The 100-Page Rule

With the sheer volume of material I have to read--books, comics, screenplays, newspapers, magazines, and ugh, don't get me started with all the ARCs and blogs and websites on my tablet--I will need at least thirteen lifetimes to get through it all. And that's if the current river of publishing would simply STOP its flow and let me catch up. Which it WON'T because it CAN'T. Between self-publishing and the stuff coming out from the major houses, publishing is a juggernaut that cannot be stopped. There's just too much stuff out there that has me foaming at the mouth to get my peepers into.

So that's why I've been forced to implement the 100-Page Rule. It's simple enough: You, the author, have 100 pages to wine me, dine me, excite me, and turn me on to your book. If you can't do it in 100, then I'm sorry, but I don't see this relationship going anywhere and I'm going to have to drop your hard work off in the local library's donation box.

Is that fair? Maybe not. I remember I was at around 96 pages when I almost dropped Bernard Cornwell's The Archer's Tale, but something made me stick with it, and I'm glad I did because it turned out to be one of my favorite books, series, and the beginning of my obsession with all things Bernard Cornwell. Maybe by shutting you down at 100 I'm missing out on you getting your stride at 101 or 102. That's certainly possible.

But there's so much AMAZING stuff out there to be read that when reading a book becomes WORK, then my mind wanders--a LOT--and I find myself wistfully wondering what the long-on-my-shelf books by authors I DO find entrancing and hypnotic are going to be like.

(Man. Reading is a lot like dating.)

A book that can't find its legs in my heart, coupled with a brain that's playing what-color's-the-grass-over-there, makes the minutes spent reading melt at a glacial pace.

Not good.

I also think that 100 pages is a perfectly acceptable rule to be judged against when the time comes that I get my own novel(s) published. So if I review your book and I throw the 100-Page flag at it, just know that I'm doing it from a Swarovski pedestal within a sugar-glass house.

If you know me, you know what Dead Man's Party is. You also know how giggity I am about the fact that this 5-issue series that Scott Barnett and I have self-published for the past, oh, five years or so, has been collected as a trade paperback and is being published by Darby Pop Comics and Magnetic Press. And it lands on comic shop shelves on January 27th, then Amazon and Barnes and Noble a month later.

If you DON'T know what Dead Man's Party is, well let me tell you about it:

Here we go again!

Nearly six years.

That's how long it's been since I've posted here.

I clearly suck at this blogging thing.

But a lot has CHANGED in those six years I've been away: I've started two independently-produced comic books--Z-Girl and the 4 Tigers and Dead Man's Party--the latter of which is about to appear on comic store shelves all around the country as a trade paperback published by the way awesome people at Darby Pop Publishing and Magnetic Press. I won a writing contest with Darby Pop and got my first mainstream comic book published, Indestructible: Stingray. 

I've become a screenwriter, and along with my good friend, Scott Malchus, and we have written a couple TV pilots that have semifinaled at a couple of prestigious screenplay competitions. One of those pilots is up on the Amazon Studios site, so hopefully we'll get some recognition.

I podcasted about The Walking Dead, about Flash, and about American Horror Story. Had to give those up, though, because, well, a day's only got 24 hours. Even despite my best efforts to squeeze in 4 or 5 more.

So I've been BUSY, yo.

But I'm back. Hopefully with some sort of regularity. Because I've got stuff to say, and dammit, the one or two of you who have searched out this blog on purpose DESERVE to be rewarded for your effort.

Time will tell how long this lasts...

The Reader

The Joker?  Ha!  Riddler?  Please, he's a punchline.  Two-Face?  Penguin?  Joel Shumacher?  Nope, nope, and really close, but ultimately, nope.

No, the biggest villain in Batman's gallery of rogues is none other than...Harvey Weinstein.  Yes, Harvey the ballbuster, the guy infamous in Hollywood for multi-multi-million dollar eleventh hour Academy Award blitzkrieg marketing campaigns for his movies.  Y'know, like the one he perpetrated in 1998 that got Shakespeare in Love to flat-out steal Best Picture honors from the far superior Saving Private Ryan?  Apparently this year Harvey put the full-court press on The Reader prior to nomination time, and eked out a spot at the show for it, leaving The Dark Knight to twist in the wind.  

So the question is:  does The Reader deserve consideration for Best Picture?  Is it a better movie than The Dark Knight?  And the answer is:  absolutely not.

For the first hour or so of this adaptation of Bernard Schlink's novel, Der Vorleser, I was lost in wondering where in the world the plot was meandering to.  Boy meets older woman, boy beds older woman (repeatedly and graphically), boy falls in love with older woman (and she, apparently, with him), older woman ends up leaving boy.  So far nothing remarkable or groundbreaking, and all I could think was that this was a Mary Kay Letourneau primer.  Don't get me wrong, Kate Winslet doing full nudity is an impressive sight to behold, but after a half dozen shots of the bump-and-grind, I kind of get the picture.

The movie develops some meat later on, after Kate's character, Hanna Schmitz, has moved away, abandoning her hyper-hormonal sixteen-year-old paramour, Michael.  Michael goes on to law school, learning the ways of the litigious, and is taken on a field trip to visit a trial.  Turns out the trial is of a group of women accused of being SS guards at a Nazi camp, one that was a feeder for the furnaces of Auschwitz.  At one point during the death march, 300 Jewish women were trapped inside a burning church, locked within by Hanna and company.  Seeing his Hanna, after so many years apart, now standing in defense of her life, is a terrible burden for Michael to bear, and much of the rest of Act 2 is how he starts to unravel a little bit, his emotions conflicted between what he knew and what he now has learned.  It affects him to the point that information he has that could save Hanna from a guilty conviction, is repressed, kept to himself in light of the horrible acts for which she is accused.

Act 3 is Hanna's transformation of sorts in prison, when a much older Michael (played by Ralph Fiennes) breaks through his wall of shame and embarks on a journey that is truly heartwarming and wonderful.  You see, young Michael didn't just make daily booty calls to his illicit lover, he also read to her dozens of books.  Classics, comics, trash, even Lady Chatterley's Lover, he read them to her by the piles.  And there's a reason for it, not just that she liked the dulcet tones of his voice.  And no, she wasn't blind.  Older Michael, armed with a tape recorder and a microphone, returns to those magic moments, and sends Hanna care packages of his books on tape, which she uses to teach herself how to read and write.  It's a beautiful and ultimately tragic (as these stories need to be) story.  

The problem is, much of the movie plays as if someone took the script and pulled out every fifth page.  Some scenes seem to cut to the next without cohesion.  There's a subplot involving Michael's family and his estrangement that isn't fully explained or at least hinted at enough for the viewer to fill in the blanks.  The reason for older Michael to be withdrawn from his own daughter, or why his marriage fails, isn't sussed out enough, either.  And for all talk of Kate Winslet's fantastic make-up to age her during her prison sentence, even that is overblown:  she's supposed to be 68 when she's released, and yet she looks 88.  And the camera cuts in the final scene between Lena Olin and Ralph Fiennes are terrible on a Vincent Gallo level.

The bottom line is that for a two hour movie (two-oh-four, to be exact), it's great for roughly 50 minutes.  And that's not straight, either.  It comes in fits and starts.  More time should have been spent on Hanna's trial and the moral quagmire that it conjured up, with less time on the late-night Cinemax quality of relationship establishment.  The ending was too much, and should have been truncated at least ten minutes.  The acting is wonderful, from all parts, and Kate Winslet shines, which probably comes as a shock to no one.

Now, The Dark Knight isn't without its problems, and it's far from a perfect movie (like Gladiator is), but it is far and away a better movie than The Reader.  It really is a shame that the former got shut out of the big event simply because it was out-politcked.  In the end, I think it'll be a moot point, as Slumdog Millionaire is this year's best of breed, but still, it would have been nice to see Batman get some props.

A Song For V-Day: The Story

My friend and co-conspirator, Scott Malchus, waxes poetic about Brandy Carlile's song, The Story, just in time for Valentine's Day (which is tomorrow, Saturday the 14th, for those of you calenderically-challenged...myself included).  Scott knows his music.  Check it out here.

Me, my song of choice for the day would be Mark Cohn's True Companion, to which I danced with my bride at our wedding.  

And all because I heard it years ago on an episode of Party of Five.

Hex Movie Gets Heavyweights

Hex is one of those comics that's just durned good readin' with each and every issue.  I'm biased, though, since my formative years were influenced not just by the super-heroics of the spandex crowd, but also by DC Comics' pre-Vertigo era of off-beat yarn spinning in Weird Western Tales.  The current creative team of Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray has one of the most consistently solid titles that take up space on a comic rack.  No filler issues.  No shark jumping.  Simply good writing and great art.  The masses go ga-ga over a book like Scalped, yet I'd take Hex any day of the week and twice again on Sunday.

So Warner Brothers and Legendary Pictures are making a flick about the scarred and surly gunslinger, due out in 2010.  Josh Brolin is set to play the titular character, Jonah Hex, while John Malkovich will play his nemesis, Quentin Turnbull.  Now, if you've seen No Country For Old Men then you've got an inkling as to how good Josh Brolin will be, and John Malkovich as, well, ANYTHING, is just brilliant casting.  I know, I know, westerns have been hit or miss lately (3:10 To Yuma, bullseye; Appaloosa, not even on the paper), but the solid casting and kookiness of the characters, as well as the lineage to DC Comics should make this a winning formula for reaping some box office success.  

New Best Shots Piece

Totally forgot.  I've got a Best Shots review up over at Newsarama on Hotwire from Radical Comics.  Now, if you've not seen anything these guys have put out, you're missing some quality work.  Gorgeous artwork and innovative storytelling, two great tastes that are often hard to come by these days.  So good is their stuff that one of their titles, Caliber, which is a re-imagining of the King Arthur myth but set in the Wild West, has already been optioned as a movie with John Woo set to direct.  

Hotwire is a gorgeous book by a very nice and personable artist, Steve Pugh.  It's an interesting read, to boot.  I highly encourage you to pick it up.