Screenwriter »

• Thoughts on the London Film Festival (and others).

  October 17, 2010 @ 10:40 pm | by Donald Clarke

  The hierarchy of film festivals remains a peculiar business. For all the bitching, nobody doubts that Cannes remains the most significant of the bunch. Even in a slow year — such as 2010 — the  French event still attracts as much coverage as all other festivals put together. You can’t argue with history, tradition and inertia. Well, you can try. But you’ll lose.

  

  Keira seems to have calmed down from the excitement of meeting Screenwriter earlier in the day.

  Mind you, within the industry, Toronto rates almost as high. More new  films are premiered there than anywhere else. But — with apologies to our Canadian readers — that city doesn’t exactly radiate glamour and the scarcity of prizes means that popular newspapers pay little attention. As a result, the TIFF barely registers with even the most fanatical movie fan. The irony here is that, by all accounts, Toronto is friendlier to the public than any other major event. In Canada, it’s the people’s festival. Outside that country, it’s just for the cognoscenti.

  The sad fact is that, whereas once the press paid attention to such venerable events as Karlovy Vary and San Sebastian, there are now really only three and a half festivals that make serious noise in mainstream outlets.

  1. Cannes.

  2. Venice

  3. Berlin

  3 1/2. Sundance.

  Win one of those events and your film will still get something of a boost. It’s nice to win the Golden Yak at Tashkent. It’s cheering to be handed the Sabre of Triumph at Pyongyang. But neither will do much to help your film get distribution. Sadly, a small band of festivals now grab all the attention.

  So, you might reasonably assume, Screenwriter and team get lots of good copy from the big three and a half. Not so. Cannes is, of course, useful for gossip and the sheer Cannesness of it all. But, when it comes to generating press interviews in this territory, the London Film Festival is way ahead of the pack. Over the fortnight, we will pick up interviews for Black Swan, Let Me In, Never Let Me Down, The Kids Are All Right, Biutiful, 127 Hours, Convction and a bunch of other films I have forgotten. I’m not even halfway through and I’m already a bit dazed. In a nice way.

• Trailerspotting hits the mother lode.

  January 10, 2010 @ 10:07 pm | by Donald Clarke

  Okay. Now, this is the trailer we’ve all been waiting for. There are few films more delightful to the Hibernian palate than the Hollywood Mick-flick. Did you see Laws of Attraction? How about P S I Love You? Yeah? How long did the post-traumatic stress disorder last? I don’t want to get too hoity-toity about it, but if the studios treated African-Americans this way they’d be under permanent threat of boycott. From where have they plucked this awful combination of twinkly whimsy and unfiltered, whiskey-soaked idiocy? From their own films I suspect.

  The latest potential atrocity is a little thing called Leap Year.

  

  Cows block the highway; old men fall down drunk; landladies disapprove of sex before marriage: all that’s missing is a leprechaun with an ArmaLite rifle. My favourite moment comes when Amy Adams declares that she is here to propose to her boyfriend on “Leap Day” and, rather than saying “What the hell are you talking about?”, Matthew Goode — what is that accent? — wisely replies through a mouthful of raw potato (perhaps) that this is the stupidest thing he’s ever heard. Quite.

  We, of course, should not be surprised that the trailer takes such an unreconstructed view of Irish culture. After all, right from the beginning it announces its reactionary tendencies — common to so many rom-coms — by clarifying that Amy  cannot contemplate happiness without a wedding and that she is unable to propose marriage herself. Come to think of it, considering her stone-age attitude to life, Amy probably finds this version of Ireland unimaginably sophisticated. I get the impression this character would regard life among Barbary apes a step up the sociological ladder. Note this line again: “I am not going to die without getting engaged.” It’s like the last 100 years never happened.

  On an unrelated issue, have a look at Jason Reitman’s little film documenting his experiences promoting the nifty Up in the Air. If you can be bothered to look closely you will spot a near-subliminal glance of Screenwriter. The resulting interview will appear in the Ticket this Friday.

• What’s the film of the week? (And other questions)

  October 23, 2009 @ 8:15 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  I make it up as I go along, you know.

  Film of the week is Wes Anderson’s agreeably strange version of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox. It’s not all that faithful to the book and it’s maybe a little too cool for its own good, but it stays true to Anderson’s hyper-geek sensibility. Heck, the hero is even wearing the director’s favourite corduroy suit.

  The Cove, a documentary about the slaughter of dolphins in Japan, is also worth a glance. Maybe they risk a few too many compromises in their desire to make things exciting, but, rather that than another An Irritating Truth.

  Over there in the stinky slops bucket we have Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant and The Goods: Live hard, Sell Hard. As regards the latter film, we, once again, find ourselves asking: what sort of medication is The Guardian’s Mad Pete Bradshaw taking and can I have some? (I should say that Pete’s a very good writer. But he doesn’t half exhibit some eccentric views.)

  Elsewhere in The Ticket you can check out my interview with Jason Schwartzman and read flesh-and-blood Screenwriter on the tricky matter of spoilers in reviews.

  SCREENWRITER’S TOP FIVE OF THE LONDON FILM FESTIVAL SO FAR (with one-word review).

  1. The White Ribbon (Austere)

  2. Tales from The Golden Age (Sardonic)

  3. Up in the Air (Suave)

  4. The Road (Grey)

  5. The Informant! (Zany)

  If you’re wondering, I have yet to (officially) see promising flicks such as A Serious Man and Taking Woodstock.

  Screenwriter has been listening to Testament Paris/London by Keith Jarrett. The greatest improviser of the last 40 years delivers his best solo piano record for over a decade.

  Screenwriter has been reading Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon. It’s the “accessible” Tom of Lot 49 and Vineland, but, if you want to follow the plot, you may still need to take notes.

  Screenwriter will be watching the following telly: Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany, tonight on BBC4. There is no movement more fascinating. Rock on Amon Duul!

• Jennifer Aniston ate my kebab.

  October 15, 2009 @ 3:08 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  A lot of the chat at The London Film Festival concerns the hoaxes carried out against tabloid newspapers in a mischievous documentary by Chris Atkins called Starsuckers. Seeking to demonstrate how gullible celebrity journalists can be (as if!), the film-makers phoned up a number of papers with outrageous stories and watched, faintly astonished, as their most ludicrous fantasies were published as hard fact. It seems Amy Winehouse’s hair went on fire. Sources say Guy Ritchie received a black eye from juggling cutlery. Most hilariously, the Sun and the Mirror accepted that Girls Aloud’s Sarah Harding had developed an interest in quantum mechanics. (Annoyingly for its enemies, The Daily Mail was the only tabloid to turn down all the supposed scoops.)

  This is all good fun, but media watchers have known for some time that celebrity journalism has totally lost contact with reality. The most spectacular manifestation of this disengagement is the ongoing coverage of the largely invented soap opera involving Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. As I understand it, the monosyllabically-titled celeb loo-rolls — Closer, Heat, Crap, Stodge, Poo — operate as follows. Somebody looks at the latest pap shot of Aniston, Jolie or Pitt and dreams up a story based on whether the relevant star is smiling, scowling, holding a can of beer, speaking down a telephone or whatever. The most prized photograph is one of Pitt and Jolie looking in different directions. “Ang and Brad to go their separate ways?” Poo shrieks. “Is it all over?” Well, it must be all over. After all, there’s a big simulated tear (as in torn, not as in weeping), separating a slightly grumpy-looking Brad from a characteristically deranged-looking Angie, down the middle of the magazine’s unspeakably busy cover. If they can now find a recent photograph of Jennifer on the phone then they’re really flying. “Jen comforts Brad as he threatens to storm out on Ang,” Balls magazine will shout. We have had celebrity soap operas in the past, but never before has so much newsprint been generated by so few hard facts.

  You know all this. The question is: how on earth do readers fall for it? I may be naive, but I don’t think many of them do. I suspect that most punters view the Ang/Brad/Jen saga the way they might view professional wrestling. They know it’s all fake, but, for the few seconds the stories (or fights) detain them, they allow reason to be overwhelmed by sensation.

  Anyway, as you can see from the image above, Jennifer Aniston ate my kebab. I want a new kebab, Aniston. I want it now!

• Not yet tired of life, it seems.

  October 13, 2009 @ 9:51 pm | by Donald Clarke

    

  Well,  the blog has only been around a few days, but it is already set to go through a period of mild inactivity. The London Film Festival starts on Wednesday and Screenwriter is about to head off on the first of many jaunts to the event. Among the films I will be covering are The Fantastic Mr Fox, Bright Star, The Road, The Informant!, A Serious Man, Up in the Air and The White Ribbon. In due course, interviews with various directors and stars will appear in different bits of The Irish Times, but, alas, I am hampered from making too many comments about the films as I go along. When you see a preview of such a feature, you will often find yourself being forced to sign a document stating that, should you be caught reviewing the flick before the week of release, you will be dragged into the gutter and beaten to death by rabid publicists. So, let me just say that I have seen some of the films listed above and all of those have lived up to expectations. Is that sufficiently vague? Hang on. Was that a knock at the door? No, no, no, please I didn’t mean it. Arghghghghgh!