No Way

And the winner is....Suse!!

Yep, the true-blue Aussie response to the chorus of the song featured in my previous post is indeed Suse's version.

I'll tell you a little secret...I didn't actually know anything about this aspect of the song until I read the comments to the last post. I suppose it shows that I was moved from Australia to England and then back to Australia at that crucial stage of development when I should have been experiencing this rite of passage. I'm quite upset about this.

In any case, my blogging is taking care of the gaps in my teenage development, thank goodness. You see, I googled the song name with an addition of "rude words" and what do you know...I found this.


I really feel much better now. Plus...my choice of song is even BETTER now than I had originally realised!!

Thanks everyone. You rock!!

Starstruck

It's all about film chez Commentbox tonight, all about film. Tonight's class was a 2-hour breakdown of the plot of a James Bond film, and I learnt a hell of a lot. Really!! There's a method to the box-office success of 007 and it taught me, yet again, to never underestimate popular culture. That being said...I have yet to sit through an entire James Bond film without falling asleep.


Here is a classic movie moment from MY crazy teenage years - the song I danced to in front of the mirror after watching "Starstruck" for the first time. The next day I went out and bought a striped shirt and red boots too.




But for my film of the imagination....I'd like to use another song for the final credits. It'll be a film about the power and glorious fun of friendships, about feeling free, not having to prove anything to anybody, and being beautiful inside and out. It'll be set in Australia, and all of the Hollywood celebrities will watch the film and feel ugly and boring compared to the characters in my story. It'll make every Hollywood starlet who's ever had a facelift feel really really ugly, and silly.

Simple really.

The Wattle Blossom Waltz

When your garden is filled

With those Banksia Men,

Don't succumb to their plot,

Don't dare set down your pen.

Yes, the wattle puffs scatter

In your garden's harsh winds,

But in best backyard races

The patient one wins.

So it is there I shall wait for you,

Darling wordfriend,

In that cold winter garden

'til your dark season ends.

P.S. With thanks to the beautiful wattle trees and May Gibbs.

Life's not about what's better than

I'm using up all my words elsewhere at the moment, the scriptwriting work is incredibly challenging and I am learning so much. It has taken me a while, but for the first time I really understand that to write well you need to have a really really really good story. Once you have that story, and it may take a very long time, the actual writing will probably come by itself. I always thought of writing as stringing together words in a beautiful way, but this course is forcing me to wring out every drop of story I can possibly come up with, and then some.

It's incredibly liberating, actually, to concentrate on "What happens next..." but also horribly frightening. So it looks like I may be writing a thriller! Who knew??!!

As my days progress in a rollercoaster ride of great idea, awful idea, great idea, awful idea I need to keep my mind on what's truly important...so I'm listening to this song quite a bit.

I hope that you enjoy it too! (The John Butler Trio):

The glimmer of hope

My scriptwriting course brought me this little gem last week, and I thought you might find it interesting.

The beginning of Act Three (in most successful films) is commonly described as a "glimmer of hope." It follows on swiftly from the end of Act Two's "couldn't get any worse." The glimmer shows the audience that the protagonist is beginning to finally see how he or she can solve the "problem."

So our teacher asked us to find the glimmer of hope in the screenplay of "Thelma and Louise."

Much to my surprise it's this snippet of dialogue:




Now...even after all the years since "Thelma & Louise" first came out, I am still astonished that a film which ends with a suicide can be heralded as such a feel-good movie. How did the writer and director manage to do that? Well...it looks like the answer to this question lies in the writing of the script. When Thelma says that she couldn't go back..that she COULDN'T LIVE...the audience are given the tiniest of clues leading to the story's climax. Thelma and Louise will, in fact, NOT live.

So the 25 of us students in that class last week immediately typed away at the poor teacher...."But how can you call THAT a glimmer of hope? Suicide is never hopeful." Ah..but you see...in the world of this film...a fictional world....a dream really...the ending IS full of hope and beauty. The magnificent thing here is that the the writer and director can convey that feeling, through their art, to a global audience in a commercially successful film.

Don't you just love that?

"We came over to sit"

** Spoiler alert...I'm going to be giving away the ending of "Lars and the Real Girl".....

I just realised that the climactic scene in "Lars and the Real Girl" uses almost the same idea as "Tootsie." The figment of the protagonist's imagination is standing in the way of his "real" relationships, so he must "kill" this "antagonist" so as to be able to move on with his life.

Oh..and if you go to 3:24 you can see my favourite scene which always makes me think of the crafty bloggers I know.



(P.S. I'll still post about Thelma and Louise's glimmer of hope...maybe tomorrow)

Protagonist vs antagonist

How can it be Wednesday already? How strange. I am now into my 4th week of the scriptwriting course and I am finding it both impossible and possible, excruciating and exhilarating. I recently read that you know you're a writer if you can't be happy unless you write....but writing doesn't make you happy. That makes me laugh!! (which is always a good thing, especially on a Wednesday night).

So this is something really interesting which I learnt in my class yesterday...the climax of a script always has the protagonist battling his/her antagonist. This battle may be symbolic, it may not always be obvious, but it is always there (unless you're watching an arty-farty film, but my course is all about making commercially successful fun stuff). So, the question is...here is the climax of "Tootsie"...the protagonist is Michael (Dustin Hoffman's character)...but who is the antagonist?




The antagonist is Dorothy, who doesn't really exist, because she's a role Michael plays so that he can get an acting job. In this scene, Michael "kills" Dorothy because her "existence" makes it impossible for him to have an authentic love relationship with Julie.

Don't you just love that?

P.S. Who noticed Geena Davis in that scene? How funny is that? I think my next post will be about the "glimmer of hope" in the 3rd act of "Thelma & Louise"....stay tuned.