Screenwriter »

• Surprises at JDIFF.

  February 28, 2010 @ 11:53 pm | by Donald Clarke

  Just back from the surprise film at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. It proved to be a canny choice this year. Five years ago, the mystery film turned out to be Noah Baumbach’s superb snoot-comedy The Squid and the Whale. Baumbach, writer for the New Yorker and other egghead publications, later followed that picture up with the ghastly Margot at the Wedding, featuring Nicole Kidman in more than usually strangleable form.

  When the words “A film by Noah Baumbach” appeared on the screen, festival punters could, thus, have been forgiven for feeling somewhat conflicted. Happily, Greenberg turns out to be something of a return to form for Noah.

  

  Ben Stiller plays a deeply troubled bloke, once a promising rock singer, who seeks to put his brain back together while house-minding in LA for his more bourgeois brother. Loose-limbed, featuring another selection of largely unlikable characters, the picture has all the muddy, perverse appeal of an early film by Bob Rafelson. Welcome back, Noah.

  Comments (42)

• If you read one “blog” today, read Screenwriter!!!!

  February 25, 2010 @ 11:09 pm | by Donald Clarke

  On the previous post, a number of people pointed out a quote on the trailer for the Carney Brothers’ upcoming Zonad from (hem, hem) The Irish Times. Mr Times said the low-budget alien invasion flick was “uproariously funny” or “blood-curdlingly hilarious” or something. To be fair, I think the quote is accurate and is not used gratuitously out of context. But it still seems a bit bald when pulled from its paragraph and flung at a seated audience.

  

  “He said what now?” 

  An example of genuine misuse of a critic’s copy was picked up by The Guardian yesterday. It seems that the DVD of Dead Man Running — a horrible Danny Dyer film financed by various footballers — carries the following “quote” from that no-longer Mancunian paper: “‘Delivers performances that will almost certainly be seen as stellar”. The quote does not appear in Mad Pete Bradshaw’s review or in any related features. It transpires that the distributors plucked the phrase from a football “blog” by Barry Glendenning. Barry (one of our own, incidentally) happily admits that he has never seen the film and that the comment was meant satirically.

  I still maintain, however, that the most outrageous example of quote manipulation involved the Irish film The Most Fertile Man in Ireland. One DVD issue of the comedy informs us that The Observer felt it was “every bit as hilarious as its title suggests”.  A glance at the review by Mark Kermode (standing in for Philip French that day) confirms that the full sentence read: “Sadly, The Most Fertile Man in Ireland is every bit as hilarious as its title suggests.” I told Mark this when I met him in a lift shortly afterwards and, like me, he felt the distributors had demonstrated such outrageous chutzpah you really had to take your hat off to them.

  Incidentally, the distributors of Dead Man Running were unable to misrepresent this paper in their advertising because they didn’t even bother showing the film to the Irish press. Make of that what you will.

  Comments (33)

• Are we too kind to Irish films?

  February 24, 2010 @ 1:49 am | by Donald Clarke

  

  Some of you may have seen Neil Jordan’s interesting comments to the effect that Irish film writers are, perhaps, too kind towards domestic movies (to be fair to Neil, he included himself among the indulged). I have heard the opposite case argued by many industry professionals. It is said that my colleagues and I are all “begrudgers”. We positively yearn to bump into people whose work we’ve just ridiculed. I wonder what the rest of you think.

  Hang on. Is this the right photo?

  Comments (61)

• Farewell, Lionel Jeffries.

  February 22, 2010 @ 12:59 am | by Donald Clarke

  So Screenwriter’s been a bit quiet of late. I’ve been busy at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. What’s it to you? Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant Port of Call New Orleans plays tomorrow (Monday) and I am very excited indeed by the prospect.

  On an unrelated issue, I think it behoves us to pay tribute to the great Lionel Jeffries who died a few days ago. Many of the obituaries pointed out that he directed the Railway Children, but I remember him most fondly as one of those great English comic actors always to be found lurking over Margaret Rutherford’s shoulder. Here they are in Murder Ahoy. Note also Joan Benham, who was so great as Lady Pru in Upstairs Downstairs.

  

  Comments (11)

• Gore Vidal can’t stand John Updike.

  February 16, 2010 @ 11:57 pm | by Donald Clarke

  Excuse us another jaunt off-topic, but I have to recommend Mark Lawson’s new radio series on post-war American writers. It’s on BBC Radio 4 and it’s called — you’ve guessed it — Capturing America: Mark Lawson’s History of American Literature. You have, at time of writing, a day to listen again to the first episode. Check out Gore Vidal on John Updike at about 25:10. “I can’t stand him.” Then listen to Tom Wolfe on John Irving and vice versa. On that last dispute, I do remember John Irving giving out about Tom Wolfe not being a serious writer and finding myself staring incredulously at the page. John Irving? It was as if Tom Clancy had decided to set himself up as a model of the highbrow intellectual. Anyway, enjoy…

  

  “I can’t quite make out who it is, but I’m pretty sure I hate him.”

  Comments (25)

• Extraordinary Measures does not star Jean Claude Van Damme.

  February 12, 2010 @ 11:21 pm | by Donald Clarke

  Good news everybody. Next week a Hollywoood movie opens called Extraordinary Measures. Well, you know what to expect with a title like that. We will begin with a mid-grade female star — it used to be Anne Archer in the 1990s — picking her children up from school and driving them back to a house surrounded by white picket fences. The phone rings. It is the Archerian husband in the muscular form of Stallone, Schwarzenegger or, to a lesser extent, Van Damme. Cleverly — to suggest some lurking presence — the director shoots the phone call, during which hubby explains why he’ll be late for dinner, from the other side of a hallway window.

  

  A scene from Extraordinary Measures (probably).

  A few moments later, Joe Pantoliano bursts into the house and, after standing rudely on the toddler’s teddy bear, murders the entire family in a noisy, smoky mess of Uzi fire. “Nooo!” Stallarzendamme yells, before setting out to annihilate the appalling culprits. He will do anything to put the villains in the ground. Yes, he will even take EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES! This is going to be awesome.

  But, hang on, what’s this? It seems that Extraordinary Measures is actually a true story about a man seeking a cure for a fatal disease that affects his unfortunate children. It stars Brendan Fraser,  but this is not the awesome Brendan Fraser of George of the Jungle. It is the serious Brendan Fraser of Crash or  The Quiet American. No fair. You can’t call a film Extraordinary Measures and then refuse to give us a scene in which a Mexican drug lord gets eaten by his own Rottweilers. Isn’t there a Movie Title Ombudsman to whom I can complain?

  This week, Screenwriter is listening to: Dark Eyes by Tomasz Stanko. Another limpid winner from the great Polish trumpeter.

  This week, Screenwriter is reading: Gloriana by Michael Moorcock. An anarcho-feminist classic from one of the very great English eccentrics. He played with Hawkwind, you know.

  This week, Screenwriter will be watching the following telly: Generation Jihad on BBC Two. After landmark series on Northern Ireland, the excellent Peter Taylor investigates Islamic extremism in the UK. Very good so far.

  Comments (7)

• Get ready for Shutter Island with Isle of the Dead.

  February 7, 2010 @ 10:43 pm | by Donald Clarke

  Last autumn, when the first of several release dates for Shutter Island loomed, Martin Scorsese unveiled a list of his favourite 11 horror films. It’s an eccentric collection but, oddly, quite a few entries — the British ones for starters — might appear on my own list. Even Peter Medak’s undervalued The Changeling is worth rediscovering. The only real objection I  have is to the inclusion of Psycho. I’m not saying the Hitchcock classic is an unworthy enterprise (perish the thought), but I’m not sure it really counts as a horror movie. Note how all the rest have at least a hint of the supernatural to them.

  

  A rare photo of Marty not talking.

  Anyway, here’s the list…

  1. The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963)

  2. Isle of the Dead (Mark Robson, 1945)

  3. The Uninvited (Lewis Allen, 1944)

  4. The Entity (Sidney J. Furie, 1981)

  5. Dead of Night (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1945)

  6. The Changeling (Peter Medak, 1980)

  7. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)

  8. The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)

  9. Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1957)

  10. The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961)

  11. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

  Among the most interesting inclusions is Isle of the Dead way up at number two. Scorsese has, quite understandably, always been a fan of the superb B-pictures produced by Val Lewton’s unit at RKO during the 1940s. If you arrived late for the programme and missed support features such as Cat People or I Walked with a Zombie then you were a very silly person indeed.

  Isle of the Dead is less well known than those two films, but it is every bit as interesting. Directed by one Mark Robson, who went on to helm big movies such as Peyton Place and Von Ryan’s Express, the picture details the experiences of a disparate group stranded on a plague-ridden island during (bet you didn’t see this coming) the Balkan War of 1913. Boris Karloff is unusually chatty as a ruthless Greek general who, at first, dismisses talk of vampires, but slowly comes to take the ancient superstitions seriously. Like most of Lewton’s pictures, the film subtly rations its shocks. Indeed, nothing properly weird happens until the last reel. The chances that the main feature exhibited anything like the restraint of the accompanying Lewton picture were slim indeed.

  Clearly, Scorsese had Isle of the Dead in his head when he was preparing Shutter Island. Both concern two people who travel to an island and, for differently terrifying reasons, get stranded there for an uncomfortable few days. Indeed, Scorsese is so enamoured of Lewton that he has narrated a documentary on the great man’s work.

  “Oh I would love to see this fine film,” I hear you say. “But I have no DVD player and, anyway, anticipation has been ramped up to such a degree that I want to see it now!”

  Fret not, imaginary nutcase. The entire film is available on YouTube (entirely legally, I’m sure). Here is part one. Enjoy. And remember: there are such things. Shutter Island finally opens (probably) on March 12th.

  

  Comments (37)

• The greatest bargain ever.

  February 3, 2010 @ 10:04 pm | by Donald Clarke

  I was in London on Monday — Read Clarke on Tom Ford in Friday’s Soaraway Ticket! — and picked up the greatest DVD bargain of all time. The British Film Institute has just set about reissuing a series of supposedly lost British films from the 1960s and 1970s under the title Flipside. The collection focuses on barmy comedies such as Dick Lester’s The Bed Sitting Room, experimental head-trips such as Don Levy’s Herostratus and quasi-exploitation flicks such as Lindsay Shonteff’s Permissive.

  

  An excellent look, Mr Newman.

  There are (to me at least) few more interesting eras in cinemas than the fag end of the swinging London scene and — more fascinating still — the long period of feet-shuffling that came after. How the hell did any British director get anything made between Performance and Chariots of Fire? Through ingenuity and graft that’s how. Check out the gruesomely “shocking” Permissive for pointers. Better still — moving away from the BFI’s series — have a glance at the imperishable British horror film Blood on Satan’s Claw. It’s available in an excellent Tigon Pictures  set that comes in a coffin. Wooo!

  Where was I? Oh yeah. As a taster for the series, the BFI has put together a DVD featuring an introduction by the unstoppable Kim Newman, one of the great men of contemporary cultural commentary, and a small collection of fantastically bizarre shorts. It’s called Kim Newman’s Guide to the Flipside of British Cinema and — here’s the thing — it only costs £1.99. Okay, it doesn’t seem to have an Irish cert, but you can pick it up from the BFI’s website. While you’re there, you might splash out on Peter Watkins’s Privilege.  As Kim points out, this rock opera thungummy — an early film from the director of The War Game and Culloden — is rare in seeing the repressive consequences of much rock idolatry. Anyway, it’s no classic, but it’s a really fascinating piece of work.

  On a side note, do you recognise the woman on the cover of Kim’s DVD? You know her well.

  Comments (12)

• Professor Screenwriter and other geniuses.

  February 2, 2010 @ 11:46 pm | by Donald Clarke

  Comments on the last post offered confirmation — not that any was needed — that readers are sick to the teeth with Oscar chatter. Fair enough. We’ll call a halt for a few weeks, before returning to the subject in the days before the ceremony itself.

  

  Professor Screenwriter celebrates A Serious Man making the final 10.

  There was, however, no way Screenwriter was going to allow today to pass without bragging about his extraordinary success in predicting the Oscar nominations. Of the 25  I called, I got 23 correct. To paraphrase Lionel Hutz, I don’t use the word “genius” very often, but I am the greatest genius in the history of the world.

  Okay, this year’s Oscars did, for the most part, go according to plan. Many sites will have had a similar hit rate and, if I’d included the best supporting acting prizes, my success ratio would have plummeted. Nonetheless, 23 out of 25 ain’t bad. If I’d been working at Lehman Brothers in the early part of this decade the economy would be in a much healthier state right now.

  What were the surprises and how welcome were they? Well, District 9 took the best picture spot that I had reserved for Star Trek. We have no complaints there, though it would have been nice if both had made it in. Invictus continued to fade and was eventually edged out by Blind Side. That Sandra Bullock flick is the only one of the 10 I haven’t seen, so I can’t comment on its quality. But… Well… Are you looking forward to it?

  Everyone expected Julianne Moore to make it in to the final five for her supporting turn in A Single Man — and she deserved to — but that place was taken by Maggie Gyllenhaal for Crazy Heart. Good for her.

  There was, however, no doubt about the biggest shock of the nominations. (And not just for the Irish.) The Secret of Kells is a fine film, but the team’s achievement in securing a best animated feature nomination is quite staggering. Somebody has been working very, very hard — and cleverly — at ensuring that voters watched Tomm Moore’s beautiful picture. I don’t use the word genius often…

  Comments (14)