Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 166

Someone Else's Eyes Dept.

This may not be an especially profound insight, but the thing I notice most about artists who are most successful in terms of putting a personal stamp on their work is that they are that much more in touch with what they are. That person may be of one given political bent or another; they may be meek or bold; they may be tough or sensitive. But whatever it is, they are entirely cognizant of it and in tune with it. They know how to look inside themselves to get whatever it is they need to spea...

Elysium

Elysiumis one of those movies that feels like it ends just when it's really getting interesting. That's not something I wanted to say about a film from the man who gave usDistrict 9,one of the few recent SF movies that despite its action-ride ingredients actually felt like ascience fiction movie and not just a tarted-up shoot/beat-'em-up. Neil Blomkamp's successor toDistrict 9 has a larger budget — although, paradoxically, it doesn'tfeel like a much larger movie — and more explicitly politica...

Talk Is Cheap, Thank Goodness Dept.

Something else came to mind after my discussion of how not every book can and should be filmed: the economics of it.

One of the advantages of the written word is that it's cheap. It's far less expensive to put words on a page, and that much less expensive to get them back off a page, than it is to put images on a screen. This despite the fact that our words and our movies are being delivered that much more from the same screens — believe me, the irony isn't lost on me.

The problem lies in how m...

Running Time Dept.

I finally watched the "short" version of Kenneth Lonergan's much-debatedMargaretearlier this week, and I can't remember the last time I saw a film that I simultaneously liked so littleand admired so much. I admired its ambition and scope, but I disliked how all that ultimately translated into a story that was too baggy, too sporadically volcanic, too fundamentally undisciplined to really work. It's more interesting for the story behind it and for the ideas it touches on than for what it actua...

Disrupt Yourself Dept.

99/1 is the new 80/20 -rude.vc

My concern about the trend toward a winner-take-all dynamic is that it enables defense of the status quo over disruptive innovations.

The buzzworddisruptive makes me giggle into my Ovaltine just as much as the next person whose eyes have gone a-glazed at too much Silicon Valley / TED talks horse manure.

But let's put that aside and look at the core truth invoked herein: in most walks of life, there's a few at the top and everyone else down below. We take this for...

Young Adult, Not-So-Young Adult Dept.

There's an article that's made the rounds about how adults should feel foolish for preferring young adult fiction over the "real thing". The article has been roundly criticized — me, I only just stumbled across it the other week — and I can see why, as it aspires to make no friends. It has the nerve to tell people that maybe they're cheating themselves out of the pleasures of growing up.

You heard me say it: pleasures. And no, I didn't say growingold,I said growing up. For so long, we've condi...

The End Is Extremely F---ing Nigh Dept.

I'm betting some of the people reading this get off, at least a little bit, on seeing the world end.

Admit it. There's a fun little zing that goes through some folks when they watch Los Angeles getting nuked in Terminator 2. There's something about scrambling through the ruins of The Last of Us, The Walking Dead, Revolution, Defiance, I Am Legend, 28 Days/Months Later, et any number of crumbling ceteras, that provides a bit of a frisson.

I've gotten that zing myself any number of times. I got i...

Sell It Or Shelve It Dept.

This past week I had a conversation with a fellow writer dealing with two classes of advice he receives. I don't have a name yet for the second class of advice, but the first class earned a label immediately: Sell It Or Shelve It.

The folks of the SIOSI mentality tend to speak like they just fell out, fully formed, from between the pages of a book namedWrite That Damn Novel In 30 Days Or Go Get A Day Job, Loser!1Their advice is entirely workmanlike and practical, to a fault: explain everythin...

Success Stories Dept.

I Don’t Give A Shit How Much Money EDGE OF TOMORROW Makes | Badass Digest

... if Edge of Tomorrow had been a smash hit the lesson Hollywood execs would get from it wouldn’t be “Let’s make more smart, funny, character-driven blockbusters!” but rather “More mech suits! More time loops! People like infantry battles, so more of those!”

Right. It's not that we don't learn from success, it's that we learn all the wrong things.

For those who weren't around when the firstStar Warscame out, the only peo...

Page Down Dept.

One of the more depressing pieces ofadvice I've seen come out of a successful author's mouth while they were wearing a straight face was something along the lines of, "Don't put anything on the page that can't be easily filmed, because you don't want to scotch any potential movie deals for your work."

From outbursts come truth, it seems. Not in the sense that the highest aspiration for any written work is to become a Hollywood meal ticket for its author, but that the things people say with str...