BilmBlog500

  A perfectly fine way to spend a couple hours.  There isn’t a plot per se. The movie is so disinterested in plot that we don’t even know until well into the movie what our competing bands of thieves are vying for.  But the string of incidents is acted by an excellent cast, all of whom seem to be enjoying the,eves.  Hugh Grant is especially enjoying, channeling Michael Caine, portraying a James Bond villain with the megalomania dialed down to around a 1 on the scale,. You really have to see the performance, as well as Josh Hartnett’s, to understand them.I don’t want to try. The flaw of the movie is that there are too many characters in that in between place of needing either to do more or to br consolidated. Like, what if the Cary Elwes character were a little more Peter Graves in Mission: Impossible and actually part of it, rather than being an M in a movie that already has an M. And that would free up Aubrey Plaza to be the sniper\sharpshooter, which would be a nic...

COME ONE, COME ALL - I'm delighted to be on programming at Boskone in 2023.  It's one of my favorite conventions to go to, in part because it's proven to be one of the best places for me to discover new clients.  It also has one of the best proportion of pro attendees of pretty much any convention outside of a WorldCon or a World Fantasy. My panels and panel times are all below.  In addition to three panels, I also have a Kaffeeklatsch, which is a good chance to have questions answered in a small group setting.  Because it's limited seating you need to check the convention website  for information on signing up. A lot of other agency clients are going to be at the convention, many on programming, including Dan Moren, Suzanne Palmer, Auston Habershaw, Walter Jon Williams, Toni L. P. Kelner aka Leigh Perry, Zac Topping, Randee Dawn, and Steve Kelner.   The convention and all programming takes place at the Westin Boston Seaport Di...

I decided to change my process for getting queries as I prepared for heading from 2022 into 2023.  And here's an updated/revised version of my earlier blog post about querying. THE GUIDELINES: 1.  If you don’t follow the guidelines, your query will be deleted, unread and without a response. 2.  I'm now using Query Manager, a system that's generally been proven helpful to both agents and authors, and all queries should be submitted via https://querymanager.com/JoshuaBilmes. 3.  Once upon a time, I asked only for the query letter, but it's been a long time since queries were sent in #10 business envelopes with an SASE. At this point, I'm not longer accepting paper queries, and I'm asking you to send ten sample pages with your Query Manager query.  This will help speed things along, since I can more easily give a "yes" or "no" on borderline queries where the pages themselves are serving as tie-breaker, and I'm less likely to ask for a full m...

11:55 PM Poor Netflix. Poor, poor Netflix. It can put all the money it wants into movies that are like the Wonder Twins, movies which have the form of Oscar winners but which really aren’t. It can spend its riches and get award nominations aplenty.  But then the actual voting begins, and more and more people come into the process, and then the hollowness of things starts to show. The Irishman isn’t Goodfellas. Roma isn’t The Prisoner of Azkaban. The Power of the Dog isn’t Unforgiven. And when the time comes for the awards to get announced, Netflix doesn’t have the top prize.  Poor poor poor poor Netflix.  But that said, Netflix did give us Tick Tick…Boom this year. Also, Netflix isn’t poor. But there’s a rich irony to having Apple TV+ get a Best Picture for CODA while Netflix is still waiting. And as to the show, it’s an Oscar ceremony. It is what it is.  Embrace what it is. Present the awards on the air, please.  Don’t farm out production to Eon Productions, wh...

  This week I’m  celebrating the publication of WINDERS by Ryan O’Nan, in audio from Recorded Books and and in print and ebook from JAB Books. Ryan’s a screenwriter and actor who’s written for or performed on many of your favorite TV shows.  He’s currently doing both on ABC’s Big Sky, after several seasons with USA’s Queen of the South and a couple in the writer’s room for Hulu’s Wu-Tang: An American Saga.  He was just seen on the big screen in the recently release Copshot, and other TV credits include Skins, Marvel’s Legion, Ray Donovan, and many more. The thing that impresses me most is Ryan’s willingness to put in the hard yards on succeeding as a prose writer.  If you’re writing for television, you’re used to having your work rewritten. A script with your name on it will have had many hands changing your words along the way, and if you’re a staff writer you’re one of the people doing that on everyone else’s scripts. But these are also jobs that come with ...

11:30 PM Mine not to reason why.  If you read my 3400 words on this blog from before the Oscars, you’ll see that I am mostly happy with the things that won and the things that did not. But it was a weird evening.  The dry section in the middle was extremely dry. The beginning was extremely fresh because it was like no Oscars since I can remember, and I can remember back to things like the years when Chariots of Fire or Raiders were nominees, and I was watching in the TV room of the house I grew up in.  The ending was extremely odd.  But I watch most of all for the actual winners and losers.  I love every frame of Nomadland, and it won for Best Picture, every frame love that movie like I do every frame of Barry Lyndon.  The movies I liked least were Mank and Ma Rainey, and Mank won only in technical categories that it had an argument for winning, even in the photography category where it wasn’t my choice. Ma Rainey won some small awards, but not for the acti...

The Oscars are happening today.   And I’ve read many an article or analysis, which I think generally true, that the world doesn’t very much care, and that the ratings are going to plummet as they have for other award shows, and even for a lot of sporting events. But, I care!   I’m not sure what I’ll be doing for my live blog.  If all goes well, I am going to have some fully vaccinated family members joining me in my (very large!) hotel room for at least part of the evening, and might not be able to give my full attention to the posting.  So I’m putting a little more effort into the pre-show this year. In spite of and because of the pandemic, I ended up seeing as many or more of the nominated films as in a typical year, all in theatres.  I went some six months in 2020 where I saw only one movie, a fan favorite welcome back of Superman: The Movie at a theatre in Connecticut that opened for around three weeks in June before closing its doors to allow the cobwebs mo...