One of my new favorite shows on TV: Generation Kill, created by the people who brought us The Wire.

It's not so much about the horrors of war as it is about the horrors of gross incompetence in leadership. There are good leaders and horrible leaders in the show. There's a lieutenant who knows what he's doing and is thus respected by his men. But there's also a captain (nicknamed "Captain America") who at times screams to everyone on the com system that whatever mission they're on is a "suicide mission", and also fires off a captured AK at unarmed civilians. There's another captain who just doesn't have a clue -- he pronounces the last name "Baptista" as "Baptist" -- and when one of his field medics tells him, point blank, that he's incompetent, the guy is genuinely surprised... And can think of no response except to just walk away.

Basically, it's like The Office except everyone has guns. And it's often just as funny.

Paris, je t'aime: I finally sat down and watched it. My absolute favorite piece was the Alexander Payne one at the end. It was touching and universal and still tied very strongly to America, which is what I like most about Payne's work.

And guess who has a new TV series coming out on HBO?

Fortunately it isn't a series based on William Hung, although that might be really neat too. Or horrible. Or horribly neat. Or neatly horrible.

One of my current favorite shows is Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. This is where Gordon Ramsay arrives at a failing restaurant, and like Pollyanna, makes the place a success.

Often the current leadership of the restaurant is resistant to Ramsay's plans. However, his necessity is often self-evident. He's there to save restaurants on the brink of closure, and despite the fact that the restaurant owners/chefs are facing failure head on, it takes his arrival to wake them up to reality.

What boggles my mind is when these guys serve Ramsay their food and he tells them to their face that it's shit, they often don't believe him. On an episode the other night, a chef/restauranteur said "I don't care how many awards he has -- they mean nothing to me." What?! He has nine Michelin stars. If there's anyone who truly knows what the fuck is going on, it's him.

And often their success hinges upon whether they finally GET IT or not. And despite their empty restaurant and lack of customers, it takes Gordon Ramsay coming in to tell them the truth before they finally fucking get it.

Being bitch slapped by reality hurts, but it's a good kind of hurt. It's a hurt that's been waiting to happen, and the sooner it happens the sooner you can change course. Like the dude says in his last lecture, if they stop giving you criticism, you're screwed because they've given up on you. They don't care enough to criticize.

In regards to writing, every now and then someone will say, "Yeah, I'm hoping I won't have to do any rewrites." Saying this out loud means that in all likelihood you're wrong -- in fact, you have a TON of rewrites to do. Because it means that you've lost touch with your story. Like the chef that's surprised that his food sucks -- he's lost touch with his food. He has settled for what it is, with all of its warts and problems.

Settling sucks.

Sam wanted to check out the new X-Files movie; I was all for this since I liked the last one and I haven't been keeping up with current events.

I don't know if you're planning on seeing it, but I think there's a lesson to be learned there in terms of scope. As in make sure that the scope warrants the film. SPOILERS FOLLOW, but if you don't intend to see the movie, please keep reading.

At the beginning of the movie we have Mulder and Scully called back to the FBI to track down a missing agent. All well and good. A helicopter picks them up, lands them on a rooftop. A figure in the shadows steps forward to greet them. The way that it's played visually, you think that it's AD Skinner.

But it's not. It's Some Other Dude. And that's where things start to collapse.

You see, if it was Skinner, the movie would have started off big. This is the guy who allowed Mulder to get drummed out of the FBI. They have history and tension. And if he's there, you know things are serious. The stakes are high.

But NO -- instead you get Some Other Dude meeting them, telling them about an agent that they don't know (and who we barely meet, and thus don't care that much about) that has gone missing. She's the Quest Object. These are the stakes.

Dude: In the last movie Mulder rescued Scully from a fucking ALIEN SPACE SHIP in the ARCTIC. How does missing agent lady compare to that? To being rescued from a SPACE SHIP? It's like going from steak and eggs to a PB&J. What is the point?

OKAY -- the story can be simple. It can be about a missing agent, it can be about greater themes that surround that simple story. I feel like they were attempting that. Here we have a subplot with a convicted pedophile psychic priest that tests Scully's Catholic convictions. But there wasn't enough digging there -- he merely tells her to keep going, have faith, but WHY DOES SHE? Why does she allow herself to trust him? Why doesn't the story dig into the fact that she can never be a mother due to alien tampering, something that she can't explain? Why doesn't it shake her core beliefs?

So the problem here is a stakes issue. It's also a scope issue. This movie felt like a very long episode of the TV series, and not a particularly good one. The scope of the story was not cinematic.

I've read a few scripts that had this scope problem -- either nothing happens that warrants a cinematic storytelling, or the scope and stakes are so small that no one would bother throwing money at the project. However, none of these scripts were actually made into a big-budget movie. So it's kind of bizarre that this has actually happened.

I got to eat a lot of popcorn though. That was cool.

Write what you know: I believe in this proverb. If you don't know what you're writing about, you are going to generate problems. Unless of course you're very good at making up things that sound plausible, in which case you're in good shape.

Still, I like to learn new things. So I'll often get really interested in a subject, learn everything I can about it, and then write about it. Learning about something and then writing about it tends to cement it in my mind -- like how they say that they best way to learn something is to eventually teach it.

And as a writer you are constantly trying to find thematic meaning or clarity in the things you write about. The world is an extremely complex place, arguably without meaning unless human beings come along to create that meaning themselves. Evil is banal. People are murdered for no clear reason or for ridiculous reasons -- fifty bucks. Road rage. Who knows.

When I learn something I invariably attach meaning to it. It gets added to my database and marked with emotion or memory or something. I think that the meaning that's attached is as important as the piece of knowledge itself. That's the part of me that's making the connection to the outside world.