I Have Some Notes

We recently watched two heavy social media related documentaries, The Social Dilemma and Feels Good Man, both of which left us jonesing to work out our feelings about. Sorry, we don’t offer any fixes for the giant mess Mr. Zuckerberg has made, that’s a bit outside our wheelhouse. We do, however, dive deep into the social and political ramifications of his software and how Facebook, along with many other companies, shape our everyday lives for good and for ill.

Venom is good…actually? Sure there's a serious lack of Spider-man, and there's at least 40-minutes of pointless globetrotting, but overall we have to admit this film is pretty fun. Of course, that doesn't mean we didn't find plenty to tweak. I mean, the titular symbiote has some real motivation problems, and Riz Ahmed needs a better relationship with his new genocidal alien buddy Riot. No amount of fun can stand in the way of our movie meddling, and we do it all with fan favourite guest, Danica LeBlanc!

September marks the beginning of season six of I Have Some Notes. Six seasons, where does the time go? What is time? I seriously don't know anymore. Speaking of milestones, we pass 100 episodes like three shows ago and didn't even mention it. Acknowledging significant milestones is for suckers. Anyway, for the 104th episode *party streamers* we watched DUNGEONS & DRAGONS with our wonderful guest and D&D expert Glenna Schowalter. It's the kind of movie that takes gleeful pride in making all the wrong choices . None of us were interested in fixing it so much as pitching a page-one rewrite.

The Old Guard is a pretty decent movie…there, the end, no need to listen to the show! I suppose if you missed the dulcet tones of our voices, we’ve got some tweaks that might be fun to consider. Gregg adds a new sentimental brotherly subplot, Scott sends Nile into the arms of the villains in the first act and Liam eliminates the TV pilot-esque stinger. Special thanks to Deja for providing research on this film for us. He dug up all sorts of great tidbits including the fact that the post-production team was made up of 85% women. This is especially impressive considering among the top-grossing films in 2019 only 6% of VFX supervisors were women and just 25% were editors. Even if you weren’t over the moon about the movie, this is definitely refreshing in a frustratingly male dominated industry.

A listener recently asked if we've done an X-Men film yet, and we thought to ourselves: Wow, what an excellent untapped franchise! Of course, what better film for us to tackle than the worst one. This could be our last stand, friends. Liam, Scott, Gregg and special guest Olav Rokne take their first class in X-Men, united by the franchises' potential future, haunted by its past. Together we look to stave off the screenplay apocalypse and attempt to resurrect Dark Phoenix.

Indiana Jones, beloved cultural icon and with a fan base that spans generations, surely suggesting rewrites to a sacred franchise will go over well on the internet. Liam, Scott and Gregg struggle mightily with trying to fix the character of Willie Scott, while finding a bit of an easier time eliminating the films offensive elements. The end result is a reimagined story that belongs in a museum.

We're back from a brief hiatus! Hope the armchair screenwriting community got along without us, we certainly missed you. This week we're programming updates for the TRON: LEGACY, Walt Disney's attempt to cash in on a property that made almost no money the first time around. Sounds like a great business strategy to us! We spend time tweaking the villain, adding conflict for the main characters, and building a new plot device to beef up the secondary characters. Tune to the episode then let us know what you thought of our changes.

Sorry, everyone, the newest episode has been postponed. In the wake of the horrific murder of George Floyd and the massive protests that followed, now doesn’t feel like the time to riff on mediocre movies, so we’re kicking the Tron Legacy episode down the road a bit. We’ll be back soon, but in the meantime, if you are looking for ways to listen, learn, and participate in the fights against systemic racism, here are some things you can do. On the listen and learning side you can start right here on the Alberta Podcast Network with Modern Manhood’s latest episode “The Murder of George Floyd” in which German speaks to Avry Lewis-McDougall and Sharon Ruyter about their experience living as black people in Edmonton. I also highly recommend the podcast 1619 by Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ava DuVernay’s documentary The 13th. Follow the voices of black and other marginalized groups on social media and soak up all you can about what it’s like to walk in their shoes and how you can be a better ally. As for participating

At the height of their careers, Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton joined forces for an explosive disaster movie that had all the trappings of a certified hit. Unfortunately the box office did not agree, and this rather decent volcano flick has laid dormant ever since. Untill now! We power up our script rewriting robot and attempt to pull Dante's Peak out of the rubble.

James Cameron spent years trying to put a live action version of Alita: Battle Angel up on the silver screen, and once he finally did it took us less than an hour to tell him all the things he could have done better. Sorry James, such is the nature of the internet, eventually three white guys with microphones are going to unnecessarily disassemble all your good work. Truthfully though, Alita is not a bad film, and while we put it through our notes process, most of our proposed changes revolve around putting this film in a better position to succeed as a series. We're just trying to help you make another buck James! We don't want you to starve.

Hey, do you love Aladdin? Do you love the Genie and Carpet and Abu? Well now they’re back, in soulless live-action remake form! Hooray. This episode takes a few twists and turns as we discuss the cultural space Aladdin occupies and how that would affect any rewrites or changes to the film. We also get into a deep tangent about the value of remakes compared to more original screenplays. It’s a good one, listen in!

We asked you to send us your questions for the I Have Some Notes crew, and holy crap did you deliver! We spent this week’s episode covering topics from how COVID-19 will affect movie theatres to our favourite/most hated movies of all time to whether we regret doing The Mighty Ducks (no). Huge thanks to all our listeners who submitted questions and a special thanks to our podcasting friends Flicks X-Rayed, Repodcasting and Cinematological for sending us audio questions!

Life is a movie from 2017 that nobody watched, which makes it perfect podcast material, right? Look, we’re wannabe screenwriters, not wannabe marketing experts. It’s honestly pretty decent, though. There’s a lot of fun sci-fi and horror-y things going on, and a dynamite cast including Rebecca Ferguson, Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynolds. Still it’s not perfect, or we wouldn’t be looking for put it through our notes process. Listen in as we debate if Life should be more science-y or more horror-ish, whether the twist should stay or go and how long we should keep Ryan Reynolds alive.

This week we take a microscope to the 2001 blockbuster attempt, Evolution. Liam, Scott and Gregg recoil in horror as they watch a decent sci-fi premise turned unnecessarily into a wacky goof-ball comedy. Reimagining a comedy can be difficult, particularly when "make laugh better" is not an insightful note, but we manage to dig a bit deeper, add some stakes and create an arc or two all while downplaying some characters who were played by poor performers *cough* Orlando Jones *cough*.

What happens when you combine unchecked cinematic ambition with a the world's entire supply of cocaine? You get easily Bruce Willis' strangest (and possible best) film of his career. As you may recall, we were forced to watch Hudson Hawk after losing the Rotten Tomator Prognosticator to listener Michael Senchuk. Hope you enjoy the episode Mike, because it holds a bit of a surprise.

After having our souls crushed by movies like Beneath the Planet of the Apes and Ready Player One, we decided to take a breather from really, really bad movies. For once during the pandemic we wanted to watch a good movie, so we fired up Netflix and hit play on Sharon Stone's THE QUICK AND THE DEAD. How do you rewrite or reimagine a movie you have a lot of affection for? With great difficulty! But, as they say, art is never finished, only abandoned. We do, however, end up adjusting the Sam Raimi's firing pin slightly, but only after spending 30 minutes praising his flick.

Are your eyes and ears ready to be assaulted by the densest collage of pop-culture references ever put to film? Perfect! Grab a Jolt, fire up that projection screen TV and insert a coin for Ready Player One. For an unremarkable film, we couldn't stop talking about it, this is our 2nd longest episode ever. It took a long time to record too, as we were having some audio problems again. Ain't podcastin' fun.

You've been to the The Planet of the Apes, but have you ever wondered "Hey, what's under there? What's beneath that little planet?" Well, wonder no longer! Today we grab our rewriting shovels and dig up Beneath the Planet of the Apes, starring Charlton Heston and a guy who looks exactly like Charlton Heston. Just a quick note, we had some audio difficulty with this one, we did all we could to touch up the audio and the result is completely listenable, just slightly noisy. Enjoy!

It's a crazy time on this little blue ball of ours, so we hope we can provide you with a little distraction by reimagining the 2017 remake of Power Rangers. Thanks to listener Thomas Meehan for suggesting this movie to us. The boilerplate pitch for this film must have been "Hey, what if we remade The Breakfast Club, but it was also Power Rangers?" but somehow doesn't capitalize. Instead, this remake contains a whole lot of training montage and not much else.  Gregg mistakenly attributes Power Rangers to Michael Bay's production company, which is incorrect. I could have edited it out, but I'm lazy. Go Go Lazy Producer!

We have yet to tackle a romantic comedy here at the I Have Some Notes studios – a.k.a. Gregg's basement – and for our first rom-com punch up we decided to examine perhaps the greatest on screen couple of all time, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, in easily their second best effort: You've Got Mail. We had a lot to say about this one, although the rewrites themselves were quick and easy. Oh, and here is a link to the Onion article Scott mentions.