Summer Movie Roundup

I've seen an unusually high number of movies so far this summer. Well, unusually high for a married guy with two kids, one of them a toddler. Somehow I've been able to make it to the theater this movie season, and I've got some opinions.

Iron Man: Loved it.
I knew absolutely nothing about the Iron Man character going in to this film, not really being a Comic Book Guy. But the previews were compelling, and Robert Downey Jr. is always fun to watch. Sure enough, his performance was one of the highlights of the film, portraying an accidental superhero convincingly.
I liked the film's solution to the universal "super powered suit power supply" problem. It was internally consistent. There was still the niggling issue of g-forces on your brain while flipping around in the suit, but hey, going to the movies is largely about suspension of disbelief.

And speaking of suspension of disbelief...

Speed Racer: Loved it.
Yeah, I hear you sighing is disbelief. How could I love this piece of empty claptrap, hated by almost every critic on the planet. Simple, really: When I was a kid I used to come home from school every day and watch the original Speed Racer cartoon. Every day. The Speed Racer movie was made for people like me, people with an intimate, encyclopedic knowledge of the TV show. Throughout the film, time and time again, I noticed countless subtle nods to the TV show, quick little shots, that I'm guessing the vast majority of viewers wouldn't even notice, and many of them made me laugh out loud.
That said, if you're someone who doesn't have a deep understanding of the subtle world of Speed Racer, then yes, I could understand how the film might come up short for you. But I have to ask the critics who were harsh, who criticized the film for a flimsy plot - Well what were you expecting? It's Speed Racer, for god's sake!
I also found the film to be quiet simply stunning, visually. Bold, unique and groundbreaking, very stylistic.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: Loved it!
We're all big Indy fans here at the Bittner house, and there was a lot of anticipation leading up to this film, balanced with a certain amount of trepidation. Could Harrison Ford still pull of being Indy, with his advanced age?
To me, the great thing about this film was that it felt like an Indy movie, from start to finish. The pacing, the writing, the cinematography, the direction, the humor, all fit the Indy mold. They set out to make a solid Indy movie, not to break any new ground, and they did it. Yes, the thing with the aliens was a bit "out there" (ha!) but no more so than the Holy Grail, Lost Ark or Seeing Stones, if you think about it. And it fit in the tone of the era the film was set in, the 50's, with the space race and the rush to beat the Russians.

Am I going to easy on these films? Has a year and a half trapped inside my home with an infant made me soft, made me just so happy get out of the house that I'll love anything put in front of me? Perhaps. But I think not.

My wife is going to be dragging me to Sex and the City soon, so we'll see how that goes...

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"He said it right."

Reader Adam made a great point in the comments to the last post -

I still have people who try to write scripts that have had one too many English classes and try to write for the human voice with proper English. The problem is that nobody speaks in complete sentences.

Adam is dead-on right here, and we've run into this situation countless times over the years. These days, when we ask for a script from a client we frame it by asking for a "script outline" and tell them that we'll likely be fine-tuning it for the spoken word, then coming back to them for approval. That way, whoever is doing the writing knows ahead of time that there will be changes, and they're not as likely to get their feathers ruffled. Although sometimes they still get their feathers ruffled. 

This clip from The West Wing sizes up the situation rather nicely - 

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Why Most Execs Give Lousy Presentations

Andy Craig posts a really spot-on article at chiefexecutive.net on why so many corporate execs, otherwise excellent communicators, give such lousy presentations.

"You didn’t put in the hard work in advance of your presentation. As a result, you ask your audience to work hard to follow your Death by PowerPoint presentation and the blather loosely associated with it."

Check out the entire article here.

Rehearsal is critical for any live presentation. And not just an "Oh, I'll read through this presentation and go over what I'm going to say in my head..." kind of rehearsal. Get out the projector. Use the remote. Talk out loud. Run through the slides. You will quickly find the flat spots, the transitions that don't work, the phrases that are just plain hard to say. You'll go in more relaxed too, knowing you've actually ironed out the rough spots and you won't have to deal with them on the fly.

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