Years ago, when I was rather more dense, I heard an EP by the band Psychic TV. They always were a fairly terrible act, led by the curiously named Genesis P. Orridge (just don’t pronounce it ‘porridge’ even though that is of course what he’s crying out for — he’s a counterculture icon, after all). And the songs included a Beach Boys cover and a track called Roman P. The connecting factor was Charles Manson, Mr Orridge at that point having a juvenile fascination with the 60s murderer, that any number of tiresome individuals have perpetuated since. Yawn.

Roman P. was of course about Roman Polanski, whose wife Sharon Tate was one of those killed by Manson’s gang. It was a dreadful crime, more so because Tate was just two weeks or so from giving birth at the time. And this was by far from the only tragedy in the filmmaker’s life: he’d also survived the ghetto and concentration camps in World War Two, while losing family members to the Nazis.

So, Roman Polanksi went through tough times, no question. And still went on to make some notable films, such as Chinatown, Tess, and The Pianist. Somewhere in there, he also raped a 13 year old girl.

Now, 32 years later, the past has caught up with him. Arriving in Switzerland to collect a gong to add to his collection of prizes, he was arrested at Zurich Airport at the request of American authorities. A reminder of what was said in the last paragraph: Roman Polanski raped a 13 year old girl. Sodomised her too, for that matter.

What’s happened in response to Polanski’s arrest? 100 notables in the world of film have written a pompous letter to the effect that making some decent films should exempt Roman Polanski from being punished for his crimes. (Remember: he violated a 13 year old girl without her consent, vaginally and anally.)

Those notables include Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen, and they should be ashamed. Family men both, they know what it’s like to have a daughter of 13. In Woody’s case…but maybe we shouldn’t go further into Woody’s case. Might have been silly asking him to sign up to the petition, in the circumstances, given what went on between Woody and his adopted daughter. But hey, maybe I need to loosen up about this, and accept that filmmakers have libidos bigger and wider ranging than most.

It’s not just American filmmakers that are making apologetic noises about Roman Polanski the rapist. A whole bunch of arty French types are supporting sex attacker Polanski and suggesting that at 76 the matter is too long in the past to deal with now. I wonder how many people who believe that also believe it’s time to let bygones be bygones, and forgive surviving Nazis for their crimes?

But of course, this is about men of culture who happen to be rapists, not run of the mill fascists. Hmm. What would we now make of Hitler then? Perhaps the Holocaust ought to be reassessed in the light of the Fuhrer’s accomplishments as a watercolourist. Or would his painting have to be better to earn him some time off?

Just in case there’s any doubt, I have no doubt. Old cases are coming to light as the result of DNA evidence which mean sex offenders and murderers are being brought to justice for the crimes of the past. The fact that Roman Polanski is wealthy enough and protected enough to have maintained his career as a filmmaker all these years is an obscenity. He should no more be given clemency on the basis of his art than I’d grant it to any other rapist. Is that clear enough?

Folklore doesn’t stop just because we’re living in a world of iPhones and satnavs. It just changes form. Once upon a time we told stories about giants and Jack-in-the-Green. Now we tell stories about people giant on the celebrity circuit, like Elvis, and archetypal figures like Jack Kennedy. Both of them feature — or do they? — in the low-budget movie Bubba Ho-Tep.

Bruce Campbell stars as Elvis Presley, who’s come to reside at an East Texas nursing home after swapping places with one of his own impersonators to have some more fun in life. Which works until he falls off stage and needs to convalesce somewhere after breaking his hip. Stuck there with a growth on his dick and wasting away through being surrounded by infirm people and treated like an imbecile, it looks like the King is on his way out — until a soul-sucking mummy starts offing residents of the home.

It’s John F Kennedy who alerts Elvis to the mummy’s existence. He finds it hard to believe at first, what with this JFK being black, but when actor Ossie Davis explains that he was dyed and his brain replaced with sand by enemies unknown, his current condition almost makes sense.

So, Presley and JFK unite to bring the Egyptian spectre down. Only, Kennedy buzzes round in an electric wheelchair, and Presley has a walking frame, and neither is as strong or spritely as in their heyday. But the challenge boosts their confidence, and they find the pep necessary to keep them going.

All this takes a while to accomplish, mind. I’ve zipped through the plot of the story there but the delight of the film is the way it portrays nursing home life, which is paced slowly. The rhythm of the film is dictated by the deaths of the patients there, whose bodies are picked up by a pair of morticians who aren’t cut out for the job. And the joy of the story is its sheer nonsense, beautifully executed through Campbell’s fabulous performance as Presley, and the deadpan hilarity of the script.

Written and directed by Don Coscarelli, based on a short story by Joe R. Lansdale, it’s a film that makes the most of its meagre resources. The majority of the film is shot in a nursing home, but the quality of the dialogue and performances, and interesting lighting and editing choices, make you forget how low budget this film is, and instead just simply bask in the surreal world it creates, soaking up every delicious detail.

Yes, it’s nonsense. And it’s not for everyone — you’ll know by now whether Bubba Ho-Tep appeals to you or leaves you cold. And that’s fine. One thing that’s important with low budget films in particular is to realise you’re not making a film for everyone. Forget it. You’ll never have the marketing resources to create a Spielberg style splash at the box office. But by creating something of quality and distinction, you can craft a film that will create its own audience through word of mouth. Exactly what’s happened in the case of this cult movie, which there’s talk of a sequel to seven years after this first exciting installment.

And, if you’re looking to create a low budget success yourself, creating a story that draws on contemporary folklore might be an interesting way in. The number of times Princess Diana continues to pop up in the media after her death, the ongoing soap that is the (former) relationship of Peter Andre and Jordan, continued attention given to bad boy Lottery winners…all these threads have some kind of currency within the popular imagination, and I’d rather make a film drawing on those elements than concoct another mockney gangster film. I’m just sayin’…

How often do you see a film that functions as a fable? One that utilises the vocabulary of cinema itself to create a world like and unlike our own, and uses that vocabulary to convey a multifaceted message of self-realisation? What if I told you that film was American? And that it features William H. Macy as the archetypal 50s dad in a sitcom called, as the film itself is, Pleasantville.

Tobey Maguire is a contemporary teen obsessed with the old sitcom, the comforting values of which provide a welcome contrast to life in high school and with a fragmented family. A bit of handwaving involving a spooky tv repairman follows — the weakest part of the film — and next thing you know Tobey and sister Reese Witherspoon find themselves transported into the Pleasantville show, easily realised since they’re now living in black and white.

What could be a clumsy metaphor instead becomes a thing of beauty, as the presence of brother and sister in this old time community literally brings colour to the world. Pleasantville sounds like somewhere you’d want to live, but the reality is anything but; it’s a narrowly conformist town that offers no choice, no creativity, no substantial emotional experience, to its citizens.

There are moments of cinematic magic along the way. William Macy’s wife, having heard about sex from Witherspoon (standing in for and accepted as her daughter), pleasures herself in the bath, and the ecstasy she experiences not only brings colour to the bathroom, but sets the tree outside the house alight. It’s pure poetry, mixed with comedy as Maguire then has to instruct the local fire brigade in how to put a fire out — being sitcom firemen, they’ve only ever had to rescue cats from trees until now.

And that’s just the start. By connecting people with their passions, whether sexually or through art and music, more of the Pleasantville locals become colour in their monochrome world. This disturbs those who liked things the way they were, and pretty soon the town authorities are planning to shut Lovers Lane and the local library, the two hotspots for polychromal activation.

It’s not just colour that’s used to signal that the times they are a-changin’. The cafe, hangout for the local teens who are becoming colourful quicker than their elders, has a jukebox that plays a key role in soundtracking what’s going on. Two seminal late 50s jazz tunes, Dave Brubeck’s ‘Take Five’ and Miles Davis’s ‘So What’ play in one key sequence, demonstrating the power of music to bring out passion and colour. This is the journey undergone by the cafe’s owner, who discovers his artistic side and paints a nude of Maguire’s sitcom mum that he puts in the window. That prompts violent retaliation from those threatened by the colour in their midst, the painting destroyed and books from the library burned — in an echo of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (filmed by Truffaut), the firemen are seen raking over the smouldering remains of novels, poetry collections, and art books.

There’s worse to come. The Chamber of Commerce, protectors of all that is comforting about Pleasantville, issue a decree effectively banning colour from the town. Maguire and the cafe owner are put on trial, and the latter allows fear to bring him in line, offering to paint with a Chamber-approved palette. The youngster makes a stand though, realising that by now people turn colour when their passions are ignited, and provoking both Macy and the prosecutor into doing exactly that by knowing what buttons to press.

Of course, Maguire has to return to his real life, and does so. Having gone through what he has, he can for the first time play an active role in his family and support his downhearted mother. And in a delightful glimpse of what’s happening back in Pleasantville, William H. Macy and his wife are seen pondering their future in the company of his wife’s lover, the cafe owner, all bemused by their new freedom and aware that things could go any which way between the three of them. It’s a bravura ending to an excellent film, which I caught almost accidentally on Fiver, a channel whose existence I’m grateful for if only for this fine movie, written, directed and produced by Gary Ross.

House is a show that I enjoy but don’t follow. And having caught an episode this evening, I can’t imagine me watching another one for a while. My feelings are shaped considerably by Hugh Laurie’s portrayal of the good doctor.

Apparently a key reason that a Brit ended up in the role was because they couldn’t find an American actor willing to make himself so unlikeable. See also the popularity of Simon Callow Stateside: the man speaks the truth, however unpalatable, and that’s something at a premium in a country which, more than the UK, showers its children with praise for their clumsy efforts at becoming performers, however painful the results for anyone watching.

Gregory House’s form of honesty is incisive diagnostic skill, delivered with a hefty side order of sarcasm. Which would normally make him someone to be hated, or at any rate admired only grudgingly. But the show’s creators were canny enough to give him a limp and a walking stick, which hints at tragedy in the shorthand of the small screen, and lo and behold Laurie’s character attains another dimension; two is about right for a lead in an American drama series.

Anyway, several seasons in, the show has found a comfortable formula with its patient who has something inexplicably wrong that worsens with every ad break until House cracks on with the solution, having done what he can to goad it out of his team of juniors. And this is what makes the show work: cranky genius is attractive. And we know he’s a genius because the medics assisting him use bigger words than we do to describe what’s up with the patient, which makes them smarter than us the audience, and hence House even smarter in turn.

To be fair, it can work very well. House’s thing is looking for systemic solutions, underlying principles which account for the whole array of symptoms that a patient is experiencing. And that has a certain Holmesian quality, attractive to watch as House groups together symptoms and explains why they do or don’t explain what the patient is experiencing. It’d be petrifying to go through as the patient, but for the armchair viewer it’s compelling stuff, as House joins the dots and saves the day.

Leavening this heady stuff is the interplay of personalities within House’s backing group. And tonight’s episode did something pretty smart. They’re dealing with a woman who feels that her life is best devoted to supporting those who are brilliant, having decided to accept that she is ‘average’ (please note: the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of Normality has yet to identify any human being who conforms to statistical norms). The parallels with the backing group’s relationship with House are obvious, and it made for a touching tale as, along with her illness, the patient lost her job supporting her particular highflyer and decided to change her aim in life.

The other business, also nicely conducted, was to do with getting House and someone he’s thought of as a friend to talk and for that friend to stay at the hospital rather than moving on. Only, that went into an interesting direction when the friend announced at the end of the episode that he considered his friendship with House over, if indeed it had ever existed. An interesting ‘ouch’ moment, House having opened up with the guy and showed some vulnerability in the process.

All of which goes to show that with a protagonist as individual as House, the writers have to reach that bit further to come up with a resolution that fits the lead and the tone of the series. No heartfelt exultations and hugs here: instead, the chill of a friendship that may never have been. An unusual climax, and one entirely appropriate to this singular show.

How much detail do you need to provide an effective description? Generally speaking, I’m a fan of choosing words that have added value — nouns that have subliminal adjectives, if you will.

Huh? Think about the distinction between walk and shuffle. The first is neutral, the second creates a more complex mental picture. And, a lot of the time, that option will serve you well. Think also of car vs roadster, tree vs mangrove, fabric vs cheesecloth. Get the idea?

There are times though, when directing the audience’s attention to the class of nouns, rather than a specific instance, works better though. This realisation came when I was toying with an imaginary blues song — never mind why — and found that the title Dog Fightin’ Woman worked best.

In that instance, all we need to know is a woman is fighting dogs. That alone creates a gruesome/comic scene, and the particulars of whether the canines are mastiffs or collies matters a lot less. There are all kinds of nuances — a woman fighting poodles ups the comedy, if she’s pitted against labradors it makes her sound more cruel, etc — that threaten to spoil the purity of Dog Fightin’ Woman.

Now, the concept having played in my head for a few hours, I’m wondering if a B movie can be created from the title. What sort of woman would find herself matched against canines? At this point, I’m picturing someone who tabloids would run social services horror stories about. A tattooed lady reduced to brawling with beasts to feed her children, since her brute of a husband spends all their money on drink.

Clearly, this piece of social realism needs to be handled with some sensitivity. I understand Warp X were running a scheme aimed at grooming female horror directors, and I’m sure one of my female director pals would love to collaborate on a dog-fighting yarn with a woman protagonist.

Update: Never one to overlook a marketing opportunity, I’m planning to lease the title Dog Fightin’ Woman to Nick Cave. The words conjure up a brute world that he could sculpt a fine song from, and I’m happy to talk to him about using it as the title piece for the movie. He can have a cameo too, perhaps as a moody one-eyed gambler. Yes, this is starting to happen for me now. Not in the zone yet, but pretty near.

Yeah, Nick Cave for the soundtrack and a cameo. And for the heroine herself, how about Amy Winehouse? With her tats and tousled beehive, she looks like she’s just done ten rounds with a Great Dane already, and she needs a project of this calibre to get her life back on track. Note: get her to duet with N.C.

This is just the sort of story the British industry needs. Fuck your zombie films and historical romances, a pox on your football yob fantasies and coming-of-age dramas: people want edgy violence with a twist, and Dog Fightin’ Woman delivers on every level.

Damn. When I’m good, I’m good, you know?

Now the question is what my role models will be. A title as direct as Dog Fightin’ Woman needs an unambiguous style of writing and direction. This is a perfect project to channel my admiration for the work of Alan Clarke, whose Scum portrayed borstal life so powerfully. A bit of research on women players in the dog-fighting scene and I too can create a piece of searing authentic drama.

I don’t need research to create the structure for the story though. The Ordinary World for our heroine needs to be one of grime and squalor, before an Inciting Incident which raises the prospect of fighting dogs to escape her social misery and personal demons. Not sure of the precise question that Inciting Incident raises, but it can be addressed through the second act, which features fights of increasing savagery, before she is faced with a bout that could see her clear her debts and maybe buy the washing machine she’s always craved — only, social services get wind of what’s going on and threaten to take her children away on the day of the fight. Can she face down a 15 stone rottweiller and save her kids from being fostered? Something of that sort anyway.

I’ll stop while I’m on a roll. Besides, I don’t want to give all my secrets away. Just remember, when you see posters for Dog Fightin’ Woman, that this is where it all started.

There’s a dodgy geezer in my neighbourhood. He wears shorts and a vest most of the year, has his hair in a ponytail, and the only sign that he works is a poster I’ve seen in his van promoting a retro rave night he put together one Bank Holiday. Local teenagers are often in his company, and I am convinced this is because he is peddling drugs to them. Lacking espionage skills or evidence, where am I supposed to turn to deal with this social menace?

That’s where The Fixer comes in: a covert action team controlled by a shady government agency, with the capability to wipe out troublesome individuals. In my fantasies, I call them and they show up in an inconspicuous car. The woman flirts with the drug lord at the front door while the chavvy member of the team gets into the house at the rear, casing the joint thoroughly and finding evidence of the drugs empire the dodgy geezer runs, leaving it to the tough guy to pop round that night and place three well-aimed bullets into that vest of his while he’s wearing it.

Only, that’s not enough story for an episode. And really, what would be accomplished by wiping out one techno-loving van driver? Which is why tonight’s story focused on Gideon Stone, an ex SAS member who is trafficking heroin on a massive scale. Nasty man. But things aren’t as simple with him as they first appear. Gideon is still in with the British establishment, supposedly acting against the Taliban in Afghanistan using the profits he makes from drugs. Which counts as a moral dilemma, at least to the stiff upper lipped goon who met up with him, and also knew the Scottish guy who runs the hit team. You could tell they were cut from a similar cloth: both wore leather gloves and seemingly never removed them. If I wore leather gloves when I went to the toilet, I’d be as wound up as the Scottish team leader.

The story was pretty good, complemented by some skilful camera work and credible performances, but I felt more work would have given it more impact. After being shot by Gideon, the team’s shooter gets all morose, and finding out he has a bullet in his shoulder that could lead to gangrene and his arm being removed does not do wonders for his state of mind. This was interesting stuff I’d not seen before: how a man of violence copes with violence against him. And I’d have liked to have found out more about it, but The Fixer is handicapped to some extent by being written for ITV, and every ad break is an act break too.

The consequence of that is you’ve only got twelve or however many minutes to move the action on and up to the next level, which really wasn’t enough to see our hero get his mojo back, decide he’s going to win the day, take that damned bullet out of his shoulder, and face Gideon down. The idea is fine, but I felt there just wasn’t enough time to convince us of it. You need to be with him when he’s at his worst to appreciate him at his best, and that process was sketched over.

A shame. The first series of The Fixer was quality stuff, and this is the first episode I’ve caught of the second series. There’s room on the schedules for a post watershed show that combines action with moral dilemmas and interesting characters, and at its best The Fixer delivers on every count. Let’s hope subsequent episodes of this series bring home the goods.

I’ve still got a bit of a warm glow from seeing Adventureland, the new offering from writer-director Greg Mottola. It’s a story that other creators may have been tempted to inflate into something bigger, but by staying with what I strongly suspect are his feelings if not the facts of what he did in the summer of 1987, Mottola has arrived at a charming coming-of-age story that works because of the sincerity of its script and performances.

James Brennan was hoping to travel in Europe before studying in New York, but his father’s demotion means that he has to find a job himself, and the only one available is in the lousy local themepark, Adventureland. The unamusement park is depicted just right, a moribund place that most attracts young people at a loose end in their lives, the exceptions being DIY man Mike, rumoured to have jammed with Lou Reed, and the avuncular owners of the attraction, whose number one rule is not to let any of the visitors leave with one of the few remaining big-ass panda teddies that are on display as prizes. Naturally, James finds himself in a situation where he is relieved of one of said pandas, though to be fair its redneck ‘winner’ is carrying a knife. Anyway, this unfortunate transaction introduces James to Em, who soon becomes his love interest.

And that’s kind of it. Don’t expect any road trips, encounters with mentors, complex set pieces, or much else than a credible and touching depiction of a relationship that causes pain for both James and Em. He’s a virgin, and unsure of much except that he loves Em. She’s involved with the married DIY dude, and it’s messing her up. Their inability to untangle all this and kindle the warmth between them into the heat of love is the melancholy path that this bittersweet movies treads perfectly.

What helps along the way is the surety that this is 1987 we’re experiencing. The musical choices are pitch-perfect, from Husker Du in Em’s car to the ghastly Rock Me Amadeus that one of the park rides blares out 20 times daily, a dismal metal band that plays in a local bar to the pain experienced by Em when an asshole drummer tries to impress her with his Rush impression because he’s heard she’s into musicians.

Maybe all this has particular resonance with me because I spent the summer of 1987 working and traveling in America myself, and know what it’s like to put a C90 of meaningful songs together for a girl you’re into. But plenty of films have covered this kind of territory before without convincing me…so what makes Adventureland work where others have failed?

Ultimately, the answer to that has to be naturalism. Adventureland has the reek of life about it, in the same way that Napoleon Dynamite has, and that a lot of other films overstyle one way or another. And that’s important about films that want to convince you about their protagonists, welcome you into their worlds. These are characters prone to the same kind of low-status humiliations that real teenagers struggle with in seeking to make their misshapen bodies do what they’re supposed to, and say things that represent their shifting beliefs and feelings while knowing that those utterances will put them in a pecking order, all the while subject to the whims of older people with more power than them, often for the most arbitrary reasons.

The one area where this lovely film failed to convince is in its coda, where James and Em meet in New York a while after their time in Adventureland, and consummate the relationship that they began there. It works in the sense of a well-turned third act, but here I suspect we’re seeing what Mottola wishes had happened rather than what actually did. Life has loose ends, and when we’re younger in particular there are all kinds of ‘what-ifs’ that never get resolved for real. I sort of wish that he’d had the courage to end the film at the melancholy point things reach at the end of the time in the theme park…but I can also recognise the impulse to give your younger self the break that you never actually experienced.

One morning, as David Brent was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been transformed into a monstrous verminous prawn. That, at least, is the premise of District 9, the rather confused debut feature from Neil Blomkamp, who co-scripted the film with Terri Tatchell.

OK, so it’s not David Brent really, but I’m sure I can’t have been the only person to have found the early scenes of the film comically akin to The Office, and its protagonist Wikus Van De Merwe to share some of the hapless self-absorbed Brent’s characteristics. Only, Wikus works for a multinational company big in the weapons trade rather than a stationery supplier. And his job brings him into contact with an alien race, nicknamed prawns, who for no readily apparent reason flew their ginormous spaceship to Johannesburg 20 years ago, and have been living in a shanty town every since.

All this is revealed through news footage, which is good in that it gives the film a raw feel that’s to its advantage when the aliens appear. And bad since it allows Blomkamp to get across all manner of exposition through reportage, rather than use more inventive and less obtrusive means of layering the story.

Ah, the story. OK, initially Wikus is involved in relocating the aliens from District 9 to a pupose-built camp — you’d be right in suspecting some racial theme going on here fitting in with South Africa’s apartheid past, though it isn’t explored particularly. What matters is that there are aliens anyway, and that they’re living in intolerable conditions because…oh never mind because, since it raises all sorts of questions about what the aforementioned ginormous spaceship is doing floating above Johannesburg.

Wikus gets sprayed with a peculiar substance which also serves to power a smaller flying craft that the aliens have down on the ground. Whatever it is, it’s not very economical, since it’s taken twenty years to fill a flask with it. And, err, it also serves to mix Wikus’s DNA with that of the aliens, so he slowly becomes a prawn. Meaning we can throw The Fly into the mix as one of District 9’s influences. That’s The Office, Kafka, and The Fly…just for starters.

Once Wikus finds himself sporting a prawny hand in place of the one he’s used to, the tone shifts again. This time to a buddy movie. Wikus and one of the prawns become allied in time-honoured fashion, and next thing you know it’s getting all Lethal Weapon as the two become action heroes to take down the multinational’s HQ and recover the canister of DNA mutating fuel.

The change of tone and pace is frankly bewildering at times, but if you can put the illogical aspects to one side — bear with me on this — you’ll find District 9 an enjoyable science fiction romp that seems to be all kinds of things without ever settling down into anything coherent. Frankly it’s a mess, but it’s a fun one, and I expect good things from Blomkamp in the future. Mind you, I’m not convinced that said future should involve him picking up the conveniently dangled promise of a sequel — I have a horrible idea he’ll want to infuse it with genres that were unaccountably overlooked first time round and include dance sequences and a serial killer.

As it is, there’s more than enough to keep your attention occupied. A bit of conspiracy thriller, a touch of comedy (even if it’s not deliberate — I seemed to be the only person laughing in the screening I attended), some macho action, a transformer robot, and some badboy Nigerians hoping to eat the hero in the belief that doing so will pass his mysterious powers onto their boss. You can’t fault District 9 for lack of invention, though maybe in the rush of enthusiasm that clearly went into creating this film some ideas really should have been dropped. But hey, with Peter Jackson shepherding the film into existence, a man never knowingly understated, perhaps it’s no surprise that District 9 seeks to be all things to all audiences.

There’s a school of psychology called Transactional Analysis which explores how people function from the perspective of whether they’re acting as a Parent, Child, or Adult. Psychologists being psychologists, they decided that typology wasn’t complex enough, so they elaborated on that and developed subcategories along the lines of Angry Child, Hurt Parent, and so forth. The idea is, you analyse someone’s interactions and see which of these personas emerges. As these things go, it’s got some half decent thinking in there that is all easily misapplied by people who get into TA and forget that those personas are descriptions, rather than anything real.

Anyway, I was involved in an event where a therapist wanted to get these concepts across to an audience of people with mental health problems. The danger to me was that it would sound super-theoretical, and that people would not latch onto the concept. Then I had an idea that seemed to be useful: instead of using abstract labels, why not bring the concepts to life by identifying them with Simpsons characters? Pretty much everyone is familiar with the show, and it struck me that it would be a fun and accessible way to bring the thinking of Transactional Analysis alive for this particular audience.

I’ve returned to The Simpsons as a teaching tool several times. The characters and world are so well defined that it’s easy to recognise yourself or anyone else in the mythology of the show. And because of this, it can be a very useful tool when developing a script. It’s all very well suggesting that writers learn from Shakespeare or the myths that predate the Bard, but let’s get real: most people have more experience of sitting in front of the adventures of Bart and family than of absorbing the finer points of classical drama.

Most recently, I utilised The Simpsons in working with a filmmaker who is developing a new script. The characters were half-baked, and to inspire him to find a new take on them I asked him to imagine that they were Simpsons characters. Silly, yes. But it helped. Realising that the protagonist’s girlfriend had connections with Lisa clarified that she needed to come across more sympathetically, and with intelligence. Two of his friends had echoes of Carl and Lenny, complete with homoerotic subtext. A crucial mentor figure had parallels with Professor Frink. And so on.

Working with those commonalities helped the filmmaker see his story in a new way, an important part of the script development process when the writer feels stuck. And it allowed other realisations to emerge in turn. The thing here isn’t to do with doing a Simpsons knock-off — it’s about helping a creator shift from being blocked to realising that they can make choices about their story. Once that flow is re-established, The Simpsons and other analogies can be forgotten, and the creator get on with being in whatever zone allows them to come up with ideas.

Using pop culture reference points works a lot better for me than delving into the canon. Even if you are working with someone who has Renaissance poets at their fingertips, there is often a self-consciousness about the process that can get in the way of the freed up thinking you’re seeking. So: Simpsons, not Shakespeare. And with similar intent, I have created a set of cards based on images from 1960s Fantastic Four comics that can be used to provoke ideas. Could so something similar with Tarot, for sure, and indeed have done. But there’s something about seeing Jack Kirby drawn superheroes — just as archetypal as any Tarot image — that frees things up for me, and the people I work with.

It’s not that I make a point of walking out of films. It’s just, sometimes, it’s the wisest thing to do. Stay in the cinema and continue to be assaulted with idiocy — or leave, to a world where there is coffee, and carrot cake, and people; some of whom will say more intelligent things than what you’ve witnessed happening on screen.

This evening it was Orphan that I made an early exit from. My expectations were not high, and they were not satisfied. I don’t expect cinematic genius from the horror genre, as my liking for The Descent and the films of George Romero makes clear. But some basic respect for the audience goes a long way, and this spooky kid film showed me none.

Things came to a head in a scene where the couple on the lookout for a kiddie go to the orphanage. Which at least means I got to see CCH Pounder, who I love in The Shield and is here cast as a nun who clearly sees the devil at work in the weird kid painting upstairs while her peers party. Oh, silly husband for going upstairs. Sillier still, for being entranced by the freakish child’s preternatural ability with a paintbrush, and her cutesy story about how the lioness in the picture is being reunited with her cubs. I couldn’t be bothered to untangle the metaphor, but I wouldn’t want a freak-eyed Russian-accented child who paints jungle creatures with family issues anywhere near my house.

And that’s as much as I saw. The bit with the paintings, and some dreadful on-the-nose dialogue, was enough to catapult me out of the cinema and into the early evening. Somehow, I don’t feel I’ve missed anything. The bogus shock at the start, direction that made every damn thing creepy regardless whether it was or not, and risible dialogue…thirty minutes of that was quite enough, thank you.

Last time I walked out was about three weeks ago, for different reasons. I decided to check out the G.I. Joe movie, figuring that being directed by the man who made The Mummy such fun made it worth a look. I’ve no attachment to the geekery associated with the animation series or comic, just wanted some big dumb action. And I got it. Even before the film started, a couple of sweets were shot in my direction by some nearby teens, and were soon joined by a shower of popcorn. I figured I wouldn’t enjoy much more of that, and left.

You could also argue that such is the price of going to see a kids’ movie. Has to be said I’ve had similar experiences in American cinemas, and at a German one where the audience was primarily composed of G.I.s. I’m used to the idea that The Rocky Horror Show is an interactive experience for audiences, but it seems that some American audiences treat every film as if it’s a long lost cousin or dimwitted friend, to be hollered at genially and offered food and drink.

Cinema etiquette seems straightforward enough, so I’m at a loss to know what to do when people behave like asshats in one. I have been known to urge people to shut up, and I’m big and ugly enough that such entreaties have worked and not resulted in confrontation. But there are other things that people can do…I was unsettled to be in a front row screening once when the guy next to me slipped out of his seat to lie on the floor. He was hurting nobody, but at the back of my head was the thought that a man who lies on the ground in a cinema might be capable of anything. And yes, I know that sounds sad and alarmist, but that’s what I thought. He was wearing sandals, for godsake. Who knows what could have happened?