MBV 3D = MDP*

Contains spoilers for My Bloody Valentine

There are a lot of great and interesting movies doing the rounds at the moment: Revolutionary Road, The Wrestler, The Reader, Slumdog Millionaire, Milk, Frost/Nixon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Bride Wars (just kidding).

With all these in mind, for some reason I ended up going to see My Bloody Valentine (in 3D no less – not that you’d know it. Most 2D films offer more 3D thrills than My Bloody Valentine).

As is usual with films like this, it’s not really worth launching upon a lengthy critique of its narrative. My Bloody Valentine (MBV) is essentially a B-movie – I certainly didn’t hand over my hard-earned cash and expect something penned by David Hare or Simon Beaufoy. However, what I did expect was a load of schlocky, campy, nonsensical fun. And for a moment, MBV threatened to deliver...

There’s one sequence in the movie that is almost worth the price of admission itself: without going into mind-numbing detail, it involves a motel-managing dwarf, a butt naked Betsy Rue, a nasty trucker and a pickaxe in the head. The rest of the movie doesn’t even come close to what the critic Anthony Scott of the New York Times describes as the ‘zesty crudity’ of the B-movie:

...the cheesy, campy, guilty pleasures that used to bubble up with some regularity out of the B-picture ooze of cut-rate genre entertainment... now dominate the A-list, commanding the largest budgets and the most attention from the market-research and quality-control departments of the companies that manufacture them... For the most part, the schlock of the past has evolved into star-driven, heavily publicized, expensive mediocrities...

Even when filmmakers take on the subject of the B-movie, the results can be patchy: look at Death Proof, possibly the most crashingly dull B-movie ever made (the traditional B-movie certainly never contained acres of boringly pointless dialogue). Planet Terror is much more like it – supremely daft, the film even dispenses with core parts of its narrative by pretending that whole reels of the film have gone missing, which means it can jump straight into the action without titting about with hectares of talky exposition (something that Death Proof is stacked to the back teeth with).

When a B-movie is done well – Frank Darabont’s The Mist, for example, or even Kubrick’s The Shining – it can even transcend the usual A-list dramatic fare (Revolutionary Road anyone? The Reader?). I love a good B-movie – the problem with MBV was that it was only half a good B-movie – when the only thing that’s keeping you awake is the sight of Tom Atkins’s jaw flying past your shoulder, you know you’re in trouble.
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* MDP = Mostly Dog Poo.

Tag Teamed

The newly agented up Oli tagged me with this:

When it comes to writing, what do you know you're good at, and what aspect of writing are you worst at? (Procrastination is not permitted as either part of the answer.)

I like to think I’m good at dialogue – give me two characters in a room and I can magic up a no-holds barred argument (with a gratuitous garrotting thrown in for good measure) out of thin air. I’ve also been told I have a good visual sense, probably a result of spending far too long at art college and hanging around with talented people such as Mister Edwards, god bless 'im.

On the downside, I don’t have too many problems with plotting or story design, although I have a tendency to try and over-complicate things from the get-go – my first drafts are often so horribly complex that I’m often forced into using colour coded spreadsheets, a ream of Post-It notes and copious diagrams on fag packets to try and figure out what the hell might be going on.

I also seem to suffer from an overdeveloped sense of the absurd – let me explain:

When I was 11, part of my history homework one week was to draw the death mask of Tutankhamen (you know the one, it’s right here). I really took my time over the task and produced something that I thought was pretty darned good. I took my exercise book into school the next day, fully expecting it to be collected in and the work marked – except, it wasn’t. A week later, still nothing. By now thoroughly convinced that my meisterwerke would never get marked, I drew a pair of glasses on King Tut and gave him a rather fetching pair of cross eyes. Lo and behold, ten minutes later, the book was collected, marked and returned to me with the following comment underneath my now bespectacled drawing:

Chip can often ruin very good work by being exceedingly silly. 0/10

This is an aspect that I’ve found incredibly difficult to shake off ever since. For example, my last attempt at a straight drama veered quickly off into what a lot of people described as ‘wild implausibility’, but which I like to describe as ‘carnivalesque’ (that’s my excuse anyway). Which is probably why I feel safer writing within the boundaries of a genre. Rules, you see – rules are good.

Scenes from The Wire

I’m currently re-watching all five seasons of The Wire via the gift of the DVD box set (I’m generous to myself like that). Problem is I get all obsessive-compulsive about it and watch an entire season over the course of 48 hours, which means I forget to do essential household chores such as watching Apparitions or anything currently emanating from the Jungle (saints preserve us).

My favourite scene from season 2 comes in episode 8, Duck and Cover. After being thrown out of the marital home, McNulty (since demoted from detective to harbour patrol) goes on a monumental bender. After promising a bartender that he has no intention of driving home, he does just does that. Swinging round a corner, McNulty completely misjudges it, and slams his car into a concrete underpass support. He gets out, and drunkenly tries to figure out how he didn’t make the corner. He gets back in the car, backs it up, and has another go. This time he hits the concrete support with much greater force than before, smashing the passenger side window and cutting his hand.

If all the scene did was to demonstrate McNulty’s pig-headedness, it would still be great – but it does so much more than that. It almost serves as an overarching metaphor as to exactly how McNulty lives his life: first time round, McNulty can’t help but fuck things up. Second time round, he simply repeats his previous error, which makes his fuck-up even greater than before. The metaphor is underlined by the fact that this scene sits slap bang in the middle of an attempted reconciliation between McNulty and his wife and a drunken shag with a waitress. This is superlative writing (by George P Pelecanos) that makes its point without resorting to heavy handed exposition or even a great deal of explanatory dialogue. The sequence of events spells things out just enough.

I love The Wire – then again, it’s a hard show not to love.

I'm Confused (So No Change There Then)

At the risk of sounding like a doofus, didn’t Apparitions seem, well, you know, a little bit complicated?

Perhaps it might help if I tried to summarise what the devil (see what I did there?) was going on:

A young sufferer of leprosy, Vimal, prays to an image of Mother Theresa at the same time as the little saintly nun shuffles off this mortal coil. And whaddya know, hallelujah, he's cured! At exactly the same time in London, Liam and his wife conceive their daughter, Donna, who, ten years later, seeks out the exorcist Father Jacob (Martin Shaw). Liam is nuts, a fervent atheist who just happens to be possessed. In turn, Liam believes his daughter is also ‘possessed’, but by the spirit of Mother Theresa, which makes Liam froth at the mouth a bit. Meanwhile, Vimal has now ended up in the same seminary as Father Jacob, where he is taunted by a homeless man, who informs him that it wasn’t Mother Theresa who cured him of his leprosy – it was Satan. Cripes! Vimal is eventually relieved of his skin in a sex sauna after helping Jacob with his exorcism of Liam.

Got that? Good. ‘Cos I didn’t.

It’s not as if the basic premise is difficult to understand. It’s just that the two main narrative threads – Jacob’s run-ins with Liam and Vimal desperately trying to hang on to his Devil-donated skin – didn’t really seem to be related. In fact it was like watching two distant cousins in blindfolds blundering about and occasionally smacking into each other. It didn’t help that Apparitions started with Vimal’s story, which was little more than a sub-plot. Still, it gave an excuse for a truly gruesome skinning at the episode’s conclusion.

I can appreciate that many narratives might sound daft when reduced to a summary, but Apparitions truly is completely bonkers. Is it frightening? Not really. And that’s mostly because I found it too complicated, due to the fact that there was too much flippin’ plot. If you’re going to saturate a 60 minute drama with two significant narrative strands, it would be handy if they actually ran into each other every now and again.

Or maybe I’m just a doofus, who knows?

War on Reality

Contains spoilers for Spooks, Series 7, Episode 1

Don’t get me wrong, I love Spooks – I love it so much I’ll even watch it in French (and my French is notoriously rubbish). But as Adrian Reynolds has pointed out in insightful fashion, there’s something a bit ‘smoke and mirrors’ about the new series - and I can see what he means. This resides predominantly in the ever-so-slightly clunky plot mechanics. Hmmm – thinking about it, perhaps that’s a little unfair: ‘clunky’ is the wrong word. When you consider the way that writers Neil Cross and Ben Richards handle the various thorny problems that a Spooks narrative throws at them, you start to realise what a finely tuned machine the whole thing really is. It may well all be smoke and mirrors, but you don’t actually realise until way after the closing credits – which in my book, makes it a pretty major achievement.

Let’s face it, most narratives are going to contain some stray thread of implausibility or lapse in logic that, once worried and pulled at, means that the whole thing is going to unravel like a demented cat’s cradle. However, Spooks seems to be a special case. Last week’s opener started from a point that could have easily been totally implausible, but - due to some superlative writing - didn’t feel artificial or contrived: well, not that much.

Private Andy Sullivan is kidnapped by an al-Qaeda cell and threatened with a spot of decapitation unless Remembrance Day is cancelled. In a show of ballsy Brit bravura, Sullivan refuses to read out his captors’ pre-written statement, forcing them to read it out themselves. Once in receipt of the offending broadcast, the Spooks team is able to match the voice pattern of one of Sullivan’s captors against ones they have on electronic file – this inevitably puts them on the trail of the cell and its nefarious backers.

Taking this at face value, there doesn’t seem to be much wrong with it – and indeed, there isn’t. But the logic Nazi that resides deep in my psyche couldn’t quite shake the thought that it just seemed a teensy bit contrived. The fact that one of Sullivan’s captors is forced to read out his own written statement direct to camera is the conceit that essentially sets the narrative in motion – without the voice to match to a suspect on their spiffy CGI database, the Spooks team would have been on a hiding to nothing straight from the off. I’m not a connoisseur of kidnap videos by any stretch, but I can’t imagine there’s any way on god’s green earth that any self-respecting al-Qaeda member would read out his own list of demands on a video which every security service in the western hemisphere would be queuing up to analyse with one of those weird toothcomb things.

Like I said – I’m a logic Nazi. It’s a problem – unfortunately not one that can be treated with any known medication (I’ve tried the odd anti-psychotic, but they don’t work either).

However, all credit to the writers – at least they get this little implausibility out of the way quickly.

Which then neatly leads on to the next teensy tiny problem:

Even though Spooks is grounded heavily in an instantly recognisable world, it’s almost as if that world is too real. So Spooks compensates for uncomfortable reality by giving everything an overwhelmingly positive spin, and throws in a bit of wish fulfilment to boot as well: kidnap victims are rescued unscathed, terror plots are successfully foiled with no civilian casualties, and MI5 agents have the public’s best interests at heart. Reality itself is far more horrific, random and mundane than anything Spooks could throw at us. But then again, it’s just fiction - right? Why would anyone want pesky reality playing a part in proceedings?

At least Spooks has the good sense to up the ante every now and again and kill off one of its main characters - which sort of begs the question: how much reality can we really take? I love Spooks, but every now and again, it would be nice to see how the team deal with the fall out from a full-on terrorist outrage (inasmuch as terrorist outrages can ever really be described as ‘nice’) ;-)

In The Crap

There’s an article here by Toby Young that essentially talks about this:

As a reviewer, I always accepted that film is a collaborative medium, but until I started spending time with film-makers I had no idea just how true that is. It is most obvious when it comes to the screenplay. It is fairly well known that the officially credited writers of a film are rarely, if ever, the only authors of the shooting script, but I was still shocked when a famous screenwriter confided he'd been Oscar-nominated for a film he hadn't written a single word of...

I now realise that describing someone as the "director" - or "screenwriter" or "producer" - is completely misleading, in that there are no clearly circumscribed areas of responsibility on a film set. Those official titles are, at best, starting points, guideposts that sometimes point you in the right direction, but equally often lead you astray.

Slogging my way through In The Cut, a single question became immediately apparent: if film truly is a collaborative process as Mister Young states in his article (and I’m not suggesting for a second that it isn’t), then how on earth does something like In The Cut limp its way onto celluloid? Didn’t anyone involved with the making of this film have the presence of mind to say, “Uh, Jane, sweetie – that film you’ve directed? It’s utter guff.” Perhaps everyone was intimidated by the Oscar that Ms Campion no doubt takes everywhere with her, but even so, that’s not really an excuse. If you believe Toby Young, then a film can be made or destroyed in the edit. With that in mind, just imagine the raw material that the editor Alexandre de Francheschi had to work with – it doesn’t really bear thinking about it.

Just what makes In The Cut so toe curlingly bad? Talking about film as a collaborative process is all very well, but if you’re going to start with a script that’s essentially rubbish, then no amount of blood, nudity, swearing and pretentiousness is going to help you. The protagonist Frannie is as drearily passive as a wet weekday morning, where the male characters veer between being either cardboard cut outs or gross stereotypes. Campion can sprinkle the finished product with as many moody atmospherics and pretentious asides as she likes, but she can’t disguise the clunky, paint-by-numbers plot that telegraphs its ending a good hour before it occurs. In other words, you can’t make a skyscraper out of housebricks – and the building that In The Cut most closely resembles is a brick outhouse.

Perhaps the fact that Meg Ryan takes her clothes off might divert attention from the mound of rubbishness clunking about on screen?

Er, nope.

As above, the one thing that constantly staggers me with films such as this is that it has taken a small army of professional, intelligent people with an Oscar winning director (supposedly) at the helm to get the thing made. So why is it so bad? There has to a reason: too many cooks? Or not enough? Maybe there weren’t enough suits involved (Toby Young’s criteria for getting a half decent film made)? Who knows? And more to the point, who cares? All I know is that some collaborations work and others don’t – and you can safely put In The Cut in the latter column.

Brooked

Contains spoilers for Mr Brooks.

Since the 1970s, the writing team of Bruce Evans and Raynold Gideon have sought to create the perfect script with each collaboration. Academy Award winner Kevin Costner believes they achieved their goal with their most recent project, Mr Brooks.

“Costner was incredibly complimentary,” remembers Bruce Evans, co-writer and director of the upcoming Mr Brooks... “He said, “I’ve read hundreds of scripts in my life and only four perfect ones. This is one of them.” (Script, Volume 13, Number 3, May/June 2007).

Are you quite sure about that, Kevin? Are you quite sure?

Just imagine for one second that your shower has sprung a leak and water is seeping through the ceiling below into your kitchen. Not good. So, after consulting the trusty Yellow Pages, you call a plumber, who duly turns up. You need to pop out for an hour, so you leave the plumber to it – the guy’s a professional, right? You trust him to do a good job – after all, he’s done this sort of thing before; the man knows what he’s doing.

You get back later to find that your plumber has ripped out the shower from upstairs and has relocated it in your lounge using nothing more than a plastic bucket with a hole in the bottom and the crazy magic of gravity. When you enquire what happened to the shower upstairs, he replies that it was old and needed replacing. And anyway – isn’t it more convenient to have a shower downstairs?

Brought to you by the power of crap analogy, welcome to the world of Mr Brooks.

Bruce Evans and Raynold Gideon were the adapters/ screenwriters of Stand By Me, a film that Script rightly describes as “a standout among the classics.” So what the devil were they thinking when they cooked up a film such as Mr Brooks, which is so brain implodingly bad it’s difficult to know where to start?

Kevin Costner plays the titular Mr Brooks, a seemingly happy and successful family man. But there’s a problem: Brooks is a serial killer. And what’s more, he likes it. Well, not Brooks per se, but his ebullient alter ego, Marshall (William Hurt on autopilot). Brooks’s problems start when he murders two dancers with a penchant for having sex with the curtains open; Brooks is photographed in the aftermath of the crime, and is blackmailed by a Mr Smith who rather bizarrely wants ‘in’ on Brooks’s next murder. At that point, at least thirty seven subplots of such stunning silliness drop in uninvited to turn the entire film into a convergence of tangled narratives that lead us precisely nowhere:

* Demi Moore plays Tracy Atwood, the (highly unlikely) cop who’s after Brooks. Atwood is in the midst of a bad tempered divorce from her second husband, whose financial demands upon her seem excessive – that is, until Brooks and Marshall discover that Atwood is a millionaire many times over. This fact alone seems to motivate Brooks to kill Atwood’s husband and his lawyer, an action that inadvertently sets up Atwood as a suspect (only it doesn’t, not really). What does Atwood’s financial status have to do with the main narrative thrust, or anything else for that matter? Absolutely nothing at all. There’s an effort to toss a ticking clock into proceedings, but the device is used in such a convoluted fashion that the detail floats over your head (and who cares about a ticking clock in a subplot anyway? Wouldn’t it better to shoehorn it into the main narrative, where Mr Brooks and Mr Smith drive pointlessly around town looking for someone to kill (which they never actually get around to doing)?).

* Atwood spends a good part of the film being hunted by an escaped convict – a packing slip in Mr Smith’s empty apartment (the contents having been shipped out by Mr Brooks and the slip planted there knowing full well Atwood would find it) leads her inadvertently to this guy’s lair, where they indulge in a boringly filmed shoot-out. Again, what does this have to do with the main narrative? Absolutely nothing at all.

* Most pointless of all is the subplot that concerns Brooks’s daughter, Jane, who has returned from college to admit to her parents that 1) one day she’d like to take over pop’s super-exciting box manufacturing business, and that 2) she’s pregnant. What she neglects to tell them is that there was a murder at her college shortly before she bailed out back home. Suspecting that his daughter has inherited his psychopathic make-up, Brooks flies halfway across the country to Jane’s college and commits a copycat murder, thereby providing his daughter with an alibi (of sorts). This subplot is concluded when Jane stabs her father in the throat with a pair of scissors, thereby confirming his worst fears. But wait: Brooks’s death is all a dream! I’m afraid that I simply do not have the words to describe just quite how staggeringly stupid and inept this entire subplot is.

All bitching aside, if anyone can explain to me exactly what on earth any of these subplots have to do with the main thrust of the film (if indeed there is one), then you’re welcome to my copy of Script in which Bruce Evans and Raynold Gideon recount how they got Mr Brooks off the ground (the one with the rather fetching picture of Randall Wallace on the cover). And if an entire rack of pointless subplots doesn’t do it for you, you might like to ponder the fact that the film resurrects this hoary old scene. Sheesh!

Stand By Me is a great film; Mr Brooks is unmitigated, unfocussed tosh. Weirdly, the one thing both films have in common is that they’re from the same writing team. If I was able to hark back to my crap plumbing analogy at this point, believe me, I would; however Mr Brookes is so bad, I’m pretty certain I’m going to have to think of an analogy that’s even barrel scrapingly worse than that.

Navel Gazing for Fun and Profit

Contains spoilers for Hellboy II - The Golden Army

Hmmm – I’m not quite sure what to say about Hellboy II – The Golden Army, which is a peculiar position to be in. Perhaps it’s something to do with the film’s two extremes cancelling each other out in a kind of yin/yang implosion – visually, it’s incredible; screenplay-wise, it’s clunky and illogical. However, it’s witty and at least moves along at a fair old lick, which is more than The Dark Knight did. Strangely enough, the one aspect that Hellboy II and The Dark Knight have in common is a whole load of reflective navel gazing: does Gotham need a masked vigilante? Does the human race really deserve to be saved time and time again by Hellboy and his band of assorted freaks? Will Luke Goss ever consider reforming Bros (for the love of god, nooooooo!)? Questions, questions...

Even if Mark Ravenhill feels that Batman should spend more time punching people in the gob and less time philosophising about it, at least the script was consistent. Guillermo del Toro is obviously too enamoured of his often outré visuals to spend much time worrying about narrative logic or coherent sub-plots. Hmmm – maybe ‘coherent’ is the wrong word. One intriguing sub-plot – about how Hellboy and his chums in the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense are called upon to rescue a human race that’s just downright ungrateful – is dropped as soon as another big ass action sequence lumbers into view. There's nothing wrong with the action sequences in Hellboy II - far from it, they're great - but they tend to trample on anything that just happens to be in the way.

Hellboy’s fight with a giant forest elemental – essentially an enormous piece of CGI celery – is a case in point. The visuals are often too strong for the narrative to withstand, so something’s gotta give: the twin annoyances of logic and plausibility are ditched, the idea being that you’re so overawed by del Toro’s newly minted ‘visionary’ status, you won’t even notice. Maybe some more navel gazing could have saved the day, but I doubt it.

I am the Knight who says ‘Meh’

Contains spoilers for The Dark Knight

If an analogy for mainstream cinema is the three minute pop song, then The Dark Knight is a fifteen minute progressive rock epic, complete with harpsichord solo, spoken word interlude and a huge bag of whizz-bang pyrotechnics – with is another way of saying it’s very long. According to my bony backside (always a good arbiter of cinematic quality), its 150 minute running time seemed like five hours – too much dialogue, slow pacing, two endings, scenes that simply go on and on and on. To be honest, I’m surprised that any backside could take it (perhaps there’s a marketing opportunity here for the Chip Smith ‘Numb-o-meter’ – just don’t ask me how it works as I haven’t invented it yet).

So, The Dark Knight. Mark Ravenhill thinks this. On the other hand, John Truby thinks this. In all honesty, I suspect the reason this film has been so stratospherically successful is down to one thing: Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker. It really is a tour-de-force, as if Ledger has somehow managed to channel the craziest bits of Jack Nicholson through a dilapidated mental asylum. Not that either John Truby or Mark Ravenhill is wrong, of course: Ravenhill thinks there’s too much dialogue and not enough action, and he’s right; Truby believes that “The Dark Knight proves that a movie can be a huge hit because of theme, not in spite of it,” and he’s right as well. And yet strangely I find myself disagreeing with both of them.

Ordinarily, the more complex a plot, the happier I am, and the series of constant moral conundrums that The Dark Knight throws at you are more than welcome – this is a film that the term ‘blockbuster with a brain’ was invented for. However, this narrative and moral complexity tends to disguise the fact that there isn’t really a great deal of emotional content at the movie’s core. The narrative is technically proficient – perhaps overly so – but within its complexities, something gets lost along the way.

Compare The Dark Knight with Tell No One, a superb French film from Guillaume Canet, adapted from the novel by Harlan Coben. Although the narrative of Tell No One is complex, the central spine of the story is simple, and focuses on Beck’s frantic search for his supposedly dead wife. The Dark Knight has a complex narrative and a dizzying array of themes, the combination of which seem to squeeze all the humanity out of the film.

Interestingly, The Dark Knight is unusual as far as Christopher Nolan’s usual modus operandi goes, inasmuch as it’s told in a linear fashion. The narrative cut ups of Following and The Prestige are nowhere to be seen, mostly because things are complicated enough. However, what the linear narrative does expose here I think is the fact that at its heart, The Dark Knight feels a little empty. Unwind The Prestige and Following and you might even find something similar – that their complex narrative structures successfully disguise the fact that neither of them really entirely manage to engage the viewer on an emotional level. Don’t get me wrong, they’re both great films, but like The Dark Knight, the overall feel is of movies that have been ruthlessly designed, much like a Swiss watch or a formal garden where messy, unpredictable nature doesn’t really have much of a place.

The film’s politics seemed a bit skewed to me as well: mass surveillance of Gotham’s citizenry which is justified by the fact that a single terrorist might be caught at some future point (hmm, sounds familiar); the cover up of Harvey Dent’s crimes due to the fact that the people of Gotham ‘need a hero’. The Dark Knight doesn’t spend too long pondering these uncomfortable questions, which are arguably more interesting than the moral conundrums that John Truby points out.

Anyway, it’s probably pointless arguing with box office receipts in excess of $300 million. Let’s hope that Christopher Nolan does something outside of the Batman franchise next time out...

Arthouse or Mainstream? Let's Have Both!

Contains spoilers for Blue Velvet

I saw Blue Velvet when it first came out in 1986 – it was the first movie of that particular ‘type’ I’d seen and, although my friend and I emerged blinking form the cinema asking each other “What the flaming fup was that all about?”, I loved it. David Lynch has always made films that are defiantly ‘arthouse’, but what really distinguished Blue Velvet for me was that it seemed to exist at a crossroads between ‘arthouse’ and ‘mainstream’ cinema. To be honest, I’ve always had problems trying to distinguish between the two anyway (I’ve often asked myself why arthouse films can’t have more car chases, and conversely, why a lot of mainstream cinema has to be so unrelentingly dumb). Trying to put it down to an explanation that mainstream cinema relies predominantly on a traditional three act structure (as Karel Segers suggests) doesn’t really do it for me. If there are distinct differences between the two, they’re far more subtle than that.

Perhaps a major distinction between arthouse and mainstream cinema is the fact that in an arthouse film the dots are not immediately joined up for you. This can apply not only to the film’s narrative, but also to its visual style as well. By not providing an explanation of every little narrative or visual detail, a film can quite easily slip into the ‘arthouse’ camp, where it’s remarkably easy for a seemingly random detail to inspire someone to say, “What’s going on there, then?” (which was exactly the question I was asking myself throughout Inland Empire).

Blue Velvet is a case in point – during the concluding scenes, Jeffrey walks into a scene of torture and carnage in Dorothy’s flat. The scene is not explained via a huge landfill of exposition, so the onus is on the viewer to try and piece the various bits of elliptical logic together (that said, good luck to you if you try this with Inland Empire).

Now take an example that exists at the other end of the spectrum: Joel Schumacher’s Flatliners. For me the most notable feature of this rather daft bit of mainstream fluff was the striking visual of an injured dog: a memorable detail completely spoilt by the fact that it’s ruthlessly explained away. A director such as David Lynch would have felt no desire at all to have done this, which seems to me to form a distinction between the two ‘styles’.

Of course, ‘arthouse’ and ‘mainstream’ are not mutually exclusive. Here’s Karel Sagers again:

The darkest film I have recently seen is PRINCESS, a revenge tale mixing anime and live action. Subject matter: pornography and child abuse... the film was told in a traditional three act structure. Even if you believe your film will appeal to intellectuals only... you will need that conventional story structure. Because today without it you have no audience.

As above, I’m not sure that this is entirely correct. Princess is again a film like Blue Velvet that sits quite comfortably at the crossroads between mainstream and arthouse, which is absolutely fine by me. Given the problems that Tartan Films have been having recently, it might even be tempting to say that the market for arthouse films is in decline – this isn’t because audiences are somehow demanding more conventional story structures, but probably because ‘arthouse’ is in a constant process of being co-opted into the mainstream: perhaps Christopher Nolan’s successes of recent years are particular cases in point. And besides, whenever I hear the over-used term ‘blockbuster with a brain’, it invariably means that the brain has been borrowed from an arthouse sensibility – and there’s nothing wrong with that either.

Treasure/Trash

Contains spoilers for No Country for Old Men

This is from Frank Cottrell Boyce’s thirteen golden screenwriting rules published in The Guardian on June 30th:

No one leaves the cinema saying: I loved that character arc. They come out saying: I loved the swordfight, or the bit with the bloated cow, or whatever. The manuals emphasise the flow of a narrative, but it's better to think of a film as a suite of sequences. That's where the pleasure is.

I would actually go a little further than this and state that a single image can occasionally have a lasting effect, and be eminently memorable to boot. No Country for Old Men is a case in point. The pleasures of this film are almost entirely visual (which is a bit of a given seeing as much of the narrative unfolds without dialogue or even music): scuff marks on a linoleum floor, the aftermath of one of Chigurh’s brutal murders; the slow seep of blood across a motel floor; Chigurh checking the underside of his boots after killing Moss’s wife; all beautifully written and executed visual moments, the undoubted signifiers of (overused word alert) a masterpiece.

If only the story mechanics were as well considered.

I’d been warned by a friend that the ending of the film was a little disappointing, and that it didn’t really make much sense. Er, hello? Everything made perfect sense to me, so I can only assume my friend had nodded off at some point. The only thing that irritated me about the film (and it’s a pretty major thing) was that it was brought to you by the crap power of co-incidence, that hoary old screenwriting shortcut/standby. Characters had a habit of simply blundering across each other in a most convenient fashion. One such co-incidence I could probably buy, but when they’re mercilessly piled high (much like the bodycount), you realise that No Country for Old Men is not a masterpiece: it’s an high falutin’ genre film with superior visuals that feel as if they’ve been hijacked from a eminently better, more interesting movie.

Which is a shame, as the Coen brothers get everything else right: a meticulous attention to character, fantastic dialogue, believable relationships – it’s all here. The problem is that it’s wrapped up in a genre that has to rely on some pretty creaky co-incidences in order to keep things moving.

The Kingdumb

Contains spoilers for The Kingdom

With Michael Mann producing, the one thing you’re guaranteed to get with The Kingdom is an honest to goodness lorry load of shoot ‘em up action. The action sequences in Heat – the heist and the concluding gun battle – are probably some of the best ever filmed, and The Kingdom does its damndest to ensure that its two big action sequences are structurally almost direct lifts from Mann’s undoubted masterpiece. Thing is, exploding Range Rovers, ferocious hails of bullets and the sight of Jennifer Garner holding a gun like it’s about to chip her nail polish does not make a great movie. A good one, sure – but not a great one.

If you're expecting another Syriana, you will come away disappointed. You don’t even have to scratch the surface to find an almost wholly conventional thriller here. And whatever you do, don’t dwell too long on the machinations of the narrative – it is utterly preposterous. Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx) leads a small team of FBI agents into Saudi Arabia to investigate the indiscriminate bombing of an American housing compound. Five days later, the team are out (not a bullet wound between them, although poor Janet Mayes (Jennifer Garner) almost suffers a burst eardrum, bless her) and the crime has been solved. The Kingdom has been criticised for being revisionist, and you can certainly see why. This is the way the US would like to see things done. The reality, of course, is entirely different.

You want more preposterousness? You got it! In order to get ‘in country’, Fleury has to rely upon a friendly journalist, who sows a series of half truths with the Saudi ambassador to the US that Fleury is then able to leverage to get what he wants. Got that? Good. Now forget all about it. If this was Syriana, Fleury’s actions – essentially a man driven by a vague sense of vengeance – would have tragic and probably fatal consequences. But they don’t, purely because all the guff about getting the team into Saudi is nothing more than exposition. The political storm that Fleury stirs up by acting unilaterally simply falls away, to be replaced by big guns and even bigger explosions.

The political and personal relationships that the first hour of the film spends time exploring are quite intriguing, if only for the fact that you expect some sort of concluding pay off later in the film. Haytham, the Saudi police officer who stops the first attack on the compound is initially suspected of being involved, and is mercilessly interrogated as a result. As Haytham ends up being part of the joint US-Saudi team who set out to kick some major terrorist butt, you’d half expect this piece of intrigue to have some sort of bearing on how the team ultimately fare. It doesn’t, which means that The Kingdom doesn’t really have sub-plots – it has a lot of narrative loose ends that ultimately get swallowed up by impressive explosions and gun battles.

All that said, I quite enjoyed it. Even though The Kingdom thinks it’s intelligent, it isn’t really. Treat it like a big, dumb generic thriller and you can’t go wrong.

(The screenwriter of The Kingdom, Matthew Michael Carnahan is at the helm of the US adaptation of State of Play, which is slated for a spring 2009 release. Quite what he does with Paul Abbot’s BBC mini-series remains to be seen, but if The Kingdom is any indication, he’ll turn in something efficient and effective, but pretty unremarkable).

Time Team on Acid

Contains Spoilers for last night's Bonekickers

Ever since Life On Mars, one gets the impression that Ashley Pharaoh could pitch his shopping list to BBC executives and get given the green light for a six part series exploring the mysteries of supermarket trolleys and the fruit n’ veg aisle. That said, Bonekickers was all right I suppose (and certainly not as godawful as Gareth McLean made out in Tuesday’s Guardian), but it entirely depended on what you were looking for – if that happened to be a drama-lite romp thought seven hundred years of pseudo-history, you were in luck. If not – oh well, just sit back and marvel at the errant silliness.

Bonekickers did at least have a brain cell rattling round in its mostly empty head, if only for the realisation that a dramatised Time Team would have been like watching the live feed on Big Brother. A crazed, right wing Christian group wearing limited edition Templar t-shirts was wheeled out to do battle with a bunch of perplexed looking Muslims (fresh out of the story conference, no doubt), one of whom got his head cut off by Paul Nicholls (gotta take the work where you can get it these days I guess). A sub-plot too far methinks, as by the halfway point Bonekickers had forgotten about its brain cell and proceeded to stagger toward its deliriously daft finale. In fact, there was so much overt nonsense on show that an extra twenty or so minutes or so might have calmed things down somewhat, and allowed for some much needed tying up of loose ends.

With the recently announced Red Planet competition in mind, anyone looking for clues as to what a returning series looks like wouldn't have come away with anything useful from Bonekickers, save for the fact that the first episode was exceptionally plot heavy. The main characters were introduced via the tried and tested mechanism of a fresh faced newbie in their midst, but save for a perfunctory line or two, character development was not something that Bonekickers particularly interested itself in, as it spent a lot of its time bumping into convenient narrative signposts, such as an old geezer who was able to point the way to the one true cross (well, a warehouse full of them at least).

So: it was all right. But judging by this outing, at least shopping lists are coherent.

FCB in The Guardian

There was a good article in yesterday's Guardian by Frank Cottrell Boyce, which can be found here. As a little teaser, here's what he has to say about the three act structure...

All the manuals insist on a three-act structure. I think this is a useless model. It's static. All it really means is that your screenplay should have a beginning, middle and end. When you're shaping things, it's more useful to think about suspense. Suspense is the hidden energy that holds a story together.

Oooh, controversial!

I've been thinking about structure and pacing quite a lot recently, and this little article is helping me frame some of my thoughts in a wider context. I may well post some of this meandering old nonsense at a later date, but in the meantime, hop over to the article and have a gander.

My New Favourite Film

Contains Spoilers for Session 9

This movie cropped up on the Sci-Fi channel recently, and what a little gem it is (something about the title rang a bell so I recorded it, only to discover later that Mr Arnopp recommended it on his esteemed blog last year – which means I’m only twelve months behind the curve).

I’ll try to give you a flavour without going all spoiler-tastic on your ass, but it’s a hugely effective horror cum ghost story. Filmed almost entirely on location in a deserted mental asylum (Danvers State Hospital, now apparently torn down to make way for swanky apartments), the emphasis is very firmly placed on character and a slow sense of creeping dread that will scare the bajesus out of you (well, it did me). Even though it is shot on digital video, the cinematography by Uwe Brieseitz is stunning – there is certainly more than a touch of The Shining about it, but where The Shining was filmed on a series of huge, purpose built sets, every location you see in Session 9 is real – which makes the whole thing that little bit more frightening. The cast – including Peter Mullan and David Caruso – turn in stellar performances, and the script is a veritable mine of ambiguity, where the major sub plot may or may not have much to do with the primary narrative (the sort of thing that would have script readers the world breaking out in mass cardiac arrests). The director, Brad Anderson, went on to make The Machinist, so you know you’re in safe hands.

Even if you don’t like horror as a genre (and let’s face it, Session 9 is certainly not your usual horror flick), give this a go – I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised as well as severely creeped out – and who could want anything more from a film than that?

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Played Out Franchise

Contains Spoilers for Indy 4.

Bearing in mind the middling reviews that IJ4 has already received, I went along to my friendly, local multiplex not expecting to experience a landslide of narrative coherence. I mean, the words ‘Story by George Lucas’ is enough to make anyone spontaneously combust, but I was prepared: just entertain me, goddamn it! With a big marquee film like this, I don’t expect anything more than that.

One thing I just wasn’t prepared for was just how damn boring the whole thing was.

Mystery Man lays into the whole thing here better than I could, but the one thing he seems to miss is just how frickin’ dull it all was. The first fifteen minutes are a case in point: Indy and his chronically underwritten double/triple-dealing sidekick Mac find themselves prisoners of the Russian Army, forced to search an American military warehouse for the body of an extraterrestrial (don’t bother asking how half the Russian army have somehow ended up in the United States; you won’t understand – or even care about – the answer). OK, that much I can buy – it’s the heavy handed set up that really starts to grind. The three previous films hit the ground running – this one sort of limps out of the gate and has a lie down for fifteen minutes whilst it tries to figure out where the hell it wants to go. What’s more, the entire opening of the film is effectively made completely redundant by the fact that the narrative starts again with the arrival of Mutt (another crap sidekick). The scene in the diner is where the film actually begins, albeit with a landfill of boring and confusing exposition thrown in for good measure. Add in some pointless sub plots, far too many underwritten characters and a narrative that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, and there you have it: the worst film of the quadrilogy by a long, long way – which brings me back to the whole problem of coherence.

I get positively autistic when faced with a narrative that doesn’t make sense, although I was quite prepared to temporarily suspend this debilitating condition in order to be entertained. Didn’t happen. Now I know that narrative coherence is not a luxury to be sacrificed in favour of spectacle: if you’re confused, you’re not involved - you spend half the time fretting away at a confusing narrative detail and not emoting, which is probably why Indy 4 has no discernible emotional intelligence to it at all. The first step should have been to make the thing actually make sense – everything can then follow from there. But then again, coherence is not something we’ve come to expect from George Lucas, bless him.

Let's Hear it for the Scriptwriters

An article in yesterday's Guardian here from Mark Lawson that might be of interest. What's more, a link in the comments section will take you here, where Donna Franceschild talks about Takin' Over the Asylum - there's also an intelligent debate further down the page that is well worth checking out as well.

Soupy Twist

Contains spoilers for War, The Usual Suspects, The Number 23, Perfect Stranger and Secret Window.

I have a confession to make: I’m really starting to despise movies with a twist ending, in particular those that reveal that the protagonist is actually the antagonist (i.e., that guy we’ve been following about for last ninety minutes who’s been trying to solve those mysterious deaths in that haunted old cheese factory? It was him! He did it! And just to piss you off even more, here’s a painfully convoluted explanation). That said, perhaps I should start watching a better class of film than War, in which Jason Statham does his best to get his chops round an American accent. As if anyone needs to be told, the film features two twists, both of them pretty pointless (and one of them a very half hearted attempt at making the protag the antag) – at which point I thought, enough! Twist endings? Take a hike! If any film commits the now unforgiveable sin of revealing that the protagonist is the bad guy, I will snap DVDs and bellow at someone until I get my money back.

The culprits in the area of protag/antag reversal are many and varied: Adam Quigley comes up with a handy user’s guide here, where he points the finger at some of the major offenders in this field – Secret Window, Perfect Stranger, The Number 23: all of them complete rubbish. One notable exception to this list is of course The Usual Suspects, mostly because the film uses the ‘conceit’ of an unreliable narrator: as Verbal is not exactly your typical movie protagonist, the film sits way above the blundering stupidity epitomised by The Number 23.

Even so, what The Usual Suspects did was to kick start a whole slew of scripts and films where the surprise/twist ending was everything. The ending of The Usual Suspects has been criticised quite widely, but I enjoyed the film more for the fact that it didn’t presume its audience were morons, which is certainly something you can’t say about The Number 23. After The Usual Suspects, it was The Sixth Sense, and before, it was Angel Heart. Every few years a standout film will push head and shoulders above its contemporaries and inadvertently inspire a whole new wave of warmed up cack: so it goes.

However, enough is enough, and the reversal/twist ending of protag as antag should be the first casualty. It’s been done so many times – both by great films (Angel Heart) and by rubbish ones (Perfect Stranger) – that it’s stepped across the line and has become a cliché (albeit one that people still use). For me, it’s on a par with being told at a movie’s conclusion: it was all a dream. Arrrggghhh! Can’t we have something a little more intelligent for a change?

A Suitable Case for Treatment

As my regular reader might know, I have been searching for a user friendly working method for a while now: loglines, synopses, outlines, treatments, I’ve done ‘em all in the vain hope that sometime something will stick.

Unfortunately, this eureka! moment has not yet happened, and I doubt it ever will, mostly because I approach each individual project from a totally different perspective. The outline for the last feature length script I wrote consisted of a diagram sketched out on a page of A4 paper (I was going to post this, but I’m scared you’ll laugh as it’s covered in smiley faces and references to Scooby Doo). To be honest, this is probably the most successful outlining tool I’ve ever used – five drafts in and, although the narrative has changed along the way, I'm still adhering to the basic structure sketched out in this document.

I find synopses useful in this respect as well – something short (two pages maximum) that outlines the major events in the narrative that leaves plenty of room for some wild ‘riffing’ along the way. I have always found treatments quite intimidating for this reason: events are mapped out in such a way as to make ‘improvisation’ seem a little out of place. The way I write is determined by accident as much as anything else, and a full blown treatment seems to squeeze all the fun out of the process somehow. And anyway, with previous treatments, I have always found that, once the treatment is ‘locked down’, an idea materialises out of nowhere that knocks the whole thing for six – the fact that I am usually three quarters of the way through writing the script at this point really does not help.

That said, I am working on a treatment for someone at the moment – well, by ‘treatment’, I mean a series of about a million ideas that will hopefully start to coalesce into something vaguely coherent in the next few weeks. The advantage to doing things this way is that a lot of ideas get ditched early on in favour of better ones, and horrible things like coincidence get put out of their misery relatively early on.

Even so, I’m a great believer in the fact that until you start writing the script itself, you have no idea how things are going to turn out. A detail that looked eminently logical in your treatment can turn out to be amazingly silly once fleshed out in script form - the solution here as far as I’m concerned is to manically write your way out of trouble. Exposition – one of my pet peeves – is also tremendously difficult to navigate around once you are in the script 'zone'. A treatment naturally tends to be heavy on exposition as this is the way you get the essential planks of your story laid down – in the script, it’s a difficult kettle of fish altogether.

Which is why I’ve always stuck to relatively simple outlines/one pagers. The current treatment is starting to make some vague sense, but there’s no substitute to actually getting stuck in and writing the damn thing.

Sounds Like A Rude Word But Isn't.

There are some things in life that I’m destined just not to get: for example, anything written by Stephen Poliakoff, or any script that is unlucky enough to find itself in the hands of Michael Winterbottom. Whether I’m simply demented, stupid or slightly retarded, I have another item to add to the list – the films of Pedro Almodóvar (well, Volver at least).

Maybe my not liking Volver exhibits my own prejudices and subjective dislikes much the same as anyone else, but when Mark Kermode describes it as a gorgeously melancholic melodrama-cum-ghost-story, I have to wonder whether he saw the same film as I did. Yeah, OK, so there’s nothing drastically wrong with it – it’s just the critical avalanche of hyperbole that is heaped upon this film just seems to be a little misplaced to me.

Talking of hyperbole, here’s Paul Howlett:

Almodóvar manages to make a ludicrous farce about a mother and daughter who kill the abusive man of the house and set about covering their tracks, hindered by a back-from-the-dead grandmother, into a work of emotionally astute, heartaching drama. It's pure magic...

Except, it isn’t – not really. I think the best way to describe it is three parts melodrama, two parts soap opera and one part camp (or five parts camp if you consider that melodrama and soap opera fall under this heading as well). Don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely nothing against soap opera/continuing drama, or anything that is even remotely camp for that matter – it’s just that in Volver, soap opera is equated with ‘trash TV’, where in fact the film doesn’t really do anything to transcend the genre it’s supposed to be an ironic homage to. Think of it as a feature length episode of Emmerdale with the camp quotient turned up to eleven. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just not my cup of tea – like I said before, the fact that I didn’t like Volver harshly exposes my likes and dislikes, and there’s nothing I can really do about that. However, if an ‘emotionally astute’ drama is Almodóvar’s aim, then to my mind why can’t the story be told without it being fed through the prism of camp, ironic or not?

Down at the level of screenwriting mechanics, something seems to be amiss as well: although the central planks of the narrative are all sound, characters spend an absolute age saying hello and goodbye to each other, before walking across the street to do the same in someone else’s house. Characters get out of cars, walk down streets, then walk back up them. Cut these travelling to-and-fro moments out of the film, and you’d probably lose about fifteen minutes (which would be a good thing, as I almost nodded off at the 110 minute mark). A good deal of exposition is delivered during these moments in such a way as to make it obvious that these little nuggets of information are going to be vitally important later on – and there’s the problem: it’s obvious that they’re going to be important. Apart from one clunkingly enormous revelation at the film’s conclusion (which is both startling yet somehow banal), everything just seems eminently predictable.

Ah well – I’m off to see Iron Man at the weekend – something tells me that the camp quotient there is going to be dangerously low.