I Have Some Notes

Captain ███████: Brave New World may be one of Marvel’s better cinematic efforts of late, but it’s also one of their better efforts of late. Disney’s former golden goose has become just a regular old goose, and if you know anything about geese, you know they suck. Still BNW isn’t completely devoid of fun. There are two monster action sequences that make this film worthy of some touch ups. Good friend of the show and walking cinematic encyclopedia, Robin Taylor, joins us to rip the script apart with all the ferociousness of an 80-year-old man in a CGI Hulk suit.

At this point the true trap for us is an M. Night Shyamalan movie. They're just bad in very, very interesting ways! TRAP is maybe less of a mess than some of his more recent efforts, but it still features wild decisions from strange cinematography choices to straight up playing the nepo-baby card with abandon. As always, we try to play script doctor, working to keep the trap in the movie TRAP as well and shuffling the character deck for some fun thematic changes. Enjoy!

If you can get past the Tom Cruise of it all the Mission Impossible series is generally quite good. Each new addition offers clever heists, death-defying stunts, and occasionally a man reloading his arms like some kind of sexy human shotgun. Also running. Lots of Tom running. Dead Reckoning: Part I, however, struggles to match the thrills of its predecessors. Its omniscient AI-run-amok plot is derivative enough to have been written by ChatGPT itself. If that weren’t bad enough, it’s interminably long and gets bogged down by the ego of its star. But where there’s mediocrity you’ll find the I Have Some Notes crew. We dive into the AI plot to make it more fun, while rearranging some of the main characters so there is less…fridging.

As a movie podcast, we are bound by law to collect our thoughts and broadcast our picks for the best films of the year. We may have no choice in the matter, but it's our favourite episode of the year all the same.  It's also, as is tradition, our longest episode of the season, so let's get to it! Hopefully, we'll inspire you to add some new movies to your watch list. If you prefer to jump around here's a breakdown of our discussion by timecode: 00:01:36 – 2024's Top Box Office Earners 00:04:56 – Super Hero Movie Reprieve 00:08:44 – The Year of *whispers* Musical 00:11:36 – The Year of AI 00:18:48 – Hundreds of Beavers 00:22:16 - The People's Joker 00:26:58 – Speak No Evil 00:31:42 – It's What's Inside 00:35:28 – I Saw the TV Glow 00:43:41 – Love Lies Bleeding 00:52:44 – Stand Up Solutions 00:58:28 – Heretic 01:02:03 – Conclave 01:06:29 – Challengers 01:13:30 – The Substance 01:20:31 – Megalopolis 01:27:55 – Nosferatu  01:35:41 – Civil War 01:50:16 – Listener Comments

Fresh off the heels of watching Robert Eggers' superbly grotesque Nosferatu, we decided to screen another, less well-regarded, Dracula film. THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER travelled swiftly through theatres, perhaps faster than warranted. It sets up the stakes and principal characters nicely and skillfully envelopes the audience in a creaky nautical atmosphere. Still, even though there was a lot to like about this Alien-Vampire mashup, it left us wanting in the way that makes it a perfect candidate for the show. Join us for a retelling of the retelling of The Last Voyage of the Demeter!

Every year, we float the idea of watching a Hallmark Christmas movie for our traditional holiday episode, and every year we chicken out. The trouble with Hallmark is that their formula is so streamlined that not one film stands out above the rest. So how do we tackle these movies in an interesting way? Then it occurred to us…if every Hallmark Christmas movie is the same, it shouldn't matter which movie we choose. In fact, we could all watch a different movie, and fix the Hallmark formula itself!  So that's what we did! Liam watched Jingle Around the Clock, Scott screened Every Christmas Has a Story and Gregg sat through Crown for Christmas. We then evaluate the Christmas movie mill and give the studio some notes on how to improve the product. Happy holidays, Armchair Screenwriters! Show Note Links: Liam's Sketch Group The Debutants

I Have Some Notes boldly goes to the one branch of the Star Trek franchise we’ve never gone before! Star Trek (2009) offers an exciting blockbuster reimagining of the classic Original Series, captained by the one and only J.J. Abrams (and thank goodness there is not more than one of him!).  Liam, Scott, and Gregg riff on ways to clean up the convoluted time travel plot, add some depth to the supporting cast, and try to put the third act back on trek…er…track.

Some weeks back our Discord channel erupted in a lively discussion over a recent article from Variety titled Toxic Fandom: How Hollywood Is Battling Fans Who Are ‘Just Out for Blood’. In it, journalist Adam B. Vary reports about the effects toxic fandom is having on the personal lives of actors and how studios are combating it from hiring security firms to focus grouping diehard fans. The article inspired us to explore the topic more deeply in a Side Notes episode. This was an inspiring and enlightening conversation, and I hope you all get as much out of it as we did. Back next week with another movie fix, see you then!

It's nearly Halloween and we wanted to watch a creepy, blood-curdling movie for this week's episode. Unfortunately, we watched Insidious instead, a film whose spine-chilling twist is that it's not a haunted house movie, it's a haunted kid movie. Eat your heart out Wes Craven. Liam, Scott, and Gregg propose a cold open with some fun ambiguity that adds much more intrigue to Patrick Wilson's character. They also work in music that plays a central role in the climax, something that was honestly a huge missed opportunity.

After years stuck in development hell, all Sony could muster was to poop an incredibly mid adaptation of its triple-A video game UNCHARTED. Almost perfectly miscast, Uncharted succeeds only in misunderstanding what made the games so appealing. Liam, Scott, and Gregg restructure the cold open in a way that unlocks a potentially fun adventure script with consistent themes and plenty of treasure-hunting intrigue.

We're back to season 10 of I Have Some Notes! It's a new season of cuts, keeps, punch-ups, and tweaks on your favourite (?) mediocre movies! It's been a while since we circled back to the Alien franchise, which is surprising considering how plagued the series is with stinkers. But we'd inevitably try to fix Ridley Scott's follow-up to Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, and here we are. Follow along with us this season on all our social media, especially Discord where we're having a blast discussing movies every week. Don't bother following us on Twitter, however, we have officially left the platform for reasons I'm sure you implicitly understand.

For our Season 9 finale, we dawned our nerdiest pair of boxing gloves for a Franchise Fight to determine the best science fiction franchise of all time! Gregg argues for Star Trek (obviously), Scott backs Star Wars, and Liam makes the case for Doctor Who. Thanks to all our listeners for making Season 9 a success, despite some turbulence in the spring. We appreciate you all and are so happy to have built this little niche community of armchair screenwriters. Onward for Season 10!

In a fortuitous confluence of events, we all happened to see Deadpool & Wolverine in the theater opening weekend and figured we can't NOT do an episode on it, right? And episode we did! While we all quite liked Ryan Reynold's love letter to the 20th Century Fox era of Marvel movies, we found a couple of things that might have tightened the film up. 00:07:17 – General Thoughts 00:13:11 – Trailer/Plot Summary 00:15:29 – Movie Review 00:44:03 – Pitches and Fixes 01:04:35 – Listener Comments

Twister, not to be confused with Twisters, is a disaster/thriller directed by complete loose cannon, Jan De Bont. The former Roar DP shoved Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton in a dirty truck and drove them up and down Tornado Alley stopping to shoot at random locations without a concern for coordinator or safety. We appreciate that kind of shoot-by-the-hip filmmaking, as we are shoot-by-the-hip writers who aim to fix a movie in, oh, say an hour. An hour and a half tops! Listen in to our rewrites now!

Once every couple of decades Jerry Seinfeld gets bored enough driving classic cars and bottomless pots of coffee to make a movie. So what inspires this behemoth of comedy to pen a script worthy of the storied history of the silver screen? In an increasingly divided world, what draws this titan of jest to cut through the noise to deliver a heavy cultural impact? Bees. And Poptarts. Robyn Slack joins us again to remaster and rehabilitate the script for UNFROSTED! Together we find stronger motivations to hang the comedy off of and delete some pointless references to current events.

We're back from hiatus and for our return, we wanted to pick an exciting, uplifting movie that would match our excitement of being back…and for some reason, we chose Star Trek: Nemesis. The movie that ended the golden era of Star Trek is truly a depressing watch. It's dark, rapey, and far from the optimistic future depicted in The Next Generation's 7-year TV run. We certainly had our work cut out for us imagining a rewrite for this one. Still, it's good to be back! Thanks for your patience while we were away, we're excited to bring you new movie rewrites all summer long.

Welcome to the first-ever Intellectual Property Lottery! We took 20 of your suggestions for IP that have yet to be turned into a feature film and with the roll of a 20-sided die, randomly selected one for each host to pitch how they would adapt it. Comedian, musician, director, playwright, and all-around talented dude Robyn Slack joins us for another episode of slinging elevator pitches. His band, Success 5000, has a brand new album called Sad Forever, so please check that out, cause it's great! But also sad. But great! But sad. Forever. 00:02:56 – The Property Draw List 00:04:32 – Chrono Trigger 00:22:27 – Scrabble 00:34:25 – Shadow Run 00:42:30 – Megaman 00:56:35 – Alpha Flight 01:00:23 – Axe Body Spray 01:04:54 – Fraggle Rock 01:08:08 – Captain Planet

Baseball diehard Scott Belford of The Walk Off podcast joins us to rewrite our very first sports movie! Well…sports adjacent movie, anyway. The only problem is Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!! is a pretty good movie, you guys. We give it the old college try, though (Get it?!). Scott and Scott find an opportunity to add a secondary protagonist, Liam seeks to pass the Bechdel test, and Gregg questions whether adding any kind of central conflict would just undermine the whole point of the movie. 00:14:01 – Plot Summary 00:15:09 – Movie Disussion 00:30:50 – Fixes 00:55:38 – Listener Comments

We've teased it all season and at last, it's here, the great rewrittening of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania! Of course, we wouldn't have hyped it up so much if we didn't have some awesome guests lined up. Josh and Alex of Talking SMAC join us to reimagine the movie that officially landed Marvel in "jumped the shark" territory. 00:13:06 – Plot Summary 00:14:56 – Movie Discussion 00:38:36 – Rewrites 01:04:37 – Listener Comments

What makes a movie bad? What are the confluences of unfortunate events and decisions that cause a film not to work? Liam, Scott, and Gregg share their theories and experiences on the wide world of putrid cinema.