We've had some requests for themes. Any suggestions? Just leave comments here with suggestions. I'm not sure we should have an 'official' weekly theme, but if people like to use them as an excuse to write, it can't hurt to suggest them.
My suggestion is this: Write a story using only dialogue from one scene of a movie. You can change everything else about the story (setting, characters, plot, etc), as long as the dialogue is the same.
Just thought I would introduce myself to get the group started.
I'm John, I haven't really written any fiction in 10 years, but I'm starting to get the itch again. I'll probably mostly be submitting short slice of life vignettes set in the near future. I'm primarily interested in experimenting with form and style and also in filling out a particular fictional world I've been kind of idly invisioning in my head for the past year or so. If anyone wants to suggest themes, I'll be happy to play along, as well.
(if anyone not on metafilter is reading this, read here to find out what I'm talking about.
It’s an image of cheerful pink cotton candy printed on a tiny sheet of edible paper that tastes like cotton candy. The paper measures roughly two-by-2.75-by-zero inches, so it won’t take up much space in the time capsule, and, as far as I can tell, it won’t suffer at all from rot or mold over the next hundred years. But none of this explains why this morsel ought to be preserved for future generations. The truly historic feature of Cantu’s two-dimensional treat is the legal notice printed beneath the cotton-candy image:
Beaming people in "Star Trek" fashion is still in the realms of science fiction, but physicists in Denmark have teleported information from light to matter bringing quantum communication and computing closer to reality.
Until now scientists have teleported similar objects such as light or single atoms over short distances from one spot to another in a split second.
But Professor Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have made a breakthrough by using both light and matter.
Current TV shows what waterboarding is in a new video.
See the 25 minute uncut mock interrogation here.
TPM Muckraker is digging through the Abramoff-White House files released by the House.
Here, Here, Here, Here, Here and Here
Sample:
From The Washington Post:
One exchange of e-mails cited in the report suggests that former Abramoff lobbying team member Tony C. Rudy succeeded in getting Mehlman to press reluctant Justice Department appointees to release millions of dollars in congressionally earmarked funds for a new jail for the Mississippi Choctaw tribe, an Abramoff client. Rudy wrote Abramoff in November 2001 e-mails that Mehlman said he would "take care of" the funding holdup at Justice after learning from Rudy that the tribe made large donations to the GOP.
So in exchange for political contributions, Mehlman made sure the Choctaw got their $16 million contract. I believe that's called a quid pro quo.
It's by no means the only example of Mehlman's favors.
In 2001, he made sure a State Department official wasn't re-nominated for his post -- the official, Allen Stayman was a long-time foe of Abramoff's.
And according to a report from the Justice Department's Inspector General, Mehlman ordered one of his suboordinates at the White House to keep Abramoff updated on issues related to Guam; Abramoff was keen to see the U.S. Attorney there replaced.
In March, Mehlman told Vanity Fair, "Abramoff is someone who we don't know a lot about. We know what we read in the paper."
A reader at Ain't It Cool reviews the new Charlie Kaufman script -- Synecdoche, NY
The movie sounds absolutely brilliant. I love art about art, and as gimmicky as it is, I never get tired of movies and books that turn themselves inside out the way that Kaufman's movies do. Everyone has felt like they were living in a movie from time to time, and Kaufman has made a career out of turning that feeling into incredibly good movies.Overall, this seems to be, by far, the craziest script Kaufman has written yet. It's beautiful and it's haunting and it completely throws logic or reality out the window while still managing to be full of ideas that I really haven't put the proper amount of time into thinking about. I'm not even close to sure what it is I just read, and if it ever gets filmed and you guys see it, I'm sure that leaving the theater, you won't be sure what it is you just saw. ...I really hope Kaufman is able to pull this off (I hear he's directing this one himself), and if he can, this may end up being one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of cinema.
Either that or a steaming pile of indecipherable, pretentious shit. You know, whatever.
The way I judge good books and movies is if I find myself thinking about them days, weeks, even months or years later. Being John Malcovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind have been touchstone movies for me, and I find myself reflecting on them over and over again as their themes intersect with the events of my own life -- which is quite an achievement considering how surreal and 'out there' the movies are. It just goes to show that beneath all the narrative flash, there is a core of human truth in his best scripts.
When Kaufman isn't so good is when his movies become all about form instead of character, which was the case with Adaptation-- technically showy, but emotionally hollow. IMO, you can invent wildy in movies, but as soon as you create an unrealistic character, you've lost your audience, and that movie was filled with ridiculous character choices. I understood that 'that was the point', but I'm not to fond of movies that exist entirely to prove a point about movies.
From religion to real estate, from pensions to parent-child dynamics, almost every aspect of society is based on the orderly succession of generations. Every quarter century or so children take over from their parents—a transition as fundamental to human existence as the rotation of the planet about its axis. In tomorrow's world, if the optimists are correct, grandparents will have living grandparents; children born decades from now will ignore advice from people who watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Intergenerational warfare—the Anna Nicole Smith syndrome—will be but one consequence. Trying to envision such a world, sober social scientists find themselves discussing pregnant seventy-year-olds, offshore organ farms, protracted adolescence, and lifestyles policed by insurance companies. Indeed, if the biologists are right, the coming army of centenarians will be marching into a future so unutterably different that they may well feel nostalgia for the long-ago days of three score and ten.
