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Posts tagged as “Horrible”

A Letter to Hunter College on the Recent Decision They Made Regarding My Suitability for their Program.

March 22, 2010 |

About Writing, Letters and Writing

Dear Hunter,

Boo.

I am disappointed. This is not a very fun way to start my Monday. I thought I wrote a pretty fucking good piece for you guys. Much better than last year’s certainly. Was it the F for the English class on my NYU transcript? Was it all the cursing in my piece? Was it that I’m just so super stylish and great that you thought I would overwhelm the rest of the students? Probably not. Whatever arcane magic went into your decision making process, I am not mad. Disappointed? Yes. Saddened? A little. Curious? Totally. I also understand that you only take six students a year and that the selection process is a difficult one. I guess I lost this little wager.

Luckily, I have a career I like and things to look forward to. And, shit, I can and will keep writing.

All in all, Hunter College, I understand. Personally, I think you made the wrong choice, but what are you going to do? We’ll see how I feel about applying a third time in the coming autumn.

Sincerely,

Joe Dillingham
The Black Laser

> Continue reading...A Letter to Hunter College on the Recent Decision They Made Regarding My Suitability for their Program.

Fuck you, Event Horizon.

February 24, 2010 |

About Filmmaking and Film & TV

I first saw Event Horizon theatrically way back in the late 90s (remember those?). I was with some friends, probably Deegan, and I remember walking out after the film thinking that it was the biggest piece of shit I’d ever endured. But time eases such pains and since 1997 I’ve heard from someone whose opinion I trusted that it’s actually an all right film. I thought that perhaps I’d judged the film too harshly. Perhaps I had missed the obvious brilliance within the film. Perhaps some of the subtext had flown right over my 15 year old head.

I threw the film onto my Netflix queue and it arrived yesterday in the mail. After doing the dishes while listening to Hall & Oates and making myself a sensible dinner, I sat down to give Event Horizon a second shot. I am nothing if not a giving man. I placed the blu-ray disc into the PS3 and waited for my mind to be blown.

Well, if you have taken anything from the title of this post, my mind was not blown. I mean, the movie blew, but my mind remained entirely unblown. Event Horizon has to be one of the most formulaic pieces of crap I’ve ever had the extreme misfortune of forcing upon myself. If you haven’t seen the movie, let me ruin it for you.

It’s the future! People live in space! A few years ago the government sent a super secret spaceship to the far reaches of outer space and it disappeared! Zip forward to now, which is still the future, and a small, rag tag group of ethnically-diverse soldiers are on a spaceship going to investigate a distress beacon on the far side of the solar system! A scientist rides along with them! Uh-oh! After they get out of hypersleep or whatever they call it, the scientist tells them, in a feat of unrivaled expository pseudo-science, that the distress beacon belongs to the Event Horizon! The ship was a super secret experiment in faster-than-light travel and on its first trip out, it disappeared! What happened to it?! The rescue crew boards the ship and all sorts of really spooky things start to happen! Hallucinations! The lights flash on and off! Bloooooooodddddd! Soon after boarding things start going to hell—literally! Turns out when the ship’s experimental drive punctured the fabric of the universe it went to hell and came back alive and evil! Really! That’s the actual plot point! The original crew is all dead! Scary! The scientist along for the ride who, coincidentally built the fancy engine thing, gets pulled into the evil will of the ship and then starts to sabotage their efforts to escape! Oooooh! Then the captain and the scientist have a stand off and the scientist gets sucked into space! But the ship brings him back to life! Convenient! Then they have another stand off and end up traveling through the darkness dimension but we never find out what happens to them! The end! It actually says “the end”!

I think I can sum up the whole film and my feelings about it with one photo and a related caption.

Oh no! Your eyes! What happened?! Oh, you saw Event Horizon? I understand.

Indulging in every stupid horror cliche, Event Horizon is so mired in banality that I couldn’t even see through to the positives that it does have. It’s a well designed film, to be sure, but that’s not enough for me to get past just how fucking awful the script is. Every single word made me cringe. And I LOVE bad science fiction. It’s great. But this is bad science fiction trying to be GOOD science fiction and GOOD horror and it just doesn’t have the chops to do either. It just plain sucks. Every time there was a dramatic pause before one of the characters revealed something…. dramatic, I wanted to punch the TV in the face. I wanted to fly to England, grab Paul W. S. Anderson, and punch him in the face over and over and over. And then I want to punch him in the face for the Resident Evil films, for Mortal Kombat, and for the rest of his fucking trash body of work. It’s like he’s taking other, better films, distilling them to their common beats, making those beats dumber, and then making the movie over again ineptly. Just terrible.

Do yourself and favor and never see this movie. I’d ask for my two hours back, but I’d only waste them.

> Continue reading...Fuck you, Event Horizon.

Are you guys fucking kidding me?

January 15, 2010 |

Thoughts

See this?

Do you know what this is? If you’ve been keeping up on all the blogs, you do, but let me illuminate you in case you haven’t. This magical little turd is the new SARCASM PUNCTUATION MARK which you can buy from US-based Sarcasm Inc., whose site is down right now, for use on the Mac, Windows, the iPhone, Blackberry, whatever.

Seriously, guys? Are you kidding me? That is the stupidest fucking idea ever. I’m not even going to indulge these people by posting sarcastic remarks in this post. Do we really need to dignify sarcasm with a brand new punctuation mark? And do we really need to BUY IT? I’m pretty sure I get all my cues regarding whether or not a statement is sarcastic from context, just as people have done it since the beginning of verbal communication. No doubt sarcasm has been around that long.

What’s next? The irony mark? Maybe a schadenfreude mark? How about a mark to indicate that I’m writing something in an e-mail to someone that I don’t really care about but feel obligated to explain so that they’re not confused even though it would only take them two minutes to research it on Google? Give me a fucking break. As David Lynch said, “Get real.” How about you learn to insert the proper clues into the text to indicate that you are being sarcastic? If you can’t do that, it’s probably best to leave the fucking sarcasm out of your work e-mails. Stick to declarative statements and everything will be just fine.

> Continue reading...Are you guys fucking kidding me?

COBRA, a bittersweet victory

January 6, 2010 |

Thoughts

No, not snakes. And not the nefarious terrorist organization from G.I. Joe, either.

I’m talking about the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (hell of a name, eh?), which has allowed me to have health insurance after losing my job back in June. And, with the shithole the economy’s in right now, the government has enacted a subsidy on COBRA payments. That is, my former employer, Ascent Media, pays 65% of my COBRA charges, about 310 bucks, every month. Sweet deal. It means that my health, dental, and eye insurance only cost me about 163 dollars every month, much better than the 475 I’d be paying without the subsidy, or, worse, not having health insurance at all.

My subsidy was supposed to end in March, which was perfect, because my former employer changed their health insurance for the third time since I was initially hired by them in 2005 and the doctor I’ve built a relationship with over the last few years is no longer covered. I figured, ok, I’ll pay for the next three months and then figure out how to get some health insurance that covers her so I don’t have to go through the nightmare of trying to find a new doctor that I like.

But then the government extended the subsidy until September 2010. Fucking hell. That means I’ll need to find myself a doctor between now and then which is a huge pain in the ass. I suppose I should be happy that I will continue to have inexpensive health insurance (I wonder if these payments are a tax write off?), but I wish I could keep going to the doctor I’ve been seeing for a couple years.

Actually, what I really wish is that health insurance wasn’t such a fucking scam and that I could just plain old afford to go to any doctor I like because their prices wouldn’t be so inflated because of the racket the insurance companies have going on. What a bunch of horrible thieves. A man can dream.

> Continue reading...COBRA, a bittersweet victory

Pet peeves on the subway

December 3, 2009 |

Thoughts

I am a (fairly) understanding, (mostly) patient man. I hold the door for people. I get out of the way. I allow others to go first. I think it’s just common decency. But that’s just me. I don’t like to be a dick (usually) to total strangers. That doesn’t get my rocks off. It’s lame. It’s putting a whole bunch of bad energy into the universe for no real reason. The Space Pope is down with being chill.

As such, it always astounds me when someone goes out of their way to be a total fucking boner. I notice that it seems to happen a lot on the subway which, understandably, is an unpleasant, often stressful place. No one really likes the subway; it’s an unfortunate, unavoidable truth of life here in New York, especially for the lot of us peons who can’t afford to even have a car, much less a driver. But not liking something doesn’t mean you have to be a total cock to everyone else when you get on it. No one wants to be there, so you might as well be pleasant to the people surrounding you. It just makes things nicer.

Now, there are a few things people do that I just can’t stand. Let’s break them down.

  1. The guy who stands in front of the door when you’re trying to get off the train. — Look, guy, I know that you saw that there’s a seat open through the window as the train pulled into the station, but GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY. I can’t walk through you, and you sure as hell can’t get onto this train until I get off. This is even worse when the train is crowded near capacity and there is literally no room for him to get on, but he tries to shove his way on anyway.
  2. The guy who steps onto an empty train and then stops immediately so that he can stand by the door. — Are you serious? Look, this is totally fine when there’s no other people waiting to get on behind you. Great, you like to stand by the door and lean, I get it. But if you’re the first motherfucker getting on and you decide to just stop and be in the way of the 20 other people trying to get on the train, you are a fucking asshole. This is the train rider’s equivalent of driving into an intersection, throwing on the e-brake, and expecting people to just drive around you. Yeah, it sounds pretty fucking ridiculous doesn’t it? Just got on the train and walk toward the center of the car. Theres plenty of room and all sorts of things to hold on to. That’s how they designed the train.
  3. The guy who tries to push his way onto a train that obviously has no room for him and ends up standing halfway in the doorway way, holding the whole damn train up. — Let me clue you in on a little secret, buddy. There’s zero reason to squeeze on a train like that. The train is only ever like that when there’s been some hold up way down the line and people have decided to force themselves onto the first train that arrives. 99 times out of 100 there’s another, much less full train right behind it. All you have to do is wait 2 more minutes and you’ll be able to stand in the train like a human being. Try it some time.
  4. The guy who pushes past you to snipe a seat — Oh, I’m sorry, fuckface, that I was being polite and letting the people on the train get OFF before I forced myself onto the train. I didn’t know it was necessary for you to push me out of your so-important way so that you could sit down ON THE EMPTY BENCH because, you know, 12 seconds later that seat would have been filed with someone else. Oh the train doors are closing and we’re still the only two people sitting??? Well, thanks for pushing me for nothing, dipshit! I really appreciate that.
  5. Anyone who asks me for anything while I’m on the train — I know that your acrobatics show was really fucking amazing, but I have a headache and just want to go home and eat some dinner and watch the episode of Dexter sitting on the table. And, no, I’m not going to give you and your brother a fucking dime. I’ve seen the show before. Oh, you’re selling newspapers, Raffie? No you’re a lying fuck junkie who’s been using the same line on this train for YEARS and the only people stupid enough to give you anything are the people who’ve just moved into the neighborhood. Curl up and die under a bridge, you swollen-hand, toothless, drug-addled fuck.

That list pretty much encompasses the things I really hate on the subway. There are some things that other people hate—delays, slow service, stopping in the tunnel beneath the river, whatever—that don’t bother me at all. In terms of the actual subway service, once I’m on I sort of just let go. It’s out of my hands. But other people on there bug the living shit out of me. That’s not to say there aren’t other courteous train riders; there are, of course. But, my attention is often grabbed by the annoying fuckers much more than the nice people who aren’t obtrusive. And, really, this article wouldn’t have been nearly as fun for me to write or for you to read if I was being super nice to the considerate people, would it?

> Continue reading...Pet peeves on the subway

My least favorite TV/Movie convention – The Overheard Conversation

November 30, 2009 |

About Filmmaking, About Writing, Film & TV, Thoughts and Writing

It is no secret that literature and cinema often use common themes and devices to propel a story. Some of these are very useful for opening doors for your characters or building drama. Indeed, Joseph Campbell’s entire career was based on the idea that the literature of the world, myth, repeats certain key elements and structures across cultures, geography, and time. They represent the human mind seeking answers to unanswerable questions through the use of imagery and symbol. If you’ve never read any of Campbell’s work, I highly recommend you do. It’s fascinating stuff.

But those are not what I want to write about here. Instead, I want to discuss a common dramatic device so lazy, so dastardly, so woefully incompetent that I cringe and immediately lose my ability to enjoy said film or show. I’ve never heard it referred to by anyone else so I have come to call it “The Overheard Conversation”. You’ve seen it before.

How about a quick example? Here’s the premise: GEEKY GUY has spent the entire film trying to woo the most popular, most beautiful BABE in school. He had been successful for a while, but then they got into a fight over whatever the hell reason and he stormed off at the big homecoming party. Later, feeling stupid, GEEKY GUY tries to find BABE who has been approached by her ex-boyfriend HOTSHOT GUY. But because he’s so shy, GEEKY GUY doesn’t approach them and instead hears a snippet of their conversation that he takes completely out of context. Like this.

EXT PARTY NIGHT – HOTSHOT GUY and BABE are on the edge of the party by the pool. He is drunk and making physical advances. She is rejecting him, but he is much stronger.

BABE
Get off me HOTSHOT GUY. I’m with GEEKY GUY now.

HOTSHOT GUY
What do you see in that dork?

BABE
More than I see in you, jerk.

GEEKY GUY approaches HOTSHOT GUY and BABE where they are arguing by the pool, but he cannot hear them. He comes up toward them quietly and in the shadows and they do not see him.

HOTSHOT GUY
Don’t you still care about me?

BABE
Of course I care about you, but…

HOTSHOT GUY kisses BABE forcefully and she is not strong enough to resist. Enter slow motion. Close shot of GEEKY GUY with tears welling in his eyes, and then rage blossoms. He runs off.

BABE pushes HOTSHOT GUY off and slaps him in the face.

BABE
I told you already we’re done! I never want to see you again!

Stop me if you’ve seen this film before. Oh, you can’t stop me? Well, then I’ll continue.

From here, GEEKY GUY goes on a self-destructive/depressed/whatever bend. Eventually they reconcile when he confronts her about the night by the pool and she tells him the truth of what happened and he suddenly feels foolish and she forgives him for not just being forthright with her in the beginning and they live happily ever after through high school graduation. How romantic!

How many films can you name where some permutation of this has happened? Five? One hundred? A billion? It’s basically the plot device used in every stupid rom-com piece of trash spit out by Hollywood 50 times a year. Whenever I see this used, I imagine this conversation.

“Gosh! I can’t think of how to drag this Jennifer Anniston vehicle out to the bare minimum 90 minutes. Whatever shall I do?!” one writer says.

“Why not just have her walk into the room when her boyfriend is on the phone with his sister saying something she’ll take completely out of context because this is the only way to inject some ‘drama’ into this horrid piece of trash?” the other says.

“Brilliant!” the first one says. “I’ll get another Oscar for this one!”

It really must be the laziest cop out to burden the state of modern drama. It’s the Deus Ex Machina of modern cinema. How do we drag this out? Add some fake tension? Perfect.

What’s worse is that I cannot think of even a single time that this has happened to me or anyone I know in real life. Now, I’m not saying that all drama in films has to be absolutely realistic. Of course it doesn’t. I have zero issues with the Eye of Sauron being able to see Hobbits when Frodo puts on the ring. That’s awesome. Great. But if you’re going to be basing your drama on real life, then at least make it believable. Are you really expecting me to believe that GEEKY GUY, after spending the whole film fantasizing and eventually attaining BABE, would not just step in and be all, “What the fuck?” He would run off without, at the very least, waiting in the shadows to see how their conversation turned out? Pathetic. He doesn’t even need to be forceful, just, you know, let it play out a little. How about giving your girlfriend the benefit of the doubt? Has she betrayed you before? Do you have ANY reason to think that she’d not be faithful to you? How about asking her about it? Nah, instead you should just assume a bunch of untrue crap and then spend the next 35 minutes of screen time moping around being an all around asshole. Good plan.

Here’s how the scene should have gone.

EXT PARTY NIGHT – HOTSHOT GUY and BABE are on the edge of the party by the pool. He is drunk and making physical advances. She is rejecting him, but he is much stronger.

BABE
Get off me HOTSHOT GUY. I’m with GEEKY GUY now.

HOTSHOT GUY
What do you see in that dork?

BABE
More than I see in you, jerk.

GEEKY GUY approaches HOTSHOT GUY and BABE where they are arguing by the pool, but he cannot hear them. He comes up toward them quietly and in the shadows and they do not see him.

HOTSHOT GUY
Don’t you still care about me?

BABE
Of course I care about you, but…

HOTSHOT GUY kisses BABE forcefully and she is not strong enough to resist. Enter slow motion. Close shot of GEEKY GUY with tears welling in his eyes, and then rage blossoms. He steps out into the light startling the other two.

GEEKY GUY
What the fucking fuck?!

BABE
Geeky Guy! This isn’t…

HOTSHOT GUY (interrupting)
Get the hell out of here, Geeky Guy. She’s my girl.

BABE
It’s not what you think! I didn’t mean to kiss…

GEEKY GUY hold up his hand to stop her.

GEEKY GUY
It’s all right, Babe. I trust you.

BABE runs over and gives GEEKY GUY a big hug. HOTSHOT GUY fumes.

GEEKY GUY
Now, I must deal with you.

HOTSHOT GUY
What are you going to do, World of Warcraft me to death?

HOTSHOT GUY laughs. GEEKY GUY pulls out his lightsabre, but HOTSHOT GUY begins to mutate into a giant beast, like a cross between a lizard and a slug and a spider, all fangs and teeth and eyes, more than 10 feet tall.

See? Wasn’t that better? Doesn’t that sound like a better movie? It makes you wonder how many completely awful films could have been saved from their fate as utterly forgettable pieces of fluff if the writers had just spent another 40 seconds and avoided The Overheard Conversation. Truly sad.

> Continue reading...My least favorite TV/Movie convention – The Overheard Conversation