Couples Retreat, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

Where do we start? This has to be the most inept piece of laughter-engineering I have yet seen emerge from the self-congratulatory world of Vince Vaughn and pals. I’m pretty sure that had I submitted the script for this mirthless dead zone, it would have been rejected for all the reasons I am about to elaborate. But Mr Vaughn is a prime example of someone who having got the door to Hollywood success open, is determined to make the most of his time in the celebro-sphere.

OK, enough of the invective — let’s get specific. It’s a given of storytelling that the path taken by your protagonist has to be one where the audience can believe in the forces that compel the hero to act as he does. You want to see people make choices that make sense, even if they’re not the ones you’d make yourself. And this takes some thought about the emotions at play within the world of the story. Here, Couples Retreat falls at the first hurdle.

The couples in question have to be motivated to get to an island retreat where they will experience compulsory relationship counselling. Now, no sane couple I’m aware of would submit to such an ordeal, and the audience will be with me on this one. So what artillery is brought in to ensure that the holidayers go to the island? First, the dullard organising the experience has suffered testicular cancer, which means that having gone through pain once his friends are presumably willing to do so again. Second, most egregiously, Vince Vaughn’s winsome children say that they want mummy and daddy to go on the retreat so they don’t divorce. And you can’t ignore the counsel of winsome children.

Ick. So, the characters have been crowbarred onto the island. Now we have to find a sane reason for them to remain there, when just across the bay is an island of singles partying their asses off. You know and I know that at least some of the couples are going to head over to that island at some point in the story. But only when it makes dramatic sense. And there is little of that in evidence anywhere in this manipulative piece of drek. Instead, the characters are told that they will forfeit their right to be on the island unless they go through the revolutionary (read: sappy) couples counselling process devised by the mysterious French therapist who is Stalin to this tropical gulag.

Are you sensing my hostility? Good. This really is one of the most dismal films I’ve seen in a long time, an utterly contrived and mechanical exercise in delivering half-laughs to the witless. Naturally, the couples have to come off the island better than they went on it, and it’s not because of the entreaties of Frenchie and his staff. Instead it’s down to downhome American cussedness: the couples go to the party island, and — you guessed! — realise that their relationships matter to them more than casual temptations of the flesh. Just to make sure the audience have family values wired in too, acres of pliant flesh are put on display for them to say no to.

There is little else to say. Couples Retreat is a sorry excuse for a comedy, wasting some genuine performing talent in the pursuit of cheap overchoreographed gags that seem to have come off a production line. I’m guessing that factory was until recently devoted to making cars, and the workers are making valiant but so far amateurish attempts to shift over to the creation of humour. As a case study in how not to write a film, Couples Retreat has a lot to offer. Otherwise, avoid at all costs.

I’m developing a treatment with a friend for a movie that centres on a close friendship, so figure that we should catch an example or two. Only, there’s something clearly twisted about my take on such things because the films that catch my attention in the local rental store are twisted hymns to dysfunctionality. Not quite the vibe we’re aiming for in our own attempt at the new Little Miss Sunshine.

The first is Ghost World, an adaptation co-scripted by Daniel Clowes of his own graphic novel, co-written and directed by Terry Zwigoff. Despite an appealing look and starring Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson, it’s a film that doesn’t give up its pleasures easily.

The principle problem is the source material, and the arch and distanced take Clowes has on his characters. He observes with some accuracy but little empathy, as two high school girls prepare to take on the world and discover it isn’t how they wanted it to be.

There’s also an issue to do with change: Clowes is seemingly opposed to it, while most films traffic in transformation. This is addressed directly in a scene in which a curmudgeonly blues fan who’s been taken under the wing of a woman turns his back on the wider world she’s introduced him to. The character, played by Steve Buscemi, retreats to the narrow world of his obsessions, and you can’t help but feel that Clowes is chuckling as he flips the bird at Hollywood.

Somewhat disappointed, we next watch Chuck & Buck. Again I’ve misjudged my memories of the film, my co-writer correctly pointing out some half way through that it could easily be a horror movie. Scripted by Mike White, the film is a toe-curling tale of a man-boy who refuses to grow up, and tries to rekindle his friendship with a childhood best buddy who’s now grown up with a job and fiance.

We both squirm as the beautifully judged film takes us through exquisitely painful scenes as the twisted man-child stalks his former pal in Los Angeles, watching him have sex with his partner and hiring a theatre to put on a perverse account of their relationship with adults in the role of children. This really is naked and painful stuff, and it’s only a perfectly balanced resolution that stops it being one of the most awkward experiences of your life, the tenderness of the climax a blessed relief after the sheer torture of what comes before.

The performances are pitch-perfect, Mike White himself playing the child who hasn’t grown up, and Chris Weitz the equally complicit jock who has managed to move on in his life. Shot on DV, the film has a jagged and brutal look that suits its themes perfectly.

What has all this taught us given Vicki and I are developing our own treatment? While Ghost World doesn’t give equal weight to its protagonists — you never get as clear an insight into Scarlet Johansson’s character as you do Thora Birch’s — it does at least delineate them clearly.

Chuck & Buck meanwhile is a masterclass in exposing the undercurrents of a macabre friendship, and while the project we’re doing has none of its darkness, there are scenes when we need to portray a rift between the pals. Seeing how Mike White writes Chuck and Buck is a model in developing characters who have a shadow side to their relationship, and the better we can do that in our own tale the more impact the pals’ break up will have before they make up again.

Is it possible? A film with the twisted insight of Chuck & Buck and the cheery worldview of Little Miss Sunshine? It’s certainly worth a try. And aiming for it will give us something of note to aspire to. Watch this space.

I’ve been script doctoring a couple of interesting projects recently, a short and a feature both due to be shot next year. And I find, time and again, that what I come back to is the emotional impact of the script. Sure, it might express itself as a structural issue, a need for zingier dialogue, or higher stakes in a particular scene, but more often than not those specific requests are aimed at heightening emotions.

And really, that’s no surprise. The reason we go into a dark room to watch pictures play before us on a screen is so that those pictures, and the sounds that accompany them, inspire feelings in us. Without feeling, cinema is a dead experience. It’s for that very reason that there’s a distinction made between film and art installations using film or video: in an attempt to legitimise the latter’s typical lack of emotional affect, they are defined as being a different art form judged by different criteria.

Even at the simplest level, a story is about emotions: specifically those raised by a protagonist’s success or failure at achieving their goal. The other day I set out for Heathrow Airport, carrying with me everything I thought I needed to get to Australia. Arriving good and early to the flight desk, I started to check in my luggage, only to be asked for my Australian visa. My what? I had no idea I needed such a thing. (Desire: get to Australia. Obstacle: need for a visa. Character revelation: lack of preparedness. Get it?)

Then the lady at the check-in told me I could get a visa at the airport, and that Australia is one of the few countries to offer such a service. So I hopped over to another desk, and the woman there got the system loaded up — only for it to crash a minute later. Great: a technical problem impacting on me now…and the clock is ticking before my flight departs. Embarrassed, the woman said she’d try sending a telex and that the reply was likely to come in ten minutes: how about I get a drink while waiting?

Sure enough, I found somewhere to get a bagel and a latte and when I came back, the visa was there. Again, what would this tell us if this were a film? That your protagonist has a happy-go-lucky attitude maybe, instead of raging against computer failure cheerly going for a coffee and bite to eat instead of snarling at the woman who was getting the visa sorted out. That optimistic outlook paid off when I was presented with the visa, enabling me to check my luggage in and get the plane. Point being less about me as an ill-prepared traveller but about the revelation of character through incidents that, in their small way, provoke some measure of empathy. Geddit?

One way to change the scale of emotion is to change the size of incident. Let’s say that the whole computer network went down, and that instead of a telex being sent and the system righting itself, things really went kerplooey. Then, I’d potentially be faced with being more resourceful to achieve my objective. And in the process demonstrate my character. Would I buckle under pressure? Turn on the charm and call on influential contacts? Get fellow travellers to sympathise and organise a sit down strike so that no one boarded the plane until I got to go with them? Each of these is a different story pointing to different facets of personality being highlighted, creating different emotional responses in the audience. Engagement is everything. Without it, all that remains is dust motes floating in front of projected light.

So, here I am, in Australia. I’ll be here a month, and as well as continuing to write about film, creativity and more here, I’ll also be creating a separate vehicle for general writings about my experiences here, under the name Ozblog, which you’ll soon be able to access from the top of the page.

I always feel a touch of trepidation when a new Pixar film comes to town. For every creation of unalloyed cinematic joy — Wall-E or The Incredibles – there’s one that just doesn’t hit the spot for me — Cars and Ratatouille most notably. Is it fair to compare a studio’s new film to their previous excellent ones? Maybe not, but having established different standards, I expect Pixar to live up to them.

And along comes Up. Which I’m delighted to tell you is perhaps the finest Pixar film yet. Again, note the name of the studio: this is not something you find me doing in other reviews. But Pixar isn’t like other studios. They’re not just the people who greenlight the project and sort out its budget and marketing; the Pixar team are involved at every stage of the lengthy process it takes to get from initial concept to finished film.

Oh, about the initial concept. Did you know that all the films Pixar have made started out in an informal pitch meeting way back when the studio was formed? Everything from Toy Story to Finding Nemo to Up was there in embryo around one dinner table. As brainstorming sessions go, that counts as a success.

Pixar’s unique working method is for people involved in a film to showcase their work to peers on a regular basis, for feedback to make what they’re doing even better. A lot of the egos involved in making film would shrink at that prospect, but Up demonstrates the power of the process. And please note — it’s feedback from their peers the filmmakers receive, not a demographically sorted random audience whose desire for a formulaic movie is pandered to.

Such a group would never vote for a movie starring a crotchety old man and a plump boy scout as its protagonists. And they wouldn’t have the aesthetic sense to come up with a story that contains so many beautiful and moving sequences, the most notable being the tear-inducing montage that takes you through the life of the film’s cube-headed hero Carl Frederickson and his long relationship with beloved wife Ellie.

A rickety house borne aloft by thousands of toy balloons. A pack of talking dogs. A zepellin piloted by a callous egotist who used to be Carl’s idol. This is the stuff that dreams are made of, and the scenes it gives rise to are regularly breathtaking in their conception and execution.

The scope is enormous, but tiny details count most of all, in ways that are human and cinematic at the same time. Carl and Ellie would swear to one another by crossing their hearts, so when the young scout Russell uses the same gesture to seal a deal with the old man, the audience knows just how much that simple movement means to him. Ditto when Russell is awarded a badge that Ellie made for Carl decades ago, a prize more valuable than anything else the lad could imagine.

It’s those emotional touches that bring life and meaning to the fantastic landscapes and stupendous set pieces that Up is made of. All that visual spectacle is correctly in the service of a powerful emotional experience, the antithesis of the empty merchandising advertorials that George Lucas bored audiences with in his second Star Wars trilogy.

What else is there to say? Up is cinema at its finest. The fact that it happens to be a fable told in drawings says perhaps that animators have a respect for the power of the image that goes beyond what some of the world’s most lauded filmmakers are capable of achieving. Make sure you see this magnificent film, and perhaps for maximum enjoyment go with someone who is a very different age to your own.

You can take it as a given that if you’re interested in a phenomenon, Japan will produce an exaggerated version of it to demonstrate your point. In this case, I was intrigued to read about a new trend in Japanese gaming in which players lay waste not to barbarian hordes or space monsters, but targets closer to home resembling their families or colleagues. The usual response at this point is to go ‘Oh, those wacky Japanese’, but in this particular instance it made me realise just how close that kind of casual carnage is to the violence meted out to zombies.

Think about it. Zombies are the ultimate guilt-free kill. You’ve got to off them or you’ll be bitten and become one yourself. If that’s not self defence, what is? And if the zombie in question used to be an aunt who bought you grotesque tanktops, or a boss with an irritating laugh, well that just gives added oomph to your fighting arm when you’re taking them down. Reminder: this is us we’re talking about, not funny foreigners at a comfortable distance in a Tokyo prefecture.

All of which provides a fascinating backdrop to Zombieland, which is quite probably the film I’ve enjoyed most this year. My expectations were not high, so I was surprised to discover a well-crafted film of considerable humour and warmth, resting on a quality script by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. Kudos also to director Ruben Fleischer, who casts the film well and is equally adroit handling comedy, shock, and scenes that are genuinely touching.

Who would have thunk a film that features numerous inventive ways of despatching zombies is ultimately about finding family? Substitute zombies for the assholes in your own life, and it all starts to make sense. Wouldn’t it be cool to blast away the jerks who hold you back, impede your progress, and generally make life an unsatisfying experience for you? And wouldn’t it be cooler still to do so in the comfort of friends who really do have your back?

Ultimately, that’s the promise of Zombieland: a world in which you can blow away all the assholes with no fear of retribution, and the only living people left are cool to hang out with. Not that this sentimentality is there from the word go, of course: instead, it creeps up on you, first in the company of Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), then with his new buddy Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), and later the sisters they hook up with and gradually come to trust, Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin).

The characters are named for the destinations they’re separately headed for, but in practice the four of them unite at a theme park outside of Los Angeles, a superb setting for the film’s climax, after a hilarious interlude featuring Bill Murray as himself. The action in the theme park works to bring the characters together and demonstrate they really are a family of sorts, while providing some fabulous set pieces for them to dispose of zombie predators on rollercoasters, swinging galleons, and the other paraphernalia of the theme park.

What’s fascinating is how successfully the film camouflages what’s quite a conservative message within the trappings of the zombie genre. When George Romero first started making zombie movies they were satires in which the zombie was us, the viewer, a passive consumer in a society devoted to excess. Zombieland demonstrates, with greater humour and scope than Shaun of the Dead, the closest it has to a peer, that the zombie film can be used for other purposes, and does so with surprising intelligence and warmth.

All of which suggests that the zombie genre is more mutable than might be supposed. Like the science fiction film or western, it may be that all kinds of stories can be told using the bare tropes of the zombie movie. In which case, I look forward to seeing more examples that do something as interesting with the genre as Zombieland has. But whether those other films will be as all-round fun as this one, I very much doubt.

True Blood had me from the opening scene, when a wolfen fellow with long hair dressed in black is found behind the counter of a shop. We assume he’s a vampire, and that he’s called something poncy like Lafayette…only he turns out to be posing as a member of the undead, the real vampire in the scene being the guy who looks like a redneck and threatens to kill the pseud.

Speaking as someone thoroughly tired of humourless dudes wearing long black leather coats and bike boots as they go to pick up milk and kitty litter from the local Tesco, that reversal was a longed-for relief. Not that True Blood is without its stereotypes, as we were introduced in quick order to a feisty black woman tired of serving and working for imbeciles. That would be Tara, good friend of Sookie, our barmaid heroine, whose defining characteristic is that she is psychic, able to hear the inner voices of those around her. All, that is, except Bill, the local vampire.

Yes, that’s Bill. Not Draco, Pierre, or Gunther. Bill. Short for William, and here applied to a smoulderingly handsome vampire who, like his peers, gets by through consuming the faux plasma referred to in the title of the series. That in turn accounts for the vampires coming ‘out of the coffin’ and entering the mainstream of American society.

This being America, there are bigger weirdos than vampires to contend with. The presence of the undead triggers all kinds of buttons, not least a subculture determined to have carnal knowledge of them. Which is fine with the vampires, who are themselves partial to sex with humans. Add a bit of blood letting to that, and the scene can get pretty intense and messy, and the pilot episode partly concerns a woman who turns a lover on by showing him a video of her making love with a vampire, the consequence being he gets so excited he ends up strangling her in the height of passion. Oh, and the man in question is Sookie’s brother, so you can be sure this is a story we’ll be coming back to.

All this is brought to you by Alan Ball, the man who scripted American Beauty and created and masterminded Six Feet Under. Two impressive achievements, and it looks like True Blood could be a more populist third.

Like those two other successes, this new series traffics in matters of sex and death — the biggies that underpin any drama. It lacks the subtlety of Six Feet Under, but nuance and fangs are unlikely bedfellows at the best of times. Instead, we get interesting characters and situations: Sookie rescues Bill from a sick couple who want to drain and sell his blood, there being a blackmarket in vampire juice since it supposedly functions as a kind of haemoglobin-enhanced Viagra.

It’s good fun stuff, seemingly devoid of the kind of metaplot that was responsible for the weaker aspects of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Well, so far at any rate. Given that the show is entering its third season in the States, I’m sure that in the process it’s gone into all kinds of interconnected detail that was thankfully absent tonight anyway.

Why the widespread interest in toothy bloodletters? Vampires are all over the media, almost as much as zombies. There’s something romantic about vamps though — the difference between gently nibbling a lover’s neck and levering their cranium open to get to the grey stuff — which in a classic case of reverse psychology only makes me more curious to write about the brain-eaters at the base of the undead food pyramid. And I do believe I’ve got a take that…but let’s leave that pitch for another day.

One of the best things I ever did was fail all but two of my GCE ‘O’ levels. Meant I escaped the dismal institution I’d done a five year learning stretch in, and got to do some retakes at a much more egalitarian technical college, before leaving there with enough passes to go to a quality sixth form college.

The sixth form was a beacon of light in a conservative area, an excellent model of how to give young people a liberal education and enough experience of independence that it’d match where they were in their late teens emotionally. It also meant that it functioned as a great place to ready yourself for further education, or the world of work, depending on what you had in mind when you spread your wings after A levels.

A number of factors at sixth form served to prepare me well for the idea that I could write films years later, though at the time the nearest I managed was some scribbling in inky fanzines. One was that teachers there, as well as teaching their regular A level classes, also did a weekly session in which they shared one of their passions with students. You could do anything from bee keeping to astronomy, and one of the extra classes I remember making an impact was on film appreciation. Each week, we’d watch a sequence from a film, and discuss how the way it was made affected you as a viewer.

It was nothing heavy — one week, I recall, we watched a chunk of Escape from Alcatraz, realising how the photography made the prison so imposing. What made this possible was the appearance of the video recorder, which by the time I’m talking about — the early 80s — was ubiquitous enough that many people had one at home.

One of those people was Mike Ward. A fellow sixth form student, it was Mike’s house we piled round to on afternoons off from college. It became quite a ritual, and a gang of us watched videos at his on a regular basis. Escape from New York, screened last night on ITV4, was one favourite. It pressed all the buttons for that mostly-male crew, what with being an action science fiction yarn that could have sprung from the pages of 2000AD, which several of us were reading. And Mike himself was a connoisseur of genre films; I can remember him making jokes about the length of credit sequences in John Carpenter films, and circulating the information that Carpenter himself did everything from write the things to compose their soundtracks. Again, VHS is to thank for this knowledge, rather than any formal film education — Mike knew these things because he watched the films before and after we watched them as a group, and some of what he saw stuck.

We didn’t just watch action hokum though. We watched Hong Kong action hokum, Mike having got into Jackie Chan early and with more enthusiasm than the rest of us could muster. The definitive film of that time though remains Flash Gordon, which we viewed innumerable times and was our very own cult classic. Never mind Rocky Horror Picture Show (though we enjoyed that too), the essence of camp for me is Brian Blessed’s performance as the King of the Hawkmen. And watching it lots of times — I dread to think how many — gave me an appreciation of details of the filmmaker’s art and led, along with the consumption of cannabis purchased from whoever it was who supplied such things then, to some fascinating theories about the film. All good stuff for activating bits of the brain interested in how films function.

Naturally, it couldn’t last. We were due to go our separate ways — and those sessions at Mike’s place helped prepare us for that. When it came to filling in the forms you had to complete to send off to universities, there was a section for stuff of note, like whether you’d swam the channel for charity. None of us had done that — but we’d all spent a lot of time at Mike’s place watching cool films. And thus the Dorridge Film and Video Society was born. We all got to be officers of the club, ensuring that we all had a position of responsibility representing our commitment to watching VHS genre films in a marijuana haze. I was Secretary, and I’m sure that made the difference to my eventual destination as a student when it came to doing a degree.

William Burroughs isn’t the easiest writer to approach, his cut-up experiments rendering comprehension in the usual manner difficult, and instead offering multiple perspectives on his concerns. Two of his books remain popular for their insight into living as a gay heroin user in the 1950s. The analyses contained in Junky and Queer are timeless. His writings on drugs rival those of Aldous Huxley, whose Doors of Perception was a piercingly intelligent commentary on the hallucinogenic experience.

Part of the reality of those chronicles is how the drug experience affects everything the user does. And it is with this insight in mind that I offer an analysis of the perspective of someone suffering mild flu. True, flu lacks the seedy glamour that the drug user is credited with, but it remains an altered state that affects the sufferer’s whole perceptions.

In particular, the flu sufferer is driven to desire comfort, in the form of hot drinks and fluffy jumpers. And, in my case, I am also eager to experience comfort viewing. At times like this, I have no desire for novelty. No, I desire the tried and tested. In particular, I yearn for Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Which, conveniently, is on ITV2 at this very moment.

This is a film I have seen many times, and continue to enjoy. Yes, it’s puerile, relies on some dumb jokes, and is altogether silly. But what else would you expect of a story in which two underperforming high school kids get access to time travel and use the technology to collect historical figures ranging from Napoleon to Socrates, Freud to Billy the Kid, to show off in their class history test?

Besides, that spare account misses out the warmth of the relationship between the protagonists, and the endearing positivity of their worldview. Ultimately, Bill and Ted influence the path of civilisation, the future based on the music and values of the band the two friends start. And it’s that core of enthusiasm and optimism running through the film that I love, and which brings me back to it time and again.

Much of the humour comes from putting historical figures into the contemporary setting of a mall, Bill and Ted’s spiritual home. Seeing Genghis Khan get to grips with toilet cleaning products, Napoleon in a water chute, Beethoven rocking out on a synthesiser…what it lacks in subtlety it regains in its ability to put a big dumb smile on your face and kickstart the production of endorphins. And the more endorphins are swimming round your system, the quicker you’ll recover from flu.

The film’s dialogue is an acquired taste, and one that works for me. Sure, Bill and Ted have a limited vocabulary in which things are ‘bodacious’ and ‘totally excellent’, but in the mouths of Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, it works just fine. Get into the spirit, and you’ll discover this is a buoyant and upbeat tale with a big heart, and more of a brain than you might notice at first sight. Some of the temporal paradoxes that the lads set up to win the day are truly inventive, and its optimistic philosophy wins more points from me than any number of frowny worldviews perpetrated by other filmmakers.

As written by Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, and directed by Stephen Herek, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is just the kind of feelgood nonsense that I respond to when feeling under the weather. You’ll excuse me if I say goodbye for now before the film reaches its climax, as Bill and Ted round up their historical allies to deliver their school report. Excellent, I can feel myself getting better already…