screenwriting
Jasper Rees
The story of the man (and it usually is a man) who voluntarily disappears has been told and told again. Wakefield is based on an EL Doctorow short story which is itself inspired by a short story by Hawthorne, so it’s a narrative with deep ancestral roots. In this iteration Bryan Cranston plays Howard Wakefield, a New York salaryman who, thanks to a chance train delay one evening, decides on a whim to absent himself from his own life.As this life involves marriage to Jennifer Garner, who has given him two gorgeous twin daughters, this looks like senseless squandering of a winning hand. But as Read more ...
graham.rickson
Memory plays funny tricks; Alan Clarke’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too is fondly remembered as a cheeky 80s sex comedy. It’s not. There’s a fair bit of sex, and the laughs do come thick and fast, but the film leaves the bitterest of aftertastes. And, viewed 30 years after its cinematic release, what’s alarming is how little has changed since the late 1980s (the original tagline was "Thatcher’s Britain with her knickers down"). Andrea Dunbar’s screenplay, based on two plays she’d written as a teenager living on Bradford’s Buttershaw Estate, is a rambling, discursive affair, centring on the priapic Bob Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Anyone who expected a simple robots-versus-humans confrontation, like in Michael Crichton's original Westworld movie from 1973, had another think, or bunch of thinks, coming. The final episode of the Jonathan Nolan/JJ Abrams Westworld was more like a sci-fi manifesto for a post-human world.It was further proof of how the new wave of long-form, big-budget television is developing vast horizons way beyond what even filmmakers can now envisage. While they get about two hours to get their message across, here auteur Nolan (along with his wife and co-writer Lisa Joy) has already had 10 and a half Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Most of us like a good legal drama, which is why there have been so many of them. By the same logic, finding a fresh spin or a new way of writing and shooting them inevitably grows ever-tougher.The Escape Artist, a new three-parter written by Spooks veteran David Wolstencroft, has given itself a head start by casting David "Mr Box Office" Tennant in the lead role of the irritatingly clever and successful barrister Will Burton. He has all the usual perquisites that accompany this familiar TV archetype - sparky and adoring wife, photogenic offspring, penthouse apartment with spectacular views Read more ...
Simon Munk
Stunningly good entertainment, interesting art, rubbish game. Beyond: Two Souls does more than any other videogame around to further the cause of interactive narrative fiction – sadly, by jettisoning most of the "interactive" bit.Beyond: Two Souls predecessor is 2010's Heavy Rain. It's probably one of the most important videogames of the last ten years. Ostensibly an update of the old "point-and-click" adventure genre, you play as four characters whose lives cross in a rainy city – your job is to choose dialogue options, solve puzzles and occasionally grapple with action sequences where you Read more ...
David Seidler
George VI had been my hero since childhood because I was such a terrible stutterer. We had been evacuated from England to the US and during the war, particularly the latter stages, my parents would encourage me to listen to the King’s speeches on the wireless. “Listen, David,” they’d say, “he was a far worse stutterer than you, and listen to him now. He’s not perfect but he can give these magnificent stirring speeches that really work. So there’s hope for you.” It didn’t help me at the time but I thought, wow, he’s brave. When I grew up to be a writer I thought I would like to write something Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having masterminded the existential fantasy of Lost, reinvented Star Trek and served up the monster-on-the-loose rampage of Cloverfield, JJ Abrams now comes trampling all over Steven Spielberg's favourite turf of a homely, nostalgic America. He can feel Spielberg's benign hand resting on his shoulder though, since the Big 'Berg co-produced and brought aboard several of his favourite sound and visual effects specialists.Plot-wise, it's the summer of 1979 - we know this from an introductory blast of ELO's "Don't Bring Me Down" - and we're in the small town of Killian, Ohio, where many of the Read more ...
hilary.whitney
David Leland (b 1947) has worked extensively both sides of the Atlantic but he is best known, both as a writer and a director, for his shrewd observations of ordinary people struggling against the constraints and hypocrisy of the accepted social mores of English life in films such as Mona Lisa (1986), Personal Services (1987) and Wish You Were Here (1987). However, it was Made in Britain (1982), a television play written by Leland for Channel 4 and directed by Alan Clarke, that first brought Leland widespread acclaim and the story of Trevor, a sociopathic skinhead, indisputedly destined for a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
AI Bezzerides, who scripted Kiss Me Deadly (1955) for director Robert Aldrich, thought Mickey Spillane’s pulp novel was trash. Spillane, offended that Bezzerides changed so much, couldn’t understand why the film became a cult favorite in France; one of its admirers was François Truffaut, who tracked down Bezzerides and congratulated him in a phonecall. Depicting the search of the bedroom peeper Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) for “the Great Whatsit” - narcotics in the book, a box of fissionable material on screen - Aldrich’s film is a Cold War masterpiece that deconstructed Spillane’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In a week unfeasibly packed with new drama across the BBC and ITV, the three-part Exile may prove to be the one that lingers longest. It was a thriller and a detective story, but what gave it its formidable grip was the way the central mystery was intricately entwined with the painful personal story of Tom Ronstadt (John Simm) and his father Sam (Jim Broadbent).Simm's character was a burnt-out journalist from the fictional London-based Ransom magazine. Until he got the sack, he had specialised in high-octane sleaze, his dirt-digging zeal cranked to a frenzy by drink and drugs. His Read more ...
hilary.whitney
No prizes for guessing what the future holds for the four Irishmen ensconced in the empty swimming pool in Enda Walsh’s latest play, Penelope, which opens at Hampstead Theatre next week. For these unfortunate creatures are the last of Penelope’s suitors from Homer’s Odyssey, the pariah who invade Odysseus’s home and make merry at his expense whilst shamelessly trying to win the hand of his faithful wife – and their time is up. Odysseus is homeward bound and they must face up to what is basically going to be an unavoidable bloodbath.“These four men”, says Walsh, “have been having conversations Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Episodes may prove to be the zenith of television’s obsession with making television about making television. It was certainly a handy primer for anyone who fell asleep around 2000 (perhaps during My Hero; you are forgiven) and missed all the dominant strands of TV comedy emerging over the next decade. We hadn't simply been here before; Episodes was incubated in the post-ironic, multilayered comedic landscape in which we all now live. The success of the US version of The Office was referenced within the first five minutes. I’m surprised it took so long.Episodes seems to want to have it all: Read more ...