Monday

Why is Tremors such a good film? I'm sure I've written about this before here, but seeing it again the other night reminded me of its subtle brilliance. At its core is the perfect buddy movie. Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward are great together. What revolves around them is then a witty, slightly post-modern, but perfectly pitched horror/monster/disaster movie. It's funny and/or scary when it needs to be, creates an interesting set of rules to follow and then disobey, and builds to a suitably good climax, ending in the exact spot that it began. What happened to the director afterwards in 17 years? He did City Slickers, Mighty Joe Young, and The Adventures of Pluto Nash - to name his most well-known films. So, he hasn't done too well. How is it that these one-hit wonders happen? The right group of people at the right time produce one good movie, then drift away and fail to replicate anything really worthwhile again. Only Kevin Bacon has been able to maintain some degree of quality, but he has had his periods in the wilderness too.

Sunday

My favourite television series at the moment is Supernatural. Yes, the plot is silly, it takes itself too seriously, and sometimes the humour is puerile. It could never succeed as cinema. As light entertainment, however, it is perfect. Now in its second season (here in the UK at least), the characters and the writers have really grown into their roles. The main relationship is between two brothers, Sam and Dean, who travel around America, staying in cheap hotels, hunting the supernatural. One is sensitive and intelligent, the other isn't. It's the classic double-act. They never take anything they encounter seriously, verging on the post-modern, but staying safely the sane side of it. As a taster, in tonight's episode Sam wakes up in a motel not remembering the last week of his life. Dean does some research and discovers that Sam checked-in under the name Richie Sambora, which leads to the great line: 'I don't know what's more disturbing: that you lost your memory, or that you like Bon Jovi'.

Saturday

Your correspondent arrived rather inebriated at the cinema for Spider-Man 3, so what, and how much, I remember may be subject to debate, and not very useful for critical appreciation. However, I shall try to offer a few remarks. I have to admit it was enjoyable. I think, though, that it lacked focus. The ostensible plot is predictable: they break-up, then get back together. What has been an interesting factor in Spider-Man is continued: the bad guys aren't really 'bad', they're lost and angry individuals who in the end see what is right. This time, of course, Spider-Man almost becomes one of these bad guys, but not quite. I have a great problem with the nature of the black goo that overcomes him. In every other element of the films, things are man-made. Although unbelievable, they are still the result of men's actions. The black goo is extraterrestrial, and although attracted to vengeance in people, still has independent action. I think the purity of the metaphor of Spider-Man (that we are responsible for our actions, and always have a choice) is lost here. Anyway, that, once again, is the motto of this film. It is good, but I wish they'd done a more interesting variation on it: we haven't arrived at a new place by the end, just gone round in a circle. Spider-Man going loopy was funny for a bit, but did begin to drag. So I thought this was a good film, but certainly not capable of standing on its own - I found myself reminiscing about the original movie, and how great that was.

Friday

Do we really need Ocean's Thirteen? As you know, I'm a sucker for franchises, but this is one I've never been able to fully engage with. The second film was so terrible that I thought it had been killed off permanently. Not so. I greatly respect the director, Soderbergh, but it seems his 'box office' films are often empty star-vehicles. However, I will no doubt go to see it anyway because it belongs to what I think is one of the most interesting, and perhaps most underrated, genres in cinema: the heist film. I'll write a full article on this in a few days, but for now I just wanted to say that whilst simple in form - a group getting together to rob someone/somewhere - this is one of the hardest genres to pull off. The 'catch' has to be superb, complicated, yet easy to understand, to delude the audience but let them feel like they've figured it out. The great thing about Ocean's Eleven was that, opposite to most of the other great heist films, they succeeded at the end. It would be brilliant if in this third film they fail.

Thursday

To continue the theme of problems for script-writers, I thought I'd focus on cars today. This really is an issue for directors, but it originates in the writing phase: how to do you film two people in a car? There is very little scope for invention here, and any radical departure from what we already know will jar obviously unless the rest of your film is as inventive, and the shot has a purpose other than to avoid monotony. You almost always have to go for the two-shot establishing angle from the front windscreen. The audience needs to orientate themselves to the space the characters are in. It's painful, but is there a way out of doing it? Variations on this are to leave the reflections on the glass - sometimes giving interesting light effects - or to mount the camera on the car - as in Touch of Evil - to make the shot more dynamic. Other than that, as I said, the problem is in the writing phase: don't create any scenes where characters have to talk in (and/or use) cars. Perhaps the only solution is in crass humour: How do you shoot two people in a car? With two guns.

Incidentally, May the Fourth be with you - today is one of the most important days in cinema history, and in every cinema year.

Wednesday

Since there's been some discussion of it I thought I'd ask: are mobile phones as terrible for script-writers as guns? I would like to broaden this question, though, to include modern technology in general, e.g. the internet. When a character is in trouble they can quickly phone the police. When they don't know something they can easily look it up on Wikipedia. Modern technology solves dilemmas quicker than we can create them. So what is a script-writer to do? Most often you'll find a character will lose reception, run out of battery, or drop his phone down a deep chasm etc. Script-writers try whenever possible to avoid the issue. Watching someone read a text message, or write an email, is not good cinema. Talking on the phone can be dramatic, but it normally halves the tension of a scene. Perhaps this is why there has been a great interest with science-fiction/disaster in film? When there's a gun-impervious alien in your living room, phoning someone or looking it up on Wikipedia won't help - likewise for when the earth's core stops rotating. However, as Alex says, you can try to turn phones into a positive force for your movie. I would like to suggest, though, that this is a rare example, not easily replicable in all contexts. The best solution, and the hardest, is to think of dilemmas in which using a mobile phone wouldn't help even if you had one. These, after all, are the best stories anyway: would it have helped Achilles, or Hamlet? (Yes, perhaps it would've helped Romeo...).

Tuesday

I couldn't decide what film to see today because the one I most wanted to watch, Shooter, was either too expensive, too late, or too far away. However, thanks to our man in the field (or rather back in the office), Alex, delivering some quickfire information minutes before I arrived at the box-office, I was able to choose Fracture over Next. We'll never know if I made the right choice. But I thought this was a pretty interesting film. The script and story were good, and the acting impressive. The direction was professional. Although the music was generally quite bland, there were good points. There are some slight issues with the ending - the final 'solution' has some flaws; and we're not taken through it clearly with the main character; and the love interest plot isn't tied up neatly enough - but otherwise I was intrigued all the way through. The question is, would I want to see it again? I'm not sure. An overall problem was that this could easily have been an episode of CSI or Shark. With television programmes making such an improvement in recent years, movies really have to step up and do the same in order to distance themselves, and validate their status as higher works of art - a bigger budget and longer production time is no guarantee of quality.