B movies (and C and D movies) can have a certain charm.  Not everyone gets this.  Most people like B movies in the “So Bad They’re Good” way, and I do enjoy many a B movie for that reason too.  But then there are other Bs that aren’t really horrible enough to laugh at and aren’t all that great either.  They kind of sit in the middle and exist in this state of quantum uncertainty.  Are they bad enough to make fun of?  Sorta.  Are they good enough to surprise you?  No, not really.  So what are they?  Who gives voice to B films that aren’t quite bad, aren’t quite good?

Yours truly.  That’s who.

And so today, I begin my (possibly) semi-regular feature on B movies that I’ve seen.  I’m not going to suggest you go and watch these films.  That’s your call.  But they are available on Netflix, and people went ahead and made these movies.  So why not give them a look?  I’m fairly certain that if you made a film, these filmmakers would go ahead and watch yours, no matter how bad it was likely to be.

Today, it’s 2010′s Titanic 2.

I will just say off the bat that this isn’t a bad movie.  It’s not very good either.  But it isn’t boring, which is nice, and it has some decent FX and acting.  It managed to entertain me for 90 mins, which is more than Cameron’s version did.  And it doesn’t waste two hours with morons when really, I’m there to watch a boat sink.  Titanic 2 understands this, and I give it mad props (as the kids probably don’t say anymore) for knowing what I’m there for.

Titanic 2 is about a boat called (you guessed it) Titanic 2.  Granted, this is an incredibly stupid idea.  If there was a reason our hero billionaire (played by Shane Van Dyke) had for building a replica of a boat synonomous with disaster, I didn’t notice it.  Maybe it’s his thing.  Maybe he’s working on a Hindenburg 2, a Lusitania 2, and a New Coke 2.  If so, I can respect his moxy.

On the plus side, the boat is designed to only look like the original.  It has modern engines and the latest in lifeboats.  So, hey, it’s not like the project is a complete screw up.  Although, if you haven’t guessed that Titanic 2 is probably headed for disaster, you should stop reading this right now and go watch the film.  Spoilers are to follow.

By the way, it’s mentioned several times that the ship’s engines haven’t been fully “tested” yet.  I’m not sure what that means.  Did they just slap on some engines and decide to see if they turn on later?  Are engines like calf muscles on long distance runners?  Will they seize up if they don’t get a chance to stretch?  Or maybe they’re warranty just expired.  This is a mystery I have yet to decipher.

In addition to our billionaire friend, there’s also Marie Westbrook as a ship . . . er . . . lady.  I think a nurse.  I’m not quite sure.  She once had a relationship with Billionaire, so that’s going to come up.  And there’s also a pair of scientists studying glaciers or ice caps or something.  Guy Scientist (Bruce Davison who you will recognize even if you don’t know his name) is also Nurse’s father.  He knows Titanic 2 is not up to snuff, but, of course, Nurse fails to listen to him.  Lady Scientist (Brook Burns) is along just to give Guy Scientist someone to talk to, as far as I could tell.

That’s really the extent of the characters.  There’s a second nurse who is friends with Nurse, but let’s be honest, we all know she’s going to die at some point so it’s hard to get too attached to her.  Titanic 2 seems to understand this too because it doesn’t waste a lot of time with secondary or tertiary characters.  We don’t meet any passsengers.  We barely get to know a handful of crew.  The brief time we spend before disaster strikes is spent with Billionaire, Nurse, or Guy and Lady Scientist.  And that’s just fine with me.

Through a series of complications, a giant wave shoves an iceberg into the Titanic 2.  The ship immediately starts sinking, and people run around in a panic.  In the disaster, half the lifeboats are destroyed so that’s a problem.  Although not really much of a problem considering that the second wave destroys all the lifeboats and everyone on board them.  Yeah, Titanic 2 racks up quite a body count.  And then at about the halfway point, the ship even explodes.  So that’s not good.  And to add insult to injury, near the very end, another giant wave capsized the ship like the Poseidon.  In the meantime, Billionaire and Nurse run around trying to get to various locations for various arbitrary reasons.  And Guy and Lady Scientist talk about stuff while riding around in a helicopter.

Really, that’s the plot and everything you need to know.

But let’s get something straight here.  Titanic 2 isn’t all that bad.  In fact, the directing is competent.  The FX are adequate.  And the few characters we do have seem like nice enough people I didn’t mind rooting for.  I give the movie credit for a few unexpected twists.  Billionaire isn’t a bad guy.  The disaster that befalls the ship is more one of circumstance than of his greed or incompetence (as is pretty standard in these sort of films).  And he even demonstrates his heroism by loading wounded people into his own escape helicopter and staying aboard the ship to help.  So technically, some people do survive the disaster though they are never mentioned or seen again after the helicopter scene.

This might be a good time to point out that Shane Van Dyke AKA Billionaire is also the writer and director of the film, so maybe he just wanted to make himself look good.  Still, I enjoyed that he wasn’t just a douchebag who gets people killed as so many A and B movie billionaires tend to be.

The film moves at a fair clip.  If there are some strange scenes that don’t add up to anything, they’re over pretty quickly and then we’re off to watch our heroes try not to die as things go from bad to worse to more worse.  In the end (spoiler) everyone aboard the ship but Nurse dies.  And honestly, that was a bit of a downer.  I kind of wanted Billionaire to live by the end of it.  He seemed like a decent sort.  But maybe that’s in the rulebook for decent Billionaires.  They have to die so evil billionaires can take their place.

HIGH POINTS:

These are some points that left a positive impression on me.

There’s a scene where a random bearded guy punches Billionaire while shouting “This is all your fault!”  It’s surreal to watch as a guy who actually bought a ticket for a boat called the Titanic 2 complains about it sinking.  What did he expect?  Furthermore, it doesn’t make a whole heck of a lot of sense to punch Billionaire, who is about to die with you anyway.  I enjoyed this brief scene because it was both absurd and actually, probably fairly realistic.

There’s a cool shot of a helicopter trying to rise about a rushing wave.  It’s nothing compared to something a blockbuster would put out there, but for a low budget flick, it’s not bad.

There’s a lot of shots of people looking at something in awe.  Very Spielbergian.  But, y’know what?  If I saw a giant wave coming at me, I’d probably gape too.  So this is a situation where gaping is permissable.

LOW POINTS

Not many.  The movie really isn’t too bad.

There’s a scene where our heroes have to use some pipes to climb past electrified water that went on too long.

There’s another scene where Billionaire fails to save a man dying on the other side of a door.  I think it’s to highlight his powerlessness and guilt, but at this point, the ship is already half sunk and on fire and a whole bunch of people have died, so that plot point was already made.

And then there’s the end, in which (SPOILER) Nurse drags Billionaire’s frozen body through the icy submerged depths of the ship with the hopes that the freezing water will preserve him enough to allow her to revive him.  Preposterous, certainly, but this isn’t The Road.  I’m wililng to suspend my disbelief for a happy ending here.  After all, our heroes have gone through a lot to get to this point.

So she gets him to the surface and tries to revive him.  And . . . nothing.  He dies.  The end.  Kind of a downer.  And an unnecessary one at that.  I don’t know if Shane Van Dyke was trying to be artistic by dangling false hope in front of me, but it only ended up annoying me.  So, hey, maybe Titanic 2 is high art, after all.  Maybe Cormac McCarthy coached Van Dyke on how to end on a depressing note in hopes of getting Titanic 2 an Oscar.  Who knows?  Who cares?

All I know is that, sure, a few hundred people died, but I didn’t give a crap about any of them.  But I kind of cared for Billionaire, and if he’d lived, I would’ve probably given Titanic 2 a better recommendation.

So, overall, the film is decent.  It probably won’t leave a tremendous impression, but it’s not bad.  If you happen to be bored one afternoon and want to watch something about a boat sinking that doesn’t take three hours to get to the sinking part, then you could do a lot worse.

Thumbs Up from this reviewer.

NEXT WEEK:  Mega Shark Vs. Crocasaurus!

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

It’s the limitations that make things worth doing, that give them value.

One of the fun things to do in WoW is the dungeons.  Dungeons, for those uninformed souls out there, are segments of the game designed for 5 players to team up, fight bad guys, and (hopefully) pick up some good rewards along the way.  The evolution of dungeons in WoW has mostly been in how you find other players to join you in the dungeon delves.  The current system is simple.  You just que up for a dungeon, carry on with whatever else you’re doing in the game, and when you’re matched up with a group, you can just jump right into the dungeon.  It’s ridiculously easy.  Especially considering that originally doing dungeons meant trekking across the landscape to meet up at the entrance of whatever dungeon you were going to do.  This could lead to all kinds of problems, not the least of which was coordination.  And if even one of your party members was someplace far off…it was just as likely someone would decide not to wait and you’d have to start all over in your search.

But things are different now.

What’s unique about Cataclysm, the latest expansion, is that you have to discover the new dungeons before you can que for them.  This means you have to do some questing and exploring, which I’m sure will annoy some players.  Personally, I love this system and hope they keep it.  Because discovering dungeons makes them special.  Players might be annoyed by it, but that’s the point.  It’s annoying.  It’s meant to be a reward at the end of your playing experience.

You would think that Blizzard would avoid possibly annoying many of its players, and that it would be smarter to just give the players exactly what they want.  But I think that’s wrong.

Giving people what they want all the time is a bad idea.  If WoW was merely an imaginary playground where players could do whatever they wanted, where any reward was within easy reach, then it would not be the game it is.  On the other hand, there’s a balancing act here.  You can’t ignore the audience.  But neither can you just bow down to their every outcry.

The parallel is everywhere.  Especially in entertainment media, where every successful film becomes a franchise and where series books dominate the fantasy and mystery shelves.  I don’t want to say that these are always a bad thing.  Or even usually bad thing.  But the job of an artist, be they a video game designer, novelologist, or filmmaker, is to find the balance betweeng keeping the audience interested without giving them too much or not enough.  Give them everything they want, and they’ll get bored.  Screw with their expectations too often, and they’ll get angry.  Either can be death of whatever you’re attempting to do.

This is something I think about quite often.  And it only gets harder as time goes by.  With my first few novels, I didn’t have to worry about expectations.  There were few.  Gil’s All Fright Diner came out with absolutely none.  Nobody had heard of me and so nobody knew what they were getting.  They might have had some ideas, but they still went in fresh, more or less.  In the Company of Ogres and A Nameless Witch both had a similar advantage, though even Witch started to bear the weight of my previous work.  When I heard The Automatic Detective called wacky and zany, I suspected that had as much to do with my previous books as anything in Detective itself.

It’s not that Detective doesn’t have humor.  It’s just that I never intended it to be a “funny” book.  And it really isn’t all that funny.  It’s a little weird, a little retro, but it’s not nearly as silly as some like to consider it.  Absurd?  Sure.  But isn’t all fantasy?

Whenever I start a new novel, I find myself pondering where it will fit in my previous catalogue.  It’s not like my books don’t have similarities.  It’s just I don’t always know where those similarities lay.  More importantly, I don’t know where other people will think those similarities lay.  I’ve heard the full range of comments, both good and bad, and I realize there’s no escaping them.  If I write something too much like what I (or someone else wrote) then I run the risk of treading water.  If I try to do something different then I could end up annoying my audience.  Both pitfalls are unavoidable.  Especially as I continue to add books to my list.

But if I had to pick a trap to fall into, I think I’d rather fall into the one defying expectation than blindly following them.  Maybe that makes me an artist after all.  I’ll leave that for others to decide.  All I know is that, so far, I’m getting paid to write and have been fortunate enough that I haven’t really had to face that dilemma.  And that’s only because of the fine work and support of a lot of people.  I know I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating.  I wouldn’t be here without you, gang.

By the by, A. LEE MARTINEZ APPRECIATION DAY!! is on the way.  January 12th, as if I have to tell you.  Hope you have your monster movies and board games at the ready.  If not, you might want to get on that.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Funny though.  Without Heroscape, I don’t think I’d be married today.  It was through Heroscape and a convoluted series of events that I met my lovely wife.  So if you ever love why I love games, that’s why.  They’ve given me hours of fantastic entertainment, taught me quite a bit about life (even though I know that sounds absurd), and they got me a wife.  So a guy really can’t ask for much more than that.  Although if they could somehow create a game that could give me laser vision, I’d want for nothing.  But that’s probably being greedy.

I went to a friend’s book club meeting this weekend, and it was a lot of fun.  It’s always cool to meet people who are excited to meet me.  When I do a booksigning, for example, I tend not to attract much of a crowd.  If I sign or sell four or five books, it’s a rousing success.  So when I actually get to talk to people that seem happy to see me, it’s still something I’m not entirely used to.

The book read was Gil’s All Fright Diner, and one of the questions asked was about Tammy.  If you haven’t read the book by chance, Tammy is the villain of the piece, a teenage sorceress with sinister designs on the titled diner.  Tammy is of Japanese descent, and she’s also adopted.  Someone asked me what happened to her parents and how she ended up in Rockwood.

I admitted I had no idea.  Hadn’t really thought about it.

There’s a myth that in order to write a character, you have to know everything about them.  It’s absolutely not true.  There’s another myth that if something is unusual about a character, it probably ties into the plot in some way.  So if Tammy is adopted, that must mean something.  But, honestly, it was just something that happened as I wrote the story.  Tammy was Japanese-American, an off-hand detail thrown in for no good reason other than why-the-heck-not?  And she was adopted because . . . well, for exactly the same reason.

Most of my characters do not have elaborate backstories, and I like it that way.  I don’t really care how they got where they are most of the time.  I care where they are and where they’re going.  Some might argue that you need to know a character’s past to understand how they would react, but I tend to view the past as an illusion anyway.  I’m less concerned with what happened in the past than with how they relate to the world now.

It’s tricky.  There are indeed times when backstory is important, and for some characters, their history is absolutely essential.  But I usually find it irrelevant.  One of the most elaborate backstories I’ve ever created belonged to Mack Megaton, the protagonist of The Automatic Detective.  Mack actually has quite a bit of justification for how he came to be.  And none of it ended up in the book, aside from a few hints here or there.  There just wasn’t a place for it, and to put it in would’ve only slowed the novel’s pace.

But even in stories where backstory is important, I usually am uninterested.  I couldn’t care less about how Darth Vader became evil or how the Empire came to power, for instance.  I don’t need to know how the Jedi were wiped out or how Luke Skywalker was born.  All those questions are irrelevant.  And trying to answer them only ends up tying everything into uncomfortable knots of continuity snarls.

I still believe that my job as a writer is to tell you just enough of a story that you can make as much or as little of it as you want.  Perhaps in your imagination, Tammy’s parents were sacrificed to a dark god and their daughter was shipped to Rockwood to begin the Apocalpyse.  Or maybe they just died in a car crash.  Or maybe they just gave her up because they didn’t like kids.  Your answer is as good as mine, and that’s cool with me.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

I’d like to give a heap of credit to Covenent Games (http://teamcovenant.com/) who created a great experience.  And, of course, we can’t forget Privateer Press (http://privateerpress.com/) who created the Monsterpocalypse game and even sent a ton of great prizes and a couple of friendly enthusiastic representatives that made the game that much more fun.

I love Monsterpocalypse, and Moncon only made me realize how great a game it is.  I chose the Terrasaur faction with Pteradax, the great flying reptile, as my monster.  I didn’t do very good.  My record was 1-4, but I had some close matches and with all I learned, I believe I would’ve finished much better.  Or maybe not.  Either way, it was a fun time.

My spoils were a signed Monsterpocalypse poster, a Mega Pteradax figure, and a certificate for being the highest ranking Terrasaur faction.  True, there weren’t any other Terrasaur players (or their might have been one other, but if so, he left before the closing ceremonies).  It still counts, and I look forward to many years of reflecting on my victory through my iconoclastic nature.

Have I mentioned I play games, and how much I enjoy them?  I really do.  And it’s not just because games are fun, especially games featuring a kaiju-based theme.  It’s because they help me reflect on life in general.  You can learn a lot about life while playing a game.

The big lesson (and the one I think everyone should learn) is that life is unpredictable, and that your intentions and design, no matter how meticulously crafted, rarely work out the way you expect.  The most skilled players in the Monsterpocalypse tournament seemed always to be the ones that were the most flexible, the most devoted to playing in the moment rather than plotting and strategizing before the game began.  I noticed that I always did better when I was less focused on a particular outcome and more on exploiting the opportunities that presented themselves.

In a way, it’s exactly how I have gotten to this point in my career.  I wanted to be a novelologist, but I didn’t focus on anything too specific.  I just wanted to get paid to write, and while it took a while to happen, I just focused on writing, submitting, and seeking opportunities.  When those opportunities came around, I was ready for them.  But if I’d been looking for specific opportunities, if I’d assumed there was a very straight path to publication, then I could’ve missed my shot.

And, of course, games, just like life, are unpredictable in their outcome.  The one Monsterpocalypse match I did win was a last second hail Mary pass that came literally during the last turn of the game.  With one desperate, calculated gamble, I was able to score a victory.  It wasn’t even planned.  I just saw the opportunity and took it.

Meanwhile, in my own life, I have a lot of things I never imagined.  I have a great group of cool friends, a wonderful fiance, a growing novelology career, and I’m even getting involved a bit in some Hollywood stuff that, frankly, still surprises me.  If my life were a game, I definitely feel like I’m winning it, but I can’t say it’s because of some brilliant master plan.  It’s just luck, readiness, flexibility, and more luck.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to find a place to hang my Friend of Gaia certificate.  I’m thinking above my bed, next to my Alex Award.  Truly, I am a Terran of many accomplishments.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

This was a few years back when the original Iron Man movie was about to come out.  Or maybe it had just come out.  Little hazy on the details, but I remember that some tenative steps were taken between me and a publisher to write an Iron Man novel.  It wasn’t going to be an adaptation, but rather, an original story.  I even wrote and submitted an outline.

I don’t quite remember the exact details of the story I had in mind, but I know it revolved around espionage, both corporate and governmental, and attempts to recover a lost alien robot.  The robot, for those who have enough of a knowledge of the Marvel universe to even care, was an inactive Kree Sentry.  Basically, I imagined an Indiana Jones style story where Tony Stark has an adventure, foils the bad guys, fights the reactivated Sentry.  Also, Iron Man’s love interest was going to be a Skrull spy in disguise.

The deal stalled, and I don’t remember why.  Just sort of sputtered to a halt.  It happens.  Still, it would’ve been cool, I think.

I was also approached once to write a Brutal Legend novel.  That fell apart quickly though, and I didn’t get nearly as past the tenative stages.  While I wasn’t a fan of the game (how could I be?  It wasn’t even out yet.), it might’ve been fun.

The near-adaptation I bemoan most though is the Heroscape novel I might have written.  This one was purly my idea, and my agent even went so far as to approach the right people and express my interest.  Regrettably, that interest wasn’t reciprocated.  No one with the power to authorize such a thing seemed to think there was a demand for a novel based on one of the greatest board games ever.  Too bad because I guarantee my Heroscape novel would’ve been amazing.

But thinking about these potential projects, I can’t say I’m disappointed that they didn’t work out.  The money would’ve been nice, and while it might have been cool, it would have been work for hire with no real control over how it came out.

I’ve never really understood people who aspire to write Superman, Batman, or some other character not of their own creation.  I understand doing it.  I even understand enjoying it.  It can be fun to play in someone else’s sandbox and enjoy their toys.  But in the end, those toys will never be yours.  You’re just borrowing them for a short while.  Of course, if you’re an aspiring comic book writer, you really don’t have much choice.

Even more troublesome to me is the invention of an original character that you surrender all control over.  Steve Gerber had this problem with Howard the Duck.  He had very little control over Howard, and he only wrote Howard stories if Marvel allowed it.  I’m not villainizing Marvel for that.  You know the deal when you write for Marvel (or DC).  Yet making that deal is usually easier than living with it.

Two of my favorite new superhero characters, Blue Beetle (DC) and Gravity (Marvel), currently languish in editorial disinterest.  Blue Beetle’s comic was one of the last ongoing titles I enjoyed.  After its cancellation, he was moved to Teen Titans, and as much as I wanted to like that comic, I just don’t have any interest in any of the other Teen Titans.

Gravity had a terrific debut miniseries, and then…he just sort of vanished.  Gone.  He’s coming back, this time in a team comic.  But again, I doubt I’ll have enough interest in the rest of the team to care.

I find it tremendously annoying, and I’m just a fan of these characters.  I can’t imagine being the creator behind them, having lost any creative control over them, not even being able to ensure that they will get any real exposure at all.  Even worse, there’s the very real threat that someone somewhere will decide to kill or maim these characters in the service of more popular characters.  Either that, or just disappear into obscurity.  Either fate sounds lousy.

I’ve had a few books optioned for film, and it’s certain that however these films turn out, I’m cool with.  But that’s because my characters and my stories will still exist.  The movies might be very similar.  Or they might be entirely different.  But the books, the original characters and worlds, will still exist.  No one is going to write a dark and gritty reboot of Gil’s All Fright Diner or the Mack Megton story where zombie cannibals attack Empire City.  Not on my watch.  Not as long as I have a say so.

Although if Marvel came to me and asked me to write a Devil Dinosaur or Man-Thing story, I’d be up for it.  And if DC ever gave me the green light to write a Kilowog . . . well, that ain’t going to happen.

But it’d be awesome if it did.

Fighting the good fight, writing the good write,

Lee

Still, I’m behind, and I really shouldn’t be wasting much time blogging when I have actual work to do.

So I bought Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs on DVD and watched it again.  Perhaps I’m sounding like a broken record, but damn if that isn’t a great movie.  The spaghetti tornado alone is worth the price.  Highly recommended.  And I’ll try not to mention it again.

Even before I was a writer, I was a writer.  All that novelology entails is creating a story via imagination and conjecture.  I have this game I play sometimes.  When I see someone on a cell phone, I’ll imagine that through a quirk of fate, they picked up the wrong signal.  The voice on the other end of the line says a meteor is heading for Earth, and, long story short, you’ll be dead by the end of the hour.  Then I ask myself, what would this person do with that time?

Try it sometime.  It’s a great way to flex your novelologist’s talents.  Even if you aren’t a professional story maker-upper like me, you can still have fun with it.

Okay.  This was a short post.  Just checking in.  Now back to work.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

No part of that sentence is not cool.

Too bad the previews tend to resort to such uninspired elements as breakdancing guinea pigs and Trace Morgan doing his generic “I’m a funny black guy” act.  Robin Williams introduced the manic comic sidekick, and now it seems like most movies aimed at a younger audience have to have this.  Heck, even Transformers 2 had this going on.  And it didn’t just have one goofy comedic sidekick, but three or four.  It’s uninspired humor like this that makes me resent the “comic fantasy” label I’ve been saddled with because if this is what passes for comedy, I’d rather not be considered part of it.

The problem is that, as often as not, these bits are indeed selling points.  It’s hard to sell a film without a sound bite or two, something that you can cram into a 30 second commercial.  Maybe it’s an explosion.  Maybe it’s a dramatic tag line.  Or maybe it’s a breakdancing animated guinea pig spouting nonsensical catch phrases.

G-Force is a kids’ movie, and kids aren’t really concerned with plot development or subtle characters, and it is a movie about guinea pig spies versus robots, so it’s hard to argue that it’s high art.   (Although in a perfect universe, it should be.)  But even more “mature” movies have to use this technique or face commercial failure.

Advertising rules our decisions, and if you don’t believe it, well, you would if I spent a few million dollars running television commercials telling you so.  Even looking at my own career, MONSTER is selling well, and it doesn’t hurt that I’ve built a reputation with my previous books.  But the deciding factor is the exposure that comes from finally being put in the front of the store and from getting more prominent reviews.  The marketing department at Orbit has as much to do with my success as any other factor.

I wouldn’t say word of mouth is dead.  It’s probably more influential than ever, but so is advertising.  And while word of mouth has gained a level or two, advertising is now officially a level 80 elite, surrounded by several hundred respawning elite mobs, at the end of a 25 man raid set at heroic difficulty.  (Dig the WoW reference, gang, because I’m cool like that.)

In short, advertising makes the Lich King look like a neutered, limp-wristed wuss.  How else can we explain the existence of Van Wilder 3, Without a Paddle 2, Anacondas 3, and the endless string of Bring It On movies?  It’s not hard to figure that name recognition and a brand name are more important than anything else.  So much so that it’s had a retroactive effect.

Remember when Star Wars: Episode 4: The Empire Strikes Back was just called The Empire Strikes Back?  Remember when Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark was just called Raiders of the Lost Ark?  Remember when a sequel to a movie actually had a different title, rather than merely subtracting “The” (as in Fast and Furious) or adding “The” (as in The Final Destination).

None of these observations are particularly groundbreaking.  I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been said before, probably by people more eloquent than I.  But I’m just putting it out there because adding my voice to the boundless din of the internet makes me feel important, and I was kind of bored.

Hope you enjoyed it.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee