Stickup #44

You're not gonna hit me with an Ipad, are ya?

Stickup #43

Succeed cause this paper says so

Stickup #42

Building a house with the bricks they throw at you

Why Breaking Bad Succeeded And (Insert TV Show) Failed

You know, there's a lot of potential in television. Like the creators of The Wire said, you can make a TV show like a "visual novel" if you know what you're doing.

And yet, potential is a promise you don't have to make a commitment to. People have this notion of what you will be in a couple years based on what they see now.

And we've seen a lot of shows that made a promise of something crazy happening in the future, only to come up short.

Some shows delivered. Supernatural had there own "Kmart Apocalypse" in the fifth season that made out on all the things it promised. Granted, it wasn't a John Martin painting, but with all the creative, artistic, and managerial difficulties of television, I can't really blame them for this.

And we have had many disappointments. Jericho. Heroes. The later episodes of Twin Peaks.

The Epitaph episodes of Dollhouse that came a little too late.

And Lost rebounded after every other option was experimented and played with.

But there's reasons why Breaking Bad succeeded where those shows failed:

They held nothing back. 

Usually, a four episode rule applies when it comes to television. A creator and their writers don't really know what a show is yet, and so they have to play around for the first four episodes to figure out what they are. As many television shows are now available on DVD, you can watch the first disc of a show and wonder if it's something worth continuing. 

The pilot episode of Breaking Bad did not have any of these problems. We know who Walter White is going into this. We saw his life.

A lot of television doesn't undergo the rewriting that movies do since they evolve with each episode, but the opening of Breaking Bad was cinematic. 

Breaking Bad was also amazing in how they slowly revealed Walter's wrongdoings to Skyler.

There wasn't any Clark Kent/Lois Lane thing going on. Skyler was catching onto things. And the show's writers didn't jump any sharks with each revelation.

There was no amnesia. This wasn't any Pinky and the Brain/Coyote and Roadrunner chaos without growth. Things carried on. Things you as an audience member might even forget about. You didn't scratch your head wondering about Peter Petrelli's lost Irish girlfriend.

Watching Breaking Bad felt like I was reading one of the best graphic novels of all time. You know that feeling you got when you read Watchmen for the first time? Yeah, like that.

You can tell that Vince Gilligan cared. 

It was really refreshing. People have been telling you since the age of nine that you have to leave your brain at the door when you engage in pop culture or else you will alienate a part of the audience.

They Knew What They Were Doing

Breaking Bad didn't treat the audience like a dummy, and they weren't dummies either.

They did their research. And they knew where the show was going. They were prepared. They took calculated risks (like Walter White) and everything resonated because of it.

Even when they didn't know where the fifth season was going (showing Mr. Lambert and going backward) they excelled since it challenged them. They weren't going through the motions.

There's this video online of Louis C.K. talking about how much George Carlin meant to him. C.K. said that his career changed when he listened to an interview of Carlin's where he explained that the secret to coming up with new material was throwing it away after his special was done.

Carlin explained that a person has to dig deep to find new material once they throw away what they had before. And in this digging, one finds himself.

Breaking Bad feels that way. You know how characters in horror movies do dumb things for the purpose of plot? I can't recall a time when that ever happened in Breaking Bad.

There was never an easy way out of things. The villains were as smart as Pinkman and Heisenberg. You honestly didn't know how things were going to be. It was awesome.

They Knew When To End Things 

When things look great, you have this tendency to keep going until it's bad. When things look bad, people tell you to give up.

The creative staff of Breaking Bad quit while they were ahead. I know a lot of people who thought that they should have kept going. These are the same people who also thought Dexter should have ended sooner.

Breaking Bad is also the one show that knew both when to kill characters, and how to give deep meaning to each character's death.

There was no Kirk falling on a bridge that you got with Star Trek Generations. You felt pain when people died. And they died with dignity. There wasn't any crying. They anticipated it.

It was all very badass. 

You didn't have people who should have died two seasons ago hanging around for ratings.

The show made tough decisions. Creativity comes from knowing what to cut. The same goes for the length of a production.

An early finish that leaves them wanting more.

Stickup #41

Purgatory is having writer's block on your suicide note

What I Want...

This is a little diddy called what I want.

What I want:


I want what all those old school movie posters promised me but never gave (well, maybe sometimes).

I want miniatures exploding.

I want the movie I thought Army of Darkness was going to be. Which isn't to say that Army of Darkness is bad, but to say that what I thought it was was actually quite different.

I want all those movies that I thought all those computer games I played in the 90s were based on.

I want to make the movies that everyone thought would have existed by now since CGI meant that "you could do anything" even though we feel it has yet to do those things.

I want to give answers to horror cliches in a way that makes sense, but not in a way that thinks it's too clever or more clever than the genre.

I want to suffer artistically for a bit, because I know mental/physical/and financial suffering is part of the equation of making a great film.

I want to be able to watch an enjoyable afternoon's worth of YouTube clips based on my material, promotional material, or a fan mashup of the previous two things.

I want three dimensional female characters. Which isn't to say that they will all be feminist propaganda pieces, but rather human beings reacting rationally in a situation.

I want to set out to venture onto my accomplishments and not worry about the idiots from my past who told me to choose another career path due to the fact that my fanbase will outnumber them.

I don't want fame. But, I want the people who like projects like mine to know that my project exists, and if I have to do endure a little bit of overexposure to get there, I will accept that.

I want to know that my goals have changed since I have ventured onward, and they will continue to change as I progress, and that I am totally okay with that.

How The Evil Dead Remake Explains Pop Culture At Large

So, I just finished watching the Evil Dead remake. The movie was well done, and exactly what it was supposed to be.

I also felt that it was a microcosm of the filmmaking world at large.

The only real issues that the movie had was its familiarity.
But it was a remake. That's what a remake is supposed to be.
I mean Evil Dead II was it's own remake. So it wasn't like there was some tradition that had to held up here. 

And yet, there was something missing. Something that could have made it a lot better.

And I realized what those things were.

It was aftermodern

The Evil Dead remake had pretty much everything a modern Evil Dead remake should have, short of a Bruce Campbell saying awesome one liners as he fights demons.

There was a couple of things that gave the characters a lot of depth, and I'll give them credit here.

I'm a big fan of Ataque de Panico,  Fede Alvarez's short film depicting an alien invasion in his native Uruguay. I think Alvarez is a talented guy with a long amazing career ahead of him.

I don't know, I like a lot of movies made in other countries. I think a part of it has to deal with the military industrial complex. America spends more money on defense than any country in the world. There really isn't a plausible fear when it comes to aliens, zombies, or monsters in Manhattan, unless you act stupid during the entire situation.

But any of those scenarios in another country, like Egypt, or Syria right now, would be interesting. Especially when seeing how its citizens deal with it. We can't all be Brad Pitt and have a special airplane fly us out of any situation.

That, and we are a culture that fantasizes about this nightmare scenario. America lives in codependency with the threat of a giant monster it can be the hero against.

It's why we love movies so much. We're a bunch of drama junkies. We can't be content. Contentedness is boring.

And yet, we feed off of remakes from old movies we have seen many a time before.

I guess it's understandable. It takes five times as much energy to create an original property as it does to make a remake.

Anything in its past is a tangible advertisement, it's money you don't have to spend in marketing. You get that a lot with new stuff "I've never heard of this movie, it it any good?" as opposed to "Oh, I saw the original as a kid. I will check this out".

There's a confidence to working on an established property. It's like building your own boat versus buying an already made boat. If you build a boat, you always have this fear that it might sink. Like, you're not doing something correctly. But, a boat that's already built usually doesn't have those problems. It's an old boat.

Since people did not have a hand in creating the intellectual property they're working with, they tend to develop an entitlement about them. Like people are obtaining what they haven't earned. They mistook a remake's recognition for their own fame. Of course, you have the drones treating the remake like some pet or family member.

It's like when Crystal Skull came out, and you had all those idiots on the Internet saying "Welcome Dr. Jones". That's cringeworthy.

You're supposed to feel like an asshole for making a fan film. Unless that fan film is mindmeltingly amazing.

Remakes do sort of the same thing. You see younger talent in these things, and they have an arrogance about them they didn't earn.

I feel the same way about most DJs/people of the sampling ilk.

There's this Twitter account called "DJ's Complaining", and it's dedicated to well, DJs complaining. Henry Rollins broke this down in his now famous rant about modern music and the egos these people have.

In my work, I have found that the people who create original work tend to be humble (unless someone is actively trying to destroy their creation), but a lot of people who were not involved in the original creation process have an ego about them.

It's the same way with joke thieves. Look at how Carlos Mencia acted during his time on Mind of Mencia. Compare that with Louis C.K.

There could be a couple different reasons for this. One, fame has gone to their head because it was easy for them. Or, they act in this brash manner due to an inferiority complex. That is, they must exude what they believe to be confidence, so no one steps back and realizes that the emperor has no clothes.

Star Trek Into Darkness echoes postmodernism. The movie retraces and reiterates all of the things that Star Trek has done in the past.

I mean, the movie didn't really break any ground, outside of interesting concept art and design. And I know why that is. But, it sort of goes against "boldly go where no man has gone before".

To go where no one else has gone takes risks. And risking is hard. Especially nowadays. We are living in a world that is paying for the risks of the past. All the films and albums that the industry gambled on that didn't pan out is why things are the way they are. But, that can be a huge drain to one's motivation.

Now, I'm not a fan of Kantianism, mainly because Kantianism is not practical. That, and I'm a filmmaker. There's that old interview with George Lucas in the 70s where he says that a special effect is not good in and of itself, but only good if it helps tell the story better. Later in life, it might be argued that Lucas became more Kantian when it came to special effects.

So doing things in and of itself themselves is a weird thing to live by. But on the subject of remakes, schlocky movies, and the difficulty of making movies, it's sort of re-emerged as a counterpoint to working on movies you don't enjoy.

Like, you see all these people working on all these various projects. And you wonder, do they even like movies? All these nerds complaining about stuff. Do they even like movies?

They always work on something in the hopes of getting somewhere else. Somewhere else in the somewhere future. But, have they enjoyed anything they've worked on recently? Is there any sign that their goals are tangible?

Like, they would make a crappy horror film, because they want to build clout and make their serious drama later. But sometimes, that doesn't happen. What ends up happening is that movie ends up bombing, and the drama never gets off the ground. They would have been better off just making their serious drama now when they had an opportunity to make a film.

It's like these people who go on Kickstarter and try to get their short film made for $40,000. Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi for $7000. Why not just make the movie? Cut out the spectacle, and focus on story. You might not get another chance. Not with that kind of money.

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