I Have Some Notes

Some weeks back our Discord channel erupted in a lively discussion over a recent article from Variety titled Toxic Fandom: How Hollywood Is Battling Fans Who Are ‘Just Out for Blood’. In it, journalist Adam B. Vary reports about the effects toxic fandom is having on the personal lives of actors and how studios are combating it from hiring security firms to focus grouping diehard fans. The article inspired us to explore the topic more deeply in a Side Notes episode. This was an inspiring and enlightening conversation, and I hope you all get as much out of it as we did. Back next week with another movie fix, see you then!

It's nearly Halloween and we wanted to watch a creepy, blood-curdling movie for this week's episode. Unfortunately, we watched Insidious instead, a film whose spine-chilling twist is that it's not a haunted house movie, it's a haunted kid movie. Eat your heart out Wes Craven. Liam, Scott, and Gregg propose a cold open with some fun ambiguity that adds much more intrigue to Patrick Wilson's character. They also work in music that plays a central role in the climax, something that was honestly a huge missed opportunity.

After years stuck in development hell, all Sony could muster was to poop an incredibly mid adaptation of its triple-A video game UNCHARTED. Almost perfectly miscast, Uncharted succeeds only in misunderstanding what made the games so appealing. Liam, Scott, and Gregg restructure the cold open in a way that unlocks a potentially fun adventure script with consistent themes and plenty of treasure-hunting intrigue.

We're back to season 10 of I Have Some Notes! It's a new season of cuts, keeps, punch-ups, and tweaks on your favourite (?) mediocre movies! It's been a while since we circled back to the Alien franchise, which is surprising considering how plagued the series is with stinkers. But we'd inevitably try to fix Ridley Scott's follow-up to Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, and here we are. Follow along with us this season on all our social media, especially Discord where we're having a blast discussing movies every week. Don't bother following us on Twitter, however, we have officially left the platform for reasons I'm sure you implicitly understand.

For our Season 9 finale, we dawned our nerdiest pair of boxing gloves for a Franchise Fight to determine the best science fiction franchise of all time! Gregg argues for Star Trek (obviously), Scott backs Star Wars, and Liam makes the case for Doctor Who. Thanks to all our listeners for making Season 9 a success, despite some turbulence in the spring. We appreciate you all and are so happy to have built this little niche community of armchair screenwriters. Onward for Season 10!

In a fortuitous confluence of events, we all happened to see Deadpool & Wolverine in the theater opening weekend and figured we can't NOT do an episode on it, right? And episode we did! While we all quite liked Ryan Reynold's love letter to the 20th Century Fox era of Marvel movies, we found a couple of things that might have tightened the film up. 00:07:17 – General Thoughts 00:13:11 – Trailer/Plot Summary 00:15:29 – Movie Review 00:44:03 – Pitches and Fixes 01:04:35 – Listener Comments

Twister, not to be confused with Twisters, is a disaster/thriller directed by complete loose cannon, Jan De Bont. The former Roar DP shoved Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton in a dirty truck and drove them up and down Tornado Alley stopping to shoot at random locations without a concern for coordinator or safety. We appreciate that kind of shoot-by-the-hip filmmaking, as we are shoot-by-the-hip writers who aim to fix a movie in, oh, say an hour. An hour and a half tops! Listen in to our rewrites now!

Once every couple of decades Jerry Seinfeld gets bored enough driving classic cars and bottomless pots of coffee to make a movie. So what inspires this behemoth of comedy to pen a script worthy of the storied history of the silver screen? In an increasingly divided world, what draws this titan of jest to cut through the noise to deliver a heavy cultural impact? Bees. And Poptarts. Robyn Slack joins us again to remaster and rehabilitate the script for UNFROSTED! Together we find stronger motivations to hang the comedy off of and delete some pointless references to current events.

We're back from hiatus and for our return, we wanted to pick an exciting, uplifting movie that would match our excitement of being back…and for some reason, we chose Star Trek: Nemesis. The movie that ended the golden era of Star Trek is truly a depressing watch. It's dark, rapey, and far from the optimistic future depicted in The Next Generation's 7-year TV run. We certainly had our work cut out for us imagining a rewrite for this one. Still, it's good to be back! Thanks for your patience while we were away, we're excited to bring you new movie rewrites all summer long.

Welcome to the first-ever Intellectual Property Lottery! We took 20 of your suggestions for IP that have yet to be turned into a feature film and with the roll of a 20-sided die, randomly selected one for each host to pitch how they would adapt it. Comedian, musician, director, playwright, and all-around talented dude Robyn Slack joins us for another episode of slinging elevator pitches. His band, Success 5000, has a brand new album called Sad Forever, so please check that out, cause it's great! But also sad. But great! But sad. Forever. 00:02:56 – The Property Draw List 00:04:32 – Chrono Trigger 00:22:27 – Scrabble 00:34:25 – Shadow Run 00:42:30 – Megaman 00:56:35 – Alpha Flight 01:00:23 – Axe Body Spray 01:04:54 – Fraggle Rock 01:08:08 – Captain Planet

Baseball diehard Scott Belford of The Walk Off podcast joins us to rewrite our very first sports movie! Well…sports adjacent movie, anyway. The only problem is Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!! is a pretty good movie, you guys. We give it the old college try, though (Get it?!). Scott and Scott find an opportunity to add a secondary protagonist, Liam seeks to pass the Bechdel test, and Gregg questions whether adding any kind of central conflict would just undermine the whole point of the movie. 00:14:01 – Plot Summary 00:15:09 – Movie Disussion 00:30:50 – Fixes 00:55:38 – Listener Comments

We've teased it all season and at last, it's here, the great rewrittening of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania! Of course, we wouldn't have hyped it up so much if we didn't have some awesome guests lined up. Josh and Alex of Talking SMAC join us to reimagine the movie that officially landed Marvel in "jumped the shark" territory. 00:13:06 – Plot Summary 00:14:56 – Movie Discussion 00:38:36 – Rewrites 01:04:37 – Listener Comments

What makes a movie bad? What are the confluences of unfortunate events and decisions that cause a film not to work? Liam, Scott, and Gregg share their theories and experiences on the wide world of putrid cinema.

We have an absolutely MASSIVE year-end wrap-up show for you, but I promise we didn't plan it that way. The intention was for the first section of the episode to be a rapid-fire list of movies we loved and wanted to mention, but we just couldn't help but discuss each of them at length. Hey, give us a break. This is the one episode of the year we get to talk about actual good movies, we're understandably a little over-eager. Below are the timecodes if you'd like to jump around to the movies you really want to hear us talk about: "Rapid Fire" 2023 Movies: 00:04:56 – Spider-man: Across the Spider-verse 00:07:25 – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem 00:08:47 – Super Mario Bros. 00:11:03 – The Creator 00:13:04 – Dream Scenario 00:15:18 – Leo 00:17:32 – Talk to Me 00:19:50 – Reality 00:21:25 – Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3 00:23:31 – No One Will Save You 00:25:12 – Barbie 00:28:43 – Asteroid City 00:33:06 – Lebanese Burger Mafia 00:36:08 – Marc Maron: From Bleak to Dark 00:37:32 – The Holdovers Most Disap

Zack Snyder may be this podcast's most prolific source of content. Whenever a Snyder joint drops we know it will be ripe for pitching rewrites. While Rebel Moon kicks off with surprising promise, the saga quickly develops into empty action and even emptier characters. Scott and Gregg try their best to restructure the plot and add more intrigue to the large cast of characters, while Liam takes a big swing at making this a much more challenging artistic affair. 00:08:08 – Plot Summary 00:09:23 – Movie Discussion 00:29:45 – Rewrites 00:48:43 – Listener Comments

The legend of Indiana Jones ends in an unfortunate snoozefest that fails to live up to the vaunted films of the 80s. Fortunately, that leaves us all kinds of relics to rearrange in the museum of Indy. Scott, Liam, and Gregg look to bring Indiana Jones to a close by interrogating the nature of the character and his history of looting. In addition, we add a fan-favourite character while conversely trying to make the audience feel as uncomfortable as possible. 06:42 - Plot Summary 08:27 - Movie Discussion 30:10 - Punch-up 01:02:17 - Listener Comments

The Flash is another in a long line of troubled DC movies. Although the core is simple and smart, director Andy Muschietti loses the handle to blockbuster bloat. Fortunately, Scott has a simple, yet brilliant change that takes the drama to a whole new level and opens up the opportunity to keep the scope smaller and more focused. 00:14:43 - Plot Summary 00:17:06 - Movie Discussion 00:41:00 - Movie Punch-up 00:58:35 - Listener Comments  

Ducan Jones' follow-up to Moon dropped, it barely made a sound. It remains one of the many Netflix original misses that have been scarcely seen – must less heard – by anyone. But hey, we were looking for a noir cyberpunk movie, and this one fits the bill! Laena Anderson of Quantum Kickflip fame joins us to give a stronger voice to Mute. They deftly adjust the challenges the protagonist's disability would present in an ableist future, while Scott looks to change the film's protagonist altogether. Gregg tweaks a single scene, again, and Liam…well Liam may not have even watched this one. 15:57 – Plot Summary 18:07 – Movie Discussion 41:44 – Rewrites 01:06:44 – Listner Comments

This week we pitch modern remakes for the O.G. horror flick: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. A classic of the Weimar Germany era of expressionist films, Dr. Caligari left an indelible mark on the horror genre with its haunting score, trippy hand-painted lettering and sets, and unique film tinting. I can say with confidence I've never seen a movie like it. You can watch it for free here. Liam and Gregg propose remakes that are essentially artistic love letters to a classic, while Scott zags in the other direction creating a techno horror/thriller that pays homage to the original. If you are interested in checking out the short films that inspired Liam's remake, here is a list of links: The Periwig Maker – Stop motion short from 1999, based on Daniel Defoe's novel A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), narrated by Kenneth Branagh. https://vimeo.com/94166448 Flying Sailor – Canadian short by Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis https://www.nfb.ca/film/flying-sailor-the/ Behind Closed Doors https://youtu.be/H9InaUJm0A8

Ti West's X is honestly a pretty great horror/slasher movie, but would we let a quality film from A24 get in the way of our Monday morning screenwriting? Hell no! The question for us was whether X took its themes all the way to the finish line. We propose a couple of character moments for Maxime that might done just that, while also making the deaths of certain members of the film crew more tragic. 10:46 - Film Discussion 37:34 - Rewrites for X 1:00:16 - Listner Comments