Lots of great moments, but it didn't come together for me by lostboy6987

Overall: Lots of great moments, but it didn’t really come together for me. Maybe it was because I’ve seen this before. A couple who are both bored with their marriage. A guy whose not confrontational on dates. I see lots of potential for more detailed development, and I guess it’s kind of there. Barry is simply such a passive character.

I think there are some great lines here. I’m interested in seeing more of this world and these characters. You take us to a fairly ordinary setting, which is usually a recipe for boredom, but this is one of the first screenplays I’ve read on triggerstreet that I couldn’t put down. I wanted to see how things resolved themselves.

There are some great, detailed scenes here, like when David and Nicole are trying out role-playing, and the argument that ensues after that. That general relationship malaise is so relatable and in some ways clichéd, but that scene has enough details that it feels new and alive.

I enjoyed how you revealed the dual stories of Barry and David/Nicole. Each storyline held my interest, and when one threatened to get boring, you switched to the other. You might check out ‘About A Boy’ if you want to fine-tune this dual exposition in a movie that basically has two protagonists.

Overall, however, I really missed what it was you were trying to do. I didn’t fully grasp the journey these characters go on, and therefore didn’t understand the point of the movie. I believe there are two reasons for this.

First reason: A lot of this script left me really confused.

I didn’t understand the basics of what H2H was. All these characters work at H2H, a software company started by David and Nicole. It’s a big enough company that they have their own building in downtown, yet small enough that all the employees fit in one cafeteria, and all the nerd programmers at one table. So how big is it, and if they have such a small number of employees, how is it so lucrative?

Furthermore, what type of software does H2H make? Is it Rosetta Stone? Is it software for corporate file storage? Is it Photoshop? There are a thousand different types of software, each of which would give this company a different feel, and we never, not once, hear what the actual software is. All we know is that H2H released a bum version (version 5), and that this company is in ‘customer service,’ whatever that means.

Being so lost, not knowing how big H2H is or what exactly they do, left me guessing as to why exactly Sensi was buying them, and why Sensi was launching spyware against a company they were acquiring.

The result of things not being clear is that I never really understood the conflict between Richie and David, and therefore wound up kind of lost as to how Barry fit into all of this.

I feel like it would help you to really imagine you know NOTHING about this world and these characters, read this screenplay, and pinpoint all the unanswered questions you’ve left us with. I don’t really know where to start in giving you advice on how to clarify things, because it was so utterly confusing for me.

Because so many things were unclear, there were many moments that were supposed to have emotional weight where I was struggling so hard just to understand the office politics and hierarchy that I couldn’t really emotionally be with the characters. For example, on pages 67-68, when Barry walks out of the office as the team is looking into the spyware, I realized much later that this was a significant scene, but it didn’t make me feel anything at the time. When those moments don’t work, it’s hard to really feel the emotional arc of the characters.

Second reason: For these characters (Barry, especially) I don’t feel they take a complete journey (but again, me being confused is probably part of why I don’t feel that.)

Let’s start with Barry. At the start of the screenplay, he’s not confrontational, he’s extremely timid and is wallowing in low self-confidence. We see him on a few failed dates with women. Then he has a few specific moments (with Lila, then with Nicole) where a more immediate, vocal, relaxed side of himself comes to the fore, and he’s more successful with women. These moments both seem to come, more or less, out of the blue. They just happen. Barry isn’t pushed into them, and therefore I don’t buy that he’s gone through emotional growth that will endure past the end of the film. He’s got a budding relationship with Nicole, but I really feel like Barry will go back to being his insecure self after a few weeks.

With Nicole, I really liked how you explored her family dynamics, and all the pressures and stakes (family, wealth, sexual fulfillment) that are weighing on her. However, at the end of the movie, I felt like she was a little more connected to her kids that she was at the start of the movie, but was still fundamentally in rebound territory, and Barry was her rebound. It didn’t feel to me like she had gotten enough space from anything to get perspective on her life or to go through real growth.

Therefore, I feel like this script has lots of good moments, but I failed to comprehend the basic journeys of the two main characters, and therefore failed to grasp what this was all about.

I’ll go into some detailed, fairly fixable notes now.

-There are lots of spacing issues and spots where one character’s speech is broken up into two dialogue blocks without any scene description in between.
-I liked the scenes between David/Nicole and the kids. They were one of my favorite parts of the script. However, I feel like these kids are expressing themselves too well for being kids. Kids speak in incomplete thoughts. No matter how big their vocabulary, a 6-year-old or a 13-year-old won’t be able to vocalize their thoughts and emotions as well as an adult, because vocalizing your inner world takes complex critical thinking which takes a long, long time to master. Basically, I’d advice you to dumb down how these kids talk.
-Also, there are points at which both David and Nicole ask Jack to be comfortable with his parents’ sexuality; not only that, but Nicole expects her son to understand her emotional complexity and why she would sleep with Jesus. It’s ridiculous for any parent to expect their 13-year-old to be comfortable with mom and dad’s sexuality, let alone mom’s sexual need to sleep with another man. The parents should just be happy if the 13-year-old can manage to be comfortable with his own sexuality. That being said, if you intended Nicole and David to be totally misfiring, it works, but when I read those scenes I felt bad for Jack and felt like Nicole and David were massively out of touch with what if feels like to be 13
-Why does Rico need to be Lila’s boyfriend? I kept waiting for this coincidence to pay off somehow and it never did. Just have her boyfriend be a random guy who’s her boyfriend, or cash in more on the coincidence, but don’t create this highly unlikely situation and then not use it to any narrative purpose.
-Having David's father die...I didn't really get what this accomplished, narratively. If you want to end this with a funeral, I suggest having the deceased be a character who works at H2H (and a character that we know already). That would explain why everyone from work is at the funeral. It seemed a little clumsy that the film ended with the death of a character we never even met.

Anyways, I hope this helps. I do think this script has some great moments, but again, it’s difficult for me to review because I was so confused by it.

Review

Reviews of No Prince Charming (5)

Reviews by lostboy6987 (4)

How it Rates

Details

Trigger Updates

Screenplay of
the Month

Reviewer of
the Month