was a little tortuous and disturbing for my soul. The movie was broken up into chapters as if in a book, and I felt myself thinking “we’re still on Chapter two? How many chapters are there going to be?!”. If it had been distilled into a one and a half hour movie, we may miss out on some of his adventure, but it would have distilled the message into a more powerful statement. Overall, it was a cinematic delight, but I think the term “you can love something and not like it” rings very true for Into the Wild.