Nolan's Bane: How to NOT Make a Villain

Ok, so finally I have watched "The Dark Knight Rises" and Oh BOY!...



...I really don't know what to think about this film.

Is not by any means a perfect film as a lot of people expected, I don't know yet if I could call it a Great film or a Good film.

But there are certain issues that really bothered me about this final part of the Nolan trilogy. And I'm not going to complain about the logistics, scientific facts or physics of the movie, like:

How Does Bruce Wayne Get Back to Gotham?

Why Does a Prison Exist Where People Can Possibly Climb To Freedom? 

The Unrealistic way that the bomb exploded or the unrealistic way that the bomb functioned.

because I know that in that territory the film is pretty flawed.

If you want to see more technical and logic problems of the film, here you go.

But you know, almost all action films have these type of flaws, specially superhero movies. But if you think about it; there are a lot of great films with a lot of technical and unrealistic flaws and they are still great films indeed, and I guess there are flaws that not even the almighty Nolan could surpass.

But anyway, as a lot of wise people said "Just ignore the technical stuff and enjoy the story", and that's what I always do, but still there are serious factors about the story that annoyed me.

There are 3 major factors about the story that simply made me consider this film the weakest of the trilogy.

1.- The obsession to make Batman a Messianic martyr of the people. Instead of the dark, underground, mysterious and symbolic vigilante figure that he really is.

2.- I feel that the film doesn't know what it wants to do or in what it wants to become, TDKR stars mainly as a noir film but eventually right in the middle of the film, it wants to become a dystopian film all of a sudden, with really poor results, that’s because the overall dystopian Gotham is not developed at all. We don’t even see the true nature of this environment within the people of Gotham, we just see cops trap inside a tunnel, bad guys with tanks in the streets and that’s it. There’s no development in the environment, you don’t really see the hell and chaos you should see. If you want to make this kind of environment effective you need to give it a lot of exposure and development. That’s why I think it would had been so much nicer and badass to start the film already in this dystopian state, develop it throughout the whole film and explain what happened with flashbacks. Instead of building this forced dystopia that nobody knew how it really worked and we only get to see until the third act.

And third and most important, the villain: Bane.



I have to admit that the Bane of TDKR is probably the most disappointing villain of the last couple of years. And here's the reason why: Trough out the hole bloody film we hear about Bane, all the stuff that he has done, all the stuff that he is doing, all the things that he has planned, they build the character as a truly bad ass brutal mastermind and that's perfect, that's exactly what they have to do, specially with his background.

I mean, uuuuh he's Bane, he escaped from a prison climbing a brutal enormous cylindrical wall and he has been the only to reach the top, and he did this while he was just a little kid.

uuuuh he's Bane, his the son of Ra's Al Ghul.

uuuuh he's Bane, he has an eternal vendetta against Batman.

uuuuh he's Bane, he's the leader of the League of Shadows.

uuuuh he's Bane, he planned all this mayhem.

They built this character as probably the greatest villain of Batman ever and suddenly, is like... uh remember all the things that we  said about this guy... well... it wasn't him... yes... yes that's right it was that new chick over there... yeah the one who is suddenly so important in the third act of the story and we pretty much ignored her throughout the whole film giving her almost no proper character development... yes... she's the one... she did all that.... uh, what did Bane did then?... uh... well, he... he... helped her.

And then BOOOM , this great and epic villain that they were able to form in this entire film is dead by a single motorcycle gun shoot, and he dies in both a physical and spiritual way. When a villain dies at least he still lives in a spiritual way when you remember all the things that he did, but we cannot do that with Bane, because he wasn't the true mastermind behind all of this, he wasn't that epic villain that you thought he was, he was basically just a goon, the thing that you least expected from him.

Is not the first time Nolan does this, he did it in Batman Begins with Ra's Al Ghul, but at least he did in a reverted form you know: when you have a really cool villain, but you think he's just a goon of someone else but actually it turns out that he's the actual leader and it's even more badass than you thought, that way really works, Ben from LOST is a living example. But don't do it the other way around.

That was the thing that just killed the character for me and a big part of the film, I know that I'm complaining a lot with this but in a superhero film, the villain is the most important character in the story. And I just hate when they fool you with the identity of the true villain. I mean that's ok in a Mystery, Thriller or Noir story, but not in an epic action superhero film, specially since you have promoted that villain in the marketing of your movie like crazy!!!

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One of the best language learning methods, Assimil: How to use it and review

I have finished one of the most helpful books that I have read so far in my entire life, "Assimil: Le Nouveau Francais Sans Peine". If you are already a veteran of the language learning field; the most probable thing is that you're already aware of this method, but if you're a new comer in this discipline, this is the right place for you and probably this is the right method for you.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="437"] The Assimil Series: Available in a lot of languages[/caption]

The Assimil Series is one of the greatest self-learning books that you could encounter, mainly because of its unique method that consists in an overall exposition of the language you're learning in short lessons which feature either short dialogues, short stories, jokes, or interesting text about the language or about the country in which that language is spoken.

I know that the books are expensive and everything, but... you know... cuf, cuf... you could get them...cuf, cuf...around, cuf, cuf, cuf.

So, almost every lesson of the book looks pretty much like this:



You have your text in L2 ( the language you're learning ) and right in the next page you have the overall translation of that complete text in L1 (your mother language). But the true powerful aspect about Assimil is the audio, the book also has the audio recordings of every single lesson in the book, and that's the most important aspect of this method.

I know what many of you are probably thinking, "so it's basically just a book with a bunch of little texts, jokes and dialogues, but it will not actually teach me the language".

That's where you're wrong, I'm studying French right now and when I started "Le Nouveau Francais Sans Peine" I was a little skeptical about this method, but to be honest, it looked way more interesting and with much more content than the grammar-focused conventional books that I was studying at the time. So I decided to give it a shot, and the results were  amazing, taking in consideration the initial expectations that I had for this method.

This method is amazing because it works in a really mysterious but effective way, and also, (if you use it properly) it will actually make you start speaking and writing the language, better yet, it will help you to express yourself in the language, whether you're making some grammatical mistakes or maybe you're not speaking the language at 100%, you are still able to express yourself and make people who only speak that language understand you even tought you don't speak it 100% correctly, and that really should be your first goal while you're learning a language, to be able to express yourself so that natives understand you even if you're not speaking in a perfect way, that's your first goal, and Assimil really helps you a lot to achieve it.

First of all, there are two things that I would like to talk about this method. Okay the first thing is that, although Assimil tells you in the first pages that this method is for absolute beginners, I still don't quite believe that, but that's just my opinion, maybe you pick up the German Assimil and you'll learn a lot from it and you'll find it great, but I think that before you get to start with the actual book, you first need to check out a little bit your target language.

What do I mean by that? Ok, just check out the basics of the language like:

• Common greetings


• The verb To Be in present


• The verb To Have in present


• Common descriptive articles like: tall, fat, thin, etc.


• How to ask questions.


• Numbers, Days and Months

And that's pretty much it , you know, really basic stuff. But now pay attention at the expression that I used "check out", that doesn't mean that you need to learn them or to memorize them completely. Not at all, just get to know the language, familiarize with it, this is not yet the time to learn the language, it's just the time to familiarize yourself with it a little bit and c'mon don't be lazy, you can check out those 6 things that I listed above in just one week or maybe a couple of days.

Why do I says this? Ok, I believe this deserves an explanation. The thing is that if you don't know zero about the language, when you open Assimil, you are going to be truly expose to the language. You're a going to see texts all written in the language and even if you see the translation next to it; it's highly probable that you will be a little overwhelm by the language and by this method and if you're impatient you'll probably end up saying "Oh the hell with this!, this is just too advance, I will never be able to learn these entire texts, I need something simpler" and you will throw the book away. Big mistake.

But if you have already check out the language, it's probable than in the first lessons you will be able to identify certain words or sentences, and you will say "Hey I know what this means" even tought you still don't understand the rest 90% of the text without the translation, that feeling of "huh I already knew that word" or "huh I already knew what that sentences meant" kinda gives you some sort of motivation to keep moving forward.

How to use Assimil:

Ok, now let's get into the real stuff, how to use this book? In the first pages, the book already kinda explains you how to use it, but it's not really specific about it, it tells what you have to do, but it doesn't tell you in which order you need to do it, or which learning part is the most important. So, if you are having troubles or questions about how to use this method, I will tell you the way that I used it, maybe you don't like it, maybe you want to do it your way, but I'm just recommending this way because that's how I feel that I got the most out of this method.

Okay, first, remember the part of the audio recordings that I said before?

[caption id="attachment_402" align="alignnone" width="254"] Yes, here we go again.[/caption]

Well we're going to begin with that. The first thing that you want to do, when you're already about to start lesson one is... CLOSE THE GODDAMN BOOK!
Listen to the audio recordings, don't read anything and just listen to lesson one over an over again. Okay I'm going to explain myself, the language learning process in divided into 4 parts: Listening, Reading, Speaking and Writing. Assimil will help you with all of them, but the most important skill that you have to develop in your early stages of learning is: Listening. Yes I know that I have already said this a thousand times in my previous posts, but "Listening" is the form that the language gets inside your mind, inside your brain, and once that happens, everything is going to be so much fluid.

How many times should I listen to the audio?

Well I think this depends in the language you're learning, for example if English is your L1 and you're trying to learn another Germanic-based language like: German, or Danish. Or if your L1 is Spanish and you're trying to learn: French or Italian. I think that mandatory you'll have to listen to it 10 times, and then, once you have already listen to it 10 times, listen to it more times until you kinda actually now what they're talking about. If they are languages from the same group of families you should be able to at least recognize one or two things about what they're saying, when you feel that you understand just a little bit of what they're talking about, okay that's enough and open the book.

But what about if you're learning a language completely different from any other language you know, I'd say that 20 times mandatory.

Ok, that's the first part, now open the book, put the audio of the lesson once again and read (in your mind) while you're listening to the audio, do this at least five times. Then stop the audio, read the translation and all the notes that the text has, and then play the audio once again and try to read it yourself out loud along with the audio, do that at least 5 times.

Now you're going to close the book and you're going to do one of the most important techniques in the early stages of language learning, this is going to help you a little more with your listening and your pronunciation: Shadowing.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="302"] That's right baby![/caption]

When you do shadowing you have to listen to the audio and you have to say everything that the audio it's saying, but now here's the trick, you will NOT pause the audio at any time. You have to follow everything that the guy is saying without stopping and with the best pronunciation possible. That's why it's called "Shadowing". At the beginning is going to be a little hard, but it's all matter of practice.

How much shadowing you should do?

Well, ideally 10 times but I'd say that you should stop, when you understand everything that it's said in the lesson and when you feel that your pronunciation it's similar or almost identical as the recordings.

How many lessons should I do?

One lesson per day is perfect

But what about writing?

Ok, yes I know the method that I described doesn't contain any actual writing developement, but stay calm dudes. Assimil is divided into 2 big parts or "waves", in the First Wave (1 - 49) you should do what I already described to you and in the Second Wave (50 - 99), after you have already done your usual routine, as Assimil explains to you, you have to go back to one of the earlier lessons and you have to pick up a notebook, read the translation of that lesson and translate that translation (xD) into the original language without reading the original language. So is that good writing practice for you?

When you finally finish Assimil you'll have developed a good listening ability, tons and tons of vocabulary, a fair amount of idiomatic expressions, and the ability of expressing yourself in various subjects.

Is not going to completely teach you the language, but is going to make that tedious early learning stage so much easier, productive, faster and effective.

Trust me, I have used it in my French, and recently I met a French teacher (from France) and she told me that she was amazed with my French, the vocabulary that I knew, my reading ability and the sentences that I was able to formulate while speaking, she didn't believe that I have only studied french for less than a year. I'm not trying to show off xD, I'm just trying to make you realize how effective this method could be, and you should definitely check it out, the books are available for a lot of languages: Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Arabic, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, you name it, they are extremely good and trust me they will help you a lot.

I hope that this post was helpful for you and thanks for reading :)

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The Screenwriter's Dilemma: Becoming a Filmmaker

This post it's for everyone who wants to become a screenwriter or who's already one.

I remember that when I was younger I wanted to be a screenwriter, well first I wanted to be a writer, then a novelist, then a screenwriter and now I just write and I still write scripts. But I don't longer want to become a screenwriter, well at least, not only that. Obviously, I'm interested in the cinema industry, I'm interested in Hollywood but to a certain degree, I guess nowadays I'm more interested in the TV industry, because as I already said in a previous post,  I'm pretty sure that nowadays you can find better film quality in modern TV series.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="190"] Really good documentary about this profession[/caption]

But anyway, when I was younger, I started to investigate a lot about screenwriting and screenwriters and that was the same year when the Writers Strike took place, so just by that, I learned a lot about screenwriting, a lot about screenwriters and a lot about the situation that they were and that they are in. Let's face it, being a screenwriter has to be one of the most painful, unrewarding and underestimated creative jobs out there, and just for that, they're the most interesting characters in the cinema industry for me and they're the ones that I have analyzed the most, but I still have a ton of questions and a lot of things to say about them.



Okay, we are going to start analyzing this in the most simplistic way possible. And now, please answer the question in the most simplistic way possible, What is a film?, a film is nothing more that a story and that's it. You could have a brilliant director, you could have a powerful producer, you could have the greatest ensemble cast ever, but if you don't have a writer; you don't have a story and you don't have a film. For many years I looked at screenwriters as the martyrs of the film industry, mainly because they don't get at all the recognition that I thought they deserved. Just tell me, right from the top of your head, the name of five famous screenwriters...

I think the only screenwriters that I would consider "famous" or at least recognizable are Alan Ball, Robert Towne, Guillerrmo Arriaga, Paul Schrader and maybe David Chase (and all of them are also directors, producers and two of them successful TV creators executives).

But it's really strange to encounter a screenwriter whose talent is really recognizable and whose career it's really transcendental just by the fact of being a screenwriter and nothing more.

Most of screenwriters are left in the shadows if they don't get involve in the project as something else, and at the end of the day, they receive really poor recognition and poor compensation.

But why is it?, why screenwriter don't get as much recognition as directors? Well I think that there are certain factors to take into consideration,

• First, the whole: "Film is a visual media" yeah right I know that, but even if it's a "visual media" it's still trying to tell a story and stories are written in paper first.


• Most of really succesful movies are based in novels or in real life events, so that's not really good for the screenwriter if he wants to get recognition for his creative work, because he is not creating anything really, and even if he is, the public will think that everything is adapted.


•   And the third, which is the most important: ... (I'm going to save it, until the final part of the post)

That's the truth and still you have this:



The overall message that he is giving it's true. Screenwriting or better yet fictional writing it's a discipline and you don't need an absolute inherit talent, you can become a great writer if you do certain things or as he put it "skill sets", but which are those skill sets? God only knows.

I believe that you need to learn or experience certain key aspects to become a good screenwriter, and notice this word GOOD screenwriter. To become a screenwriter, there's only one thing you really need: connections. Talent or no talent, skill or no skills, if you have connections non of that matter.

But you don't want to be that writer right?, the one who writes bad comedy films and pathetic action flicks? No, I'm guessing that you're aiming for something with more substance.

Well, after all of this, it seems that being a screenwriter is one of the worst thing in the creative world. You struggle a lot and you finally manage to create your story, to define your characters, to connect everything together, and after months or maybe years of hard work, writers block, research, depression and everything; your script is finished.  And you did all that so that you could sell it to a film studio, so that studio could give your story (that's right YOUR story) to a director guy, who will make a movie about it and if it's successful, the producer will make millions out of your idea, the director will take almost the entire credit of your story (even if he wants it or not) and you will end up just as a lonely and forgetful name in the credits, without making a big amount money.



"Why would anyone want to be that?"

That's really not my question, to all of you young screenwriters or young aspiring screenwriters, my true question is: Why would anyone want to be ONLY that?.

In this world there are two types of artist: The Creative Artist and The Interpretative Artist.

Film Directors (who make movies based on somebody else's original work), Actors, Singer who don't compose their music. All of them are Interpretative Artist, they interpret what somebody else wrote, they interpret what somebody else compose or lived. Of course some of them are able to take their own creative perspective and transform it into something else. But without that main original idea, there's nowhere to go to.

Creative Artist, on the other hand,  they start from zero. Writers and musicians are creative artist, they have no place to go, no path to take but their own, they create that main idea themselves and then they develop it. So by this enormous characteristic, Creative Artist can generate their own material without relying in anyone else.

The third aspect that I wanted to save until this moment, is: Almost the absolute majority of successful screenwriters are film directors themselves and a lot of successful film directors are screenwriters themselves.

If you are already a creative artist, aren't you able to interpret your own work, your own story?

I understand why this happened before, but nowadays, there's no excuse, specially if you're young, if you're already a screenwriter why aren't you a film director? Nowadays there are only two things that you need to become a director, a story (which you already have) and a passion for films (which you already have). Why don't you take charge of your own story? Why don't you direct your own story?, even if it's an indie low-budget production it's Ok, the point is to get your story out there, show the world your story, receive feedback, and all of that is going to give you incredible experience in your writing and in your directing and guess what? since you're already a Creative Artist, you can write another story  and make it a film using all the experience that you gain from your previous one. In this time, is not that hard to produce an indie short film or something like that, there are a lot of good editing softwares out there, a lot of books info and tutorials about filmmaking, great cameras that are not really that expensive, and a lot of people interested in these kinds of projects.

Is that or, wait for some successful hollywood producer to take a look at your work and  if you're really lucky he will buy it, and you won't see your story ever again, until he produces it and that could take years or simply could never happen.

Screw that man, don't wait, don't waste your time with this industry-business bullshit,  life is too short, do it yourself!

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="380"] Nowadays, we have great examples of this kind of philosophy[/caption]

Cinema is composed by two powerful disciplines: Writing and Directing. If you're a film-maker it's better to be these two things.

I already said that if you are a Writer you should become a Director, but that's also the other way around, if you're a Director become a Writer, generate your own material.

If you don't believe me, maybe you'll listen to Spike Lee:



So from now on, new and aspiring Film Directors; let's become writers and new and aspiring Screenwriters; let's become Film Directors, for the sake of both arts.

Interested about the cheap cameras stuff I said earlier?

Interested about the editing softwares stuff I said earlier?, of course you could buy them but... there are other ways.

Interested about the film tutorials stuff I said earlier? 

Thanks for reading :)

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Basic Spanish: Similarities between English and Spanish

Obviously, almost the most common question or the most common thing that someone asks himself when he has decided to learn a new language is the following question: Is it hard?



So, in this case, if you have decided to learn Spanish, you're obviously wondering or are interested to know, if Spanish is a difficult language or not .


In my point of view, the difficulty of a language it's completely defined by the languages you already know. I'm from Mexico, so it's possible that learning Portuguese it's going to be a little more easy than someone from China. Or vice versa, let's say that I and a chinese friend want to learn Japanese. It's possible that he will pick up the language a little bit faster that I will because he's already familiarized with Asian Languages.

Languages are all a big gigantic family, almost all of them are brothers, sisters, cousins, distant cousins, fathers, mothers and grandpa's. There are two enormous families of languages that are predominant in the world: The Indo-European Family and the Sino-Tibetan Family.

You can find the Indo-European languages in America, Europe, Oceania and the Middle East, while you can find the Sino-Tibetan languages in East and South Asia.


Spanish, English, French, Russian, Hindi, Italian, German, Portuguese, Marathi, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Urdu, etc. They all are from the Indo-European family, so in a way they all are, brothers, sisters, cousins and distant cousins.
So in a way, Spanish and English are from the same family but we can't called them brothers.
From the Indo-European Family several groups of languages descend:
The Italic Languages where Latin emerge and from here, the famous Romance Languages arise, all of these languages are based on Latin and they are: Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, etc). All of these languages are direct brothers from one another, and if you already now one of them, you can learn another one without great difficulty. They have almost the same structure and they have similar vocabulary.


English descends from another group of languages called the Germanic Languages: Where you can find German, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, and many other, of course including English.
So they're both from the same family, but they are not from the same group, so I guess we can call them cousins, BUT!!!, they are not distant cousins, NOT AT ALL.

There's a big little thing that English and Spanish share with each other, and that little thing is LATIN!

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="295"] Latin is not dead[/caption]

Yes, I know that English is not a language based on Latin, but the Anglo-Saxon language was heavily exposed to Latin in three great moments of its history, The Conquest of the Roman Empire (When the romans conquered Britain), the Christianization of the English Kingdom and the Norman Conquest (When french soldiers, who spoke french, a language descended from Latin, attacked and conquered Britain for a long period of time).


So as you can see, English is not based in Latin, but I'm pretty sure that English is the Non-Romance language that has been exposed to Latin the most.
Don't believe me ? , well I'm going to put a little text that I already wrote above, but after that little text, I'm going to write the translation in Spanish, and almost every little similarity that you see in both texts it's because on a Latin based word or term.

English is not a language based on Latin, but the Anglo-Saxon language was heavily exposed to Latin in three great moments of it's history, The Conquest of the Roman Empire (When the romans conquered Britain), the Christianization of the English Kingdom and the Norman Conquest (When french, who spoke french, a language descended from Latin, attacked and conquered Britain for a long period of time).

El Ingles no es un lenguaje basado en Latin, pero este lenguaje Anglo-Sajon a estado fuertemente expuesto al Latin en tres grandes momentos de su historia, La Conquista del Imperio Romano (Cuando los romanos conquistaron Bretaña) la Cristinianización del Reino Ingles y la Invasion Normanda (Donde los franceses, quienes hablaban Francés, un lenguaje descendiente del Latin, atacaron y conquistaron Bretaña por un largo periodo de tiempo).

So as you can see, there are a lot of words and a lot of things that Spanish and English share despite not been from the same group of languages.  So truly, without knowing it, you already have good descent amount of Spanish vocabulary without even realize it.

If you read the two texts closely, you can see that the structure of English and Spanish it's similar but they differ in certain aspects, but you can learn them without big problem. I will talk about these aspects in a next post, so stay tuned.

Thanks for reading :)

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