Every project needs its own vocabulary, its own rhythm. By ‘vocabulary’ here I don’t mean the lexicon of words you use, though that can be part of what I’m getting at. Instead it’s to do with working out what goes into your story. Some of that will be clear if you’re working in a particular genre. Staccato sentences work well with thrillers, for instance. A touch of humour in a comedy helps remind you and readers that this is meant to be funny. And so on.

But what about when you’re not writing something that’s clearly one genre or another? Some people will raise their arms in horror at this point. But stories that cross over genres are increasingly popular, and for all the effort of people like Phil Parker in defining how genre splicing works, that kind of thinking tends to be based on perceiving the pattern in what someone else has already done. What if you’re doing something new?

You could argue that The Full Monty is just another personal drama with comic touches. And sure enough, there’ve been plenty of attempts to capture the lightning that went into that particular bottle. How many British films have been made in its wake that tread a similar path? From Billy Elliot to Kinky Boots, Calendar Girls and Brassed Off there’s been no shortage of films that attempt to pluck heartstrings with peculiarly British tales of ordinary people with a commitment to a very personal path in life.

Thing is, it’s uniqueness that matters, distinctiveness that truly makes an impact on audiences. If that wasn’t the case, then sequels would put as many bums on seats as their forebears. If people really valued consistency to that extent, they’d stay home and find it on the telly. If you coax an audience into venturing out to spend money on a cinema ticket, the least you can do for them is give them some kind of surprise.

Which isn’t to say that anything goes. This isn’t a plea to abandon narrative and play William Burroughs cut-up games with text. Though, that said…

I went to an extraordinary concert the other night. A Dutch lute player called Jozef Van Wissem, playing to just twenty or so people. He deserved an arena. There was nothing obscure about what he was doing except that he was doing it on an instrument that time has forgotten, though if you do think of the lute it’s probably because Sting recently got into them and did an album of tunes with one.

Anyway, Jozef is a very contemporary kind of lute player, who in looking for new repertoire to play uses the cut-up methods that Burroughs was known for to create new pieces based on the elements of old ones. Which all sounds very academic and mechanistic — except the effect is anything but. His playing is elegant, delicate, touching. Methods that seem calculated turn out to shed new light on old material. And that’s just as true with some of what Burroughs did, by the way — ‘experimental’ conjures up whitecoated scientists, whereas these experiments are all about connecting with creativity in new ways.

That attitude of experimentation is important. Yes, there are doubtless times that three act structure is the best way to express your story — it certainly is for some of mine. But on other occasions you have to reach for something that truly suits your concept, rather than trying to bang it into a readymade template simply because that’s what seems to be available. It’s not. As stories differ, so do structures. For every similarity there is between your tale and one out there already, there’ll be a difference that’s worth thinking about just as much. Oasis might have got the hang of some of what The Beatles did, but there is no possible way that Liam and Noel could have come up with what Lennon and McCartney created at their height.

Humour is interesting. Being funny is often about accepting shocks that are delivered in a way that makes it clear that you the audience are still safe, despite things appearing otherwise for the characters that the joke concerns — whether literal ones depicted by actors, or ones conjured by the imagination of a comedian. No surprise then, that perceptions of what is funny vary — one person’s safe territory is another’s danger zone.

Witness the recent minor furore over Frankie Boyle finding humour in Down’s Syndrome. To me, the taste failure lay in him picking on a pretty much voiceless group, it being pretty much a given that people with learning disabilities are less capable than most of speaking up for themselves. Others might find the notion of humour about disability at all to be taboo, their own delicate sensibilities being of more concern than any empathy with Down’s sufferers.

Enter Chris Morris. Famed for his ability to sniff out media cant and hypocrisy and reflect it back in the form of some truly twisted humour that itself has become the subject of media attention, his latest project is the film Four Lions. Terrorism and satire are two words you don’t often come across in the same sentence, triggerhappy dogmatists not being high on the list of people you’d want to get on the wrong side of. The bomb found recently in the proximity of South Park’s creators confirms that such fears are well founded.

Scripted by Morris along with writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, the film is thankfully much more on a par with the latters’ edgy work on Peep Show than their limp feature Magicians. It features a group of wannabe Muslim freedom fighters living in Yorkshire, all but one of Pakistani origin but perhaps the most intense being a white guy, a loser who puts the zeal into zealot.

What makes it work so well is that the Al Qaeda apprentices are depicted as a regular group of friends, who in other circumstances might share a love for football or poker but in this case have a thing for jihad. And why not? Their case that capitalism is morally bankrupt might be exaggerated, but how much? Increasingly, even conservative thinkers are disgusted at the antics of bankers — so why not blow the whole system up?

Well, because mass slaughter is a surefire way to kill lots of people who have very little to do with the mechanisms of capital, but are victims of it themselves. One of the scenes shows the terrorists identifying their targets — this one a banker, that one a gynaecologist, but none of them innocent, an impossibility within the logic of the terrorists. Only, that logic comes increasingly unpicked as the story develops, and the friends come closer to putting their plans into practice.

It’s exemplified in the debate between the group’s leader, a bright and articulate man less fundamental in his views than his pacifist brother, and their resident dimwit. The latter functions as a barometer, his straightforward fear and lack of comprehension meaning he needs to be pretty much conned into going along with the terror plan — a job of confusion which turns from comic into something genuinely moving when the none-too-bright guy is caught up in a hostage situation at the climax of the film.

Some reviews have suggested Chris Morris has held back from the force of the attacks he’s unleashed at other targets, but that entirely misses the point. This is a film that humanises people who are demonised even more than the IRA were in their day — their culture, dress, and skin colour marks them out as other in a way that goes way beyond anything to do with their beliefs, which at the end of the day aren’t any more bizarre than many people with strong religious or political views.

People get the wrong idea about King Cnut. They hear about him trying to turn back the tide, and think ‘what an arrogant idiot’. Whereas the whole point was the monarch demonstrating the limitations of his power to those who fawned around him. Smart guy, and one I was reminded of during The Ghost.

Former Prime Minister Adam Lang is holed up at an American benefactor’s luxury beach house, which comes complete with staff. Including a poor gardener who attempts in vain to sweep up the leaves outside: a thankless task since the conditions make it impossible. But this is the world of the wealthy and powerful, and if they desire their view to be untroubled by stray leaves, then so it shall be. But ego is powerless against elemental forces.

Into this world comes Ewan McGregor as a hapless ghost writer, charged with turning a turgid first draft of Lang’s memoirs into something that’ll be a best seller. The first draft was written by an old aide of Lang’s, who was found drunk and drowned, and thus created the vacancy for his successor. McGregor is nonplussed to be doing the job, but reckons his ignorance is an asset — he wants to get to the heart of Adam Lang, and is less bothered by the fine detail of his career.

That political naivity is a calculated choice on the part of Robert Harris, who wrote both the book this film is based on and its screen adaptation. It ensures that this is not a film for politics wonks, but for a general audience. McGregor’s viewpoint is ours, and as he goes from being charmed by Lang to seeing the skills that have made him such a political success, the viewer is drawn along by McGregor the whole way.

Polanski’s craft is pretty much invisible in this film — his emphasis is on telling the story elegantly, and he does so without ever peeking from behind the curtain in the way that many directors would. Where Scorsese would stamp his personality on the material, and Oliver Stone draw attention to his choices, Polanski simply lets it all unfurl. It’s a refreshing and old-fashioned approach, more reminiscent of the days of Hitchcock than Tarantino. Not that I’ve forgotten what I last wrote about Polanski — the fact that he’s a supremely talented filmmaker doesn’t give him a Get Out Of Jail Free card for his sex attack on a girl barely in her teens.

The Ghost is a slow burn thriller that’s developed with meticulous detail, and rewards the attention you pay it: I was saddened to hear a couple talking and laughing through much of the story. Seems she didn’t get some of what was going on and neither did he, but rather than confess he wasn’t following it came up with some alleged jokes to impress his date. A shame — not just for those of us who shared the cinema with them untroubled by incomprehension, but for the implication that the film was somehow difficult, which is far from the case.

One of the film’s major mechanics is status, both in the sense of temporary or ongoing social status, and the boost that possession of information gives a particular character. This was nicely played with throughout, from an opening when the ghost is given the job by a team of publishing professionals from which one English representative is pretty much excluded, to a scene in which Lang’s wife sleeps with the ghost, and another in which the ghost — now in possession of critical information — interviews Lang on his private jet. All virtuoso writing and performances, directed superbly by paedophile Roman Polanski.

I tend to have a problem with antagonists in my stories. Often as not, the protagonist is his/her own worst enemy, which I guess expresses my belief that if you’re not getting what you want from life, odds are it’s because of you messing up, and not because some villain is cackling stage left as the latest phase of his dastardly plan clicks into place.

Only, in many mainstream films — and I’d very much like to be involved with such — there really are baddies with black hats out to get the good guy. And I need and want to be able to create such fiends for some of the projects I’ve got in mind.

All of which helps explain why I was so happy with Iron Man 2. Particularly after being disappointed by the resolution of the first Iron Man film, which was yet another variation on the theme of taking on a level boss, to use computer game terminology. There was a baddy conceptually similar to the hero, only bigger and scary, and it was all a bit trite compared to the skilfully written stuff that preceded it, brought to glorious life by Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark, the gazillionaire technocrat who wears the Iron Man armour.

This time round though, it all worked a lot better. Stark’s problems were multifaceted. Ivan Vanko, a Russian with a historic beef against him, had worked out how to copy some of Stark’s technology, and used it to intelligent effect, attacking the industrialist in the full glare of the world media at a Grand Prix event. As Vanko (another comeback kid in the form of Mickey Rourke) knew full well, the effect of the attack was to chip away at Stark’s image as the provider of a privatised world peace. A genuinely smart move, as well as a great set piece action sequence.

Stark isn’t about 1:1 conflict though, at least when he’s written intelligently. His true arena is the military-industrial complex, and his real enemy comes from within it: rival industrialist Justin Hammer. Perenially second string to the charismatic Stark, Hammer couldn’t be more of a beta male if he tried. He wants what Stark has, and is aided and abetted by the military, who are angry at Stark’s refusal to share his Iron Man technology.

That sets the tone for what’s to come, as Hammer hires Vanko to develop a new generation of armoured suits for use by the American military. Only, Vanko instead comes up with robot drones, which are under his control — and he uses them to continue his vendetta against Stark. Which is one way of getting across the nature of retribution while saying something about government contracts for good measure.

All of this falls into line with advice from screenwriting gurus to have your baddies have intelligent and evolving plans to tackle your hero. In this case, one villain is working against another while apparently being his ally. Good stuff, and cleanly executed. And there’s another layer of opposition between Stark and his right hand man Lt. Col. James Rhodes, whose loyalties are torn between his buddy and his employers. It’s dramatised perfectly when the battle armour he’s wearing is controlled by Vanko and targets Iron Man, and Rhodes gives Stark a heads up about the assault coming his way.

It all adds up to a highly enjoyable movie, with the same kind of zing that its predecessor had, and a smarter and more character-based script by Justin Theroux for good measure. How director Jon Favreau got here from his somewhat smug debut with hipster drama Swingers I couldn’t tell you — but he does a fine job, and I look forward to a third installment of the series.

Someone who’s seen a film treatment I’ve co-developed said that they very much like it, but were concerned about some predictable elements. The tone of their communication suggested that they felt this was a problem, and I can see where they’re coming from. After all, you don’t want to second guess a story…do you?

I saw How To Train Your Dragon earlier, and predicted much of what was to come. And you know what? It didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the film one iota. And it wasn’t predictable because of being a film primarily for children. Not at all. It’s just that, once you set up the characters and plot and world they inhabit, there are only so many ways it can plausibly go and hold your interest at the same time.

Sure, the dragons in the film could have torched the village and dropped the Vikings into a volcano. But that would have lent the story an unnecessarily apocalyptic tone for an audience of a tender age. And yeah, the hero — Hiccup — could have used his dragon-friendly ways to rule the Vikings by fear as their despotic leader. You know what though? Those would have been pretty shitty stories for a bunch of highly talented writers and animators to turn their attentions to.

So, How To Train Your Dragon is kind of predictable. Guess what though? The story is delivered with such relish, such panache, such joie de vivre, that it matters not a jot. What counts is how enjoyable the experience was, and let me tell you it was a hootenanny compared to the smartarse games played in Shutter Island. If Scorsese’s looking for a real challenge, I’d recommend he makes a film for a young audience, and find out whether his Hitchcock riffs and colour schemes pull the wool over young eyes as well as those routines lull his adult viewers.

Imagine a friend is telling you a story. Maybe you were at the event that the tale relates. Do you interrupt her as, laughing aloud, she sandpapers actuality and introduces other elements to tell a yarn that gets you feeling as good as she clearly does? Or do you pull her monologue apart for inconsistencies and contrivances that push it closer to a three act structure than what ‘really’ happened?

Being unpredictable for its own sake only goes so far if you’re interested in engaging an audience. It might fascinate David Lynch, but you’ll note his work rarely troubles the box office and that he helps fund himself through his online presence. That’s far from a criticism: it’s a good business model…at least for someone who has dabbled with something like the mainstream from time to time and profited from it.

Brains like patterns. Can’t get enough of them. So if anything, they’ll tend to find evidence of coherence even when there isn’t any — which explains the attraction of conspiracy theory. Work with that tendency — there’s a whole industry devoted to helping you to do so, with the likes of Syd Field and Robert McKee offering their versions of how film structure really works.

Thing being, it’s not the structure that people go and see films for. They go to be moved, to laugh and cry and empathise with people going through journeys analogous to their own, even if those journeys involve spaceships and spies and Eddie Murphy in a fatsuit.

If a friend asked for a fiver and then cleared off, never to be seen again, you’d be understandably annoyed. And confused. As with friends, so with films. A trailer helps create a contract in the viewer’s mind. One that tells them what sort of film they can reasonably expect for their money, and what kind of emotions will be involved in its realisation. You can honour that agreement, and ideally do so with some wit and style, throw some curveballs in to keep them on their toes. Or you can run off with their money. Only, do that, and they won’t be coming back to see anything of yours again — and they’ll make sure their friends know you ripped them off.

Have a look at this, the script for The Losers. Based on the excellent comics series by Andy Diggle and Jock, this adaptation by Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt is a great model for anyone keen on the kind of high octane action fun that tends to do so well at the box office worldwide when it’s done properly.

In particular, let’s look at the first eleven pages. There’s a masterful job of tension and release done from the off. Opening on what seems to be a scene of someone suffering in a desert setting, a lightning reframe reveals that the anguish was bogus, one of a small group of friends goofing around over a game of cards. Which in turn acclimatises us to the tone of what’s to come: already we have experience of tension being turned into laughter.

The game isn’t played for money, but for weapons. Deadly sexy weapons. Owned by deadly sexy guys, described with magnificent economy: Cougar being a ‘Sniper Rock-God’ is a particular favourite. They’re passing the time while on their way in a truck to a mission, effortlessly swapping the kind of snidely funny lines that men everywhere wished they exchanged with their buddies.

That mission? To use a laser device to target an Afghan prison for destruction from the air. Only, there’s a complication. Kids. And having seen one of our heroes with a tattoo of his own child, it’s reassuring to know that these guys have standards where this killing people business is concerned: they have no intention of letting children die.

Only, there’s a lethal air barrage on the way to the target. And our heroes decide with barely a pause that they’re going to get in there before it arrives, and save the kids. Which counts as a good indicator of their convictions and cojones — and provides the audience with a glimpse of the mad killing skillz that these guys have.

In short order, the guys off the forces guarding the prison, and discover a group of abused children. To underline the fact, a pervert is caught in the act of readying himself to sexually assault one of the kids, which means it’s ok to kill these bastards, and confirms that our guys — and by implication the audience — are on the side of the angels.

But wait, there’s something more. In one of the prison cells, an unspeakably tortured American asks if the newcomers will off him. And reveals that he knows the badass who’s sent them on this mission, and refused to rescind the order just because there are kids on the premises. In fact, this whole operation is about designating the prison a target so this guy — an American behind enemy lines, betrayed by his commander — can be killed.

Naturally, our guys put the poor sod out of his misery, before heading out of the prison complex at speed — because of course the airstrike is on its way, raining death and destruction on anyone the gang haven’t already disposed of. Meaning an opportunity for some high speed driving, barely in time to escape destruction from above.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m exhilerated. And massively impressed. In just a few pages a worldview has been created, and characters who articulate different aspects of it through their solid teamwork. Prowess has been shown, with weapons ranging from old fashioned knives to the newest of guns. Camaraderie has been displayed, in a way that musketeers of old would applaud. And a sinister enemy has been identified, who we strongly suspect will turn up in the story again, and whose corrupt and cowardly actions provide motivation for the band of brothers to take action against.

What more could you want? Frankly, if this doesn’t impress you, nothing will. This is an excellent adaptation of very strong source material, translating Diggle and Jock’s comics creation into mainstream cinema with finesse. I was already looking forward to the film. This screenplay will give me plenty to think about before that happens, not least because I’ve got my own action-thriller-with-a-twist I want to write, one of these days.

A few days ago, in chatting to a friend, I compared comics writer Mark Millar to Malcolm McLaren. And with McLaren now dead, I’m going to explore that comparison some more. What I’d got in mind was their ability to hype projects that tend to collapse under more than a minute’s thought. But that’s fine, because a minute counts as an attention span these days, and both men have demonstrated their ability to occupy young minds perfectly well for that duration.

This is something I’m especially conscious of having seen Kick-Ass. I’m pushed to know what to say about the film other than it’s crass and entertaining, and if you’re in the mood for that then it’ll provide empty calories perfectly well. There is blood and there is swearing, and it’s all done with a laconic attitude. And it took a good deal of thinking to make it that way, lest you think I’m being dismissive.

Just as Stan Lee and Steve Ditko bottled sixties teen angst and distilled it to come up with Spider-Man, Mark Millar and John Romita Jr (himself the son of a classic Spidey artist) have concocted something entirely in tune with 21st century adolescence. The teens in Kick-Ass are plugged into Facebook and Myspace, victims of street crime, and are considered gay by their objects of desire. A world away from the dilemmas that young Peter Parker was faced with, and there’s no sense of the aspirational aspect of Parker’s character. He wanted to do well at college, and as a press photographer, and had a sense of duty when he became a superhero. In Kick-Ass, the protagonist is motivated by nothing more than the desire to be as cool as the characters he’s grown up reading about in comics.

If Millar is McLaren, then Kick-Ass is his Bow Wow Wow. Huh? Well, just as the controversial element of that manufactured band was 13 year old singer Annabella Lwin, the real stand-out character in Kick-Ass is Hit-Girl, an 11 year old brought up by her father to be a killer vigilante.

McLaren had a knack for spotting the coming zeitgeist, as he did brilliantly with Buffalo Gals — which introduced turntables as an instrument to many — and Double Dutch — a whiff of Johannesburg packaged without the coffee table element that was part of Paul Simon’s dabbling with African sounds. Millar has a similar capacity to see what’s on the horizon and respond to it, drawing attention to what he’s doing so you know he’s the man with the plan. And, like McLaren, he knows the value of a collaborator, working with artists at the top of their game — Bryan Hitch on The Ultimates, and various other fan favourites on one spectacle after another.

Note the distinction between spectacle and spectacular. Rarely does Millar’s work live up to the exuberant hype he puffs it up with. The exception is Red Son, an imaginative and well-executed alternative version of Superman had he landed in the corn fields of the Soviet Union rather than America. That project brought together Millar’s interests in politics and comics, and is very well-regarded. But it hasn’t sold that much, and Millar’s career trajectory is all about hitting the big numbers. Which is all well and good, and he’s got it down to a fine art — there’s something about his work which resonates with the core comics readership. But as with McLaren, that’s a skill more to do with identifying a demographic than conjuring up something of substance.

Go see Kick-Ass and enjoy the hell out of it. There are thrills and spills aplenty, and it’s delivered with verve by director Matthew Vaughn and his co-writer Jane Goldman. Just don’t expect to have anything to think about afterwards — Millar likes to wind people up, but it works mostly on the Barnum principle (‘You can fool some of the people some of the time…’) rather than because he’s saying anything that bears investigation.

Someone contacted me earlier today by Facebook, asking if I’d be interested in writing the script for a low budget feature they intend to make. I had to pinch myself, since the filmmaker in question is someone I consider highly talented, and who I’ve always felt some kinship with despite us never having met.

And that approach is one answer to the question of why I maintain this blog. One collaborator, a good friend at that, has never really understood why I write anything for free. And it’s not something I can explain in purely rational ways. Maintaining a web presence is not easily reduced to something that can be identified in a cost/benefit analysis. I do it because I enjoy it. I do it because I want to build up my profile. I do it because I enjoy the discipline. I do it because of the unexpected things that happen to me as a result.

The filmmaker’s overture was not today’s only step forward. I had a meeting with a theatre company who’ve established a good reputation for their work, and identified an opportunity to collaborate that none of us were expecting when we first sat down around a coffee table. There was something we knew we would talk about, and we did. But then this other thing came up, which if all works out you’ll be hearing more about soon.

So, advance two spaces. It feels good, and it validates the approach I’m taking to develop my writing career. These are very interesting times, and it’s possible that Mr Gladwell’s tipping point is nearing for me. But, the trick is not to get too caught up in the possibilities. Right now, and write now, is what matters. There are three ideas to develop for the theatre company, and so far I have one. There is a short story to be read that the filmmaker wishes the script to be developed from, and the process of assembling my thoughts about it. Oh, and there’s the screenplay I’m writing, which is a little behind schedule. And a novel, for good measure.

All of this is fine. All of this has been achieved by making good use of my time. What seems to work is either doing work, or doing other things. No need for all that other stuff which used to consume me, about wondering whether I’d ever get anywhere, whether I was any good. All that kind of thinking does is waste energy that could be more productively used in writing, in networking, in blogging.

Put another way, the above amounts to saying ‘cut out the trying’. There is only doing, and not doing. Anything else is an indulgence. Which includes the speculation about approaching a tipping point. That may be the case. It may not be. Pondering about it is an irrelevance either way.

All of which gives a samurai-like dimension to the life of the writer. And why not? It beats endless agonising and reflection and recrimination. I’d rather be Mifune than Woody Allen any day. Except, for all the angsty stuff, Allen gets things done. That’s the thing. Also noted by someone on talking to Helena Bonham Carter about her husband Tim Burton, commenting what a practical man he is. That makes sense. Making films is not a pursuit for dreamers who only dream. This is a business. And it’s a business for people who get things done.

It’s 11.15 at night now. Time to do some more work. To write up the first play idea I have, and see if I can conjure another one. And then, I will sleep. A few nights ago, I dreamed of the filmmaker who contacted me today. I wonder what I’ll dream of tonight?

It’a interesting to speculate what draws an actor to a particular part. Especially when it’s so unlike anything else they’ve done. In this case, the question is what exactly is rubberfaced clown Jim Carrey doing playing a gay conman in I Love You Phillip Morris? He’s shown in Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that he’s got an eye for a challenging role in a well-written film that has some substance — a world away from the annoying shtick he’s normally associated with.

The film is based on an improbable true story about Steven Russell, a man leading an outwardly respectable life who decides to be honest about who he really is when he experiences a near-fatal car crash. From church organist and father of an adorable daughter, he moves to Florida where he finds a boyfriend and begins to lead a lifestyle based on immediate gratification that he can’t actually pay for. You always end up paying for the things you can’t pay for, and Steve does time in prison for his conniving duplicitous ways. While there, he meets blonde blue eyed Phillip Morris, and is soon smitten, wanting to spend his life with this new love interest.

What’s impressive is that the story does’t shy away from the gay aspects of prison life — it’s clear that anything can be had for a price, whether money or offering someone a blowjob. This is a mainstream film about gay men where those gay men have sex, which some films pussyfoot about. Steven and Phillip’s story isn’t just an adorable romance — it’s an adorable romance with the physical action that films about men and women together let us in on, and is all the better for that. Whether it is also responsible for the film’s weak performance — it was showing four times a day for a week and is now going to once a day in its second week — I couldn’t tell you. Maybe Carrey fans aren’t so much homophobic as unused to seeing their star outside his usual context.

Ultimately it’s a story about a man discovering different versions of himself in the course of his love for someone else. And in the end being punished for the self that he truly offers to Phillip without the gameplaying that the rest of their relationship has been characterised by. He’s lied and cheated to have Phillip in his life, but there comes a point when Phillip will tolerate that no more — and Steven continues to love him, from a prison cell where he’s locked up 23 hours a day. In the end, Steven’s audacity challenged the powers that be in Texas — another way of saying the Bush family — and he is punished for that beyond any reasonable degree.

It’s a fascinating tale, all the more so for being a true one. John Requa and Glenn Ficarra write and direct the story perfectly, following Steven as he sheds first one skin, then another, and another still. At its most harrowing, the film follows Steven while he is dying of AIDS, only to reveal that this is one more breathtaking piece of chicanery by a master trickster who even gets away with faking his own death. And that’s what takes this film into deeper darker territory than Spielberg ventured into with Catch Me If You Can, his breezier take on the life of a con artist.

That willingness to go to the brink of death is ultimately what distinguishes Steven from other screen con artists. And it’s what appealed to Carrey, I’m sure. Known for twisting his face and body any which way in pursuit of a laugh and more applause, here Carrey gets to the roots of someone whose talent for deceit exceeds his own. In the process, Steven finds love, and finds himself. Put like that, you can understand why chameleon Carrey would be tempted to portray Steven onscreen.

A friend of mine interviewed Martin Scorsese once, and said that the filmmaker was without doubt the most intelligent person he had ever talked to. His range of interests was wide, his knowledge of them deep, and he could talk about them with ease to a diverse audience. Being one of the most cultured men of the twentieth century, and maintaining that status in this new one, is quite an accomplishment. But it’s not the sort of gig you actually go out and stake a claim for, not unless you’re Jonathan Miller anyway. And in Scorsese’s case it’s all incidental to his primary reputation as a filmmaker. Quite simply, there isn’t anyone else like him — making Goodfellas, Raging Bull and Mean Streets alone puts him at the pinnacle of his art. Which is an unenviable position to be in. Especially when he falters, as he has on this occasion with Shutter Island.

I am predisposed to liking Scorsese, and was excited to hear that his new film is in part a homage to Hitchcock. It also indicated that, relatively speaking, Scorsese was looking to slum it this time round, and enjoy making a B-movie. Which I have no problem with. Thomas Pynchon can move from highbrow acclaim (Gravity’s Rainbow in particular) to enjoying himself (Vineland, Inherent Vice, voicing himself on The Simpsons) and that’s viewed as part of his charm. So, why can’t Scorsese do the same? He’s made his Rolling Stones documentary, and done his tv series on jazz and blues music, so why not now do a film that’s lighter in tone?

All very well in theory. The same theory that says wasps shouldn’t be able to fly. Problem being, Scorsese seems incapable of approaching anything without gravitas and aplomb. If he were to buddy Bruce Willis with a labrador in a film for kids, there would still be critics poised to explore themes of redemption and sin in what transpired. As a friend puts it with regard to relationships — she comes with more baggage than Pickfords. So it is with Scorsese.

For the first forty minutes or so of Shutter Island I was hanging on to every beautifully conceived image, following every movement of the camera, and I was transfixed by what was going on. Then I stopped to think about what was going on, and it all started to unravel. A couple of Federal Marshalls are sent to a remote island where a group of criminally insane patients are experimented on by a sinister doctor. Fabulous setting, perfect for some kind of shenanigans…but what follows is ultimately trite and annoying, playing games with unreliable narrators that have a kind of crossword cleverness but minimal emotional affect.

All of which is a massive shame. All the performances are strong, but there’s only so much you can do with a crummy story, and for that we presumably have to blame Scorsese himself for wanting to adapt Denis Lehane’s original novel, as well as screenwriter Laeta Kaologridis for the adaptation. Based on the film, I have no desire to go back and read the book. Any story suggesting in the 21st century that mentally ill people invent people whose names are anagrams of their own suggests a total disconnect with any awareness of actual mental illness, for a start. I’ve been on a ward myself in connection with being bipolar, and I don’t recall meeting anyone constructing acrostics out loud, or composing sonnets when Thursday’s curry was served.

OK, no fair to expect the film — or any work of art — to have to connect with real world stuff. But what we’re left with in its place is not enough to sustain an audience that’s grown to expect material of substance from Scorsese. Which takes us back to where we started, unfortunately. I don’t want to see Scorsese trapped into any sense of obligation to repeat himself — but if he’s set on serving up such vapid material, there’ll come a point when I won’t be the only person less eager to see what he’s doing. Maybe if he really has nothing left to say, then Scorsese should indeed say nothing.