Bite Sized Bits

I don't have the full mojo for a big post, so a couple of observations on unconnected subjects follow:

Dresden Dolls

I caught the premiere of The Dresden Files on the weekend and thought it was kind of spiffy. Paul Blackthorne is very good, the production values were great, and the story was, you know, good old fashioned genre double. I call shows like Dresden Files "peanut butter" because they're never going to win Emmys, but when you're curled up on your couch it's actually nice and diverting. I'll be watching it again. And best of all -- shot in Toronto, so yay for that. (Sci Fi in the USA, Space in Canada, Sundays.)

Brush Up Your Shakespeare

I've been laying aside 2nd season Rome till I had the time to devote to it. I got just enough time to watch the premiere episode last night and found something so great and valuable in it that it actually made me clap my hands in delight. One of the things I'd been wondering was, in the aftermath of the death of Caesar, how would they handle the oration over the body? How do you top "Friends, Romans, Countrymen Lend Me Your Ears, I Come to Bury Caesar, Not to Praise Him?"

Well the answer, of course, is you don't. You go to the aftermath: straight to the scene where Marc Antony negotiates with Brutus to get him out of Rome because the crowd turned on the killers after Antony's oration. Brilliant! You play the fact that EVERYONE KNOWS THIS SPEECH, or at least everyone literate. You're playing on the audience's own knowledge, and engaging them. Then you play a scene from the perspective of the lower classes, recounting the two speeches -- not quoting the speeches, but simply speaking about the emotional content and how it made them feel. Dramatize the effect, because that's what's important for the narrative. Not the cause.

We struggle all the time with: how much does the audience know here? Should they know more? And sometimes we forget that you can actually count on the audience quite a bit. Twenty years ago they didn't trust that you could cut from someone in a car to someone knocking on a door. Now, you can omit the oration speech and play other scenes we haven't seen a hundred times before.

Whenever you can omit the scene we've seen a hundred times before, why wouldn't you do it?

How many of those scenes are in your script. Rip'em out.

Conservative Surprise

I can't figure out our Conservative Government here in Canada. But I am glad they seem to recognize that as screwed up as it is, the TV industry is actually an industry that employs real people. Go read this article in the Globe and Mail, and then read the comments below. That's what we're up against. I swear, it's when I read these comments from the body politic that I think to myself, "what are you doing here? Just take the hit, move south, and let them trade their damn country away." They'll get teary eyed at a beer ad manipulating Canadian pride, but they'll blithely hand over cultural sovereignty when it counts.

Canadians, you are an odd, odd people.