Screenwriter

  • Elementary, dear Trailerspotting.

    November 20, 2009 @ 11:49 pm | by Donald Clarke

    Insofar as anything so grand as “controversy” can attach attach itself to the trailer-junkie community, some sort of, well, controversy has gathered round the promo for Guy Ritchie’s upcoming assault on Sherlock Holmes. Recalling the whole Shutter Island furore, the dispute hinges on whether you think the film looks like a steaming pile of turnips or the dog’s best pyjamas.

    We must, of course, face up to the problem of Mr Ritchie himself. There are, I guess, three takes on our Guy.

    1. The man’s an idiot and that’s all there is to it. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was Mockney garbage from a monocled-toff whose aunt is the Fourth Duchess of Bufton Tufton and who eats poor children for supper. Snatch was more of the same. And as for Revolver…

    2. The man’s a decent entertainer who went off the rails all too quickly. Lock Stock and Snatch are perfectly good fun. Sadly, Swept Away and Revolver are among the most hilariously wretched films ever made. RocknRolla was a partial return to modest form.

    3. The man’s a genius. Far from being pretentious drivel written, apparently, by a 19-year-old with a railway spike in his frontal lobe, Revolver is intellectual meat of the gamiest type. You just don’t get it.

    Now, I tend towards the second option. As a result, I am rather well disposed toward this apparently unpretentious Sherlock Holmes. I bow to nobody in my devotion to the original stories, but Ritchie is, it seems, making no gestures towards faithfulness. So there’s no real reason to get hoity-toity about the trailer’s lack of Doyleness. This is Holmes as action hero and the promo suggests that penny-dreadful larks will not be in short supply. Okay, Downey Jr — an actor I can overdose on very easily — doesn’t quite have the accent right. Sure, the film seems very reliant on CGI backgrounds.

    But Sherlock Holmes dives out of the Houses of Parliament into the Thames. He has a fight with a big man and his hammer — beside, I’m guessing, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s The Great Eastern — and various people appear to be rising untethered from the dead.  Come on. It’s bound to be a bit of a lark.

    As far as weekly housekeeping goes, the film of the week is, without question, the Coens’ astringent, penetratingly pessimistic, weirdly hilarious A Serious Man. I was much  keener on Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! than many critics. And I remain pretty much on board with the latest episode of the teen bloodsucker mopefest that goes by the name of Twilight. Decide for yourselves, folks.

  • Hooray, hooray. It’s Corman, Bacall and Willis.

    November 17, 2009 @ 11:59 pm | by Donald Clarke

    The zombies who hand out the Oscars can be so knuckle-headed you have to give thanks when somebody who is actually one of the higher primates receives a statuette. Perversely, nothing demonstrates the inadequacy of the awards more effectively than the frequent appropriateness of  their honorary Oscar recipients. Every year, as the latest hitherto neglected genius ambles out to get such a gong, the world’s film fans point at the telly and scream like Donald Sutherland in the last scene of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. “You what? The greatest actor/director/editor/caterer of his generation never got an Oscar and Cuba Gooding Jr did? And they say the Treaty of Versailles was unjust.”  That sort of thing.

    Well, here’s some more good news that contains bad news at its heart. Earlier this week, Lauren Bacall, Gordon Willis and Roger Corman all received their honorary Oscars and, in so doing, generated the usual aghast screams.

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    About f**king time, you cretins.

    It is well known that Bacall never picked up an award. You could probably guess that Roger Corman didn’t snaffle one. But Gordon Willis? I know I have mentioned the following fact before in the inky version of Screenwriter, but such a bizarre statistic deserves repetition. Here goes. Not only did Willis, the cinematographer known as the Prince of Darkness, fail to win an Oscar for The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Manhattan or All the President’s Men,  he wasn’t even nominated for any of those films. Want to get a bit more angry? Here are some of the masterpieces whose lighting cameramen were nominated in the years those three films were released: The Poseidon Adventure, 1776, Butterflies are Free, The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, King Kong (the crappy 1976 one), A Star is Born (the crappy Streisand one), The Black Hole. It’s enough to make you vomit.

    Anyway, all three admirable folk now have their belated award. Who deserves one next year? Maybe they’ll see sense and honour John Carpenter or Jim Jarmusch or Harvey Keitel or David Lynch. Not likely, I suppose. Actually, there is one codger who really deserves the nod and may actually get it…

    Yep. Mad old Tony only got nominated once — for The Defiant Ones in 1959 — and lost out to David Niven.

    Who else should be in the running? Remember, the candidate cannot have previously won an Oscar.

  • Is it my Aunt Doris?

    November 13, 2009 @ 3:01 pm | by Donald Clarke

    While on the move today in London, I was browsing through The New Yorker (Ooo! Get him!) and encountered this photograph from a recent production of Strindberg’s Miss Julie. Who’s the scantily-clad lady being groped by Jonny Lee Miller? Quickly, quickly. No Googling, Martindale.

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    It’s on the tip of my tongue, love.

    It’s Ms Sienna Miller. Maybe I have some very precise, very obscure mental condition — Miller-Obscurist Syndrome, perhaps — but, like some character in an Oliver Sacks case, I simply find it impossible to recognise Miller when I see her. Over the last few years, I’ve bored readers with a series of cheap jokes on this matter. However, I was not joshing when I said that, every time she reappeared on the screen during Cassanova, I thought  a new character had arrived. “Who’s she? Why does everybody seem to know her already? Nurse, they’re stealing my pills again,” I tended to say. Is it just me? Or is this condition common among the populace?

    Moving to non-Miller matters, the film of the week is, without question, Michael Haneke’s austere, gripping, deliberately confounding  The White Ribbon. If you want something a little more mainstream — though no less grim — then check out Michael Caine in the cracking vigilante flick Harry Brown (no relation to the journalist, incidentally). It’s every bit as dubious as Death Wish, but rather brilliantly made and energised by a terrific late performance from the splendid Mr Micklewhite.

    This week, Screenwriter is listening to: Radioactivity by Kraftwerk. Radio-act-iv-ity. Discovered by Madame Curie.

    This week, Screenwriter is reading: Buddenbrookes by Thomas Mann. I think I was led in that North German direction by The White Ribbon.

    This week, Screenwriter will be watching the following telly: The Making of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr. He does overdo the theatrics, but it remains fun.

  • Do you like Der Zorn Gottes?

    November 11, 2009 @ 10:03 pm | by Donald Clarke

    I was interviewing Michael Haneke the other day (as you do) and, for more than one reason, I began to feel like a bit of a moron. Obviously, most people would feel somewhat dim when sitting opposite the director of The Piano Teacher, Funny Games and this week’s first-class The White Ribbon. But I’m getting at something very particular. Every time I mentioned Hidden, his peerless philosophical thriller from 2005, the translator would, while speaking in German, refer to it as “Caché”. Now, I am, of course, aware that this was the film’s original name, but, when talking in English, it is surely proper to use the title that appeared on the English-language poster. Nonetheless, I felt a slight (undoubtedly unintentional) rebuke with each translation. “Ha, ha, this monoglotal bog-trotter can’t even manage one word of French,” the charming translator almost certainly didn’t think.

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    Hey Deathso, after the game why don’t we go and see that Det sjunde inseglet?

    Never mind that. Here’s the issue I’m getting at. When do we translate film titles and when not? German is a language most Anglophones find reasonably unthreatening (at least in terms of vocabulary), yet almost all German films have  their titles translated when playing overseas. Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God never appears as Aguirre, Der Zorn Gottes in the pages of The Irish Times or Sight and Sound. Die Blechtrommel is always The Tin Drum. And so on.

    By way of contrast, Japanese is, for us, a much more difficult language. Yet films from that country are very often presented with their titles unmolested.  Rashomon is always Rashomon. Yojimbo is Yojimbo. True, Tokyo Monogatari often becomes Tokyo Story, but Mizoguchi’s timeless Ugetsu Monogatari is usually, well, Ugetsu Monogatari.

    I was in a conversation with an American once who thought me a half-wit because I hadn’t heard of a hot Danish film called “The Celebration”. I ended up looking like a pretentious wazzock instead when I eventually said: “Oh you mean Festen.” It looked as if I expected every one I met to speak fluent Danish. As it happens, the title of Thomas Vinterberg’s contemporary classic was translated for the American market, but not for the British or Irish.

    The more you think about it the odder it gets. You would seem up-yourself if you started talking about Les Vacances de M Hulot. (Unless, of course, you were French. In which case there would be never be any chance of you behaving pretentiously.) Yet you’d look like a cretin — or at least weird — if you referred to Federico Fellini’s most famous film as The Sweet Life.

    I’m sure nobody else cares, but these anomolies have always bothered me. Anyway, spare a thought for Herr Haneke when he does the Mexican junket. Apparently Hidden is called “El observador oculto” in that part of the world. Cool! Now that doesn’t sound like something in which you’d  expect to encounter Daniel Auteuil. Danielo del Diablo, perhaps. But not M Auteuil.

  • Trailerspotting Considers The Wolfman

    November 10, 2009 @ 1:43 am | by Donald Clarke

    It’s ominous. It’s an evil omen. Wooooo!

    What’s an evil omen? Being shuffled around the schedule like a veruca patient at an emergency ward during a hideous bus crash. That’s what. If my memory serves me, The Wolfman was originally supposed to be released in 1618, but was cancelled due to the unexpected outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. Since then its movements about the calendar have been so frequent and complex that ascertaining its current release date has become as difficult as accurately assessing longtitude on a Viking drekar.

    Anyway, after toying with a November outing, it now seems reasonably certain that the the hairiest of the classic monsters will return just before Valentine’s Day. KISS AND HELL! FANCY A WOLFWHISTLE THIS VALENTINE? Okay, so those are all appalling. Who made you secretary of state at the Department of Taglines, anyway? Shut up and watch the trailer…

    Could you be any more negative. It could be okay. Yeah, so it does look eerily (eerie in a bad way) like the cataclysmically frightful Van Helsing. True, it’s hard to shake the notion that the film only exists because somebody looked at a photograph of Benicio del Toro and realised they wouldn’t need all that much makeup for this Wolfman. Okay, we appear to be back in the era where horror films — or at least their trailers — were scored with a singularly unfrightening class of Belgian moron metal. But Hugo Weaving’s shaved fetus-like werewolf seems pretty scary, doesn’t it? No? Oh, I don’t know why I bother.

    In any case, we all know who should play The Wolfman. This guy…

    If you look up stamina in the dictionary Shouty McDiatribe’s YouTube video will be there. Nice bellowing, sir. By Tuesday lunchtime you will be bigger than Jedward.

  • Baldwin & Martin’s Laugh-In (And weekly notes)

    November 6, 2009 @ 7:56 pm | by Donald Clarke

    So, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin are to host the Oscars. Well, that’s almost interesting. Actually, there is something mildly intriguing about the fact that Dr Hfuhruhurr and Mr Conductor are now being flung together as a double act. Note how the reports take it as read that Steve and Alec are equally famous and equally respectable. This constitutes quite an achievement for Mr Baldwin and — depending upon your view of Alec’s standing — a potential source of worry for Steve and his current face.

    We first heard of Baldwin back in the early 1980s when, as a member of the Knots Landing company, he blazed trails for an array of similarly boxy brothers — Billy, Danny, Stevie, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, Titch — who massed together to form a kind of collective punching-bag for the world’s film writers. You remember how it went. “Why, sir, the only thing this film requires to complete its wretchedness is a few Baldwins about the place. Har, har.” He got caught up in a messy marriage with Kim Basinger and appeared in  movies that were so forgettable I can’t be bothered to make fun of them.

    Meanwhile, Steve Martin was  maintaining his position as the world’s greatest Kafka-reading, banjo-playing, prematurely-greying quasi-physical comedian. Baldwin flashed his teeth at various inflatable nonentities in Knots Landing. Martin raised proper laughs in The Man With Two Brains and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. If, at any point in the following decade, you suggested that Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin were similarly prestigious celebrities you would have been laughed down Sunset Boulevard, out across the desert and back home to Kansas.

    Yet here we are. Once Baldwin realised that, rather than an only modestly good-looking lead, he was an unusually handsome character actor, he powered forward and became the chap every star wants lurking over his shoulder. He was nominated for an Oscar for his role in The Cooler and picked up two Emmys for 30 Rock. A mere five years ago, in Team America World Police, Kim Jong Il noted that “Arec Bardwin is the greatest actor in the worrd” and we all laughed. Now, though he is far from achieving that honour, the joke doesn’t seem quite so funny.

    Martin’s recent films have included Pink Panther 2, Cheaper by the Dozen 2 and Bringing Down the House. Actually, come to think of it, it’s Baldwin who should now be outraged that the two men are regarded as equals. It’s a cruel business.

    In other news, the film of the week is The Men Who Stare At Goats. It’s a flawed piece of work, but, thanks to Mr Clooney, it remains diverting throughout. A great many critics liked Bright Star but, the nice Flake-ad photography noted, I found it a little bit thin.

    This week Screenwriter is listening to: Tarot Sport by F**k Buttons. Thump, thump, thump. Crunch!

    This week Screenwriter will be watching the following telly: The Thick of It. Some people (inevitably) think it’s “gone off”. Not me.

    Oh and, yes, as at least one reader pointed out, there is an error in the quiz. See if you can find it.

  • I just want to start a debate…

    November 4, 2009 @ 7:02 pm | by Donald Clarke

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    Look, I just wanted to start a debate about the Sudetenland.

    I just want to start a debate about the disingenuous use of the phrase “I just want to start a debate”. I don’t know when this happened, but, at some point in the last half-decade, those seven words came to be used as the standard get-out clause for anybody who didn’t have the guts to unambiguously express their supposedly controversial views.  You know how it goes. “Now look, Pat. When I said I supported the mass castration of all short people I was just trying to start a debate on the superabundance of non-enormous citizens.” That sort of thing.

    I was reminded of this last month while watching Bill Maher (who I generally like, incidentally) talking paranoid, pseudo-scientific garbage about the dangers of vaccination. The variation on the dread phrase appears around 0:25.

    That’s not what you’re saying Bill. Or, rather, that’s not all you’re saying. You are saying, like notorious horse-frightener Dr Andrew Wakefield, that vaccinations are substantially more dangerous than the conditions they ward against. Now, we don’t have space to rubbish this nonsense in Screenwriter and that’s not the purpose of this particular post, anyway. (Mind you, it is interesting to note that, of all people, Bill, who has so vigorously ridiculed the 9/11 truther fruitcakes, has climbed aboard this particular charabanc.) My point is simply this: say what you mean and stop pretending you’re just running a metaphorical flag up a virtual pole.

    Jack Straw, the British Justice minister, recently said something similar while revisiting his much-discussed comments detailing how he preferred female Muslim constituents to remove their veils when visiting his surgery. Again he was “just trying to start a debate”. No you weren’t, Jack. You were lodging an indirect objection to a practice you find troubling. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just say what you bleeding mean, matey.

  • Trailerspotting previews the greatest film of 2010.

    November 3, 2009 @ 1:43 am | by Donald Clarke

    Well, I say the greatest film of 2010, but that may, in fact, be downplaying the truly staggering potential of Old Dogs. Barely a day goes by when I fail to receive an email asking whether there is any chance of John Travolta and Robin Williams coming together for a film in which one of them suddenly discovers he has two boisterous children. It would also be nice if, after receiving the news, the dad (Williams, say) faints into a plate of spaghetti. Is there any chance? Is there? Is there?

    Obviously, I have to reply that such a delicious prospect would be far too much to hope for. It’s like wishing for the clouds to rain Madeira and the rivers to flow with tawny port.

    Then one day I clicked on Apple trailers and the sky filled with fortified wine.

    Everything about this film looks fantastic. John Travolta plays a rogue who can’t get enough of the ladies. (What’s so funny?) Robin Williams plays (I say “plays”) a man with the sad, desperate eyes of the terminally misunderstood. What will happen when the twins come to stay? Fun, laughter and a little bit of poignant redemption I’m betting. Still not convinced of Old Dogs’ brilliance? This is a film in which a gorilla smacks John Travolta in the face with a tractor tire, for Pete’s sake.

    Gorilla. Tire. Travolta. If it doesn’t end up being better than La Regle du Jeu  I’ll happily sign up with the Scientologists.

    Gorilla. Tire. Travolta.

  • So who does like 3-D?

    November 1, 2009 @ 11:55 pm | by Donald Clarke

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    Now that’s what I call a 3-D movie.

    There is, sadly, no way around it. The return of 3-D is one of the big  stories of the cinematic decade. Though only around 20 percent of Irish screens showing films available in 3-D were able to offer punters the process this summer – the rest showed the old-fashioned flat versions – those screenings accounted for about 50 percent of takings for the relevant pictures. Yet, however many people you ask, you never seem to find anybody who actually likes the blasted business. It’s the Robson and Jerome of its era. The phenomenon is a roaring success, but its fans all seem to live in remote caves or in bubbles at the bottom of the ocean.

    Okay, the story is not quite so unfathomable as I have suggested. Whereas almost all adults will tell you they find the process underwhelming, uncomfortable and overpriced, younger children do tend to enjoy putting on the glasses and ducking the hurtling spears. You may complain about Pixar giving in and issuing Up in 3-D, but the truth is they had no serious alternative. If a kiddie’s birthday bash arrives at a screen showing Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs in 3-D and a flat version of Up you can be fairly certain which entertainment the young consumers will plump for. For all his talk of immersive 3-D, Pixar’s John Lasseter knew that he had little choice but to order the Upsters to make with the digital depth-finders.

    So what? To this point, 3-D films have tended to be family entertainments anyway. The number of kids who get excited by the thought of a bumpy Up, Ice Age or Meatballs greatly exceed the number of parents scared away by the thought of paying more money to see a darker screen in marginally greater discomfort. The success has encouraged exhibitors to install digital projection systems — thereby saving the studios money on print costs — and the 3-D presentations have proved much harder to pirate. Who cares if only kids like this stuff?

    James Cameron. That’s who. The beardy Canadian made Titanic the biggest film in history by appealing to virtually every demographic. Okay, Avatar, which opens in a little over a month, will also be available in flat prints, but, what with so much of the promotion focussing on the 3-D effects, Cameron clearly believes that those old enough to vote do genuinely crave the process. I am still unconvinced. Is there anybody out there over the age of 15 who would give a fig if 3-D withered away yet again? Come to think of it, is there anybody out there still excited by Avatar?

    Anyway, if you do fancy the gimmick then Disney’s A Christmas Carol is coming at you later this week. And I mean coming at you.

  • And they talk about Christmas coming earlier ever year.

    October 29, 2009 @ 5:52 pm | by Donald Clarke

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    Oscar voters consider the year’s releases.

    Before anybody else says it, let me clarify that I am aware the Oscars are nothing more than a combination of crap shoot and marketing beano. Look through the records and you will struggle to find a single instance in which the Academy awarded the top prize to the best film of the year. Indeed, once or twice — I’m thinking about A Beautiful Mind here — they have actually managed to garland one of the very worst. Despite recent victories by Slumdog Millionaire and No Country for Old Men, the Academy still seems to think its job is to recognise the most middle-brow, meretricious releases and the chewiest, most self-regarding performances.

    So why pay any attention? Well, it’s become a sort of sport. As in all sports, success depends on talent, but, here, the talent is less in the fields of acting and directing than in marketing and scheduling. Nothing demonstrates this more effectively than the Oscar success of The Reader last year. The film got pretty ordinary reviews, but, by a characteristic sleight of hand, the brothers Weinstein managed to fool voters into thinking it was a critics’ favourite. They pushed Winslet up a few red carpets and, sure enough, come February the nominations rolled in.

    It is, however, a sport I continue to follow. Thus I find myself being drawn into the debate that has already begun about the potential nominees for best picture. There are a great many sites devoted to the Oscars, but the most obsessive remains an offshoot of the LA Times entitled The Envelope. Here, a gang of philistines, who believe the awards actually mean something, argue endlessly about the intentions of a bunch of geriatrics who wouldn’t know a masterpiece if it bit them in the genitals. At least one of their contributors thinks the notoriously bad Irish film Strength and Honour is a masterpiece for the ages. There’s plenty here to get Oscarologists such as me fuming.

    Anyway, as you will be aware, the Academy is putting forward 10 nominees for best picture next year (up from the usual five). This should allow in a few more commercial pictures, but, with no trippy, dippy Amelies about the place, we will probably not see a foreign language flick in the shortlist. Here is my current nap for the final ten. Let me be very clear: these are not my personal favourites (indeed there’s a few I haven’t seen). These are the films I think the Academy will pick. It all could change if The Lovely Bones gets a kicking or Nine lives down to the standards of director Rob Marshall’s distinctly iffy back-catalogue.

    The likely nominees for best picture in no particular order…

    Nine (Everyone’s in it and Daniel Day Lewis is a statuette magnet.)

    The Lovely Bones (Based on big fat, Judy-and-Richard friendly book. Hello?)

    An Education (For many in the Academy, being British makes a flick an art film.)

    The Hurt Locker(Best-reviewed American film of the year)

    Invictus (Clint Eastwood directs Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela. Need I say more?)

    Precious (The little indie film that could.)

    Up (Wall-E just missed out on last year’s top five. Our apologies.)

    Up in the Air (We love George! We love George!)

    A Serious Man (May be a bit dark, but it’s just so darn good.)

    The Road (Serious. Important. Again, based on a big book by an important person.)

    Coming up on the rails: Star Trek, Bright Star, District 9, Avatar, Brothers.

    Thoughts?

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