Christmas Passed

And so I have stood the test and gotten through those awkward couple of days unscathed. I ended up spending Christmas with some actor friends of mine, and immediately took the opportunity to force them gently into a reading of The Children’s Crusade, or what I’ve got of it so far. Their comments were invaluable, [...]

Prospects

I wrote the following for my Journal back in early November. It’s still very much relevant.
“Filmmaking in the UK is a cottage industry. It’s like the First World War. People streaming out of the trenches, mowed down by reality. Only a few of them manage to stagger on and actually make films.”
- Brian Dunnigan.
That’s a [...]

Five Great Christmas Movies

Now that I’m in Europe I get to have a properly cold December. Whether it’s going to be a white Christmas is still up in the misty air, but no matter what happens in reality, one can always rely on some holiday cheer courtesy of the silver screen. Below, bringing a good tradition back, five [...]

More Quick Notes

Dreamt the plot of Woody Allen’s new movie last night. A celebrated prosecutor with National Health Service glasses falls neurotically in love with a charming white-collar criminal half his age (thus middle-aged) who keeps finding ways of escaping from the courthouse, while he at the same time is convinced by a part-time filmmaker friend to [...]

There But For The Grace Of God…

…go I. In fact, with a certainty reaching towards the inevitable I can say that there, in a year, I will go too.
Where? The Graduation Show. It’s the last LFS-related event of the year for me, taking place in the ever-so-posh National Gallery, just off Trafalgar Square. It has its own cinema – who knew? [...]

The Artifice Of Story

Comedy’s the upsurge of life, tragedy the downsurge. Drama is the wave itself.
Sounds neat, doesn’t it?
There’s a tendency on writing courses, and it’s a tempting tendency, to put the process in sections, boxes, schedules. To boil it all down to ingredients that can be added and subtracted and modified. This is what it does and [...]

The End Of The Beginning

As opposed to the beginning of the end. Or the beginning of the beguine, which Wikipedia tells me is a dance, quite similar to a slow rumba, which was moderately popular in the 1930s. I think it fair to say that you will never see a moderately popular slow rumba taking place on this blog. [...]

Golden Years

I was going to watch Elizabeth – The Golden Age anyway. I loved 1998’s Elizabeth and Cate Blanchett, who I follow religiously, hasn’t disappointed me yet. On the contrary, she has frequently astounded me. Add to that the gorgeous trailer, filled with magnificent costumes and wild cinematography, and The Golden Age quickly found itself climbing [...]