Monday, August 5, 2013

TAKING FRANKENSTEIN’S SCALPEL TO SCARED SILLY

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Hello fans. Today I come to you to reveal that I've reached an impasse. After taking some wise counsel (specifically from my wife) into account, I must be honest and face the facts:

Many of my most recent Scared Silly reviews have just been too long, and not properly edited. Through some misguided notion I conceived that readers would want as much detail as possible, coupled with a hyper-focus brought on by ADHD tendencies, we've arrived at this place.

This has been an issue on several levels. Since I can only work on Scared Silly in my spare time (there is no publisher paying me to write this – the payment will come on the back end, after the final manuscript is delivered to whichever publisher decides to publish it) – in-between a day job with ever-increasing demands of my time as well as outside projects – writing long reviews is just counterproductive.

Take my previous review, of The Three Stooges in Orbit. It didn't take me weeks to put that together; it took months. The end result is a rather unwieldy concoction where I give way too many details on too many gags and too much plot minutia.

I've written a few reviews like the one above. Not only do they take way too long to write for someone who doesn't have the luxury of a lot of time to work on the project to start with, but in a way they also take away some of the fun for folks who may want to watch the films. A good review captures enough of the flavor to enable someone to decide whether they want to watch a movie or not. It doesn't give away every detail.

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Needless to say, I’ll have to go back and rewrite some of my lengthier reviews once I (hopefully) land a publisher. And I’ll have to return to the more balanced reviews I wrote earlier on, such as Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla.

Hoping to get more reviews up here soon. I have some shorts lined up and if all goes well perhaps there won’t be as many tumbleweeds rolling through here the rest of this year…

Now, apropos of nothing… or maybe apropos of everything (if you equate film editing to book editing that is), here’s Olsen & Johnson: (with an assist from a couple of our other favorite funnymen, Shemp Howard and Hugh Herbert):



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