Mafferties

I've been mad busy for the past few days.

I was obsessively writing on my feature, re-writing the other two features and helping my little sister write her first screenplay. On top of that, I had school (great fun, like a brick in the head) and I'm writer/producer of a film for the Vancouver Film Race '08. THAT is also great fun and keeps me crazy busy almost all the time.

I have a good crew for it - my DOP and Editor works for YTV, and my Director keeps calling me to brag about how he worked on Battlestar Galactica last night (grr).

Today is an off-day. I took the entire day away from life because I'm getting a tattoo, on my arm, of the Seal of Rasillon (it's a Doctor Who/ Timelord thing).

I've been on a John Cusack kick lately. We studied Con Air in class and he's just adorable in it, so I got hooked. I watched:

"High Fidelity"
Good storyline, good acting, good ending. Kind of emo.

"America's Sweethearts"
Very sweet, good storyline with a lot of good comedic moments. Sometimes the comedy goes a bit too far, but the relationships are great, and the whole staying with Monks and the what follows as far as that goes is rather well done.

and "1408".
A 'Stephen King' style movie. The character is very well flushed out, it has some BAM! spooky moments, some really cheesy moments... but the ending is kind of blah.

I also saw Kung-Fu Panda which was very cute and deffinately worth watching.

I should go now. Cirque Du Soleil is in town and I have to go acquire an Illustration job so I can afford a ticket xD



"Do you have an Entourage?"
"I'm a paranoid schitzophrenic. I am my own entourage." ~America's Sweethearts

Apocolypt-NO

On a five day break from school because we are between terms. I spent from after school Wednesday night, until just now in the early hours of Tuesday morning, writing. Stopping only to eat cake, shower and use the bathroom. I left my apartment only once, and that was to meander over to the gas-station convienance store (dressed in shorts, hooker boots, the scarf of justice and a really large yellow sweater), because we were out of food and I needed cake to survive. The life of a writer. So difficult. So hectic.

I finished the first draft of my feature on Saturday evening and decided to reward my greatness with watching a movie (thinking of it now, that's vaguely ironic). My roommate had been out to his sketch group and one of the other intrepid artists leant him a movie, which I was excited to discover was Mel Gibson's thing, "Apocolypto". So, in the darkness of our livingroom we watched it and it was dreadful.

Okay, not entirely dreadful. As much as my roommate complained about the shoddy cinematics and bizarre directorial shots, I rather liked them. And the characters has neat tatoos and it was supposed to be a Mayan culture, so it was a bit interesting. But, from a writer's point of veiw, I'd rather stick two fingers down my throat than have to watch it again. If Gibson tried to pass that script through a writing class, he'd get his knuckles rapt. Honestly.

It starts out focusing on this hefty character, who's getting made fun of by his peers because he's unable to father a child (shooting blanks, as it were). And this is the main story for the first 15-20 minutes, along with this thing that happens when a village's worth of people walk through the area and say that they were ravaged. You can immediately point that out as the inciting incident. And this is all well and good, until - ultimately - the main character's village is attacked and burned (essentially ravaged) by the bad guys.

The entire "shooting blanks" plotline is ditched, then and there. Also, that hefty guy you came to sort-of root for, as a village underdog? Apparently he's not even the main character. He just sits about for a few minutes blubbering about how life isn't fair and he wishes he could die, and, from then on, he plays no role in the movie at all! OH WAIT, but there's MORE!

Apparently the main character is this fellow called Jaguar Paw. The switch wouldn't be so bad, except that this guy is the main tormentor of the hefty guy, so any sympathy that we could have mustered for this character has flown out the window, twenty minutes ago. But WAIT! There's MORE!

They have all the prisoners from JP's village out in a line of this field, and they're killing them, one by one. But then (after taking an arrow in the chest) JP survives and manages to get away! Out-running all of the perfectly fit, uninjured people chasing after him. And they NEVER go back to show us what happened to the other prisoners who had been sentenced to die - one of them being the hefty guy that I sort-of cared about!

And I'm not even going to go into the whole, "Ending the film with the arrival of the British tall-ships". Despite, y'know. It was the MAYAN CULTURE and in the real world, the Brit's never showed up the shores and met up with the Mayans. To quote Dylan Moran as Bernard Black from "Black Books"::

"Don't make me get sick into my own scorn!"

So if you can look past the bizarre directing, un-fullfilling storyline, and all the little things that you could never believe (Taking an arrow to the chest only to rip it out, get up and start running again for miles and miles, then another arrow and still running for miles... falling and hanging by your neck on a rope over a cliff and not dying...etc), then it's not a half-bad film.

Ha! Mel Gibson?

EPIC FAIL.

Meet Henri

The one weekend where I don't have anything homework to do! Other than random Doc. things. So I've been working on my character designs and the like for a comic pitch for Slave Labour.

Meet Henri.

Oh boy, Oh Boy

I'm in-between classes now and isn't it just the worst thing? I have a class from 9-12 in the morning and then 6-9 in the night, which really isn't that fantastic if you think about it, having to drag myself off to school twice in one day. Torture, really. It's only redeeming quality is the 6-9 class is for Sketch Comedy, so it's mostly worth it.

Then again, our first class Tuesday morning is Documentary, which sounds like it would be disgustingly boring, but it's almost just as fun. Our teacher, David Ozier , is rather clever. My partner, Aaron, and I are also doing a pitch project for Doc. class about AIDS as a Government Conspiracy. So even if David was a boring old wheat crumb, I think I'd still find the class fairly entertaining.

I'm a bit nervous about workshopping my sketch at class today, because it includes themes of animal boinking, penis envy and murderous rampages. Must remember not to let my roommate read it, or he'll start blanking me. Maybe. I'm not sure if he's clever enough to pick up on the fact that one of the characters is a caricature of him. Oh dear.

Lee:: I didn't actually make the connection between my net name and your company until after the fact. Copernicus just *sounds* cool, and I looked it up. He's some type of super-cool astrological scientist, and so it fits anyways, because most of the stuff I write is science fiction. All complete coincidence, of course.



"Tapioooooooooooooca!" ~Colin Mochrie, "Whose Line Is It Anyways"

First Entry Blues

I've always hated these whole beginning, introduction things. They're usually so boring--Hello, my name is so-and-so, and I'm a writer and blah blah potatoes. I want to jump right into Act 2, and start going on about "Ohh THIS was bad, and THIS was squeaky, and, etc."

Instead, I'll tell you that my name is not Copernicus, but you WILL call me that. Or Copper. Or Nicus. Or Perni, if you're my grandmother (or have dellusions/aspirations of being my grandmother).

I'm going to write about television things, and writing things, and meeting famous people, relatively famous people and those people who aren't famous but probably should be and my cat. Mainly because I'm a writer. What sort of writer, you don't really wish to ask, but ask anyways because I'm going to tell you in spite of it?

TV writer. Comic book writer/drawer. Feature Film Writer. Monkey Novel Writer. Obscure Television Blogger-writer.

Ohhhh, it's good to be clever!

I met hollywood writer, Michael Basir, today and that was rather brilliant. He came to do a talk and I attended. I ended up being stuck in the third row to the back with a giggling brunette behind me and a guy in front of me with bad hair who blocked my view of Basir and kept interrupting to ask stupid questions. "In Hollywood, do you have to kiss ass?"

The talk was really interesting (you should've been there) and I went up to him afterwards- it was easy to tell who he was, the only guy in the hall surrounded by a semi-circle of people and a crowd of on-lookers to afraid to step closer -and got the chance to talk with him one on one. Basir is pretty smart and a funny guy, but I couldn't help but stare at him once I finally got a good look. He's like somebody genetically engineered Larry David and Harold Ramis into one person, and gave him a balding version of Einstein Hair.

I'm recently very much into the British Comedy show, "Black Books" and the exceeding adorable Dylan Moran, who plays the lead - Bernard Black, a cantankerous and drunken bookshop owner. If you haven't seen the show, you MUST! But don't watch it while in bed, because you'll piss yourself laughing and it won't be very pretty. Best off setting up a telly in the bathroom and parking yourself on the throne for the duration.

I don't really recall what got me going on British Comedy, but I think it might have something to do with a friend of mine, Liam (JD), who's Welsh and is doing a spec for "The IT Crowd", which is another brilliant British Comedy show.

I was on a bit of a Hugh Laurie kick some time ago, and he's actually British in real life. Through Hugh Laurie, I found out about "Black Adder" (although I'll take the rubber chickens being thrown at my head and admit that I'm not exactly a fan of Rowan Atkinson), "Jeeves & Wooster" which was a sort of a disappointment because it came across as "Oh look, you can see her purple leggings" funny as opposed to "british comedy" funny... and "A Bit of Fry and Laurie", a sketch comedy show in the likes of SNL starring Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, holds a small piece of my heart.




Black Books Quote:

Manny: Do you think I should wash my beard?
Bernard: I think you should wash it, yeah. Then shave it off, nail it to a frisbee, and fling it over a rainbow.