I’ve written about Darwyn Cooke before, in a review of the collection of his take on Will Eisner’s Spirit. I’ve kept an eye out for more of his work since, and recently picked up his two volume exploration of the DC superhero universe’s roots, The New Frontier.

As ever with Darwyn, his work looks out of time. He’s fascinated by commercial art from the 1940s onwards, and that shows in his take on Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the other characters in this globe-spanning adventure. His style is deceptively simple, and relies on a minimalist approach. It means he’s got less to hide behind: every line has to count for something, whether it’s a just-so facial expression, perfectly formed experimental jet, or fierce dinosaur. Take any element away and the whole would fall apart - it’s pretty much the antithesis of detail-heavy art that the likes of Ethan Van Sciver specialise in, and gives it a lightness of touch that I find refreshing.

The same elegant approach applies to Cooke’s scripting. He writes well plotted tales with lean characterisation: the look of his heroes tells you as much about them as what comes out of their mouths, a synergy that’s best realised when the person writing is also doing the art.

The retro approach here isn’t a mindless indulgence in all things fifties. Cooke carefully incorporates social issues into the world he portrays in ways that were never addressed in the comics contemporary to the period the story is set in. No surprise, since comics were firmly seen as kids stuff then, but it’s interesting to see how an awareness of race, for instance, plays out in a story that is a homage to the roots of today’s comics.

Cooke’s mastery of page design marks him out as one of the medium’s sharpest creators. Most of the time he sticks to one illustrative style, but dips into other approaches - childrens’ book illustration for instance - where that serves the story best. And it always is what serves the story best: unlike some of Dave McKean’s experiments, the focus here is always on making the narrative as clear as possible.

What’s next for Darwyn Cooke? I just picked up a copy of western adventure Jonah Hex that he illustrated, which was great to look at but felt overwritten compared to the stories he writes himself. And it’s just been announced that he’ll be adapting the Richard Stark Parker crime novels in comic form for IDW: considering they include one that was brilliantly adapted for screen as Point Blank, I’m gagging to see what Cooke comes up with. He’s already shown his affinity for crime and period tales, so the combination should be sublime.

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Anyway, that’s all for a few days. I’m off on holiday for a little while. Expect me back around Monday August 4. Enjoy…

At the core of many a good drama is the relationship between protagonist and antagonist. This being 2008, we’re living in a world that’s way beyond the white hat/black hat days of yore, when a scowl or choice of headgear would identify which side you were on. No, things are way more complex now, and that complexity is at the heart of The Dark Knight, and makes it a very special film indeed.

Christopher Nolan’s first outing with Batman was largely successful, but the story became more of a generic action thriller towards the end. This time round, the story is firmly rooted in the psyches of two characters who are poles apart: Batman and The Joker. Batman lives in a world of absolutes, hoping that his example can help turn the tide of evil in Gotham, and seeing in legal crusader Harvey Dent a populist whose success within the justice system may allow Batman to hang up his cape.

That analysis only works if you believe Batman really is capable of relinquishing his identity though, and one person who’s sceptical about that is The Joker. A poster child for the post-Columbine generation, The Joker has chosen to embrace chaos as the best response to the world he’s been brought up in. Every time he gets the chance to talk about his past, a different ‘origin’ story emerges from his mouth, empty as the tales of suffering and rebirth on Oprah that he’s grown up watching. Never mind what people tell you they’re like: what interests The Joker is how they really are, and to that end he sets up a series of deadly scenarios around Gotham that test its citizens, its police, and its caped crusader. There’s no winning any of The Joker’s games: they’re pretty much guaranteed to cause death and destruction, the only distinction being exactly how the situations play out, and what that tells him about human nature.

This being Gotham, human nature tends towards the bleak. Even love is no guarantee of freeing yourself from the all-pervading corruption of the city, as the fate of Harvey Dent and his love Rachel - also involved in a triangle with Bruce Wayne, Batman’s alter ego - demonstrates. And if Venus will not win through, it’s left to the forces of warlike Mars and stern Jupiter to fight it out in the streets of the city.

And if all of that sounds epic and dark, you’d be right. This is cinema for adults who are willing to tackle big questions about ethics and morality. Sure, it also delivers astonishing action sequences, fabulous gadgets, and world class acting, but really this is a film that should leave you feeling uncomfortable by the time it finishes. If all you’re left with is adrenaline, then you got the booby prize basically.

All the actors deliver the goods, though I’m still not convinced by Christian Bale’s impossibly deep Batman voice, but towering above them all is Heath Ledger’s take on The Joker. Previously a part owned by Jack Nicholson, Ledger indelibly stamps his mark on the role in the same way that Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit trumped Led Zeppelin’s take on rock and roll: both classic performances, and each attuned to their times.

While Marvel’s slate of superhero films could have been made pretty much anywhen, the only contemporary aspect being the CGI, The Dark Knight is absolutely a product of its times in ways that run deeper than how the effects are done. One argument I’ve heard that’s pretty convincing is that this take on Batman is about how America sees itself in the world today: wanting both to be powerful and popular, turning to extreme measures in the face of its failure to deal with terrorism, wanting to continue to use democratic methods but increasingly subverting them when they’re inconvenient. There’s a lot to be said for that perspective, and getting that kind of mileage out of a superhero film is quite an achievement.

Why is it that a man who plays a harmonica whilst playing guitar is classed as a musical genius, but put a set of cymbals between his knees and a drum on his back and he starts to look insane?

I found the above question on a forum yesterday, and it got me thinking. What is it about the alteration of one detail that can irrevocably change a whole picture?

The first line of the old song ‘Misty’ goes ‘Look at me, I’m as helpless as a kitten up a tree’. Aah, sweet: we empathise with the singer’s vulnerability straight away. Substitute ‘kitten’ for the similarly syllabled and sounding ‘chicken’ and all of a sudden things are different. A chicken is just as helpless as a kitten is up a tree, but the empathy disappears. It’d be easy to say it’s because a chicken is a ludicrous creature, but let’s look a little deeper than that. Is it because a chicken is feathered and kind of reptilian in its movements, whereas a kitten is indisputably mammalian?

All this is towards making a point about what fits, and what doesn’t, and what kind of non-fitting thing you want to put into your screenplay when the time comes to break whatever pattern the audience is currently experiencing and present them with something unusual. Huh? Well, let’s say you have a thriller. The protagonist fearfully opens the curtains in her living room to discover…a sheep looking in at her. Unexpected alright, but not the kind of unexpected that works with a thriller. Whereas, if the curtains are pulled back and a man with a knife is seen outside, then all is well with the world.

In any screenplay, you’re seeking to strike a delicate balance between the expected and the unexpected. Veer to far off track and you lose the audience with what comes across as irrelevance. (Unless you make it your trademark and you become known as a surrealist: stand up The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.) But if your concerns are more narrative and linear, there’s only so far off the path you can stray without losing your audience.

So, how do you cement a surprise into your screenplay such that it will work on screen? Part of the answer is the inner logic of the story you’re telling. Donkey Punch features assault with a deadly weapon in the form of an outboard motor engine, but the story is set at sea, the absence of the engine has featured as a plot point, and it has been seen and thus foreshadowed.

Music and sound are your friend in situations like this too. If you create an auditory cue at one point, its reappearance will be associated with whatever was happening the first time it was heard. So, let’s say you have a string section stab just before a jack-in-the-box pops open. Later in the film, all you need to do is hear the same string stab to expect an equivalent surprise.

The degree of surprise you allow for in a film depends on the nature of the genre you’re working in. You probably won’t get far writing a romcom if the protagonists hate each other at the end as much as they did in the beginning, unless there was a love story in the middle. And so on. But finding ways to create surprise is one way to keep you as a writer on your toes. And face it, if you’re not engaged by what you’re writing, what hope has anyone else got?

The best thing I can think to say about Donkey Punch is that it does exactly what it sets out to do, and does so with remorseless effectiveness. You pretty much know in advance what you’re in for, and that’s precisely what’s delivered: a shocker about what happens when some northern lasses meet some posh blokes on holiday in Spain, and take them up on their offer of going out to sea.

Anyone who’s heard a sea shanty could tell our heroines that they’re unlikely to be due a pleasant time. And I had the misfortune to study the godawful poem Peter Grimes for A level English, which is all about what happens when a salty seadog takes a series of handsome young men off the shore and returns without them. The canon is against our heroines, basically, so it’s no surprise that what follows is nasty.

The fate that befalls the women is a very modern sort of nasty, which is no surprise since this film is made under the Warp X umbrella, one of eight low budget features they’re making in the wake of the modest success of their first experiment in film, the Shane Meadows feature Dead Man’s Shoes. The role models for Warp X include Oz shocker Wolf Creek, and to some extent this is an aquatic variation on the theme.

The film is a morality tale of sorts, though one that’s already upset the Daily Mail. Our plucky Leeds ladies are wooed onto the boat by public school smoothies, plied with drugs, and what follows has a sick inevitability about it. Young people being up for sex is all well and good, but there’s a twisted laddishness at work that leads to one of the women being killed as the result of one of the guys trying to live out an urban myth, the one referred to in the film’s title.

The thing with corpses is, it’s hard to stop at one when you’re on a roll. And what follows is a textbook example of plotting that maximises the potential for conflict between every pairing of characters on board. It’s understandable that there’s tension between the guys about what to do now that one of their number is a killer, but even the two remaining women are split by their different understandings and objectives.

There are no great surprises here other than the ones you’d expect of a well executed film of this sort. It’s pacy, well performed and edited, and has a strong score, as you’d hope from Warp, up till now known for their music rather than their films.

I hope this film does well commercially, and see no reason to think otherwise. It’s not very ambitious, but it succeeds in achieving its aims, and if the Warp X slate can do that across the board then maybe it’ll pave the way for more films in the future. And if some of them can be as adventurous as the Warp musical roster, which includes Aphex Twin and Battles, then I’d be very happy. As it is, the musical equivalent of Donkey Punch would be a compilation of indie anthems by laddish bands; a few good hooks but nothing truly distinctive.

Whatever it is that fuels Pixar’s filmmaking, I want some. At a time when mainstream cinema is vapid and formulaic, summer is a graveyard for braindead blockbusters, and the tv schedules are empty of pretty much anything resembling intelligence, along comes WALL-E.

The sheer scope of the film is staggering. It’s pretty much a creation myth, or at any rate a re-creation myth, although what’s in the foreground most of the time is a touching love story. Between two robots. In a cartoon. And believe me, it’s likely to be one of the most emotionally affecting films you see this year, as well as being a bravura demonstration of filmmaking. Oh, and it’s designed for an audience of 4 and up. Feel humble? You should.

I’m not going to say a great deal more about this film except that you owe it to yourself to experience it if you are at all interested in cinema as an artform. It’s one of the most completely realised visions I’ve seen, an elegaic tale of impossible love that begs the question of whether our species deserves to survive. It would be easy to call it pretentious, but it accomplishes its goals with a lightness of touch that’s breathtaking.

What comes across more than anything in Pixar’s movies is their lack of cynicism. And that’s a beautiful thing to see. When so many producers are second guessing the tolerance of audiences for gross out ‘comedies’ and torture porn, it’s refreshing to encounter an organisation thinking on an epic scale and coming up with such beautiful films for audiences just experiencing their first taste of what cinema has to offer.

It’d be amazing to see something of Pixar’s spirit in the low budget sector in the UK, but all too often I meet aspiring filmmakers who have jaded ideas and no real respect for their potential audience. Some time ago I went to the launch event of one prominent filmmaking initiative and what came across was, first, the unquestionable intelligence of the people behind it and, second, the decidedly questionable aims to which they planned to put that intelligence, creating films that first and foremost were about pulling in identifiable niche audiences. Never mind quality, get those bums onto cinema seats and then off to town to buy the DVD for the price of a pint or three.

Fortunately there are exceptions, and I’ve been lucky enough to meet people who want to make films that find audiences and make money and even have something to say in the process. And that, when it comes down to it, is one of the big differences between film and television: come out of a cinema and you can feel charged up with a sense of how the world could be. That matters, and if there’s one thing I’d like to see in the British film industry it’s more filmmakers with something to say, and no regard for whether that something is fashionable or not. Which in an industry of hustlers, opportunists, and schemers out for a deal, is not a vision that’s very tactical of me, but so be it.

There was a news item I snagged for my research files a few years back about a Japanese trend for older people to hire actors to pretend to be family members and come and visit them. Interestingly, having paid all this money for the faux-family experience, typically the grandparents used the time on the meter to berate their pretend kids for not coming to visit them often enough.

That’s a lovely example of what happens when social changes crystallise around a particular group with economic freedoms but not the emotional experience they believe they’re due from family obligations. Societies change, in Japan and beyond, and some fascinating developments are outlined in the book Microtrends by Mark J. Penn with E. Kinney Zalesne.

The book is utterly fascinating, and if you’re at all interested in writing drama you can’t help but see the potential for stories to come out of the wealth of research that’s between its covers. Drama stems from conflict, and this book provides plenty of insight into the lifestyles that some of us are now leading. Cougars are a phenomenon I’d already heard of - successful career women in their 40s seeking younger playmates on their own terms - and this is the book that outlines the social and economic reasons for their existence. As I was reading the chapter on them, I realised that one key character in a story I’m working on could well be defined as a cougar, and the piece on them here usefully helped shape my thinking about who she is and what she does.

What about other subgroups though? Did you know that in America, more than 3.5 million couples are living apart much of the time thanks to having jobs far enough apart that the sensible thing is to maintain separate households? Think of the potential for stories that emerge straight from that fact. How do you keep a relationship alive when you’re spending so much time apart? Does absence make the heart grow fonder, or are evenings away a temptation to stray?

Further afield, 14% of marriages in South Korea were to foreigners in 2005, compared to 4% in 2000. A little poking around into that statistic, and you’ve got the makings of a film: you could feasibly have 2 marriages to foreigners within one family, and the upsets and surprises of being wedded to a European or American could provide plenty of story fodder.

A third of American cosmetic surgeons are dealing with requests to do work on both partners in couples, and the number of mother and daughter combos wanting assistance is increasing. And while Asia in general is anti plastic surgery, Korea has 1200 plastic surgeons, 300 more than California. Clearly something interesting is happening in Korea at the intersection of marrying foreigners and getting cosmetic surgery, and film is a good way to tell the story.

The above examples are just a few pulled out of a fascinating book. I’m all in favour of circulating widely to get experience of different social worlds, and Microtrends is a way of supporting that attitude with research breaking down trends around the globe into statistically significant social groups. If you’re at all interested in telling stories about the world we live in now, and the one that’s round the corner, I highly recommend that you pick up a copy of this book.

If The Visitor is the best that liberal filmmaking has to offer, the right wing populism implicit in so many Hollywood features has nothing to fear. It’s a shame, because Tom McCarthy’s new film (he also directed the sweet and subtle The Station Agent) seemingly has a lot to recommend it, on paper at least.

It’s the tale of an uptight academic widower, a specialist in international affairs, whose life is transformed when he encounters a Muslim couple. Were this a Tony Scott film, the transformation would be because they get him to swear allegiance to Allah after tying him up and dunking him in oil (politics, see?). But no, this is all about the slow alchemy that occurs when the academic is brought out of his shell by the erotic rhythms of a djembe drum.

The djembe is played by the male Syrian half of the Muslim couple, who are in America illegally as far as the authorities are concerned, and who turn up just at the moment you expect them to in the film. Which is one of its problems: I was a minute or five ahead of all of the film’s turning points, except the bit when a hovercraft full of liberal mavericks turned up to bust the Muslims out of their corporately owned detention centre. Turns out that was the ten minutes of the film I was asleep for, but damn if it wasn’t the most exciting part of the whole thing.

Actually, the corporately owned detention centre had cropped up before I nodded off, and it was one of the more effective aspects of the film. Sadly though, this is a film that has its heart in the right place, but thinks too small. An ageing academic is loosened up by his contact with a brown skinned percussionist, and the American government intervene to spare him the problem of having a houseguest outstay his welcome. That’s pretty much it. OK, at least we’re spared the big budget version of the story, where he quits his academic post and goes on the road with a Santana cover band populated by quirky seniors (The Bucket List meets School of Rock: I can see it happening, what with the lure of the grey dollar…). But it seriously would have helped the script (also written by McCarthy) for some more imagination and a sense of the epic to be brought into play.

What ultimately failed to convince me about The Visitor was its commitment to liberal politics instead of messy human realities. The academic is not attracted to the djembe player’s wife. The Muslim couple do not exploit his friendship. The academic’s field of study is international affairs, which far too neatly mirrors the film’s concerns. And so on. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the choices made, just that together they’re too obvious a selection. Result? A film that will only ever preach to the converted. Great for making white liberals feel better about themselves, and that they too might one day play drums with an exotic refugee, but in every other respect a film that consistently pulls short of really engaging your emotions because of the safety of the choices made at every step of the filmmaking process.

There are creators in all fields who prefer creativity itself to be something unexamined, for fear that looking under the hood of what they get up to will disturb their ability to actually do it.  Not a theory I subscribe to: I’m very much of the opposite inclination, happy to look at the processes which may underpin my ability to write.

I like to see my attitude as part of a lineage which includes seminal creators such as Miles Davis and Brian Eno (and no, that doesn’t mean I believe I’m as ‘good as’ them).  Miles started off as a sideman in the bop era, before pretty much inventing cool jazz, and then reinventing himself a few other times.  He did so out of a desire to keep moving forward, not getting stuck in his or anyone else’s cliches.  As a result, it’s hard to hear the connections between, say, Kind Of Blue and On The Corner.  The former sounds accessible enough, a masterpiece of melodic group interplay.  The latter baffled people on its release, and only in recent years has it been reappraised in the light of its twin influences: experimental composer Stockhausen and funk maestro Sly Stone.  Personally, I love both disks, but even if you don’t it’s hard not to be impressed by Davis’s determination to keep his sound fresh.

Brian Eno takes that determination to experiment one step further with the Oblique Strategies cards he co-developed with Peter Schmidt.  They’re designed to keep the recording process alive when things get stale, giving gnomic instructions such as ‘What would your best friend do?’ and ‘Honour the error as a hidden intention’.  OK, maybe hard to imagine such processes being employed now that Eno is working with Coldplay, but listen further back to his solo albums or collaborations with Robert Fripp and David Byrne and you can hear a restless intelligence at work, navigating uncharted territories that would later be marked out as whole new genres of music.

What this has to do with writing is my conviction that writers should look in any and every possible direction when seeking inspiration and guidance.  Read Steven Pinker on language and thought.  Study Tarot for interesting ways to look at character and structure.  Pore over graphic novels for new possibilities in visual storytelling.  Talk to people outside of whatever social circles you usually move in to keep your antennae alert to difference.  Your job is to output writing, and its uniqueness will be determined by the range of your input.  There’s no shortage of writers out there who’ve studied with Robert McKee: how about instead soaking up all you can about hypnosis, anthropology, scuba diving, the tattoo business? 

I’ve not done a screenwriting MA and am perhaps stubbornly proud of the fact that whatever I’ve learned and accomplished I’ve done by doing it my way.  Perverse maybe, but it makes a difference.  OK, it’s taken me longer to make some connections than it otherwise would, but the particular path I’ve taken has been fascinating and absorbing, even on its darkest days, and I wouldn’t swap it for anything.  For me, perhaps the biggest lesson I’d pass on about writing is simply captured in the phrase ‘be where the difference is’.  By which I mean stay restless, tune in to what is most likely to take you off your own map and into the bit that reads ‘Here be dragons’.  History tells us that dragons are unlikely to have existed, but the pursuit of them - well, that’s a grand tale…

The premise of Bonekickers - that archaeologists discover evidence that seriously unsettles the accepted version of the past - is one I was perfectly happy to accept. And that fact that it was brought to us by the people who devised Life on Mars was potentially promising. I was never as ardent a fan of the latter as many: I thoroughly enjoyed the Gene Hunt bits, but frankly they could have come out of Viz.

Anyway, what really annoyed me about the Bonekickers pilot episode was being told what to think about the characters. One expert introduced another as ‘Google with a beerbelly’ and that was supposed to pass for characterisation. Only, in my book at least, characterisation is based on behaviour that leaves a conclusion in the viewer’s head, not a summation of that person delivered by another character. So that annoyed me. Then it happened again, and I realised this was no accident, but an intentional attempt to give ersatz characterisation that was unearned by what I was actually seeing. And that bugged me.

Which isn’t to say there wasn’t any characterisation going on. There were a few stereotypes in evidence, mostly in the form of a media academic who wrote books about sex in history that were adapted for Channel 5, and that clearly made the author an enemy. The heroes were our boys and girls in the trenches, with trowels and, err, spectrographic analysis machines. And if they weren’t larger than life enough, there are also some descendants of the Knights Templar running around, and I have a horrible idea that the whole thing is going to develop into some kind of Da Vinci Code scenario. Which is fine: once I sussed that, and had tired of wincing at the sub-CSIisms and clunky dialogue, I stopped watching and instead put on a DVD of some sublime live music and had a fantastic evening.

So, what to make of all that? Well, I’m pleased that the BBC is spending money on something that isn’t an emergency service drama. That’s definitely a good thing. I’m less pleased that they went to the purveyors of one left field hit to find another, when there are any number of writers and production companies out there who could have come up with something else. Or maybe they did go that route, and weren’t happy with what they came up with. I’d be fascinated to read the brief for what became Bonekickers anyway, and see if anyone else came up with anything for it.

Overall then, 10/10 for trying, 3/10 for execution. I seriously doubt that I will be watching future episodes of Bonekickers. And I do hope that someone, somewhere, hits the bullseye in terms of delivering a post-watershed hit for a large audience: I appreciate it’s not an easy task.

So, what makes you scared? Venturing into the dark? Noises that you can’t explain? Zealots? Fucking enormous monsters with sucking tentacles? All of these and more are to be found in The Mist, Frank Darabont’s third outing with a Stephen King adaptation after The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, and his first on the author’s home ground, horror.

It’s refreshing to see a horror film with a moral centre to it, and that’s what raises The Mist above most horror features you’re likely to see. A bunch of random Americans are trapped in a supermarket in the mist, and something is out there. More than one something in fact. And the longer they stay in the supermarket, the greater the tensions within the group. Consistently, it’s what people do that provides the real scares within the story: there are creatures sure enough, but it’s easy to claim that they’re acting by instinct. We’re supposed to be the ones with the capacity for reason, and that’s the first thing to go when people are under pressure.

We’ve all been in situations where things have got tense with the people around us. But we’re usually able to leave those situations, claiming other engagements or priorities. Part of King’s simple genius in this story is that there is nowhere to go…except into the unknown, about which the one thing that is known is that it’s highly dangerous out there. Imagine a dinner party with a high complement of arseholes, and the only way you can leave is to face a pack of werewolves while you’re armed with just a fire extinguisher. That’s pretty much what the characters in this story are faced with.

What with the setting being a supermarket, and there being a cross section of people there, it can’t help but feel like a microcosm of America itself under threat. And, true to life, the scariest part is when a good chunk of the people there fall under the spell of a deranged evangelist who perceives what’s happening as the realisation of all the really messed up Ray Harryhausen/Michael Bay style stuff that the Bible promises at the End of Days.

The protagonist and a few of the saner people there escape the supermarket rather than be stuck there with the zealot, driving through the mist and the monsters it contains, hoping to find an end or an answer. They come across neither. And what happens instead has to be one of the bleakest conclusions to a film I’ve seen in a long time. Which perhaps explains why the film is showing just twice a day at the cinema where I saw it, and was only selected at all because of the persistence of the film programmer at the cinema.

If that’s the case, that makes things bleaker still: are we so desperate for screenings of the film version of Sex and the City and Kung Fu Panda that we can’t stomach a film with some real intelligence and an unpopular viewpoint? Hopefully not: the recent success of No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood demonstrates that there is a taste for grown up films with bleak conclusions, but maybe in the summer months we’re expected to subsist on a diet of vacuous blockbusters. And that really is a horrific thought…