"You’re a funny guy Sully, I like you. That’s why I’m going to kill you last"

This Wednesday - Movies you can swear by.  Or "why I don't particularly think that profanity belongs in movie scripts any more than a movie script should be longer than 120 pages."

What does that mean?  It means that while there are a handful of very good films that clocked in over 120 pages - some way over 120 pages, generally speaking (as in almost always) being longer than 120 pages is a sign of poor writing.  I believe that the use of profanity in a script follows a very similar rule; while there are a handful of very good scripts that use foul language to great dramatic effect, by and large their insertion serves only to underscore a weakness in the story or writing.

Profanity in writing, as in life, is simply a poor substitute for dialogue.  People swear because they can't think of anything else to say.  You may disagree, but I’ve been sworn at a lot and, trust me, it’s usually because my adversary is at a loss for an intelligent comeback.  Filling your written dialogue with cussing and saying, "That's how these people are" is wasting space.  Dialogue is one of the few places the author has to show the audience about the inner workings of a character.  An argument between two characters that consists mostly of swearing makes both characters seem pretty much the same.  It also makes the author look like he can't write dialogue worth a *$&^.

If the director and actor playing a role feel that a particular scene or character should have profanity in it, and they have decided they want to push PG-13 or go for R, they'll put in the foul language.  And it will be in the right place.  Why?  Because it takes no skill to use short words.  It's just like accents or colloquial dialects - you don't write them out phonetically because that work is done, on the fly, by the actor.  In the mean-time, you are showing off your writing chops with really powerful dialogue that exposes the inner heart of your characters and professional quality skill by not swearing.  You're no gutter-snipe.

Some people are oblivious to foul language.  They don't really even hear it.  These people will not experience any drama reading your script - the effect you were going for has been lost so you should have used other words to convey the emotion of your characters.  Other people find such language offensive and will be turned off by it - whether contest judges, friends ask to provide notes, or even a professional reader - again, not the effect you were going for.  Everything in a

script is condensed from real life.  A little bit goes a very long way.  A lot - of anything - is quite overpowering.

I find that when I'm reading a script, the ugly words (like that?) jump off the page, sort of take me out of the story for a moment.  I have to find my way back in.  There haven't been many exceptions.  Hearing it on the screen is more like real-life, except it has to be consistent - the "token" words always stand out and again, a little bit goes a long way.  If there's no dramatic purpose being served, it's just filler.

“Django Unchained” was filled with profanity and took a bit to get through.  I wasn't impressed by the story or the writing but I also had trouble visualizing everything - all of the characters kept swearing at each other and they were hard to keep track of.  I read a draft of “The Matrix” which had far more - and far stronger - swearing than the final movie.  The finished product was better for the editing, I'm sure that the characters, in real-life, would be foul mouthed, but on screen, there just isn't time to waste with minutes of meaningless words.  “Fargo” had its share of four-letter words too but they were confined to a couple of goofballs and, interestingly enough, illustrated that they were goofballs.  “The Sixth Sense” had one.  It was used fairly early and the entire scene was constructed around getting to the point that the word was used.  Personally, I'd probably have written around it, but then, in case you missed all the clues, I don't use that sort of language.

Interestingly enough, in all of the fiction that I've written, it wasn't until I started writing movies that I was tempted to use foul language in my dialogue.  It must be the influence of all of the action movies from the '80s.  Just remember, the line Arnold is most famous for was completely clean.

This post is finished, but don’t worry.  “I’ll be back.”

" 'But I, being poor, have only my dreams. I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.' I assume you dream, Preston. "

Wednesday Movie disclaimer: Spoiler alert for “Equilibrium”.

There was a bit of a mix-up with the Netflix queue this weekend so my original plan of watching The 6th Sense fell through.  Would you believe it isn't it streamable?  Where's Robert L. Ripley when you need him.

I did, however, watch a Christian Bale film upon the occasion of a recommendation from a friend.  Now, I've often had recommendations from friends that I pass on, but in this case the friend also provided a copy of the film and, as I mentioned, The 6th Sense wasn't streamable...  Our first impression (I've been married nearly two decades, most of this blog is plural) of the film was that it was a mash up of Gattaca and The Matrix.  Then, when it became clear that certain elements were more than just archetypal window dressing, the better parents were Fahrenheit 451 and The Matrix - with a bit of Gattaca/1984 thrown in just make things seem original.

Maybe that's a little harsh.  When your story is set in a dystopian future, it's hard to seem fresh.  This film very much suffered from the "same" part of the movie-making axiom "Give me the same but different."  I read the script for The Matrix two weeks ago and the stories weren't related at all, it was the visuals.  Black leather and kung fu.  It could have been a Tarantino film if there had been spaghetti western music... and a lot of gratuitous 'R' content.  The plot was ***Major Spoiler*** Guy Montag.  100%.  Right down to Sean Bean's book.  I'm surprised it wasn't billed as a remake.  They were called Clerics instead of Firemen, but the character arc of the protagonist and significant plot points were nearly identical.

That's not a bad thing, I thought 451 was a great story (movie was okay) and even wrote "the last chapter" as a project in school.  Equilibrium also benefited from remodeled sets/props for its view of the future so it looked fresh – okay, not old (and I was startled to learn it was released in 2002).  Taye Diggs was the biggest surprise for me.  He played his part very well, keeping us guessing to the very end which side he was going to end up on.  As I mentioned, Sean Bean made an appearance but he's gotten into what I can only describe as a "Shakespearean Melancholy Rut" and while he delivered poise in spades, he was completely underutilized if not actually wasted.

In fairness, it wasn't all 'same' - there was a bit of different too, but that seemed centered around the execution of the action sequences.  I suppose you could argue that getting an entire society to take Prozac all the time is a twist, but then we're back to Gattaca, the premise of Sean of the Dead, and, as I recall, that was sort of Max Von Sydow's plan in Strange Brew.  There was nothing surprising in “the big twist” if you’d seen it done well in Freejack.

Despite all of the familiarity, the writing was good enough to keep us engaged (and awake) wondering which of the familiar paths it would eventually head down.  Further, the story was compelling enough that, even knowing what those paths were; we were still interested in making the journey.  It wasn't the movie we were planning to watch, or the movie we were expecting when we started, but I wasn’t asking for my life back at the end.  It did not suffer from the typical sci-fi maladies of confusing plot, preachy exposition, or under/over budgeting.

Note: We did not watch the theatrical or rental release of the film, it was an airplane edit with the foul language, sexually explicit content, and graphic violence/gore removed.  I'll be talking about this type of content in a future post, but I can't help wondering if the lack of ejectors kept us more fully engaged in the story.