Toy Story - The Best Film Trilogy?

I stumbled across a fascinating analysis that attempts to identify the best film trilogies according to both IMDb voters and professional critics.

The conclusion is that IMDb voters rank the following trilogies as the best of all time:

Lord of the Rings
Star Wars (original 3)
Godfather
Toy Story
Indiana Jones

The order changes if you only count the top 1000 voters, but those are still the top 5.

Astonishingly, but deservedly, professional critics (as collated by Rotten Tomatoes) rate none other than the Toy Story trilogy as the best of all time. Their top 5 includes most of the trilogies preferred by the plebs above, plus the Trois Couleurs trilogy.

It's a great article, with graphs and everything. Have a look!

Toy Story 3

#9 at time of writing.

Wow. I haven't laughed out loud so often, and cried so hard, since... well, since Up. But if you exclude Pixar, since ever.

That's right. I'm a grown man and I bawled my eyes out.

Pixar are the masters - nay, the gods - of story. With Toy Story 3, they once again excel themselves. There is not one moment that allows your attention to flag, and the plot masterfully achieves that most challenging of goals (as taught by Terry Rossio): it's decisive, set-up, inevitable and yet genuinely unexpected.

This wonderful threequel complements and augments the first two films beautifully, whilst simultaneously laying a fair claim to being one of the best animated movies ever. Indeed, IMDb voters have propelled it into the top 10 movies of all time, of any genre. (With Inception currently at #3, July 2010 is proving to be a month of astonishingly high-quality film releases, at least as far as IMDb voters are concerned.)

The emotional core of Toy Story 3 is provided by the question: What happens to Andy's toys when he grows too old to play with them? A typical Pixar mix of loss, jealousy, hope and high-jinks follows, with an ending that will reconnect you to your inner child - and perhaps have your real children wondering why you are sniffling and teary-eyed over a bunch of toys.

Thank goodness Pixar and Disney made up. When they split over creative differences in 2004-2005, Disney started up an animation division titled 'Circle 7 Animation,' which would have been in charge of churning out sequels for Pixar films without consulting Pixar. The original plot for Toy Story 3 was going to be about Buzz Lightyear having a defect and being shipped to Taiwan to be fixed, and the other toys shipping themselves to Taiwan to rescue him. Judging by Disney's decidedly mediocre record with sequels, we should be grateful that Pixar are back in charge.

The UK government are doing WHAT?

UK Film Council to be abolished? I'm so angry I'm speechless. I will let my alarmingly eloquent friend at Polygonic speak for me.

Inception

#83 at time of writing.

Just came back from watching the IMAX premiere of this with a few friends. I don't think I've come out of a film and talked about the plot - and the ending - so much since Donnie Darko. Without giving anything away, the last ten seconds of the film show something completely mundane, but had the whole room on the edge of their seats. When the screen went black, there was a collective gasp and spontaneous applause.

So, definitely entertaining. Definitely tense. Sufficiently clever and ambiguous to stir up a few hours of après-film conversation. Christopher Nolan has successfully maintained his near miraculous record of directorial excellence.

The central concept of stealing (and planting) ideas within people's dreams allows for some beautiful images of bending cities and gravity-defying hyperreality. Inception owes a lot to The Matrix, perhaps with sprinklings of Synecdoche, New York. Subtle it is not, but who needs subtle - this is Hollywood.

However, it has flaws.

Don't get me wrong, I heartily recommend this film. It's a big-screen film, confident and ambitious. But I think it suffers (although not nearly as fatally) from the same problem as the Matrix sequels. (Let's speak of them just this once, and then never again.) It is an overdose of exposition plus action. The plot is so complicated and so carefully laid out that character and emotional involvement feel squeezed into the edges.

As far as dream-within-a-dream films go this might beat Vanilla Sky, but I prefer the disorientation of eXistenZ or the emotion of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Still, I would gladly watch Inception again.

(Side note, David Walliams was sat behind us!)

Buy tickets now for The Man Who Married Himself screening in LA

If you are near Los Angeles on Wednesday July 28th, be sure to check out the short film I co-wrote last year, The Man Who Married Himself, starring Richard E Grant.

It's showing as part of the LA Shorts Fest. Tickets are available as of today.

City of God

#18 at time of writing.

This is a stylish and impactful rollercoaster of a film that devastatingly evokes the cycle of poverty, crime, drugs and violence that can trap the children of Brazil's Cidade de Deus, and favelas like it, in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro.

The characters are all children, almost all of whom carry guns, and most of whom will be killed before the age of 20. The film follows one child in particular, Buscapé (translated as Rocket), who goes to great lengths to try not to get caught up in the criminal underworld, but without success.

The story, acting, directing, cinematography, editing - everything - is first class, but the thing that makes this film unbeatably compelling is that it is based on truth. Not in the Hollywood "inspired by true events" way, but for real. Some shots in the movie are recreations of genuine photos from the drug war the film dramatises. All of the child actors (with one exception) were amateurs recruited from the favelas themselves. And, of course, the story and the characters are based on Paulo Lins' eponymous account of living in the City of God during the 60s, 70s and 80s.

According to director Fernando Mereilles, much of the script is improvised. For example, when we hear Buscapé (Alexandre Rodrigues) talking to Marina (Graziela Moretto) about how he had never taken a hot bath, that was not scripted. Rodrigues was telling Moretto, during a pause in the filming, about his life in the slums.

The DVD also contains a horrifying and fascinating documentary about the modern-day City of God. Becoming a hoodlum in Cidade de Deus isn't just a fringe career option for disenchanted rebels and social outcasts - it's the main industry.

Festivals

If you're in the USA, there's a couple of chances coming up to watch The Man Who Married Himself. The Los Angeles International Short Film Festival (July 22-30), and the Rhode Island International Film Festival (August 10-15). Watch this space for more news.

Four Lions

Unranked at time of writing.

At the time of writing this film has a score of 8.2 on IMDb, but - being a low-budget indie British film - it doesn't have enough votes to get it into the Top 250.

I LOVE that British cinema can tackle such brave material. Hollywood could never be so blasé about domestic terrorism. The director Chris Morris is best known in the UK for a couple of extremely controversial TV comedy series back in the late 90s/early Naughties, in particular an episode of Brass Eye that unflinchingly parodied and exploited our nation's uneasiness about paedophiles. With this comedy about inept suicide bombers, his ability to put his finger on the core of our cultural paranoia and push the boundaries seems to be as strong as ever.

Four Lions is funny, edgy (thankfully not nearly as bad taste as it could have been), and intelligent. Most of the jokes come from how stupid the wannabe terrorists are, and a careful balance is struck to make sure that all cultures are mocked equally. I enjoyed it, but I came out the cinema feeling more could have been done with it. I wanted to know more about why the characters had decided to become terrorists. I wanted something deeper. Perhaps I wanted too much - the fact that Chris Morris has squared up to these topics at all is already much further than any sane man would go, and I am grateful for that.

There have been some truly excellent British films recently which are scored lower on IMDb, but I think deserve more. In particular, I recently watched The Disappearance of Alice Creed - man, Gemma Arterton can act - and the brilliant An Education.

(Trivia from IMDb, if you believe it: "On January 23rd 2010, Four Lions had its world premier at Sundance. On the same day, the UK 'terror threat' level was raised to 'severe' due to non-specific 'chatter'.")

Kick-Ass

Unranked at time of writing.

I watched this film without much expectation, and was pleasantly surprised - not to mention thoroughly entertained. It functions as a very funny parody of the superhero genre whilst also being an excellent example of the genre.

It features a hapless teenage loner who decides to become a superhero, and fails catastrophically. However, his endeavours get him embroiled with a criminal gang and a duo of much more successful superheroids, including a sweary and shockingly violent eleven year old girl played memorably by Chloe Moretz. (Dude, she was born in 1997 and she's old enough to be saying c*nt in Dolby surround sound. Doesn't that make you feel old?).

Think Spider-Man meets Kill Bill. Kick-Ass indeed.

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Premiere

Yay! My wife and I attended the private premiere of The Man Who Married Himself at BAFTA's Princess Anne Theatre yesterday, and it was brilliant.

The film looked great on the big screen. The music added a whole new dimension, emphasising the tragic elements of the main character's loneliness. People laughed in the right places, clapped plenty... there were even one or two heckles. :)

I'm generally not great at schmoozing at those kind of events, but it was fun to chat to Warren Clarke (he praised the film, and offered me one piece of advice for the future: "Write bigger!"), and Mark Joseph who I'd met on the set, and Film Four people, and some of Garrick's friends and family.

It's incredible how many people were involved in making an 11-minute film. Everyone worked so hard on it, with such an incredible amount of goodwill, mostly for little or no money - what other industry (apart from the charity sector I suppose) can claim that kind of dedication?

So, soon the film will be touring festivals and I'll be persuading all my friends and family to go see it. You too! Go!

10 Rules For Writing

My wife sent me an article about various writers' ten rules for writing fiction. It's fascinating to read how disciplined, intelligent and well-read everyone else is.

These are the ten rules I seem to live by:

1. Do anything - anything - to put off starting to write. Read about the bystander effect on Wikipedia. Play Scrabble on your iPod Touch. Just sit there and stare at a blank screen for forty minutes.

2. Leave the house. A cafe or a pub is a more productive place to write, particularly one without a wireless internet connection. Start by drinking Cokes, because 2pm is too early to be drinking alcohol. After a couple of litres, when the sugar buzz is making your eyes shake, start on the beers to calm yourself down.

3. Stay up ridiculously, self-destructively late. Several nights in a row. You'll know you've had the right amount of lack of sleep when you're barking at passers-by on the street for walking too close to you.

4. Dwell on a particular line of dialogue for at least an hour without moving on. Then realise how long you've been stuck on it, put in a placeholder, and end up cutting it later anyway.

5. Edit, edit, edit the first ten pages before you've written anything else. Editing is so much easier than writing more.

6. Bring your laptop everywhere with you in the utterly misguided hope that you'll pull it out to snatch a few minutes of writing on the train or wherever. Having to carry your microchip-brick all over town is a useful kind of penance for being a lazy writer.

7. Deadlines are essential enemies. It is perfectly natural to leave it just a little too late so you end up writing in an antisocial blood-sweating panicked frenzy. Face it, that's the only state in which you ever get any writing done anyway.

8. When you've finally finished a first draft, assume that there's nothing wrong with it, and refuse to listen to any constructive feedback for at least three weeks.

9. When a project is at last finished and out in the public domain, rest on your laurels. For goodness' sake don't do any more writing until you've milked all the mileage you can (to mix metaphors) out of what you've already written.

10. Remind yourself that you enjoy writing. It's fun.

Honestly, it's a wonder I ever get any writing done.

Website

The website for The Man Who Married Himself now has some content on it, including the trailer. I'm excited.

I was looking forward to introducing my wife to Richard E Grant at the premiere, but she attended the premiere of Food, Inc. on Monday as an ambassador for the Fairtrade Foundation, and he was there - so she's met him already! Apparently, they had an awkward conversation along the lines of:

"Who are you?"

"My husband wrote The Man Who Married Himself."

"Oh! It's a good story. Will I see you at the premiere?"

"Yes."

"..."

"Bye!"

We're clearly not cut out for this hanging out with famous people malarkey.

Back to the Future

#74 at time of writing.

"Where we're going, we don't need roads."

There are a few films that create their own mythology. A mythology so complete it's as if it's always existed. Back to the Future is one of them. H G Wells might lay claim to the time travel book, but there's no doubt Robert Zemeckis created the time travel film.

Doc Emmett Brown, the quintessential mad scientist, invents a time machine and Marty McFly inadvertently gets stranded thirty years in the past. Watching this is like a journey through time in itself - it's so wonderfully Eighties. The script is very clever and layered, executed with a rich dose of slapstick humour.

Some good music too, including The Power of Love (Huey Lewis and the News not Frankie Goes to Hollywood, nor Jennifer Rush). Huey Lewis himself is in the film, playing a High School band audition judge. And there's a suitably stirring and catchy score by Alan Silvestri.

But for me the highlight is the over-the-top dramatic tension of the climax, with Doc Brown hanging from the minute hand of the clock tower (which I went to see as a child as part of the Universal Studios backlot tour a couple of years after the film was released). By the end of the film, you will be grinning from ear to ear.

Michael J. Fox was working on the sitcom "Family Ties" during the filming. Apparently, every day during production he drove straight to the movie set after taping of Family Ties was finished, allowing very little time for sleep. The bulk of the production was filmed from 6pm to 6am, with the daylight scenes filmed on weekends. The whole thing was wrapped in less than ten weeks.

Using a DeLorean seems like the perfect choice now, but the device originally considered for use as the time travel machine was a refrigerator. Robert Zemeckis said in an interview that the idea was scrapped because he and Steven Spielberg did not want children to start climbing into refrigerators and getting trapped inside.

The Wedding of the Year

Today I received an invitation to the wedding of Oliver and... Oliver. The premiere of the short film I co-wrote last year, The Man Who Married Himself, will be at the end of this month at BAFTA in Piccadilly.

Extremely exciting. Another chance to hobnob with the stars and feel terribly important. Also, hopefully a chance to introduce my wife to all the great people who helped make this project happen.

But I'm not going to deny feeling a shade nervous as well.

OK, deep breath...

Bring it on.

Secret Agent

Jeremy Sheldon provided me with an introduction to a guy who works for Curtis Brown, the pre-eminent UK literary agency.

I'm meeting him next week to get some advice on the perks and pitfalls of breaking into screenwriting. I'm excited.

Nomads

I'm part of a writing group called the Nomads Literary Movement. Well, I like to add the Literary Movement bit.

We've been meeting every week for over a year now, usually in the Bell & Compass pub at Charing Cross. We take turns submitting a piece of writing so the group can critique it. Most of us are currently working on a novel.

I met most of the Nomads in the first year of my MA Creative Writing course (I'm now halfway through the second/final year). For me, the writing group is the best thing to come out of my MA so far. They're such a dedicated, insightful, and lovely bunch of people. They will keep me writing, and keep me writing well, for years to come I'm sure.

Recently, a couple of new members joined us (now we are eleven), including a guy called Felix who is also interested in screenwriting. Check out his awesome short film. He's keen to try collaborating on a screenplay so we're going to stay on next week after the Nomads session to bat some ideas about. I'll tell you how it goes!

Rocky

#210 at time of writing.

What a great film.

Rocky Balboa is a thoroughly likeable underdog character. Poor, uneducated and ungraceful, but a real good guy. When he gets a once-in-a-lifetime wildcard opportunity to fight for the World Heavyweight Champion title, he begins a life-changing battle with his own self-doubt. A battle I - and possibly everyone - can identify with.

The small-time domestic scenes that build the story up are contrasted by the tense and unflinchingly brutal climactic fight. Sly Stallone admirably puts his all into the character. You would believe he used to be a boxer, rather than a beauty school dropout. (True!) Stallone deserves extra credit for having written the screenplay himself as a remarkably successful attempt to kick-start his acting career.

The story was inspired by a fight between Muhammad Ali and Chuck Wepner in 1975. Chuck was thought to be a no-hoper, but he defied all expectations by lasting 15 rounds against Ali - even succeeding at knocking him down at one point. Stallone saw the match, and turned it into a piece of cinema legend.

The scene with Rocky running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art was one of the first uses of a Steadicam. It's probably the second most famous steps scene in movie history after the Odessa steps in Battleship Potemkin. The steps are now known as the Rocky Steps, and feature a permanent statue of Rocky at their base.

What makes a good writer?

You are a writer whether or not anyone has read your work yet. You are a writer whether or not you have been published, or won awards, or got good reviews. There is never any badge or certificate you'll get that will say you are a writer. You just have to believe it and it's true.

If you believe it for long enough, and finish enough stuff, then you will gradually transform from being just a writer into being a good writer. The publication, awards and good reviews will follow - in direct proportion to the strength of your belief.

(If you can't bring yourself to believe you're a writer, pretend. Act as if you are and, actually, that's all it takes. Acting like a writer makes you, in fact, a writer.)

There are many different kinds of good writers. Some are popular, some are deeply insightful, some are just good for passing the time in an airport lounge.

The difference between a good writer and a bad writer is that a good writer finishes things and moves on.

If you've been working on an idea for the last five years to the exclusion of all else, or you've started ten novels but they all trailed off somewhere around chapter thirteen, then you are a bad writer. It's not about the quality of your prose, it's about what you do with it.

A good writer knows that ideas don't fail. If he's writing something that doesn't feel right, he finishes it anyway, and moves on.

A good writer has faith that more good ideas will come.

A good writer produces enough material that he's not afraid to shelve the crap.

A good writer says, "I am a writer," without qualifying the statement.

A good writer accepts praise and rejects criticism.

At least, all that's what I keep telling myself. I'm still working on being a good writer.

Alan Parker

Alan Parker, director of Evita, The Commitments and Angel Heart, watched the rough cut of The Man Who Married Himself yesterday.

He called it "Original, out there, and stunning to look at," and said it was "unexpectedly wise at the end."