April 2008 Archives

I have two pet peeves when it comes to screenwriting: expository dialog and character-development dialog. As Amy and I are watching the DVD's of the Showtime series "Weeds" (the one about the middle-class suburban pot-dealing single mom), both types come up frequently enough that they are starting to turn me off of this otherwise decent show.

If you Google for "expository dialog" you'll find I am certainly not alone in hating the dreaded monologue that only serves to explain often convoluted plot points to the audience. But what irks me are the small, throwaway lines that ring false and could clearly have been cut or incorporated some other way.

In an episode we watched last night, for example, a character, Celia, is in the hospital recovering from breast cancer surgery and her mother arrives unexpectedly. The situation is clearly awkward -- the actors do a good job of expressing the decades of tension that exist between them. But then the moment is blown when Celia says to her mother: "Thank you for coming all the way from Florida to see me."

If both Celia and her mother know that mom lives in Florida, why is that bit of dialog necessary? If my mother suddenly appeared at my door, I wouldn't great her by saying: "Mom! You came here all the way from St. Louis!" No. The line only exists to inform the audience that Celia's mom lives in Florida.

How else could the screenwriter have conveyed the information? Well, after a few more rounds of more honest-sounding dialog, we learn a lot more about Celia's mom -- she's active in her church, she's leaving soon to go on a cruise, she's a miserable control freak. At some point, a more indirect reference to her home in Florida could have been slipped in. But I'm not even sure why it was necessary to establish that she was specifically from Florida anyway. Had she arrived carrying a suitcase or had Celia merely inquired about her flight ("How was your flight?" is a banal question but one that we all ask, right?) then we, the audience, could get everything we need right then.

The other class of cringe-inducing lines are the ones that exist only to establish some aspect of a character's personality or physical appearance that might not be obvious through, say, acting or just looking at an actor.

The most egregious example of this I can recall was in the dreadful 2001 movie Amy's Orgasm (AKA Amy's O), starring, written, and directed (uh oh!) by one Julie Davis (who, not coincidently, hasn't appeared in any movies since). Ms. Davis is fairly cute, but the movie's dialog is packed by other characters commenting on just how gorgeous and super-hot she is. The premise of the film requires that the main character's desirability simply be taken for granted; it's supposed to be a shock when others learn that she hasn't had sex in several years. But the actress herself isn't really a knock-out, so the dialog has to try to convince the audience through incessant repetition that she's the most beautiful woman in the diegesis.

Sadly, this sort of dialog is starting to spoil my enjoyment of "Weeds" as well, and as with Amy's Orgasm it involves the physical attributes of a female character. Mary-Louise Parker is the pot-dealing mom, Nancy, and I'll admit that she is pretty damn hot. It's also apparent from looking at her that she has practically no ass. And yet, there have been, on average, a half dozen references to her supposedly hot butt in every episode. In one, two African America characters independently comment on her "badunkadunk" (alternately, "ba-donk-a-donk").

I don't understand why the screenwriters felt it was necessary that Nancy's obvious physical attractiveness be augmented by repeated hyperbolic references to her virtually non-existent booty. Is it really that important that all the ass-men (and women) in the audience be catered to? Are they so insecure about Mary-Louise's actual ability to induce lust that they have to verbally inflate certain of her assets?

It's really too bad because I'm now so tuned in to it that I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to keep watching the show unless the scripts drop all this "establishment" bullshit and focus on keeping the dialog real.

Amy and I saw the documentary Helvetica the other night.

"You're expecting me to spend an hour-and-a-half watching a movie about a font?" Amy asked in her typically charming manner.

"It's not a font," I explained. "It's a typeface."

And it wasn't an hour-and-a-half either -- it was 80 minutes, and probably 20 of those were filled with the camera lingering over hundreds of city signs and ads featuring the eponymous characters. So, we had essentially an hour of graphic and type designers talking about Helvetica -- its origins, its history, its status in contemporary design, its political significance, etc. It was actually pretty interesting.

But Helvetica, for all its popularity and ubiquity, isn't part of the standard Microsoft Windows collection of fonts, and I was never really sure why. I know that license fees for fonts can be outrageous, so I thought maybe that was it. But Helvetica is standard on Macs, so what was up with that?

Type designer Mark Simonson explains in "The Scourge of Arial" that Microsoft bundled Arial -- a Helvetica look-alike designed by the Monotype foundry -- "probably because it was cheaper and they knew most people wouldn't know (or even care about) the difference.

"Typeface knock-offs became common after the rise of desktop publishing, and Monotype created Arial as a close-but-no-cigar copy of Helvetica -- a typeface with the same proportions and weight as Helvetica but with hundreds of small and seemingly arbitrary differences.

And though the differences are small, they are perceptible if you know where to look. Simonson also provides a handy guide for telling the difference.

The American spirit played out in typography.

When I was a teenager, MTV showed British TV shows on Sunday nights starting at 11:00 pm. Even then, I was an early riser and an early-to-bedder, so staying up until midnight on a school night was always a challenge, and I frequently wouldn't make it. But when I did, I was treated to such classics as The Young Ones and Comic Strip Presents....

The Young Ones episodes were repeated frequently and over time I probably saw every one 10 times or more ... enough that I committed them to memory. The addition of the family VCR to the mix ensured repeated viewing over time.

I have only vague memories of The Comic Strip Presents.... It wasn't on all that frequently, and the shows weren't as bombastic and eminently quotable as The Young Ones. Each episode was a standalone film and often parodied other British shows and cultural elements that I only rarely understood.

Last night, I came across episodes of The Comic Strip Presents... on YouTube and watched one I had never seen before: Les Dogs, a surreal little film that reminded me of Buñuel and features Miranda Richardson and a lovely Kate Bush. Adrian Edmonson (Vyvyan on The Young Ones) is hilarious as an embattled best man at a wedding that ends in bloodshed.

I love this summation of the non-controversy around "intelligent design" -- otherwise known as creationism -- from an article by Valerie Tarico at The Huffington Post.

Said whining will soon take the form of a ludicrous movie called Expelled, whose thesis is that so-called educators are being shut out of the academy if they dare to question evolution.

There's been a lot written about Expelled, especially over at Pharyngula and The Panda's Thumb. But Tarico's article is a good summary of creationists' calls to "teach the controversy."

As she makes clear, however, there is no controversy.

She ends with a call to action.

One action that Pharyngula's PZ Myers recommends is for bloggers to link the word Expelled to the Expelled Exposed website (which will publish its full response to the film tomorrow [April 15]) in the hopes of raising the site's Google PageRank. Hey, it's a small gesture, but still....

According to Slog, the movie opens in Seattle this Friday at the Uptown and Pacific Place theaters. I don't think I'll be going, and I hope no one else does either.

It's Friday. I can't think of anything to write about. So here's a walrus dancing to "Smooth Criminal."

(via Metafilter)

The University of Washington recently purchased and took possession of the 22-story former Safeco Tower near the UW campus. My organization, which currently has its staff scattered across campus in five different locations, is planning to move into the newly-dubbed "UW Tower" this summer.

Or, rather, we are moving into the "UW Tower Properties".

We're not actually moving into the tower itself; we're moving into one of the 3-story "outbuildings" that encircle the tower much as medieval villagers' huts encircled their Lord's castle.

The views from the upper floors of the Tower cover the entire region, including the downtown skyline, Lake Union, Lake Washington, and both sets of our mountains.

The view from our section includes a dentist's office and a gas station.

But I'm not complaining. Really. It's going to be nice to finally have everyone in my office located under one roof, and I'm looking forward to interacting with my co-workers more regularly. I've worked in far, far less attractive spaces in my day, and I honestly don't have any issues of status caught up in the location of my office.

I got to take a tour of the UW Tower today. Only a few groups have moved in and there's a ton of work left to be done to the interior to prepare for new tenants. I thought some of the fields of stacked furniture we encountered in our future workspace made for interesting geometric patterns, so I snapped a few photos. Enjoy.

Somewhere around Pier 39 in San Francisco is the Musée Mécanique, one of the world's largest collections of antique coin-operated arcade machines. Within those machines lurks a veritable army of the most horrifying miniature creatures I have ever encountered.

I have previously written about my fear of clowns, which some might term "irrational" but which I know to be both well-grounded and justifiable (as a textbook ENTP, I don't do irrational, dammit!)

Along those same lines, but to a less acute degree, is my fear of mechanized creatures.

Perhaps this stems from the scene in Blade Runner in which Harrison Ford searches through J. F. Sebastian's menagerie of automatons and eventually finds Daryl Hannah, who kicks his ass.

Wandering through this arcade of horrors I felt very much like Ford/Deckard and wondered to myself "Which one of these is going to be the one to try to break my neck?" Will it be the terrifying "Laffing Sal"? Or maybe the entire team of miniature baseball players? I can see the headlines now: "Tourist Slain by Tiny Honus Wagner."

I bravely documented my journey just so you can see what I'm talking about. Bone-chillingly freaky, right?

Let's cleanse the palate with a relevant tune by the Dresden Dolls.