Among the many forgotten drafts sitting around for this blog is a rambly one about Inception. It is more or less a defence against the charge that the film is shallow – the characters aside from Cobb are 2 dimensional and it’s just a dumb action film dressed in philosophy undergraduate clothing. My retort to that is one long, loud, giant raspberry which is accompanied by the words “well fuck ya’s …”.
Fine. I think this film is brilliant on several levels – I buy the entire plot and the characters. At the moment I’m of the belief that the majority of the film happens within Cobb’s dream logic and so the other characters are in part his creations, sort of like the imprint and memories we carry of other people Ariadne is the give away and at the beginning, Sato is handling Cobb’s totem (ooh-er) so we establish that nothing we see is to be trusted.
I would have loved to have seen the script notes that Nolan must have received for this. If I ever meet him (and you know what? I’m going to. There, I’ve said it. One day I will meet Christopher Nolan as a peer … hopefully I won’t make a complete tit of myself at the time), I’m going to ask him. Apparently he pitched the idea to Warners in 2001 but then decided he needed to get a bit more experience first. I’m sure an element of that is true, but I’m also going to guess that someone looked at his pitch and laughed at him. So away he went, built up his reputation as a man who not only makes incredible, intelligent, commercial films but also as someone who can lure a patron into a seat. Once he convinced the money men, perhaps only then could he have made this film.
More importantly, this film shows that an audience will come to see an original feature in their droves. In a time where we seem to be getting nothing but adaptations and remakes, this can only be a good thing – when will we see studios take a similar leap of faith with other filmmakers? It can take about 2 years before things even get green-lit so I hope that 2013 will have some gems in store … That said, Mark Harris’ excellent GQ article on the state of modern cinema does have me worried if studios think that Inception‘s success is an anomaly.
Honourable mentions (get thee to a video store and rent them!): Four Lions (dir. Chris Morris)
I wish wrote this film, but no Chris Morris (along with the stupidly talented Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong of Peep Show brilliance and Simon Blackwell from The Thick of It) did. Fuck the terrorists, fuck government scaremongering and fuck Mini Babybel!
Whip It (dir. Drew Barrymore)
Complex, three dimensional female characters? Check. Kick arse soundtrack? Check. The best representation of a mother and daughter relationship on screen that doesn’t appear to side with either party? Oh hell yes.
I saw this and thought “I’ll do what every good writer does, and steal it!”
According to the ladies of Sass – the days are laid out as such:
1. The best film you saw during the last year
2. The most underrated film
3. A film that makes you really happy
4. A film that makes you sad
5. Favourite love story in a film
6. Favourite made for TV film
7. The most surprising plot twist or ending
8. A film that you’ve seen countless times
9. A film with the best soundtrack
10. Favourite classic film
11. A film that changed your opinion about something
12. A film that you hate
13. A film that is a guilty pleasure
14. A film that no one would expect you to love
15. A character who you can relate to the most
16. A film that you used to love but now hate
17. A film that disappointed you the most
18. A film that you wish more people would’ve seen
19. Favourite film based on a book/comic/etc.
20. Favourite film from your favourite actor/actress
21. Favourite action film
22. Favourite documentary
23. Favourite animation
24. That one awesome film idea that still hasn’t been done yet
25. The most hilarious film you’ve ever seen
26. A film that you love but everyone else hates
27. A film that you wish you had seen in theaters
28. Favourite film from your favourite director
29. A film from your childhood
30. Your favourite film of all time
Now having done the 15 films in 15 minutes meme, I’m going to try and be a bit more academic this time around and treat the project like the work and research journals that I would have to do for school. It’s been a while since I’ve done one (this blog is meant to be an extension of that idea but, well, life has got in the way).
So after yesterday’s angsty post, I did what I do best- sought out food to drown, or rather consume, my sorrows.
Unfortunately good food is not the easiest to find or remember in a rage, so I have decided to add to my procrastination and collect my cheap eat exploits over at Beyond The Pie … No doubt the non writing angst will go that way too …
UPDATE: So a little over a year later, I deleted the blog. It had all of 3 posts which goes to show, when you are really dirt poor there aren’t any cheap eats to be had in Brisbane that aren’t your usual rubbish, fast food fare (though I will say it now, it rubbish, fast food is delicious).
Instead on every Friday, Sam and I write up a menu for the week and only shop for those ingredients. When I had a normal office job, I would increase the portion of rice or noodles or lettuce and take the leftovers for lunch the next day. It was healthier and cheaper than any take out near my office (which itself was in the middle of no where). Since freelancing, Sam (who works in the business underneath our house – best commute ever) and I make lunch our main meal of the day and only have a few snacks in the evening if we’re hungry. It has stretched our limited pennies super far. If we were still in London or Singapore, the story would be different. Sadly, we’re not and street food doesn’t really exist in Brisbane yet. Maybe when we chuck in this whole filmmaking lark, we’ll buy ourselves a catering van and start a street food revolution in our back yard.
I’ve been home and I’ve moved again – from the shaky isles of NZ to the flood plains of Australia … wherever I go nature seems to have left her mark be it the volcanic ash that almost stopped my flight back into London; the snow that almost stopped my flight out of London; the floods that engulfed my home town to be before I arrived or the earthquake that shook the mountains of my homeland after I left.
I wonder what the universe is trying to tell me?
In the meantime, I am slowly finding my way in a new town.The writing has mostly been for other people’s projects and has been plentiful and my own projects seem to have taken on a new life when I have time. As usual, I am also trying to find a way to convince people that I would be the most awesome employee in the whole friggin planet™. It’s only week 2 but the hunt has not been going so well … at times I rue my decision to leave Beloved in dirty London town when my visa expired – he’s so far away and skype, when only one party has a camera, doesn’t cut it. Today I’ve fought a bank, wordpress eating half of this post and my own self doubt.
Have to count the good things, have to remember it’s only been two weeks.
Dear Universe, please keep your fingers crossed for me, I need some help picking myself up and dusting myself off now and then. Or a cuddle. I could really do with one of those too.
The travels are almost over, I’ve made it home. Back to the mountains, back to the sea, back to the howling southerly that cuts deep through your bones (I had genuinely forgot that it does that).
I’m still in limbo, somewhat – my move across the ditch is fast arriving and I have managed to distract myself with the joyful thoughts of nesting and working my way through boxes in my mother’s house filled with forgotten 21st and (my brother’s first) wedding gifts that will furnish my new (rented) home quite nicely.
The most exciting thing is not to have all my books and DVDs in one country, but to finally have a single place where I can work. My very own office that doesn’t need to be moved means I can finally have a desktop computer once more, a chair (oh the hours of procrastinating that will be taking up by finding the right chair), a cork board, a bookshelf to keep my growing pile of notebooks …
I’m not going to kid myself and say that by having a settled work area will mean that I will find a routine I’ll stick to. I think I have to abandon the idea that I will be of the Ronald Harwood style of writers who gets up, sits at his desk and writes like it is a normal job. I find myself in the Graham Linehan, Dean Craig camp where you procrastinate forever, realise how long you’ve been procrastinating, panic and then write everything in a flood of words. I will have to come to terms that for me, the magic seems to happen between the hours of 10.30pm and 6am.
Speaking of which … it is warm up time*. Yes, the magic needs warm up time.
*Warm up time: 1. Opening Final Draft. 2. Opening the file 3. Rewriting a line of dialogue from the last time I opened it 4. Staring at the screen for a really long time (about 2 minutes) 5. Checking the clock to see if 20 minutes has passed yet. 6. Repeating steps 4 and 5 for about 20 minutes. 7. Quickly checking facebook as something important needs to be looked up again. 8. Getting distracted on facebook. 9. Returning to document. 10. Remembering that I didn’t actually remember to check that thing I was looking for on facebook. 11. Opening the thing I needed on facebook, reading it, closing the link and going back to facebook where I get distracted again. 12. Thinking “so I don’t lose focus again, I’ll quickly check Twitter and the feed reader” 13. about 2 hours later, I finish with the feed reader, see the clock and panic at the lack of productivity. 14. Put a DVD on to distract myself from distracting myself online. 15. Magic almost begins. 16. Pee. 17. Repeat step 12. 18. See that it’s almost 10pm and realise I have done fuck all and this screenplay is due the next day. 19. Magic begins.
Aside from the excruciating memories that I’m sure this will bring to most people of explaining something, that you have spent hours of your time and passion on. to your parents who may be bemused about the whole thing; the films are a beautiful study of characters.
One room, two or three people talking about art. And yet, here we have complex back story that gently edges it’s way into the foreground while all parties skirt around how this creation of art is shaded by our upbringing.
The parents are all seated on chairs that are ever so slightly higher than that of their child’s, forcing both players to slowly fall from slightly equal status, back into their old roles …
My favourite is the exchange is between visual artist Arno Coenen and his father, especially the visual tableau when … well, you’ll see it soon.
I’ve got a couple of posts lined up talking about more things like figuring my way through character work and other serious matters which are, in reality are me procrastinating over a new outline that is WAY overdue.
So, in that frame of mind, here’s the result of some procrastinating I’ve been doing when I should be finishing an outline that is now ridiculously overdue … (shut up).
This one is a variation on the 15 albums in 15 minutes that has been doing the rounds on Facebook lately. The rules are as pretty simple – You have 15 minutes in which to come up with 15 films that have left an indelible impression on you in one way or another.
1. Return of the Jedi
It’s not about the Ewoks! Honest! It’s all about the Vader vs. Luke swordfight in front of the Emperor … and you know, the whole battling the idea you will one day be like your parents, dead fathers thing too … ok, no, lightsabers battling in and out of the shadows is pretty fricken cool!
2. Infernal Affairs
This completely and utterly displaced the above as my favourite film in the world, ever.
Forget that I can’t speak Cantonese and am reliant upon sometimes inaccurate subtitling, I find this film entrancing. It’s story is elegant – two men, two undercover lives, both trying to expose the other; it’s pacing is a hundred miles per second – this is one film that isn’t going to wait for the audience to catch up; it’s characters are complex – with enough back story to satisfy a very good prequel (the sequel, not so much).
I so very much wish I could write this well.
3. The Muppet Movie
I’m still surprised that the video cassette of this (recorded off the telly, of course) still works. I played it so often, I can still sing most of the songs.
The Muppets television show had a bigger impact (another list for another time), but the film is notable for beginning my love of Steve Martin and Mel Brookes.
4. Time Cop
Don’t think that this isn’t a stupid film. Time travel that defies the laws of physics, JVCD doing the splits as many times as possible. It’s also the film that was playing on the telly the night I decided to hang out with my friend Helen and her, then flatmate, Sam. Beloved (as he was soon to be known) and I had met on several occasions and had started a “take the piss” antipodean banter with each other (he’s Australian).
That particular evening Helen and I were in town trying to find a farewell party, piked when we found the place packed and returned home to watch movies. Flu ridden future Beloved was already on the sofa trying to kill germs with whisky, we watched films, Time Cop was on TV after the DVD was finished, I should’ve gone home before it started but Helen insisted I crash on the couch instead. I did and watched the appalling badness that is Time Cop, while drinking whisky. Banter turned to flirting. And flirting turned into nothing. Dude, he had the flu!
Anyway, mid way through the week, he has a spare ticket to Dylan Moran and invites me. I possibly mistake it as a date … and here we all are, battles with immigration policy, an MA, a new career in film and awesomeness that makes up for the hard times later.
It’s a rubbish film, though.
5. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
This film scared the bejebus out of me. My father would play the little chords on a casiotone and point to the sky to tell me that aliens were coming. I would scream and hide under the bed for a couple of hours.
He thought it was hilarious. Dick.
6. E.T.
This is the first film I actually remember seeing in cinema. My brother took me and I cried the whole way home because E.T. left his friend behind. He consoled me by buying fish and chips.
This could be where my abandonment issues stem from. Also, fish and chips as a comfort food.
I haven’t been able to watch the film without being a wet mop of tears afterwards. It was playing in the background of an eatery a couple of weeks back and I saw that final hug goodbye and got all choked up (I can’t even bring myself to find a you tube clip – I’d need a cuddle afterwards).
Damn you, Spielberg!
7. Closer
Possibly the best break up film ever. In fact one of the films I hired the day after I was unceremoniously dumped out of a four year relationship (the rest included Shaun of the Dead and Stepford Wives). What does it prove? The world is filled with manipulative, cowardly arseholes and good people get crushed, no matter how nice they are.
8. Lost in Translation
And this would be the film that I sat through and realised my, then 2 year, relationship was over … stuck with it another two years after that – see above.
9. The Birds
I love Hitchcock and I’m currently working through his interviews with François Truffaut – watching the films first and then reading what he says. It’s a brilliant way to study a filmmaker.
I saw this as a kid, well I have images of it and even though Rear Window was the film I obsessed over in my early 20s, this one seems to have had the biggest impact on me as a writer.
Brooding, foreboding and guaranteed to make you a mite nervous when a flock of birds congregate at dusk.
10. Ghostbusters
Most kids get taken to animated films by their parents or ones about the young boy or girl overcoming some obstacle to become a hero.
Meh.
My father and I tried. We went to the Carebear’s Movie and almost died of embarrassment when it came to the audience participation bit (everyone stood on their feet and said “we care”). After that fateful day, we agreed over a Fillet O’Fish to NEVER DO THAT AGAIN.
Cue: Ghostbusters! This film is aces. FACT.
It also causes me to type in block capitals.
11. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Possibly one of the first films I could quote end to end. And a bigger influence on my writing than first I realised.
12. Labyrinth
There are muppets, Escher’s stairs and David Bowie. Tight pants, spectacular mullet, I don’t care. It’s David freakin’ Bowie!
Oh and this:
13. Brazil
I have a soft spot for Terry Gilliam’s films. They are magical, strange and fantastic in the truest sense of the word. Every inch of the screen has meaning, every shot is important and the story layered like the most delicious cake imaginable.
When I daydream, Gilliam is at the helm.
I will work for him some day. Some how.
14. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Oddly enough my in to Stoppard, Beckett and Pinter was through this film. I had no idea who Stoppard was before it came out, but my friend Erica recommended it on the back of what a Shakespeare geek I was.
Tim Roth and Gary Oldman will always be the best Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to me forever more, however as I’ve developed as a writer, I’ve moved further and further away from Stoppard. It’s all part of the learning process sometimes we understand that our gods are merely men who aren’t always perfect. That’s a whole other blog post – one sitting in the drafts folder for the last month …
15. Hamlet (Branagh’s full length)
This is by no means the best Shakespeare on film (that would be Longcraine’s Richard III with Ian McKellen or Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara); nor is it the best Hamlet (a tie between Derek Jacobi and David Tennant); nor is it Branagh’s best filmed Shakespeare (Henry V would be, by far, the winner and I’d put his Much Ado before it too) … But, it takes some cojones to do a virtually uncut film of Hamlet and then film it on 70mm stock.
Branagh over enunciates, Patrick Doyle’s score is irritating (“ooh, this is important” or “you will find this poignant, now!”), some of the casting is a horrible mess and yet again, Ophelia is just a bit loony (the best Ophelia is still Julia Stiles in Michael Almereyda’s film). And yet, I protested on seeing the cut version on a school trip and held out to see it in full for four glorious hours. Four times.
It also has the best poster for any Shakespeare film or stage performance.
Obviously the time limit means that this will never be a definitive list (The Godfather, A Clockwork Orange and The Searchers are some of the more notable omissions off the list), but interesting none the less. Anyone else care for a little procrastination?
The very first time I participated in an online chatroom was back when I was studying at Royal Holloway. My classmates egged me on to join them one night after a pub visit (don’t judge, we were astrophysics students, we knew rocket science, fuck you) and after five minutes I had manage to pick a fight with religious nut that turned into an online rumble …
Yeah, not much has changed and to prove it, I’m going to start this blog with a fight. With feminists. Some feminists. The ones I disagree with. Turns out there are a fair chunk of those but I’ll just concentrate on one faction for now …
*I am cheating a little here – the remainder of this post is lifted straight out of the work and research journal I had to submit as part of my MA. I may drop in some other articles from it every now and then.
I know that as a female screenwriter, I am a minority species in the world of filmmaking. I also know, as both a politically aware female and as a feminist that there is a lot of expectation on me from certain sections of the sisterhood. How I represent women on screen is, forever, going to be scrutinised and while I strive to make realistic women on screen it pains me every time this argument arrives in my inbox …
I understand the basic principle behind this argument. Women make up 50% of the world’s population and yet are not represented in cinematic stories in the same measure. Passing the test doesn’t mean that the film is any good or advances the feminist cause.
I guess the test is meant to be about presence of women on screen but it also suggests that if a film is unable to pass the rules then it has failed for not representing women properly. The test has resurfaced this year as a viral video on YouTube, garnering much popularity among my friends as ‘a good guide’, but I think the whole theory and the standard it has become is bunk. Here are my reasons why :
1. There isn’t a reason for two women to start talking to each other.
Forget two women talking to each other, if a film had a majority female cast and only a handful of men like Whip It, the masculine version of the test fails this film. There’s no reason in the narrative spine of the film for two of the male characters to talk about anything other than women. To expect a meaningless exchange between two characters in order to pass a test is crass and doesn’t serve the craft of screenwriting. Every line should have significance and advance the audience’s understanding of the story, if it doesn’t, it shouldn’t be there. If a story is necessarily male, just like Whip It is necessarily female, then why put in two characters just for the sake of it?
My feature (for my MA) passes the test. But only because it has one scene where my protagonist’s mother, Jess, asks a female guest, Allie, what she does for her job. It’s only a couple of sentences of dialogue but it seems to be enough. What the test doesn’t acknowledge is that there are four important women in my film, all who are crucial to the psychological development of the male protagonist, Ben. The test passing exchange between the two women could just as easily have been about the men in the room as Jess’ adoration of Ben is very important to her character. I chose to have Jess talk about Allie’s career as I wanted there to be a moment where Allie is humiliated in front of Ben for only working on a free community newspaper and not a broadsheet. It was important that Ben had somewhere to direct his bitterness for Allie, after her rejection of him.
2. The film works around the idea that there is only one or few woman.
Take the example of naughty list film Alien 3. Not a great film, granted, but it’s a film set on a male penal colony – the whole point is that Ripley is the only human woman on the planet and these men have been kept away from females this whole time. Ripley represents temptation and is rejected as a corrupter but some of the men showing up their fear of sexuality and arguably mirroring contemporary fears about the modern woman (sadly still present today).
3. The original piece adapted into a film, doesn’t have multiple female characters.
The adaptation naughty list includes: A Clockwork Orange, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Godfather, American Psycho. All excellent films but the original source material didn’t have women in it. It seems a little unfair to list them as test losers unless women plan to take on all of literature …
4. Some films are in an all male setting.
It wouldn’t make sense for The Shawshank Redemption to have an exchange between women in a film predominantly set in a male prison. Nor would an exchange between two women feel real in The Green Zone unless it were two female journalists or a female journalist to a female diplomat – but that’s not the point of the narrative. It also applies to almost any war film like Black Hawk Down, Saving Private Ryan, Jarhead, The Hurt Locker …
A sub category of this would be films that deal with the male condition – Rushmore is all about the male gaze and one up man ship on matters of sex. Fight Club is completely about masculinity, the loss of it to consumerism and the reclamation through these brutal, underground fight clubs.
5. The test is trivial.
For all of it’s popularity it would appear from a graph that appears on one of the leading proponents of the test, bechdeltest.com that, at the time of writing this, a little over 50% of the films submitted (which are mostly Hollywood mainstream types) pass the test. Being a little over 50% of the world population, is that not a fair return on our presence as women on screen?
I understand that the test is not meant to be the be all and end all of feminist film critique but I find it frustrating that this stupid test is the focus of so many women rather than, say, how women are portrayed on screen. Take Transformers 3, which passes the test, purely because one character comments on another’s hair! Yet the leading female character is dressed and shot purely for the male gaze – she’s a car mechanic who wears hot-pants and her hair out. Worse still is Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, which passes the test and keeps on passing it, through every soft pornography scene of a half naked woman rubbing herself just because she’s seen another half naked woman.
The test misses great performances of actors who create brilliant, real women on screen -Vera Farmiga’s character in naughty lister Up In The Air is very real, believable, mature, and is just as complex as George Clooney’s protagonist. It renders the work of women like Kathryn Bigelow meaningless as she is yet to make a film that passes the test. Or what about Slap Shot a film about the very masculine sport of ice hockey that completely fails the test and is written by Nancy Dowd? How about the brilliant American Psycho directed by Mary Harron, does her brilliant direction count for nothing because her film (for which she wrote the screenplay adaptation) fails the test?
I know that this was only a cartoon and the simple rules are meant to be the springboard to a larger conversation, but what a frustrating conversation it is to start when you spend the first half hour collapsing the pedestal it’s been placed on!
Um … there isn’t any milk in the fridge, we’ve run out of bread and I think the egg in the fridge has gone off … I’ll pop down to the shops and get something …
I may be some time* …
* probably a week, once I’ve finish these cover letters.
