The Drunk by Cristian Nicolae - Short, Drama - A young man lost his thoughts in the wine bottle, dealing with problems. His nephew tries to show him the way out. 6 pages - pdf, format 8)

Is the writer around?

I just read it and have some comments but before I do, I want to make sure this puppy isn't a drop off.

Shawn.....><

Hello....

I took a look.

The dialogue....five pages of it...was on the nose to me. It sounded totally unnatural and basically said the same thing back and forth for four pages.

The two characters...I didn't care much about either character. We don't get to find out why the guy is a drunk, but it appears to be just one drunken episode. The other guy doesn't really help him. I want to buy into caring for the drunk guy but you don't give me a reason to....My advice is to build better characters...give us some depth...some reasons why he is the way he is.

The story...this was more(as said before) like a drunken episode without much to it. The guy did finally pass out or die at the end. Whichever...I didn't really care because I wasn't invested in the story or your character. I'm sorry.

I think you could rewrite this and make it better. Keep working on it. Read your dialogue out loud to make sure it sounds like people when they talk. It's hard to write dialogue ....

If you do a rewrite of this, I'd love to read it again....best of luck.

Sorry, I can't believe that a drunk person talks with such... efficiency, and thought.  In fact, neither of the characters really talk naturally.  It makes it hard to care about them.  

Hi Christian.

I'm going to have to agree on other comments and say that I didn't really care about the characters either. The dialogue was unnatural. I would suggest reading it back to you to check how easy the words roll of the tongue.

You need to avoid the use of 'we' I used to do this as well, until someone here told me to avoid it. For me, its not a very visual way of storytelling.

I'm not the director of this one, so I don't want to see camera directions. It gets in the way of the read.

Page 1: "OLIVER HITS THE TABLE WITH HIS FIST." - Any reason why this is in CAPS? I've never understood why some writers choose to have whole sentences capitalized.

"Oliver gets back to his drunk attitude." - Isn't he already in his drunk attitude?

"He feels bad for his reaction." - Try not to describe a character's emotions. Just show us their facial expressions.

*There's no need to capitalize a character's name every time you mention them. Once is enough, IMO.

Page 3:" He is scared." - Show Stephen's fear. Trust me, I'd rather you spend a couple extra lines describing his facial features than simply saying "He's scared." I don't think I stand alone on this one...

Page 5: "OLIVER gets even more drunk..." - So just like that he's gotten more wasted, without drinking anymore?

So, I finished it, which means it's not that bad. I just think it needs more substance to it. I mean, if I was to summarize this, I'd say "A teenage boy is abused by a drunk man for 6 pages. At the end he passes out." That is literally all it is... a drunk man verbally abusing a poor kid, demanding that he get called "sir." There's no real point to the script IMO.

Sorry, this one didn't really bring anything new to the table.

Daniel

There's some grammar issues here, and they're sometimes a little off-putting.

Occasional 'we's' ar eokay, but we're littered with them here - also, may be an idea to drop some of the camera shots.

I think someone alse mentioned the dialogue being a bit on-the-nose - true - Oliver seems not to struggle to figure himself out at.

Overall, the writing ain't great, and the work really lacks any direction, tension - and the ending is really nothing ... needs work & a lot of it.

Im sorry but this is really bad.

There are no emotions or natural reactions to the conversation and as it's been pointed out the dialogue is very much on the nose...

You finish it off with Oliver being so drunk he can barely speak.... then he recites this:

No, we cannot do that.  A bastard
like you should be sleeping outside,
in the mud or maybe with the dogs,
so when they'll be hungry, they will
be getting some meat without waking
me up.  That would be....majestic..

Not bad for someone who can barely speak.

Again create a little more emotion and better reaction from steven, better dialogue and less banging of the fists on the table.

Mark