With V out of town, K and I have had more opportunities to do stuff that we like to do, which includes getting outside and being active, or in this case, going to a museum.
There was an exhibit at the Palace of the Legion of Honor featuring works by Isabelle de Borchgrave, a Belgian artist who would recreate an outfit from a painting in the medium of paper. Literally. The entire thing was made out of paper, but done in such a way that unless you knew it was paper, you would have to peer in very close to tell the difference.
K had heard high praise for the exhibit, and this was the last weekend for it, so we went. It was amazing.
But this isn’t a review of the work. After we left the building and were heading back to the car, we stopped to take in the gorgeous view of the area west of the Golden Gate. It was also amazing.
My point for all of this is that instead of staying cooped up inside and plotting out the next sequence, or whether or not a particular scene works, I allowed myself the chance to step away from the outline and go and do something enjoyable.
Yes, I probably could have gotten to a desired point in the script, but at the cost of spending time with my sweetie and letting myself relax and broaden my cultural view. Every writer should allow themselves the luxury of doing such a thing. It really does help in the end, and on several levels at that.
Besides, I’ll be diving back into the outline tomorrow.
-Movie of the Moment: THE GREEN HORNET. Oh man, was this bad. I like the old radio show, and have seen a handful of the 60s TV show, but this? This was just lousy.
My biggest complaint is the lack of motivation for Seth Rogen/Britt Reid. What’s at stake? What does he stand to lose? For the most part, he’s really a passive protagonist; Kato does a lot more than he does.
As K succinctly put it, it’s like he becomes a masked vigilante because it seems cool.
And Rogen as a heroic lead is just a bad idea to begin with. I didn’t realize he and his partner Evan Goldberg had written the script, which reeked of lazy writing. I’m probably one of the few people who didn’t think SUPERBAD was fantastic.
I’ll admit I laughed at a few of the jokes, but if you’re going to do a modern interpretation of a semi-obscure crimefighter from 50 or 60 years ago, you should start with an appreciation of the character and what he/she is all about, THEN work on adapting it to the present day. This should have been more of a slick noir-type film, not a lame action-comedy. I think George Clooney and Greg Kinnear were both considered for the lead about ten years ago. They would have been so much better. And the script would have been significantly better too.
A guy I used to work with thought this was a great movie. My opinion of him has dropped slightly.
Maximum Z 
Was there ever anything really at stake for The Green Hornet? The first few years of the show were never that compelling, just fun to listen to because of Fran Striker’s clever writing (never mind the television show, which I could never get into). It really became a nail-biter in the later years, especially when Reid’s father sent a gal to check up on Britt’s activities and she (unbelievably) discovered he was The Green Hornet, which led to a wonderful scene with his father who not only approved of the activity but told Reid he was a descendant of another masked crime fighter that he (the father) actually rode with. I’ll bet you already knew that, though.
It doesn’t sound familiar. Was this on the radio show or the TV show? And wouldn’t it have been Britt’s grandfather, or grand-uncle, who would have rode with the masked man?
It always seemed like the radio show had Britt going after gangsters with a local politican in their pocket. The Sentinel taking on graft was also used with common frequency.
A friend and I also wondered why they never had some kind of sound effect for the gas gun, rather than the person coughing, then exclaiming “gas!” Guess it wasn’t in WXYZ’s budget to create something that could hiss.