Don't trust the critics and other wiseful advices

An edition about things I'm doing, things I'm watching and some guys who inspired it.

WELCOME TO A NEW EDITION OF MY NEWSLETTER

I advance this edition a week due to reasons I explain in two lines below. Let’s begin!

SERIES MANIA

This week I’ll be travelling to France to attend the Series Mania Festival, in Lille. Series Mania is one of the most important festivals of fiction production of the world (you can deduct that it’s very focused on the production of TV shows) and I’ll attend it with the people of the Spanish producer-distributor Vértice 360 and the U.K.-based Born Wild producer, and we’ll try to get more partners and funds for MOTORWAY, a live-action Young Adult drama series created by me.

I’ll be in Lille some days before the beginning of the festival due to reasons I think I cannot share yet, but I’ll tell you when I return. It’s a very interesting initiative linked to the Motorway project and with the creation of TV shows in general.

RELEASES

If I’m not wrong, the issue 2 of the Dark Horse anthology 4-issues series Masters of the Universe: Masterverse releases this Wednesday, where I participated with a variant cover and drew a 9-page story written by Tim Seeley. The story is about an alternate version of Man-at-arms as a hard-boiled/MikeHammeresque hero in his most difficult case. MOTU and noir together at last! For the art, I took inspiration for the old EC crime comic-books, and revised the Johnny Craig and Wally Wood material. I tried to use the ziptone in the way Wood used it in comic strips like Cannon (a strip so full of sex that I cannot find a page without a naked woman to post here)

AND IF EVERYTHING GOES OK…

You will receive news about a new PARANOIA KILLER story very soon…

THE ART OF THE SCRIPT

One of my latest motivations writing has been thinking on how writer and director Walter Hill works. I found this interesting article about how Hill wrote Driver (a movie I have recommended so many times that my friends already hate it).
https://neotextcorp.com/culture/walter-hills-screenplay-for-the-driver-is-the-best-screenwriting-school-you-can-get/

You also can download the original script, which is like reading a Donald Westlake’s novel mixed with a Jean-Pierre Melville’s film and a Haiku poetry book.

RECOMMENDATION

And speaking about hard-as-nails-anti-heroes, my movie recommendation. You know here you are not going to find valuations about the latest Ant-man movie (they are still doing Ant-man movies, can you believe it?). My recommendations lately go to the world of B-series and VOD. Recently watched Little Dixie, directed by John Swab and starred by my beloved Frank Grillo (an underrated actor, in my humble opinion).

The reviews of this film in Imdb are generally bad but I would give the movie a chance. Speaking of Imdb, do you really still trust these online critic services, Imdb, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, etc?  With the review-bombing you can’t trust the ratings of a movie starring a woman, a black person (or even worse, a black woman!) or whatever problem a bunch of idle guys consider it outrageous or “too politics”. The other day, I read about a poorly rated kids movie because it had an anti-war message! A kids movie which was against the idea of war! How dare you, you pervert animators?

So fuck the reviewers and the aspiring reviewers. If I tell you Little Dixie tells a story of an ex-CIA agent trying to rescue his daughter from the Cartel, you’ll think of Liam Neeson’s Taken movies (and its different variations/exploitations). The distinctive element here is that Grillo’s character, Doc, is a real son of a bitch. He’s a crooked man who works for even more crooked guys, and he will do anything to recover his little girl, and this means all kinds of felonies, treasons, killing a lot of innocent people, and of course using the most excessive violence… Beau Knapp composes an unpleasant but original villain (“villain” is a strange concept in the movie) more near than a Nicolas Wind Refn’s eccentricity that the classic “Cartel Mal hombre” from the typical mainstream action movies.
The movie has a grim-dirty 60-70s vibe, and I can’t help but think of old films of Lee Marvin or Charles Bronson, and I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that the main character shares name with the main character of Steve McQueen in The Getaway.

SEE YOU SOON…

… In a new edition of my newsletter, where I’ll tell you my adventures in the TV shows conventions world.
Take care!
Victor

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