OK, so if you read my last post you would be aware of my wish that when the name ‘Daniel Peak’ is googled, my paragraph about him might appear. I decided to check if it would and – hooray! – it’s already the 31st result on google! So that’s nice. But googling the inane culture diluting fuckwit reveals some horrible things….

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newtalent/comedy/success_peak.shtml

an interview with him. with some hugely illuminating answers!

It turns out he is a graduate of the BBC’s ‘New Talent’ scheme – something I’ve been highly skeptical of for years. Under the same umbrella of ‘Writers Room’. it is a box ticking exercise in keeping bad writers occupied with each other rather than bothering the executives. If you have an idea for the BBC you can go straight to them – you don’t have to fanny about in the writers room creche. In this interview he states he ‘I spent 10 years trying to be a TV writer with no success’ TEN YEARS? It’s not THAT hard. Then, presumably, just as he was on the cusp of realising maybe his lack of success is due to his lack of aptitude, the BBC name him New Talent of the year (can you imagine the standard of the runners-up?).

On this page…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newtalent/comedy/advice_peak.shtml

…Peak offers advice for aspiring writers. In the video clip, he offers his top 3 tips…

1. Watch loads of sitcoms. He cites George & Mildred as being ‘very very funny and cleverly written’. George & Mildred is of it’s time and fine but only a really bad writer would view it as aspirational.

2. Enter lots of competitions. This is TERRIBLE advice. Most screenwriting competitions have entry fees and, although you might be awarded first prize, it means nothing – there is no guarantee the script will get made or shown to agents or production companies. It’s generally a profit-making scheme by shady companies. When institutions like the BBC and C4 run such things, the small print is generally terrible – by entering, you are giving them an option on the material for free. Any professional writer will confirm that you should get PAID for the option on your work. By entering it, you deny the project the chance to be set up anywhere else for a substantial period of time. Meanwhile, the BBC and C4 are still looking for good scripts! So why not avoid the competition, take it straight to the relevant department and have them pay to option your script if it’s any good. I’d love for people to inform me of anyone (apart from monsieur Peak) who has gone on to success as the result of a screenwriting competition.

3. – and this is amazing – ‘don’t be afraid to steal from other people’. If you watch the clip, he says this with a nod and no hint of a smile or irony or jocularity. The transcript on the BBC page incorrectly adds an exclamation mark where none was implied. He offers this a piece of calm, honest advice. Don’t be afraid to steal from other people. There is an old showbiz phrase ’steal from the best’ – which is better advice, if you think about it.

It’s just a shame he can’t be bothered to steal from anyone good.

Still, his career will progress. That’s the sick thing about the industry. Once you’re ‘BBC NEW TALENT WINNER’, that’ll get you a gig on Two Pints of Lager, and once you’ve done that you’re ‘WRITER OF BBC TV’S TWO PINTS’ and then you’re ‘WRITER OF PRIME TIME BBC SITCOMS TWO PINTS AND MY HERO’ and – on paper – you’re a bankable investment.

I spoke this afternoon to my old writing partner Andy – an incredibly funny guy – who had read my earlier post and wanted to discuss it. We’ve both pursued different avenues with our lives now. We both turned our backs on the notion of a screenwriting career. Although in the few years we did write, we were INFINITELY more successful in every way than Peak was in his wilderness DECADE. Neither of us really have any ambition any more and that’s a shame because we were pretty good. Every single thing we did was better than anything Daniel Peak has ever written. It came from a reason, it had fuller characters, it was more sophisticated yet more accessible, it was more tightly constructed and it was funnier. Everything we wrote was funnier than anything Daniel Peak has written. Even the serious stuff. I wonder how many great writers gave it a shot, shrugged their shoulders and walked away because the broadcasters seemed to just not have any agenda for new quality programming.

I feel a bit bad now for calling Peak a cunt. Especially seeing him on video now. I do take it back, he’s not a cunt. He’s not an evil cynical guy trotting out lazy crap – that’s obvious now. He’s just an insignificant talentless chump who has fallen upwards thanks to a ludicrously-run BBC.

I think I’ve finally distilled in my mind what is wrong with British TV.

Like most world-shattering revolutionary and radical theories, it came through a lot of work and not inconsiderable pain. The pinnacle of pain was experienced last night whilst watching a new BBC 1 Primetime sitcom on iplayer that made me constantly question my own reality as to how this could exist within it in this millenium on primetime public-funded television.

In my eyes, the BBC shot itself in the foot about 30 years ago. By producing the series The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, they proved that they were capable of creating work so sublime it achieves not just entertainment but art – and they’ve done this many times before and since. Although the gaps between such works of brilliance are fewer and further between. I can think of only The Office, the re-invention of Doctor Who and Outnumbered being ground-breaking examples of the last decade. Whereas I can list reams of shows on an almost weekly basis that are not just awful but almost remit-bendingly mind-boggling. For example, there’s a show called ‘Hole in The Wall’ where ‘celebrities’ have to jump through a hole in a moving wall or they get knocked into a swimming pool. Even in the inanity of the programmes of my childhood, the producers of It’s a Knockout went to the effort to dress the contestants up as big animals and offered a wide array of games that ended up with them being knocked into swimming pools. Now…. they just change the shape of the holes.

But my eureka moment was not Hole in The Wall. It was a sitcom called ‘Big Top’

If you’re as yet unaware of it, you probably won’t believe that this is a BIG BUDGET PRIMETIME BBC SITCOM – remember that that label has previously been used by classic TV like Only Fools and Horses, Blackadder, Fawlty Towers, The Young Ones, The Office, Red Dwarf… you get the idea.

Big Top is a studio based sitcom (don’t see many of those since The Office – because they are archaic and cringe inducing) with a LOT of canned laughter set in a CIRCUS. Now, it’d be one thing if it was using the circus as an allegory or metaphor or exploring the notion of a circus in the modern world, but no, it’s just a circus. Possibly the first adult show about a circus because unless you’re going to do something interesting with the setting (like the genius work that is HBO’s Carnivale), it is puerile and rubbish. It’s a children’s show. But presented to adults.

There were a multitude of things I hated about it – the canned laughter, something I haven’t seen for years and used, presumably out of desperation. Were a real audience forced to watch it, the laughter track would be silent yet punctuated by long sighs. The use of a comedy foreigner as ‘the stupid one’, the completely unsophisticated storyline, the lack of comedy. These are all technical things. The cast list is incredulous…

Amanda Holden as the ringmaster – she’s… not a comic actress. Ruth Madoc from Hi-de-hi! Who knew she was still alive? Then, in the supporting roles Tony Robinson (Baldrick from Blackadder) and John Thomson (brilliant comic actor from the Fast Show and Cold Feet). The last two depressed the shit out of me as they are brilliant comedians clearly slumming it for a big paycheque. Good actors are in bad things all the time but you can’t predict how a show will work out. There is no way these two read this script and thought it was anything like the caliber of their previous work. No way.

The show is turgid archaic crap. It doesn’t have a single saving feature and is entirely inexcusable. Tired, lazy, rubbish. It was whilst thinking ‘how did this EVER get on the air?’ that I figured it all out.

Commisioning executives are almost exclusively idiots. Long gone are the days that TV stations are run by experienced programme-makers who understand quality and talent. It’s all media and PR and business now, half of the jobs are blagged by cocaine-huffing empty-headed media fools and the other half are shrewd businessmen who are wizards at profitability – which shows will generate more revenue. Quality is not an issue at all.

In all my industry experience, I only ever met one executive who knew how to read a script. A really cool woman called Mae Gibson who could see the commerciality of an idea but also give intelligent, direct criticism on full screenplays. I don’t know what she’s doing now, but I imagine it has integrity and greatness. Nobody else I met – from the BBC downwards – knew how to read a script or how to spot new talent. The best writers I have met in my life STILL haven’t got proper writing careers. Yet whichever fucking idiot (and I do mean fucking idiot who should be fucking shot for making a living pooing in the waters of culture) wrote Big Top probably exists in a bubble of tenuous kudos and pays his mortgage.I just researched it – his name is Daniel Peak. DANIEL PEAK IS A CUNT. Whenever anyone googles ‘Daniel Peak’, I want the following paragraph to come up….

Daniel Peak is a talentless writer who has crafted a tenuous career writing episodes of the three worst sitcoms the BBC has ever screened – My Hero, Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps and now Big Top. He has been fortunate to work in an era at the BBC where actual quality, vision or message is purely incidental. He benefits from a lack of self-awareness that allows him to actually leave the house and operate within a society where most people would feel at best awkward, if not suicidal, about the contribution they made to it were they the authors of My Hero or Big Top or Two Pints.

But we can’t exclusively blame Daniel Peak. He was just following orders. There’s lots of rubbish shitty writers out there, it’s not his fault he’s the one who managed to actually get his sticky turd to air.

So, I’m thinking ‘how does this get to air???? how? HOW?????’

and then I visualise the meeting…..

INT. BBC OFFICE. COMEDY DEPARTMENT – DAY.

FINELLA – a sloaney development executive adjusts her pashmina and sits in the empty office in an array of poses – trying to find the one with the most integrity. She settles on a crossed leg posture with slight intellectual head tilt. She whips a compact mirror out of her handbag and checks her nostrils for powder. The door flies open and BARRY marches in. Barry is a commissioning executive in light entertainment. He looks stressed but also vacant.

BARRY: Did you hear about Channel 4’s announcement?

FINELLA: The wanking over grannies thing?

BARRY: It’s  not wanking over them. It’s just called Wanking Grannies.

FINELLA: So what is it?

BARRY: Who knows? Who CARES? It’s called WANKING GRANNIES. Those genius bastards. I wish we could be that edgy. So who are we meeting?

FINELLA: The guys from Big Bear Films have a new sitcom idea!!!

BARRY: FINALLY! The guys who brought us MY HERO are stepping back up to the plate!

FINELLA: Who’d have thought that a sitcom about a superhero would get high ratings for FIVE series?

BARRY: I know, people said it wasn’t even funny but every Saturday night, right around dinnertime in an era before the wide choice of TV channels that we enjoy now, millions of people would have their tellies on and that would be on it.

FINELLA: Why did we ever cancel it?

BARRY: Well, we moved it to sunday afternoons and for some reason about 5 million of it’s devoted viewers just… went off it. TV audiences are hard to predict.

There is a knock at the door and MARCUS MORTIMER – owner of Big Bear Films and screenwriter DANIEL PEAK stride in.

FINELLA: Ah, Marcus! Dan! So good to see you, please take a seat.

DANIEL: Take a seat? Where will I take it…. to?

There is an awkward silence. Daniel laughs VERY LOUDLY. Everyone laughs.

BARRY: Marcus, how are you?

MARCUS: up three points according to the FT.

BARRY: Very good! Very good!

FINELLA: Would either of you like a drink?

DANIEL: I’d LIKE one…. but I wouldn’t HAVE SEX with one!

There is an awkward silence. Daniel laughs VERY LOUDLY. Everyone laughs.

BARRY: So tell us about this new sitcom idea….

MARCUS: It stars Amanda Holden – you know the leggy blonde on the cover of all the tabloids for various sexual exploits.

BARRY: Oh yeah!

MARCUS: Then it co-stars Ruth Madoc – she was the star of one of your biggest ever sitcoms of the 80s – people from the 80s will be delighted to see her again!

FINELLA: Yeah, that whole career revival thing is huge right now – look at Bruce Forsyth!

DANIEL: Look at him? I’d rather do that than SMELL him!

There is an awkward silence. Daniel laughs VERY LOUDLY. Everyone laughs.

MARCUS: Then…. TONY ROBINSON! BALDRICK FROM BLACKADDER!

BARRY: BALDRICK IS IN IT?????

MARCUS: The actor who played him, yes.

BARRY: Oh. Still….. he LOOKS like Baldrick!

MARCUS: He really does!

BARRY: And John Thomson from The Fast Show, Cold Feet and all of Steve Coogan’s shows! The show is funny, primetime and fit for FAMILY VIEWING.

BARRY: So, let me get this right a PRIME TIME show for ALL OF THE FAMILY starring a NATIONAL CELEBRITY with a BIG CELEBRITY CAREER REVIVAL and backed up by BLACKADDER, THE FAST SHOW AND STEVE COOGAN?

DANIEL: BACKED UP…. but not like a toilet gets backed up.

There is an awkward silence. Daniel laughs VERY LOUDLY. Everyone laughs.

FINELLA: Barry?

BARRY: It’s on! Let’s commission FIVE series! Shake my hand!

DANIEL: I’ll SHAKE YOUR HAND but not your willy!

There is an awkward silence. Daniel laughs VERY LOUDLY. Everyone laughs.

FINELLA: A successful meeting!

DANIEL and MARCUS head for the door. As they leave, Barry shouts after them…

BARRY: Oh, what’s it about?

MARCUS: A circus!

BARRY: Whatever!

END.

You see, that’s what I’ve realised. It’s all about concept. Commissioners care about who’s in it and who it’s aimed at and how they can market it and sell the concept overseas but not… whether it’s any good. It struck me that all of the best TV shows can’t be boiled down to a very effective concept whereas all the worst can.

CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM – the writer of Seinfeld plays himself getting swearily angry at day to day life in LA.

MY HERO – the funniest character from hit sitcom Father Ted gets his own superhero sitcom aimed at the whole family.

CARNIVALE – a host of unknown actors play characters in a touring circus in depression-era America which provides the backdrop for an epic battle against good and evil

BIG TOP – comedy heavyweights Tony Robinson and John Thomson star with sexy celeb Amanda Holden in a comedy for all the family.

THE OFFICE – a cast of unknowns star in a faux-reality documentary about life in an office with a bad boss

HOLE IN THE WALL – a huge team of celebrities battle it out with hilarious consequences for all the family to enjoy.

It’s so so hard to convey quality through concept. Only commericiality. And if something is commissioned on that basis, it has very little chance of being good. The people in charge do not know how to read screenplays. Or how to talk to upcoming writers and directors and producers and see integrity in them. The best shows – the ones that will always be remembered started as great scripts and were produced by casting the right people for the roles – regardless of their celebrity status. Big Top is the culmination of everything that is presently wrong with the BBC.

That said, over on C4, Misfits is a bold commissioning choice. It’s not perfect but it’s the first time in many years in this country that a big budget genre piece with attitude and no stars has surfaced. Apart from Skins, but that was marketed purely on sex and shocks. Actually, so is Misfits. At least Channel 4 are sometimes stealthy about their agenda.

I’m going to sound amazingly pretentious and snotty when I say this but… I don’t watch TV. About 2 years ago, I moved to my current house and in the months it took me to settle, I didn’t bother connecting my TV to an aerial (the aerial socket was in a weird place) and I realised very quickly that I didn’t miss television. I’d taken to watching DVDs on my laptop and was working really hard for the first 18 months here, so I was never in that mood to collapse in front of the telly and let whatever was on play out in front of me.

Also, as someone who had grown up glued to the box, the frustration about the decline of UK TV since 2001 – the rise of reality shows, the lack of new comedy and drama with any voice and the dumbing down of everything else – was getting too much to handle, I was better off out of it.

When the BBC launched their Iplayer service and channel 4 similarly launched 4OD, it was the dream solution. So, when I now have my winding-down couple of hours at the end of the evening, I’ll hit iplayer and see what documentaries they have and I’ll watch one of the few ‘reality’ shows that I’m capable of enjoying – any of the cooking ones, Dragons Den and The Apprentice. On Iplayer, the docs are all stored in the category ‘factual’. Factual is a mixed bag, mainly dominated by lazy syrupy demi-consumer-based-gameshows; Flog It, Bargain Hunt, Car Booty or shows about property – Escape to the Countryside, To Buy or Not to Buy, Homes Under The Hammer. It’s as if the BBC has looked at society and said ‘they all want to own homes but they’re too poor and have to buy crap from car boot sales – so this is what they probably want to see’. It’s a wasteland.

But I have a new obsession. I don’t know why I first clicked on the show called ‘Don’t Tell The Bride’, as I have no surface interest in weddings but it’s a show in which an impoverished couple is given 12k by the BBC of licence-payers money to have a wedding. The comedy twist is that the groom has to organise it himself with no input from – or contact with – the bride. The title sequence stresses that this is agreed ‘in front of a lawyer’ – so it’s pretty serious.

It is neither the subject matter or the premise which has struck a chord with me, though. I’m not convinced the programme-makers are even aware of the cumulative effect watching a whole series of this show has on painting a social portrait of modern relationships. It is absolutely fascinating. I suppose they could only attract a certain demographic to appear on the show – young enough to be whacky, poor enough to be desperate and, maybe, thoughtless enough to stage a wedding at just 3 week’s notice. There is a mean smugness behind the concept where the BBC seems to be dangling a financial carrot infront of desperate families to risk their most important day for our lascivious pleasure. They don’t have to participate, though. They deserve as much sympathy as the Big Brother contestants who are prepared to forego their complete dignity for a shot at fame and money just as these people are prepared to forego the beauty of a meaningful wedding for a bit of a free knees-up.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that every episode of this series would be radically different – different couples, personalities, problems, outcomes… but they are all disconcertingly identical. This consistency – that the BBC has found so many identical couples (and the show doesnt feel like it’s made with the kind of effort it would take to do that on purpose) – paints a really compelling portrait of love in our time.

These couples are all already living together – some already have children – and they talk about how much they love each other. The episode starts with them being separated. The women cry, the men assume a pose of desperate confusion until the car is out of sight and they relax a bit and make no secret of their feeling of freedom. At this point the best man arrives. These guys are, almost without fail, utter twats. The brides span a limited emotional spectrum in regard to these chaps from uneasy toleration to unbridled hatred. As they should because these guys all represent the fact that the grooms are not ready to get married in any way. In footage of the couples together, the grooms are sedate, docile and permitted to do basic household chores under supervision. In footage of them with their best men, they are animated, alert, happy and say ‘dude’ a lot. Sometimes, there is more physical affection displayed between the groom and best man than the groom and bride.

At this point, the bride goes to stay with her family and the groom and best man go to the pub. The bride details exactly what her dream wedding is, intercut with her husband-to-be detailing the exact same description but prefaced with ’she definitely wouldn’t want…’ It kind of boggles the mind to think that not only have they never discussed this but that the men’s instincts about the women’s tastes could be SO out of whack. You get the first hint that these guys don’t actually ever listen to what their partners might be saying.

The first two days of wedding planning are spent either drinking with the best man or playing computer games with him, self-assured that they are geniuses who deserve a break. Then they start making calls and reality sets in – what do you mean you can’t book a church with just 2 weeks notice? What do you mean invites have to be sent out? It becomes a huge hassle to them and they make decisions with little care or thought. Thought being the main problem. A wedding can be the most important day in a woman’s life to her but the grooms give only the slightest of thought about that. they choose the venues they are impressed by (this could be in spirit or price) themselves; pubs, tents, horrible cheap hotels under the Heathrow flightpath. They also prove that when man is left alone to organise catering, he will invariably opt for a ‘hog roast’ – an entire pig carcass rotated over an open flame. Always amusing when the bride’s family come from cultures who don’t ‘do’ pig.

The groom goes on to pick venues, catering, the dress, flowers, cake and entertainment all, almost without fail, not just the exact opposite of what the bride wanted but specifically singled out by her as something she would kill him for if he chose. The groom has to meet the bridesmaids in some horrible chain store to sort out their dresses. He always treats them with barely concealed contempt and stresses to the camera beforehand ‘they’ll wear what I tell them to! I’m not having any backchat!’

This contempt is always comically restated when the hen/stag nights occur – the groom sends his to-be and her mates off to the bingo or some crappy pub whilst him and his mates hit the town Vegas-style and have a full-on money-burning binge complete with dirty girls.

The big day arrives and one-by-one the disappointments are revealed to the bride – the meringue dress which she had categorically said she would rather die than wear, the tiara she denounced as tacky by concept, the bridesmaids who look like prawns, the ridiculous and inappropriate venue, the choice of day (who gets married on a thursday???), the hog roast complete with withering starving vegetarian guests, the string quartet she had hoped for replaced by a karaoke machine and some train wreck of a relative belting out ‘I Will Always Love You’. Everything wrong and misjudged but one-by-one immediately excused and forgiven. Each show ends happily with everyone agreeing that it couldn’t have possibly have been a more magical event and what an incredible job the groom had done and how much they love each other.

It’s very sweet. Isn’t it?

I’ve been thinking, as have many people, about Nick Griffin and the BNP quite a lot recently. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about why I just can’t find it within myself to get worked up about the man.

The fury about him being allowed to speak on television and the anxiety about the perceived swell in support for the BNP are things I would assume that I’m rather hardwired to indulge in, yet I can’t bring myself to be a part of them. It isn’t apathy or defeatist. I think I’m just rather happy to have him ‘in charge’ of racism. While he’s at the top of the UK fascist contingent, I think we’re in quite a good position.

First things first – by trying to ‘play the game’ and legitamise his party, he’s had to somewhat sort out the militant and racist groups he slithered from. He understands that to achieve their ‘Britain for the British (but not the British with different coloured skin, obviously)’ end game, they can no longer take the law into their own hands, they must crack the system from the inside. I have no facts and figures in front of me but it feels like the organised racist violence and activity which was so pervasive in the 80’s and somewhat the 90’s has died down.

Nick Griffin himself is an interesting figurehead. At first he seems like a kind of rubbish James Bond villain. Sitting back smugly in his chair absolutely tickled that nobody will guess his masterplan for global domination. He seems to delight in presenting a dignified public face whilst harbouring the dark truth of his cantankerous plan. But, of course, he’s rubbish at it because most of us know his history and his true ideals. This turns him into kind of a pantomime baddie and makes all of us complicit in this bizarrely enjoyable routine in which we love to loudly boo and hiss whenever we see him and wait joyously for him to say  ‘OOOOOOH, I’M NOT A RACIST!’ so we can reply  ‘OH YES YOU ARE!’ and he loves it and shouts back ‘OOOOH WINSTON CHURCHILL WOULD HAVE VOTED FOR THE BNP’ and we all try to scream back loudest ‘OH NO HE WOULDN’T!!!!!!!’ And it’s all rather jolly. He has neither the passion and vision of Hitler (and I am in no way saying that Hitler should be admired for these things) nor the charisma and leadership skills of Mosley. He’s more like the manager of a Tesco in the shit part of town who says he’s sorry they don’t stock tofu but blatantly doesn’t mean it and actually thinks you’re a bit of a cunt for eating tofu.

I think perhaps my favourite thing about Nick Griffin’s reign is his rubbish masterplan. After a lifetime of racist huffpuffery, he has decided that the best way of taking power is by pretending to be something else. This is quite brilliantly stupid. So, he goes into depressed areas and rallies support by telling the disenfranchised that his party will put their needs first. This has been working. If any of the other parties could be bothered to seem to care about the disenfranchised, it’d work for them too. Disenfranchised people generally would like nothing more than to feel… enfranchised. The votes he is gaining from these people, however, are not indicative of their political beliefs and, should the day ever come (it never will) that Griffin is sworn in as Prime Minister and turns around with an evil cackle shouting ‘RIGHT! Now I banish every black, brown, yellow and purple person from my country forever!!!’ it would be many of his actual voters who would stand side-by-side with their friends in their beautiful multi-cultural community (along with the police and armed forces) and say ‘I think maybe you should leave, pal’. He wouldn’t last a day.

I think that’s why I am amused and unfazed by him. The sheer lunacy of attempting a racist agenda by non-racist means is compellingly notable. I mean, are we short of racists in this country? Wouldn’t he do better by being explicit and honest about his intentions and just uniting the latent prejudice and racism that is omnipresent in this country? Real actual racists must be despairing as to what he is doing to their cause.

Which is why I’m rather happy we have him about.

Is optimisery the opposite of grumptimism? Who cares.

A reader of this blog complained that the last post about these endless shitty ‘100 best films’ lists lazily tossed at us by third-rate media whores was too negative. So in the name of being positive, here is mine…

Well, not quite. About 5 years ago, a friend in the US challenged me to write about 10 films I was passionate about. I think that has far more validity than ‘BEST FILMS’, it gives someone a chance to explore their personal relationship to a film and what it has meant to them rather than trying to work out how it is ‘better’ than other films.

5 years has passed since I wrote the following and I’d probably swap a couple of the films out now but generally it’s still accurate. So for delicate souls forced to read my evil blog, here is something nice….

10 FILMS I’M PASSIONATE ABOUT (in no particular order)

I’m going to start with An American Werewolf in London, which is a film I just keep coming back to and have probably watched at least 3 times a year since I was about 12.

I often use it as an example of how a film doesn’t have to be about lofty concepts or pretentious subject matter to be a well made piece. Everything surrounding it screams ’schlock’ – the title, the subject matter, the director’s resume (which literally screams ’schlock!’). I’m not at all surprised people out of a certain demographic haven’t seen it at all and always enjoy the positive reactions from like middle-aged women when I screen it in class.

Its just solid from the bottom to the top here is a writer/director who not only knows what he is trying to say but has found a new way of saying it. At core, its a simple morality tale about heeding warnings and the responsibility you must take for others. At each stage of the film, David – despite being a good guy that you genuinely empathise with – ignores several warnings and others pay the cost.

The tone of this film balances on a knife edge but never waivers it is exactly 50% horror, 50% comedy. The humour is spot-on both in situation and character and the horror is genuinely scary and disturbing. The result is a film that feels very human. It hits a point of reality, we believe in these characters and their relationships with one another. They don’t feel like plot points or werewolf fodder, we’re not waiting for them to be picked off in slasher style. It really doesn’t follow a traditional horror narrative, if anything it plays out like your standard drama. I maintain that the film has more in common with Midnight Express than any werewolf film. Being about a likable guy who broke a well-stated law and has to pay a price so high for it that despite being clearly in the wrong we empathise for him (despite, in this case, the fact that he’s killing people)

Besides this solid base, Landis pushed the boundaries of the genre. Not only did he make a werewolf film that is somewhat cheapened by being described as ‘horror’, he still managed to take that genre’s conventions and raise them up a notch.

the transformation scene. Still one of the greatest effects sequences in cinema, hasn’t aged at all. Still as shocking to me each time. How in a well-lit room, he can go from reading a book to sweating, screaming in agony and then into a complete bone-crunching transformation. Unlike so many other effects sequences, this was not gimmicky at all. Everything served the story. We weren’t wowed by the effects, we felt his pain and, man, it just felt so real.

So many filmmakers want to be innovators. They want to push boundaries and show you stuff you’ve never seen and basically collect kudos and it always seems to be to the detriment of the film – flashy stunts, effects, gore scenes. Its basic nut-flexing and almost always detracts from the narrative or anchors a film down to an era of technology. George Lucas’s entire new trilogy shows this. All too oftenthe story serves the ttechnology we all want to be DaDavidincher – but here is a film which hits amamazingeverisimilitudesp?) because the filmmaker isn’t trying to b some kind of paragon of style. it all serves the story. Suburban transformations, awesome.

Originality and innovation comes when the filmmakers are more concerned with finding effective visual/storytelling methods than appearing to be an original or innovative person.

But I’m making it sound too poncy. I don’t just ‘appreciate’ this film, I fucking enjoy it.

- the banter between jack and David as they walk across the moors in daylight

- that fucking pub ‘you made me MISS’ an, how the tone drops in a heartbeat from hilarity and warmth to cold fucking silence.

- the nervous tension as theylise thththey’reing tot geggetacked by the wolf. real fucking nervous tension, no filmic cliches, then jack gets fucking decimated and he even shoushouts ‘hee’he’sling me’ which gives me shivers everevery time. and David fucking runs away – as we all would.

- frank oz in the hospital

- those fucking dream sequences.

You see, I’m just going through it scene b y scene. its perfect throughout.

For me, 2 scenes hit genius – the first is in the hospital when he is visited by a mutilated Jack, and not in a ‘wooooooooo surreal scary way. His best friend, face ripped open, starts with ‘can I have a piece of toast?’. probably my favourite scene in film history.

Then the scene in the cinema. genius. I cant think of anotherfilm (aalthough I’im sure you can prove me wrong) where at one point the killer is confronted by all of his victims, in various stages of mutilation, who in quite a friendly manner try to ‘blue sky’ the situation and how best David could end the madness.

Perfectly cast with unknowns and British character actors, this film is just watertight. I cant think of any films from my childhood which I have gone on to appreciate more and more on ever more complicated levels. But, yeah, most of all, I just fucking enjoy the shit out of it. Its funny, compelling, scary, fucking awesome.

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A Room For Romeo Brass.

This one is just so dear to my heart, if you say the title to me I’ll just be like ‘man…’ and sigh. Here’s the thing; I grew up obsessed with movies, totally obsessed, I’d go to the cinema like three times a week to see whatever came out, I wasn’t at all selective, I’ve seen like every crappy film that was released between 86- 93.

At about 16, I started getting a bit more selective and hunting out better films and had this realisation that I’d seen very few British films, I found Withnail & I, which was great and then jumped headfirst into the films of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. I hated them. Ken Loach is a gritty fucking guy, but it often seemed to be grit for grit’s sake. There was just too much going on politically, they felt like working class propaganda more than good stories (Kes was pretty great nonetheless). Mike Leigh was almost the opposite he seemed to be making these films that served up the working and upper classes on a plate to the middle class to either laugh at or feel sorry for. Just horribly patronising films. And every fucker loved them. Still do. I hate the average Loach/Leigh renter. Again – Leigh is not a bad filmmaker and he’s done some great work (Naked was amazing) but on the whole it felt that through the 80s and 90s Loach and Leigh had a stranglehold over British cinema and everyone was happy with that. They won awards and took the lion’s share of the funding from the government schemes.

The only other stuff coming out of the UK was either east-end gangster films or American-financed films presenting a picture-book country fulfilling all of their aristo stereotypes. I came to this revelation when I saw Three Men and a Little Lady, the second half is in the UK and I remember just being livid that they portrayed the country in this way.

So, that’s the background, since the 60s, the UK just really hadn’t been truthfully represented in cinema. That never sat easily with me. I felt that if you came from any place or background in America, there was probably at least a couple of films which struck true with your life and you could relate to. I never had that. WE never had that, especially if you lived outside of London. Provincial Britain just never got a look in.

Then in ‘97 Twenty Four Seven came out and it was this hugely exciting thing for me. Shane Meadows was this really motivated dude from Nottingham who’d played the funding game, done a couple of interesting shorts (one was great, the others kind of were a mess) and scraped the funds together to make a feature. He made all the sophomore mistakes in that he was clearly desperate to make a film that would be received as a real film – so it was shot black and white, messed about with time frame a bit and had an ending that was a bit brutal and overblown within the context of the rest of the film. But it was great, regional accents took centre stage. The cats – were they even actors? if so, they were little provincial workshop actors. the dialogue seemed to be mainly improvised and it was so fucking fresh and vibrant and funny. It was the first British film that wasn’t pandering to stereotypes or hiding an agenda, it was just a story set in Britain. A little British story. So, I loved it and saw it a few times at the cinema, dragging everyone I knew along with me, but in my heart I still knew, despite what it represented to me, it was still a pretty flawed film.

So 2 years later, Meadows kicks us A Room For Romeo Brass. I love it. Firstly, as a filmmaker, he’d found his confidence, the pacing is great and it’s amazingly well filmed. The most dramatic scenes playing out often in single camera long takes without flashy visuals. The drama takes centre stage and it feels all the more real for the distance of the camera.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Its about growing up as a normal kid in suburban England. The choices we make, the mistakes, the fluctuating qualities of friendship. The actual plot follows Romeo Brass, a chubby Nottingham kid and his best mate Knox, who has a bad back. They get into a fight and get helped out by a guy called Morrell in his mid-20’s. He seems a little bit odd but quickly falls into the big brother role. When he gets unhinged, he drives a wedge between Romeo and Knox, playing on his new place in Romeo’s life as a replacement father figure after a confrontation with Romeo’s actual deadbeat father.

Everyone in the film is somehow damaged but its not made explicit, its never really played on, its just understood that everyone is a bit damaged, that’s how life is. The drama doesn’t kick in until the end but it keeps you so engaged just watching the character Morrell. He’s both endearing and terrifying. Like an abused puppy who is fun to play with until he suddenly bites your hand off.

The performances are off the hook, no big names at all (except for a Bob Hoskins cameo), the only recognisable cast member is Frank Harper – maybe the UKS most dependable character actor, always watchable and fantastic. Everyone else, well, it just feels documentary. The 2 kids play off each other fantastically and are clearly improvising and loving it. Morrell was Paddy Considine’s first screen role and really one of the best performances I can think of in British film ever. Like I said, you can’;t take your eyes off him because he alternates between this pathetic but sweet character you can’t help but love and this absolute psychopath who could do anything.

The final scene is perfect. No-one dies, nothing really happens that is technically so huge, but it plays out like real British suburban drama. The threat of having your home and family invaded and uncomfortable stand-offs in the street. Knox’s dad vows to protect his family no matter what and his willingness to die for them even surprises his attacker, and its so amazingly acted.

Morrell: Do you want me to kill you? shall I put a hammer through your fucking skull?
Knox: I don’t know.
Morrell: You Don’t know? Get on your knees, I’m going to get my hammer and smash your fucking skull in.

Knox gets on his knees.

Morrell: He’s fucking doing it! You fucking coward!

Ugh, so good. Like he’s saying  ‘I’m going to defend them even though I don’t know how.’

The film kind of slipped under most people’s radar because it wasn’t very flashy or concepty. I don’t even know how it fared for reviews but it means a lot to me because its as close as I’ve ever seen to my childhood on screen. suburban 60s architecture, getting chips on the way home from school, hanging out in the countryside but not really appreciating it. I’m very happy that this film exists and I will always wave the flag for Shane Meadows because as patchy as his films are (I didn’t like Once Upon a Time In The Midlands) he’s really the only guy out there making films that portray our culture as most of us know it.

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Defending Your Life

I think quite often in life, as much as you want to retain an appearance of cool sophistication, the comforts you turn to when you’re alone are those which defy kudos but strike a chord somewhere deep in you.

Albert Brooks, man. This guy’s flicks are my comfort viewing. He’s like old baggy sweaters and Sundays on the sofa to me. I don’t drink, but if I did, his films would be my hangover viewing. When I’m tired or stressed, my routine is a long bath, cook a good meal from scratch and stick on an Albert Brooks film.

I’ve always viewed him as kind of a footnote to film culture in the last few decades. Everyone kind of recognises him, from Taxi Driver or his fucking world-class performance in Broadcast News (god, I can watch that film a thousand times but won’t put it on the list cos I’m trying to contain my Brooks worship to this one), I guess he’s most famous now for being the fish in Finding Nemo. A lot of people don’t realise that he’s had a pretty solid career writing/directing and his films really are these little gems that so easily go unnoticed or just don’t look like they’re going to be cool. I wouldn’t feel walking into a video shop hiring any of his flicks.

So what is he and why do I like him? His career, flicks and subject matter resemble closest those of Woody Allen, both writing and directing themselves as the eternally caricatured autobiographical flawed male central character, but he kind of does Woody Allen with a lack of sophistication, education and refinement. That sounds unattractive, right? But he’s like an everyman Woody Allen. What Brooks lacks in pretension, he makes up with in soul. Where Woody Allen’s characters are usually quite cold and cut-off, Brooks is warm and almost pathetically endearing. He narrowly avoids schmaltz but still carries about him the look of a kicked puppy having just made the decision to forgive his abusive owner.

So, through a series of films, the standard brooks character – essentially well-meaning but somewhat arrogant and selfish – finds himself swallowed up by the consequences of one of his own grand, but flawed, ideas. In Real Life, he’s the documentary film-making following a family 24/7 about 30 years before reality TV became a…. reality. In Modern Romance, he decides to prematurely break up his relationship for reasons he can barely rationallise. In Lost In America, he convinces his wife to sell all their assets, buy a Winnebago and spend the rest of their lives seeing America. In Mother, he realises that the reason all his relationships with women have failed is because he’s never surmounted his relationship with his mother, so in his mid-40s, he moves back home. There is a definite formula and its a simple but effective one.

If I’m being honest, I love his films fairly equally but Defending Your Life stands out a bit for me. It was a bit bolder and a bit more of an achievement. It has a lot of heart and, more so than all of his other films, it really is about puncturing the bubble of complacency most people live in.

So, the film pretty much opens with him dying. Its his birthday, his professional life is going well, he has just bought himself a BMW and his colleagues have bought him a bunch of CD’s for him to play on his in-car CD player (a sign of luxury back when this was made). He drops the cd’s, bends down to pick them up, veers across the road and drives straight into a bus. The rest of the movie takes place in Judgment City, a holding station between Earth and the beyond where a judge, under the guidance of counsels for the defense and prosecution, scrutinises events in your life and decides whether you have grown sufficiently to ‘move on’ or if you’ll get reincarnated to try again. This flick follows the abnormally long 9 days of Brooks’s trial. In a world where most trials last just a few days and most people have only needed reincarnation a few times, the more Brooks learns about himself, his life and his chances of ever moving on play to the stubborn neurosis that got him in that position in the first place.

I like the set-up, its an original and captivating story to me. Populated by fun characters and nice touches. Those who work in Judgment City use more of their brains than normal humans and take great delight in watching our funny little ways. Rip Torn as Brooks’ representation is fucking awesome and, the day he’s away is replaced by Buck Henry who, Brooks is repeatedly assured is the best there is, but stays silent throughout.

There’s a nice little romance between Brooks and Meryl Streep – it falls a little flat as all relationships in Brooks films do cos you kind of get the feeling he’s a little bit more in love with himself (as a filmmaker and object of his own focus) than the arm candy, but since this film really is about his weakness its nice seeing him go up against a more rounded character.

As a film, its kind of standard in execution, but the glory is in the details. All food in Judgment City is free, plentiful. delicious and calorie-free. The mob of sushi-chefs repeating Brooks’ every sentence, the Italian waiter who insists on baking him 9 pies – one for each day of his trial. The only guy he meets who has a longer trial and more reincarnations than him (whose biggest achievement in this last life was coining the phrase ‘ALL NUDE’ for strip bars). The amazing fast-cut montage the prosecution shows in response to Brooks protestation that he didn’t make bad choices, which catalogues every chainsaw accident, bad car deal, fall off roof and brushing teeth with shampoo incident of his adult life in quick succession. All of the footage shown of his life is priceless – watching him turn down a chance to invest at the ground level in Casio and instead putting his money into diseased cattle. Watching him spend ages psych up for a pay review and then accepting the first offer.

This is not genius film making, not something I’d take a girl I was trying to impress to see or display a poster of on my wall. But this is my thing. This is what I dig. Put me on a desert island with a DVD player and the back catalogue of just one director and this is the dude I’d choose. When it boils down to it, its all about comfort and this is my comfort viewing.

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Silent Running

This film means a lot to me on a lot of different levels but above all it’s a nice original piece that has aged gracefully whilst it’s message has increased with potency.

I’m not a fan of sci-fi at all, this should be said. At worst the genre promotes cliches and stereotypes safe in the knowledge it is going to a rabid audience, at best it seems to use heavy handed metaphors for today’s society in the context of special effects and make-up. I don’t think sci-fi films can avoid falling into these traps because they are the cornerstones of the genre (and many wouldn’t call them traps at all). Silent Running is certainly the latter but it never feels like it is trying to cunningly get a message across. It deals with the issues at hand in an upfront way, avoiding simile, and plays out like a flick that could take place logically within the realms of our reality in the space of a couple of decades. There are no funny looking aliens or lazers. Its safe.

I feel that this was the first film I ever discovered for myself and certainly the first I ever called my favourite film with any degree of validity (I’m a 28 year old guy, Star Wars was my first favourite film before I’d even seen it). I think at 9, when I first saw this, all the films I’d seen had been as a result of my parents taking me along or sitting me down, friends forcing or mass-marketing. I read a description of it in the TV guide, had never heard of it and decided it was something I wanted to see. I’m sure I didn’t get past the words ‘from the effects producer of Star Wars’, but I found it and waited a week to see it on BBC 2, 6pm on a week night.

It really was unlike anything I’d seen up to that point but I wasn’t put off because it still had that familiar feel of 70s cinema sci-fi – a bit industrial, people in jumpsuits and American accents (so it felt like a real film). I was struck by the fact that after the initial flurry of activity, nothing really happened, but it wasn’t boring or inaccessible. It was kind of awesome just watching this really passionate guy doing the gardening and teaching robots how to play cards.

The story goes like this; after much change, expansion, modernisation/destruction of Earth (I’m still unclear as to whether there was a crisis or this was just a government programme), the last remaining forests and natural habitats exist only in domes being stored on American Airlines spaceships. Lowell – played by Bruce Dern – is the botanist on one such ship. Society has moved on and he is the butt of many jokes from his 3 other crew mates as he chooses to eat natural food and gets angry when they drive their buggies over his grass. He’s basically treated like a space straight-edger. They humour him but find him and his idealism ridiculous. They get a message from the government to blow up the forest domes and return to Earth, the ships are to go back into commercial use. As happy as the rest of the crew are to be going home, Lowell can’t believe that the government is prepared to destroy these last remnants of nature, ensuring that the Earth will never be refoliated. He tries to stop his crew mates from destroying the forests as all the other ships are but to no avail. They’ve already destroyed one of the 3 domes, he kills one of his crew with a spade in one dome, locks the others in the other dome but they’d already primed the bomb so they die along with it. Lowell has one dome left, no crew mates and after feeding a story to the other ships, manages to get the ship to drift out of contact, presumed missing. The rest of the film is really him coming to terms with his action, trying to save his forest from dying due to lack of sunlight and reprogramming and befriending 2 maintenance robots (played by double-amputee victims).

It was the first film I ever saw with a strong political message, that if we allow our attitudes to important issues slowly ebb away, one day we’ll be left with nothing. I don’t even see this as a staunchly environmental sentiment and, obviously, like everything these days, it draws a terrifying parallel with the way Bush is slowly erasing liberties and the everyday Joe doesn’t really care. The guys he kills are not bad dudes at all, they’re just normal guys exhibiting routine behaviour – nature means nothing to them and hasn’t meant much to society for decades, so why should they care that this last speck is destroyed? its almost all gone anyway and they just want to get home. Lowell comes off as just being a bit of a freak for caring. The bitter irony comes later when we see him with a certificate from some government scheme of the environmentalist’s pledge he’d signed as a child stating that as a good American he would do all he could to save the environment.

I think the most chilling moment comes when the last human voice he ever hears before drifting out of contact is one telling him that for giving up his life in the supposed pursuit of following orders and destroying the forests, he’s dying a ‘great American’.

Again, the story kind of plays second place for me to the tone, the acting and the awesome little touches. I don’t understand how Bruce Dern didn’t quite breakthrough to proper acclaim and bigger roles. He’s the perfect combination of lead and character actor, but I guess I just like to see this as his film. Perfect in it’s own way and perfect for him. Dern is just supercharged and shows his full spectrum of moods, a really rounded performance when he could easily have played the whole film as a curmudgeonly hermit.

The model effects are great and predate Star Wars by a clear half-decade, its directed by SW/2001 effects guru Doug Trumbull and I kind of wonder why he didn’t go on to direct more as I wouldn’t describe it as an ‘effects’ film. It has a good pedigree, having been written by Michael Cimino and Stephen Bochco in their hungry early years and, man, its just a great film to stick on late at night. It has that kind of spiritualism of solitude thing going on.

One of those great 70s oddities which is too quirky to be commercial and too straightforward to be quirky. In a horrible twist of irony, they don’t make them like this anymore – why would they make a big budget, starless, first-time writer/director combo film about an intimate human story? It just wouldn’t make commercial sense, and 30 years later, people won’t demand or see the point in it. Ugh.

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The Graduate.

I don’t put much stock in films that are labeled as classics and I kind of have beef with people who do. I think the label ‘milestone’ is more appropriate for most of these things. These are flicks which mark a point of innovation or the genesis of a genre or film making discipline. They’re great to study and to watch for the sake of historical importance, but I just can’t quite believe people really dig them.
Every time someone returns a copy of Battleship Potemkin and goes ‘oh, it was great!’ I always kind of think ‘Yeah, it was great when it was released, but fuck that for a Saturday night’.

Psycho is a classic and was great but if it genuinely scares you….. ugh, I don’t know. Call me a heathen if you will, its not that I don’t appreciate these films, it’s just that the visual language of film develops so quickly that as advanced as they often were for their times, they’re just horribly dated in terms of structure, pacing and aesthetic. Don’t get me wrong, I still love me some Hitchcock, love me some Marx Bros, love me some Ealing, Chaplin and De Mille. I really love me some Norman Wisdom. Actually, I’m half reconsidering the point I was trying to make, but I’ll soldier on. All I’m really trying to say is that when asked to list 10 films I’m passionate about, only one of them that springs to mind is really labeled a classic. And films labeled classic, as great as they are, often don’t really speak to me and how can you love a film you don’t engage with?

I don’t know why I didn’t see The Graduate earlier, having seen most ‘classics’ in my mid-teens. I was always aware of the poster and the soundtrack and I guess it felt like one of those films that you kind of felt you had seen without actually having seen it. I’d seen clips and read articles and thought I had a good feeling for it. I actually saw it for the first time when I was 18 and finishing up school

To this day, its the only film I’ve seen which captures what it feels like to be a ‘young man’. Young enough to know nothing, old enough to know better. Nothing has ever come close, John Hughes skirted around the issue in pre-emo style, Johnny Depp played young male angst in every incarnation. Its hard to do, because essentially, as soon as you show a young man facing his weaknesses or crying, you’re in chick flick territory. Men will disengage with it emotionally as quickly as they can. Fuck those pussy flicks.

The Graduate deals with this part of us that isn’t often spoken about, what most guys do when they need to emotionally shut down. Its like hedonism but it lacks the bravado and bragging, its what happens when we sink into ‘whatever’. We knowingly sleep with the wrong people, use and demean perfectly nice girls, ignore our friends and become monosyllabic with our family, choose to do nothing in particular and anger those around us with our general apathy towards life.

I’d dig it if it were just a film about that but to round it off, Ben Braddock just represents the awkward humanity in most of us educated middle-classers. He’s not an asshole and he’s not a saint. He knows how to go off the rails but he doesn’t really know how to do it right.

The joy, as with all these flicks, is in the details. The script is probably the best use of dialogue I can think of. It has a polite, clipped quality to it but that just serves to make it all the more absurd. The fact that he’s sleeping with his parents’ friend and still calling her Mrs Robinson in bed. Buck Henry is just one of the great dialogue dudes and I find it weird that he hasn’t really done all that much since. He did Catch 22, so maybe his skill is more in adaptation.

Perfectly photographed and scored – the montage sequence still remains one of my favourite uses of editing and camerawork in film history. Mike Nichols is just so smart and confident with it. The stuff with the dive suit in the swimming pool on his birthday which would probably in someone else’s hands would play out like such a heavy-handed metaphor comes across as so obvious yet understated.

I usually focus on either visual style OR scripting. This is one of those films that gets you excited about both. Buck Henry is perfect for saying everything that needs said, Mike Nichols is a genius at saying everything that isn’t vocalised.

Performances – amazing. Dustin Hoffman, holy shit, young Hoffman is my favourite actor ever. The Graduate, Tootsie (I’m still deciding if this gets to make the list), Kramer vs Kramer, Marathon Man. I swear there has never been more exciting actor to watch than young Hoffman. He’s utterly uninteresting now but, man, his 70s and 80s shit is fucking fired up. William Daniels (voice of KITT) as his dad showing that generation gap in full force. Anne Bancroft, shit, I’d still do her. Buck Henry’s cameo as the hotel clerk, Richard Dreyfuss’s one line, Murray Hamilton as Mr Robinson. Craggy, broken, awesome dude.

I’ll accept all criticism that the third act is kind of weak. Once Elaine comes into the picture, it goes off the boil A BIT. But where was the story going to go? Besides, its all worth it for the ending. The bit in the church at Elaine’s wedding. He doesn’t get there in time, watches from above ‘oh Jesus god no’, starts hammering on the glass ‘ELAAAAAAAAAAAAINNNE’. ‘BENNNNNNNN’. And he hasn’t even made it in time! He didn’t make it in time to stop the wedding – she’s totally married to the pipe smoking dude but she runs anyway.

Then the greatest final shot in cinema history. I mean, Nichols could have fallen into SO many cliches for a happy ending where Ben Braddock now finally knows what he wants and where he’s going in life. But no. He fucking left that camera rolling. So they run from the church, get on the bus, sit down grin to each other and grin to themselves about their triumph. The camera keeps rolling. They catch their breath. Their smiles a fade a bit. They don’t know where to look or what expressions to wear. They’ve achieved nothing. She’s married, he still doesn’t have any plan above getting her and they’re on some fucking bus going god knows where.

This film doesn’t age for me at all. The camerawork and direction is still sophisticated even in today’s terms. The concerns remain relevant – young educated dudes who have bright futures but don’t know how or why to start them. At least a couple of times a year I’ll hit that point the ‘what am I doing, why am I doing it?’ point and this film is just all the validation I need to get through it.

It should be compulsory viewing for teenagers. These days films tend to illustrate the issues by turning the characters into goths, anorexics and drug addicts. It doesn’t have to be that overblown and dramatic, every normal person with half a brain goes through these periods of confusion and apathy and a story told simply is a story told well.

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My Life

I want you to think about two things going into this.

Firstly, think about the movie Ghost. Bare with me, imagine it wasn’t directed by that dude Zucker (his first non-Airplane movie), then imagine it didn’t star Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg. Recast it with your favourite leads (but keep Vincent Schiavalli). Strip out the pottery scene, maybe, definitely ditch Unchained Melody and try to see it through the eyes of another director. Almost any good director, I don’t care. Tim Burton? Wim Wenders, Gilliam, not Spielberg – no one schmaltzy. What I’m saying is just try to look at the concept, structure and the barest elements of it. Its pretty fucking cool.

Now, take yourself back to winter ‘88. Tim Burton’s got the gig directing Batman – the ultimate superhero at the peak of the ultimate action film decade. And who does he cast? Michael fucking Keaton. Beetlejuice! Mr Mom! There’s re-imagining and there’s taking the piss. But he was really good, wasn’t he? He was just fucking right. Christian Bale’s not going to be that good.

OK, so with those thoughts in mind, I want to drag you through your video shop to the ‘drama’ section, the quagmire of not-very-genre films of the last three decades. Somewhere on one of the lower shelves – the flicks that hang around cos no one can be arsed to buy them ex-rental – is a dull looking box for an uninteresting looking film. Man, it looks like a fucking TV movie. Soft focus pic of Keaton giving Nicole Kidman a little cuddle – both smiling and a picture of a man’s hand going to hold a baby’s hand. Tag line ‘Every moment counts’. Fuck that.

Yeah, I’d heard about it when it came out ‘Michael Keaton and Nicole Kidman in love, he dies of cancer’. I was never going to sit down and watch this flick. I lumped it straight in with the Julia Roberts cancer movies (dying young, stepmom) and that flick where Val Kilmer is blind. Vanity projects all ’stars’ decide to make to flex their dramatic nuts. I’ve learned to have more faith in this Keaton cat since.

I saw this for the first time on TV. I’d come in knackered from work, turned on the telly and there was Keaton. Always watchable, I’m not about to flip channels on him, especially until I work out what film it is. It took for Kidman to appear on screen for me to suss it out, but by then I was hooked.

So its not your standard love story of boy meets girl, falls in love but then their time is cut short by the tragic onset of cancer (which, if memory serves, actually was the plot of Love Story). This story opens with the crap very much cut. Keaton has cancer and he’s very soon to be told that it is terminal. Keaton is in love with Kidman, but its not fairytale shit, they’re your everyday married couple. She is pregnant. So there is your scenario. A regular guy gets terminal cancer, he’s not old or unhealthy, it has just struck him randomly in the way cancer does and he is not going to survive but, at this point, the symptoms have yet to take hold of him. He has some time. Does he have 9 months? Luckily the cheesiness of this question is never really at the forefront of the story. Instead, we get what I consider the first film to handle the subject of death in a rational, even and, I would imagine, totally realistic manner (noticed how keen I am on emotional honesty yet?).

There are no scenes of ridiculous high drama here and it is that level of underplayed honesty that destroys me. This film just stuns me, decimates me, it absolutely rips my heart out.

So, back to the story. Firstly Keaton has to accept that he is going to die, he deflects this slightly by putting his energy into a project. Since he probably is never going to meet his son, he buys a video camera and starts making tapes for him. This is golden Keaton material. He demonstrates how to shave, how to make pasta, how to enter a room with confidence. As his journey continues, he uses the camera to hide behind as he is simply not ready to make his peace with the world.

Having been estranged from his family for years, his wife convinces him that he has to visit them, to spend time with them and let them know. But no water has passed under the bridge. The old tensions are still there. Why wouldn’t they be? He’s in his thirties, just because he’s dying doesn’t magically solve his issues with them.
They resent him for moving to LA, changing his immigrant name and not embracing family as the most important thing, he resents them for not being proud of his first-generation-American success.

and so the story continues, he starts getting ill and by the time it manifests itself physically, you’ve come to dig this guy and, since it’s a film, you hold out for that happy ending. H has to survive, he’s the hero. But he’s not going to and the film becomes more and more brutal as he gets worse. Again, not in a flashy, overly-sentimental way – no big scenes of drama.

Instead of a cathartic ‘I LOVE YOU’ scene, we get hit by the sucker punch of the completely understated arrival of a hospital bed in which he will now sleep, downstairs, because he can’t walk up the stairs anymore. There is no big reaction to it by the characters, but when you see it arrive, you understand the real implications. He’ll never sleep in his own bed again. He’s going to die downstairs. Man, the walls just seem to start moving in.

In his final days, his family make the trip from Michigan which he was always bitter about them having not done (his mum is afraid to fly) and he lets his hatred go. He lets his dad be a dad and in the scene which I would select as my most emotional in cinema history (and this makes me well up just thinking about it), his dad – admirably holding back the tears – shaves his weak and invalid son (its brain tumours). Its this awesome, touching, real moment. As he shaves him, his dad asks ‘How are you?’ and Keaton replies with a slightly slurred voice ‘Its been a tough year, dad’. Oh, I lose my shit every time.

It was the only film directed by a dude called Bruce Joel Rubin. It was also written by him. He wrote Ghost and he also wrote (drum roll) Jacob’s Ladder. So, if you hold onto your thought of Ghost as it might have been in less commercial hands, then place it alongside this and Jacob’s Ladder, you have pretty much the most interesting trilogy of flicks on the subject of death, or at least, what it is to die. My Life taking an approach of realism, Ghost an approach of fantasy and Jacob’s Ladder, if memory serves, the science of the moment of death.

I bet he’s a great dude, his CV is patchy, his other works include Stuart Little 2 and Deep Impact and that tells a story to me. Here’s a guy who produces consistently interesting work which is either mishandled or mis-marketed by Hollywood. This doesn’t even cover the projects he probably couldn’t even sell – Jacob’s Ladder was in development hell for years. So, I bet he just takes the high paying gigs when they come and writes for his own amusement now. The Ghost cheque alone probably set him up for life. He seems too smart for the current climate almost – he’s not quirky enough to b an indie icon and not straightforward enough for the mainstream. I bet he’s just a great guy to talk to.

So, I present to you the great overlooked film. Its not flashy or concepty, its not manipulative but, fuck, it’ll get to you. Horror films desensitise us to death, dramas give it glory or romance or meaning. Here is the only film I know to really tackle what will likely be the reality of the playout of many of our lives. And it’s sat on a dusty shelf in a shitty box. There’s no justice.

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Static.

Now, I almost don’t want to see this flick again because it had such an impact on me, I’d hate to have it lessened. It has a very sacred place in my film passion. When I found out more about it, I immediately got kind of disheartened because I found out it was directed by Mark Romanek. Why is that disappointing? Romanek is awesome – well, that’s why it’s disappointing. I don’t want to be the film geek who’s all ‘Eternal Sunshine? Pah! Did you ever see Mark Romanek’s first feature film before One Hour Photo?’

So basically, I don’t want you thinking this is any affectation on my part, I didn’t hunt this film out to be elitist and at the time I saw it, I think it was the only thing he’d done anyway. I saw it on TV late night in ‘89. 4 years after it was made. I was 13 and had fairly typical tastes for a 13 year old in ‘89. I liked Batman. This was probably my first ‘indie’ or ‘art house’ film, but I’d have to see it again to know if it really falls into that category. It was certainly offbeat to my primitive tastes and made me think very heavily about what a film could be and do.

What I remember of it, and again this is faded memory so might not have been the actual focus of the flick, but certainly what I got from it, is that it was about a guy in his late teens/early 20s whose parents have died but he’s OK with it and pretty well adjusted, if a bit lonely. Anyway, he starts seeing images of heaven on his broken old TV. I think he even sees his parents there. So at first, he doesn’t quite believe it, but then it becomes apparent to him that its completely real. I can’t remember exactly how the plot goes but I remember that when he finally shares his discovery, no-one else can see it, they just see static on the screen. So he loses it and takes a bus full of pensioners hostage.

I’m sure I’m not doing it justice and may have some facts wrong but that’s how I remember it. Anyway, it stood out for me on 3 distinct levels. Firstly, the subject matter and style was so far apart from anything else I’d really watched all the way through. I’d catch scenes from random foreign/weird films late at night but they never held my attention particularly – I just found them inaccessible or obtuse.

The second reason I why I found this accessible. Keith Gordon. The lead actor. The reason I watched this film at all was because of him. Since I was very young, I go through periods of obsessing over certain films – looking back, its hard to understand why certain films were considered worthy of 2 months of viewing every single night, I think it was just me latching into films and finding nuances in odd places. These films (for better and worse) included Psycho 2, Jaws, Blues Brothers, Poltergeist 2, Empire Strikes Back, Moron From Outer Space, The Graduate, Tootsie, a bunch of others and… I’m almost ashamed to admit, a TV movie called Combat Academy.

I think he reason I fixated on Combat Academy (also notable for an early appearance of a teenage George Clooney as ‘Biff’) was Keith Gordon, a very dynamic and charismatic actor. He’d also had a shitty role in Jaws 2 and I remembered that. It upsets me to think about him because he really had a nothing career as an actor and I still think he could have (or still could) have gone on to greatness. He’s a director now and has done some credible stuff. I’d love to see him act again, he has a certain tone that is unique. Like a young Hoffman crossed with Richard Dreyfus and with a certain cheeky fuck-you attitude. I just really like him.

The final reason, and the reason it left such an impression on me, was that it was just the ultimate film about frustration. It summed it all up for me. The standard filmic interpretation of frustration is aggression. Like ‘I’m not happy, I will destroy things!’ they seem to think that is frustration – the feeling of things not going your way and making you angry. That’s just not how I’ve ever experienced it. I was a kid who was constantly taken to doctors/psychologists until the age of 7 (when they found it to be ribena-related) for having temper tantrums. They always stemmed out of frustration, that feeling that people can’t understand you. Not many films have been made on this subject. Gordon plays it perfectly. It almost makes him laugh. HOW can they not see what he does? Its ludicrous. Its ridiculous that something so obvious and crystal clear to you is so unimaginable to someone else. That point at which you don’t even know how to communicate something so obvious that your blood boils.

Like I say, a very human emotion, generally unrepresented on film, which I really connected to.

I know as a result of writing this I’ll hunt for the film with a new vigour, probably find it and almost certainly be disappointed, but I’m glad I’ve done this and pinpointed why it has meant so much to me.

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Life is Beautiful.

I hate the Oscars, I am fundamentally opposed to them. The main reason for this is an issue of terminology. The usage of the word ‘best’ bothers me. Best film. How can you quantify the best film of the year, and even if you found a way, how could you ever apply it to Titanic? Its just bollocks. They usually just mean ‘worthiest’ film, a po-faced study of oppression or success. The amount of levels and factors a film would have to work on to stand out, in a genre-defying stunt, as any year’s BEST FILM is mind-boggling. And yet I’d easily proclaim Life Is Beautiful as the best film of ‘97. The best film of the 90s. Probably the best film ever made. Which is a pretty big and very arguable proclamation, but I’ll stand my ground.

Firstly, from a technical point of view. This is a beautifully written film. Mary Poppins said ‘a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down’ and Roberto Benigni seems to have embraced this as an ethos both in the sense that a bit of playfulness helps to communicate your message AND that a spoonful of sugar is all that is necessary, moderation, too often this kind of set-up falls into syrupy over-emotional tackiness.

The script is paced perfectly and moves in a flow that many American films avoid due to five-second-attention-span audiences. The first half of the film is the story of Guido’s hapless courtship with Dora. We understand that fascism is on the rise, but it is never dwelled on or given big tacky moments of significance (hellooooo Sound of Music!). It is just fact, that is the political backdrop but is unimportant to this story, so it stays where it belongs, at the back.

We get to know Guido and Dora, and although he’s an annoying little twat, we form a bond. When he finally gets the girl, that story ends. I think I’m right in saying it takes at least half the film to get there, but its no problem, we’re in no rush. Benigni is funny and enjoyable to watch even in a ‘what a little twat’ way. Its nice to see him channeling Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin without feeling the need for a full-on homage. So, boy gets girl. End of story.

5 years later, a totally different story starts with the same characters but a completely different environment. WW2 is in full swing and Guido, Dora and their 5 year old son Joshua are packed off to a concentration camp. To get his son through it, Guido pretends the whole thing is a game and basic methods of survival are the things they must do to get points. Only if they get 1000 points can they win the first prize – a shiny new tank.

It sounds so fucking twee, doesn’t it. I suppose to many it might even be. I didn’t see it for a while because it looked painfully twee and tears-of-a-clown-ish. Even the trailer looked that way. But Benigni more than pulled it off.

So, to begin with, its a great, original story. The first half is almost painful in its predictability (‘will he get the girl? hmmmmm, i wonder’) whereas the second half is even more painful in it’s lack of predictability. There is a complete absence of emotional crutch and the story unfolds in such a way that you experience optimism and pessimism in equal blasts and the outcome is never clearly signaled. Is this a comedy or tragedy? Ultimately, that question can only be answered depending on whether the family die or survive in the end. I’ve never seen that in a film before. The idea that it really could swing either way between joyful and tragic based on that one factor but still be retrospectively consistent in tone.

So, conceptually and structurally, big thumbs up. The performances are great throughout and Benigni, despite being an annoying little twat, somehow manages to avoid his interactions with his precocious 5 year old becoming mawkish. I’ve never noticed any hugs or kisses or ‘i love you’s, there is a surprising absence of mollycoddling. Everyone in it is great, from the one-dimensional slapstick supporting cast of the first half to the more multi-faceted ghouls of the second.

The next point I adore is the theme. I’m big on theme, trying to work out what a film is basically about and therefore whether it tells the audience anything – if it has any worth. Shit films trot out the same themes; crime doesn’t pay, value your family, believe in yourself. Its all stuff that is obvious to a 5 year old and has become hackneyed and insignificant to the audience and, worryingly, the filmmakers. Obviously a lot of film theory is just speculation and really the filmmaker is the only person who could comment on the message he intended, but for me, what I get out of it is a statement on sacrifice.

All the main characters take the choice to make sacrifices throughout and all are rewarded with what they most desired. Dora sacrifices her security twice, once financially by leaving a wealthy and socially important fiancee for an annoying little twat and again when she orders the Nazis to stop the train her husband and son have been put on so she can board it too. She understands that she is sacrificing her life, not being Jewish, but she is prepared to do that for a chance to remain with her family. Guido sacrifices his own emotional needs for his son’s spirit. He has to work twice as hard as everyone else because on top of his suffering, he has to be able to retain his enthusiasm for life and his smile. Along the way, he takes risks that could be construed as sacrifices, were he caught, to broadcast messages over the loudspeakers to his wife in the separate female camp. Joshua, the son, makes constant sacrifices, he forgoes crying, personal freedom, complaining, playing – all the things that kids do – because if he wins the game and gets to 1000 points, he gets the first prize – a tank. He learns that to get what you most want, you have to make big sacrifices. The others already know this and have the burden of reality on their choices. Its a strong and positive message in what could be a damning, negative film. Whereas Schindler’s List seems to focus on the things people didn’t do or should have done and the idea that you can always do more, this film, using the same settings and subject matter manages to convey a message of optimism.

I do think Schindler’s List is great, but it relies so heavily on shocking you out of your complacency. It is a visually brutal film. This one shows no physical brutality. The only blood we see is a scrape on someone’s arm. There is no death shown onscreen, there isn’t even any visible act of cruelty. But we understand what is happening and the fact it is unshown leaves us to picture the saddest moments. Which are never looked back to or revisited.

Being Jewish and 2nd generation British, the holocaust has never been too far out of mind. Many of my elderly relatives still have the concentration camp tattoos and the ones who fled still have their deep emotional scars. Although ethnic cleansing is in no way history, it’s something that our generation of westerners will probably never know. We’ll never have that legitimate fear, but being Jewish, it still is in the back of your mind somewhere. Anti-antisemitism isn’t exactly on the decline although not as rampant or aggressive as other forms of racism. You still get that feeling, like if the shit came down, a lot of people wouldn’t fight your corner. In the age of holocaust denial and ‘quit your whining’, it is important to remember that this shit, within living memory can and did happen within civilised society. And, to quit my whining, films about the holocaust can be easily related to current world politics and instead of viewing a film and saying ‘this happened once’, it can make us ask ‘is this what is happening’.

Its important that these films get made and whereas many people avoided Schindler’s List because they didn’t want such a cold emotional experience, this film trawled in the wake and using it’s perfect sugar measurement, spread the message to a wider audience. If only Hollywood could find a way of extending the message to the multiplex masses. Ii fear Pearl Harbour might be as close as they ever get.

So, for me it scores on every level, the stories, the writing, the performances, the comedy, the drama, the point of view, the message the skillful direction which conveyed the horrors without ever showing them, the pacing, the tension as to the outcome, the outcome itself and, finally, oh great academy, THE WORTHINESS.

A worthwhile film that is thought-provoking, optimistic and entertaining. So, I’m in no way saying this is my favourite film or the funniest or worthiest, it just hits every point and then exceeds it without being flashy or auterish. When i look at the facts, I can’t think of a better film.

He’s still an annoying little twat, though.

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Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

I feel kind of funny putting in another sci-fi because that doesn’t very accurately convey my tastes – I really don’t like sci-fi in general. But I had to include one of the holy trinity – Jaws, Close Encounters, ET. Spielberg was just a god to me growing up and those films in particular still stand out as some of the best modern film-making. I think he may be the last great director in the sense that the point we have reached now, we can probably only develop film-making in a technical sense. He was one of the last to push the boundaries of storytelling. Everything seems quite derivative now but his stuff still feels fresh. What a great filmmaker he was, so different now, his current output bears no apparent relation to his 70s/80s greatness. Ah well.

It really is neck and neck for me between Jaws, CE3K and ET and the only reason I settled on this one is that Jaws has been picked apart endlessly and I’m still smarting a bit from his Lucas-esque anal raping of the film for it’s 20th anniversary release.

So, first of all, what I love about all early Spielberg is a certain style and tone that you rarely get elsewhere in that the films often don’t feel scripted. The cast talk over one another, shout over one another, mumble, lines get lost, rephrased and ignored. On the moments when someone says something clearly, it draws your attention and stands out – which is a great directorial trait. I guess I talk a lot about realism or verisimilitude (still can’t spell) but films work best when they strike that feeling of authenticity.

CE3K is the most epic film I can think of. and I don’t mean 6 million extras watching some chariot race or seeing every landmark in the world destroyed by aliens or weather conditions. It takes place in so damn many places, often for just a scene at a time, but never feels gimmicky or overstretched. We see the story played out in the army facilities, third world, suburbs, so many places but it never once feels inhuman. Its still always about the people, no matter that we may see them for one scene only. That early scene in the air control centre where the guy is talking to the pilots (that we never cut to) who are seeing the UFOs and how each time we cut back, more and more of his colleagues are surrounding him, then at the end of it they all just decide not to report anything – no drama, just a blip in their normality.

Then Richard Dreyfuss. Man, what happened to him? He was so great. Just a normal funny guy who gets sucked into this scenario – but not in the normal Hollywood way of being approached by aliens and told he is special (Last Starfighter style). His is a story of perseverance and redemption. He has his experience early on (and holy shit, that scene where the headlights pulling up behind him just rise up – one of the best understated moments in cinema history) and then sees the image of Devil’s Tower everywhere. He could drop it (as Truffaut says later in the film – think how many must have) but he doesn’t and he pays for it with his sanity and his family. That scene where he’s sat in the shower fully clothed crying and his son is repeatedly opening and slamming the door shouting ‘CRY BABY!’, ugh, so intense. Its such a horrible storyline for him. The idea that he’s locked into this course which he can’t even just sit back and let happen to him, he has to fight every step of the way and give up everything in his life for something he never wanted in the first place. I often wonder what happened to that character, because making it into the mothership was really just the vindication that he had been right to question the messages…. but now he’s on a fucking spaceship. I mean, he’s just an electrician, did he ever want that? Its not like we ever saw him sat around dreaming to be taken away. He seemed pretty happy at the beginning with his family.

Anyway. One of the golden age of special effects films. We go from the mundane to the amazing and we believe it because there’s no crappy CGI. Incredible model shots, beautiful film grainy organic looking compositing, fantastic lens flare. The aliens are just shadows and great simple puppets and we only get to see them at the very end where we’re already emotional enough to forgive a certain amount of cheesiness.

Its just great film-making. Very funny and human but also intermittently awe-inspiring and terrifying. That scene where the aliens come for the kid? Man, that shit is horrible and I love that he never feels the need to justify it in the wider context of the film. Like, just because they do that, they aren’t bad aliens, the director is just showing us that its the fear of the unknown that is so terrifying. And it is just so well done. The screws undoing themselves from the air vent, the POV shot down the chimney and then the kid being dragged out the fucking cat flap. Great stuff.

Like Jaws, it really splits into two clear halves too. This film is set-up, then Devil’s Tower – which is like a separate film to me. I think the mid-section of this part is what blows me away. The mother ship lands and just kind of sits there, then they start the musical exchange. Holy fuck. I’ve never seen anything like that anywhere else. I’ve also never seen music used like that anywhere else. Film generally falls back on music a lot to fill in emotional gaps in the storytelling, but using it as essentially language in a dialogue scene where neither quite understands what is being said but understands purely from the tone of the exchange. Whoa. I don’t know, that’s just amazing film-making. And when the mother ship gets excited and just blows the glass out of the windows.

CE3K is fantastically shot too. I kind of yearn for that kind of cinematography. Film manufacture just got too advanced. 35mm film is too good these days. The grain is too small and even, we’ve lost that organic feeling. Film isn’t supposed to look clean. Life isn’t that clean. Same reason photos from the 70s look so much better than digital photos today. Film grain used to give us something that we don’t have anymore. And as much as I dislike the modern use of super 8 to appear arty and pre-loaded with a certain integrity, I miss a lower quality of film being used as the norm. Use that look now and it looks like you’re chasing an effect. Its a shame.

I haven’t mentioned how awesome Teri Garr, Bob Balaban and Truffaut are as well, but with a film of this quality, such a strong supporting cast almost fades into the background without the audience even noticing how incredibly good they are.

The first time I saw this film, I was like 8, and really couldn’t follow the story or characters at all but I still loved it and I think that’s because there was so much to latch onto of quality. It wasn’t Star Wars where every frame was filled with an interesting looking creature or spaceship. There’s surprisingly little to look at in this flick, it’s almost visually mundane when the ships aren’t there. But the performances and composition are just totally intoxicating. Spielberg deserves to go down in history as one of the greatest directors, but I don’t think he’s challenged himself for a very very long time.

I will always go back to this film, beyond comfort viewing and fun, it is just how a film should be made. You know people now get impressed by film making they can see. Fuck bullet time. Seriously, fuck it, that pulls you out of the reality a film builds up so that you can spend a couple of minutes going ‘oh, what a clever director’. Genius lies in the details you don’t really notice and CE3K is very much my definition of film-making genius.

It makes mashed potato fun too.

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OK, Here’s my last one and it’s my favourite film. The thing is, I have two favourite films, this one and Midnight Run. Midnight Run didn’t actually make the rest of the list, which is a bit weird, but I can’t really wax lyrical about the flick beyond ‘FUCK! It’s the fucking BEST!’ I guess, essentially, the whole deal with Midnight Run is the interplay between De Niro, Grodin, Kotto and whoever played Marvin. It’s just a joy of acting. It’s pure charisma without being a terribly interesting or clever piece of work. But fuck, it’s the fucking best.

Anyway, my final choice and clear favourite film….

The Last Waltz.

It’s kind of where all of my favourite things meet. All roads lead here for me. As someone passionate about film, well, it’s the greatest music or concert film ever made and it’s made by – excuse me – MARTIN FUCKING SCORSESE. As someone passionate about music, it is the final and, as legend would have it, greatest performance by The Band. Who are the best band ever in the world ever. You can disagree, but you’d be wrong to. It’s also a time capsule of that generation as the surviving members of the Woodstock days were drifting into some kind of irrelevance and the young bucks like Neil Young were snapping at heels.

It’s hard to know where to start because when I even think about The Last Waltz my blood just starts pumping harder. Ugh, where to begin.

OK, as a performance film, it’s killer. This is not what you usually get from these things where it is essentially a documentary, cameras just filming what’s going on. There is thought there, this is filtered through the eyes of a filmmaker and then carefully edited so what you get is the drama and subtleties of a live show. The stuff a camera doesn’t often pick up. These awesome moments of eye contact between band members, cutaways at points when you’d expect maybe the focus to be elsewhere, but instead you see a band member clearly appreciating what is happening in the limelight. That’s not to say you don’t get to see the meat of the performance, just that the crafting and attention to detail is superb. There’s a beautiful moment towards the end where Dylan is onstage and they’re winding down ‘Forever Young’ and it’s clear that the band (or indeed The Band) don’t know what he intends to do next and Rick Danko has this little moment of ‘where are we going?’ and as soon as Dylan starts the first note of ‘Baby Let Me Follow You Down’, Danko just grins, knows exactly what he’s doing and turns away to do it. I just love that stuff. Its so easy just to show musicians as gods – always in tune, always dynamic and it’s all trickery, but when they’re filmed honestly and you get those little moments to see the actual craft of what they do and how damn sharp they are, man, I love that. There’s an amazing part, which is totally blink and you’ll miss it, when Clapton first comes out and launches into his bit, really early on, his guitar strap breaks and he almost drops it – the camera cuts away quick so you barely see – but Robbie Robertson is in there and covering the solo without dropping a beat. Fucking amazing. Then, once Clapton is sorted, they have a fucking guitar cockfight. You can tell this is unrehearsed and they may well respect each other but they’re totally measuring dicks at this point. All these other little moments, Levon Helm watching a usually morose Van Morrison in disbelief as he high-kicks his way off the stage. God, all of them, every performance, every nuance is caught (although it seems no cameras were ever on Richard Manuel, which is unforgivable). Robbie Robertson gurning as he wrings every note out of his bronze-coated guitar, Rick Danko bopping his little baisin haircut forwards and backwards, Levon Helm fucking snarling into the mic as he pounds the living shit out of the drums, Garth Hudson back lit, wild-haired and surrounded by aura during his solo (why did they fucking cut to a talky bit midway?) Richard Manuel hammering out on the piano with a big grin. This is what a great gig feels like. When you’re pressed against the stage and you see a band for the first time not airbrushed or well lit or miming, you see them sweat and spit and joke around and shoot each other dirty looks. Its so real and yet so much grander than life. Quite genuinely, there have been occasions where I’m preparing to go out for a show but end up staying in to watch The Last Waltz cos it’s a front row ticket, satisfaction guaranteed. That sounded cheesy, but honesty often does.

So the structure itself, we get the highlights of the gig (which lasted 7 hours in actuality, The Band’s set alone taking up several of these – it’s worth getting hold of the Rhino 4 CD set with a lot of the missing stuff and rehearsal takes) inter-cut with The Band reflecting on the most epic career in music history. These guys started out rockabilly backing band to Ronnie Hawkins as teenagers, busting lose and forming The Hawks as a touring rock n roll band, getting snapped up by Dylan as his backing band when he went electric, then going solo again after his motorbike crash and rediscovering real American music (despite being mainly Canadian). Their stories are great and where they could easily fall into (we did this, then this, then this), Scorsese just draws small personal anecdotes out of each of them and we get to see them relaxed and chatty. Richard Manuel, not far on the road from his suicide, clearly fucked from years of alcohol abuse but supported and cajoled by his best friends, Rick Danko – not much upstairs but so much heart, Robbie all mouth and hyperbole which sounds great at the time but dumb upon reflection. Garth, quiet but succinct and Levon passionate but unimpressed by Scorsese. He gets the best moment in the talky sections where he talks about how blue grass comes down and mixes with rhythm and dances with country and blues music and forms a melting pot and makes its own special music and Scorsese asks ‘and what’s it called?’ Levon just tilts his head and grins ‘Rock n roll’. and he just fucking flusters Scorsese with it. So great.

The film starts with the title ‘THIS FILM SHOULD BE PLAYED LOUD!’ and some talky stuff with Danko playing pool but the film kicks in with the concert beautifully. Black screen, black stage ‘Good Evening’, the stage lights come on revealing this huge operatic set up with chandeliers and The Band are already firing into ‘Cripple Creek’ and it’s so infectious, so perfect. If someone wasn’t affected by this, I couldn’t be friends with them. I know that sounds dumb, but at a basic level this is so inarguably amazing, it crosses barriers of taste and opinion. It is what it is and if your musical tastes get in the way of it, you’re an idiot. This is beyond fashionable, beyond hip – as The Band always were, it’s just something of unquestionable workmanship and craft on every level. It’s something to behold.

So, the music – certainly the best renditions of these songs I’ve ever heard and I have everything The Band released and a lot that they didn’t. You don’t need anything else. With the only obvious track missing being Acadian Driftwood (which they did perform that night with Neil Young and is available in audio in the Rhino set), everything is here. Its a greatest hits set and beyond. It also manages to rope in the greatest moments of it’s guest performers too.

So, it kicks off with Ronnie Hawkins, personalising the song to include all of the band member’s names and clearly lapping up playing to such a big crowd in front of the guys he trained and groomed to supersede him.

Levon heart-aching through The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down for the last time with his band. Backed with a full brass section and going for it like none of them ever had before, it just fucking soars and hits fucking this transcendental perfect beauty. I know it sounds so dumb, but it’s like a religious epiphany, it’s touching heaven. Then Danko singing Stagefright, the one real time in the film he steps from the sidelines and leads The Band as if it were his own and it’s just pure glory. Seeing him from behind, single spotlight silhouetting him in front of a totally dark stage. Man. Fuck, this is what it’s all about. Maybe that’s my favourite bit, I think it probably is. It gives me fucking goosebumps.

Neil Young digging being on stage with his heroes, Neil Diamond horrifically out of place and unsuitably cocky (‘I’m just gonna do one song. But I’m gonna do it GOOD’) considering that as great as he is, stood on that stage in his powder blue suit and sunglasses, dude is just outclassed. Dr John looking like a big Cheshire cat and making everyone smile, Van Morrison turning up in a sparkly fucking jumpsuit, clearly having decided to steal the show – which he does. Eric Clapton on one of the few times in his life where he actually achieves coolness, Muddy Waters and Paul Butterfield giving it some blues, then Dylan at the end, looking almost divine in some kind of soft-focus aura lighting, the only person able to stand in front of this band and call them his own. The only guy they are clearly in awe of. The big everyone-on-stage ending is a little syrupy, giving Ringo a drum kit for a song which barely needs one drummer, let alone two, but I shall Be Released is a suitable enough closer. If only they could have got the Staples Singers on the night and finished on The Weight. But who has the right to dream when faced with sheer perfection?

There is nothing like it, never will be again. If I could only watch one film the rest of my life, it’d be this, and I’d happily watch it twice a night. It feels like it’s on repeat for most of my life anyway and it never loses anything, it is still perfectly fresh and feels as exciting as the first time I saw it, whilst being as familiar as an old friend. This is nourishment for my soul. Talking about it turns me into a mad preacher because I can never convey the beauty and brilliance and satisfaction it can deliver. You don’t know music until you know this film. I really believe that. It’s like amazing architecture, where you just stand there and go ‘this was made by humans? This is the fucking oxygen of my passion. When I have a bad day, this is what restores me. It has healing properties. I’m unapologetic for my zeal for this flick but I should shut up about it.

Anyway, I know this is all I’ll need the rest of my life for entertainment/relaxation purposes. I know that I’ll be in my seventies, still sitting back in a chair watching this without my eyes leaving the screen and it’ll still be the best thing ever.

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So, that’s the happy list of good things.

Now prepare yourself for grumpiness or sod off.

In reverse order…

100. The Guardian’s 100 Best Films of all time. Possibly the most definitive list for middle class people to either crawl out from under some amazingly heavy rock to discover the work of The Coen Brothers or to be reminded how much they like the work of The Coen Brothers. Although Buena Vista Social Club was made within ‘all time’, the  ‘critics’ who assembled this list have forgotten how they spent three years feigning shock and disgust at anybody who hadn’t seen it and have given it’s number 12 slot to In The Loop – which they saw last week. They also forgot to include Betty Blue – which they REALLY liked when they were students and have cheekily inserted a silly film from the 80’s in at number 34 as a ‘guilty pleasure’ (but only because Patrick Swayze died a few weeks ago)

99. Empire Magazine’s 100 Best Films. Until Empire came along, nobody liked films like Star Wars, Jaws and anything by Martin Scorsese in the 70’s (and Goodfellas). Luckily for us, four times a year, Empire devotes an entire issue to the 100 Best Films* (*= your choice of: ‘ever’ ‘ever made’ ‘according to you!’ ‘according to us!’ ‘according to some other people!’ ‘!’). These are mainly of the Star Wars, Spielberg or Scorsese in the 70’s (and Goodfellas) variety. Because the best films don’t have subtitles, do have monsters or posturing with guns and can be found in every HMV sale for £2.99 because how the hell are there still people who don’t fucking own them. It has been rumoured that film companies pay their way on to Empire’s best lists – the same way that they kind of might bribe Empire into giving shitty films good reviews in exchange for an exclusive interview with Tom Hanks – but that’s all hearsay. Also, the annual Sony-Ericsson Empire Awards are not just a hastily-thrown together list of celebrities who are currently in town, available for an award and prepared to hold the sponsor’s product for a prolonged period of time.

98. Channel Four’s 100 Films You Must Watch Before You Die. Essentially a televisual combination of The Guardian and Empire lists with added reactions from Justin Lee Collins, some bloke from Heat magazine and someone you’ve never heard of who is apparently a ‘comedian’ and will say something like ‘I mean, really, how did Darth Vader have a wee?’ Avoiding these films will, disappointingly, not prolong your life.

97. I can’t think of any more, have I made my point yet? There is little so dull as a bunch of this new breed of film critics (they don’t know much, but they know what they like!) who are either ex-indie kids or dependable geekish cheap labour who have blagged jobs writing hip ‘opinion’ pieces or glib retrospective pieces assembling their collective talents to tell us nothing new about films we’ve already seen.

This also applies to 100 best albums lists.

And 100 best TV show lists.

But not to 100 Best shitty critics lists – which I would like to read.

I’ve found myself in a vaguely ridiculous situation.

I think it’s a situation of my own construct but I also lay the blame pretty hugely elsewhere. I wouldn’t have created this mess had I thought I had any other logical course of action. So, I have nobody to blame but myself really but I think the situation is endemic of a bigger problem which is not my fault.

I get the feeling that this post is going to be a long and ranty one, I should warn you of that now, I type these stream-of-conscious and my views tend to solidify as I work through them. There are a whole bunch of factors going into the juicer here but I think the smoothie will be a good one. So, you’ve been warned. Turn back now or steel yourself for the journey.

When I write these blogs, they tend to be on a subject I’m passionate or irritated about. I rarely feel the need to share too much of my personal life – that’s a tendency in bloggers that I detest, the mere documenting of how they are ‘feeling’, which is invariably maudlin. I avoid talking about the specifics of my life, family and work because they’re not really anybody’s business and I’m aware that, once written, that information will exist in some form as long as the human race does (this, dear friends, is why you should never email pictures of yourself that you wouldn’t be comfortable with your 8 year old grandchild one day presenting to you and asking what is protruding from your bottom).

I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a while but have held back because it would be unavoidable to mention certain quite personal (although disappointingly unsalacious) things but this blog is about why modern things are so shit and how they might improve and the subject of this post is undoubtedly the biggest cause of frustration in my life so…. might as well.

I’ll start with a very potted history of my ‘career’. When I was 5, I decided I wanted to be a film director. It took the best part of a decade to work out what a film director actually was but I knew I wanted to make films. If it weren’t for the purity of a child’s wonderment, I’d cringe at what made me realise I wanted make films – like every other thirty-something, white, middle class film-maker the world over it was Star Wars. I’d seen and loved many films before – my dad was and remains a film buff – but Star Wars was the one where I thought ‘I’d like to make people react the way this is making me react’. Actually, that’s probably projection, I imagine I just thought it’d be cool to play with robots and monsters all day. I still think it would, by the way. I held true to my ambition throughout my childhood, making super-8 and camcorder epics with friends and alone. As a teenager, I took practical film-making courses at OFVM. By the time I was 15, I could load and operate a 16mm film camera and edit film on a flatbed steenbeck or video on a 3-machine edit suite. Around that time I started writing screenplays too. I was prodigious in my output, writing feature length huge-scale flights of fancy. After school, I spent 4 years at film school in Edinburgh. The university itself was a complete sham, the film department appeared to be run by crooks and assholes who had no interest in educating. This turned out for the best as we largely educated ourselves. We had a huge stash of free film equipment, great facilities and limitless time and enthusiasm. I made films constantly and with each one, I could see my work improving. At this time I met Andy and we started working together. We’d co-write, I’d direct and he’d produce. Before we even graduated, one of our short films got some attention and we found ourselves thrust into the professional world – mainly as a comedy screenwriting team.

In a short period of time, we were doing well. Although none of our original work ever saw the light of day, we were developing a feature film with Palm Pictures, making money selling options on our comedy series ideas to Thames Television and briefly courted by an enthusiastic BBC. When I re-read the work we were doing then, I’m kind of suprised by how good it still seems to me. In my work as a screenplay editor and screenwriting teacher now, I know that if I saw work of that quality from 22 year olds, I’d be pretty excited about it.

Those three situations all ended fruitlessly and differently. Our point of contact at Palm Pictures was an executive of some sort – I forget her actual title, they always seem vague to me – commisioning executive? development executive? acquisitions executive? She was fast, anyway. The day BEFORE our first short film debuted at the Edinburgh Film Festival, she had sneaked in, viewed a VHS of it, called us and told us that we were hers. We rather liked that. She told us that we were going to be the UK version of Kevin Smith’s View Askew set-up. She gave us Manga flick-knives (Palm Pictures owned Manga), Star Wars soundtrack CDs and took us out for dinner a bunch. She told us stories of doing coke in public toilets with rock stars. Neither of us did coke. Maybe that was the problem. We thought she was great, anyway. Palm Pictures had acquired two indie films that they were about to release and she wanted our *honest* opinions on them – sent us off to screenings in London. The first – Six String Samurai – remains one of the most fantastic indie films I’ve ever seen – seriously, hunt it out! The second – Razor Blade Smile was the biggest pile of shit ever made. I’ve seen bad films but this was just below swill. A shitty English ‘erotic’ vampire mistake. We gave her our honest opinions and she was furious with us. Livid. We got a full-on ‘who do you think you fucking are?’ response. This is when we realised that honesty is an incredible faux-pas in the ‘industry’. Everyone is so busy being fake that the second you puncture their insane fantasies, you become an asshole of the highest order. Ultimately they rejected our first draft of the feature film (ingeniously they managed to not actually commission us, but get us to write it, exclusively for them, for free) and she stopped returning our calls. I have no doubt that had we done coke with her and blown smoke up her ass about how cool she – and everything she ever did – was, we’d be making feature films now. The director of Razor Blade Smile still is – his most recent one just got released. It ’stars’ Danny Dyer. how wretched. Palm Pictures put all of their marketing resources into Razor Blade Smile. I don’t think Six String Samurai ever got any kind of release on any format in the UK. Had we played that game, we would have had a career of sorts.

My best comedy writing ever was for the BBC. A chap called Gareth Carrivick got in touch with us and we spent a fun day with him at the BBC TV Centre – we played about in the TARDIS and hung out in the Blue Peter garden. Time seems to cloud what he actually did there. I have a feeling he was some kind of head of comedy or comedy commissioning. He was a known director and his claim to fame seemed to have been directing the Vicar of Dibley. Recently he directed a feature film called FAQ About Time Travel. It was shit. Anyway, he dug us and wanted us to write a sitcom for a youthful audience. This is what he wanted. I went away and within a week had written a pilot and a couple of extra episodes of a sitcom I called ‘Little Indie’ – a jaded but sweet little sitcom set in a record shop. The BBC apparently loved it, everyone who read it seemed to. But Gareth eventually told us it would not get commissioned. Instead, the BBC made ‘Two Pints of lager and a Packet of Crisps’. He kept emphasizing that it had some ex-Hollyoaks stars ‘attached’ and that the writer was ‘only 21!’ and , this somehow off-set the awfulness of the writing. I was 23 at the time, Andy, 22.

Thames Television were very different. The executives there were intelligent and thoughtful. The notes we received back on our work were invariably smart and insightful and, brilliantly, they gave us money! They were keen to option ideas we came up with that they liked but never managed to get them to production. Thames were always ‘looking for’ something. One week it might be a ’smart kid’s drama’, the next a ’studenty comedy’ or ‘high octane thriller’. They liked us and we liked them but it never took off. They’d tell us what they were looking for, we’d develop projects to order, they’d hum and ha, maybe option them but never actually commission.

The situation was becoming desperate. Andy was living with his parents and had a girlfriend who didn’t understand why he couldn’t just grow up and get a real job and actually have some money in his pocket. I was hugely frustrated less on a domestic level but on a creative level. The thing is this; our talent was never in question. As I’ve progressed, I’ve discovered that a good screenwriter (or team) is a very very rare thing and all of these companies saw the potential and ability in us and wanted to work with us but there were these stumbling blocks in the way. The blocks were – from various companies and execs;

1. The fact that we weren’t party animals and couldn’t socially bond with certain execs. I guess this is a security thing – if they’re going to make you famous, they want to be damn sure you’ll take them along with you.

2. We were an untested commodity. The BBC, for the last ten years, has taken few risks on new talent. It’s safer to recommission critically panned shows which have performed acceptably (due to scheduling more than audience loyalty) than put their faith in something new. This is why 2 pints and My Hero lasted so long and why shows like Buzzcocks which have been tired and spent for seasons will drag ever on.

3. Predicting the market. Instead of just trying to commission GOOD projects regardless of industry figures, some companies feel they have to predict the market and give the people what they think the people want. This never works. But look at a company like HBO whose projects are all amazingly diverse and, on paper, often sound like they’d never work but are consistently incredible. It’s because HBO invests in writers, producers and directors they believe in and trust them to do a good job.

There were other jobs I haven’t listed, other companies, projects and opportunities but they were all much of a muchness. The frustration of producing good work – knowing it was good, being told by the right people it was good, but never getting to actually develop one idea through from concept to screen was unbelievable. The pressure was always there. People ask what you do and you tell them ‘I’m a screenwriter’ – which you are, you’re getting paid to do it and working hard – they ask what you’ve done they might have seen and you have to reply ‘nothing’. This gets particularly grating because the people who ask tend to fall into two categories – your supporters who want to hear exciting news and your rivals who want to hear of your failure

The  highest profile gig we had was a year spent writing episodes of cult Canadian sci-fi show LEXX. Problem was that it was a genuine cult show; ie, nobody had ever heard of it. Eventually, Andy and I went our separate ways. I felt the quality of work we were producing had dipped horribly and unlike the projects we generated organically between ourselves, these ‘made to order’ ideas were empty and pointless. Had one of them been commissioned and we’d been expected to spend a year of our lives actually producing it, we’d have been miserable. I think we had both grown to resent and hate screenwriting. Any got a series of jobs in production on live digital TV shows, I opened my video shops and started teaching film-making, screenwriting and eventually script editing. It felt very good to have a steady income that didn’t depend on my perceived quality of work or an executive’s whim. Very, very good.

I basically stopped writing all together. I directed music videos and filmed gigs and rediscovered my love of just making films for fun, with friends, with no undertone of ambition or expectation.

I got persuaded once to write and submit a screenplay for the Screen South/UK Film Council production scheme and found it a frustrating and tawdry set-up. It was a good short screenplay and my producer Hank and I were immediately shortlisted and called in for a meeting. This meeting consisted of being sat at a large table full of people who didn’t introduce themselves or tell us their positions or backgrounds who expected us to justify our project to them. I felt the work justified itself and if they wanted to make it they should just pony up some cash rather than spend it all on of these people’s dayrates to sit around the table telling us conflicting views on the script. A couple of people sycophantically told us how great it was, one man kept blathering ‘I DON’T FIND IT FUNNY! IT’S NOT FUNNY’ to which I constantly replied ‘Maybe it’s just not to your taste, maybe you just don’t get it, maybe if we made it, you would!’. The ‘prize’ was that a bunch of the shortlisted films would be given an 8k budget to be made. I don’t think any short film is worth 8k of tax payers or lottery funding. If you gave 8k to a promising filmmaker, they could make a stunning raw debut feature film with that. What I found particularly distasteful was how obviously most of the film funding in this country was being spent on executives and their friends who were hired to deliberate pointlessly. It got worse – we got on the short shortlist and I was excitedly informed that I got to attend – for free – a screenwriters workshop where I would be given ’skills’ to improve the screenplay. I pointed out that as I was currently teaching the 22 week UK Film Council official screenwriting course, I was actually teaching at a higher level than the woman they’d hired to give the workshop. I was told it was compulsory I attend. Predictably, this woman didn’t have a clue and was just one of the ever-growing legion of unqualified ’script readers’ who wangled low paid jobs at production companies like Working Title and use that as leverage later on to teach screenwriting or become script editors despite having no formal training, industry experience of actually writing or any actual skill or insight. After all of this, we didn’t make the final list. But amusingly, they offered me a slot producing one of the chosen films and Hank was encouraged to become a screenwriter. Despite neither of us presenting a talent or desire for such roles. It turns out that part of their remit is to be seen to ‘develop’ talent and this was their idea of doing so.

Back in the day of simple arts funding, people who wanted to make films would approach these bodies, display some passion and be given a grant to just go off and make films. No ‘execs’, no ‘experts’, no enforced ‘development’ – no gravy train infected by middle management types.

Hank and I decided to just make a short film ourselves with no outside involvement – he bankrolled it himself. It won a best short film award at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas – the most respected ‘cult’ film festival. Hank did later try his hand at screenwriting for Screen South. They insisted on so many rewrites (his first draft had been almost perfect but far too subtle for the brand of idiot they emply to understand) and beat the project so far beyond recognition that he gave them the money back and decided not to take it into production.

So, finally, I return to the point of this post. The situation I got myself into. A couple of years ago, it was announced here in Oxford that the Zodiac music venue was to close and reopen as a corporate-fuelled Carling Academy. I had been a member of the Oxford music scene for some time – filming gigs, making videos and that was my main social scene, all of my friends in Oxford are somehow a part of the scene. It hit me that the time was right to make a documentary about the scene – this tiny scene which had given the world Radiohead, Supergrass, Ride, Foals, Young Knives, Swervedriver, Talulah Gosh and a huge slew of their peers who were in incredible bands that the world never really got to hear – The Candyskins, Dustball, The Anyways, The Mystics… I knew, despite having no real documentary experience that I was just the right guy to make the film. I was on the inside, I had the knowledge and skills needed but was detached enough to give it perspective and make a point with it. So I just did it. I’ve spent the last two and a half years making this film, it really snowballed, all of the bands (except the Young Knives) totally got into it, participated, gave me long interviews and loads of unseen archival footage and I’m really proud of my work. I rarely am, I’m usually painfully self-critical but I think I’ve made a good film. Those who have seen it seem to agree.

Here’s the problem; How do I get it out there? I have signed a limited distribution/sales contract but it depends on me submitting a finished film – this means it has to be picture graded, sound mixed and have all of the footage and music clearances paid. The film cost me about 7k to make over 2 and a half years and it is finished in so far as it is fully watchable and edit locked. To ‘finish’ it will cost in the region of 8ok. Eighty thousand pounds.

I purposefully didn’t try to get the film funded in advance because I knew from years of painful experiences that the funding bodies wouldn’t just let me make the film I knew I could make – they’d want meetings, to develop it, to pay their friends to come up with stupid changes to justify their fees. I knew I couldn’t take it to production companies as they would have only assessed it on a commercial basis – meaning they would have insisted that Radiohead be more prominent in the edit and marketing. There was no point going to the BBC or Channel 4 because as an unknown quantity myself – with no doc experience – they wouldn’t have had the faith in my ability to just do it. This was obvious at Britdoc – which I spent a lot of money to attend only to have my idea facelessly rejected but be encouraged to attend many parties with horrible development executives drinking copious amounts of some horrible soft drink which was sponsoring the event.

So, now I’m left with a film, possibly a significant music documentary, that I’ve been told is well-made and of great commercial interest, I’ve seen far lesser films in the cinema and the dvd shelves recently, but I’m left skint, outside the industry, weary and unsure of how to progress.

I have no career ambition and have never seen it as a potential moneyspinner (if I broke even on it, I would be ecstatic!) but I desperately want it to reach its audience as I think it says some important things that I have never seen said on film before and it could introduce the world to some of the greatest bands they have never heard along with telling the untold stories of some of the bands they are hugely familiar with.

I think it deserves to get out there. But I have no idea how to do that.

Anyone got a spare £80k kicking around?

TEENAGE JON: Social networking? That sounds very corporate.

CURRENT JON: Oh, it’s not corporate at all. It’s a way for you to communicate with everyone you know, easily.

TJ: Sounds corporate.

CJ: It really isn’t. Aside from the fact that all of your personal information… and probably all of your communication… is owned and viewable by ’some’ corporation. But they promise not to be evil with it and really they only share it with anyone who wants to advertise to you.

TJ: You signed up for this?

CJ: Yeah.

TJ: Willingly?

CJ: …..yeah. Everyone did! Even loads of people you know – people from school!

TJ: They’re all dicks! You’re telling me that I’ll still be in touch with these idiots when I’m 33?

CJ: Not so much in touch… You don’t have to talk to them, they’ll just be able to monitor all your activities and search through albums of photos of you and see lots of communication between you and your current friends.

TJ: You let them just spy on your life???? WHY?

CJ: Well, because it’s rude to turn down their friend request.

TJ: So anyone can just access any information about your life?

CJ: Not anyone. The most that complete strangers can do is find out your name, what you look like and who everyone you know is.

TJ: That’s insane.

CJ: I think there’s a setting where you can change some of that. I keep meaning to…

TJ: So you have surrendered all of your personal information to a huge database. What are the advantages?

CJ: Well, you can stay in touch with people really easily!

TJ: How hard is it to stay in touch with people?

CJ: Staying in touch with like 300 people isn’t easy!

TJ: Who the hell are these 300 people???? You know THREE HUNDRED people you want to stay in touch with?

CJ: Well, they’re… your school friends, uh… some people from uni, quite a few ex-girlfriends and even just some people I went on single dates with and nothing happened… um… FAMILY! there’s some family, always stay in touch with family… FRIENDS of course – REAL FRIENDS! but then also, for some reason, their wives and girlfriends and a bunch of their friends who I met once and of course the brothers and sisters of friends… there’s people I met on the internet… some customers… people who I don’t really know to talk to as such but see at gigs… it all mounts up.

TJ: I can’t believe you can be bothered to stay in touch with all these people!

CJ: Well, I can’t, that’s why I use Facebook.

TJ: You use it to stay in touch with hundreds of people you can’t be bothered to stay in touch with?

CJ: Exactly! It gives the APPEARANCE of being bothered. It’s all about the facade.

TJ: How so?

CJ: Well, my young chum, adult life isn’t like teenage life was in the 90s. Adult life is competitive! All those people you’re hanging out with now, your ‘friends’, they’re going to turn into lifelong competitors. You have to have a better career than them, a better house than them, a better girlfriend or wife than them, a more exciting lifestyle….

TJ: I’m not really the competitive type.

CJ: I know. Neither am I.

TJ: Are we winning?

CJ: We’re doing very well.

TJ: Better than ********?

CJ: Mate, he burned out at 21. Lives with his mum. Works in Tesco.

TJ: Yessssssssss. What about *******?

CJ: Well, her penchant turned to addiction…. I heard she ended up on the game.

TJ: Oh, this is fun!!! What about *******?

CJ: He’s doing ok! Got a good job, a nice wife, some cute kids. He’s doing good.

TJ: Better than us?

CJ: No.

TJ: Sweet. How can you monitor someone’s lifestyle?

CJ: Oh, well, everyone posts photos and videos of everything they do.

TJ: Everything?

CJ: Some people more than others. Like if you go to the pub with some friends for a drink, inevitably the next day the most insecure person there will have posted about three thousand photos they took surreptitiously on their phone and you’ll discover that you were actually an attendee at ‘PUB CRAZY SHENANINGANS AND GOOD TIMES SUMMER 2K9′

TJ: Thousands of photos? On a phone?

CJ: Oh yeah, it’s all digital now, mobile phones have cameras on them and you don’t need film so…. people take a lot.

TJ: A lot?

CJ: You could pretty much make a flickbook of these people’s lives.

TJ: Just of them at the pub?

CJ: At the pub… at home…. at work… they take high-angle photos of themselves and whoever is near them in even the most mundane moments and post it on facebook to make it appear like their lives are a non-stop-fun-time-laugh-riot.

TJ: How do you know they aren’t?

CJ: Because they’re spending all their time on facebook.

TJ: Gotcha.

CJ: When they DO go away – on holiday – although nobody calls it ‘holiday’ anymore, they say they’re ‘going travelling’, they still manage to find the time to be permanently updating their facebook page and blogs with arty photos of things they’ve discovered and anecdotes of being a stranger in a strange land.

TJ: This sounds tedious.

CJ: It really is.

TJ: So why do you read it?

CJ: It gives me a sense of moral and intellectual superiority.

TJ: And this is all added to this database which could conceivably be sold to anyone, visible to anyone, hacked by anyone and commandeered by some fascist regime?

CJ: Absolutely.

TJ: Spying? Pathetic competition? Self delusion? I can’t believe you’re into this! Is this what I become?

CJ: Look, no, that’s all a part of it but you get to chat online with loads of people you know, it’s an easy way of spreading and catching up on people’s news, you get to share photos and music and videos. It’s not a dominant part of my life. It’s just easy.

TJ: Since when was anything easy worth anything at all? Do you write letters at all anymore? I love letters!

CJ: Not so much.

TJ: Seems like a shame.

CJ: Yep.

TJ: So what else happens in the future?

CJ: Every band you ever liked from the 70’s and 80’s and wished you’d seen live, they all reform and you see them all.

TJ: WOW!

CJ: And they all suck.

I generally detest talk radio.

I like radio and I like discussion based political programmes, I just don’t like the ones which announce ‘the phone lines are open – what do you think?’ Because the general public are a bunch of uneducated, reactionary shitboxes and these shows neither develop the actual discourse or draw a conclusion. It’s just hours and hours of incensed Daily Mail reading idiots applying broad issues they don’t understand to the painfully narrow focus of their own lives.

Nowhere else, outside of provincial barbershops and barbecues fuelled by Stella Artois and Tesco value meat are the phrases ‘I’m not racist, but….’ ‘I’m entitled to my opinion’ and the perennial ‘It’s political correctness gone maaaaaad’ churned out with such alacrity.

In the car this afternoon, I caught this show…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00n6×8y/Jeremy_Vine_16_10_2009/

At around the 36 minute mark, Vine starts his piece on the BNP conceding the court case which means they will have to allow people of all colours and nationalities to join their party.

I’ve always believed that the best way to deal with the BNP is with calm dismissal. Everytime the left wing marches against them, barricades their appearances, complains about giving them a platform, it gives them a veneer of legitimacy to their claim that they (like the white British, in their beliefs) are being discriminated against and targeted. It fuels the dim suspicion in the dim-minded observer that maybe the indigenous caucasians of this country are being forgotten and under represented.

I’ve always felt the most effective way of dealing with idiots is giving them some space to be an idiot, letting everyone else say ‘oh, they’re idiots’ and not adding fuel to the idiot fire. There is nothing the BNP can say without lying to refute the simple central truth which is that they are racists. And when they DO lie, they tie themselves up in spiralling desperate ropes of racist logic.

Their current bid to be taken seriously as a political party is hilarious and if we just let them talk for long enough, ask a few simple questions of them and go into areas where they are winning support and calmly point out that they are just racists and have no workable ideaologies and absolutely no experience or potential to be able to actually run the country in any way. Even if they managed to remove all the non-whites, would they really have a clue about the economy, education and global politics? Of course not, they are uneducated, shaved racist apes.

Vine’s piece was brilliant. at no point did he get angry or even notably pointed with Deputy Leader of the BNP Simon Derby. He just let him talk and debate with comedian Paul Sinha. Derby talks at first amiably about ‘the right to an identity’ which strikes me as bizarre rhetoric but quickly gets riled at Sinha’s level-headed rebuttal to the notion that ‘preserving a culture isn’t racist’. His response to the allegation ‘you are a racist party, you’re just not publicly a racist party’ is to blather on about ‘are you a comedian? because you’re not very funny’.

Any real politician would have a well-worded, well-rehearsed response to such an allegation or would have a deft plan of avoidance. Derby turns into a complete bozo. Reasserting over and over his ‘are you a comedian’ defence. Eventually Vine steps in, asking ‘there’s nothing in your constitution about comedians, is there?’ Derby then alleges he lost his cool because of Sinha’s display of ‘extreme anti-white vitriol’.

Even a devout racist would listen to Derby with an expression of slack-jawed confusion. Where was the extreme? Where was the anti-white? Where was the vitriol? This man’s an idiot. The least we demand from our crappiest politicians is that they can at least lie to us somewhat convincingly. By all means, accuse him of that if we hadn’t all just heard exactly what he said but… to say that… right after?

It strikes me that the BNP has two potential courses of action if they want to succeed. The first would be to just say ‘Yes, we’re racists, specifically we hate people whose skin is a different colour, we don’t really understand why we feel this way – maybe we weren’t cuddled enough when we were children – but we hate these people anyway and we’d like to kill them but will settle for putting them in countries where people look more like them. If you feel this way too, vote for us and we’ll try to do that’. There are lots of racists in this country, this kind of honesty could rally them to the polling stations. The BNP’s other option is to lie. Racism has too many negative connotations, so claim to NOT be racist but to be anti-immigration, pro re-patriation and basically put the UK before any notions of Europe or the world. Pretend to be sorting this country out. This could actually work. They’d have to accept the rights of British-born people with different colour skin but could probably stem the flow of immigration quite effectively. The thing is, to do that, they’d have to be able to LIE REALLY WELL.

And they can’t. Because they’re fuckwits.

They can’t even find a rhetoric to hide behind or control themselves for 30 seconds when a man with different coloured skin states simply that they’re racist. and this is their DEPUTY LEADER.

Vine brilliantly closes the piece by asking Derby

“You feel closer to a white Polish person than to a black British person, is that correct?”

To which even the most inexperienced an politician would reply “That is a ridiculous question”, “it’s a more complex issue than that” or simply restate a piece of party-line rhetoric. Derby thinks for a second and answers…

“Yes!”

Genius.

So, Stephen Gately is dead at 33.

In dying, he has completed his apparent mission in life to do nothing original. This is a man who was part of a manufactured boyband constructed to emulate the success of Take That but without original songs or the barest emergence of engaging personality. Boyzone sang cover versions of songs from the 70’s that were *just* obscure enough to slyly convince their brainless audience that they might be written by the potato-headed band themselves. The arrangement of these songs was a lifeless faux-orchestral swill which raised an octave in the last verse to lazily impose some intensity upon a group who were a dull sham and attractive in only a provincial sense. Upon splitting, Gately attempted a solo career, failed, and ended up performing in some faltering West End musicals right in that era when producers realised that integrity made them less money than casting an ex-soap star or manufactured band second stringer in the lead role. And now he’s dead, like many people before him. Death is singularly the least original thing a person can indulge in (although David Carradine at least proved there are still original methods) and is, seemingly, a fitting end to the life of Stephen Gately who did nothing original or interesting.

I’m aware of how cold-hearted and boringly provocative that last paragraph was and I should say that his death is, indeed, a tragedy. He was far too young and one shouldn’t make light of the impact such a horrible situation will doubtlessly be having on his friends and untalented former bandmates. I’m not mocking the valid grief and sadness of those who knew him.

It’s this modern construct of reinvention through death which bothers me. Gately’s death is sad because he was a young and, by all accounts, very nice chap. However, I will angrily refute the notion that we have lost a great talent here. That somehow music has lost out. This was Gately’s first appearance…

7 years later, post-Boyzone, with the investment of millions of record company pounds, stylists, songwriters, pop producers and session musicians, here is the zenith of his solo ouvre…

We have not lost anything even resembling a talent worth comment. Yet, this is the tragedy of the week and anyone financially connected to the back catalogue and licensing of Boyzone will be wiping away the tears with a very healthy looking projections sheet for the last business quarter of ‘09. Doubtless their ‘greatest hits’ album is alreadybeing frenetically pressed for the Christmas rush and someone somewhere has been tearing their archival department apart trying to find the masters of Gately’s failed solo album New Beginning to slam into immediate production.

This is my point. This is not real grief. This is a highly commercial and sickening rush to profit from actual sadness on a human level. Why is it front page news? Even the bulk of ex-Boyzone fans don’t CARE about his death beyond a passing sadness for a stranger who had somewhat featured in their pre-teens. Most of the country have no interest in the man whatsoever – this is obvious from his failed attempts at a career post-Boyzone. Yet his death interests us? No. We only discuss it because of it’s prevelance. And it is only prevalent to make rich people richer. The tabloids have already turned it into a soap opera, each promising exclusive revelations that will doubtless sell more newspapers because people want to be kept abreast of whatever everyone else is going to be talking about. These same newspapers are owned by the companies and people who own the big TV stations who are doubtless planning tributes and documentaries which will be heavily plugged and generate them HUGE advertising revenues.

Do you remember the general public perception of Michael Jackson before he died? People hated him – he was seen as an obvious peadophile who had ‘got away with it’. He was basically bankrupt. His last albums had underperformed drastically compared to his previous form and the press conference in which he had announced his planned London residency had been regarded as a freakshow. Yet, he dies and becomes absolved of it all. ‘Weird’ becomes ‘troubled’, ‘failure’ becomes ‘tragedy’ and buying a Jackson album goes from being a strange and somewhat shameful venture to being a public display of respect and memorial. For someone that two weeks previously was a baby-dangling, kiddy-fiddling hasbeen? A week ago, did you hear anybody saying ‘I wonder what Stephen Gately’s up to, he’s so talented and brilliant’?

It is horrible and underhand mass media manipulation engineered to generate profit.

A fleeting glance at the obituaries page on the Guardian website tells me that in the last few days alone we have lost Barry Letts – the producer of Doctor Who in the 70’s who cast Tom Baker in the role. Shelby Singleton – owner of Sun Records also died, although he didn’t start the company, he was instrumental in pushing it’s catalogue out across the world and himself produced a bunch of hit singles including Walk On By. A week earlier, we lost iconic photographer Irving Penn, Robert Kirby – a musical arranger for the likes of Nick Drake, Elvis Costello, most of Fairport Convention, Vashti Bunyan and The Magic Numbers. We also lost ‘the best drummer in Britain’ Bobby Graham – who played on a long list of 60s songs the beats of which are ingrained in the whole nation.

And that’s just the people from the arts. Every one of them a fuller life and a more valid contribution to culture than Gately’s, yet our loss of them becomes mere footnotes. Gately dominates the front pages. And this is just from the entertainment sector of society.

Everyday we lose campaigners, political heavyweights, writers, archaeologists, architects, intellectuals, charity workers, scientists… people whose lives deserve to be publicly acknowledged, whose passing deserves to be mourned, whose legacies deserve to be noted and explained. Whose lives we can learn through and take something from.

But these are real people, not attractive street urchins from some crappy little town who had been transformed into the most empty version of celebrity. These are people who did something and lead amazing lives. These are people whose lives had no inherent commercial value.

This appropriation of private sadness and manufacture of public grief stems, no doubt from the cash cow of Princess Di’s death. The Daily Express still seems to be entirely financially dependent on it. It is tasteless and exploitative and just another notch in the bedpost of the syphilitic old whore that ‘journalism’ has become.

Print media is dying – as it rightly should – and the next generation of journalism will be online and egalitarian and so fractured that the millionaires who currently own the ‘free’ press will never again have the power to influence on such a scale. It’s about time their power is questioned and rather than be fearful of their influence, those in the public eye speak out against conjecture, opinion, advertising and propoganda masquerading as journalism. I was heartened this week to see this clip…

The White House head of communications Anita Dunn finally telling it like it is in regards to FOX. The corporatised media shouldn’t be allowed to get away with what they do by people fearful of their power. You should never be scared to call bullshit. That’s how they got so corrupt and powerful in the first place.

Rather than waste time fuelling the profit-making of another celebrity death, why not watch this documentary……