Indelible Freckles

My lengthier meanderings will return once I’ve finished mucking around with them. And I have more time. Or have a script to deliver but just don’t feel like it right now. Until then -

• Locals looking for some chuckles - no, some jandle-stomping, gut-stitching hilarity - are urged to see Vela Manusaute’s Super Fresh which opened tonight and runs until Saturday. Vela is aided and abetted by Fasitua Amosa and Stacey Leilua, lately of To’ona’i.
• Over at the glacially-growing Guild forums is a nice exchange about When Collaborations Go Bad.
• And post of the week belongs to Jeremy Slater for his ode to monkey-love. (Yes, I know: apes are not monkeys.)

Prrretty busy this week.

• After several months of having just eight members and a total of nine posts (four of them by my own hand), the New Zealand Writers Guild forums is getting some traction with sixteen members and forty-two posts as of today. Go ask a question or something.
• Over at the Beeb’s Writers Room is a rather informative Q&A with Casualty writer Mark Catley. The Writers Room seems to be a great resource for television writing. (Ooh! It’s got Q&A’s with Bourne Supremacy and Ultimatum director Paul Greengrass, and Hu$tle and Life on Mars co-creator Tony Jordan.) (Fedora-tip: WGGB Blog.)
• And Break cinematographer, Matt Meikle, recently won the 2007 Australian Cinematography Society Gold Award for Cinematography on Hawaikii. Congratulatoriations!

Yay, we’ve been back home a week, back in our own beds, eating the kinda food we usually eat. And even though I’m long overdue to explain how/why The Boy and I hobbled Amit in a friendly game of front lawn-cricket (he did it to himself) (he did) (and then we made him dinner), instead I offer some scriptwriting-related distractions:

• Across the ditch, Lynden Barber’s Eyes Wired Shut blog has a great series of posts about why Australian films have been lacking lately (the scripts suck). And he just might have put romantic comedies back on my viewing list. (Fedora-tip: Canberra Rob, friend of the recently-wed webmistresse DeborahK.)

• American public radio station KCRW provides two must-download/listen podcasts: Claude Brodesser-Akner’s The Business is a witty and acerbic look at Hollywood; and former New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell scores some of the coooolest interviews in The Treatment. Download. Listen. Enjoy. (Fedora-tip: Leonie who requested that I share.)

• Seeing that Rambo IV has just hit theatres in the States, it looks like the Kimbo film will have to be pushed back even further (not that it’s going anywhere anyway, but I thought I’d work it in). (Yes. Rambo. IV.) As critics review it with tongue in clenched cheek (and, possibly, NRA memberships secretly renewed), James Berardinelli summed it up rather nicely: If what you want from a movie is a lot of Stallone looking morose and pensive before suddenly going apeshit and slaughtering a bunch of people, then Rambo is your kind of experience. Guess where I’ll be heading when that opens in New Zealand?

• And here I was thinking I’d cornered the local blogging-scriptwriting market (being the youngest of five, I was uh, doted on a little more than the other rabble siblings): Stephen Hickey, writer of Hopeless and Love Bites, has been blogging since 2004 at multi-dimensional. He’s quite open and generous about his writing process - and has just set up a wiki. (Fedora-tip: Leonie).

FIVE is available to be viewed for free at film.com.

For a limited time only.*

*  Cackle! ‘Ve always wanted to say that.

Gosh.

Hundredth post.

I may not have written as much as I wanted to since 1 January 2007 but I’ve -

• run a total of 558kms (97kms of that sans mongrel);
• picked up 170 books, comics and scripts, and read 137 right through;
• and sat down to watch 128 films, DVDs and TV series, and watched 105 right to the (sometimes bitter) end.

‘S not bad. And because it’s that time of the year, I give you a list of notable and recommended reading and viewing experiences (in strict alphabetical order):

• comics: Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos’ Alias, Charles Burns’ Black Hole, Brian K Vaughan and Tony Harris’ Ex-Machina, Chester Brown’s I Never Liked You, Jimbo’s Pulp Sticktion strip in DMC’s New Ground anthology, and Alex Robinson’s Tricked;
• scripts: 28 Weeks Later, The Bourne Ultimatum, Casino Royale, Gone Baby Gone, and Perfect Creature;
• books: Carl Hiaasen’s Basket Case, Mike Figgis‘ Digital Filmmaking, Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Rising, Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, and Patricia Grace’s Tu;
• features: The Children of Men, The Departed, Everything is Illuminated, Serenity, and Stranger than Fiction
• television: Burn Notice, Green Wing, Homicide: Life on the Street, The Insiders Guide to Happiness, The Shield, and The Wire.

As for the running, I do it only so that I fit my clothes.

Happy new year.

This week, in lieu of my usual witterings, I offer you:

• At The Editing Room, Rod Hilton writes ‘abridged scripts’ of popular films - but in an indecently irreverent spirit that harks back to web classics “movies in a minute” and “movies with bunnies”. Behold his takes on The Bourne Ultimatum, The Departed and Ronin.

• Bang2Write head script-reader, Lucy, is oft-name-checked in the UK scribosphere - and for good reason: her Write Here, Write Now blog has gems aplenty to offer, like no, your script idea has not been nicked, Worst. Feedback. Ever., and The List. (Collective fedora-tip: Messrs. Barron, Clague and Stack.)

• A mere twelve months ago, Severance scribe James Moran listed seven reasons why his beloved horror genre can sometimes suck ass. Read. Memorise. Avoid. (Insta-fedora-tip: Write Here, Write Now.)

• Former Paramount Theatre manager Dan Slevin used to throw together the best - the best, I tell ya - weekly e-newsletters. I may have been in the wrong city at the time (Christchurch, then Dunedin), but the reviews, descriptions and one-liners were a pleasure to read, and welcome heads-ups on what might (eventually) hit the South Island. He’s now the Capital Times film reviewer - and generously reprints his reviews at his blog, Funerals and Snakes.

• And for something different, try killer-fact.com where literary quizzes (what novel opened with “Call me Ishmael”?) gleefully rub shoulders with polls like which Spice Girl to eat first when all the food has run out on your desert island. (Fedora-tip: NZBC.)

Update:  the killer-fact.com page now says “This account has been suspended - please contact billing…”. Guess you’ll have to take my word for it.

My take on the WGA strike? The thing is, obviously, -

There’s a lot of stuff on the web about it, and the screenwriting blogs have a screed of information to choose from. I’ve found Shawn Ryan’s guest post on why he’s joining the strike despite being a multi-hyphenate, Josh Friedman’s succinct report on standing for what’s right, and John Rogers‘ overview all particularly enlightening.

As a card-carrying screenwriter, I wholeheartedly exhort the strikers onward to victory.

Those TV nuggets were, of course, hiding on the VCR.

• Jimmy McGovern’s The Street is an excellent example of an involving drama that shows fully-realised individuals and their complex, interconnected relationships with their loved ones and the wider community. Such material may be grist for the soap opera mill, but in the hands of Mr McGovern, his collaborators and an ensemble cast that includes Jane Horrocks, Jim Broadbent and the ever excellent Timothy Spall, we’re in meaty Mike Leigh and Ken Loach territory. It took me a while to warm to it but The Goddess loved it because it’s all about relationships.

• Equally satisfying was Burn Notice, a spy/P.I. series cut from the same cloth as Eighties classics Stingray and MacGyver, and lined with the cool absurdity of David Niven’s Casino Royale and the sudden violence of True Lies. It’s got a light touch that’s rare in American television, and enough home-made gadgets, action set-pieces and one-liners to have me grinning by hour’s end.

(Am looking forward to Pushing Daisies after reading the Vidiots‘ review - particularly since its premiere inspired one of them to poetry.)

It’s pretty quiet on the box at the moment. The last few months were very pleasantly crowded with:

• Desperate Housewives (Mon)
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent (Mon)
• Medium (Mon)
• Extras (Mon)
• The Closer (Wed)
• Law & Order (Wed)
• Studio 60 on Sunset Strip (Thur)
• Kingdom (Sat)
• Doctor Who (Sun)

Most of them have finished now (or in the case of Studio 60, I stopped watching). The Goddess and I have tried some new and returning shows, without great success.

• Despite the presence of Six Feet Under alumnus Rachel Griffiths, Brothers & Sisters tried so hard to stop us from switching channels, we turned the box off completely.
• Having read somewhere that Hu$tle had shuffled up to the big con in the sky, I was surprised to see it return - only to find that it was sans Adrian Lester. Who cares about a bunch of grifters, no matter how funny (Danny), pretty (Stacey), reliably versatile (Ash) and wizened (Albie) they are? We want the cool black guy back!
• Saving Grace looked very promising with Holly Hunter in the lead. Unfortunately, for us, yet-another-cop-show with a smart-mouthed, promiscuous, boozin’, law-bendin’, gun-totin, ass-grabbin’ protagonist who happens to be female just doesn’t wash.

So far, not so good. Still no sign of my beloved Shield or the satisfyingly dense Wire. And waiting for us on the trusty VCR are the pilots for The Street and Burn Notice. The Law of Averages is on our side.

Okay, I’m back. Had a few deadlines to meet this week. Which I did, of course. Exciting, exhausting times. Here’s a quick round up with a decent post to come this weekend.

• A second review for Five, this time from the Screen Directors Guild of New Zealand, which is now available for rental (the film, not the review) - and if your local doesn’t have it in stock, demand to see some Made in New Zealand.

• The Writers Guild’s newfangled online forum is awful quiet. Are we Kiwi screenwriters so reserved?* Or are there enough distractions with TV, DVDs, Playstation/Wii, online gaming, Bebo/Facebook/Myspace and, uh, blogs/blogging?

• People who spell definately and your rather than definitely and you‘re in correspondence to me will join my growing list of newfound friends asking me to help free up some money.

• I now have a Data Book listing. I almost feel like I’ve arrived. Except for the nonsensical www.dfmamea.com/http://if.dfmamea.com link.

• And finally, having prepared a well-I-didn’t-need-your-money-anyway post as a follow-up to my grant application, they approved it. Yes, of course I’m chuffed - especially once the panic attacks subsided - and am beginning to savour the impending adventure.

Toodles.

*   I keep wanting to start a thread about the winding up of the Signature telemovie initiative: Isn’t it a bit short-sighted to finish up now? Won’t the wheel have to be rebuilt if when the broadcaster change its mind and returns to cheaper reality observational-documentary television-making? … But I’m too chicken.