Inspiration and Stuff

As has been well-documented here in the past, I'm regularly influenced by all kinds of things, but especially things I read, tv shows, and movies. So I'm going to talk about two things I watched this weekend that apply.

I've been steamrolling through the second season of How I Met Your Mother, courtesy of Netflix, so fast that there's only one more disk left to come and then I have to wait for the third season to be released. What? Watch it on regular tv? What a crazy idea. Anyway, the show is really great. As someone who's spent time watching almost the entire runs of probably 85 different sitcoms since I was a little kid, I may be saying that somewhat lightly, but god damn is that show enjoyable. Thanks to the show I now have a good-sized crush on Cobie Smulders, who plays Robin. And I think Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) is the best sitcom character created in probably ten years, if not more.*

*I feel I have to note that this remark is somewhat qualified by my ignoring Arrested Development, a show so awesome that I believe it's actually transcended the sitcom form to become it's own seperate category. It's necessary to mention this because AD is packed to the rafters with tremendous characters -- there's at least ten of them -- any of whom would make my statement above somewhat suspect.

But what I find influential about the show is it's structure. I really like how it's set up. Twenty five years in the future, Ted (our main character) is telling his kids the story of how he met their mother. But there's a lot of stuff that builds up to that meeting, and in fact we haven't even met that character yet (that I know of). So from there a main timeline begins in the fall of 2005, but thanks to the structure the show is free to jump around in time, going further back, and a couple of times into the future. It's really interesting to watch how the writers work it out. I'm not sure if they've constructed an endgame or if (for the most part) they're making it up as they go along, but it totally works.

While I was watching some of it yesterday it occurred to me that I'm essentially writing that same story, if you consider whom I'm really writing the book for (if you get down to it, that's pretty much true).

Another one is True Romance. It's inclusion in my movie list yesterday inspired me to put it in the dvd player this afternoon. I haven't watched it in probably five or six years, but man I so enjoy that movie. It's directed by Tony Scott, but written by Quentin Tarantino, and somewhere in this sentence I think you can divine the reason why I love it so. It's probably my favorite romantic movie, which probably goes a long way in explaining a few things about me. Clarence and Alabama meet, fall in love almost at first sight, get into some trouble, and go on a crazy adventure filled with snappy dialogue, oddball characters, and a whole lot of violence ... and it's frikking great. Clarence walking into Drexel's house to retrieve Alabama's personal items might be the single most badass thing I've ever seen. And here's a little behind the scenes info on the book: the scene in Chapter 13 involving Alyssa, where Kelly and Emma aren't there but arrive just at the end of it, is a spiritual descendant of the scene between Alabama and a pre-Sopranos James Gandolfini in a motel room. When I was first figuring out how to write it, that True Romance scene was right there in the back of my mind.

Seriously. If you haven't seen it, it's totally worth your time.