July 2003

With any luck, I'll get to see The Matrix: Reloaded at the IMAX tonight. Somehow, I'm just not as excited about it as I was last time round.

They'd best not have projector failure tonight, though…

Full report tomorrow, and an explanation about why I've not been blogging much lately.

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I think I’ve been working on this script for about 20 days now. I’m up to 76 pages, so making good progress. Today, though, I realised that I had things out of sequence. Stuff was happening long after it should have, so I took my printout, cut it into scenes and laid it all out on the floor.

Ever wanted to know what 76 pages of script look like? Something a bit like this:

Anyway, I shuffled things round a bit, and that was fine for the first half dozen or so columns of papers, but the last two or three are giving me real trouble. They’re just too clunky, not enough flow. Not enough contrast between scenes. (You see that really long scene, on the right? Too many pages. That's where the trouble starts!!)

See, I just knew that I’d need Syd Field’s The Screenwriter’s Problem Solver before this script was done. I’m not surprised that I’ve hit a problem, and I’m also not surprised that it’s happened now, at this point. If I were writing a novel, it’s usually at this equivalent point that trouble sets in. Course, novels are tricky buggers and I’ve usually put them on hold when I’ve hit this brick wall in the past, with the promise to myself that I’ll come back and fix it ?in due course?. But I never do.

This time, though, it’s a bit easier to see what the problem is. Possibly a bit harder to find a fix, but there is a fix there, somewhere, in my head. I just have to find it.

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Pizza's not the same when the topping has slid off one side.
Paramount's scheduling of M*A*S*H sucks arse.
I'm up to 63 pages.
The plot to Donnie Darko is oxymoronic. Or possibly tautalogical. I'm not sure which yet.
Wat dacht u van korter werken en meer verdienen loesje.
It's impossible to lick your own elbow.
Finger crossed, all things being equal and barring disasters with the projector, I should be seeing The Matrix: Reloaded next week.
If anything should occur to prevent me from seeing said film at the allotted time, heads will roll. And they won't be mine.
I'm off to Dorset tomorrow. May blog. May not. Depends.

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I seem to be finding myself oddly without much to say at the moment. The Guardian Online, usually a source of some sort of response from my grey matter, is just dull and boring at the moment, with idiotic writing about fluff like how to cope with email. I can answer that problem in one go: don't answer the damn stuff! Works for me every time.

I wrote the closing scenes of my screenplay last night. One character dies. I cried. I've never done that before. It was a strange experience. I knew this guy had to die days ago, it's inevitable considering his life and the way that he develops through the film, but I was still a bit upset when he finally expired, lying injured at the top of a Welsh mountain, having made a noble sacrifice that results almost directly in his death. I suppose that if it gets me like that, hopefully it will get the reader too.

Course, now I have to figure out how to get said character from Reading to the top of a Welsh mountain. Should be fun.

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I just got invited by my mate Debs to join Friendster, a 4-degrees of separation networking web site. So, I thought, why not? So far, I have to say, it's been an amusing experience – within a few moments of joining I discovered that I'm linked via only two friends to 41 people (at least one of whom is cute as hell, single and in the UK…).

Friendster is free during beta (like so many of these networking sites appear to be) and works fairly well on a technical level. My only criticism is that it's a bit short on information as to how stuff works, e.g. what exactly does one get if one suggests a match or requests an introduction? I dislike clicking on things if I'm not certain what's going to happen when I release the mouse button.

Another networking site that I've recently joined, after an invitation from Ken, is LinkedIn. That has more of a business bent to it. It's not so much fun as Friendster, but could be more useful in the long term. I've already made one contact through it, so we'll see how that pans out.

For those of you who actually know me, online or off, if you want an invite from me to either Friendster or LinkedIn, just email me and I'll sort you out.

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I don’t want to write a review about Donnie Darko. It wouldn’t do it justice. It would be just too linear. Too done before.

Instead I want to just enthuse. Jake Gyllenhaal, despite a dyslexic's nightmare, is amazing as the eponymous Donnie. There are times, as he gazes up through his eyelashes, half grin on his face, intense and brooding, when he looks just like Malcolm McDowell from A Clockwork Orange. That sense of foreboding, that something really, really bad is going to happen very, very soon.

Then suddenly, an interruption and the moment has evaporated. Donnie is again, just a teenager, albeit a troubled and schizophrenic one. Gyllenhaal’s performance is eerie, almost as much as Gary Jules? version of Tears for Fears? Mad World. The film, Gyllenhaal’s performance, Jules? cover, they’re all haunting, disturbing, beautiful. They’re going to get under your skin and stay there for a long while.

It’s a slow film to start, I’ll admit, but the way that director Richard Kelly rifles through the subjects physics, philosophy, teenage emotional trauma, religion and mental illness without ever skipping a beat, and without talking down to his audience, makes for a captivating watch. The explanation of the possibility of time travel is tossed into the mix without so much as pause, the philosophy of fate vs. self-determination, the question of whether we truly do die alone. There’s no exposition in this film at all, which makes it all the more fascinating.

It’s not often that I see a film where I reach the end and realise that in order to understand it fully, I have to go back to the beginning again. The film is not only circular in plot, but emotionally circular too. As it brings you round to the conclusion that’s the beginning, you find you want to follow the path you know now is set out for you again. You want to stay there, in that loop, forever.

Even if it does mean endlessly dealing with a six foot rabbit called Frank.

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Just lurking.

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Been spending a lot of time, possibly too much, on Zoetrope lately, mainly on the message board. Makes me feel more involved in this whole screenwriting thing to be talking to other screenwriters. Course, it's also mildly amusing to watch them ripping each other's throats out. Why is it that internet communities invariably suffer from some fucktard who likes picking arguments?

Script now up to 51 pages. And I've got the ending. So that's only another 60-odd pages to fill in the gap now required. Should be fairly easy. Just like join the dots. Except I don't know where half the dots actually are yet.

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