Write Up My Alley

This is a sequel of sorts to a post I wrote a while back collecting words of wit and wisdom about writing, curated by me, a person deeply suspicious of One-Size-Fits-All writing advice. Nevertheless, occasionally a few choice observations manage to penetrate my thick carapace of scepticism to earn the AKA seal of approval. It’s no coincidence that all of the quotations below come from writers I admire. Here are some of my recent favourites:

"Anyone who says he wants to be a writer and isn’t writing, doesn’t."
Ernest Hemingway

"Write like everyone you know is dead. You can't please everyone, so don't try."
Joe R. Lansdale

(1) Write your nonsense stories out your system.
(2) Actually sit and write, treating it as a craft. FaceBook fighting is not writing.
(3) Take criticism as a criticism of your work and not you, despite how it feels. You are not perfect, everything can be improved. It will take someone other than yourself to usually find where you need to improve on that.
(4) Operate with realism not convenience, since the latter is detectable bullshit.
(5) Be aware of patterns in your writing.
Alex De Campi from this interview at 3quarksdaily. Also: Buy Her Comics! They're great.

"So put the work in and believe in yourself, believe in your ability to change yourself, if not the world, because changing the world does actually start with changing yourself."
Alan Moore from The Honest Alan Moore Interview - Part 3: On Comics, How to Break Into Comics, and Modern Culture

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
Mark Twain

It doesn't matter what time of day you work, but you have to work every day because creation, like life, is always slipping away from you. You must write every day, but there's no time limit on how long you have to write.

One day you might read over what you've done and think about it. You pick up the pencil or turn on the computer, but no new words come. That's fine. Sometimes you can't go further. Correct a misspelling, reread a perplexing paragraph, and then let it go. You have re-entered the dream of the work, and that's enough to keep the story alive for another 24 hours.

The next day you might write for hours; there's no way to tell. The goal is not a number of words or hours spent writing. All you need to do is to keep your heart and mind open to the work.
Walter Mosley

"If we’re not doing something with the information we’re taking in, then we’re just pigs at the media trough."
Warren Ellis from his excellent blogpost The Manfred Macx Media Diet

We Can Be Heroes Just For One Day

When I started this blog over eight years ago, many of the early posts were written in the stifling atmosphere of a former central London police station converted into rudimentary office space. Rumours persisted that it was one of the most haunted buildings in the UK, dating back to when a police officer had hung himself in one of the cells decades earlier. My desk wasn’t that far from the old cells...

Sitting opposite me for much of that time was Matt Phipps. We both sat there quietly despising our colleagues and tapping away on keyboards writing instead of doing what we were (poorly) paid to do. We both eventually got the fuck out of that job before it destroyed our souls, but we have kept in close touch ever since. The labyrinthine machinations of life will always ensure that the path ahead is strewn with people dumber than you, so you better make damn sure that when you meet people smarter than you, you hang on to them. And so I did.

A lot has happened in both our lives over the last eight years. Matt is now a father and writer living in São Paulo. We don’t see each other anywhere near as much as we would like (geography can be a motherfucker), but I suppose we are as close as two people separated by an equator can be. And I always like to keep tabs on anything and everything he writes, as he brings to bear a distinctive voice, an idiosyncratic curiosity and intellectual rigour to anything his mind alights on. And as an added bonus, there will often be dick jokes.

So when, a couple of weeks ago, he posted a blogpost partially inspired by the tragedy of the multiplex shootings in Aurora, Colorado, I paid attention. He mused that he “happened to be thinking about heroes a lot in the week before that night, in particular about how we keep returning to heroic narratives despite living in a decidedly unheroic world. Is it OK to like heroes? Or does it represent a failure to engage with reality? Worse, is it dangerous?”. His thoughts on Heroes are well-worth a read and I highly recommend clicking-through and digesting the lot.

His post started an email exchange in which I took his well-considered, thoughtful ideas as a jumping-off point and added my scattershot, half-baked witterings to the mix. Clearly, Matt thought that they had merit, as he has kindly requested that he could re-post my thoughts over on his blog. You can read my contribution to the debate here. We touch on cyphers, spandex, sonic screwdrivers and more. Go forth and read.

Matt can be found on Twitter here and you can read his wide-ranging array of blogposts here. There is also a light smattering of blatant Cliff Richard fetishism. So there’s something for everyone.

Kentucky Fried Friedkin

On Friday 22 June, I headed over to the BFI Southbank for a screening of Killer Joe followed by an on-stage Q&A with William Friedkin hosted by Mark Kermode. Unless something pretty astonishing and unforeseen comes down the pike in the next five months, Killer Joe is already a lock for my favourite film of the year, and it’s a joy to behold a film as raw, visceral and vibrant as this coming from a 76-year old filmmaker.

Regular readers of the blog should know my tastes by now. My cinematic appetites lean towards the pulpier end of the spectrum so, for me, the canon of All-Time Great Directors are masterful genre practitioners like Landis, Carpenter, Walter Hill and William Friedkin. (Let’s throw in Brian De Palma to make it a solid fistful of five filmmakers). So it goes without saying that I was vibrating with excitement at the prospect of hearing the great Billy Friedkin regaling an audience with his no-bullshit opinions. As expected, he didn’t pull his punches. He talked freely about things he didn’t like - “I hate 3D...who needs it?” and the things he loved (proclaiming Kaneto Shindô’s Onibaba “the best horror film I’ve ever seen”). Friedkin also describes himself as a “Ripperologist” and he discussed his abortive attempt to bring James Maybrick’s Jack the Ripper diaries to the screen in a film that would have been called Battlecrease.

Here are some of the other conversational detours that I found particularly interesting.

On Alfred Hitchcock:

Following on from the success of his award-winning documentary The People vs. Paul Crump, the producer of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Norman Lloyd, invited him to direct the final episode of the show - the episode Off Season that aired on May 10th 1965. (Norman Lloyd may be better known as Hitchcock's Saboteur and, more recently, as Dr. Auschlander on St. Elsewhere). Here’s Friedkin on what happened next:

“One day Mr. Hitchcock came on the set, and he just came on the set in those days to read his introductions, he didn’t direct any more of the shows or even look at the scripts, but they brought him over, a phalanx of guys in very dark suits, these were the Black Suits of Black Rock, which was Universal Studios, and they came as a giant phalanx and in the centre of them was Mr. Hitchcock and they brought him over to me and Norman Lloyd introduced him to me and I was dressed not quite as good as I am now. And Hitchcock put out his hand - it looked like a dead fish - and I think he expected me to kiss it or something, but I took his hand and I said: “Oh, it’s really an honour to meet you, sir” and it was. And he said: “Mr. Friedkin, usually our directors wear ties”. And I thought he was kidding and I made some lame remark. I said: “Well, in my haste to get to the set, I left my...” and by the time I’d finished he’d gone.

And five years later, I won the Director’s Guild Award for The French Connection, and it’s done in a big ballroom with people having dinner and wine and all that and then you get up and they present these awards, and when I got up to accept my award, I saw right down in front of me at a table, in the front, Mr. Hitchcock and his entire family and his retinue of assistants and I was sort of distracted in my acceptance speech, but there were some steps leading right down, you weren’t supposed to take those steps, you were supposed to go off into the wings and be interviewed. I had a rented tuxedo on and one of those snap-on bow-ties and I went right down to Mr. Hitchcock’s table. I had this gigantic award and I snapped my tie at him, and I said: “How do you like the tie now, Hitch?” And of course, it was very disrespectful. But he simply stared at me, he had no memory of what I was referring to. Of course, I had carried it with me for five years, and it was only a cheap closure after five years.”

Nevertheless, Friedkin still referred to Hitchcock as the Master. “There are many others considered Masters, but I don’t think there’s ever been a director more influential than Mr Hitchcock.”

On Cruising:

The ratings board took forty minutes out of the film in order to get an R rating, which the studio had to have, and now recently that studio, which was United Artists that no longer exists, so Warner Brothers acquired the home video rights and they looked everywhere imaginable for the footage that was cut, anywhere that it might have been, and they couldn’t find it, or I would’ve put it back into the Blu-ray of Cruising which Warners released. I had to go back to the ratings board fifty times before they gave me an R rating. We just wore them down.

There were scenes that were not really S&M porn in the film that were also cut. The cuts to Cruising were draconian, and there’s the intimation at the end of the film that the Al Pacino character, who plays an undercover detective who goes into the S&M world to try and find a killer, there’s the intimation at the end that he may be one of several killers, that he may have flipped out and lost it and become one of the murderers, and I only discovered that in the cutting room. It’s not in the script. When the film was finished and I showed it to Pacino, he said: “You didn’t tell me that I might be one of the murderers!”. And I said: “What did you need to know for? I don’t know myself, it’s just an intimation”. And, really, films speak to you in the cutting room. They tell you things about themselves that you don’t know going in and I discovered that aspect of Cruising only in the cutting room.

Pacino was very difficult to work with, he was unprepared. That was part of his modus operandi. After the success of The Godfather, he felt that the way to make a film was to learn the lines just before you shot the scene and to go out and do it about twenty or thirty times until magic happened. And sometimes magic would happen, but by that time the other actors in the scene who were prepared were dead. They had lost their mojo. Pacino would get happy around Take Thirty. By the time I came to direct Killer Joe, I made it very clear to these actors that I was a one-take guy. I would only do Take Two if a light fell into the shot or the camera fell over or if an actor died and we had to replace him. I’m not interested in perfection in cinema. In the films that I make, and I haven’t done Shakespeare, I’m much more interested in spontaneity and I found when I made my first films, I would do twenty or thirty takes just like the next guy hoping for magic to happen, and I found when I got to the editing room that the take that I wound up using was the first printed take. That’s where the spontaneity was. All the rest were just repetitious. Long before I got to Killer Joe, I made it a point: No Second Takes. You have to approach this stuff like it’s live. So we never did more than two takes. If a shot was out-of-focus, and I even allowed some of out-of-focus shots into the film, because I thought the performances were good and I didn't reshoot them, but I believe in spontaneity over perfection.

On Drive:

There are a lot of films that owe a debt to To Live and Die in L.A.  Have you ever seen Lethal Weapon 3, where they did the same chase? And other films. The last Bourne film which I very much liked, I think it’s The Bourne Ultimatum, it did the wrong way chase, it was very well done. A lot of it was done with CGI. We had to do everything in the chase scenes that I filmed because that other stuff didn't exist. Drive was a film that I felt that I had seen before. I wasn't that impressed with it, to be honest with you. I met the young director before he did the film [Nicolas Winding Refn] and he gave me the DVD of To Live and Die in L.A. to sign. This was at Cannes when we ran Cruising [in the Director’s Fortnight in 2007]. I guess he’s a very talented young man, but I think I had seen Drive many times. I thought he owed a greater debt to that film Melville did with Alain Delon, Le Samouraï. I thought that the tone, the mood, the shots, the kind of laid back approach to it was much closer and owed a much deeper debt to the film Le Samouraï by Jean-Pierre Melville, a great timeless movie to me.

[It’s good to know that Friedkin’s opinion of Drive tallies with mine.]

On To Live and Die in L.A.:

I worked with the cinematographer who shot the chase in To Live and Die in L.A., not the rest of the film, that was Robby Müller, but the young man who shot the chase, I put him in charge of the cinematography for that because he was, though he had never been a Director of Photography, he was a Camera Operator, he was more comfortable shooting a chase scene than Robby Müller was. He really needed a perfect light to frame his shots, and when you’re doing a chase you’re shooting in all direction at all times, but the young cinematographer who shot the chase with me was a young fella named Bob Yeoman, who has now done all of Wes Anderson’s films including the most recent one, Moonrise Kingdom, and that was his first job and I felt he could do it. The production designer of To Live and Die in L.A. was a woman called Lilly Kilvert and I had made The French Connection which had a macho sort of a reputation, and I didn't want To Live and Die in L.A. to have that same sort of feeling. I didn’t want it to be quite so macho, I wanted it to be kind of sexually ambiguous and I chose women in very important roles in that film.

On 35mm vs digital:

Killer Joe was shot on a new camera called the Arriflex Alexa. It’s a digital camera, but Caleb Deschanel’s lighting is film-style lighting, and even with digital equipment, if you film the scenes like a film, it’s gonna look like a film, only you have more depth and more latitude in colour timing and in density, than you have with 35mm film. And, in any case, unfortunately and sadly, 35mm film is over. It’s a thing of the past.

The manufacture of a 35mm print was very, very difficult once the labs got rid of the three-strip process. It used to be three strips of film that would be combined to make a colour print. It was a yellow strip, a cyan print and a magenta print. These were the original negatives: yellow, cyan and magenta. And they have produced copies that are still magnificent, like the MGM musicals that were shot in the three-strip Technicolor process, and those films still look great today, but when the labs converted to single negative film, those films have a shelf-life and they fade. A couple of years ago, when Paramount wanted to make the new Blu-ray of The Godfather, which is their crown jewel, they went into the vault and the negative had completely faded. All those deep rich blacks that Gordon Willis had lit were gone and were the colour of milk. They had faded to milk and they had to spend close to $2 million to digitally restore the film to get what was ultimately a beautiful Blu-ray copy. But printing itself, in the one single negative process, had many flaws. For example, on The Exorcist, I would reject 25 or 30 reels to get one reel, and The Exorcist is twelve reels, and each reel is printed separately. Each reel is roughly 1,000 feet of film. You print them separately, and what happens when you print a reel of film in, for example, Technicolor in the San Fernando Valley outside of Hollywood, the chemistry in the water is constantly changing. The water that is the developer, the amoeba are constantly changing and the electricity that is going to the printer is constantly fluctuating, even unnoticeably, but it is fluctuating, and so a print would come off that was green, and the next roll was blue, and you’d have to go back, and they’d have to retool and compensate for the errors that the technology itself had built in. Now, that’s no longer the case with digital. Every single copy will and should look the same.

If you want to watch a little bit of the Q&A, some of the footage is available to view at the BFI website here.

A Life in Tweets

There was a time when Twitter wasn’t thought of so much as a social network, but more like a microblog. I certainly didn’t use it that much as a communication tool when I first started out. I just catalogued the minutiae of my life in 140-character increments. I sent my first tweet at 2.57pm on 25 May 2007. As of this blogpost, I have thrown 7,437 tweets out into the world. With an idle half-hour at my disposal, I decided to take a gentle stroll through my tweet archive. Tweets seem almost intentionally designed to be disposable, but very early on I got into the habit of keeping copies of all my tweets by doing an occasional cut-and-paste on my Twitter timeline. For my own amusement, I decided to zero in on tweets posted on this date, July the 6th, and I’m throwing them up here as an ephemeral snapshot of my life on this day over the last six years:

Started the day listening to the Beastie Boys' "Sure Shot" & killing zombies LIKE A BOSS.
10:01 AM - 6 Jul 12 via Twitter for iPhone
　
I want Frank Langella as Rupert Murdoch for a #NotW movie. "I'm saying that when News International does it, it's *not* illegal!"
06 July 2011 15:03:51 via Seesmic twhirl

All of this simmering hype for INCEPTION just makes me want to watch DREAMSCAPE again: http://bit.ly/cy8uSN
06 July 2010 09:46:44 via Seesmic

Working my way through the email account of a dead person is not my idea of a fun afternoon. Need a fucking break.
3:51 PM Jul 6th 2009 from web

DOCTOR WHO = 13 weeks of build-up to...a headache. That made no sense at all. Enjoyable? Yes. Bullshit? Also yes.
01:22 AM July 06, 2008 from web

Watching a guy running a Find The Lady card scam at the bus stop. Got the crowd eating out of his sleight-of-hand.
05:53 PM July 06, 2007 from txt　

The Unwritten

And so, with my belated recollections of the John Landis Q&A from 2010, I think that I’ve now exhausted my cache of Unfinished Things that are Potentially Blogworthy. Half-formed ponderings that almost made the cut include:

A post bestowing lavish praise on Charlie Brooker’s Dead Set, the finest piece of genre fiction on British Television since the 1980s (with the obvious exception of the indestructible Doctor Who. And, yes, I am getting impatient with excitement for the return of the mad man with a box. Not long now!)

Anyway, yes, Dead Set. Absolutely phenomenal. I rewatch the whole thing at least once a year. It is magnificent, and it’s probably a good thing that I never wrote about it in any great detail as it would have just been a post dripping with superlatives. Although I was going to go off on a tangent about the BBC’s revival of Terry Nation’s Survivors from 2008, going into all the reasons why it didn’t quite work when Dead Set did.

The original three-season, 38-episode iteration of Survivors from 1975 to 1977 was overwhelmingly white and middle-class (but, hey, that's the BBC in the Seventies for you) and it wasn’t always fun, and it had that peculiarly-BBC habit of defaulting to episodes based in rock quarries in the arsehole of nowhere every now and then (just like Doctor Who. All conversational roads lead to Doctor Who eventually). But it was, on balance, sufficiently compelling and bleak with a far higher success rate than, say, AMC’s The Walking Dead when it came to the nuts and bolts of “The world we know has gone. What the fuck do we do now?” post-apocalyptic fiction.

What else was I playing with? A valentine to Danny Glover as Roger Murtaugh. As I get older, it occurs to me that Murtaugh was the true badass of the Lethal Weapon movies. That other guy with the wobbly accent, the dodgy mullet and the predilection for getting his arse out? Not so much. But it was just an idea. And ideas on their own ain't worth shit. But I stand by my assertion that Murtaugh, despite repeated protestations that he was getting too old for that shit, was The Man. Being crazy is easy. I'll take the reluctant, grizzled warrior with the six-shooter over that Every Single Time.

The only other thing of note I was tinkering with was a post picking apart The Cabin in the Woods. It basically boiled down to my opinion that, whilst it is clever, it is often too clever for its own good and yet never quite as clever as it thinks it is. At the same time, it is far too arch and knowing to ever be scary. And I say all this as someone who actually kind of enjoyed it. But I was never going to be able to top Sean Witzke’s blistering deconstruction of Goddard and Whedon’s meta-horror that kicked off his epic journey through 83 slasher movies. Go and read all of it.

So. Time to write new things instead of applying paddles to the corpses rotting on my hard drive. Next up: William Motherfucking Friedkin. Watch this space. It'll be finger-lickin' good.

See You Next Wednesday - An Evening with John Landis

Once upon a time, there were two men called John, and they towered above all others in spraying fuel on the simmering embers of my nascent cinephilia. Back in 1994, I was fortunate enough to attend a Q&A with John Carpenter at the National Film Theatre to accompany the world premiere of his wonderfully nuts Lovecraftian feverdream In The Mouth of Madness.

16 years later and, on Tuesday 16th March 2010, I finally caught up with John Landis on exactly the same stage at the now-renamed BFI Southbank. An unflagging bundle of enthusiasm, self-confessed film geek Landis came straight from a day's shooting on Burke and Hare at Ealing Studios and sat with the audience through a rare showing of his 2004 documentary Slasher before regaling us all with his encyclopaedic knowledge and love of movies for two hours, starting out by taking photos of the audience from the stage and wrapping it all up by exhorting us to go and watch Scott Pilgrim vs. The World when it arrived, directed by his friend Edgar Wright who was sitting amongst us.

The following is cobbled together from a bunch of notes I made over two years ago, so cut me some slack.

On his friendship with Alfred Hitchcock:

During their regular lunch dates, Hitchcock expressed his irritation that Dressed To Kill was frequently referred to as “Hitchcockian” by calling Brian DePalma “that boy that steals from me” to which Landis said:
"But Hitch, he’s not stealing from you, it's an homage."
"You mean fromage?"

On bad movies:

Landis unashamedly loves bad movies, in particular the oeuvre of Roland Emmerich, singling out the recent 2012 and the delirious absurdity of characters attempting to out-drive a natural disaster. He also pointed out that film is the only art form where you can experience the worst possible entertainment and still have a good time.

I’ve just discovered that Landis recently restated his affection for Emmerich’s logic-defying excesses on German TV as he wandered around London with Terry Gilliam:

On Coming To America:

During the making of Coming to America, Landis was made aware of comments by Spike Lee bemoaning a trend of “old Jewish guys pretending to be young black guys”. [Despite extensive research, I’m unable to locate the interview that Landis cited. However, Lee does have form for this sort of thing. For an example, see page 57 of Spike Lee: Interviews on Google Books for Lee’s remarks on the writing staff of In Living Color during a conversation with Elvis Mitchell from 1991].

Despite the well-documented acrimony between Landis and Murphy at this stage in their collaboration, Landis, knowing what an incredibly gifted mimic Eddie Murphy is, approached him about flipping this around by turning a young black guy into an old Jewish guy, which led to the creation of the character Saul. (This is the zenith of a relentless downward spiral that leads to Norbit - Coming to America marks the first time that Murphy played multiple characters in a movie, so maybe Landis has to shoulder a little bit of blame for kicking off that particularly unwelcome trend in Murphy’s career.)

On The Spy Who Loved Me:

Landis was one of many uncredited writers (along with Stirling Silliphant, Ronald Hardy, Anthony Burgess and Derek Marlowe) who worked on the script for Roger Moore’s third outing as James Bond, claiming that his major contribution was the downhill ski chase that opens the movie.

On Into the Night:

His first flop. Landis told an anecdote of being summoned to meet Jack Nicholson to discuss the project in a remote location (Aspen, perhaps?), that turned into an unusually treacherous trip due to the snow and icy conditions, just so that Nicholson could turn it down on the grounds that the Ed Okin character (eventually played by Jeff Goldblum) is passive and never actually does anything, spending the whole film being led around by Michelle Pfieffer's character. Nicholson softened the rejection by saying that he still thought that it would be a great movie and he looked forward to seeing it. Landis conceded that maybe Into the Night was just "too weird" for audiences. Personally, I think Into the Night ranks way up there with his finest work and the three-way knife fight between Carl Perkins, David Bowie and Jeff Goldblum in a darkened hotel room strewn with corpses whilst Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein plays in the background is just glorious:

On casting Burke and Hare:

Landis professed his love and admiration of Ronnie Corbett, saying that he was the only member of the cast he had to fight for to get him into the movie. He called him a great actor and a national treasure, acknowledging that “national treasure” in the UK means that you've been on TV for over 25 years.

On Hollywood today:

With a hint of amused irritation, Landis noted that some of the younger breed of Hollywood executives don't know their history, recollecting that he has been asked in meetings: “Did you ever see Animal House? That's what we want.” Understandably, he’s insulted and flattered at the same time.

There was so much more, and the event was recorded by the BFI, with selected highlights available to view here.

I went to see both Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Burke and Hare on the weekends they opened. The former ended up being one of my favourite films of 2010. The latter didn’t. But I confess that I just really enjoyed the fact that I could go and see a brand new John Landis movie on a big screen and, as always, I can’t wait to see what he does next.

When in Hollywood, Visit Universal Studios. Ask for Babs

It Came From The Archives! - Nic Balthazar’s Ben X

Still rooting around in neglected folders. Retooling unfinished pieces for publication here on the blog and briefly glancing at things that have been out there at some point in the past but are no longer available. I’m going to start recycling some of the latter here, otherwise all those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain....Here’s a review that originally appeared on the now-defunct Write on Film (Hi Marie!) back in August 2008.

The debut movie from Belgian filmmaker Nic Balthazar, Ben X unfolds from the perspective of Asperger's sufferer Ben, as he gets through his rigidly-structured daily routine by immersing himself in the lush pixelated landscapes of the MMORPG ArchLord (the one place where he feels truly in control) before the drudgery and discomfort of the real world encroaches on his virtual reality.

Very loosely based on real events (which I can't go into in any great depth without blowing the ending), Ben's story is interspersed with posthumous faux-documentary footage analysing the events of the film by most of the major players, as the narrative creeps little-by-little towards a teased and seemingly-inevitable tragic denouement.

As a diverting thriller, Ben X crackles along and is watchable enough, there are enough neat twists and reversals to keep an audience engaged and Greg Timmermans is excellent as the titular Ben, all barely-repressed tics and twitchy anxious movements as he struggles to function in a world that doesn't quite make sense to him.

But Balthazar seems less interested in what it means to live with Asperger's Syndrome - it just appears to be a plot-motor to tell a story about feckless teens and out-of-control bullying, and Ben's love of ArchLord, whilst interesting in illustrating the way in which he operates differently in distinct and yet not-quite-separate "worlds", teeters dangerously close to a flashy, over-used gimmick when the virtual environment of the MMORPG is overlaid with comparatively dreary Belgian suburbia to show how Ben retreats into his innerlife as a coping mechanism.

The final half-hour obliterates believability beyond any reasonable suspension of disbelief, indulging in nonsensical narrative contortions just to get the story to where it wants to be. Nevertheless, there is a kind of emotional logic at play that almost let's Balthazar off the hook and up until that point the movie has built up sufficient viewer goodwill that makes it all slightly easier to forgive.

Balthazar has a striking visual style and an undoubted facility for spinning an entertaining story, and Ben X is certainly ambitious with much to recommend it, but now and then I had the nagging feeling that it was all an elaborate shaggy-dog story masquerading as a gritty teen thriller.

Quid Pro Quo, Douchebags

(Digging through a folder full of documents that I never did anything with for a variety of reasons, I found this. I can see why I left it alone for a couple of years. It’s a really angry, somewhat rambling screed on the hateful The Hangover. Re-reading it, I find that I’m still just as angry about it, but my powder is now suitably dry, and I felt like taking it out of mothballs and throwing it out into the world. So here it is. At the very least, it should make a nice change from people griping about Prometheus.)

"The most commonly reported characteristics of a hangover include headache, nausea, sensitivity to light and noise, lethargy, dysphoria, diarrhea and thirst. A hangover may also induce psychological symptoms including heightened feelings of depression and anxiety."

Add feelings of uncontrollable rage, and that pretty much nails my feelings after enduring Todd Phillips' hit comedy / vile piece of shit The Hangover. For this particular tirade, I'm going to have to do two things that I usually try to avoid - I'm going to be overwhelmingly negative about something in writing (as I prefer to talk up the good stuff rather than expend energy trashing the shit); and I'm going to indulge in spoilers. Lots and lots of spoilers. If you haven't seen The Hangover, you are incredibly fortunate and hopefully this will dissuade you.

There's a line of dialogue in The Hangover that encapsulates everything that's wrong with the film: "You know, everyone says Mike Tyson is such a badass, but I think he's kind of a sweetheart." Yes, this is a film that holds as part of its odious, twisted worldview the opinion that convicted rapist Mike Tyson is "kind of a sweetheart".

(For a more articulate evisceration of this horrific "hilarious" cameo appearance, read Jane Claire Bradley's Punch Drunk: On Rape Apologists and Hollywood Misogyny).

It's the way certain little details start to mount up that really, really aggravated me. Aside from the appearance of former Undisputed Heavyweight Champion and ear-chewing rapist Tyson, there's this:

All of the women in the film are either screeching emasculating bitches or ripe for the fucking. Except for "hooker with a heart of gold" Heather Graham who, in one of the film's most egregious moments, bares a breast to feed her child. Nothing wrong with that, you might say. And you'd be right. Not only is there absolutely nothing wrong with breast-feeding, but there's nothing wrong with showing it on film. So far, so good.

But context is everything, and here Phillips pops a breast on the screen for two reasons and two reasons only - for titillation and comedy. God knows, I'm no prude, and I certainly don't object to nudity in movies. But breasts are not inherently erotic, and yet here breast-feeding is overtly equated with something sexual. And the three gibbering lackwits at the centre of the film are supposed to be uncomfortable at this display of bare flesh, which is supposed, I assume, to generate a laugh. This is even more disingenuous when you get to the photos playing over the end titles and see the heinous shit they got up to over the course of that “lost” night.

To be clear: I don't have a problem with gratuitous nudity. (Some of my best friends are gratuitous nudists). I don't have a problem with bad taste comedies. It's All About Context.

Also: slamming a car door in a baby's face isn't inherently funny. It. Just. Isn’t.

Also also: Are camp oriental stereotypes really funny? Really? What the fuck is wrong with you?

If this weren't such a hugely popular film, and if I hadn't heard from so many people who kept telling me how fucking funny it is, it probably wouldn't stick in my craw so much, as such widespread adulation indicates something rotten not only in the worldview of the filmmakers, but of the audience as well. But let's put that to one side for a minute and shake our heads in confusion at the list of plaudits this festering shitcake has accrued. On January 17, 2010, The Hangover won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. It was also named one of the top ten movies of the year by the American Film Institute. The film won "Best Ensemble" from the Detroit Film Critics Society. The screenplay was nominated for a Writers Guild of America and BAFTA award.

Let's just consider that last one again. Screenplay award nominations. The screenplay may be sufficiently absorbent to work as passable toilet paper, but little more than that. The entire premise of the film hinges on a trio of morons piecing together the mysteries of the night before. And yet it all falls apart once you start poking away at it. For example, if the mouth-breathing arrested adolescents had stayed in their hotel room for five more minutes once they woke up, Heather Graham would have returned to explain it all to them.

Here’s another glaring unresolved plot thread - what about the chickens in the hotel room? They are never explained. Just another piece of the scaffolding of the film that collapses once you lean on it a bit with your brain. You remember brains, don't you? Those are the things that this film asks you to forget you own. (And I don’t want to hear a counter-argument of “You’re thinking about this too much. It’s just a joke!” This screenplay was nominated for awards! I don’t expect it to be a masterpiece of construction like Chinatown or Back to the Future, but it should be pretty damn close to bullet-proof.)

So. The Hangover was loved by most audiences and despised by me. Funnily enough, the criticisms I level at this mess that Todd Phillips curled out on to the screen are not entirely different from the ones sprayed at Observe and Report from many quarters - a film largely despised by audiences and loved by me. (Not just me. Kim Morgan and Anne Billson have also been vocal fans of Jody Hill’s pitch-black comedy).

The fundamental difference is one of worldview. The makers of Observe and Report know that Seth Rogen’s mallcop Ronnie Barnhardt is a monster. That changes everything. The odious fuckwits behind The Hangover think the objectionable shitheads are just regular guys having a fun weekend of sex and booze. After all, as Jeffrey Tambor keeps repeating with a knowing wink and smile throughout "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right guys? Heh heh heh." Oh fuck off, Jeffrey Tambor, for coming out with that hackneyed line as lazy shorthand to legitimise reprehensible behaviour as mere harmless, boyish fun. What makes this all the more galling is that Tambor played one of the great all-time screen fantasist monsters as Hank "Hey Know" Kingsley on The Larry Sanders Show, in a show that was both dark and funny and made us love the central characters without ever letting us forget how fallible and monstrous they could be.

"It's like my mom always said: you can polish a turd, but it's still a piece of shit." Brandi (Anna Faris) in Observe and Report

Pitch Slap

"One thing that always surprises me about career advice is how lousy most of the writing is. They say the same boring, formulaic ideas over again. They convince you that if you do this one thing, it will all work out for you. The worst thing they do is tell you to follow the rules. This is a terrible idea." - Susannah Breslin (How to Not Be Unemployed)

Here's an unassailable truth for ya: I have written a lot of different things for a lot of different people over the years. Magazines, blogs, books. Shorts, videos and documentaries. And not one of those writing gigs came about as the result of a pitch.

That's not to say that I haven't ever pitched an idea. Of course I have. Mountains of them. Pitches that I dashed off as half-arsed afterthoughts. Long, detailed, drawn-out pitches that I spent days tweaking, buffing and polishing until the monitor screen itself seemed to glisten. Not one fucking nibble. Nothing.

Any word that I've ever written that ended up in a pay cheque came about because someone approached me. Maybe they knew me personally or by reputation. Maybe I was a friend of a friend or a recommendation. Maybe they knew me from other things that I'd already written. There’s more than one way to skin a gig.

If you’re waiting for a point to all this, where I come up with a neat, tidy conclusion about what this means, then you’re shit out of a luck. I’m really not trying to say that pitching is a waste of time. Maybe it just means that pitching is an incredibly inefficient way of getting your stuff out there. At least, my experience certainly seems to bear that out.

(This also applies to any kind of job application - hundreds (if not thousands) of people applying for the same job in the same way. The odds are stacked against you, no matter how goddamn brilliant you are).

Maybe the point is this: it’s more fun when you want me more than I want you. Or maybe it just means that the only person I’m interested in competing with is myself. And that the best way to get stuff out into the world is to take the road less travelled. Not through the front door, crowded with noisy people queueing up for their shot. I prefer to sneak in the back window. I’ve never had a problem with working hard. Sometimes, it makes more sense to work smart instead.

Rambling (almost) over. I’ve been thinking about this a fair bit recently. I’m never short of things to write. I’m the King of Spec, and I’ll happily write stuff for my own amusement forever. But I find myself craving the benefits of collaboration again. Working with or for smart people with ideas that I haven’t thought of and perspectives that maybe I don’t have. Basically, I’m in the mood to shred my rule book and shower the place with confetti. And I'm starting to build bricks to smash through the back windows that no-one else seems to be looking at. Developing...

Neural Integration

It doesn’t hurt to remind the world of who I am every now and again, so here I am. Hello. Here, have a mini-bio:

Writer. Journalist. Editor. Producer. Script doctor. Blogger. If it involves words, I've probably done it. Apart from poetry. Iambic pentameter gives me a damn headache. The relentless data churn of the modern age being what it is, a lot of my stuff is out-of-print or offline, but I tend to sling links to scribblings of note on here from time to time.

Sometimes, the people that I’ve worked with say some very nice things about me. We shouldn’t laugh and point at these people for their lapses in judgment. We should copy-and-paste their praise instead. Like this:

"Great guy, great writer, brilliant brain. Don't just sit there brief him ...great results." - Peter Penny, CEO, Connected Pictures

Oh, I’m also a very small, misshapen cog in the sleek, shiny beast that is They Quiz, London’s finest monthly film pub quiz. If you haven’t been to one, your life is sorely lacking the required amount of joy and laughter. You should do something about that.

I haven’t done one of these for over two years, so indulge me whilst I take you on a whirlwind tour of all the places where I soil the Internet with my virtual jibba-jabba.

Where I can be found online in 2012:

Stray Bullets - You’re looking at it. This blog is about eight years old, and I’ve been meaning to move it off Blogger for at least half of that time. Soon. Maybe. If you are a relative newcomer, please dig through the archives so that you too can become one of those intensely irritating people who say “Man, his old stuff was better”.

Shrapnel - My Tumblr blog. The short explanation is covered by my tagline over there: "Jagged shards of popular culture eviscerating the flabby guts of the Internet". For a slightly longer explanation, I’m lazy, so I’ve done a cut-and-paste on my response to a fan of my mad reposting skillz over there: “There’s no particular algorithm to the things that I hurl up here, or the frequency of posting. It’s just a collection of the pop-culture artifacts I excavate whilst mining the recesses of the web, armed with little more than a search engine and a whim. It’s also probably a reasonably accurate snapshot of my obsessions and preoccupations at any given time.”

Last.fm - Most of the stuff I squeeze into my earholes is scrobbled and logged here. You can usually tell when I’m working on something, because the stuff I rack up skews towards background music - jazz and soundtracks, primarily. Otherwise, my tastes tend to run towards funk and hip-hop. Recently, I’ve been listening almost exclusively to the Beastie Boys, for reasons that shouldn’t need further elucidation.

I’ve also started fooling around with This Is My Jam on an irregular basis, largely because it crossposts to Twitter. (Yes, This Is My Jam is the new Blip.fm)

Twitter - If you really want to hear me crapping on in 140-character bursts all day, every day, then you are in for a treat!

Flickr - This dinosaur doesn’t know that it’s dead yet, and I still throw photos up here on an incredibly infrequent basis. (I was on Instagram for a short while, but like a drunk taking a shit on the dancefloor, Facebook had to come along and spoil the fun.)

Pinboard - My bookmarking service of choice, ever since I moved away from the ailing Del.icio.us (another victim of Yahoo!’s cycle of acquisition and neglect).

I am no longer on either Facebook or LinkedIn because, really, who can be fucking bothered? Not me, that’s for sure. I am, however, on Google+. I’m not entirely sure why. I’m a big fan of the latest redesign, but that hasn’t helped to make it a more active place. Social networks don’t really work if people don’t use them, and Google+ is Tumbleweed City. I’m keeping it on a microscopically short leash for now.

How to contact me - If you know me personally, then pick up the goddamn phone. Or send me an email. Otherwise, Twitter is best. Alternatively, slap something in the comments here or use the “Ask me a question” function on Tumblr.