Be Quiet, Woman.

Hysterical Transatlantic scream merchant Joss Stone has secured a role in comedy history series The Tudors.

Feel free to leave your beheading jokes - nay, suggestions - here.

 

You With The Ears.

I appreciate the Art of it. I appreciate the scope. And I appreciate its extraordinary movie aesthetic, a brilliant jumbly of four decades of film sensibilities.

So, why, ladies and gentlemen, did I walk out of The Dark Knight feeling distinctly -underwhelmed?

I thought it was flabby - overwritten - desperately uneven, with action-sequences that didn’t seem to make much sense on first-viewing. And it seemed quite happy to compromise its much-vaunted real-world rationalisation of the Batman myth when it suited. I ask you, turning mobiles into sonar transmitters?

But, most of all, I thought it was utterly soulless. As unfeeling and cold as the impressive city of concrete and glass in which it was set.

Thank God for Gary Oldman, who managed to put in a typically powerful performance - a thing of heart and soul - amongst all the clunking symbolic archetypes.

Me, I liked Iron Man.

But then, I’m shallow like that.

 

Reflections.

This blog has that moribund feeling about it again.

Nothing to get alarmed about, it happens every couple of weeks or so, but this time I thought I’d pull myself out of my malaise by trying to articulate the problem.

As soon as I made the decision to start writing- finally thought: right, walk the walk - the ideas started to flow thick and fast and I’ve never looked back.

I’m writing every day, which is good. There’s a lot of procrastination, but that’s only to be expected. I’m not a robot and I have a very short attention span, but I’m progressing from day-to-day. Words get put down on a page, without fail.

Except I’ve hit one of those low points where nothing I type seems to gel. The problem is, I’ve just finished a draft of a full-length spec script - my very first - which has had some very nice feedback. That got me all excited, and flushed with optimism.

That script has gone into the drawer for a few weeks before the inevitable rewrite, and I thought I’d start on something else - something which lies at the other end of the drama spectrum.

And, of course, I’ve got hopelessly bogged down. The idea is not shifting as well as I had hoped. I wonder whether I’m cut out to do this after all. A writer should be able to write anything, right?

But this is early days for me. I’m still finding out what I’m good at - and what I’m not. And reading a lot of scriptwriting blogs is not helping.

Don’t get me wrong. I find reading about how other people work and about the methodology of writing incredibly useful, but I’m constantly reminded of what an ingenue I am, and how much of a vacuum I’m writing in.

I feel like I’m throwing mud at the wall, - working at a mostly instinctual level - when I should be methodically writing beat sheets, doing scene breakdowns, other technical stuff. In other words, learning the craft.

That means it’s time to get organised, I think.

Time to go back to school?

 

Is It Just Me…

Or does anyone else find the way people’s toes turn up when they walk faintly repellent?

 

Wyndham Gets It Off His Chest.

I’ve finally found the courage to drop an acquaintance as a friend on Facebook.

I just couldn’t put up with his self-aggrandising Status Updates any longer.

These sentence-long communications - we’re talking at least one a day, by the way - were solely intended to remind his long-suffering friends, and me, how successful he is, how creative, and - this is what really sent my blood-pressure up - how deep his feelings flow.

When I knew him in real life he was a vacuous twat, so this sudden flood of brooding existential thoughts - sometimes a whole sentences of them! -is all the more mind-boggling.

Worried that he he’ll be sent an e-mail, saying Wyndham Cannot Put Up With Your Bullshit Any Longer And Has Dropped You From His Already Anaemic Friends List, I put off getting rid. Finally, plucked up the courage last night after discovering that I’ll be able slip quietly off his list, like a drunk from a cruise-liner, and float downstream to oblivion.

One more thing. He’s an ugly little midget with a fabulous-looking wife.

So as you can imagine, having to look at his endless uploaded photographs hurts on so many different levels.

There. That feels better already.

 

Note For Mr. Owen.

I once appeared in a play where I was required to affect an American accent.

I found it taxing enough to remember my lines, let alone place them somewhere in New England. I can remember saying my lines, and I can remember doing the accent, but I’m not so sure I managed both at the same time.

So in my own modest way I commiserated with Clive Owen’s performance in Derailed, which was on the television the other night.

Mr Owen, playing an ad-man in Chicago, looked in some discomfort as his accent meandered to and fro across the Atlantic from scene-to-scene, and occasionally from line-to-line. Luckily, events transpired to let him off the hook.

A far-sighted scriptwriter had written into the script that he’d moved from London to the US, at some unspecified time in the past. As a clever diversionary tactic, they then cast Vincent Cassel - a man who does good menace, but whose French/Chicago accent violently hampered proceedings. A far-sighted scriptwriter sighed during the read-through and pencilled into the script that Mr. Cassel had also moved from Paris to the US, at some unspecified time in the past.

For good measure, Jennifer Aniston was also cast. Her accent was fine, as you’d expect, but her acting was woeful. A less convincing femme fatale you couldn’t possibly cast. A chain-link fence in stilettos would have had more range.

But it’s difficult to tell about accents, isn’t it?

They say that Hugh Laurie does a good American accent, but the man carries a lot of baggage over here and I sit there watching House thinking: that’s High Laurie doing an American accent. I don’t really know what Dominic West really sounds like, so I can’t tell whether his Baltimore inflection is good or not. Eddie Izzard’s seems pretty poor to me.

Never mind, if the technical expertise of British actors is ever put in doubt, we’ve always got a counter-argument to fall back on for the next 100 years. Good old Dick Van Dyke.

 

Warning: Writing Post.

I’ve just completed a couple of drafts of my first full-length script and said script has now been sent to a script consultant guy.

This is big news for me. For the last few months I’ve been writing in the dark. I’ve no idea whether I’ve been writing too slow or too fast or whether the script’s in good shape or not.

All I know is that there’s nothing I can do with it until someone gives me some feedback confirming the little voices at the back of my head about certain aspects of it. Time will tell.

At the moment, I’m just enjoying the fact that I’ve got this far and this morning I started on my Red Planet prize entry, which should carry me across the next couple of months.

But reading Ariel Leve’s column about Plan Bs, yesterday, I realise, over the days, the weeks and the months , I’ve been steadily starving myself of the opportunity to head back into work.

The longer I sit at home and write, the chances increase that I become more unemployable. Already, the idea of heading back into an office is anathema to me.

A scary thought.

 

A Load Of Toffee.

Revels is to evict one of its flavours - members of the public can vote out the one they like the least, in a Big Brother-style eviction.

So far, so good marketing.

But they describe the flavours thusly: chocolate, raisin, coffee, Malteser, caramel and orange.

I don’t remember pulling out a handful of caramel Revels from a packet. I remember pulling out millions of dreary toffee Revels.

Hard, chewy, tasteless toffee Revels that take an absolute age to eat while everyone around me gets the nice chocolate, raisin, Malteser and orange Revels, enabling them to quickly stick their hands back in the bag and pull out more lovely chocolate, raisin, coffee, Malteser, and orange Revels.

In fact, if there was ever a better metaphor for Life for a glass-half-full kinda guy like myself, I have yet to discover it.

 

Neither Seen Nor Heard.

More children are getting banned from weddings, according to this article, right here.

We were laughing about this trend only the other night. A year or so ago we attended such a wedding. The bride-to-be went a step further: refused to allow the children of her groom by his previous marriage to attend the reception. They were packed off home after the church.

It seemed a churlish act at the time, and more fool him for agreeing to it.

She would have done better to have banned the Best Man, frankly, who downed several dozen pints before his big speech, and told the several hundred guests that her nickname was Chopper - she was the town bike, you see.

Tumbleweeds rolled solemnly through the marquee at that point. Afterwards, the Best Man stumbled from the top table - from which he was banished - to sit on the edge of the river flowing outside looking very ill and remorseful. His girlfriend was put on Suicide Watch.

After such a good start, the reception went from strength to strength and I spent half the night talking to a lawyer who informed me triumphantly that he’d convinced his wife he earned only half his actual salary - the rest of the money he’d squirrelled away into an account until the inevitable time he became bored of her and their three kids.

The lady in question must have had some inkling of this because she didn’t move one inch, sat at the table and slowly worked her way through a bottle of vodka and 40 Rothmans. It was that sort of wedding - one of the best.

Anyway, the repercussions of the ban on the groom’s children have continued to reverberate through this particular family, and not in a good way.

I, personally, would decline an invitation to a wedding if Dexter was unable to attend. He’s a well-behaved boy, but that’s not the point. If you’re a friend of the family and you invite me and Veronica, you get Dexter into the bargain - that’s the deal.

Strangely, my nice wedding suit hasn’t been dry-cleaned in a while.

What say you?

 

We Can Fix It.

Kevin Lehane has a marvellous deleted scene from Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines.

He’s embedded it. I am unable - and, as of this moment, unwilling to learn - to do such a thing, so I suggest you follow the link here.

Can’t for the life of me understand why they didn’t use it.