Brain by Elizabeth Lavenza - Short, Horror - In a remote British sanatorium that hides questionable pioneering in brain research, a Middle Eastern immigrant renders enforced assistance to the head physician and his son.  - pdf, format 8)

Nice pseudonym... so I'm guessing this will be another Frankenstein story.

Awkward sentence structure in places leads me to believe this could possibly be a foreign speaker's script.

Very strange atmosphere to this one, it's OK... but that's its trouble in my opinion. It's just average. I think it would work better as a romance rather than a bromance.

5 out of 10.

That VO put me right off, straight out of the gate.

It would take an actor about a minute just to get through it.

An odd, wistful little story. I'd hazard that it was written by the guy who did the story about Watergate and the old hag a couple of OWC's ago.

The poetic atmosphere wasn't quite matched by the plot, imo.

It's an almost, but not quite. Would probably work better as a short story than a film.

My opinions are just that, and have been known to be wrong!

Picky bits:-
1) The logline reads a little awkwardly
2) I'm not a massive Narrator fan and his/her intro is over long
3) Character is intro'd as TALEB but Narrator calls him TALIB
4) I'm assuming that our writer doesn't have English as a first language, I'll take that into account
5) CAGE OCCUPANT flips to ADAM with no reason or introduction, suggest you call him ADAM at all times
6) And the end completely lost me!

Good bits:-
1) I like the rat brain surgery, interesting idea, very visual

Rules
Think this would be expensive to film

Overall I struggled with this one, needs more work and maybe a collaboration would help with the language issues.

Anthony

I think people are really struggling with the ‘low-budget’ part of this challenge. A two-story mansion in the middle of a hilly landscape is beyond most low-budget independent filmmakers means.

The narrator VO sounds really wrong, very unnatural.

I struggled with this one, reads much better as a short story than a film.

I think I’ve been reading these too much, time to take a break and come back to them later.

-Mark

A challenging read that rewards patience.  

THE GOOD:  The whole tone here is something totally apart from an American aesthetic.  I am almost certain this is a foreign author.  That is one of my favorite things about these boards, the variety of styles we find here.  This story develops slowly, with fine details that seemingly add little on the page, but would look good on the screen.      

THE BAD:  The big V.O. is a risk, but I can see the subtle, snarky value that it adds.  The setting is a little hard to swallow.  Where is everybody else?  Adam is introduced incorrectly, and it took a few moments to figure out who he was.  There are a few spots where the author becomes a little too pleased with his attention to detail, and it makes this script harder to read than it has to be.    

bert's grade:  B    

Brain... I really like this title, reduced to a simple and elegant statement to describe something  so complex and misunderstood. You paint a very lucid, dark, and brooding realm in the first page alone.

The exposition is clever enough. Moulded around immediate statements within today's media, perhaps falsified  by the establishment (here or there) to create fear  within society, and the notion that the mental state of a (lost) individual can be rehabilitated if removed from society itself... or institutionalized.

However, as others have mentioned, it's a little too much to ingest in one take, perhaps it could be broken into segments using the existing action that follows... just  a thought.

Then, you take us deep into the chambers of a walled institution, and though it's a future not yet realized, the placement of crude (by gone) instruments strategically placed within view show the viewer that the minds working within are most likely strong advocates of age old bloodletting techniques.

Kudos to your research here to portray the clinical environment , and jargon, of brain surgery. Most went over my head, but I caught the gist of what was transpiring.

In the end, Tahir becomes the monster the Union Jack feared he would, however, in the process also became a compassionate saviour of Adam... saved him from the knife so to speak. Adam, however, now must enter a society that will most likely treat him no better than his father, and he no longer has walls to protect him. Tahir will probably realize what he's done  only after he and Adam hit the point of no return.

Well crafted, great writing!

I agree that V.O. at the start is too long and it's not necessary either. We get what's going on without it and it doesn't matter whose brother Tahir is.

I liked most of this, I thought the actions and descriptions are very visual, I could imagine this sanatorium and the atmosphere pretty well.

The dialog, especially towards the end, was a bit weak at times.

I was wondering how Tahir could easily cut off the electronic tag in the end... why wouldn't he have done so earlier and just ran away instead of cleaning the sanatorium's driveway?

And finally some minor technical thing I noticed:

Quoted Text A walkie-talkie lying over there goes off and the sharp voice of Dr. Cornelius turns them to dead silence : DR. CORNELIUS (O.S.) I meet you at the operating theater at nine-thirty.

and

Quoted Text A MECHANICAL HUM DRONES OUT THE SPEAKER while Tahir replies: TAHIR (O.S.) I have.

Should be (V.O.) not (O.S.) here, O.S. is used for characters at the same location which are not visible, someone yelling through a bathroom door for example.

Overall, I enjoyed this but I felt the end was a bit rushed to stay in bounds.

Writer,

Oh, very good. I like this one. Consistent tone throughout, and a very human approach to horror. Felt a bit more on the dramatic side, but I think it qualifies. Written with skill, I really didn't  find much I disliked about this.  A little wordy in the beginning maybe, but you made up for it later. It made me want to turn pages, and was very visual. One of my favs so far!

Steve

The narrator has a long speech and yet Tahir's doing minor actions, not enough to warrant the long voice over. Script gets a bit too technical in places where you wind up having to tell me what they are in layman's terms. Why not keep the narrative simple to understand and leave the techno-medical babble to the scientists?

That said, I was starting to dig the vibe going through most of this. With a bit of a push, it could have been inspired by a little bit of German '80s underground .Rat surgery was a plus.

VO aside, I think I like this entry better than most I read so far.
Good job.

Brain

Logline needs some work, but then again so does mine.

There are the making of decent drama within this but the heavy read and stop start approach to the scenes did throw me.

A captive. An infamous  brother. Hostage by a mad man, asked to do dangerous work and it appears the only human to provide support to a pitiful creature.

All sound foundations.

I also appreciate the detail even if I didn't understand much of it. Sometimes the name of equipment is a weaker outcome than a simple description.

As written it needs some work, clarity being the key thing for me, but the foundation is there.

All the best

The good news...

There seems to be some real thought and talent on display here.

The not so good news...

But that talent isn't quite developed, which makes this a tough read.

Slugs not well done.  Character intro not well done.  Missing a ton of commas, which makes the read very hard for me to get through.

The bad news, because of the above, I baled after Page 2, and it's a shame, because there may be a great story here.

Starting off with a long V.O. is a problem here, IMO, as it takes your readers out of the story, before it even begins.

Which leads me to a grade of...

C (even though I didn't read it all, I can see the promise, but it's not yet being realized)

Bomber jacket, ahem.

I'm not fond of the idea of changing character lables in the middle of the script. It's confusing and annoying, like my new TV remote.

Sentences like the following make me wonder if you proofread as it'd only work with  Inspector Clouseau saying it - "His white hair below the big bald patch as well as his sideburns extremely sticks out,"

These sentences make me wonder if you were slightly merry while writing -

"The rat's skin of scalp is already opened up."

"carefully bores into the rat's top of the skull."

Apart from being amusing, it does make it a lot harder to read. Those sentences would make Yoda say "Less drink you must take."

I've no real idea what went on. Certainly a creepy enough subject. Needs work.

R

Edit: Had a think about this. I'm beginning to believe the author's first language isn't English. If so, my apologies. About my comments, I mean.

This had a nice atmosphere, the sanatorium was a good setting and you evoked it well - sitting in the mist in the middle of nowhere - but it's not there yet. The Narrator VO is a shortcut, there are many other, more enjoyable ways to drip-feed that information, it's just harder. The first draft of my own entry had one character just reeling off backstory before I looked at it, thought 'well that reads terribly' and rewrote it to try to get it across in dialogue.

Storywise I was a little confused - is Adam the doctor's biological son, or his creation? If the latter, who is the 'whore' Cornelius refers to as his other parent? Why does he want to erase his memories? Perhaps your most interesting thread was a suspected Islamic terrorist being forced to 'prove' his loyalty to the state - a paranoia and sense of mistrust that's all too real in today's UK - but you never expanded on this. I thought that was underdeveloped.

The dialogue needs a bit of work, too. I liked 'the snow is melting', but the exchanges between Adam and Tahir were slightly melodramatic and Cornelius was a touch one-note, stock 'crazy scientist from movies'. Your writing, while very good at helping me visualise the locations and setting the tone, left me a bit cold on the action. That could do with pumping up a bit more. Finally, while I appreciated the obvious research that had gone into the science, there was perhaps slightly too much of it for such a short script - that scene with the video started to feel a bit like a science lesson. Also, it jarred slightly that they were watching it on YouTube - I feel an official medical recording, perhaps with a timestamp etc, might fit the scene better.

But stick with this one. There's something poking through that's worth a bit more time to fully unearth, should you want to.

So, I know at this point who the writer of this one is but it did not colour my review with regards to 'story'.

Nice imagery, terrific visuals - which is what it's all about. Eww, 'trepanation' .

A little mixing with your tenses but that comes with NESB. You do brilliantly considering and you're really making strides in that direction.

Here, for example:

ADAM
When I was small, it's been four
hours by foot.

Apart from those instances there's some nice master strokes with this in terms of the medical lingo in dialogue and the characterisations. Dr. Cornelius evokes an image of Einstein in my head - that similarly crazed, eccentric type.

I hear
that you're boring.

That line could have a double meaning i.e., that he's dull, instead of the verb for the actual medical procedure, if you get what I mean.  ;D Requires looking at again.

Nice topping and tailing with the dialogue, the snow.

Overall, a very original and enjoyable take on the challenge with just the right amount of gore. Definitely deserves more attention i.e., reads and reviews.

Well done.

Elizabeth Lavenza,

This is pretty dark and I quite like the tone. It's just a little confusing at the moment. Quite hard to really get into. Think there's something here though. It's a good concept with flashes of great writing. Clean it up and I'd be interested in reading again.

Best of luck.

Glenn.

I didn’t care for the relatively long opening V.O. It seemed to take the easy way out. I would like details like this to be revealed as the story goes along.

Somehow we got from CAGE OCCUPANT to ADAM without an introduction of Adam who – is also referred to as inmate. A bit confusing.

The drill scene was not handled well, IMO. Somehow the sequencing was off.

All that being said – I liked the script. Vivid descriptions and characters that I felt for. Not sure how to describe your style – but to my eye it was pleasing. I think this is pretty solid.

Mmmmm.  Yes, I agree that this one's not exactly low budget.

But.... it's far more classy, well written and lyrical than many of the entries this time around.  It's yet another story based on Frankenstein - to an extent - and it's a bit of a reach to do that in this case.

Yet - when I ignore the challenge criteria and just look at the merits of the story itself... I really like this one.  Definitely in my top 3-5 in terms of the full writing package.  :)))

Cheers,

--J (W)

Alex -

Shoot me a message on this one?

Cheers!

--J (W)

Hey ho, thanks for your comments and reviews.

Perhaps I come back to respond to some of you in detail.

If by chance any of you is interested in the scientific background topic of my script, I can say those interventions on the brain of lab rats and mice actually happen. I once researched it for a feature script (never used it though), and since then kept an eye on that stuff. They make big progress every year.

It serves for example the dementia research, which is a big topic around the globe, I think, especially in case of the Alzheimer disease. With erasing experiences connected to fear f.i. they try to understand how memory works in general. The very interesting part is that the scientists are successful. They are not only able to delete a fear like an electro shock the rat has learned before, they also are able to bring it back again. Unbelievable stuff. I was astonished to see those surgeries are even displayed on YouTube, almost the way I told it here.

Another notable thing is that I saw no one titled a produced script with the word "Brain" only. Ha, don't know if it's just a bad title, but it somehow illustrates that some easy short words are available to name your projects.

Thanks again

Opening this script up, the first thing that hit my eye was all the black on the page. I would definitely break up that V.O. if I were you. Maybe you know this, but you had to do it this way to keep it under the page limit.

I readied myself for something a little bit laborious to read and it was. At first, but I soon found myself totally engrossed in the story. I honestly thought you did a great job. Low budget? Not so much, probably. It filled the other criteria though, IMO.

Had I read this one earlier, I would've teetered between RECOMMEND and CONSIDER.

Suggestions to improve. Don't really have any other than the V.O thing.

There is a script here at SS somewhere called Open Your Mind that is also about trepanation. Great script written by Martin Lancaster if you want to check it out.

Great job!  8)