SHAME, SHAME, SHANE

Only in your worst nightmare could you find yourself waking up next to this bloater. Is it just me or is there really any point to Shane Meadows? And the same could be said about his latest piece of filmmaking, This Is England, which opens today at the pictures.

Don't all rush.

Pointless because every couple of years he makes the same film, usually involving a troubled kid who gets adopted by someone alongside a 2D psycho, which only makes you think Shane’s got an absent father complex going on because he insists on making films-as-therapy so he can inflict his problems on the rest of us. Even when he’s dealing with grown-ups, like in Dead Man’s Shoes, Shane's characters come over as emotional retards. And because Shane usually gives up on plot about half way through, his movies end up in a fight or a mass killing since he can’t think up a better ending.

If I want to watch ugly bad tempered guys being violent, I’ll go to an Old Firm game, not waste my money on a Shane Meadows movie. So how come he keeps getting the funding to make this guff you may wonder? Well, speaking of male inadequacy, maybe it’s because middle-class eejits at FilmFour – the types who fancy themselves as being a bit hard and down with the lads - actually believe Shane’s films paint a realistic picture of working class England. Yeah, about as realistic as Jordan's tits. After all, they’ve backed his last three films, along with enough public money to choke the Channel Tunnel.

This Is England is just another gloomy skinhead flick where we’re meant to be interested in watching a bunch of bad haircuts in too-short trousers hurl abuse at each other until one of them (yawn) gets their come-uppance. So what if he goes on about Pakis 'smelling of curry', like, are we meant to be shocked? Shane’s storytelling's about as predictable as a fire in a Paisley nightclub. And anyway, Alan Clarke did it much better back in 1982 with Made in Britain.

Maybe it’s being Scottish that makes me hate his films, but really, who gives a toss? Like his fellow-countryman, Michael Winterbottom, Shane’s carved a nice career for himself by making serial box office stiffs but somehow manages to stay bulletproof. But if Shane’s so good then ask yourself this - how come you can’t find a pirate copy of any of his movies?

Peter Bradshaw’s write-up for TIE in today’s Guardian is way too polite but reading between the lines you get the feeling that he’d rather be watching something else. Like paint dry. The best you can say for TIE is at least rodent-faced Paddy Considine’s not in it. Oi!

RANK BADYIN

Who, you ask? Well, Rank Badyin was a famous comic strip character in Glasgow's Evening Times about a hundred years ago. He's so famous the city put up a statue to him across from the Halt Bar in Woodlands Road.

You can tell I'm bored. But I never thought I’d be so bored that I’d find myself writing about Ian Rankin.

I’m sure Ian’s a nice enough guy, but boy, he’s milked his one good idea dry over the years. In the last couple of days he's popped up in the rags linked to everything - from slagging off Shir Sean during New York’s Tartan Week to writing song lyrics for St Jude’s Infirmary or librettos for Craig Armstrong and tossing off a comic book.

When it comes to writing for comic books, Ian’s proved himself a total numptie. According to him "It is much more like a screenwriter's skill than a novelist's skill. You have to use very few words, and a lot of the writing is just instructions to the artist."

Gee, thanks for the advice, Ian, but I think screenwriting’s just a wee bit more complicated than that. You might be able to get away with duff padding in Rebus – such as –

‘Papers are going to have a field day with this,’ someone was muttering. There were a dozen figures shuffling around in the covered walkway between two of the high-rise blocks. The place smelled faintly of urine, human or otherwise. Plenty of dogs in the vicinity, one or two even wearing collars. They would come sniffing at the entrance to the walkway, until chased off by one of the uniforms. Crime-scene tape now blocked both ends of the passage. Kids on bikes were craning their necks for a look. Police photographers were gathering evidence, vying for space with the forensic team. They were dressed in white overalls, heads covered. An anonymous grey van was parked alongside the police cars on the muddy play area outside. Its driver had complained to Rebus that some kids had demanded money from him to keep an eye on it. ‘Bloody sharks.’

Muddy play area outside? Not inside? You just can’t tell with these lower orders, can you? Next thing you know they’ll be storing black coals in their grubby grey baths in their dingy cooncil lavvies.

Get real, Ian. You might have made a pile with Rebus, but this is one foot in front of the other writing, with just the right amount of adjectives but an overcooked use of the present participle. Screenwriting, where every single word counts, isn’t about using ‘very few words’. It’s about using the best few words, something novelists could learn a lot from.

As for scripts being ‘just instructions to the artists’ – well, it just goes to show what Ian knows about scripts – or actors. In the real world struggling screenwriters slog to get past the barricades of readers and development people until they reach the guy who signs the cheque. This happens before the script gets anywhere near the ‘artist’ who, if they’re not dyslexic – and most actors are - usually only read their own lines and ignore the other stuff.

Here we go again – the painter who wants to be a filmmaker and the novelist who fancies themselves as a screenwriter. Funny the way screenwriters don’t want to be anything but better screenwriters. My advice? The next time the Scotsman comes looking for a quote, Ian, don’t talk about stuff you don’t know about. In fact, try using fewer words.

HD OR NOT HD

Being more of a Heat/Closer gal, this one almost got away. Does high-def make actors ugly? According to Wendy Ides writing in Times Online it does.

timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article1614166.ece

Love the quote about HD only being good for shooting ‘ant’s arseholes’. Which might be good news for ant’s agents, but not for actors, not when every pimple, plook and surgery scar shows up big time on the big screen.

Even worse, now that the average telly’s roughly the size of a Transit van, maybe actors should be worried. It’s bad enough that the paps cash in on a girl’s sweaty armpits, bad tit job or lips like a walrus’s private parts, but to pay to see this stuff forty feet wide down at the multiplex is not my idea of entertainment. Then again, maybe that’s exactly what it is.

What’s troubling is the idea that actors ought to look perfect. As the article argues, it’s not high-def that’s the problem, it’s bad make-up artists, which I think is a bit unfair to make-up artists. After all, when all you’ve got to work with is a tube of Preparation H and a panstick it’s pretty much impossible to make certain stars look less scary – and if you don’t believe me then you’ve obviously missed Uma Thurman plugging Virgin Broadband. Mind you, I'd get up like Witchypoo myself if Branson had offered me £18 million quid.

JUNKIES REUNITED

Don’t blame me for the heading, blame those highly-paid hacks at The Scotsman.

Regular subscribers to this blog already know my Robert Carlyle theory – that if you attach Bobby to a Scottish film, it’s doomed to perpetual development. So what are we to make of the announcement in today’s Scotsman about the long-awaited follow-up to Trainspotting?

thescotsman.scotsman.com/entertainment.cfm?id=536452007

It might be bad news for the Ecstasy crew, but don’t all rush to book your tickets because reading between the lines you’ll see big question marks floating all over this one. First off, how come Irvine Welsh ‘gave’ away the rights to Porno? Maybe because he got it into his baldy dome that there’s only one outfit who can make this – the original Trainspotting team. Or maybe, just maybe, there were no other takers. Just don’t let him write the script.

And how come Ewan MacGregor is reported as ‘interested’ in signing up for it? Didn’t he come out in public to say how much he hated the book - and Danny Boyle for dissing him by casting Leo DiCaprio in the jolly for the crew and rubbish film that was ‘The Beach’? The only way I reckon Ewan will come on board is if he gets a large chunk of ching and suites at the Balmoral for his entire entourage, hardly in the spirit of a movie about a bunch of skankers.

According to Scottish Screen, this is ‘fantastic’ news. Is it? Well, as Danny Boyle says, he’s happy to wait until the cast are old and ‘ravaged’ enough to play the parts convincingly. Well, forget the wrinkles, because if Ewan’s ‘acting’ is anything to go by, he’ll have a long bloody wait. As for Bobby, he pretty much qualifies in the ageing stakes, with a face like a well-chewed ciabatta. And you can bet it’ll be riders at dawn, when he goes up against Ewan for who can make the starriest demands on the budget, such as organic bog rolls, organic baked beans and lumps of organic blaw delivered to his luxury chambers.

Spare a thought for poor Ewan Bremner – he’ll be lucky to get a portakabin and a two-day old bridie…

NOLLYWOOD OR BUST

Nigeria made around a thousand films last year. Scotland made, er… one.

No folks, it’s nothing to do with April Fool’s Day. You might have thought I was joking when I wrote earlier about this country being a third-world filmmaking nation. So did I, but not after reading Hannah McGill’s piece in the Guardian –

film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,2045524,00.html

Double-checking Scotland’s 2006 filmmaking output, sure enough, I found only one ‘Scottish’ film produced north of the border last year – David MacKenzie’s Hallam Foe. But it’s not what Scottish Screen would have us believe, not if you buy their press release.

Sure, Red Road was a success and deserved to be, but it was made in 2005. So was True North – but hang on, was that not a German film, with its dozen or so producers? Same goes for the others on Scottish Screen's list: The Last King of Scotland, The Queen and Shooting Dogs - but claiming them as in any way Scottish is pushing it a bit.

You might as well say Lucky Number Slevin was Scottish too because it was directed by Paul McGuigan. Just because a director ups and leaves doesn’t mean their films can pass the tartan test, though I guess if Paul had stayed put in Glasgow, his career would be non-existent. As for The Flying Scotsman, with more of a claim than the others, like True North it’s sitting on a shelf for want of a distributor. And no, Harry Potter doesn’t count either. Or The Da Vinci Code, or any of the other blockbusters that shot here for three days, hired a couple of runners, took a few taxis and made their getaway.

I’m not saying we should only be making small-minded, small-scale movies about Scottish subjects. Let’s leave parochial filmmaking to the English – the clapped out ‘gritty realism’ involving football and gangsters or upper class Aga angst based on the latest literary luvvie or Jane fucking Austen played by Americans for the nth time. Our filmmaking could and should be a lot more adventurous and outward looking than that. After all, we’re a different country with different social values and a different sense of humour. A thousand years of invasion and three hundred years of playing the underdog surely makes for better stories. Scotland probably has more in common with Nigeria than we'd like to think - an oppressed population, oil revenues leeched by multinationals and corrupt governments, poverty, bad housing, high mortality rate.

So how come Nigeria makes so many films while Scotland, a European nation, makes next to nothing? You’d think with all the subsidy sloshing about – Media, Film Council, the regional film agencies, city film offices - every filmmaker in the country would be run off their feet. Pointing the finger at the public funds might be obvious, but it’s the wrong target. No amount of public money makes a difference because no amount of public money is ever enough, not when movies cost millions, forcing producers to dip into the state funds of twenty different countries and pull a fast one with the books. Anyway, it’s not the fault of the public funds that a lot of these films never get seen. It’s not like the government owns the multiplexes.

But Hollywood does, judging by the number of American films playing in them. The Scottish film that gets an outing in a mainstream cinema is a novelty indeedy. When Hannah McGill says African filmmakers are attracting ‘international acclaim’ you need to ask if it’s just early hype for this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival or if it’s actually true. Which is worrying because if it’s really true it only makes Scotland’s film sector – its public bodies, producers, directors and writers - look all the more pathetic and deprived.

If there’s any logical conclusion, it’s this – scrap the subsidy. Which means getting rid of Scottish Screen because, overhead apart, it’s hard to justify an agency that acts mainly as a top-up for bigger, non-Scottish productions like Last King of Scotland. Not because they’re not Scottish but because no money ever finds its way back here in a way that benefits local filmmakers. And no, I’m not talking about David MacKenzie. You’d think with Hallam Foe - his fourth feature – he could have found the money elsewhere. Like, duh, Nigeria?