Ok… so… ya. We haven’t made a blog post in MONTHS. That is ridiculous and inexcusable. We have been VERY VERY busy.

For now we have finished work on our feature-length script Lost Case.We have entered it into the BlueCat Screenplay competition, received some good feedback on it and have decided to put it on the back-burner for now.

We are now working on a project we have been tinkering with for years. It is a TV Comedy series that we may possibly produce ourselves for the web.

We will be attending the 2010 Banff World Television Festival in June, but we aren’t going to be pushing the project so hard on people. We will take a more laid-back approach and just network, learn, relax and possibly try and find some production partners. This year Banff is combined with the annual NextMedia festival, which is somewhat exciting. The world of “pictures” is moving to the Internet, it seems. A lot of the big players are moving into the web world right now. We’ll hopefully also get to meet some celebrities who will be there such as Ricky Gervais and none other than William Shatner himself! We’re very excited.

So there may be a lot of mystery surrounding our new project, but we will make an announcement shortly about the details of the project.

Sorry again for the lack of posts. Things should be picking-up again in the Broken Forty world.

So, I caught the latest episode of the new Fox series Glee tonight. Last week’s premiere got off to somewhat of a rough start, but after getting settled I found myself curious to see more.

After tonight’s episode, I’m not sure I’ll be tuning in again.

The elements I thought were the pilot’s strongest points, the musical numbers, have here become awkwardly drawn out and cringe-worthy (the rendition of Kanye West’s Gold Digger with the rapping teacher was particularly hard to watch.) When a song was chosen for comedic effect, it ran too long and spoiled what could have been a good gag. I can’t help but think that Glee would be better as a half-hour, with these sequences cut down heavily.

Despite these issues, there are some good moments – Principal Figgins, played by veteran actor Iqbal Theba, is a fun character with some great lines, and there are some funny “Cut-To’s” throughout.

At this point,  it just doesn’t seem like Glee is living up to the hype.

We have finished a rough draft of our latest project Lost Case! We are in the process of re-working some things and getting to a comfortable “First Draft” in time for a script-exchange we are doing in a couple of weeks with some other local writers.

Early in the process we had some concerns about the page count, but it came in at right around 90 and with the revisions we’re making it seems that it will grow to around 100 even.

We are excited to be at this stage with the project, and can’t wait to get some coverage and keep on going!

This may have been announced some time ago, but this is certainly news to me. Troy Duffy is bringing us the sequel to the 1999 film Boondock Saints a solid ten years after the fact. Now while the original movie was alright, I never found it to be the classic action movie that it was hailed to be. I felt it was decent, and mildly entertaining.

What is really noteworthy for me, is the fact that Hollywood is, once again, relying on past successes to continue a franchise. Can’t Mr. Duffy write a new story that can compete in today’s feature film market? I’m sure he can, but the problem is with the big Hollywood studios: they don’t want anything new. At least that is how it seems to me, a Hollywood outsider.

I just wish the glory days of the early nineties’ spec script gold-rush would come back. The days where writing a good creative story was enough to get a sale in the ‘wood. Now it seems the only way to break in to the industry is write the tenth remake of the same old comic book story. Hulk, anybody?

Here’s a trailer:

After being bombarded for weeks on end by promo after promo after promo, tonight was finally the night: the  ’special preview episode’ of the new Fox series Glee (the show premieres next week.)

Thanks to these promos, in the lead up to tonight I  had crafted an admittedly delusional mental image of what this show might be – Arrested Development in a high school Glee club. My hopes were high.

The first couple of acts proved to be an adjustment period, to say the least. I was distracted at first by the similarities to Election – the blended-source narration, the desperate-to-achieve outcast schoolgirl, the singing jock tapping into his sensitive side – and I also struggled a bit to discern who’s story this was. But as the show played on I got more comfortable in the world and found myself completely caught up by the end.

The writing at times seemed a little ’surface’, and some of the dialogue too ‘on the nose’, but the great cast of new faces and old favorites and the incredible music (most notably the cast’s rendition of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing that closed the episode) more than made up for it.

So is Glee the new classic it’s been billed as? It’s still too soon to tell.

Will I be watching to find out? Most definitely.