A long time ago, in a city-centre far far away

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The new cast of the next Star Wars movie join the old to read through the script.  

I was, like many other millions around the world, completely blown away by this great photo of the new cast for Star Wars 7.   The chosen cast are a wonderful mix of iconic American cinema heroes (plus Mark Hammill) and up and coming Brits who very few have heard of today, but who will have their visages imprinted on billions of viewers minds two years from now.

Like many readers here, I excitedly queued around the block, in my case outside the Odeon Cinema, Bradford, to see the original Star Wars.  The movie had already been out for some months in the US, but in the pre-internet era, reviews and glimpses of the film were scarce and enigmatic.  It came as a complete and utter smack in the mind when we eventually saw it.  The cinema even illuminated the overhead spinning mirrorball as the titles came up.  Like some ancient tale, writ-large with feisty princesses, knights with light-sabres and a masked bad guy who needed an inhaler.  And like all great cinema, at it's heart a (yet undiscovered) dysfunctional father-son relationship to end all others.  

I recently went back to Bradford.  The grand old (vast!) cinema now looks like this:  

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Ironically perhaps, the derelict building (click to see the trees growing around the domed-roofs) stands just yards from the snappily named National Media Museum, which used to be called the less snappily named National Museum of Photography, Film and Television.  With even more delicious irony, the site where one of this much loved cinema once flung open its doors is now officially at the heart of the World's First UNESCO City of Film.  A derelict cinema stands next to The Alhambra theatre, which, by all accounts thrives.  

In the foreground you can see a pond.  Yes.  A pond.  And there lies just one aspect of a sorry tale or ambitious property developers and incompetent Councillors, misguided by a post-millennium vision of City Centres as "urban communal congregation hubs for civic integration", or something.  Several million of investment resulted in the civic heart of the City becoming a pond and the rest of the City centre being laid to waste.    

In 2006, the shopping district of the City Centre was sold off to Westfield, an Australian property developer who have since successful developed 'high-end' retail destinations in West and East London.  While the Westfield millions were well executed in London, after they had finished demolishing Bradford City Centre, the global financial markets crashed and this rather inconveniently left a once proud City with (literally) a hole in the middle. The project was mothballed until 2008 when work began on creating a temporary park on part of the site. In January 2014, some eight years after demolition work resumed on the construction of some shops.  A tragic tale for the City, though not tragic enough to make headlines elsewhere.  

I am writing this a couple of days after visiting the cinema to see another tragic tale, King Lear.  This was part of The National Theatre's creative scheme for broadcasting key productions as live and on Thursday evening I was sat in a packed cinema watching Simon Russell-Beale as the mad old King who loses everything while his gullible friend has his eyes gouged out.  The simulcast was live to over 1,000 cinemas around the world.  A massive audience who would never have seen the production on London's South Bank.  And a third of the cost of the normal seat.  It's an unusual experience, compelling, but not really cinema and not really theatre.  But I am probably about a decade behind the adoption curve and simulcast will undoubtedly grow and grow as the technology, sound-scape and visual impact becomes even more profoundly good than it already was this week.  So in Bradford, live theatre thrives (with a very healthy public subsidy, I am sure) and the cinema dies and grows trees.  Maybe in a cinema in Beckenham this week, there was a glimpse of something that might save other old cinemas?   

That was the year that was Once

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January 2013 started with a rainbow.  Early morning, on the coast path, heading home to coffee and toast,  we were stopped in our tracks.  It was a sign.  Of a better year than the last.  Indeed, an excellent one.  So in classic web-log fashion, after The Times 'best books of the year', or Q’s 'top fifty albums', or NME’s 'records of the year'...  Herewith, a few reasons why there was indeed gold at the end of the rainbow.  MUSIC  It started with Bowie who tricked everyone.  Everyone.  Where Are We Now sounded weary and tenorous.  Like an old man singing listfully for the artist he was once was.  A decade or more before.  But then the album landed.  Guitars, tunes, solos, choruses.  It rocked.  The Stars Are Out Tonight, in particular.  Still, an artist.  A wonderful retrospective of 'stuff' at The V&A in March only reinforced the sense of wonder.  Bowie grew up less than a quarter of a mile from where I've lived for the past twenty years.  I pick up my dry-cleaning at the end of THAT road.  My kids remain unimpressed however much I eulogise.  Meanwhile, Night Beds produced a lovely record and then Foals released a monster single, Inhaler, and one of the albums of the year, with horses on the cover and a pop tune called My Number which was never topped all year.  Ben Howard won awards and filled my office with Keep Your Head Up.  Imagine Dragons teased momentarily, then The Boxer Rebellion released a magic record called Promises, which played better out of speakers and on video than it did live.  Why the band didn't hire a keyboard player for the tour rather than have Nathan Nicholson 'trying' to rock out while stood behind an electronic rack on stuff, I don't know.  It killed the shows for me.   The National plumbed new wonderful depths of morose shoe-gazing gloom with Trouble Will Find Me.  Karl Wallinger played live in London, World Party stripped down and brilliant.  He seemed a well man, alive in his music.  My daughter bought a guitar the same colour as Taylor Swift's.  More records this year tested on flights to New York, Hong Kong and Shanghai included ballsy-ness from Editors, electronic squeakiness from Chvrches and absolute knock-outs from Volcano Choir and London Grammar (I know).  Peter Gabriel and The Waterboys both did '25-year anniversary' tours of classic albums.  Fisherman's Blues won hands-down.  FILMS  Last year I found a historic melodrama from late eighteenth century Denmark as my film of the year.  This February I fell for Elizabeth Olsen in Josh Radnor's Liberal Arts, an altogether more cheery offering than Martha Marcy May Marlene and I've not had much come close.  Woody Allen's To Rome From Love was an entertaining postcard to a place I hold dear, but not scripted with the wit and wonder of Midnight In Paris. [I have yet to see Blue Jasmine, but hear great things.]  Gravity lived up to all the pre-release hype and even 3D-phobe Mark Kermode made it one of his films of the year. Sound City (a documentary homage to an analogue sound-desk) was fascinating.   Blockbusters mainly blustered, though the Costner mid-section of Man of Steel was wonderfully done.  Hobbit II was stunningly done - and looked extraordinary, but was way too long and spoilt by a strange 'Monty Python'- esque second act, with Stephen Fry annoying, not entertaining.  BOOKS were fab in 2013, with complete immersion in the Hugh Howey's Wool trilogy (now optioned by Ridley Scott) and Benedict Jacka's Alex Verus series took another step forward to awesome with a fourth volume. But amidst much that was wonderful, it was in the Phoenix Theatre in London, where I found the best moment of 2013.  Once is the stage adaptation of the film of the same name, which won an oscar for Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova for the song Falling Slowly.  The stage adaptation won 8 Tony awards on Broadway and the London show is awe-inspiring.  Usually, for a stage musical show, the band is in the pit, hidden from view.  Here they are on the stage (which is a pub), playing, and singing and performing like their lives depend upon it.  The lead, Declan Bennett (who plays Guy), is charismatic and holds attention throughout.  The cast are brilliant character actors and can PLAY.  The interval drinks are served on the stage, from the bar, blurring the line between performers and audience in a way that is not contrived or trite, but somehow genuine.  The music is the thing.  Not the Oscar song, but Gold, the song that ends the first half and is reprised in the second.  Wonderful.  Once will close in mid 2014.  It has none of the special effects of a West End 'spectacular' like Charlie [see review], but it is the best thing I have seen in a long time.

Some Kind of Wonderful

Just back from seeing Peter Gabriel's Back2Front concert at the 02.  OK, seeing a Peter Gabriel gig is not quite in the category of 'guilty pleasures' yet, but the busy crowd was thoroughly pre-screened (not allowing anyone vaguely under 40 through the door) and the set was spaced and paced in a way that there were plenty of loo breaks. Peter Gabriel had Hamish Hamilton on site making a movie of the show, so much of the performance seemed to be played with the Blu-Ray release in mind, more than the old-dears down the front waiting for Shock The Monkey.  Unfortunately, Mercy Street was ruined by Gabriel on his back, cowered in pain, being persecuted by a dozen 3D cameras.  Still, at least he played some hits stood up and the best moments were stunningly played (with the original line up who played 'So' 25 years ago) and the gig ended wonderfully with In Your Eyes.  

Apparently when Gabriel played the show in Los Angeles, John Cusack made a cameo appearance, coming on stage to reprise his 'boom box' above the head routine from the Cameron Crowe move Say Anything.  It's the memorable scene in an OK movie and one of the best fusions ever of great soundtrack in lieu of wordy script.  Cusack stands in the yard and lets Ione Skye's character know everything she ever needs to know about how he feels, without, ahem, saying anything.  Crowe went on to make some good films, and in Jeremy Maguire a really great movie, packed full of memorable characters and lines ['you complete me,' 'show me the money', 'you had me at hello'] and  a rare likeable performance from Tom Cruise.  But Say Anything for me is less remembered as a Cameron Crowe film than as a close cousin of a whole series of 1980s 'rites of passage' movies like The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Some King of Wonderful and, of course, Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  Those John Hughes movies are rooted deep in the psyche and loved to this day.  Wonderful interwoven stories of just how awfully tough it was to be a middle-class kid from a decent neighbourhood, with your whole life ahead of you, chasing down a date with Molly Ringwald, set to a soundtrack of The Psychedelic Furs and The March Violets.  They just don't make them like they used to anymore.

Care, Care, Care and Care Again

On Screenwriting, I completely re-wrote Leicester Square again this year.   Humbly, I can now confirm it is definitely four-fifths of wonderful!  But, as anyone who writes and reads screenplays knows, four-fifths of wonderful is still, a considerable mind-numbingly-bloody-long-way-to-go.  The plot is now tighter than a rat catcher's glove and the set-pieces are tenser than an Elvish archer's weapon of choice, but once you put romance at the heart of a drama, you need to have your audience fall in love with the characters and care, care, care all the way to the titles.  Still, I know what needs to be done and think I have the stuff in the kit-bag to take it from good to great.  But, I also know to get there you need to care enough to really make it as good as it could be.  I'm reminded of the story of Blue Valentine, which was made by Derek Cianfrance. He reportedly knocked out more than 70 drafts of the script before the film was finally wrapped.  Seventy!  You have to more than care about the tale to deliver 70 drafts.  You have to have to be obsessed.   A little like the hero of Leicester Square, Tom Horner, who spent nine months of his life obsessively, painstakingly, crafting his masterpiece panorama of London in isolation, battered by the elements. Tom almost lost everything in the pursuit of his obsession.  All I need to do is re-open Final Draft.

*See more on creative writing and current projects here.

Imagine, a right proper Charlie

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Douglas Hodge plays Wonka

A new stage musical version of Charlie and The Chocolate Factory opened last week at The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.  The show will garner awards for production and Douglas Hodge as a charismatic Willy Wonka will be feted and adorned with well-deserved gongs.  What amazed though was not that the show is amazing.  It is right?   But more amazing is how something this good, left me feeling slightly cheated.  Scrub that, reverse that.  I will try and explain.  A multi-million dollar production with special visual effects, directed by Oscar winning, Bond-rebooting genius Sam Mendes.  Songs by the guys who did Hairspray and a lyricist who makes Billy Crystal's songs zing at the The Oscars.  It just couldn't fail.  Or could it?

My first experience of musical theatre, other than Panto and a school production of Bugsy Malone, was at The Palladium about twenty years ago, when I saw the same Sam Mendes' version of Oliver!  The leading lady's parents, sat just in front, were engulfed by the emotion of it all, weeping throughout.  Musical theatre, at its best, does that.  It can move you to tears, even, or maybe because of, the sheer unabashed joy of it all.  But last night, Charlie was a game of two halves.  A long over sincere (slightly plodding) opening hour, only revitalised before the break by a caricature "fat German eats too many sausages" song (!?) and then the arrival of Wonka.  The second half is a stunner: pacy, witty, funny and extraordinary in its visual chutzpah and an undoubted technology triumph.  The Ooompah-Lumpahs are memorable, the set-peice fight with vicious roller skating Squirrels, surreally brilliant.  Its so so fantastically inventive in a way that the Burton + Depp movie was depressingly not.  But still, why not a triumph?  

Well, a SPOILER follows, so quit here if you are seeing the show sometime.  A 2 hour 15 show should have at least one memorable tune.  Something to humm on the Tube on the way home.   And this show DOES.  It is gorgeously done and starts with a simple opening tease… "Make a wish.  Count to three."  

We are back with Gene Wilder at the top of a staircase, swiping his cane across the chests of the children desperate to run down the stairs and devour the set.  Pure Imagination.  A show this good still needed a memorable song and it found it.  Not in the world of the imagination, but from the dusty DVD on the shelf.  The audience almost collectively gasped and then fell under the spell, again.  The theatre last night was sold out.   It will be.  For years.

UPDATE.  The show website now shows a 2 minute trailer which…gives the whole game away

You will believe a script can die

I don't usually write single movie reviews on WYA, but…herewith, a collection of pithy, unstructured thoughts about the new Superman movie, Man of Steel.  If you don't want too many spoiler words, just simply skip to the next blog post, on something more important than a DC re-boot.    

In many ways, its like Christopher Nolan's Batman franchise, but without the humour.  But the guy who plays Superman (Henry Cavill) is so hot, you can't believe it takes two hours for anyone other than Lois to even notice.  Lois (Amy Adams) wears various cardigans and is so unlike Margo Kidder's Lois, that I kept expecting a calypso band to appear and start playing "How Can I Tell Her I Love Her", while furry animals clean the Daily Plant offices.  And then, and then, and then…it's got this bit in the middle, told non-linear, shot through long grass, which takes the Christ analogy from Bryan Singer's version and rolls it into a big fat smoke and ponders, literally, what it is all about?  Who am I?  Why am I here?  Why the cape?  The middle hour is a beautifully shot and paced episodic 'pause for breath' exploring the odd non-father-son relationship (with Costner, above, who is perfect).  Thankfully, this transcends the silly costume stuff (think Kenneth Branagh's Thor) and then ultimately the noisy Michael Bay style Transformer noise and visual debacle ending.  A fab 'reboot' franchise movie about becoming and then being a Superhero is unfortunately bookended by a terrible cacophony of visual effects rubbish at the end.  For Warners it will make at least a billion dollars and Henry Cavill will become as hot a star property as Hugh Jackman.

Hong Kong Phew-ee with @Harper

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Harper Reed. He codes. 

Just got back from Macau and Hong Kong [see blog post from March ’11 for reflection on visiting the 'end of the world'] and I am relieved to report that, yes, madness still prevails.  A few things have changed.  The harbour is smaller.  The trip to Kowloon is now shorter by about quarter of a mile.  A nearby mountain has been excavated, re-compacted and the waterfront at Central turned into new skyscraper-friendly "land".  Reclaimed land.  From a mountain.  We were in Hong Kong to see the British and Irish Lions play, as a 'warm-up' ahead of their tour to Australia.  Now as ‘warm-ups’ go, this was a clearly a success as the temperature was 35 degrees at 8 PM, with 85% humidity thrown in to make it feel welcoming, and so unlike Europe you could not have made it up.  Neither could you have made up the provision of "at your seat beers" which magically appeared whenever your mind began formulating the concept of a beer as a vague need or want.  Instantly, cold beers appeared, were consumed and life became incrementally better.  As human endeavours go, this felt up there with the wheel, or the moon landings, or penicillin, or the world-wide web.  The Rugby-in-a-sauna experience was made all the more fun for the excellent company of Harper Reed and his wife Hiromi.  

Harper, Hiromi and a massive bloke called Martin Johnson

Harper is on a two-month international speaking tour, bombarding audiences at pace with insight, wit and much hard-won tech savvy learning.  Harper was CTO for the Obama’s election campaign, spending 18 months helping raise several-hundred million campaign dollars and coordinating the online-energies of over a one-million volunteers to help save the world from some tea party crazies.  Harper is a one-off.  Search him on Google and you get an endearing lack of self-deprecation: “probably one of the coolest guys ever”. His own Twitter handle is equally succinct: “I am pretty awesome”.  See @harper, or check-out via his Blog at https://harperreed.com.  Better still, buy him a beer, book him to speak, or both.  Apparently the Hong Kong Stadium is only used for sport and not rock concerts as the local residents don’t like the noise.  In a City where horrendous traffic halts to a halt, where no-one seems to worry that an area the size of a small English town should be simultaneously home and workplace to 20 million people, we sat impressed by the residents’ heroic stance.  As Harper put it as we headed into the overwhelming throng of Lan Kwai Fong, “I like the fact that Hong Kong people give a s**t about noise pollution.”  

Hoping to bump into @harper again sometime soon.

Baseball is great. It's just not cricket.

I've recently discovered baseball.  It's been a revelation.  Readers in the US might not get the fact that you can go through several decades of being alive with a healthy pulse, and not appreciate baseball.  Well, in the UK we have cricket. Two sports which ought to be similar [viz, hard ball thrown quickly, a wooden bat and enormous gloves, for the wicket-keeper/'catcher' at least].  But the two games are fundamentally different, though in the same way.  Symbiotic.  Upside-down.  Back to front.  

In test Cricket, the advantage is with the batsman ('hitter').  Some of the greatest achievements in cricket revolve around him staying there, scoring slowly, without being caught for three days or more.  Over 18 hours of not getting out.  In England, these sporting heroes get Knighted by the Queen and win lucrative contracts with Sky TV to commentate on other merely mortal players.  In baseball, the advantage is with the pitcher ('bowler') who throws so fast and with such variety, disguise and cunning, that the very greatest of all time can go through nine innings (over 120 throws of over 90 miles per hour) with such unerring accuracy, that not a single batsman gets on base.  The perfect game.  Here, the 'Knighthood' is the Cy Young award, or the Hall of Fame.  In England, we have heroes, who don't get out and in America, they have heroes who don't get hit.  

The other big difference between cricket and baseball?  No one has ever made a movie about cricket as good as Moneyball.  The best sports movie I've seen.  I've never been a fan of Brad Pitt, but I loved him as Billie Beane, the GM of Oakland Athletic, in this movie.  I hated the 'gross-out' trash movies of Jonah Hill, but he is perfect in this as the Yale analyst Peter Brand.  It's a film about sports, and maths, and a man making decisions and living with his own hang-ups and the mistakes he's made.  But it is the writing that hits you like a curve ball.  It's a clever trick, but the pacey dialogue between Beane and Brand takes the game of baseball apart and makes it logical and comprehensible for a wider audience.  Aaron Sorkin gets most of the writing credit which, like the The Social Network, is quick, smart and jargon heavy, yet it zips.  ["The problem we're trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams, then there's fifty feet of crap, and then there's us."]  It's not Field of Dreams (which is spoilt by being fist-chewingly soppy) and we see hardly a pitch being thrown or a base being stolen in the whole film, but it makes for essential and compelling viewing.  

A new film on the life and career of Jackie Robinson (the first African American player to play Major League Baseball in the modern era) has just been released in the States.  It's called 42.  The Guardian just called it "the most authentic baseball movie of all time."  Awaited.  I hope it comes close to Moneyball. 

Freak Out, at the V&A

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For Easter, I escaped from London and headed for the coast.  That much is not so new.  There is something about being close[r] to the sea.  The sight and smell of the familiar shore clears the mind.  The inland gentle breeze, now braces near the waves, which crash on the shingle, nonchalant, making me consider deep profundities, before I offer to buy my five-year old nephew an ice-cream.  Working backwards a few days and I am back in London at the Victoria and Albert museum with a friend, erudite on the topic of pop music, David Laurie.  We were privileged to taste the new David Bowie exhibition a few days before the paying throng.  An intimate "exclusive" preview for a select crowd, which in reality meant several hundreds guests.  The V+A have sold over 50,000 tickets for this smart show of memorabilia, costumes and nostalgia, suitably turned up to eleven.  Go and see it, or rather, go and hear it, as the Sennheiser audio installation is superb.  At the party, Doctor Who showed up which seemed appropriate for Bowie, who bridges decades and centuries in both sound and vision.  I have been revisiting a rather fab tome called Strange Fascination by David Buckley.  The story of the boy from Bromley (not Brixton) is riveting, from the suburbs of South London to become the morphing enigma that he is - with tunes to die for, writing imagery to wrap around buildings and songs that resonate and resound.  We rightly love David Bowie at WYA towers (or even here from this seaside retreat) ever since I first heard his best/worst record on Radio 1 in March 1983.  The record, Let's Dance, was born out of a chance meeting between Bowie (who "needed a hit") and guitarist/producer Nile Rodgers, in a club called The Continental in New York in October 1982.  Although he anticipated a world-wide smash, Bowie could not have realised the impact that meeting with Rodgers and their subsequent collaboration would have on me six months later. 

As a song it starts starts terribly, like some visit to the doctor to check your larynx, then the double-flange on the snare cuts immediately to a bass line groove and chopped echoing guitar.  Bowie backed by Chic, and for me back then… the guy singing sounded SO cool.  So, I didn't discover Bowie on Top of the Pops in 1972 singing Starman.  EVERYONE I know (even those born in the 1980's) seems to have claimed that seeing Bowie singing his 'version' of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, with his arm draped around Mick Ronson, was how they discovered Bowie.  No, I discovered Bowie at his most commercially popular and (to many) most risible.  Let's Dance was released 30 years ago.  Not five.  The helming, guitar playing and production was from Nile Rodgers who has been a hit-maker for Diana Ross, Duran Duran, Madonna and others.  Rodgers has been "blindsided" (his words) in recent years by his battle with cancer, but he is still touring with even an appearance at Glastonbury due this summer.  

Freak Out. 

A review of the Waterboys in Hammersmith

Just back from The Waterboys at Hammersmith Apollo, or Hammersmith Odeon as it will be more fondly known to many.  Mike Scott and his 'raggle taggle' band of various musicians have over the past 25+ years created something pretty wonderful and only temporarily gone into self-parody (around 2003 then Mike fronted a five piece guitar-only version playing bad Jimi Hendrix solos and distorting his back catalogue into oblivion).  I feared he had gone awry again when he launched his 'An Appointment with Yeats' concert tour and album last year.  A whole evening of ponderous songs based on Yates poetry?…not sure Mike.  The version we got at The Odeon was a better format - part "vintage Waterboys" (Mike's words), a second part songs from Mr Yates [including an odd masked performance] and then an encore of greatest tunes.  The star of all three segments is the astonishing electro fiddle playing of Steve Wickham, who makes a noise on the violin like no other.  Another time I must revisit the astonishing legacy of these guys [Wickham played on U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday, Waterboys keyboard player Karl Wallinger wrote She's The One which became a hit for Robbie Williams, Sinead O'Connor sang backing vocals on Wallinger's World Party debut album, before becoming enormous with a song by Prince…]  I have the Wickham playing now.  If you needed any reminder, or have never seen him play:  The Pan Within, recorded in Germany. 

Wilko Johnson. Guitar Levitation.

The extraordinary, Wilko Johnson

Inspired by the new Foals record (check it out here), I found my way back through the wonder that is Spotify to rediscover Talking Heads this week.  Even my unimpressible thirteen year-old has been killing his eardrums under his Beats to the joy that is 'Slippery People' and 'Burning Down the House'.  Which got me thinking.  What did I listen to when I was an early teen?  Surely, something really cool and completely different to all the other kids?  Surely, I knew about REM or Echo and the Bunnymen way before anyone else?  I wasn't running round with a stripe of white across my nose, or cultivating a fringe like the bloke in A Flock of Seagulls.  I wasn't sat in the corner listening to Yes or Genesis (though I sagely did so in a big way, post-Acne).  No, I was led astray down a path towards the glory and guttural wonder that is the guitar.  And my first guitar hero was Wilko Johnson.  

I went to my first ever 'proper' gig at Bradford University to see Wilko.  The man in black was like some mysterious illusionist.  He could do the rock equivalent of levitation.  Wilko played rhythm and lead guitar.  So, big deal?  "No, you don't understand," I would plead, whilst disinterested mates tried to see who could spit the furthest.  "He plays rhythm and lead…AT THE SAME TIME!"  Wilko's playing transformed a tight three-piece RNB band into a thunderous gang of four.  Striding like some manic exile from the Ministry of Silly Walks, Wilko chopped chords, mixing rhythm with wah-wah and frenzied solos.  When he soloed it was like there was some force of nature simultaneously chop-chop-chopping through the bar chords.  Rock n' roll levitation.  

Wilko is playing his last ever gigs in March.  After decades of touring and making music, Wilko has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and has refused chemotherapy.  In interviews, he has talked with a touching candidness and honesty about his situation. Told by doctors his cancer was inoperable, he said he felt "…vividly alive. You're looking at the trees and the sky and everything and it's just 'whoah'.  I am actually a miserable person. I've spent most of my life moping in depressions and things, but this has all lifted."  

No surprises.  It is impossible to get a ticket for the last ever shows.

Film of the year, 1776.

There are innumerable blogs on the topic, "Best Film of 2012". Some of them are terrific - like this one, or this one, or even, this one. But few of them agree. Wonderful really that opinions can vary. That taste can be, exactly that.

My film of the year was unquestionably A Royal Affair. Period dramas as MOVIES are doomed in an age when TV owns the territory. Downton predominates our thinking, but the ambition is so pedestrian. Sure bodices are ripped, looks of longing are beautifully framed and costumers raid dusty cupboards, but script writers for TV seem to spend televisual millions explaining, explaining, explaining. Now here, complete with glorious SUBTITLES, is a fine movie of intrigue, mixed motives and true madness. Nikolaj Arcel's movie is written so well (by Rasmus Heisterberg based on a source novel of a tale apparently every Danish child would know) you may want to want to walk out and give up ever having misguidedly thought you could tell a tale even nearly so well as this. Mad King Christian VII (Mikkel Folsgaard) marries 16 year old English princess Caroline (Alicia Vikander) who falls for Johann Struensee (Mads Mikkelsen) who becomes the king's personal physician, despite being German, or something. Its cold and lots of people die of Small Pox. The film is imbued with Shakespeare, which mad King Christian loves to quote, and mixes the romantic drama of the Court with the frisson of ideas and ideals of the enlightenment, but ultimately the book burners and forces of conservatism confront such liberal claptrap with a good dose of torture and the swing of a mighty axe. A Royal Affair is filmed wonderfully, cut crisply, feels 60 minutes shorter than its 140 minutes running time and is the best advert for Danish cinema since, since, well take me on trust - its much better than Dragon Tattoo. See it. It's the best film about late eighteenth century Denmark you are likely to see, well ever.

Exit Music for a film

You'll know the feeling.  It's dark.  The score swells.  The protagonist stands, then slumps, battered, bruised and changed, but still desperate.  Maybe, there is still hope?   Then he turns and recognises the hope walking back towards him, alive.  Still alive.  The score swells again.  Piano.  ALWAYS a flippin' piano, as the text rolls up the screen. "Directed by…" and you sniff heavily, or unconsciously move your sleeve across the top of your lip.  You will not cry.  But then, the composer makes your oesophagus feel like its constricted by the very breathe that keeps you alive.  Your chest heaves and you fumble for your coat in the dark.  The girl in the seat behind you weeps openly, unconsoled by the concern of the date she did chose, because it was never HER choice of film.  Unfortunately, she will never realise how truly wonderful the man is whose arm she ungratefully pushes away.  HE chose the film.  He took her there and let the film make her feel that way.  That open.  That raw.  With him.  In the dark.  

And all it was, was exit music for a film.  

You'll know the feeling.  You have heard those songs and known they would be perfect as the title rolls.  I discovered one today on the 6.52 pm from London Bridge.  Bat for Lashes' Laura.  It starts with a piano refrain.  I don't know why they left Laura behind, or why her heart was broken, but her arms are draped around someone she loves and she longs for that time dancing on a table like some star from a bygone era.  It's beautifully written and the song has a lovely line about her "name being tattooed on everyone's skin".  Before I came across Laura, it was some Elbow tune, probably Scattered Black and Whites, but then they became huge.  I loved a ballad by REM in 1992 before Everybody Hurts, and they became ubiquitous in a way that just made you feel someone had mugged you and that someone was everyone you knew.  I've been scrolling through Spotify, iTunes, t'internet radio, Utube, Vimeo.  THAT song will be on there one day.  Not some cheesy Christopher Cross thing from when I was thirteen and knew no better, or those soaring strings as Red walks along the beach. I will forever be haunted by Aime Mann's Wise Up (at the start of the third act and before the plague of Frogs in Magnolia).  Maybe, Julia Stone.  Maybe, Laura Groves.  THOSE are the songs I mean.  You'll know the feeling.  The song plays.  And the girl in the seat behind will realise that the song was meant for her, because he chose the film and he knew they would play that song.  And she would hold him close like her life depends upon it, as the titles roll.  At least that's the way it ends in this film.  

And all it would be, would be exit music for a film. 

The importance of elsewhere

I've been thinking about doing something elsewhere.  You know the place.  Not here.  Elsewhere.  Not all the time, just some of it.  Not forever, but for a while.  Some people change jobs, some jump ship, some experiment, most procrastinate.  Some travel.  Some stay travelling.  This came home to me profoundly when a very good friend and colleague recently announced that she was to go travelling for 10 months.  It never occurred to me you could, you know, just keep going.  I travel a lot with work.  I do day trips to here and there and fly overnight long-haul, failing miserably to sleep while the plane bumps erratically en-route home.  But the destination always has the return home on the bottom of the itinery.  Apparently, travel broadens the mind.  The experience may on they surface be one of long-lines, losing baggage, getting sick and feeling nauseous at 'foreign' toilets.  But the end product is mind-broadening.  A greater understanding of different cultures surely leads to greater tolerance which can be no bad thing.  My travel experiences have been mostly good, some amazing and very few terrible.  But ten months elsewhere?  Not here, but elsewhere.  Maybe elsewhere becomes "home" and home becomes The Beach, without the paranoia, or A Room with a View, but with Helena twenty years ago, not now.  There is probably a good film around the idea of Elsewhere, or just maybe it has already been perfectly written.   I discover, through the wonders of modern technology, that I have neither shared a tweet for many days, or blogged a thought for several months.  I have been mired in the here and now, and too little concerned with the importance of elsewhere.  As for the screenplay project and the novel and the other writing, they are still sat there on a desk in that place called Elsewhere.  Like the kids' bedroom wall in The Time Bandits, maybe if I push hard enough, it will move?  Slowly at first but then with more weight and effort it begins to shift.  It moves further and further, momentum builds so the bedroom is now distant and the wall falls away in to the void.  I follow too.  Spinning downwards, until I land with a thump - elsewhere.  I guess my friend was brave enough to push the wall and keep on pushing.  I wish her good health, safety and many wonders as she travels and hope one day that Elsewhere for her and her beau, may end up being right back here.  In the meantime, Bon voyage.  Au Revoir. 

I tried the door where I used to live. Locked.

Philip Larkin lived a lie.  Many lies in fact.  The poet, the librarian, living in an unfashionable town at the end of railway line.  His personal life was torridly complex, with loves and lovers and the echoes a f***ed-up up childhood ringing through his verse.  But it is the verse that's the most remarkable thing.  I knew nothing about Larkin before I lived in Hull.  But I did visit his grave in Cottingham and write badly about an 'Arundel Tomb' and remain struck as much today as then by his line about "traffic heading all night North."  I was back in Hull this week with friends I seldom see.  But friends I spent much of 24 hours a day with for a couple of years 25 years ago.  It was not the cliched University reunion you might imagine.  Sure there was a sense of nostalgia and old-haunts visited and much drinking like it was 1987, just for a day.   Rather nervously (why?), I stood outside the house where many of us lived.  14 of us then.  It was now smartened, with conservatory extension, manicured lawns, double gazing and smoke detectors in every room.  Changed.  

The house features in a screenplay I wrote called THE VIVID, though the setting was moved to the more photogenic Cambridge and the inhabitants sexed-up appropriately for a Producer to be able to cast 'beautiful people'.  In THE VIVID, a re-union many years later brings to the surface passions and guilt and a terrible murderous secret that haunts the lives of them all*.  Back in the real world, we played pool, bought snacks from Tesco and went to an '80's disco.  The real revelation of the weekend was not how brilliant, warm, entertaining and fun friends remain many years later…they were and are…but that the town we knew grown up in had decayed so badly.  Step outside the environs of the University and Hull is a mess.  In 2003, Hull had the ignominy of being voted No1 is a poll of Britain's crap towns.  A decade later, it seems to have dipped again.  The issue is, you have to have a reason to go to Hull.  The University is one, the other is?…the other is?  

There was some early noughties investment, but despite Premiership football, and a few local heritage and Arts gems, Hull has not had the attention and dollops of cash bestowed on Liverpool, or Leeds or Manchester.  As Larkin said 40 years earlier, the traffic on the A1 heads North all night, not even glancing over it's shoulder as it passes.  You need a reason to turn right and head over the Humber, or skip eagerly through Goole and Hessle to visit Kingston Upon Hull.  But it is a City that was home to Wilberforce, John Godber, Paul Heaton, Anthony Minghella and every year it generates a university alumni who are fiercely proud of the City as just about the friendliest and least pretentious place on the planet.  Thankfully, that remains.  Unchanged. 

*See more on creative writing and current projects here.

In space, no one can read your out of office

I should be away this week somewhere far far away, but I am here.  That is both good and bad.  But ultimately, there is a choice to be made and I made the right one.  Some call it work-life balance, as if there is some perfect "newton's cradle" somewhere that beats perfectly and rhythmically between the demands of home and family and the machinations of the office, or the word-processor, or some other work-place.  There isn't the perfect balance between either or both, I am sure, but I took some good timely advice, and enjoyed the rain with the Queen and the rest of London on Jubilee weekend.  Thanks to an ever thoughtful friend, I went to the World Premiere of Prometheus last week.  The pre-release buzz had been wonderful, helped by a nifty and inventive online viral marketing campaign, some neat teaser trailers for the trailer, but most of all, simply 30+ years anticipation of film-fans wanting to know "what the hell happened on the planet before Alien and what exactly is that big fossilised "Space Jockey?"  There are some bigger questions posed by Ridley Scott's long awaited return to Science Fiction (who are we?, where are we from?, etc.) But I couldn't stop thinking about the original Stargate movie from 1994, which had the same "aliens/pyramids/map of the stars" concept.  Elsewhere some reviews have pointed to Swiss author Erich von Daniken who wrote Chariots of the Gods in the late 1960's, but it's well-trodden science fiction territory.  Maybe someone will pick up another esoteric tome - Graham Hancock's Fingerprints Of The Gods and adapt some of the completely nuts, but compellingly written nonsense in that book too?  In Prometheus, there are a couple of wonderful set-pieces, the CGI/VFX are stunning, the soundscape is fantastic, the sets deeply creepy and awe-inducing.  Prometheus is intense and compellingly made, but it never really answered that Space Jockey question to the satisfaction of this viewer at least!  What it did for me though was remind me of the astounding amount of CRAFT that goes into a production like this.  The Premiere audience rightly cheered Ridley, but as the titles rolled, everyone from the Casting Director to the Editor were cheered through the great space that is the Empire, Leicester Square.  Which got me thinking on "work-life balance" again.  Did the junior VFX techies, or other set-crew on Prometheus roll over and groan when the alarm clock went off?  Did they resignedly look miserable on their way to Pinewood, or some other production house and bemoan the balance between the demands of the job?  I hope not.  And if they did?  It is a miracle that they made such a spectacle of light and sound as this.

The Procrastination Games - writers looking for Wifi

After Italian pizza and The Hunger Games, the cultural non-highlight of the month was NOT being able to watch the start of series 5 of Mad Men because I am too tight or too proud to have a dish on the roof.  I will it seems, have to wait.  Back to The Hunger Games.  Earlier this year I managed to read all 3 parts of Suzanne Collins' Katniss trilogy in just five days.  What a book!  The film is good, not great - mainly because it adheres so close to the beats of the book it ends up being a good retelling of the written tale, without ever really getting you in the gut in the way a great film can.  But there have been some great films recently.  I loved watching Midnight in Paris (ace), Moneyball (ace), Tinker Taylor (ace, but slow) in the space of a few days days, then lurched in to guilt for not hitting the keys harder in recent weeks.  I currently have two projects on the go concurrently, or rather, not on go concurrently.  I am ponderously writing a synopsis of a wonderful original novel set in the late nineteenth century.  But not another Leicester Square style epic - more Sunday night TV, dripping with Northern accents, desperate slums and tales of heroic self-made types haunted by ghosts from the past, and bursting with characters full of jealousy, anger and ambition.  The second project (a novel) has been dusted down after some 26 years (or so) in draft form. The synopsis and first three chapters are now beautifully typo free and ready for pitching.  I need to KNUCKLE down and get some of this stuff out there and read.  A common experience amongst writers seems to be that the block to progress is not the sheer effort needed not to do the writing, but to focus actually focus on the writing in the first place.  I have tried being "locked in a cabin in the woods" (pretty much) with only the keyboard to keep me company. I found myself though spending way too much time trying to get a phone signal or some semblance of wifi during coffee breaks.  My productivity soared when I drove out to coffee shop, that had decent Wifi.  So in isolation, I never really became any more productive than I am when I write early morning before the office, or in the evening during some armageddon homework meltdown that makes Wave Your Arms towers shake like a war zone.  One of the other barriers to progress seems to be the habit of blogging about writing rather than actually, erm…writing.  Logging off.  

JD

Ridley creates TED lecture in 2023 for teaser trailer

I have always loved the original Alien movie, and then James Cameron's Aliens a few years later.  Both created an eco-system of horror, action, and better still a sense of mystery and 'other forces' at play.  A despicable corporation happy to let a expendable crew die, or colonists, get erm, colonised so weapons research can be progressed.  Both films also had a nice take on humanity versus science as much as humanity versus badass alien creatures.  There is something wonderful in both films about the place called the LAB.  Not Frankensteins dark cellar but a clinical, white surface place with jars full of something horrible.  So today was complete when I stumbled across the new teaser for Ridley Scott's prequel to Alien, Prometheus - which will be released in the summer and doubtless be completely massive.  The teaser takes the ultimate behind the scenes despotic mad man Peter Weyland - as in Weyland Corporation - and gives him a TED lecture spot as envisaged in 2023.  Played by Guy Pearce, Weyland is compelling and nauseating at the same time.  "We are the Gods now" he proclaims to the thousands watching in 2023 and the millions in 2012 who will watch it, retweet it, and blog about it…predictably, of course.  But it is wonderful film marketing, cleverly conceived and executed.  You can see it here, link below.  Enjoy.  https://www.weylandindustries.com/

Hockney knocks it out of the park

Just got back from seeing David Hockney's massive show at the Royal Academy.  The blockbuster art show is not often front of mind when it comes to parting with hard earned cash, but there were many reasons for pre-booking for this one.  Yorkshire?  Tick.  From Bradford?  Tick.  Trees?  Tick.  Living legend?  Tick.  The experience, like many others report from trying to see postage-stamp size Da Vinci's at The National or grotesque nude indulgence with Freud at The NPG, your tolerance levels for queues, coach parties and school kids have to be high to see the works.  But what works!  Massive canvasses of color, sorry colour.  Hockney has literally thrown huge buckets of vibrant colour at canvass or through the presses of high quality printers realising his iPad creations.  He has brought all the 'Technicolor' of thirty years in Tinseltown On Sea, to find Bridlington is "a lot like St Tropez" and discover beauty in a gloomy Wolds wood, or majesty in a "totem" dead tree stump that recurs in about thirty of the paintings.  He has filled just about every inch of gallery, planned in three-dimensions from his East Yorkshire studio.  Then a major surprise amongst the acres of wood and trees he has created seven versions of an old-Masters Sermon on the Mount.  Above one haphazard unfinished version he writes 'L O V E' in an arc above Christ preaching from the rocky cliff.  Sharpen your elbows, practice saying "sorry" as you thump into old-ladies who do art and lunch, then linger amidst it all for as long as your can bear.  It's worth it. 

2011 and all that. Review of the Year.

Amidst the gloom…[head to any website of choice…] lots of amazing things in the world for WYA to reflect on this year, not least the friendship of some very special people and the encouragement of even more.  Writing moved ahead: Leicester Square was speedily finished and now in the safe hands of the veritable Tony Allen at Big Time Pictures, with lots of smart people kicking the project around and seeing what might be done with that particular vision of London's past. We will see what emerges and hope to make some announcements about this very soon

Pop Music. We were bowled over last week to hear that Dave Laurie's wonderful Memory Tapes will now need to be known as 'Grammy Nominated Memory Tapes' [see blog on Dave Hawke and his music] after the video for Yes I Know was nominated for Grammy last week. If you have not see it, it's a disturbing piece of visual poetry and worth wallowing in, for a few moments. Dave Laurie's ever ace SIC Records are now working with the Swedish song writing Emil Svanängen, better known as Loney Dear. His song My Heart is one of the tunes of the year. You can see him here, re-record the song live with a microphone taped to a goose. Also, some great albums by Wild Beats, Noah and The Whale, Bombay Bicycle Club, Wu Lfy, Foster The People, Snow Patrol, Cloud Control, Guillemots, The Phoenix Foundation and teasingly ahead of debut album, the emerging wonderfulness that is Clock Opera.

But overblown disappointment from Florence + Machine, who forgot about making tunes amidst all the bombast and bluster. She could have learned much from a stripped down caffeine fuelled Kate Bush, wearing fingerless gloves at a piano, who delivered not just one, but two albums (one a remake of three previous albums). Anyway, song of the year, was this. Clock Opera, Belongings. Get to 3.46 and just try not to completely love it. Clock Opera go head to head with Dry The River and US band Milagres in the first quarter of 2012 for best new band around. Should be quite a scrap. 

Best Films this year…oh, that's a toughie. Some of the best and worst goes a bit like this:

Tree of Life sent Cannes into a frenzy of introspection, the deepest reverie about a dysfunctional father-son relationships since Finding Nemo. Director of Moon, David Jones posted the wonderful re-joinder: "never had so much fuss being made about a kid moving house" [or pithy words to that effect, since removed from Twitter]. Sublimely made, but Film of the Year, sorry no. Absolutely loved Super 8 which felt fresh for being retro and cliched and using a four-note Giaccomo motif that is as good as he has ever done. Tintin was a step forward (amidst a thousand back) for 3D, while Rise of The Planet of the Apes blurred the line between performance and animation (for Andy Serkis) further still. Of Gods and Men (this year I think…) was dull and long. I admired, but did not enjoy Attack the Block. Joe Cornish spoke at the London Screenwriters Festival and was bombarded with adoration from the audience - but a "modern A Clockwork Orange with a new patwa, to match Burgess's take on the underclasses language…", arm no. Nice alien though and my son loved it. Brighton Rock was terrific, visceral and uncomfortable. HP7.2 was the worst of the series. HP7.1 suggested a darker, greyed out uncertainty that just got stretched into meaningless Michael-Bay-with-wands schlep in the last 90 minutes. Captain America was utterly shit. A waste of all energy. Marginally better was Thor. As "warm-up" segments for the overblown Avengers movie next year, the words 'bode' and 'well' are not happy bed fellows. Finally, managed to go a whole full year and avoid watching The Kings Speech. Inexcusable for a writer, I know. Still don't care. 

So Film of the Year? In a word: Senna. Senna is brilliant. Even though you know how it ends, nothing really prepares you for him hitting the wall. And then, when it has you blubbing like a child, up pops the story at the end about the "best driver you ever raced against?" and Senna tells of being a 19 year old kid and an older British adversary…Kleenex should have sponsored that genius splicing, editing and construction of archive footage. Made by Asif Kapadia and writer Manish Pandey, I have recommended to more people than anything else seen this year. I've not yet seen The Descendents, Shame, Drive, The Artist, Another Year or indeed, Another Earth, so much more to be seen before Awards season, but I do hope Senna rings all sorts of gongs in 2012.

Gig of the Year. Easy this one. The Boxer Rebellion in London at Heaven in London were brilliant. Not just because they were and were met with a cacophony for every song, but because before they came on stage the bar was raised SO MUCH HIGHER by the astonishing performance of We Are Augustines - a new New Jersey band which have emerged from the wreckage of another. No one in the room was quite prepared for that performance. Check out Chapel Song, the best possible mix of guitars and snogging you will have seen in a while.