Some puppies

Watch "Merry Christmas from some cute puppies!" on YouTube

If you like it please share. :-)

Skyfall is rubbish. Here's why.

**MASSIVE SPOILERS**

The more I think about Skyfall the more I hate it.

Its such a massive backstep for the series that I don't quite understand how it happened or why. Or how someone as talented as Sam Mendes got mixed up in it all. I need to try and figure it out and bleat about it for a bit.

• If your story focuses on the bad guy, you'd better make him formidable and super bad.

Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace were about Bond. They began a story arc that Skyfall for some reason breaks with. What we have in Skyfall is a standalone villain of the week piece with Javier Bardem at its centre. Now, I don't understand the logic of breaking with the story arc established in the first two films save for giving the franchise legs. However, the break would have been ok if the reason was they'd come up with this incredible villain that justified it. But they haven't. Javier Bardem is a great actor and I think he does his best with a badly written part, but he's just not that interesting. What we needed was Darth Vader or Hannibal Lecter. What we get is David Walliams in a wig loaded with abandonment issues. 

Our first inkling of what to expect from the character is fed to us by one of Bardem's flunkies in the casino. She's terrified of this character we know nothing about. Literally shaking terrified. You don't know fear she says to Bond or words to that effect. Brilliant. He must be a proper balls-out psycho. But no. Bardem does nothing even remotely menacing for the entire running time of the film. He's a Mummy's boy sucking his thumb. There are five specific things in the story that are meant to illustrate how scary a guy he is. 1) We're told he's scary. 2) When we meet him he makes a partly creepy speech about rats eating each other. 3) He shoots one woman. 4) He is disfigured (how old school!). 5) He wants to get a bit sweaty with Bond. 

None of that makes him the least bit menacing. It never felt like Bond was in danger, it felt like Bond would give him an absolute kicking if he could. Basically he's supposed to be scary because he's deformed and he's gay. Nice work script writers. Nice work. 

• All the familiar old bullshit is back. 

Casino Royale was brilliant. It was pitch perfect. The Bond franchise was a ridiculous dinosaur that could not continue because it was shit. Jason Bourne came along and the right people realised that Bond could not go on as he was in a post Bourne world. So they rebooted him and somehow the stars aligned. They managed to take the visceral grittiness of Bourne and marry it with the glamour and coolness of Bond. This is looking like a more and more impressive achievement all the time. Then we had Quantum of Solace. It wasn't great, but the action was still visceral and the story arc set up in the first film was nicely continued. It was dark, humourless, but it had to be, Bond had fallen in love, been fucked over by his love, watched her die, and found out she was being controlled by a mysterious organisation that orchestrated it all. That's not going to make anyone sing the hills are alive. But it was ok because it felt like the middle film of a trilogy. We knew we'd get there in the end, the Bond of Casino Royale would return, smarter and wiser and would wreak his revenge. 

But it looks like the producers lost their nerve after Quantum came in for criticism. So what we've been given is another reboot. Out is the grittiness and the visceral stomach churning action. Back is the ridiculous action (CGI motorbike chase on Istanbul tiled roofs?, killer Komodo dragons?, a tube train plunging through a ceiling as a getaway diversion?) , the misogyny, the double entendrees, fucking Q branch, gadgets, unfunny one liners, and Miss Moneypenny. They've even thrown in the old Aston Martin for good measure for fucks sake. All of this is good for nostalgia's sake but for no other reason. Casino Royale reinvented Bond and made it relevant again. Skyfall uninvents the new Bond and goes back in time a couple of decades. We're back in Moore and Brosnan territory. Daniel Craig is still great, this plot is not.

• Needless back story

Bond has no need of a back story. His character does not need to be explained. But here he goes home to the family pile and we learn more about him being an orphan. Its unnecessary. We have Albert Finney as an old gameskeeper for no good reason. He doesn't need to be in the film. The important thing is the relationship between M and Bond, and that's already been set up. It doesn't need drumming home that M is his surrogate Mum because he was orphaned. 

• Weak women

Casino Royale had a Bond girl that was smart as a whip. Quantum had a Bond girl that was tough as nails. Bond was misogynistic but was shown up for it. We weren't meant to be sympathetic to his misogyny. In Skyfall we have a prostitute who Bond climbs into a shower with uninvited, and a field agent who should really accept she's better off as a secretary and is there just as a foil for Bond's double entendres. This is an unsettling reversal, we're back to being sympathetic with his misogyny. I get that M is the real Bond girl of this film, but her relationship with Bond and her demise felt forced. The M in the previous films didn't need taking care of by Bond. She was in control of the situation. Now she's just vulnerable and needs him to protect her in some Oedipal nightmare. 

In conclusion, I didn't enjoy it and if its a sign of a new direction for the series I've lost interest.

I wish people had no ears

Lesson learned. Never, ever attempt to do a whole soundtrack to a film in post production.

I'm just putting the finishing touches to my next short film. Over the last month or so I've been creating the ambient soundtrack and effects. Due to shooting most of the film near busy roads only about 10% of the location sound was usable. Doing the sound in post has taught me a valuable lesson and wasted a good portion of my young life.

Sound is hard. It's time consuming, painstaking and consuming. Luckily there's no shortage of great free sound effects out there on the interweb. Unluckily there is no easy way of finding them. How do you know when you start searching that the perfect sound for your ammo rounds hitting the floor will be a Latvian fixing a gate post? Or that the perfect sound of a body being dragged will be a distorted recording of a cat eating Felix? In my first short I replicated the sound of Gernan military orders over a megaphone using a recording someone had made of their drunk Spanish neighbour trying to smash his own door in at the 3am.

Welcome to the weird world of sound foley. This is not a world that makes sense. You need a good level of abstract logic to work in this world.

It's made me realise that animated films must be really hard to do. When everything has to be created from scratch. They must have the most amazing sound people at pixar and Disney.

The film sounds fantastic and it was worth it. But its hard work and it's something you can easily get lost in while you obsess over the smallest sound effect nobody will ever notice.

So heed my advice and don't do it. Get your sound on location. Just say no.

Looper is brilliant, but not quite genius.

So I saw Looper last night and absolutely loved it. It put me in a really good mood and I was smiling when I left the cinema. There were some things in the film that I've never seen before and some really subtle scenes that will influence me in the future. I'm loving seeing Joseph Gordon-Levitt becoming the leading man I predicted he would after seeing Brick the first time. He's a great actor.

Rian Johnson is a very talented director and has a knack with writing. I liked the fact that all the characters were made a little sympathetic and the characters you expected to be rooting for did some pretty terrible things. It kept you off balance and unsure of what direction the story was taking. You're never totally sure who the hero is.

However, it did bring to mind one of my writing rules. There's something about the story that stops it just short of being a classic in spite of everything else about it being so well done.

• Always try to make your whole story develop out of the initial premise

One problem that Looper has, and I don't think I'm spoiling anything here, is the telekinesis subplot. I'm not spoiling anything as telekinesis is discussed from the very beginning of the film so it stands to reason its going to be an integral part of the film.  However, the core concept of the film is that Joseph Gordon-Levitt has to kill an older version of himself. That's very clever, he's a hitman who's facing an older and slower version of himself but who is also wiser, more experienced and has the advantage of having his memories. Brilliant.

However, the film also develops a Johnny Bravo-esque sub plot about telekinisis that actually overshadows  the main concept towards the end of the film. So you have a film that starts off being about one thing and finishes being about something else. I should say in fairness that it's all resolved very nicely and its never anything less than entertaining and clever. But there are very few films that have pulled off the trick of twisting the story into something else halfway through. Psycho maybe, The Birds, maybe Memento. You might say detective fiction has always played that trick. The gumshoe starts out investigating one thing but it turns out to be something totally different. But the main concept is that the gumshoe is investigating something. Nothing more.

Terminator is about terminators. Twelve Monkeys is about identifying who unleashed a virus in the past. Inception is about planting an idea in someone's mind and what it might do to them. They all explore a core concept and everything in them is an offshoot of that initial premise. To me that makes them neat, clean and gives them the extra oomph to lift them above the rest. Where Looper just misses the mark is in having two concepts. Its as though Johnson couldn't figure out how to make two men hunting each other for 2 hours interesting and so had to introduce another plot element to give it some legs.

We're all taught that you should be able to sum up your film in one sentence. Looper would take two.

If you publish this I will ruin you.

Big week this week as I hit page 30 of my first feature length script. According to lore that should mean roughly 30 minutes of screen time which means I'm a third of the way through. That makes me very happy and makes the whole project seem far more real. Which in turn has made me realise that if I want to hit my goal of having completed a film by the end of next year then I have a lot of work to do and may have to revise my estimates.

This week I've been concerned that the story I'm writing is in part inspired by real life events. I am highly fictionalising it with only the opening sequence being the same as a story ripped from the headlines. All the characters are fictional and what happens after Act 1 is totally made up. However, the opening would be clearly recognisable and I worry that this could cause problems. There's no way I can change it as its pivotal to the plot. Even if I were to state that the work is a fiction at the beginning of the film am I still leaving myself wide open to legal action?

Its not like I'm writing a political expose about david cameron smashing up frogs with a cricket bat to get his kicks. But how far can art imitate life these days?

I worry that it wouldn't stop the film being made but might stop potential distributors picking up the film lest they be sued. I've been scouring the internet but can't find a great deal on the subject. I've found some good advice and some bad. Anyway, I've not let it deter me and I'm ploughing on. I think maybe the important thing to do is to document exactly what steps I'm taking in the writing to distance it from the real story.

And to keep those photos of david cameron smashing up frogs in a safe somewhere.

Time to tweak the nuts of the elephant in the room

So, my girlfriend recently moved in with me. This has not happened before. There is no precedent, and there's trouble brewing.

The problem is this: I am an avid film fan in the true sense of the word. I am fanatical. I love watching films to a ridiculous degree. I could happily watch three films an evening and that would be a great night for me.

I have spent weekends doing nothing but watching films. I rarely watch television, I like a computer game but can drop them without too much dismay, I read on the commute, I'm not sporty. But films, films are my bread and butter. The chicken in my bucket. I own hundreds of DVDs and blu rays and can watch a film over and over again. I have even spent many a night firing up dozens of DVDs just to watch my favourite few scenes. Eject, bang in the next. In short, I gorge on film. I binge. I am nerdy and obsessive and I love it.

So here's the rub: my girlfriend can't stay awake through a film to save her life. I swear, to the extent that its almost some kind of super power. I thought it was dimming the lights but no. If a film was put on 20 mins after she woke up in the morning she would be back asleep again in half an hour.

This unnervingly puts my love for film under the microscope. One of my worst traits is that I tend to feel nervous about the things I enjoy in front of other people. I'm secretive and furtive. If someone walks in on me playing a computer game I feel ashamed and have to switch it off. I feel compelled to justify drinking a bit too much wine over and over in my head. And now my love of film is starting to seem a bit sordid. Confronted with this absolute ability to sleep during the best cinema has to offer I feel somehow like I'm in the wrong. Like I should be sleeping my way through this bullshit too. In short, I lack conviction in my own sense of pleasure.

What to do?

For the record. She has stayed awake through Drive, anything by Pixar and Moneyball, a three hour long film about baseball. How the hell did that happen?

Sabattical

So I've proved the rule that I'm terrible at this business by taking a brief hiatus almost as soon as I started this blog.

I've been absent for a little while as I've been finishing work on a drama-documentary about the Australian troops in the Vietnam war. It was someone else's baby, I just shot it and edited it and mighty fine its looking too I must say.

Here are some teaser stills.

It's out of my hands having a voiceover done for it at the moment but should be finished soon. I don't know what will end up happening to it but I'm just happy to have made it and got some invaluable experience. It did make me appreciate just how much easier it is to make something look beautiful when you don't have to worry about anything else happening on the set. 

The break has given me some time to think about my first project and backtrack a bit. I had decided to plough on with a film I knew I could make with no money and keep the one I care the most about, but will take some cash to make, in reserve for when I can raise some capital off the back of my first feature. 

However, I'm just too invested in the film that will take some money to make. So I've shelved the cheaper film while I write the script for the one I care most about. I think I've decided you should run with what you're most passionate about at the time. I still think I'll have to make the cheaper film first but I really want to have both scripts to play with. That way I can put the more expensive script out there while I work on the cheaper film. It means if the first film is successful there won't be a gap while I have to write the second. 

I hope that's a smart move. 

Anyway, the good news is the first ten minutes of the first script is complete and I'm writing it quickly. I don't want to discuss the plot in detail but its about a man who can play the piano. It seems to me that a good piano movie comes along every six or seven years and they always seem to do very well. The Piano, The Pianist, Shine. I'm hoping mine will be the next. The core themes are tragedy and loss and the redemptive power of music. 

I became aware of an incredibly talented young American pianist about a year ago and have approached him about doing the music. He really liked the story idea and seemed very enthusiastic. He released an EP last year that just astonished me and he's still in university undiscovered at the moment though he is bound to hit the limelight at some point so I hope I can get him before it happens. Maybe it will come from the back of this film.

I'm also friends on Facebook with a couple of actors who I really like and are rapidly rising through the up and coming ranks. One has asked me to send the script when its finished. But its early days yet and I don't want to jump the shark before its time. Its frustrating to have to bite your tongue when you have something you want to get people excited about but aren't ready to sell yet. How do you sow the seeds for something you may not accomplish for several years? 

My aim is to have a feature film under my belt by the end of next year but at the moment I don't know which film that will be. The temptation is to jump three steps at a time. I caught myself looking at locations for the more expensive film online the other night and bookmarking ones that I like. I have to run before I can walk and get these scripts finished and out there first. 

Lesson number one: Finish your script before you do anything.