I Have Some Notes

At the height of their careers, Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton joined forces for an explosive disaster movie that had all the trappings of a certified hit. Unfortunately the box office did not agree, and this rather decent volcano flick has laid dormant ever since. Untill now!

We power up our script rewriting robot and attempt to pull Dante's Peak out of the rubble.

James Cameron spent years trying to put a live action version of Alita: Battle Angel up on the silver screen, and once he finally did it took us less than an hour to tell him all the things he could have done better. Sorry James, such is the nature of the internet, eventually three white guys with microphones are going to unnecessarily disassemble all your good work.

Truthfully though, Alita is not a bad film, and while we put it through our notes process, most of our proposed changes revolve around putting this film in a better position to succeed as a series.

We're just trying to help you make another buck James! We don't want you to starve.

Hey, do you love Aladdin? Do you love the Genie and Carpet and Abu? Well now they’re back, in soulless live-action remake form! Hooray.

This episode takes a few twists and turns as we discuss the cultural space Aladdin occupies and how that would affect any rewrites or changes to the film. We also get into a deep tangent about the value of remakes compared to more original screenplays. It’s a good one, listen in!

We asked you to send us your questions for the I Have Some Notes crew, and holy crap did you deliver! We spent this week’s episode covering topics from how COVID-19 will affect movie theatres to our favourite/most hated movies of all time to whether we regret doing The Mighty Ducks (no).

Huge thanks to all our listeners who submitted questions and a special thanks to our podcasting friends Flicks X-Rayed, Repodcasting and Cinematological for sending us audio questions!

Life is a movie from 2017 that nobody watched, which makes it perfect podcast material, right? Look, we’re wannabe screenwriters, not wannabe marketing experts.

It’s honestly pretty decent, though. There’s a lot of fun sci-fi and horror-y things going on, and a dynamite cast including Rebecca Ferguson, Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynolds. Still it’s not perfect, or we wouldn’t be looking for put it through our notes process.

Listen in as we debate if Life should be more science-y or more horror-ish, whether the twist should stay or go and how long we should keep Ryan Reynolds alive.

This week we take a microscope to the 2001 blockbuster attempt, Evolution. Liam, Scott and Gregg recoil in horror as they watch a decent sci-fi premise turned unnecessarily into a wacky goof-ball comedy.

Reimagining a comedy can be difficult, particularly when "make laugh better" is not an insightful note, but we manage to dig a bit deeper, add some stakes and create an arc or two all while downplaying some characters who were played by poor performers *cough* Orlando Jones *cough*.

What happens when you combine unchecked cinematic ambition with a the world's entire supply of cocaine? You get easily Bruce Willis' strangest (and possible best) film of his career.

As you may recall, we were forced to watch Hudson Hawk after losing the Rotten Tomator Prognosticator to listener Michael Senchuk. Hope you enjoy the episode Mike, because it holds a bit of a surprise.

After having our souls crushed by movies like Beneath the Planet of the Apes and Ready Player One, we decided to take a breather from really, really bad movies. For once during the pandemic we wanted to watch a good movie, so we fired up Netflix and hit play on Sharon Stone's THE QUICK AND THE DEAD.

How do you rewrite or reimagine a movie you have a lot of affection for? With great difficulty! But, as they say, art is never finished, only abandoned. We do, however, end up adjusting the Sam Raimi's firing pin slightly, but only after spending 30 minutes praising his flick.

Are your eyes and ears ready to be assaulted by the densest collage of pop-culture references ever put to film? Perfect! Grab a Jolt, fire up that projection screen TV and insert a coin for Ready Player One.

For an unremarkable film, we couldn't stop talking about it, this is our 2nd longest episode ever. It took a long time to record too, as we were having some audio problems again. Ain't podcastin' fun.

You've been to the The Planet of the Apes, but have you ever wondered "Hey, what's under there? What's beneath that little planet?" Well, wonder no longer! Today we grab our rewriting shovels and dig up Beneath the Planet of the Apes, starring Charlton Heston and a guy who looks exactly like Charlton Heston.

Just a quick note, we had some audio difficulty with this one, we did all we could to touch up the audio and the result is completely listenable, just slightly noisy. Enjoy!