Screenwriter »

• Can we start complaining about Let Me In yet?

  July 29, 2010 @ 3:46 pm | by Donald Clarke

  The question is prompted by the release of the first trailer for Matt Reeves’s remake of Let the Right One In. The Swedish vampire movie, made in 2008, but released here last year, proved very popular with the Screenwriter community. Readers voted it the second best film of 2009. Your correspondent put it at the top of his list. Inevitably, news of the American remake was greeted with weary groans. What to make of the promo?

  

  Well, first things first. I don’t know who is responsible for the ghastly gloom-rock tune that thunders over the action, but it lends exactly the wrong class of high-school, door-slamming petulance. One of the worst aspects of early-noughties mainstream horror was its reliance on a particularly unlovely school of sulk metal. There is nothing less frightening than an under-educated, mid-western lout shouting about Satan while wearing his mother’s mascara. Secondly, the editing is depressingly dizzying and — again — reminds one of the hyper-active aesthetic that ruined so many horror films in the first few years of the new millennium.

  So, in short, I don’t like the trailer, but I’m not sure the film itself looks too awful. There is, of course, every chance the picture will be edited with more caution and that the annoying song will appear nowhere in the finished article. I wasn’t all that keen on Kick Ass, but Chloe Moretz, young star of that film and of Let Me In, is a very talented juvenile actor. Kodi Smit-McPhee was great in The Road and he looks promising as the kid who gets lured into blood-letting by Chloe’s undead waif. The smashing Richard Jenkins is there also.

  Reeves, director of the entertaining Cloverfield, looks to have composed the shots with the same restraint showed by Tomas Alfredson in the original. So, there is a chance — just a chance, mind — that Let Me In could turn out to be a reasonably respectable facsimile of the original. I shun no opportunity to whinge about the current obsession with faithfulness to source material, but a respectful copy of the Swedish film might be the most we could hope for from this particular project.

  Anyway, it hardly needs to be said that, if you haven’t already seen Let the Right One In, you need to have a glance before the American version arrives on our shores. Let Me In is scheduled for release at Halloween.

  Oh and one more thing about the trailer. Yes, you read that right. Let Me In is, indeed, a Hammer film. The great British horror studio has recently been reconstituted. Sadly, the example of Ealing films makes it hard to exhibit unqualified enthusiasm. That comedy enterprise also rose from the grave about 10 years ago. Since then — remember I Want Candy and St Trinian’s — they have produced little else but garbage. We hope for better from Hammer.

• It’s the tenth anniversary of Millennium Eve.

  December 30, 2009 @ 11:41 pm | by Donald Clarke

  And, of course, the end of a strange decade. To celebrate, The Ticket returns, for one week only, to Thursday’s edition of the paper. Happily, the supplement is as packed with unmissable feature articles and transcendent filler as ever.

  

  Why has Screenwriter put a picture of us on this post, we wonder.

  If you can bear one last list — oh go on, just one wahfer-thin leest — have a glance at the final deliberations of the Dublin Film Critics Circle. A few weeks ago, my colleagues and I had a slap-up lunch and voted for the best films of the year and the decade.

  The ten best of 2009 was as follows:

  1.    Let the Right One In
  2.    The White Ribbon
  3.    Up
  4.    The Hurt Locker
  5.    The Wrestler
  6.    Il Divo
  7.    A Serious Man
  8.    Mesrine Parts 1 & 2
  9.    Slumdog Millionaire
  10.  District 9/Moon

  No surprises in the top three. Let the Right One In, The White Ribbon and Up seem confirmed as the unshakable critics favourites of 2009. Interesting to see Mesrine figuring so high. I have to say, I felt it began to outstay its welcome halfway through Part II.

  Here’s the decade poll:

  1.    There Will be Blood
  2.    Downfall
  3.    Brokeback Mountain
  4.    The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
  5.    The White Ribbon
  6.    Hidden
  7.    United 93
  8.    City of God
  9.    Little Miss Sunshine/In The Mood for Love.
  10.  Spirited Away

  Now look, I don’t want to start a fight — I know many readers sided with my fellow reviewers here — but I really don’t think Downfall belongs at the very top. It’s an excellent film, but it’s really all about the performance. If Oliver Hirschbiegel directs another truly great film then I’ll eat my own head. (In case you’re wondering about the odd discrepancy as regards the relative positions of The White Ribbon and Let the Right One In in the 2009 and decade polls, there was a slightly different electorate for the two votes.)

  We also decided that Waveriders was the best Irish film of the year — though I voted for The Secret of Kells – and that the award for best Irish film of the decade should be shared equally between Hunger and Adam & Paul. You can have a gawp at the full results here.

  Also, in today’s Ticket, I ponder what cinematic delights are coming your way in the New Year. Yeah, we’re all gagging for Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Sure, we can’t wait for Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. But I know what’s really got you juddering with hopeful anticipation.

  

  Good grief! This looks awesome. We have been deprived of J-Lo’s talent for so long that this is akin to receiving a new novel from J D Sallinger. Then again, the film looks so different from her earlier work — it’s a romantic comedy involving pregnancy — that it is, perhaps, more like receiving a new opera or an original public sculpture from Mr Sallinger.

  Alas, you’ll have to wait until March for the film itself.

  Oh yeah. So why did we put a picture of Galaxy Quest at the top of the page?

• Up sweeps the first Screenies Awards.

  December 11, 2009 @ 10:59 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  No more Cone of Shame for you, Dug.

  Eager for displacement activity from real work, your host finally got round to scrolling down the comments on the best-of the-year post and assembling a readers’ top 10 for 2009. The rules were simple: I counted one vote for every positive comment made about a film. There was — somewhat surprisingly — just the one tie in the lower reaches and, benign dictator that I am, I used my casting vote to separate the two candidates. Here we go…

  10. The Wrestler

  9. A Serious Man

  8. In the Loop

  7. Anvil: The Story of Anvil

  6. District 9

  5. Inglourious Basterds

  4. Moon

  3. The Hurt Locker

  2. Let the Right One In

  1. Up.

  The results confirm how very wise contributors to this “blog” are. Seven of the top 10 appeared in my own list and only one failed to make my “bubbling under” codicil. The one that got away, In the Loop, got four stars from me on release and could very easily have snuck into the lower reaches of the Screenwriter Ten. Hell, you could write this “blog” yourselves.

  A few further points worth noting: the post was set up very shortly after A Serious Man was released, so its true position may be a place or so higher. Also, though I wasn’t convinced by Where the Wild Things Are, that picture may, I suspect, have picked up a few votes if it had emerged earlier. Then there’s Avatar and Nine. I am not yet allowed to reveal my opinions of either, but a couple of votes may, perhaps, have drifted that way too. It’s also worth considering that there were nearly as many negative comments about Inglourious Basterds as there were raves. Quentin’s flick thus wins the 2009 Marmite Award for the film you either love or hate.

  At any rate, none of this is to take away from Pixar’s achievement with Up. The best animated feature Oscar the studio will (barring a miracle) pick up for the picture may mean more to them than this inaugural Screeny, but, in the era before Pixar emerged, it would have been hard to imagine any animated feature winning such an informal poll in The Irish Times. Pinocchio in 1940? Not, I think, over His Girl Friday, Rebecca, The Philadelphia Story and The Grapes of Wrath. I can’t imagine Bambi would have beaten Casablanca and The Magnificent Ambersons in 1942.

  Anyway, it looks as if it will be a long time before John Lasseter and his crew will be forced to wear the Cone of Shame. Up, up and away.

• Ho hum, it’s the end of the year.

  @ 5:35 pm | by Donald Clarke

  After all the end-of-decade lists, our round-up of the best films from 2009 may seem like a little bit of an anti-climax. At any rate, today’s Ticket features a comprehensive analysis of what’s hot and what’s not from the big ’09 (as nobody’s calling it). My pal Michael Dwyer makes a welcome return in this article, but please note that — unless it’s been corrected since I last checked — his second “top 10″ of 2009 in the on-line version should read “bottom 10″.  You knew that. It was never likely that our distinguished film correspondent would choose the vile, unfunny, misogynistic, chaotic Observe and Report as his favourite movie of the year.

  

  Stop moping, young lady. You won!

  If you can’t be bothered to click, here is Screenwriter’s top ten:

  1. Let the Right One In

  2. The White Ribbon

  3. A Serious Man

  4. Up

  5. Il Divo

  6. Anvil: The Story of Anvil

  7. Moon

  8. The Wrestler

  9. District 9

  10. Tales from the Golden Age

  Bubbling under were Star Trek, Synecdoche, New York, The Hurt Locker, Encounters at the End of the World, The Hangover, Inglourious Basterds, Orphan and Public Enemies.

  And here’s the poo:

  1. The Boat that Rocked

  2. The Ugly Truth

  3.  Bride Wars.

  4. Couples Retreat.

  5. Surveillance.

  Also in this week’s Ticket, I break ranks with most of my colleagues in the critical fraternity by remaining unconvinced by Where the Wild Things Are. Do still go see it, though. I await the avalanche of complaints.