I Have Some Notes

Every year, we float the idea of watching a Hallmark Christmas movie for our traditional holiday episode, and every year we chicken out. The trouble with Hallmark is that their formula is so streamlined that not one film stands out above the rest. So how do we tackle these movies in an interesting way?

Then it occurred to us…if every Hallmark Christmas movie is the same, it shouldn't matter which movie we choose. In fact, we could all watch a different movie, and fix the Hallmark formula itself! 

So that's what we did! Liam watched Jingle Around the Clock, Scott screened Every Christmas Has a Story and Gregg sat through Crown for Christmas. We then evaluate the Christmas movie mill and give the studio some notes on how to improve the product.

Happy holidays, Armchair Screenwriters!

Show Note Links:
Liam's Sketch Group The Debutants

I Have Some Notes boldly goes to the one branch of the Star Trek franchise we’ve never gone before! Star Trek (2009) offers an exciting blockbuster reimagining of the classic Original Series, captained by the one and only J.J. Abrams (and thank goodness there is not more than one of him!). 

Liam, Scott, and Gregg riff on ways to clean up the convoluted time travel plot, add some depth to the supporting cast, and try to put the third act back on trek…er…track.

Some weeks back our Discord channel erupted in a lively discussion over a recent article from Variety titled Toxic Fandom: How Hollywood Is Battling Fans Who Are ‘Just Out for Blood’. In it, journalist Adam B. Vary reports about the effects toxic fandom is having on the personal lives of actors and how studios are combating it from hiring security firms to focus grouping diehard fans.

The article inspired us to explore the topic more deeply in a Side Notes episode. This was an inspiring and enlightening conversation, and I hope you all get as much out of it as we did.

Back next week with another movie fix, see you then!

It's nearly Halloween and we wanted to watch a creepy, blood-curdling movie for this week's episode. Unfortunately, we watched Insidious instead, a film whose spine-chilling twist is that it's not a haunted house movie, it's a haunted kid movie. Eat your heart out Wes Craven.

Liam, Scott, and Gregg propose a cold open with some fun ambiguity that adds much more intrigue to Patrick Wilson's character. They also work in music that plays a central role in the climax, something that was honestly a huge missed opportunity.

After years stuck in development hell, all Sony could muster was to poop an incredibly mid adaptation of its triple-A video game UNCHARTED. Almost perfectly miscast, Uncharted succeeds only in misunderstanding what made the games so appealing.

Liam, Scott, and Gregg restructure the cold open in a way that unlocks a potentially fun adventure script with consistent themes and plenty of treasure-hunting intrigue.

We're back to season 10 of I Have Some Notes! It's a new season of cuts, keeps, punch-ups, and tweaks on your favourite (?) mediocre movies!

It's been a while since we circled back to the Alien franchise, which is surprising considering how plagued the series is with stinkers. But we'd inevitably try to fix Ridley Scott's follow-up to Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, and here we are.

Follow along with us this season on all our social media, especially Discord where we're having a blast discussing movies every week. Don't bother following us on Twitter, however, we have officially left the platform for reasons I'm sure you implicitly understand.

For our Season 9 finale, we dawned our nerdiest pair of boxing gloves for a Franchise Fight to determine the best science fiction franchise of all time! Gregg argues for Star Trek (obviously), Scott backs Star Wars, and Liam makes the case for Doctor Who.

Thanks to all our listeners for making Season 9 a success, despite some turbulence in the spring. We appreciate you all and are so happy to have built this little niche community of armchair screenwriters. Onward for Season 10!

In a fortuitous confluence of events, we all happened to see Deadpool & Wolverine in the theater opening weekend and figured we can't NOT do an episode on it, right?

And episode we did! While we all quite liked Ryan Reynold's love letter to the 20th Century Fox era of Marvel movies, we found a couple of things that might have tightened the film up.

00:07:17 – General Thoughts
00:13:11 – Trailer/Plot Summary
00:15:29 – Movie Review
00:44:03 – Pitches and Fixes
01:04:35 – Listener Comments

Twister, not to be confused with Twisters, is a disaster/thriller directed by complete loose cannon, Jan De Bont. The former Roar DP shoved Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton in a dirty truck and drove them up and down Tornado Alley stopping to shoot at random locations without a concern for coordinator or safety. We appreciate that kind of shoot-by-the-hip filmmaking, as we are shoot-by-the-hip writers who aim to fix a movie in, oh, say an hour. An hour and a half tops!

Listen in to our rewrites now!

Once every couple of decades Jerry Seinfeld gets bored enough driving classic cars and bottomless pots of coffee to make a movie. So what inspires this behemoth of comedy to pen a script worthy of the storied history of the silver screen? In an increasingly divided world, what draws this titan of jest to cut through the noise to deliver a heavy cultural impact?

Bees.

And Poptarts.

Robyn Slack joins us again to remaster and rehabilitate the script for UNFROSTED! Together we find stronger motivations to hang the comedy off of and delete some pointless references to current events.