We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV’s while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy.

It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’

Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad.

You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!’ So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell

“‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’

Sound familiar?

Sounding like its resonating with you?

The power of any writing,  script, prose, poetry or otherwise is how powerful they are on initial release and then how powerful they remain long after they are written. I know as I watched this film again the other night and was reminded how powerful it was and still is.

Hard to believe but the words above are not taken from today’s headlines. They are from what is probably one of the tightest scripts ever written for a film, 1975′s Network.

If you ever wanted to understand television, power, human nature, business, show business, politics, social dynamics, to name but a few – then this brilliant piece of cinema is for you.

Get MAD as hell!

As any Trek aficionado knows, the series movies were cursed by the “even number good, odd number bad” theory. Witness the Wrath of Khan (no 2), the Voyage Home (no 4) and First Contact (number eight) versus – amongst the worst in the franchise, the Final Frontier (no 5).

From net reports and twitter postings overnight, it would seem that Hollywood wunderkid J. J. Abrams has finally and thankfully managed to break that curse, delivering from two almost simulanteous premieres (an official Opera House one in Sydney, but an unnofficial and earlier one in Texas with Leonard Nimoy) a rip roaring adventure that looks like it has finally managed to inject much needed new life into the franchise.

Live long and proser indeed. For a good aggregation of the current net chatter, the redoubtable Harry Knowles over at AICN is your best bet!

For those of you like me, who possess an unending curiosity for movies and importantly, HOW they are actually made, this is practically El Dorado. The blog Mystery Man on Film has uncovered a transcript from a 5 day series of brainstorming sessions between George Lucas, Stephen Spielburg and young writer gun for hire at the time, Lawrence Kasdan.

The result is sheer delight for anyone who wants to understand the screenwriting process, and how plot, character, pacing, exposition, structure and story all intersect on that cosmic plane we call movie magic. It doesnt happen often, but when it does, it’s an amazing joy to behold. The site has a further link to either PDFs, or a HTML version.

Check out the link to Mystery Man’s blog here, also spend some time around his site – he has some fantastic film and movie screenwriting resource links here, not to mention writing blogs to a stack of his mates and acquintances. Thanks also to AICN where I first spotted this gem.

PopMatters is one such site. Covering media across the world of film, TV, books, comics, music and the internet, like most sites of this kind, its best features is often found, well in its features – ie reviews and columns etc.

Take the following as an example. I absolutely adored Notes on a Scandal when it first came out. A tour de force by two actors at the absolute peak of their powers, Dench I think even more so, partly as she had the meatier role. This is the very nifty little capsule review for Notes on a Scandal they presented as part of their “Dark Side” of 100 Essential Female Film Performances.

Sheer delight – although what’s wrong with calling it “camp trash”? You gotta love a subgenre with a name like that.

At age 72, Dench reinvented herself as obsessive lesbian stalker Barbara Covett in this gripping study of two very desperate women (the other is Cate Blanchett’s Sheba Hart) who have nowhere to turn except to one another. Barbara is an institution at her school, students fear her, and the other teachers hate her. She is a mouthy loner that is just unpleasant in general to everyone. She finds everyone dull or stupid except Sheba, who (unfortunately for her), brushes the cobwebs from Barbara’s eyes and virtually illuminates her face and thoughts with her presence alone. Once Barbara sets her sites on a special friendship with a certain young (targeted) lady, things can get a tad nasty, a tad tawdry, even. Couple this obsessive love with the fact that Barbara has, coincidentally, stumbled by accident onto some choice evidence to use in bribing Sheba to be her companion. Filled with one-liners you will use for the rest of your life (“you’re not young, sneers Barbara in one scene), Eyre’s depiction of sexually threatening, corpulent evil lurking in the most unseemly of places, like in the person of sweet little Dame Judi Dench, is a nail-biter. The veteran actress goes for broke in a way that hasn’t been seen since Beryl Reid chortled and smoked her way through The Killing of Sister George 40 years ago. Only here Dench brings an unquestionable theatrical pedigree along with her to quiet any detractors that dismiss this as camp trash.

Hooray for Hollywood, that screwy, bally hooey Hollywood.
Where any office boy or young mechanic can be a panic with just a good looking pan.

Fortunately for us, Hugh Jackman and Heath Ledger who in their own ways owned last night’s 81st Oscar show, had both good looking pans (ie faces) as well as talent talent talent to boot.

Heath – long expected to have the Best Supporting gong in his back pocket after his maniacially diabolical turn as the Joker in Chris Nolan’s smash, the Dark Knight – was emphatically endorsed by the New York Times as a no brainer contest for picking up the prize. His family’s simple eloquence on accpeting the award will go down as one of the quintessential Oscar moments that you will see again and again on future repeats.

Now to Mr Jackman – who I thought did an outstanding job. The job of the host is to ENTERTAIN – and Hugh ( by virtue of being the best actor- singer-dancer combination in Hollywood today – come on – who else do you think could have pulled off what he did) rose to the occasion magnificently. Forget the whole cheesy cruise ship references some of the more acerbic US critics have savaged him with today – he was brilliant!

Line of the night – Natalie Portman – to a bearded Ben Stiller made to look like the current ravaged rap artist Joaquin Phoenix seems to have morphed into:

“You look like you’ve come from a Hasidic meth lab”

Hilarious!

If you didnt happen to catch the telecast (or even if you did) check out Ken Levine’s hysterical review of the night here on Huff Post. Believe me you WON’T be disappointed – a brief  sample being:

Benjamin Button did win “Best Make-Up.” They made Brad Pitt look younger. The real trick is to do that with Goldie Hawn.

Congratulations to Penelope Cruz. Even with subtitles she won. Expect to see Will Smith in the next seven Woody Allen movies until he gets his.

I will have to get along to see Slumdog Millionaire very soon. Hard to think it was slated to head straight to DVD in the US – although given most Americans  display a cultural ignorance of anything more sophisticated than grits and Southern Fried Chicken – not that surprising.

I’ve also included a link to the colour co-ordinated slideshow from the NY Times so you can compare all the hags and their frocks!

The details of your incompetence do not interest me. Tell Simone I’m not going to approve that girl that she sent me for the Brazilian layout. I asked for clean, athletic, smiling; she sent me dirty, tired and paunchy. And RSVP yes to Michael Kors’ party, I want the driver to drop me off at 9:30 and pick me up at 9:45 sharp. Then call Natalie at Glorious Foods and tell her no, for the 40th time, no, I don’t want dacquoise, I want tortes filled with warm rhubarb compote. Then call my ex-husband and remind him that the parent/teacher conference at Dalton tonight. Then call my husband. Ask him to please meet me for dinner at that place I went to with Mossimo. Also, tell Richard I saw all the pictures that he sent for that feature on the female paratroopers and they’re all so deeply unattractive. Is it impossible to find a lovely, slender, female paratrooper? Am I reaching for the stars here? Not really. Also I need to see all the things that Nigel has pulled for Gwyneth’s second cover try. I wonder if she’s lost any of that weight yet.

And this;

This… ‘stuff’? Oh… ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff.

Brilliant stuff!

Moving away from the tragic events of the past few days back to a more flippant normality – which unfortunately seems to have been the unintended theme of the cultural posts I’ve done to date – I dare you – I double dare you – to spot the rather obvious error above?

Spotted it yet?

He’s just NOT that into you?

or

He’s just not that into YOU?

Think of it people – where should the emphasis be? Of course it should be on the YOU - ie the girl/person/object – which presumably the whole point of this next big DCF (that’s DICK CHICK FLICK*) - which incidentally has not drawn that many positive reviews since its release.

Yes yes – I realise I’m probably being super pedantic. But hey, as one of my idols is fond of saying;

“Yes – I AM a high maintenace pendadist. But I think you gotta be”

Detail counts. Remember that.

* come on – there are GUYS in this as well!

Stauffy - the Real Deal

I’m sorry but I can’t let this one go without commenting. The latest spray from the head of the Church of Cruiseology in reference to Germany’s former Chancellor and the bete noire of Bryan Singer’s little Nazi piece, Valkryie;

“I always wanted to hill Hitler – I hate that guy”

10/10 for insight Tom - mmm you are just dazzling aren’t you with the way you (mis) view history. And this:

“I can’t believe somebody didn’t stand up and try to stop it”

From someone who has studied history at university level, and German history at that, I find remarks like this banal, inane and almost incomprehensibly stupid.

Where is the genetic link that assumes anything an actor says, especially one as egomaniacal and self serving as Mr Cruise is intelligent?

In this case, the next time I hear anything from a Cruise – make it Suri, not Tom.  She’s bound to be far more enlightening and coherent (although how long she will retain her “fathers” prettiness genes is a moot point, since we don’t hear much of Chris Klein^ these days). These days, Tom is looking more like Katie’s slightly smaller twin sister with a pseudo lesbian bowl hair cut)

^ Chris Klein was Katie’s squeeze before Tom and Suri’s rumoured real father

*with apologies to Kath Day-Knight (if you don’t get this, in one hilarious moment, she describes the “History Channel” as the ‘itler Channel’

Meanwhile – for something totally hilarious on Nutjob Mapother (Nutty’s real surname) and his latest historical rantings, check out this little exchange on FARK – some brilliant postings here that will have you in stitches.