Tim and I had a conversation about actors and screen writing yesterday which, like most conversations of these kinds, consisted of me talking and him nodding, doing his best to follow my crazy thought process, and occasionally trying to get a word in edgewise which-is-no-small-feet-let-me-tell-you.
The discussion was tipped off by remarks about the Bourne Legacy movie which neither of us have seen but have heard mixed reviews about. Somehow that branched into a discussion about Liam Neeson and all the crap he's been getting lately about being a lame actor [Nickolas Cage was also mentioned but I'm not even going to try and start that conversation]. Now, I've seen a few Liam Neeson movies, granted not all [including Taken, I know] and I've seen a good bit of what people complain about. Tim and I saw Unknown last year and we both thought it was horrific and summed up a lot of the complaints I've heard about how Liam Neeson is a joke now - he's corny and over the top, always playing these bad-a characters that are totally unbelievable and cheesy [I mean: "I remember how to kill you," really?]. I can see how these things are all true in movies he's been in recently, but I got to thinking that it's not so much Liam Neeson as the screenwriters for these films. Granted, Liam may need to do a better job choosing the projects he jumps on board with but those films never even should have gotten off the ground. Unknown, for example, was a terrible rip off of the first Bourne movie and whoever wrote the script really should have been forced to take some writing classes ["I remember how to kill you" really???].
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that there is a definite difference between bad acting and bad writing [for an example of both, look to the Twilight movies]. Sometimes you have excellent writing and the actors just butcher it but other times actors are just up against a major challenge from the get-go. There's really only so much you can do when you're given a crappy script to work with. And to top it off, I'd like to remember that type casting happens in Hollywood as well as high school [maybe these movies are the only ones he's being offered? he does have to make a living]
So yes, Liam Neeson has been in some corny, sub-par movies, but that doesn't mean he's a bad actor. He was awesome in the Batman movies and from what I know of Taken [where this business seems to have stemmed from] he was a force to be reckoned with as well. Unfortunately Hollywood, as with practically all things good, has pursued that Taken persona until it's begun to kick a dead horse that's been rotten for years.
What does this have to do with writing? Well, there are a lot of different areas where creative writing is used and I think sometimes we forget that someone wrote and approved those awful lines of dialogue in that movie you watched last weekend. I've been trying to recognize more and more lately how the writing of a movie influences its success as well as how I feel about it as a whole. It's impressed upon me the importance of writing well, being honest with yourself about your work and finding people you trust to be honest with you about it because I wouldn't want to be the screenwriter for Unknown, have written the script and thought it was alright, and then find out after movie production that everyone else had thought it was a stupid idea. Don't make others take the fall for mistakes and holes that you should have edited the crap out of.
Don't get paranoid or down on yourself, just be honest. Because the great thing about writing is that even if what you come up with at first is a far cry from literature, you can change it. As Captain Planet would say, "The power is yours!"
Now, I know some of you are probably wondering what happened this weekend, where were the stories? [where were the other drugs going? anyone?] Well, I'll suffice to say that, lately, life has been doing its very best to get in the way. Between work, applying for an internship [interview on Thursday, woot!] and wanting to physically remove my abdomen, writing for last weeks prompt ended up tipping the scales. I apologize for that and anyone who was disappointed by its absence. Some rethinking may need to happen on that front as our responses have been getting more and more lengthy, mine at least heading toward short story length which I was not prepared for. Hopefully my performance this week will be more up to scratch!
In the mean time, I hope none of you are following my atrocious example and have been writing like proper little authors. Yesterday I decided to make a playlist to see if well chosen music might help spurn me on in my pathetic efforts with my WIP which is mentally persistent but lacking in actual recorded text. Maybe I should try talking out loud and recording it? I could get Dragon? What do you do to keep yourself inspired and motivated?
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