Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Bad writing

Quintessential Dowd:
It was a sequel idea proposed by Tony Scott, who directed the blockbuster “Top Gun,” before he committed suicide in 2012.

Jerry Bruckheimer, who co-produced the 1986 movie, which he once described as “‘Star Wars’ on earth,” recently revealed to The Huffington Post that he and Cruise are getting “closer and closer” to a deal to make “Top Gun 2.”
It was actually quite a long time before 2012, as the following paragraph makes clear: a good 26 years. Whereas her sentence makes it sound as if he offed himself while the movie was in post-production. Or I'm misreading that comma, and the idea is that he proposed the sequel just before doing himself in, as if it were the idea itself that drove him to despair.

Either way, it has no possible relevance to the subject at hand. If she wanted to make it clear that Scott is not involved in the sequel, she could have said "the late Tony Scott", like any normal writer. But because suicide is a sort of "edgy" concept, and she's deathly afraid that her friends will suspect she might not have known the gossip item (it's two years old!), she's got to squeeze it in somehow, no matter how much it damages her rhythm. What a terrible, terrible writer she is.
From "The Incredibly Fantastic Adventures of Maureen Dowd", via Comics Alliance, 2010.

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