Friday, December 12, 2003

No, please, someone tell me this is a joke…

by Suw on December 12, 2003

From BBCi, written by Nev Pierce:

Quentin Tarantino is laughing his ass off. At John Cleese. “Are you kidding? He cracks me up! Don't mention the ****ing war, man!” Goose-stepping across his LA office in a demented impression of the once-funny comic, QT is enthusing about Fawlty Towers – his soon-to-be-hugely-hyped adaptation of the 70s TV series.

Following the mixed reception for Kill Bill: Volume 1, he's put men-on-a-mission actioner Inglorious Bastards on hold, choosing instead to jump on the TV hits bandwagon started rolling by Steven Spielberg's interest in deadpan Brit-com The Office.

“That Sybil, she's one cold-hearted bitch, man,” he says, shaking his head in wonder. “I couldn't ****ing wait to work with Uma [Thurman] again so we just decided to go for it. ****in' A!”

Adam Sandler is set to play Basil, and he's not the only one excited by this virtually untapped source of great stories – with every A-list actor/director and their uncle bombarding eBay for blurry taped-off-telly copies of English classics.

Tom Hanks is in talks with The Beard about playing David Brent (“I think at heart he's a tortured soul”), while Chris Trucker has been tapped to play funny-fringed TA-freak Gareth.

Spielberg's production house, DreamWorks, is also eyeing World War II café comedy 'Allo 'Allo, with Tom Cruise considering the Gordon Kaye character Rene Artois and Ralph Fiennes – desperate for a profitable picture – lobbying to recapture the acclaim he received for Schindler's List, as leather-coated Nazi Otto Flick.

Robert De Niro is the other impresario who adores all things British, following his success producing the Ben Elton/Queen West End musical We Will Rock You. His Tribeca Productions (About A Boy) are developing Elton's The Thin Blue Line, with Rowan Atkinson reprising the role of Inspector Ray C Fowler and Martin Short displacing James Dreyfus as camp constable Kevin Goody.

The Method Man is also looking to play Rigsby in ,Rising Damp and partner with Shirley Maclaine on Terry And June, which will be directed by Alexander Payne (About Schmidt) as a bittersweet coming-of-(middle)-age laffer.

British TV is Hollywood's future. Best bet for Best Picture 2004? Robert Altman's Hi-De-Hi!

No, it's can't be true, it can't! This has to be some sort of sick, sick joke, surely? Uma Thurman as Sybil? Adam Sandler as Basil? No… that just so wouldn't work. You couldn't get away with the Manuel jokes these days for a start. And David Brent is not a tortured soul, he's a wanker. And… and… and…

No, this Nev guy has to be toying with us. There simply is no other explanation.

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Things that suck about moving house

by Suw on December 12, 2003

A few years ago, when I worked for PwC, their stationery cupboard used to be home to some really nice notebooks. The paper was nice and thick and brightly coloured, they were spiral bound, and they had covers hard enough to be half-decent to lean on. Unsurprisingly, at the end of my contract there I… liberated, shall we say, one from said cupboard and brought it home. Instead of using it up on pointless doodlings or ephemeral 'to do' lists, I decided to save it until one day it would cry out to me to be used on a project close to my heart.

Recently, I had a conversation about stationery with Vince. His notebooks for his film and novel were, I noticed when I visited, rather nice. Big A4 ones, with cartridge paper in, good for writing on and doodling in (or sketching, in his case). They looked and felt inviting, which is what a good notebook should be.

Neil Gaiman has just started writing a new novel. From what he says on his blog, it appears that he writes everything out long hand using a two nice Lamy fountain pens – one with reddish ink, the other with greenish ink, alternated so he can tell at a glance how much he's written each day – and luscious Moleskines notebooks.

I usually work on my projects mainly on the computer, but lately I’ve been working in fits and starts. I always used to prefer working from scratch on screen – typing seems to bypass my dyslexia to some extent, (and why is dyslexia such a bloody hard word to spell? Surely they would have given us dylexics an easier word to describe our condition?), making the writing process easier on my brain. For some reason, I’ve recently started to prefer handwriting things down instead.

And so, one train of thought derailed another and before you know it my spirit is crying out for my nice, brightly coloured (some might even say bold) blank notebook which would be just the perfect thing for me to sit in bed with and make notes about my sp for the next day's typing.

Except, I've moved. Everything is still in boxes. My nice notebook is in a box. Somewhere. In this house.

I can tell you exactly where it was in my old house – it was on the black bookshelves on the landing halfway down the stairs, on the bottom shelf, in between my lightbox and heaps of slides/photos. It was next to the yellow field notebooks which contain the majority of my second novel, written in long hand mirror writing and thus unread since cessation (rather than ‘completion’).

I can see it in my head, exactly where it was, where it had been for over two years. But now, well, it could be anywhere. I have looked in every single box. I have looked in the boxes downstairs in the dining room which I really have to move upstairs to the loft before Christmas. I have looked in the boxes in the eaves, despite the serious risk of sudden and unexpected spider discovery and, therefore, inevitable heart attack and death. I have looked in the boxes in my office. And the filing cabinet.

There aren't any other boxes left.

I remain, therefore, bereft of a decent notepad with which to work. Instead, I'm faced with a crappy cheapo old Pukka Pad, which inspires my soul not a jot.

Bum.

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