Solipsis: Escape from the Comatorium

4 July, 2012

The rejected cover. 

So I've not been posting to Lumpy Junk in a while because my junk has been busy writing a novel called Solipsis: Escape from Jeff's Brain. The e-book was published yesterday. The paperback will be available in about a week.

This project started as a screenplay, and after several drafts, I decided to expand it into a novel.

Solipsis is my take on the Virtual Reality genre (See also: The Matrix, Inception, Thirteenth Floor, eXistenZ, Neuromancer, Total Recall, Source Code, and Spy Kids 3-D).


I began by identifying the issues I have with Virtual Reality stories so that I can find a way to fix or circumvent those problems.

Problem # 1 
Realism

It's one thing to ask the audience to suspend disbelief. It's another thing to ask them to take your stupid ideas seriously. But Jeff, you say, if stories are totally realistic they'll be boring.

"Brain Spiral" The painting I picked for the cover.
 Used with permission from Laura Freeman

My contention is that you don't have to abandon logic and realism to have an exciting story. It's easy as hell to come up with cool shit if you don't actually have to stick to any logic at all.

Think about the Matrix. Why do the robots keep humans in the Matrix? So they can extract thermal energy from them. Does that make any fucking sense at all? No. It doesn't. You're telling me that this super intelligent AI couldn't come up with a better power source than comatose people? Not only are humans a terrible energy source, but they also have this nasty habit of waking up and, you know, being hackers. They're breeding hackers instead of figuring out geo-thermal energy, or utilizing their "form of fusion."

Basically The Matrix gives us an epic story of humans vs. robots in an awesome virtual reality where there is no spoon and explosions happen in slow-mo and shit looks cool.

But do you really have to abandon realism to tell that story?


What if the AI actually are keeping the humans alive and in a matrix set in pretty modern times because they need help from human computer programmers? The AI aren't quite creative enough to figure out all their problems, so they keep these human slaves and trick them into helping them. Instead of embracing a sensical story, we get sequels that ignore the billions of people inside the matrix and focus instead on a weird dirty city of raves and flying octopi.

See this post for what I would have done with the Matrix sequels.

Problem #2
Stakes

If you are in a computer world and it's just some video game, then what the hell does it matter? Nothing's at stake. So if you're telling a story in a virtual reality, you have to find a way to make things matter.

The Matrix solves this by the amazing logic "If you die in the Matrix, you die in the real world."

It makes no sense at all, but hey, it leads to cool shit.


The Thirteenth Floor, another virtual reality film, made you switch bodies with your avatar, and if you die in the virtual world, the AI who you swapped with is suddenly in your body and you're dead. Huh?

In Surrogates, people remotely pilot robot bodies that aren't fat and ugly, living vicariously. The plot of  the film revolves around some new weapon that kills the people piloting the robot via some virus or something....how original.

You can tell it's fake because of the pixels.

In Inception, at the beginning, dying simply wakes you up. This is much more realistic, and leads to interesting situations where people can be tortured and you might want to kill your friend to free them from torture. The stakes are still there because they are trying to accomplish a mission and dying/waking up prevents them from doing that, and can get them in trouble in the real world.

But rather than embrace this, they change the rules shortly thereafter so that dying sends you to limbo. The movie makes it work, but it's much less realistic.

Why do dreams have to make any sense when it comes to biology/death/physics? Add onto that the pretty non-sensical idea of "militarized sub-conscious." Really? It's movie logic, so okay, it's exciting, but ultimately pretty shallow.




Problem #3 
Ambiguity


Virtual Reality movies embrace ambiguity for ambiguity sake. For example, the whole ending to Inception rests on this (maybe) twist-ending. Is he still dreaming or isn't he? I've written about Inception in more detail, but my beef here is that this ambiguous ending is totally uninteresting. It thinks it's really clever, but it isn't.

Beyond that, I don't get any pleasure out of watching things purposely not resolve and pretend to be clever. Total Recall and eXistenZ also fall into this camp. The whole plot of both films centers around trying to figure out "are we still in the game/dream or aren't we?" It's as if Hollywood sees something shiny (ambiguous reality) and can't see past it. It's okay to introduce some ambiguity, but when the whole story is just a series of contradicting clues telling you one minute that it's real and the next minute that it's fake, then the whole thing seems like a philosophy major's circle jerk.



Problem #4
Wasted Opportunities

In the film Surrogates, the coolest thing they could
come up with was blonde Bruce Willis.
Talk about a golden opportunity.

If you are in a virtual reality, then you can do anything. Of course films are limited by budget constraints, but even within those limitations they still waste their chances left and right.

 For every cool thing in Inception there are five totally cliche things.

So in Inception, on one dream level, they're in a van, falling. This causes the dream world one level down to be in zero-gravity. So Joseph Gordon-Levitt ends up in a whacky gravity spinning fight, followed by a cool puzzle where he has to make sleeping people fall despite having no gravity to help him. So since falling in one level causes zero-gravity the next level down, then the zero-gravity in the hotel should cause zero-gravity in the next dream level down, thus leading to an awesome climax of the film taking place on a space station.

Except that didn't happen. Instead we get a final act set in the snow level from Goldeneye, where they have gravity...somehow. Add that up with the fact that Juno has the ability to bend the world, turn things upside down, do crazy shit to physics, and yet...after establishing these powers, never uses them again.

Problem #5
Bullets that never hit anything

Gun fights have serious realism issues because the main characters seem to dodge bullets. James Bond has dodged 4662 bullets in his film career. We can call this henchman syndrome or Stormtrooper's malaise. In Bond movies and regular action flicks, they have no explanation for this.

The most common way of getting around this issue is to have the bad guys want to capture the main character because they need them as a hostage or need some information from them.

Another way around this is to have main characters who have super powers (Superman, Wolverine, Jedis), equipped with superior equipment (Batman, Iron Man), or are hackers (Neo). Jedis and super heroes and Terminators can't just be killed by some idiot with a gun. But there are no such thing as super powers or the force or time-traveling robots, so how else can we have our main characters be powerful?

The worst tactic for dealing with this problem is to do nothing at all. Inception has no explanation for why these dream hackers are able to win every gun fight they are in. No explanation at all.

In the Matrix, realizing there is no spoon allows you to dodge bullets. But Neo can do it better than Trinity and Morpheus for some reason. Because he is the one...what does that mean exactly?

Why don't the agents just spawn with awesome machine guns instead of dodgeable pistols? Why not spawn with grenade launchers? There's absolutely no reason the agents only have these shitty pistols. Remember, they designed the world, they're in charge, and yet they play it out under these weird restrictions. Is it because spawning too awesome of weapons, or spawning wherever they want would be unsettling to the population and lead to people "rejecting" the illusion? If so, why not use that in the sequels. Maybe they start to get desperate and use bigger and better weapons, causing thousands of matrix dwellers to die.

This is what I'm talking about when I say wasted opportunities.

Jedi and Sith have a kind of future sensing intuition. This combined with a light saber makes them able to block bullets and lasers and sense their way out of problems. This is one of the main reasons Star Wars is good.

Paycheck, the film and the Philip K. Dick story, is about a guy who had been able to see the future, but his memory has since been wiped. But before the memory wiping, he mailed himself some clues that had to be seemingly innocuous. Thus you have a plot where a guy always has the exact right thing to get him out of any jam, kind of like a psychic Macgyver. Or you know...Q. That's an interesting way of explaining how your main character can get out of so many sticky situations.

Virtual Reality, body augmentation, trans and post-human worlds offer up super powers and such without the need for suspension of disbelief. I mean, the Matrix could have been about a guy whose just the most talented video gamer on the planet, with amazing reflexes and such. But instead he's fulfilling some kind of prophecy...

Which leads me to my next point:



Problem #6
Too many leaps of Faith

You get ONE leap of faith.

Movie Idea: Geese lay golden eggs that
are actually human heads. BWAH!

Back to the Future asks you to buy that Doc Brown built a time machine. That's the one leap of faith. If you buy that, everything follows pretty logically from there.

This is a principal of post-modernism. There's one weird thing, everything else has to follow logically from there. Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine, both Charlie Kaufmann films, require one leap of faith. In BJM it proposes that there's a portal into John Malkovich's brain. Beyond that one weird thing, everything else is believable. You don't have this weird brain portal AND time travel. Eternal Sunshine proposes that there's a procedure you can have to erase bad memories you don't want anymore.

The beauty of stories like this is that they are set in worlds that are different, thus the story can be original, but they aren't unbelievable worlds. Everything after the one weird premise has to make sense. If you drop the audience into a world with magic and clones and weird shit everywhere, they're going to have a hard time relating to characters or believing the world. I'm not saying it's impossible to do, it's just extremely hard to pull off.

The first three Indiana Jones films feature religious/mythological/occult kinds of things. So that's the audience's leap of faith. Then in Indiana Jones 4, Aliens show up... And it's not in a way that's related to the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail. So now this story which has asked you in the past to believe in these religious artifacts is also asking you to believe in Ancient Aliens. Now if these ancient aliens were part of the Ark of the Covenant or Holy Grail stories (presumably with some kind of alien Jesus), then perhaps you could do it as a single leap of faith. But when the film asks you to make a second, unrelated leap of faith, everybody is like, WTF? Aliens. It's pretty weird to think about it, but Indiana Jones is set in a universe where Christianity is correct, AND there are weird aliens. Are the aliens Christians too? Did they have their own alien Jesus. (Idea for a movie: The Passion of the Beeblebrox).

The Matrix sequels start asking multiple leaps of faith, and that's where you lose a lot of people (Neo is the one in the matrix, AND he can make EMPs with his hands in the real world?).

So you get only get one leap of faith.



Having identified all these problems, I set out to create a story that followed those principals. In a few other posts written in the past year and a half, you'll see other principles of mine at work.

For example, I'm not a fan of over-the-top evil bad guys who have no apparent goals other than gaining power and being dicks to everyone. If you want there to be an interesting conflict, the way to do it isn't to come up with better trick photography and CGI, it's to come up with real dilemmas, hard decisions, you know, things that require thought.



Goals of Solipsis (Spoiler Free Section)

1. Realism. Logic. It all needs to make sense.


2. Have stakes without sacrificing realism (dying in virtual world will not kill you in real world. In fact, you can't die in the virtual world. You could be decapitated and you'd still be alive and in control of your body [good luck seeing where you're going]). Having said that, there still needs to be consequences, otherwise, what's the point.

3. Ambiguity is okay, but the plot won't just be a contradicting set of clues to which there is intentionally no answer.

4. Don't waste your opportunities. Don't resort to a simple gun battle.

5. No bullet dodging (unless there's a good reason for it). Bad guys have ability to aim guns in roughly the right direction.

6.  Only one Leap of Faith.

7. Make the main character's goals be more nuanced than simply "give me back my family" or saving the girl, etc.

8. Bad guys have actual goals and aren't simply evil dicks. It's not black and white, good vs. evil.

9. Don't use female characters as shrieking damsels.

10. Make this thing have some real ideas, not simply a way of coming up with excuses to have some action set-pieces.


Alright. Got all that? Now if you want to know more, here is the premise of the novel. I'll only reveal details that are established within the first third of the novel. Read at your own risk.

MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD


My novel supposes a near future in which people can be plugged into a shared neural network. While the Matrix just jams a metal rod in their necks, in my novel you have to have every nerve ending wired up. The only way to do that is through a procedure called a vivisection, in which the brain and nervous system is extracted from the rest of the body. You have to become a brain-in-a-jar.

I would have just ripped this off and
used it as the cover.

This setup creates some interesting circumstances. Only vivisected people can be plugged in, and once you are vivisected, your body is gone, you're a brain-in-a-vat. So this means that obviously not everyone is going to rush out to get this procedure done. It's a select few. And who would it be? The dying. This is a way of cheating death.

Vivisected people can either remotely pilot robots, like Surrogates, or they can live in the virtual world called Solipsis.


The few vivisected people are outcasts in a society of able-bodied people. They live in vats on an ocean platform, sharing a virtual reality world called Solipsis.


Since most people can't get the procedure, they rationalize it away as inhuman, barbaric, etc. That combined with the religious concepts of heaven and hell, and the fact that more Americans believe that angels exist than any other country's population, and you'll see a conflict brewing.

Ultimately the conflict in Solipsis comes about when a religious cult, thinking they are doing god's work, takes over the Ocean platform and takes the brains-in-jars hostage. The bad guy' goal is to restore god's order: People die, god judges them.

Taking over the virtual world of Solipsis, the bad guys create a virtual hell and put the vivisected people in it, torture them, try to convert them. These religious cultists don't think it's wrong to kill these vivisected people because they think god wants them dead. So it's not murder to them.

So that's the premise of the conflict, which takes place inside of Solipsis, a virtual world. The brain-jars are in a giant room called the Comatorium, hence the title.

Comatorium. Vivisection. Televator. Anybody get it yet?

So far everything is realistic, it asks no real big leaps of faith. The idea that we could hook a brain up to a computer is no longer a new idea, (nor even science fiction). People are already controlling prosthetics with their minds. They've augmented mice brains with microchips. So does anyone really think it's outlandish that fifty years from now they'll have the technology to plug directly into a virtual world and experience it just as you would the real world? Maybe it's not the most likely thing, but it's certainly more realistic than fighting a war against AIs that are keeping us in pods and using us as batteries or something.

This premise also takes care of the problem of stakes in a virtual world. The people of Solipsis are trapped in hell, being tortured, and they feel pain just as if it were really happening, and you can't even kill them to put them out of their misery  If you put a bullet in their head, they feel it, but it won't kill them. If you decapitate them, they feel it, but they aren't physically harmed in any way. So this leads to situations where main characters can be reduced to nothing but severed heads. The stakes here are high. Renee, the main character, has the ultimate goal of defeating the cult, taking back the station, but she also has smaller more immediate goals like helping comrades by relieving them of the pain of being tortured/decapitated etc.

That's not Stormtrooper Syndrome.
That's what happens when you eat Yoda's cooking.

As to the issue of stormtrooper syndrome, I avoid this problem by making Solipsis a virtual world where no guns or explosions are allowed. It's a safety measure built into the code (Solipsis is the main world, there are other worlds for playing games and such with other rules). This means that fights inside Solipsis don't come down to who has the better aim. The non-vivisected bad guys interact with this virtual world like they are playing a video game, so they don't feel pain, can't be physically harmed, but also don't have great control over their avatars. Since they are in control of the simulation, they have the high ground, can re-spawn, can change things, can make their avatars bigger, stronger, etc. BUT they are at a disadvantage because they're using a joystick and the vivisected people are controlling their avatars directly with their minds. So this avoids stormtroopers malaise, and explains the "super power" of the main characters.

As for wasting opportunities, you're just going to have to read the book and trust me when I say that I don't waste my opportunities. There is actually quite a lot more to this story, a couple of "holy shit" plot twists, and a I haven't even said a thing about the characters. Honestly this description barely qualifies as spoilers because it's doesn't give away much more than the premise.

The main character, Renee, is a teenage girl who has spent her whole life living inside of Solipsis. Much of the early plot is about her discovering the nature of her world, and is thus the audience's surrogate.

As for ambiguity, the story has some, but it's not about the ambiguity, it's just an added layer.

And really there is a lot more to the story than just the premise and the mechanics of the world. It's about the nature of the self, what it really means to be human, psychopathy, the neuroscience of free will, science vs. religion, what kind of life you live when you can essentially live forever (for example, does monogamy make sense when you're going to live hundreds of years?). So much of our lives is dictated by biology, so when we become post-biological, how will that effect us? Should death be a natural part of life?

This is right after he pulled a thorn out of its paw.

The conflict at the heart of the story is something that's very relavant. How will society adjust to the changes technology ushers in? Science and Religion are already fighting battles over science textbooks. In Louisianna they just started teaching that the Loch Ness Monster is proof that evolution is wrong. Once we start entering the transhuman and post-human realms, do you think the religious forces that are currently fighting against the ability of women to control their reproductive systems are going to just go along with it?

The conflict of my story is a conflict of ideas. The bad guys aren't just some evil robots who decided that humans are the enemy. In the future, the bad guys aren't going to be invading aliens or sentient robots. Hell is other people.


So that's what I've been working on. Really though, most of what I just wrote is what I was doing a year ago when I was writing the script. The last eight months has been a lot more about making scenes more interesting, giving characters more depth, and trying to make my writing not sound like a screenwriter wrote it. (Close up on cool shit. Pan over to reveal an awesome thing.)

After writing this project, and the months of thinking about it, it's time for me to start my next project, and it should be a topic that requires as little thought as possible: Sarah Palin.

P.S. Check out my new website.

Script Ideas

11/11/11 11:11 A.M.

Come with me if you want to save
15% or more on your car insurance.

It's a math holiday (in base 10 countries) and so that means it's time once again for me to outline the script ideas I'm currently kicking around.



1. Something Terminator related.

Terminators 1, 2, and 3 are all centered on a mission to kill someone in the past. They begin with a good guy/robot racing against time to get to the target and save them before the bad robot can kill them. Of course it's really close, but the good time traveller gets there just in the nick of time and gets them out of there, and thus leads us on an hour and a half explosion filled chase. But...wait a second. Howcome the time-travellers go back at such exact times as to arrive at the target at the same time. I mean, you'd think sometimes one or the other would get there much sooner. So that's when it hit me:

A good and bad Terminator race to the target, but the bad terminator gets there first, killing infant John Connor. With the target dead, neither Terminator has any purpose any more. So they become roomates in this existential comedy I call, The Ex-Terminators.  The trailer should show them as roommates and arguing about who's turn it is to do the dishes. Then Arnold drives up to a restaurant, "I was told there would be valet parking." Make it two Arnolds, and you've got the best 80s buddy movie of all time.


OR

Seriously guys, that's a lesbian. 

You know how Skynet takes over the military and sends all our drones and shit after us, then we get into a nuclear war. Then somehow the survivors start a guerrilla resistance led by fucking Edward Furlong for some reason? What if instead of it being a whiny bitch from LA, why not have the resistance be a group of soldiers and Al Qaeda. Think about it, Al Qaeda is already fighting against drones, they're probably the best in the world at this kind of warfare. It could be a really interesting unholy alliance. I call it The Turbinator (actually that was Gromling's title).


2. 72.

When a muslim suicide bomber blows himself up along with some infidels, he is instantly transported to heaven and greeted by his 72 dark-haired virgins. However, it's not quite the paradise he pictured, as they are forever virgins who cannot be penetrated, also they are fucking annoying bitches.



3. Queer Madness

Just like Reefer madness, but with teh gays.

Bet you didn't see that coming. 

4. Red Herring

A native American named Red Herring finds a floppy disk that contains all the nuclear launch codes. Then he meets an attractive asian woman and they have kids. Then he opens a deli and they enjoy a lot of smoked meats together. Then it turns out that he's actually not a native american, but a Martian.


5. Existentialist version of Where's Waldo: Why is Waldo?

(They actually just sold the film right to Where is Waldo? so that film is in the works. I'm not kidding)


6. Don't Ask Don't Tell

Basically just Top Gun.


7. A movie where the rapture occurs, but it ends up making the world a much better place as all the illogical people are beamed skyward into the waiting arms of Lord Xenu. I call it: The Crapture.



8. A parody of superhero films called The C-Men. There's Penicillis, he pees fire. And Tangle, she can untanlge any cords in seconds, no matter how tangled. Gender-Man, who can switch gender at will. And of course, Hottie, a hot chick with the power to eat any food, no matter how spicy.

So their powers of course come in handy. They have to hook up a laser to shoot down an incoming asteroid, but the cables are all tangled up, so Tangle goes to work. But then a swarm of cockroaches attack them, so Penicillis pees fire all over them. But then that fire pee starts to build up and burn everyone, so Hottie has to drink his fire piss. And then Gender-Man has to switch to being a woman so he can bear that child of the super villian, but then the cord gets wrapped around the baby's neck, so Tangle of course, untangles it. You see where this is going.


9. Satan Claus

A heart-warming christmas movie about Satan, living on the South Pole, pretending to be Santa Claus. Santa and Satan engage in a christmas holy war, lobbing ICBMs at each other, causing sea-levels to rise drastically. And by ICBMs I of course mean Icy BMs.

10. Toy Story: The College Years

There's a snake in my boot!

So in the world of Toy Story, anything at all considered a toy is actually a living thing with emotions and relationships. Mr. and Mrs. Potato head are actually married and she nags him. So...in this world...doesn't that mean that sex toys are people too. I figure the little sister from Toy Story gets a purple vibrator named Amy. Amy makes friends with the other toys. Then one night, she's selected from the toy chest and then is crammed somewhere. She's badly scarred by this, and then this abuse happens every night. The other toys decide to bust her out and they help Amy escape from the evil vagina. Victorious, the toys go back to their toy chest. The girl comes looking for Amy that night but can't find her, so it's Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue!

US Finally Captures the Flag; begins withdrawing troops from Iraq.

November 5, 2011

"They really hid that flag good," said PFC Tim Johnson, a veteran of three tours. "When we went in in the first place, we figured Saddam would keep the flag on him or at least close to him so he could personally guard it." Upon Hussein's capture in a spider-hole, the flag was not found. Extensive searches were performed on the surrounding area, but the flag was not to be found for another Seven years.

However, today the mission is truly a success as Iraq's flag was found and brought back to base, completing the capture and ensuring Iraq's defeat. So where was it?

They sang "We are the Champions" while
avoiding water balloon barrages. 

PFC Tim Johnson from Abilene, Texas was the man who finally discovered the flag. "They had us looking in holes everywhere, under buildings, we even bulldozed an entire neighborhood on a tip that it was under it. No dice. We looked in their old nuclear reactors, nothing. And then it hit me, where's the last place you would look for a hidden flag? A flag pole!"

Johnson discovered the flag flying proudly at the Baghdad Soccer stadium.

Johnson personally escorted the flag back to base, thus ensuring victory: "It was just like when we raised our flag over Hiroshima and ended the war. It was a lot like that."

CTF_2Fort

But Johnson hasn't let his personal achievement get to his head: "It was a team effort. We couldn't have done it without all the support people we had that were guarding our flag, and of course all the people filling our water balloons."

Saddam Hussein's downfall can now be added to a long list of dictators ended by a flag capture. Even Hitler was done in by a Private that captured his flag. Just this month, Moammar Qaddafi's reign in Libya was ended upon his capture, because, amazingly, he was wearing the flag.  "He really needed to hide that thing better. Lol," the President said when reached for comment.

Wow Them in the End: How To Finish Strong

4 November, 2011

Viking Cops?

It's NaNoWriMo, so you know what that means: lots of idiots penning novels that nobody will ever read (including the writers). Personally I think it should be called NaWhoGivesAShitMo.

Yes it's National Novel Writing Month, where dozens of bloggers and hipsters set out to pen the great novel in just the month of November. So if you see a dirty neckbeard riding a fixie and carrying a typewriter on his back, then you can figure that he's celebrating NaNoWriMo and No-shave-November. Or he's just participating in the Occupy Stereotypes Protest.

So if you are actually participating in NNWM, I'm here to tell you how to write an ending. Of course, I write screenplays, not novels (unless you count that bildungsroman about strippers I wrote when I was 21 [that's not a joke]), so my advice will apply mostly to film, but alas, stories are stories.

Ohhhh, Stars above!

The keys to writing endings:

1. Bookends


Simply have the ending refer back to something that happened at the beginning. It doesn't need to be clever in any way. Take The Social Network for example. Basically the plot shows us how Mark Zuckerberg is a douchebag. The very end is of him adding his ex-gf as a friend on facebook and hitting refresh constantly, waiting for her approval. The film opened with her breaking up with him and she's barely in the rest of the film. It just refers back to something from an hour and a half ago, and if the audience goes "oh yeah, I remember her" they think they "get it" or something and so they feel smart. People love to feel smart.

Another example of this technique would be any movie that uses flashbacks and eventually gets you back there at the end (see: Fight Club, anything by Tarantino)


2. Fuck your main character in the ass

No More Rape! Wooo!

Then murder them, piss on their ashes, shit on their grave, kill their whole family, and then have them miraculously win somehow.

Basically, right before the end, the main character should reach a lowest point, where it seems that not only have they failed, they're doomed, and so are their friends. Look at The Matrix. It's all leading up to Neo being THE ONE. And by The One, we mean Mr. Right for Trinity. So Neo's dead, shot repeatedly, in the real world he flatlines, that's game over. Then Trinity whispers to this dead guy that she loves him and suddenly he comes back to life....cause he's Mr. Right I guess, or One, which...hold on a second, rearranging the letters spells NEO. OMG I get it! This movie is so smart!

Any actiony film will follow this formula, as will just about ALL films. Rom-coms will have the couple break up for a while and seem doomed. Make sure that right before the end it seems that all is lost.

They replace Apollo Creed with a Cow. Goal change!

3. Move the goalposts


Main characters should have one clear big goal. Win the big game. Blow up the Death Star. Have sex. Don't get anally raped (Shawshank Redemption...not sure why he fled to Mexico).

So when everyone knows the goal the question simply becomes, "will they or won't they succeed." This is why sports movies tend to be more cliche. If they win the big game...predictable. If they lose the big game: well aren't you mr. non conformist. Basically you have no way to surprise us, they win or they don't.

UNLESS, you find a way for them to achieve some kind of victory, perhaps a small one, a moral or personal victory while still technically losing. See Rocky. His goal ends up being just proving he can cut it, not that he has to win as a gigantic underdog. If he wins, nobody believes it.

The Departed: Leo is the MC, wants to bring down the big bad mafia guy. Will he succeed? He does! BUT WAIT...there's still the bad guy's mole in his own department. Can he beat him? Ohhh...ohhhh, well fuck. SPOILER ALERT: he fails and is killed. Talk about moving the goalposts. Now defeating this bad guy is passed off to a different character. So we ultimately have a minor character take on a different main goal than was seemingly the main goal of the film. That's a lot of goalpost moving.

4. The Twist

OMG, he's the bad guy!?!?

Twists are tricky because they have to make sense for the whole plot. The easiest, stupidest twist is to reveal that an ally was actually a double-agent. See all bad cop/spy/thrillers. Oh my god, he's on the other side! But when you think through it, you'll realize that the traitor character's actions earlier on rarely make sense. For example, the film Unbreakable turns on a twist that reveals a seeming ally to actually be a supervillain. But he helped along the hero so much, his only goal was to make the hero eventually catch him. He's CRASY!


Howabout an example that comically checks all 4 boxes.

Signs

The Jew Media is trying to get in our brains. 

Mel Gibson is a widow who tries to protect his family from an Alien invasion. We see his wife's death in flashback, and just before she dies, her eyes glass over and she says: "Swing away." Doesn't mean anything. Moving on. The daughter fills a glass of water, takes one sip, says it tastes funny, then sets it somewhere. She fills the house with these glasses of water. The son has bad asthma, and Mel Gibson's brother is a failed minor-league baseball player.

So when Alien shit starts happening, the clear goal is to board up the house, keep the Aliens out. The house is totally taken over by Aliens, they are trapped. They defend the basement, stay safe. They apparently have won. They go back upstairs, seemingly in the clear. BUT THEN. An alien takes the asthmatic son hostage.

Now the goalposts moved, the Alien Invasion is over, there's not an endless horde of bad guys...just this one. So they don't have to mount a huge defense, just kill this one. But how?

The alien then sprays some chemical weapon in the boy's nose. Oh fuck. At that instant, Mel Gibson tells his brother to "swing away," seeing as he's a baseball player, he's bad ass with a bat, so he swings, and hits those water glasses the daughter set out, splashing the alien. TWIST: it turns out the Aliens are allergic to water (glad they picked a planet that's surface is 70% covered in water). So the splashing water kills it or whatever.

So we have the twist, we have the bookends of "Swing away" and Meryl being a baseball player, and the girl leaving the glasses of water, and since the boy's asthma kicked in, the poison couldn't get past his blocked throat. See! Everything happens for a reason. I remember all those things, and then they came up again at the end. Also, while Mel Gibson wasn't dead, his whole goal of protecting his family was nearly a failure as his son passes out from asthma and is taken hostage by an alien that sprays chemical weapons down his throat. BUT he totally lives.

See, it's not that hard.

Think about how dumb that ending is without bookends or a twist. So his wife's last words, and his brother's failed career, and his daughter's weird behavior, and his son's asthma all align to allow them to kill an alien. OR you know...if they just had a water balloon handy. That would have probably worked. Or a gun. Or just an untrained person smashing an alien with a baseball bat would probably do the trick. Or they all could have peed on him. Humans are mostly water, all we really gotta do is bleed on them and they die. What pussies. Our butt-sweat is like anthrax to them.


So those are the simple things you can do, just have somethings come up that were mentioned at the beginning, come up with some twist, have a perfect storm bring the MC to the lowest possible point, then change the goalposts and have them win somehow.  Done.

Let's look at some more examples:


I N C E P T I O N

Wrinkle Twister!

So they are about to accomplish the goal when Leo and Juno are sent down to the infinite subconscious that we've been hearing bad things about all movie. So they're in this lowest point, where they could fail at their mission and be trapped for centuries in this awful sub-dream place that drives them mad. Quite a low point. Then, we realize that we've seen this before. The film actually opened on this, but then flashedback several weeks or months. So we've bookended to something that the audience saw at the beginning. Remember that opening, Leo wakes up in the Ocean, then is brought in front of a really old Asian guy, then it kind of jump-cuts to Leo in the same room in front of the same Asian guy but younger. This beginning doesn't really make sense on first viewing, we don't know at all what's being implied and then it flashes back a long time, but we don't really know that it's a flashback. So basically it only really serves a purpose to A. give you that "Oh right, at the beginning, I get it," moment on first viewing. So then from this lowest point, book-ending twist ends up changing the goalposts drastically as Juno and Leo now have a completely different goal.

Imagine the ending not having that bookending which doesn't really accomplish anything in the first act, it's simply there to be recalled later. Imagine it isn't such a perfect storm of a shitty situation, and that the goal doesn't change from the previous level. Suddenly it ain't so climactic or "profound."


Minority Report

So Tom Cruise is accussed of the future murder of a man he doesn't even know. He knows he's not a killer, so how could this possibly be true? About all we know about him is that he's a great cop, an upholder of justice, protector of the innocent, and that he is haunted by the kidnapping and probably murder of his son. So what could be a lower point than discovering the killer of his son and being faced with the choice of killing this man, but becoming a murderer, or letting him live. What if instead of being his son's kidnapper, the temptation is that the guy hired a hitman to kill Tom Cruise or something. He could have been a really bad guy that needed to be killed. But that wouldn't make for a very personal involvement for Tommie. What's the one weakness that Tom Cruise has? His son. So of course, that's going to be a factor.

I like surfing movies. 

Always make the lowest point the "Perfect Storm" for that character. It has to be the worst possible thing to happen to them. Not just a bad thing, but the one thing. They're afraid of snakes, so of course it's an anaconda. They're afraid of heights, so they have to walk a high-wire. Make it a perfect storm. Thinking backwards from the perfect storm can give you character ideas. They need a weakness or a flaw in order to have a perfect storm. So figure out what that perfect storm bad thing might be and work backwards to that character flaw.


So there you have it. Give it a twist, move the goalposts, make it rain a shit-ton, and show them something they remember from an hour and a half ago. That'll make it "deep."

All Shallow's Eve

October 25, 2011

Wow, those costumes are great. I could have
sworn I was looking at real sluts.

It's almost Halloween, so I'm going to explain to you people how to come up with a good costume.


1. Be Slutty


Wear as little as possible. Get naked, then cover up as little of yourself as possible, then say you're going as a "Sexy _____."

Just come up with something to put in the blank. Here's a few ideas:


A. Put on a dog collar : Sexy Lassie.

B. Put on a beard: Sexy Chuck Norris

C. Cover your face in cocaine:  Lindsay Lohan

She's going as an inside-out cow.

D. Cover yourself in red meat: Sexy Cow/Lada Gaga

E. Put a trash bag on your head : Sexy Baby Lisa


2. Too Soon


Go as someone who just died. Al Davis doesn't count, he's been dead since 1993. Or go as an event.

A. Wear a cardboard box covered in Foil with a model airplane crashing into the side: 9/11

B. Dress up in the shape of Japan somehow, drink 4 red bulls, and you'll vibrate your way to a hit costume.

C. Peyton Manning jersey + neck brace = millions of pissed off colts fans. (See also: Bernard Pollard jersey)

D. Put hair in a pony tail and just look like a bitch: Casey Anthony.

Never forget.

E. Look like a small jewish girl and carry a diary around : Helen Keller.


3. Have some jokes


Last year I went as Harry Potter/stripper. That is, it was like you had booked a harry potter themed stripper to come to your party. I went up to people with my magic wand (slim jims) and offered to cast a spell of protection. Abracadabra and here's a condom. Then I offered to magically make people sexier, then handed them gum. Also I had a banana in my pants.

A. Go as 9/11, whenever anyone asks what you are, very very seriously say "you said you'd never forget."

B. Dress like a caveman, dirty as shit, loin cloth, then run around screaming "Wilson!?!?"

Tap that keg.

C. Dress like Michelle Bachman (crazy eyes), and then say any of the stupid things she has said (Carbon Dioxide is safe because it's a natural product of nature, I'm the only person that said they'd build a double wall on the border, etc.)

D.  Go as a dog then hit on girls by saying, "I want to get your leg pregnant." or "I'd bury my bone in her backyard."

E. Go as a cat and then say and do nothing, just stare at people with utter contempt.

F. Dress like an old person, then chug a bottle of whisky. You'll have no idea what the fuck is going on or where you are for the rest of the night: Alzheimers.


4. Puns 


Make your costume into a pun. I was once called "Cougar bait" by a middle aged woman, prompting someone to suggest to me that for Halloween I simply show up to a party covered in raw meat..."Cougar Bait." Here's a helpful tip: try not to creep the fuck out of everyone.


A. Tape dozens of razer blades to your hands and feet : Blade Runner

B. Cover your entire body in green jello and leaves : Forrest Gump

C. Dress up as a giant douche : Nickelback

D. Does Hipster Hitler count as a pun?

E. Print off thousands of pictures of your friends and glue them all over your body. Then wear a dust jacket: Facebook.


5. Offend your friends.


One year as a kid, I went trick-or-treating as a "fat guy." Then a stranger asked me what I was, a particularly portly stranger, and so...yeah that was awkward.

A. Go as one of your friends. Steal some of their clothes, and just generally pretend to be a moronic version of them all night, including hitting on strangers using his/her name and phone number.

B. Dress like a complete slut, offer to give free HJs or fifty-cent BJs, or do anal if they buy you one of those cheesy hot dogs at quicktrip for you. When anyone asks who you are : "Your Mom." Another variation is to answer that you're one of your friend's girlfriends. It's comedy gold.

Here's a few more:

Go as a friend's recently deceased grandparent.
Go as your friend's recently miscarried/aborted fetus.
Go as your friend's under utilized penis.
Go as your friend's over utilized vagina.



So there you have it. Folks. Happy trick-or-treating. Or as Tibbs' Mom calls it "sucking dick for candy."

Tony Gonzalez: Best Receiver Not Named Rice?

16 October, 2011

When he retires he plans to be a fire
department's designated baby-catcher.

Tony Gonzalez can move into 2nd all-time in receptions today. He has 1,096 and is 4th. Cris Carter had 1,101 for 3rd and Marvin Harrison is 2nd with 1,102. 1st all time is a bit out of reach. Rice had 1,549. He needs 7 catches to move into second.

I don't mean to alarm you, but if you look up the active leaders in career receiving yards in the NFL, you'll find Tony Gonzalez at the top of the list. I would imagine this is the first time in history that a Tight End has held this distinction.

He gave up Basketball because it was far too easy.

Pro Football Reference actually lists him at #3 with 12,752 yards, trailing Randy Moss with 14,858 and Terrell Owens with 15,934. Moss retired and Owens is a free agent, though he claims he's coming back. So depending on how strictly you define "active," you could have Tony G on top.

Gonzalez is the best Tight End ever. He holds all TE records there are to be had. He's also a hell of a blocker.

Some of the TEs these days are more like Wide Receivers. They line up outside more, they aren't often asked to act like an Offensive Tackle and help pound the rock. So some of these younger TEs are putting up bigger numbers than Tony did, but it's almost like they play a different position. Tony was part of the offensive lines that made Priest Holmes, Larry Johnson, and Michael Turner into running machines, while he was also setting records as a receiver.

He gets confused about the NFL's alley-oop rules.

So clearly he's accomplished more than any other TE. But is he one of the best Receivers of all-time?

We like to talk about how many 1000-yard seasons receivers have, because we like base-10. Tony G has 8 900-yard seasons and 4 1000-yard seasons.

In 2004 he led the league in receptions. He's caught at least 70 balls in 11 seasons.

He's 14th on the all-time list for receiving yards, ahead of Art Monk and Michael Irvin.

AND-1

By the end of this season, he'll probably pass Irving Fryar (needs 33 yards), Steve Largent (needs 350 yards), Andre Reed (needs 450 yards), and could pass Torry Holt (needs 650). If he plays next year he could pass Henry Ellard (about 1000 behind him), Cris Carter (about 1200), and James Lofton (1400 or so). He could easily be 7th on the all time list in 15 months.

He's 9th all-time in Touchdown catches. 1st amongst active players (again if you don't count Moss and Owens).

Tony G's greatness goes beyond statistics.

He saved a man's life with the heimlich maneuver. A Charger fan.

He literally saved a man's life by knocking him over. No seriously, he ran into a photographer after a play, causing a concussion which led to doctors discovering a brain tumor that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. That's Jesus territory.

Oh and he literally fucks October. And I mean literally, because he's like Paul Bunyan. His wife's name is October, but it's also the month his teams have the best record. So when Tony bangs October, they made a River...River Gonzalez. Seriously, he IS Paul Bunyan.

And he's only ever missed 2 games. Drafted in 1997, he missed one game in '99 and another in '06. That's it. That's 231 games in the NFL.

Before Leaf and Manning there was the
Lafleur/Gonzalez debate. Good call Cowboys.

The sad footnote to his career is 0 playoff wins. He lost to the '97 Broncos as Elway led them to a championship. He lost in '03 to Manning and the Colts in a game that had no punts. He lost to the '06 Colts on their way to a Super Bowl win. And he lost to Aaron Rodgers and the Super Bowl champion Packers last year.

Tony recently said he could play another 3 years. It sounds ridiculous. But you know what, Tony Gonzalez is pretty ridiculous.

He's a hall of famer without doubt. But at some point we're going to have to stop thinking of Tight Ends and Wide Receivers as totally different positions. So where does he rank amongst TEs and H-Backs and Wideouts and whatever the hell Reggie Bush is? That's what we're going to have to figure out at some point. (Just not about Reggie Bush, he sucks. FYI, Reggie Bush has fewer rushing yards in the NFL than Mark Brunell.)

So today, watch for Tony G to maybe move into #2 all time in receptions.