The fourth post

Note: This was composed on the 11th.

Wait a second... where's the third post? Well, I wrote it but my computer crashed on me as I was watching streamed episodes of HIMYM. It was getting me in the mood to start the second draft of my tv drama, but since it buggered up, I spent my time before going off to see Battle: LA (it was okay) working on a beatsheet in order to get my head in the game.


Now, I'm seven pages in of twenty pages. Progress is occuring, good times. A few weeks ago, one of our lecturers at uni asked us how we wrote characters, whether we take aspects of other people or throwing ourselves into the situations our characters go through and taking those thoughts into creating a character, I said the latter. It's true, but I think I will conciously make an effort to include the former as well, particularly of my downstairs neighbours who are ****, they're ******* *****. When they play their club music, loud enough, it  might as well be a club. My room because of the acoustics, means that I hear the crap music and can feel the vibrations from the floor. Battle: LA for anyone who sees this at the cinema, that is how it feels to live where I currently am. In the weeks prior to me moving out and returning home, I am going to give them so much music to moan about, bringing Dragonforce and Disturbed , putting my speakers on the floor and blasting it out. Just to get them to feel what my third year was like, they're at it again. The amount of times they have awoken me from sleep and they've stepped it up by shouting things to each other at night. I tried being nice, but now I don't care if I make enemies. Suffering a bad club remix of a bad song by a bad singer (Mika) from 3am to 8am, is like putting a hex on someone.

Is it fair that they can do this. The short answer: No. The long answer: No. I honestly hope that the person downstairs goes deaf, he's put a lot of work into it. I will eviscerate him in my fiction, not in a good light and I will probably use variations of his name. The funny thing is, I've never met the guy, but if you're using an asda trolley to put all your dirty clothes, it's probably for the best that we don't meet. I've suffered because of this person, and I have a dissertation to hand in. I might bring my other speakers back to Uni and buy a splitter especially for my audio onslaught.

As you can tell, it is something I feel strongly about. Even complaining to the people that lease out the houses.

Anyway, Battle: LA was alright, it had some bad spots, like how it opens with chinooks of the soldiers going into LA and then goes for a 24 hours earlier bit, with a cityscape of LA and California Love blaring out. Ick. It was okay, but they should've thrown the characters in there, I don't really care for exposition in this film. That and the music, I know it's American military and needs all that blaring music, but come on, it would still be powerful without the music. Where were the bloods and crips? No rage against the machine (An album of theirs is Battle for Los Angeles). The action was okay, Michael Pená and the refugees were pretty boring in my opinion. A part that annoyed me was when the alien dissection was taking place, the female refugee said "I'm a veterinarian, not a doctor.", obviously she forgot that she has to be a doctor first, I guess those years just flew by. Also she could say "I'm a veterinarian, not an alien doctor", that wouldn't have worked, but neither did the original line.

It was dumb fun action though. Documentary style camera work is boring now. Everybody does it, what is wrong with the camera techniques of yore. Pan, still camera or using a dolly. The alien designs were just average. What elevated the film was the earthquake and tsunami of Japan, so it already felt like the world was falling apart before I'd sat down, when the V.O. says "We've lost tokyo..." I just thought, you aren't half wrong there. As long as you're interested in something that clinches onto film clichés then you will probably enjoy this. For being a Black Hawk Down, with aliens, it didn't feel that scary. Probably because of all the horns blaring through the speakers for the entire film. If you do go to see the film, imagine it without the music, how much more powerful it would be. I don't see many soldiers going into war with an OST by Brian Tyler.

I watched the film and thought, it would be far more interesting to see the British military fight for survival. We don't see it enough, in any films of the past few decades. At least the soldiers in Dog Soldiers felt real where as the wooping americans just felt like they were without character, it doesn't matter who dies, young virgin, out of the academy leader, nigerian doctor, black, white, latino, asian. It would be fantastic if we learnt a little bit about them on the fly, but the cop out of an opening for me let me down. Seriously, it sets the pace and then they slow down it all in order to characterise these people. One of the Scotts or Neil Marshall should have directed this.

That said, I would still watch a sequel. It had potential, got tangled up in the 'confines' of a studio's guide to screenwriting and the hip cinematography.

Note: Found my third post. Makes the opening a bit null. It might mess with the pace, but I'm not changing it.