I intend to write more about this film over coming months and years. I feel there is so much to say about it. I think it’s a masterpiece. It’s such a powerful, profound and brilliantly entertaining work. There’s so much going on. I’m teaching it for adaptation. I love it.

It’s a coruscating dissection of the American Dream. It’s Cronenberg’s Blue Velvet. And as good as that movie. So watch this space. I really want to go into this film for Bright Wall/Dark Room and I feel drawn to it academically, so just looking at outlets for talking about it - journals and conferences looking at violence, adaptation, cronenberg, the american dream.

For now. Just watching it again because I haven’t seen it in a while, but it hangs over me, haunts me, inspires me, challenges me and gets me excited about writing, movies and teaching writing and movies. 

So good.

It starts off promisingly, with Michael Pitt and Michael Stuhlbarg as medium to high level mafia hitmen on a job in a scene that delivers exposition and a nice nod to the pairs turn in Boardwalk Empire. 

From there though the film is scattershot, tonally, and never really settles into something coherent and engaging despite great moments. And ultimately, it’s just not that funny. Criminally it feels underwritten which is bad for a film by the writer of In Bruges, and as it’s a film about screenwriting, in part. It feels derivative, even as it apes derivativeness but it never feels achieved with the level of satire or flair that Adaptation manages, say.

For example, writing poor female characters, and then having characters tut and avoid the topic of poor female characters in a movie, is a cop out.

The performances are either good or great, and all really want to make the material work. Walken is great, as is Tom Waits, it’s just all too disjointed to really nail what it’s going for.

Someone gets shot UP the face!

There’s a commitment to a British aesthetic and an almost tokenistic American feel to proceeedings. Outside the central tower block there’s a greater sense of America, but once through the doors, a real grimy, dark Britishness takes over, which given the roots of the comic and character is just.

This film is also so direct, and simple. There’s one plot, and one subplot. And that’s it. Both work in unison and save for a short expositional flashback, the film moves forward relentlessly. The character of Dredd is not foregrounded with grand claims of his reputation and there’s no iconic grandstanding or framing. The actions of Dredd speak for themselves and the iconography of his badassness (is that a word? it should be) emerges organically, which is so refreshing. And Karl Urban plays it spot on. He just oozes justice and ice cold violence. Through him, the brilliant morality tale at the heart of the origin story of Dredd can be played out perfectly.

There is a lo-fi sensibility, a grimy sheen, a roughness that suits the material and the violence is brutal and imaginative. It skirts the boundary of entertainment and horror perfectly. It’s uncomfortable enjoyment. Great score, although I would have loved them to have been brave and gone with Beak>’s DROKK score, that would have been something.

Balls out adult entertainment. A proper 18 made by people who clearly love the source material and did a great job with a small budget, and who have redeemed an iconic character from camp infamy (that’s you Stallone).

Finally, it was clear that the filmmakers knew what they were doing, whereas now it’s clear that the Stallone Judge Dredd is so bad, because no one had any idea how to put this character on screen, at least in the background, cos woah, this feels appropriate and the Rob Schneider one now feels like the weirdest cheese too late at night infused dream of what Dredd cinema would be.

Oh, and someone gets shot UP the face.

My first Hospice related read in a while. And Wow. 

A History Of Violence is one of my favourite films. Ever, so as you can imagine reading this I was apprehensive, but wow. It’s an amazing read, beautifully illustrated. It’s fast, dark, brutal. The scratchiness draws you in to the story, which is so good. Stark.

Reading it made me want to see the film again, and also made me realise how good an adaptation it is. There is so much in here that isn’t in the film. David Cronenberg & Co changed SO much, but it doesn’t matter. Because the tone and the themes, and the central ‘idea’ all remain and are brilliantly rendered graphically here, and cinematically on screen. This is Exactly what adaptations should do. I have a new benchmark/arguing point.

Myself and David have been talking about entering a competition for a short graphic story prize, and I gave him a script I wrote for a friend (a script I have talked about on here, called A Passing Place) that I thought may work. He loved it. And hopefully that will be a nice precursor for us before working on Hospice.

What is great is that the story is adult, a world away form Hospice. Very American, and dark and foreboding. It’s a piece of writing I am proud of, and soon it will be in both graphic and short film form.

My own A History Of Violence. This makes me happy.

Strange how we read things. What we bring to a film.

Seeing this on release I found it just a solid adaptation of a great, classic story. Seeing it yesterday, following on from a viewing of De Sica’s Il Boom I am drawn to the shallow opulence at the heart of the story. There’s a lot of it going around, in these times of ours. Bitterness towards ‘the club’ and the priviliges they are afforded, the liberties they take on small and grand scales.

The thing I still love about this movie is that the director knows the power and timeless magnetism of the story he holds in his hands and just stands back and lets it unfold. He doesn’t get in the way, which is good, because it’s Kevin Reynolds so, you know, that could be a problem.

It’s just a lavish, rollicking good yarn with some fantastically appropriate performances from Jim Caviezel, Guy Pearce and Richard Harris in particular. They clearly know they are in a straightforward romp version and judge it pitch perfectly. Luiz Guzman is a joy, as he clearly thinks he has been set up and Jeremy Beadle/Ashton Kutcher (depending on your UK/US residence) will turn up at any minute.

A hoot, no question.

This may well be more of a catharsis than any form of coherent review. And yes, at times it may veer very near to my oft held rebellious stance of comparing a book to a film, but the reasons will hopefully become clear by the close.

This was a real mess of a film. A real mess. That’s not to say it is all bad, indeed for some parts it is a refreshing piece of work, full of bravery and independent voice and vision, but these moments are soon swept aside. 

The central problem seems to be the ‘plot’, which is shoehorned in on top of the original ‘story’. There is a vast difference between plot and story and The Rum Diary is a great story, with very little plot. It’s the story of a man finding himself, his voice and his physical capacity for rum in a place where he was expecting to see the world and saw only the greedy destructive hand of the America he was running from. Here, we get that in the form of lazy, preachy, patronising ‘plot’ as the young (*cough, more on that in a bit) journalist hero becomes embroiled in a corrupt plot to steal one of Puerto Rico’s islands to turn it into a luxury resort. 

It seems to be that to get something funded nowadays you need to signpost everything for an audience which is sickening, so here the fact that America is raping the rest of the world’s beauty is told through characters telling you that, in voiceover or with gleeful smiles as they repeatedly mention the Ocean of Money (I think Aaron Eckhart says this line 3 times) and the American Dream.

The film works when it is a mess. When it’s clunky and we are following Johnny Depp’s character getting drunk and high with two very weird friends and getting into trouble with the locals it’s a lot of fun and far more interesting. The themes and meaning sweat to the surface and most of the best scenes could still have involved corrupt Americans, with braver writing that fought for the chance to reveal the meaning through character and simple action, rather than ham-fisted thriller plot. There is a great scene where the Americans go off the beaten track during a carnival and shame follows as the young girl, the love interest is retained in a club and the men are forced to leave her there to her destiny. It’s beautifully handled and tells more of Western arrogance and colonial reality than 50 shots of Aaron Eckhart in a white shirt, smoking a fat cigar explaining about Oceans of Money and how only he can get at it, yada yada.

Also, Depp is too old for the role. He’s great in parts and thankfully keeps the tics to a minimum. I would like to have seen Depp in the Sala role, with a strong enough young lead to ensure that Depp didn’t cloud the film with too much Jack Sparrow/Tonto madness. But alas, I guess he needed to be the star to get it made, and he wanted another crack at the good Doctor.

And the voiceover, where the film is most reminiscent of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and are thankfully kept to a minimum. In support Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Rispoli and Richard Jenkins are superb, with Amber Heard providing the perfect balance of sexual threat and innocence.

Why am I spending so much time on a film that I clearly didn’t like too much? A film, that I would normally give a few lines over to and then run off giggling from. Well, it’s Hunter S Thompson. 

The Rum Diary is his first novel, completed to his (sort of satisfaction) that finally saw the light of day in the 90s and tells of his coming of age as a journalist, and young American voice of dissent. The book has a similar tone and feel to that of Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries, where he goes in search of a good time and sees that all is not well and good. It’s subtle, and fun, and lewd, and raw and clumsy. Like youth.

The reason I don’t like this adaptation is not that they have changed it. It’s that they have added on so much plot nonsense and over-egged ‘meaning’ that the book is lost, making me think as always in situations like this, why not just write a new screenplay about a journalist in South America getting caught up in political and social scandals and intrigue. Why take this book, which isn’t about that, and make it unrecognisable.

This wouldn’t even matter so much if it was a good film, but Depp and director Bruce Robinson clearly love Thompson and the text and fought tooth and nail to keep in some of the rawness, the wide eyed discovery and the savage drug taking. That’s why I am spending so much time on it, because they fought to get it made, and in glimpses the rewards are up on the screen; when people just get drunk, sit around, seek out good times and more drugs, drive fast, get into local scrapes and go to the carnival. That’s why it deserves so many words, because like Thompson, it is fighting a good fight, and sometimes even utter defeat of ambition deserves credit and time spent on it.

So watch it, and when it’s slow, and clumsy, and not a lot is happening, revel in the beauty and the truth that is seeping up, for therein lies the greatness of the source. And the rest of the time, rail against the unseen powers that think we are stupid and need the world’s reality spoonfed because we are too dumb to feel.

Sometimes I don’t know what people want. I get that books are beloved and people want them done well but they become irrational and expect the film to cater for their own individual perception of a text, which of course, it can never do, even the greatest film versions.

I haven’t read The Hunger Games book or series, and I never will. I liked the film though, I thought it was good. Not great. Good.

Arguments against it have come from the book saying this or doing that and as I pointed out with Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings et al I can’t make that judgement. I can only make judgement based on what I see. 

And what I saw, I liked.

For me, a person’s expectation of any film should be that it’s good, not that it recreates an impossible emotion in an individual’s head. Some films get close it seems to capturing the essence of a book despite changes, casting issues and omissions - LOTR again, Bridget Jones’ Diary come to mind, but they seem to be forgiven because they are good films.

So, make a good movie and leave it at that.

The Hunger Games is a good movie, let down by a slavishness to form. Starting a epic teen franchise or any franchise nowadays seems to require films to be 8 hours long, despite few modern filmmakers knowing how to fill a longer time frame. This is too long. It starts to drag as the need to give depth to so many characters takes over and the danger and fear subsides a little. 

What holds it together for me is the presence of Jennifer Lawrence who is exceptional. She has been a favourite since Winter’s Bone and here she is a magnificent young lead capable of switching with affecting immediacy between lost girl and strong woman, perfectly encapsulating that age of womanhood. She is a remarkable presence and looks set to be a great actress and star.

I liked how it felt uncomfortable - the ideas around teen slaughter, reality tv, modern society. It felt real but because it was secondary to character intangible, unspeakable, unclassifiable, which left a resonance I felt. I got annoyed at the fact that there was a written intro card with information repeated by a video shown at the Reaping 10 minutes in. Patronising much?

Some of the adult actors aren’t given enough space to create three-dimensional characters with Lenny Kravitz doing the most interesting work, bringing a real stillness at the heart of a film that moves relentlessly, mainly thanks to a constantly roving hand held camera. And great to see Wes Bentley back on screen.

Overall I had a fun time at the movies watching a film that entertained and engaged. As always there is the hope that a true visionary can get hold of the series, but then that’s my hope for 95% of the films I see.

Roma loves a good ghost story, and was really excited to see this. It was her birthday weekend and her birthday movie. She kept asking me if I was excited, and to be honest, so I had to say no.

I wasn’t. I was interested, intrigued and looking forward to it, and hoping. Hoping it was good.

Thankfully, it exceeded those expectations, and hit Roma’s much higher expectations. It’s a genuinely scary movie. Really unsettling and relentlessly tense. What I loved about is that it is a genre film that knows its genre and spends its time pushing the agenda of its story and its conventions. It’s a story that feels familiar and it doesn’t do any of the scares or reveals with any real originality, it just does it all really well. It really plays on fear, and shadow and darkness and sound really well.

It doesn’t try to be anything other than a scary B movie ghost picture, which is why it surpasses The Awakening, which tries too hard. This just wants to be creepy, and boy is it creepy.

The only thing I didn’t like was the way the final moments of the film were simply announced by Daniel Radcliffe’s character. Poor writing to just announce an idea of resolution which we then see. There was no weaving in of that strand, it just arrived, jarringly, and it annoyed me. But it’s a minor fault, poor writing. Daniel Radcliffe is very good, very impressive.

And no, I haven’t seen the play or read the book. So don’t throw ‘oh this isn’t scary you should see the play’ this way. I don’t care either way. Film is film. Theatre is Theatre. And this is A Grade, Hammer produced, gothic creepy genre cinema. Nice.

Happy Birthday beautiful wife.

Cheesy, fun, funny, great script, great action, brilliant set up of classic characters and friendships.

And I don’t even like the TV series. At all.