Juno

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I recently watched Juno again. I saw it in the theatre when it was first released, and it immediately turned me into a giant, slobbering Ellen Page fan.

Okay, that didn't sound so good. I'm tall, but I'm not giant, and I occasionally drool when food is particularly tasty, but I don't slobber. However, I am a big fan of the Ellen.

The fact that she's from my hometown has nothing to do with it. Okay, there's little twinge of civic pride in there somewhere, but it's quite overmatched by the gobs of appreciation I have for her talent as an actress. "Frighteningly talented" was the phrase I believe one reviewer used.

Juno was the film that launched our Ms. Page into the spotlight, but she'd been working like a fiend in the industry for years prior to that. She's been acting in film and television since she was ten years old. Being a Canadian, she's done most of her work so far in Canadian productions, which means she was "under the radar" for much of her career. Read the rest of this entry »

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I'd like to talk about dialogue today. For some reason the topic just popped into my head, and I'm going to go with it.

One of the things I enjoy most about writing is dialogue. I have a good ear for it, and I'm able it write it pretty well. I can hear characters' voices as I type, and that seems to allow me to write dialogue that is fairly realistic-sounding.

Keep in mind that no written dialogue is perfectly realistic, because people don't really talk the way writers write them. If we wrote dialogue the way people really speak, it would be unreadable. People don't naturally wait their turn and let other people finish what they're saying. They also "ummm…" and "ahhhh…" a lot, and say a lot of pointless things that wouldn't really move a story ahead.

So dialogue in fiction (be it a book, a movie, or a TV show) is an approximation of how people speak. It's designed to move the story forward while allowing the characters to sound at least mostly realistic. Read the rest of this entry »

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