Corinne Friesen (Vancouver)

OK – I have to admit, I’m not a B movie affectionado. I make a few exceptions for “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” and “Plan 9 from Outer Space”. I believe I understand what B movies are about, but I just can’t hold the mindset for an hour and a half.

That said, I recognize Bel’s script as an excellent example of a kind of cross-over genre – somewhere between dark & twisted and the classic B movie; between “Reservoir Dogs” and “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman”.

Bel's script is well constructed. It’s funny. It’s clever. Loaded with the sex and raunchiness that sets this cross-over tone.

Saw the ending coming, but that was the fun of it. LOL

Does bog down in the middle. Maybe because the character motivations weren’t that solid? But do they have to be for a B movie? Do motivations have to be solid for your new cross over genre. That’s the quandary.

I think succinctness would be the key. You can’t let a B movie outlast the popcorn! And I think that basic truth must hold here.

Or perhaps it was too many characters? I had trouble tracking them all, (but I’m not sure I’m one to teach you about that, haha). Even so, you had me riveted with Bud and Vivi. They’re a great character combination. I enjoyed them and would go back for more of that.

Oh, and BTW, I’m gonna disagree with Matthew for a change – “many people associate the name “Kohler” with sinks, toilets and bathtubs. You might want to come up with an alternate name for this company”. Sure. But isn’t that one of your many, subtle jokes?

And I’m assuming the final bee swarm went roving at the end. Would help to keep that clear, so men everywhere can keep that in mind! Hehehehe…

Sorry I can't give you more insight here that would be fresh. You've got some very thorough reviews from people more expert in these genres. I'd say they pretty much cover it. Bottom line is, I would enjoy seeing this in the theatres with my girlfriends and a big bag of popcorn. It would be a fun night out. But the best I can say is that I just don't get grabbed by the genre and yet I enjoyed your script, Bel. That's gotta be saying something for your writing skills!

This would be a great “made-for-TV-movie” or “movie of the week”. Teenage girl, driven to excel in academia and on the verge of the Fast Track life is stranded in the forest after her father’s plane crashes. She’s left struggling to just survive.

Justin drew me in immediately with his smooth crafting of the dilemma. I easily got caught up in the emotional dynamics between her and each of her parents. That was very believably written. As the story begins, I can completely understand each person’s position and why those positions produce tension.

The father’s personal sacrifice to save her life was gut wrenching. Perhaps my reaction comes from being a parent myself, but the moment is written well. It’s just never a question in his mind about giving her the only parachute. He’s just getting her out the plane to safety and the only indication that he knows it’s his undoing is that his last words to her, (as he urges her out the door), is that he loves her.

I love also that we don’t see his plane go down, that in her early panic she’s searching wildly for him, when we all know he couldn’t have survived. I think you could have extended the tension and impact of this by not resolving this so quickly. Hold that card in your literary back pocket until a more impactful moment. If, in the back of her mind, he might still be alive, but she thinks about that less and less as survival becomes a key issue. If, eventually, she does find him dead, it would be so intense if it comes at the precise moment when she most needs hope, or if it’s used as a metaphor that marks a key transition point for her character change.

That said, for about 1/3 of this movie you’ve taken on the challenge of telling the tale with virtually no dialogue. The interaction is between the protagonist and the wilderness, (the wilderness becoming, essentially, a character). Hats off to you for that. Unlike some other reviewers here, I think it mostly works, with one exception as I’ll discuss next.

There is one key area that I would focus on for improvement, an aspect that might have put this script in the Semi-Finalist Zone. She’s too competent from the start. The tension in this script has to come from her facing her most impossible corner, the one thing she is worst at, to the point where it might claim her. Her transition needs to be from being an easy target for the wilderness to claim, to a female version of the scientist she encounters – at home in the wilderness, embracing a deeper way of being in the world.

Imagine Sarah Connor as the movie Terminator opens. She’s a mousey little waitress who couldn’t blow off a fly, let alone demolish a state of the art killing machine from the future. By the end, Connor is a warrior woman. Not that I’m suggesting Jane has to become a warrior woman, but I never get the feeling the forest could claim her, so there is no real tension for me in that early survival phase. I think this is why some people think that part of the movie is too long. It wouldn’t be if that tension were there, and if the challenges keep getting bumped up and up and up as she barely manages each one.

If I were watching this on TV, I would have turned off the TV by the second commercial break, (around page 28 or so). Which would have been a shame, cause I would have missed what turned out to be a good movie.

Your writing is excellent enough that I think you could work through such a challenge in your script and produce something that not only engages from start to finish but leaves me feeling like I’d been through the wringer. It’s sooooo close to that now.

A few little details on the side: the scientist talks like a back woods hillbilly. Yet he would have had that way of talking ironed out of him by the time he hit second year of his Bachelor’s degree, let alone by the time he gets the PhD that would have set him up in those woods. No scientist talks this way. (Coming out of personal experience taking my BSc at university, then as a wilderness biology research assistant for a time and as the sister of a wildlife biologist… ) Can you assign his character in another way? For example, such a person would speak objectively, and by that I don’t mean coldly, but without injecting personal agenda into what they have to say. They would use non-loaded words, sticking to simple facts, etc. Personally, I think it’s enough that he doesn’t say much and, when he does, keeps it brief. So, take out the “ain’t”s and such and I think you’d have it.

That’s a minor detail, though. This is an expertly crafted script that is so close to being a strong movie.

Paul, my hat is off to you for succeeding at one particular thing that I have to work hard(er) at, and which many people fail to manage – you develop this plot well, throughout the script and right to the end. Once the story gets under way, you keep developing it and the plot even holds together. That’s hard to do. It’s a clever plot line that keeps going right to the end.

Vincent is a well drawn, complex character who I actually liked, even though he’s a has-been criminal who must have had very ‘dirty hands’ at one point in his life. You write scenes that show he has a moral code. I also liked how there was this push-pull between him and his former girlfriend. He obviously cares about her a lot – enough to not invite her back into his misbegotten life. Nice dynamic there. And the dialogue between them was good. It drew me in.

Similarly, there’s a good dynamic between Vincent and Monique. Their exachanges are engaging and believable. I enjoyed those parts. And I liked the contrast in character between Monique and Vincent’s first girlfriend. You can see that his life has changed – that his former relationship just doesn’t fit his life any longer. That’s rarely done in film and I think it works here.

Could you get into your story more quickly? We were 28 pages in and I was still feeling like we were meandering. I know you were doing set up, but the events seem so unrelated that there isn’t enough focus to leave me feeling like we were driving toward something.

This happens again around the middle of the movie – when you need to keep the action going more and more intensely. You take breaks that don’t seem to be driving the plot enough.

I think in both cases this is because te plot is not being driven by the characters acting on or reacting to what has gone before.

Similarly, the philosophical moments, (a key feature of this genre), tend to interrupt the action for too long. Perhaps if you kept them very short, down to a paragraph or so. Sometimes they’re several pages long and then followed soon after by another. If these just pepper the script briefly they’ll be a treat.

Can you make it clearer off the top that Vincent is dealing with mafia or organized crime? This becomes more and more clear as the plot goes on, but it’s a key set-up point that would drive the tension stronger if it was made clearer sooner.

And finally, there are some wonderful cheesy moments in this story – which is a delightful part of the genre. In your case, I think they would work better if you set the story in the 1930s or 1940s. Of course, that would mean that Monique couldn’t be black and you’d have to work at getting a female cop on the beat, but I think resetting it would actually solve some other issues with the script as well. Giving it a kind of Sky Captain feel, right down to the brown-washed film style, would forgive lots of the little problems with your story.

All in all, the story line is a strong start to what could become an interesting night out at the movies.

Jim – you take no prisoners! Taken Hostage keeps the action happening and knocks the viewer around with twist after twist. Crime drama isn’t my usual genre because it’s so often done badly, but this one kept me holding my breath.

Premise
Good premise that explores an unusual angle for the genre. Is it possible to rewrite the premise line so that it better reflects the originality of the plot?

Story Structure
Well plotted. The plot holds together – a remarkable achievement in itself - and the threads intertwine nicely.

Dialogue & Characterization
One of the reasons I don’t usually tap into these crime dramas is that the dialogue and characterization are usually so stilted. Jim avoids this genre trap most of the time. I got drawn in to the conversations, even though, by the nature of the film, they had to be mostly plot exposition. By the final third, I was ‘watching’ the movie and felt like I was evesdropping on frantic exchanges between the kidnapper and the mother.

Emotion
I was completely drawn into the mother, Sarah, (the main character). Her reactions were completely believable in all but a few scenes. I completely understood her acting on her own. My stomach was stressed and my gut wrenched for her dilemma. I kept mentally congratulating her for her presence of mind despite her internal panic. Jim develops her well through her inevitable and necessary change from a woman buckling under a tragic event to one taking charge of the situation. I grant her this even though I wonder if a nurse and mother would flip the tables the way she did. (Don’t want to give to much away.) On the money thing, yes. I thought that was brilliant. Jim sets that up well. On putting another youth in the middle, I’m not sure this ‘option’ would occur to someone like her. For her to do that, her practicality, which I applaud, must be tainted with a bit of cruelty or else she couldn’t put Brandon in the middle, nor his mother. In that respect, I stopped identifying with her and she became somewhat unbelievable. Is there a way to address that?

On that note, I almost expected her to end up having a ‘thing’ with Agent Cooper. It’s a standard move for this genre. Thank you for not going there and for throwing a nice twist at that!

Rewrites
The only areas I would suggest rewriting are the hospital scenes concerning the bus crash. I understand the need to have her at the hospital and caught up in a major, all consuming accident, but some aspects of this don’t work as well as the rest of your movie. First, hospitals are strong on procedure so it would be hard for her to get permission to just ‘drop in’ to work to get her mind off things. Second, it’s unethical for someone in a physically or emotionally compromised state, such as hers, to be at work in the ER so the supervising physician would have to send her home, regardless. Is there a way to rework that? Third, Amy shows up with a ‘nicked artery’. An artery nick is a type one, top of the line emergency, especially on a juvenile. Bleeding lots is OK for your purposes and consistent with how things would go down in ER, but a “femoral artery laceration” would be a STAT emergency and the child would be unconscious in a few seconds. I think you can fix that easily enough by just shopping for another kind of injury? And finally, the reunion of Brandon’s family in the ER wasn’t quite believable – a little too formula or cotton candy, not up to the rest of your script.

That said, these are very fixable considerations compared to a script that holds together well and keeps you riveted right to the end. No wasted space and no down-time to go out for more popcorn!

Go see this movie when it hits the theatres!