Screenwriter »

• A word from The Muppets.

  February 2, 2012 @ 4:19 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  There is only a week to go before the release of the much-anticipated Muppets film. It offers everything you could possibly ask for from a movie starring 30-year-old felt puppets. Walk don’t run and all that malarkey. Tara Brady of this organ was in London last week for an interview with the esteemed Miss Piggy. She also attended the oddest press conference one could possibly imagine. Here is some very amusing footage featuring Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy commenting on that notorious incident which saw Fox News identify the film as left-wing propaganda. The Piggy piece will appear in tomorrow’s Ticket.

  You wonder why Fox does these things. It just gives The Muppets more material. Mind you, Kermit and Piggy are clearly just puppets of the liberal establishment. Ha ha! Get it?

• Trailerspotting handbags The Iron Lady

  July 10, 2011 @ 10:31 pm | by Donald Clarke

  We’re not really giving it a handbagging. We’re merely expressing a few reservations. Look, I understand that it’s outrageous to offer any meaningful assessment of an upcoming project on the basis of a teaser trailer. But I am, nonetheless, going to go even further than that. I’m going to criticise one insignificant gesture. The subject under discussion is Phyllida Lloyd’s impending The Iron Lady, starring Meryl Streep as the titular Prime Minister. Here’s that teaser:

  

  Roger Allam turns up as Gordon Reece, the PR wonk who honed that fearsome image, giving Mrs Thatcher a few tips on how to deport herself. Nicholas Farrell — uncredited so far, but surely playing a version of Tim Bell — offers supplemental advice from the sidelines. While the music from (of all things) Moon plays in the background, they discuss hats, pearls and vocal pitch. Then Thatcher speaks.

  It hardly needs to be said that Streep has the voice down to a (hem, hem) Mrs T. There’s just the right hint of vague, midlands-based social mobility. She’s not quite posh. But she’s certainly not working-class. Ms Streep looks a little bit too glossy and well-fed, but we can’t blame her for being raised in a wealthier, less rationed nation than wartime Britain. After all, Streep didn’t look much like a concentration camp inmate in Sophie’s Choice either.

  The problem for me comes at 42″ with that wry, ironic smirk. If we know anything about Mrs Thatcher it is that she has almost no sense of humour and that she was about as home to irony as she was to militant Trotskyism. The implication is that she finds the creation of La Thatcher a bit of a lark. No first-hand accounts of the grocer’s daughter suggest that any such levity would be forthcoming.

  Still, as I say, it is madly unfair to draw any serious conclusions from this wee clip. We’ll have to wait to stupid January to see the completed project. If Streep doesn’t get an Oscar nomination I’ll eat a bucket of sand.

• Gotcha! The News of the World bites the dust.

  July 7, 2011 @ 9:42 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  Yes, I know, I know. “Gotcha” was actually a Sun headline.  But it does seem enormously appropriate in this case. As you will be aware, James Murdoch, a close relative of The Lord of the Flies, has announced that, following revelations about phone tapping, The News of the World is to close. It’s not often you turn on Sky News and are forced to clean your glasses upon glancing the main headline. For once, it is fair to say that nobody saw this coming. Actually, it’s a double shocker. The notion that The News of the World could be axed and that Rebekah Brooks, editor when the offenses took place, could still retain her position in News International — subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation —  is quite astonishing. You could have knocked me down with a feather. Put it this way. If any government minister was revealed to have been in charge when comparable outrages were happening in his or her department, the august individual would have been immediately forced to resign. Right?

  Look. Many of us have (let’s put it gently) always had reservations about the ethics and tone of The News of the World — its objectification of women in particular — but that paper has been an unavoidable part of the British cultural landscape for a century and a half. Many respectable individuals, otherwise seen with The Telegraph or The Guardian, bought the paper each Sunday “for the sport”. George Orwell’s great 1946 essay The Decline of the English Murder begins with this delicious paragraph:

  “It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?”

  Murder, of course. Orwell’s essay touches on the hypocrisy that drives much tabloid journalism: disgust at contemporary enormities coupled with a relishing of the grisliest details. But he clearly has some admiration for the skill with which the hacks go about their business. However much you may loathe the paper’s taste for sleaze, you can’t deny that a mighty institution has just crumbled.

  Even those who are happy to dance on the paper’s grave should have some reservations about the manner of its execution. Within seconds of the news emerging, commentators were speculating about the imminent arrival of a Sunday version of The Sun. It seems that News International — there being a Sunday Sun in Newcastle — had, earlier this week, registered the title The Sun on Sunday (if any journalist had spotted that nugget he or she would have landed scoop if the year). James Murdoch, speaking to Sky News tonight, didn’t exactly deny the notion. He offered some waffle about no such decisions being made at this point. (In an aside, the Sky reporting seemed pretty balanced to me. That associate of Murdoch’s News Corporation was happy enough to drag out any number of Rupert haters.)

  Blah, blah, blah! You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to detect a frightening degree of cynicism here. If the ploy works, Murdoch will cleanse News Corporation of its recent taints and nudge aside objections to News Corporation buying out B Sky B in total. Meanwhile, a more economic Sunday paper can be edged slyly into the weekend market.

  All very nice for those News of the World journalists who, some years after the offenses took place, have been flung out into the unforgiving, brutalist streets of Wapping.  By all means celebrate the fact that certain unlovely tabloid noises will not be heard in quite the same form again. But acknowledge that something squalid has just happened.

  Enjoy the following…

  

• Slightly unfortunate photo of Michael D Higgins at the Fleadh

  July 5, 2011 @ 10:47 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  Okay, I think we have to tread very carefully here. Here is a photograph of Michael D Higgins, amiable Presidential candidate, launching the Galway Film Fleadh tonight. As you might expect, he delivered a charming oration peppered with melodic sentences in our native tongue. At no point did he threaten to invade Poland. Nothing like that would ever cross this veteran liberal’s mind.

  But this really  is a slightly unfortunate (not to say badly taken by me) image. The faux-searchlights and the hand gesture do nudge the mind in a somewhat dubious and entirely unintended direction. You’ll have to make up the jokes yourself. It’s more than my position is worth.

  For the record, the opening film, Darragh Byrne’s Parked, was an admirable piece of work. Colm Meaney plays a recently returned emigrant who is forced to live in his not particularly roomy motorcar. He makes friends with a drug-addled youth and starts a  not-quite romance with a middle-aged Finnish lady. It’s very gently handled and very well acted.

  There’s plenty more to see over the rest of the week. Fireworks will surely fly tomorrow when Keith Allen, director of Unlawful Killing, that Princess Diana conspiracy documentary, takes the stage for a discussion following the first public screening of his film. It’s all go at the Fleadh.

• Thor is a conservative film.

  May 8, 2011 @ 5:26 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  As I may have mentioned before, I am a great fan of the eccentric right-wing website Conservapedia. Established by one Andy Schlafly, son to well-known liberal-bashing blowhard Phyllis Schlafly, the site sells itself as a Conservative alternative to the notoriously Trotskyite Wikipedia. As Mr Schlafly sees it, Wikipedia is worryingly in thrall to such pseudosciences as Darwinism and dangerously enamoured by militant “socialists” such as Comrade Barack Obama (who seems to be simultaneously a secret Muslim, an atheist and inclined towards leftist Afro-centric Christian sects).

  Conservapedia does occasionally move from kicking liberals to bigging-up rare examples of right-wing incursion into the leftist-dominated media. One such case is their attempt to detail great “Conservative Movies“.

  The list is an absolute hoot. I suppose it’s hard to argue with — current number one — the recent, panned version of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (though the author’s militant atheism can’t please the Conservapedians). It’s true to say The Exorcist seems, at its heart, to be a Christian (not to say Catholic) picture, but William Friedkin, the director, has always come across as an old-school Hollywood liberal. Spider-Man is a still more baffling choice. Sam Raimi, director of The Evil Dead and once a target for anti video-nasty campaigners, would, I’m sure, be surprised to hear that his film “pokes fun at liberals (entertainers and journalist)”. The version of J J Jameson, editor of the Daily Bugle, presented there — different to the incarnation in the comics — seems far closer to Kelvin MacKenzie, red-blooded former editor of The Sun, than he is to Ben Bradlee or Harold Evans.

  It’s true to say that superhero movies do often — though not always — uphold traditional values of justice and retribution. So it’s not altogether surprising that Conservapedia has, this weekend, decided to celebrate the fact that “Thor — a candidate for Best Conservative Movies — wins big at the box office, while a Jodie Foster-directed movie nearly strikes out”. Ms Foster, director of The Beaver, is, of course, a dangerous liberal. Mind you, Ms Foster’s bizarre drama does star Mel Gibson, an actor who is rarely confused with Rosa Luxemburg. The box-office figures can, perhaps, be seen as a Rorschach Blot. Screw up your eyes and, depending upon your affiliation, you can see them as evidence of growing reactionary feeling or confirmation that Obamunism is infecting today’s cinema-going youth.

  Anyway, for the record, here is Conservapedia’s list of the top ten Conservative Movies.

  Atlas Shrugged (2011) Well, d’uh.

  Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Arguably.

  The Exorcist (1973) At a stretch.

  Dark Matter (2008) What now? Virtually unseen indie featuring, of all people, Meryl Streep.

  Spider-Man (2002) Hardly.

  Gone With the Wind (1939) Yeah, okay.

  Ben-Hur (1959) Just about.

  Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (2008) Well, d’uh.

  Hillary: The Movie (2008) Blame the left-wing entertainment establishment for the obscurity of this fair and balanced study of the current US secretary of state.

  Indoctrinate U (2007) Again, liberal distributors have kept this film from you.

• Hitler invented 3-D

  February 18, 2011 @ 3:36 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  Isn’t there some theory arguing that, after a certain number of iterations, any argument on the internet will result in a mention of Hitler? “You prefer dogs to cats? So did Hitler. What does that tell you? Huh, huh?” That sort of thing. Happily, for all those sensible people who hate 3-D, there is now a short-cut to the Hitler gambit. A recent report suggests that the Nazis did indeed devise the unlovely process.

  It seems that Phillipe Mora, an Australian film-maker, has uncovered several bumpy films shot by Nazi propagandists in the mid-1930s. The first carries the unambiguous title So Real You can Touch It. The second emerged under the more intriguing moniker Six Girls Roll Into Weekend. One imagines Aryan girls in swimsuits (or not) gamely volleying beach balls back and forwards to one another.

  “The quality of the films is fantastic,” Mora said. “The Nazis were obsessed with recording everything and every single image was controlled – it was all part of how they gained control of the country and its people.”

  Heed those words, film fans. That’s “how  they gained control of the country and its people.” Each time you don the silly glasses you are helping Megapictures dominate the universe. Before long, you will be their helpless slaves. Hitler invented 3-D. What does that tell you? Huh? Huh?

• Could Atlas Shrugged be the defining turkey of 2011?

  February 15, 2011 @ 4:22 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  First off, before anybody else chimes in, let me confirm that, at this point, I cannot offer a fair answer to that question. The film will not emerge until April. Who knows? It could be a roaring masterpiece. But the omens are far from good.

  Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a novel that makes paving stones feel inadequate, is a uniquely strange cultural phenomenon. Admired by legions of half-bright American students and the odd (very odd) US boffin, the book has virtually no currency on this side of the Atlantic. Indeed, until a few years ago, when Penguin Modern Classics eliminated a few forests to produce an edition, the book wasn’t even in print in the United Kingdom. Written in prose so sluggish it often threatens to snooze its way off the page, the novel details the efforts of a libertarian Messiah to freshen up a (no really) socialistic United States. The trains soon run on time. The old are left to die on ice floes. You know the sort of thing. Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, knew Rand when he was young and has long been a champion of the book. Unsurprisingly, given the fact that a Maoist now sits in the White House, Atlas Shrugged has enjoyed something of a revival in recent years. Rand’s atheism proves something of a problem for the new American right, but her anti-statist leanings sit very nicely with that movement’s paranoia about Big Government.

  A glance at certain shadier corners of the internet will confirm that hundreds of thousands of readers — shunning the derision of serious literary academics — still regard the ghastly thing as some sort of neglected masterpiece. In 1998, for instance, the Modern Library, after publishing a chart of best modern novels headed by Ulysses, asked the cyber-masses to compile their own list. Gathering their forces in the electronic ether, the Randinistas managed to install Atlas Shrugged at the top of the poll. This, despite the fact that the book has lower literary standing than the works of Harold Robbins.

  Unsurprisingly, there has long been talk of a film version. Equally unsurprisingly, few major investors have shown interest in financing such an unappealing production. That said, back in 1972, Albert S Ruddy, producer of The Godfather, did approach Rand with a notion of acquiring the rights. When she demanded script approval (can you imagine?) he wisely backed away. The film version has remained in development hell ever since. In the interim, there have been suggestions of a movie starring Angelina Jolie and a mini-series featuring Charlize Theron.

  What we seem to have ended up with is a cut-price, thrown-together shocker starring nobody you’ve ever heard of. Reports suggest that, as the rights were due to expire in June this year, the current holders were forced into knocking the film together in double-quick time. Stephen Polk (huh?) was initially scheduled to direct, but, shortly before the project creaked into action, he was replaced by Paul Johansson (double huh?). The multi-gifted Mr Johansson also stars.

  Just look at this thing! It’s got more racing trains than a Tony Scott film. The art-direction is done by somebody drunk on cheap perfume commercials. The level of building melodrama is quite draining. The most fearsome element of the enterprise is, however, the inclusion of the words “Part 1″ in the title. Yeah. Good luck with that, chaps. This looks too nasty to appeal even to Ms Rand’s peculiar acolytes.

  In such posts I would normally end with a phrase such as “we’ll find out for ourselves when the film opens in April”. But, to be honest, I would be astonished if the thing ever makes it to these shores. We’re all state-coddled Bolsheviks here, you see.

  

• Doogie Howser TD

  February 13, 2011 @ 8:59 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  As others have noted, the coming election has thrown up an unprecedented number of independent candidates. It looks as if I might actually get to vote for the Trotskyite Cat Party or Lord Bannahead. I’ve done so before and have never regretted it. The lone wolf causing the most chatter in my part of the world is, however, young Master Dylan Haskins. This is not the place to comment on his policies. The lad appears to have knocked together a comprehensive website and — looking more like Michael Cera than Neil Patrick Harris — has shot some impressively severe straight-to-camera YouTube videos.

  But there’s no way around it. He just looks so iggle-piggle young. Oddly, his apparent sincerity actually adds to the campaign’s peculiarity. Properly young folk do occasionally run for office (Haskins is 23), but they usually have the decency to advocate free Jammie Dodgers for students or  changing the national anthem to Karma Police by Radiohead. That sort of thing. The seriousness of Mr Howser’s campaign literature just contributes to the suspicion that the star of How I Met Your Mother is advancing on your gallbladder.

  It also doesn’t help that his slogan is — to dally in oxymoronic territory — the blandly provocative “It Starts Here”. Wags have already been scribbling beneath his posters. “Puberty” one reads. My colleague in this place suggests “Big School”.

  Anyway, I say again that I make no judgments on Master Haskins’s policies. My only objective has been to exercise bitter prejudices about the young and idealistic. I’m still voting for Commander Frogbiscuit.

• The worst thing about the economic landslide…

  November 23, 2010 @ 10:23 pm | by Donald Clarke

  Well, the worst thing about the economic landslide is the fact that thousands of people will lose their jobs, fail to make their house payments, feel the need to emigrate and generally experience all kinds of ordinary and extraordinary misery. Let me start again. One aspect of the current catastrophe that bugs me is the inevitable smugness that will spread through significant sections of the Northern Irish Unionist community. Not all of it. Not even most of it. But more than a few men in blazers will be sitting down to a huge plate of told-you-so pie.

  

  A typical southerner yesterday.

  I know whereof I speak. A child of that community, I have, over the last decade or so, encountered more than a few golf club members who, after a small bucket of gin, would delight in telling you that the Republic’s economic boom was sure to end in disaster. The  general explanation for the economic surge was — these folk argued — to be found in the fact that every penny sitting in every Irish bank account came from “the Common Market”. It seems that, each weekend, European officials would travel over from Brussels and drive around the country handing out fivers to every gap-toothed yokel (that’s to say every citizen of the State) in every poorly maintained, rat-invested hovel (that’s to say every house outside the six counties). Being simple folk — children really — the Southerners would then spend the cash on magic beans, pinwheel hats and rosary beads. Eventually, the European money would run out and they (you) would all have to go back to eating rotten potatoes and having too many children.

  You may as well argue against the tide as point out that aspects other than EU largesse were at play: the highly educated population, an outward-looking attitude, a convenient location and, of course, that fabled, controversially low corporation tax. The slack-jawed baboons who lived south of Newry (or in Newry for that matter) could not, in any way, be considered responsible for the supernatural degrees of wealth circulating about the 26 counties.

  It was equally pointless to explain that Northern Ireland is just about the most subsidised corner of western Europe. A report I’ve just made up explains that, as of last December, some 98 percent of the Northern population works for the government in some capacity. No, no, no! It’s pure toil, harsh soap and Presbyterian thriftiness that turned Northern Ireland into the economic powerhouse it plainly isn’t.

  So, where are we now? It would be wrong to suggest that Rosemary and Edwin McCausland were correct in their assertion that the southerners’ inherent uselessness and unstoppable profligacy would bring their nation to a sticky end. Whatever the members of Ballyduckle Golf Club may believe, this is not a nation of village idiots and trained monkeys. Still, the awareness that quite a few Nordies are now laughing over their Scotches does chill the blood slightly.

• Jean-Luc Godard! OsCar! Scarecrow!

  August 25, 2010 @ 11:27 pm | by Donald Clarke

  TOTALITARIANISM! SAUSAGE! DEATH FROM THE SKY!

  –reports from Hollywood (in Adeathica USA or THEM SA) say that Jean-Luc Godard is to

  RECEIVE AN AWARD

  

  FROM the ACODomy of “motion” pictures. What they call an

  OSCAR

  

  DESERVED (though mad mad mad for many years) Look, the Israelis are tying flags to the donkey. The donkey that is A BUSH. or

  THE BUSH

  

  HORSESHOE. PSEPHOLOGY. CHRISTMAS.

  BRAINSTORM. MERCY.

  OFFAL.

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