Screenwriter »

• Was Kermode pushed or did he jump?

  March 29, 2010 @ 8:29 pm | by Donald Clarke

  I was just sitting down to write a piece on the strange case of Mark Kermode and the Film 2010 job when events suddenly made the story irrelevant. Way back in 1997, when Barry Norman left the BBC’s flagship movie programme, a few prescient pundits — Derek Malcolm for one — suggested that Kermode, then only about .001 percent as famous as he is today, should be presented with the ermine and sceptre. As it happened, the Beeb took the populist route and offered the future Manuel-botherer the exalted position. In truth, he has never seemed up to it. Though a genuine expert on Manga and other Asian genres, Ross too often bigged up films featuring stars he’d recently interviewed and always read the copy as if he’d seen it for the first time 10 minutes previously.

  

  Cheer up, Mark. The Exorcist is on Sky Horror later.

  A few months ago, after a decade of hysterical whining, The Daily Mail finally got its way when Ross abandoned the BBC to spend more time with his money. Now, surely the job was Mark’s. In the interim, Dr Kermode had confirmed his expertise and passion while gathering a substantial following on BBC2’s Culture Show and — Hinge to Simon Mayo’s Bracket — BBC Radio Five Live. All the bookies had him as strong favourite. A poll in, of all places, The Sun called for his appointment. The BBC could simultaneously bolster its flagging credibility (Kermode has a PhD, remember) and satisfy its teeming license payers (he is, in many ways, a populist figure). Why, there hasn’t been a more obvious succession since R A B Butler took over the UK prime minister’s job from Harold Macmillan.

  Initially, when pressed on the matter, Kermode seemed to adopt the Michael Heseltine construction: “I cannot currently foresee the circumstances under which I would stand.” When asked about the issue by Mark Lawson on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, he stressed that he had not been offered the job, but he did not exactly deny he would accept it if the call came. Last Friday, however, the tone had changed. During his regular slot with Mayo, he seemed to deny any possibility that he would be sitting in the Film 2010 seat when the series kicked off again. His reasoning? The show needed a mainstream critic, not somebody whose “favourite film of last year was  a Swedish vampire movie”. Really? He was mainstream enough for those voting in The Sun’s poll. How far downmarket is the BBC heading? Is my cheese sandwich in with a shot? Is this pile of rotting mulch? Is Johnny Vaughn?

  The answer came this afternoon when it was announced, to the genuine surprise of most observers, that Ms Claudia Winkleman, heavily mascaraed daughter of Eve Pollard, had somehow secured the BBC’s top movie reviewer job. Now, I am sure that Claudia is perfectly adept in her specialist field (whatever the hell that may be), but, anybody who saw her dire hosting of Sky’s Oscar coverage, will be in little doubt that she is no expert on film. She could prove us all wrong, but, the chances of the Film show returning to its glory days now seem unimaginably remote.

  So did Kermode really (as he implied) rule himself out or was he making the best of an outrageous snub? It’s an intriguing situation.

  (Oh, and if you didn’t get the absurdly obscure joke above, Alec Douglas Home actually succeeded Harold Macmillan.)

  Comments (41)

• Attack of the Killer Schadenfreude!

  March 27, 2010 @ 5:41 pm | by Donald Clarke

  News reaches us of two spectacularly poor opening weekends. It seems that Motherhood, the new film from Uma Thurman, made a staggeringly anaemic £88 at the UK box office last weekend. The news has triggered surprise and, yes, schadenfreude across the film world. “You’re kidding?” Jana Edelbaum, the film’s producer, said, when contacted by the British press. “We must have broken a new record for grosses.” After that moment of near-pride, she went on to blame  Metrodome, the film’s British distributors. This is, indeed, quite an impressive figure for a film featuring a proper movie star (even one who appeared in My Super Ex-Girlfriend).

  

  “Look junior, I think it’s… Yes, it’s a punter. No. They’re going to Bounty Hunter instead.”

  Meanwhile, unheralded by press screenings or (from what I could see) advertising, a strange little Franco-Irish horror film snuck largely unnoticed in and out of Dublin’s Savoy Cinema. It looks as if Dorothy Mills — a sort of high-Gothic affair — took somewhere in the region of €170 on its lonely weekend in the city. Still, it didn’t feature anybody from Kill Bill. What on earth is the financial logic behind this? It beats me and I’m an expert.

  

  Comments (19)

• It’s Akira Kurosawa Day.

  March 23, 2010 @ 4:39 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  Let us pause for a moment to remember Akira Kurosawa. The great Japanese director, who died in 1998, would have been 100 today. There are endless ways to celebrate him. You could gather up six of your friends and attack a neighbouring group of bandits. You could watch one of the less celebrated films such as the magnificent Stray Dog or the intriguing adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.

  Alternately, you could ponder my third-favourite joke ever in The Simpsons. You know the one. Homer and Marge are on their way to Japan (the rest of the episode is fairly awful, alas). The great man is not happy about it, but Marge tries to console him by reminding him how much he enjoyed “that film Rashomon”. Homer scowls and says: “That’s not how I remember it.” Get it? Because the film is about different perspectives and… Oh, suit yourself.

  Comments (35)

• Oliver Stone Never Sleeps (alas)

  March 22, 2010 @ 2:13 am | by Donald Clarke

  The last line of the current trailer for Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps finds Shia LaBeouf asking Michael Douglas: “Is that a threat?” Good question. When we heard that the most bombastic, least subtle director of the 1980s was to helm a sequel to Wall Street we all felt much the same way. What did we do to deserve that? Oh yeah. We all bought mortgages we couldn’t afford and generated a financial meltdown that made just such a project inevitable. (It’s so “relevant”, you see).

  Oh well. At least it’s not a sequel to Natural Born Killers. That really would have been too much to bear.

  

  There’s a real lesson here about how trailers function. The promo above is, you’ll agree, not very promising. Even if we brush aside its beginning with an allusion to the “greed is good” speech, the decision to bring in Sympathy for the Devil at 00.37 remains unforgivably moronic. Do you get it? Gordon Gecko is like the Devil and, in the earlier film, we might have felt some sympathy for him. Sympathy…for…the…Devil. Please try harder. The plot seems really boring: Carey Mulligan, playing Gordo’s daughter, falls for Charlie Shian (get it?) just as he gets seduced by the old crook’s schemes. The actors all seem slightly sedated. The dialogue appears to retread all the old themes. And another thing: Carey Mulligan as Michael Douglas’s daughter? Yeah, granddaughter more like.

  Anyway, my point here (relax 20th Century Fox) is that the first trailer for the film was super cool. They put the joke about the big mobile phone up at the front and focused on hurtling helicopters and rapidly slung quips. The film looked like a happy amalgam of Cape Fear and The Bourne Ultimatum — in a good way. Sadly, we are going to have to wait a while to assess the real thing. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps has been kicked way back to September 24.

  Comments (16)

• Don Cheadle is Miles

  March 18, 2010 @ 1:03 am | by Donald Clarke

  Good grief. You go away for three days and all hell breaks loose. Winslet bolts from Mendes. Peter Graves dies. Jack Kirby’s relatives try to set up a rival Spider-Man franchise. And it transpires that Don Cheadle is set to play Miles Davis in an upcoming biopic.

  

  Farewell then Peter Graves. Sadly, your surname is now tragically appropriate.

  Cheadle doesn’t look much like Miles and he has, perhaps, rather too amiable a persona for the famously horrible trumpeter (he’s dead, so he can’t sue). But I still reckon he’ll do a pretty good job. Taking in the history of jazz from the origins of bebop to the birth of fusion, Miles’s story has the makings of a very decent picture. As long as they don’t get Brett Ratner to direct we might be okay.

  Such thoughts set one pondering about unmade biopics. The genre is, of course, very often an excuse for deadeningly dull hagiography. But a few complex characters do cry out for the treatment. Where’s the Aleister Crowley film? Where’s my Thelonious Monk picture? More interesting still, what about an Ezra Pound film? Think about it. The eccentric old versifier went barmy and they brought him back to America in a cage. IN A CAGE! Just imagine how much fun such restrained actors as Sean Penn or Ed Harris would have with that. “Munch, munch, munch! Me love scenery. Munch, munch, munch!” Yeah, I suppose all that fascism stuff was a bit of a problem. But what a yarn!

  Munch, munch, munch…

  Comments (33)

• St Patrick’s Day versus Π Day

  March 14, 2010 @ 8:34 pm | by Donald Clarke

  ΠSorry about the lack of posts lately, but I’ve been getting work put away, prior to fleeing the country from the annual festival of petty (small ‘n’) nationalism, professional vomiting and silly hat-wearing that is St Patrick’s Day.

  If you’ve been following this “blog”, you won’t be surprised to hear that I am exactly the sort of joyless sandcastle-kicker who regards everything about the national holiday as a filthy inconvenience. There’s that awful sickly shade of green — similar to the one that grows on cheese — that suddenly covers every hitherto exposed street lamp and telephone pole. There’s the enormously depressing parade with its pathetic, gyrating majorettes and floats promoting Credit Unions in unknown midlands towns. People say, of course, the parade’s got better in the last decade. But when I see tropical dancers wearing massive papier maché heads they only serve to remind me how far I currently am from Rio de Janeiro. (Not that I much fancy the notion of Mardi Gras either. That sounds like a sweaty, crowded pain in the bunda.)  There’s the way the entire national project — government, state broadcasters, railway stations — suddenly embraces the most gruesomely sentimental depictions of Ireland and allows Leprechauns, shamrocks and shilelaghs a prominence only usually tolerated in the sentimental drinking dens of South Boston.

  

  Nice one, Chicago. That’s really tasteful.

  Lest you get the impression that I am some sort of self-hating Irishman — or, worse, that horrible Ulster protestant roots are showing through — let me make it very clear that I dislike most form of collective “fun” and abhor all displays of patriotic fervour. On the latter point, it always strikes me as odd that liberals (like me) so often furrow their brows at any display of nationalism abroad while finding our own patriotic displays charming (or at least tolerable). Serbian nationalists, English nationalists, Israeli nationalists are all a bit scary. Overly fervent American patriots seem distinctly unsettling. The southern liberal, quite rightly, finds the 12th July shenanigans horrid (you should try living there, mate).  The St Patrick’s Day festival is, however, a bit of a boozy lark. Well, I’m not having it. I’m off for a few days in a less begorrah-friendly European capital.

  

  What a contrast the restrained celebrations for Π Day make with the St Patrick’s Day nonsense. Today is, you see, (using the American notation) 3/14/10. It is, thus, quite appropriate that we should stop to celebrate the various geniuses and maniacs who have tabulated, exploited and investigated the ratio between a circle’s circumference and its diameter. That number is easily expressed. It’s 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971… Ha, ha. Only joking. Π is an irrational number and cannot be reduced to a series of figures or a simple numerical ratio. If you’ve nothing better to do on Wednesday — and, I assure you, you don’t — then you might like to see how many places to which you can memorise Π.

  This week, Screenwriter has been reading: The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. Having met too many people with cats called Gandolf, I have always been wary of the fantasy genre. But this is very good stuff.

  This week, Screenwriter has been listening to: Xerrox Vol 2 and anything else by Alva Noto. Excellent austere German electronica.

  This week, Screenwriter has been watching the following telly: Vanessa Engle’s Women on BBC4. An excellent documentary on the women’s movement from the maker of the equally good Lefties.

  Comments (21)

• Oscar, Oscar, Oscar, it’s the Oscariest night of the year!

  March 7, 2010 @ 11:07 pm | by Donald Clarke

  Yes. The night is finally here when easily distracted idiots such as me — Oo, a firetruck! — get to learn which films are to be honoured with an award that has, in previous years, validated such brilliant films as Out of Africa, Forrest Gump and the wrong Crash. Oh, who am I trying to snark? I love the Oscars. For all their idiocy they remain as reassuringly reliable a constant in world affairs as the Eurovision Song Contest, double-dip recessions and failed sit-coms featuring Friends cast members. Not that you care, I have got a variety of beers in my fridge and a large bag of triangular orange American “crackers”.

  

  Oscar.

  For those of us who do give a hoot, this is one of the most interesting ceremonies for years. True, almost all the acting awards are sewn up, but for the first time since 2003, we have a neck-and-neck race for best picture. I still think that (sadly) stupid Avatar will take the top prize. Early clues will be few and far between. If The Hurt Locker beats Inglourious Basterds to best original screenplay then Bigelow’s films looks on much surer ground. If — later on — Cameron does bag best director then The Hurt Locker is doomed to a few minor gongs.

  

  Oscar

  A few other things to watch out for. Has the Academy finally sorted out the problem in best foreign language picture territory? If anything other than The White Ribbon or A Prophet wins then expect the person responsible to retire to the library with a bottle of gin and a pearl-handled revolver. If you’re inclined towards supporting the home team, then keep your eye on Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty in the best animated short race and (more likely) The Door in the best live-action short competition. Digital boffin Richie Baneham is a dead cert for his work on Avatar. Up against, well, Up, the boys from The Secret of Kells have a near hopeless task.

  Oh, blah, blah, blah…

  

  Oscar

  You can read my predictions in the main races here.

  Glug, glug, glug. Ooo! Will you look at that dress. My cleaning lady wouldn’t wear that to the dump. Oh, somebody’s got a bun in the oven. Darling, if that’s not a wig then I’m Kirk Douglas. And so on.

  Comments (49)

• Matthew Goode kicks the begorrah out of his own film!

  March 4, 2010 @ 11:19 pm | by Donald Clarke

  Two weeks ago I wrote a piece in The Ticket in which, inspired by the wretchedness of Leap Year, I bemoaned patronising representations of Ireland in American films. If you were being kind you could have described the article as a bit of filler. At any rate, it wasn’t breaking any new ground.  I received, however, more emails (all supportive) in response to that piece than to anything else I have written over the past decade. The only article that generated a comparable amount was the one about bad behaviour in the cinema. You know what I mean. Fat cretins and their even stupider dates chatting mindlessly through the film while scoffing buckets of deep-fried offal and texing inanities to their lard-brained friends. Oh if I had a machete, I’d…

  

  “Oim sah ashoimed of meesalf!”

  Hang on. Were was I? Oh yeah. The anger generated by Leap Year really was something out of the ordinary. There’s an interesting contrast here. Whereas too many shoulder-chipped Irish Americans get their knickers in a twist at any joke consciously made at the expense of Hibernian stereotypes, the real Irish tend to appreciate the irony and laugh along. Consider Irish Central’s recent attempt to get annoyed at Ricky Gervais’s introduction for Colin Farrell at the Golden Globes. Niall O’Dowd bafflingly claimed that “Farrell did not look too pleased” with Ricky’s references to drunk hellraisers, but, when I asked Colin about it, he said: “I didn’t mind that dig at all. I was told that he wanted to introduce me and to be honest, I thought it could have been a lot worse. I thought it was really endearing. It was lovely.” Meanwhile, Irish Americans tolerate — and often propagate — the sort of sentimental twinkly version of Ireland seen in Leap Year.

  It seems that even Matthew Goode, star of the film, has realised what a travesty it is. “It’s turgid. I just know that there are a lot of people who will say it is the worst film of 2010.” the English actor said. I’m still waiting for an explanation from director Anand Tucker. Recently lauded for his work on Red Riding, Mr Tucker is a smart bloke and really, really, should know better.

  What else?

  Well, in honour of International Woman’s Day, this week’s Ticket is inclining towards the distaff side. Enjoy Ms Tara Brady of Hot Press on the way women have, despite pioneering work in early Hollywood, been weirdly sidelined by the dream factory in later decades. Ms Anna Carey will be opining on strategies women should employ to get noticed at the Oscars. There’s also bound to be some super music stuff involving women. Pieces on Lynsey de Paul and Tina Charles, I imagine. This modern stuff is beyond me.

  Read and opine.

  Comments (26)

• If there’s a God then why do people suffer?

  March 3, 2010 @ 10:14 pm | by Donald Clarke

  I’ve just been to see Old Dogs. You’ll remember that we discussed the trailer a while back. This is that thing in which crinkly faced casual psychopath Robin Williams and unlikely laydeees man John Travolta have to cope with boisterous seven-year-old twins. I’m not allowed to say what I thought of the film yet (Blah, blah, embargoes. You know the drill by now), but I am minded to address one of the most baffling questions of the day: Who likes Robin Williams?

  

  “You can use this photo to scare away hungry bears, ma’am.”

  Over the last decade or so, I have taken every opportunity to make borderline-libelous remarks about the nauseatingly unfunny screen personae inhabited by Mr Williams. From time to time, someone has mailed to say I am being a little harsh. “The phrase ‘beheading is too good for him’ was overdoing it, Clarke,” they don’t actually write. “I don’t believe you would actually ‘claw your pancreas out with a rusty corkscrew rather than hear the words “Patch Adams” again’” they never say. But nobody — that’s nobody — has ever written in to defend him.

  I occasionally read pieces in American organs arguing that, when allowed to improvise, his true genius shines through like a supernova. I can’t agree. In fact, to my mind, that’s when he’s at his most annoying. A Scottish journalist of my acquaintance barely got through an interview without punching the man. Throughout the conversation, Williams delivered his answers in a “comical” Scottish accent that bordered on the genuinely offensive. “Och ye wee haggis of sporran, ye. Will ye gee us a wee highland jig.” That sort of thing.

  The obvious exceptions to the general awfulness of Williams are those roles in which he is actually supposed to be a clammy-palmed creep. Here’s the thing though. His performance in, say, Fathers Day and his turn in One-Hour Photo  are really not all that different. In both he has the look of a terminally sad man who can’t get through a sentence without considering the unavoidable advance of death. After watching both films, you feel the need to scrub yourself with carbolic soap.

  So who the hell does like Robin Williams? He has been a major star for well over three decades and he still gets paid a fortune for each of his increasingly awful films. Is it you? Own up. Do you like Robin Williams?

  Comments (24)