Ramblings – Page 2 – MarlyK's Ramblings

Paper Dolls

You know what I hop paperdolls e the next wave of feminism is about? I hope it’s about how we women are human. I don’t want to be a superwoman or an archetype. I just want the right to be seen and treated as a human being who is good at some things, clueless about other things and who sometimes needs a little help and other times knows just the right thing to make things better. A human being who sometimes has a bad day and doesn’t feel like smiling all the time like a Barbie doll when, say, she just had to meet last minute deadlines at work, and has just gotten scary news from the doctor. A human being who sometimes doesn’t know what the hell she is doing, who makes mistakes, who tries her best and often falls short, but sometimes is unexpectedly brave and strong. Just a person, not an object of desire, not a heroine, not a goddess, not an Earth Mother.

When do we get to be that? When will people accept us as just people who happen to have female reproductive organs? Is that really too much to ask?

The Diabolically Solicitous Friend

There’s a certain type of person who thrives on making even the simplest request into a huge complicated mess. For instance, if I ask for something, instead of giving me a Yes or No answer, they’ll provide additional options that, in their view, are so much better than whatever I originally wanted. Like, say I ask for a glass of water. They’ll tell me: “Are you sure you’d like water? Because orange juice quenches your thirst AND supplies your daily requirement of vitamin C.”

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Typewriters and the Art of Attentiveness

After several years of writing scripts, I’ve decided to go back to writing fiction and, let me tell you, I’m finding that my prose muscles are really out of shape. (Terrible metaphor, I know, but it feels exactly like I’m going on a run after several years of being a couch potato.) That spare script style has made it hard for me to set a scene in full sensory detail. But what’s made it most difficult is the fact that I’m so easily distracted nowadays: by email, by friends, by a constant stream of, well, information. And when I do sit down to write, I find my attention wandering. My usual tactic when this happens is to take out the airport card on my laptop and lock my phone away. When things are really bad, I just write longhand. Then I read this article about typewriters and how they aid attentiven ess.

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Some Dangers of Being Your Own Executive Producer

New technologies mean that filmmakers now may have a hand in production and distribution. You can now write, produce, edit, and find a distributor for your own film, without having to resort to third parties. I don’t need to tell you how empowering this is, but in acting as your own mini-production company, there are pitfalls. The most relevant one is quality control.

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Are RomComs Over?

In the past few years, quite a few film critics and commentators have written about the demise of the romantic comedy. The latest volley is Christopher Orr’s arti cle in The Atlantic, bemoaning the quality of the genre. His main argument is that it’s played out because none of the traditional obstacles to romance exist any longer: class conflict, parental disapproval, money problems, etc. Since I’ve been thinking about this topic for many years now, I was all set to write a post about the only obstacle that’s left in modern love that DOES keep people apart: internal conflict. But Slate’s Alyssa Rosenberg beat me to it, penning a great post about how modern romance has changed, but modern romcoms haven’t. I’m not going to rehash her insights, so I’ll come at the same idea from a different angle: How can screenwriters improve the modern crop of romcoms?

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