Michael Jackson has gone up on my estimation; way up. So has Kenny Ortega.

This movie explores MJ at work showing his definite recipe for success; he had a hand in everything involved in his projects. He’s a master perfectionist. Not only does he write and perform most of the songs, but he also works hard at the on stage choreography. To MJ a flick of the wrist is an important moment. It means something in relation to the song. Everyone in his crew needed to know that so they could ‘feel’ the action as it grooves along.

Before seeing this movie I’ve always appreciated his songs, especially ‘Beat It.’ They were always constants in the charts and I’d never turn the radio off when his songs came on, but I wouldn’t necessarily going searching for them either. Grouping together a high number of his hits for what would have been his final concert tour, shows the high quality of the product.

Kenny Ortega is a name I didn’t know until MJ died and then he appeared to be around every other interview on television. Now I can see what a great director he is. He’s managed to take rehearsal recordings and give a ‘feel’ of an MJ concert mixing it with footage of seeing the band rehearse and back stage moments. Before the movie, I wondered how much the film could appear like a concert and through careful editing he shows us a delicate line between documentary and live footage.

It was obvious that the band and crew were in awe of MJ and they all knew who was boss. The documentary aspect of the show was just as enlightening. They all knew they had a job to do and wanted to help their master give 100% perfection, but they all lived in the fun of the moment, even daring occasionally to question the word of the leader, even if the master’s word was final.

The revelation of the show, thought, has to be the lead guitarist, Orianthi Panagaris. Ori (to her friends) is just 24 but shows a style of playing you’d only expect from someone with 40+ years experience. She absolutely nails ‘Beat It’ with a riveting solo. During those rehearsals she gives the impression of not be over shadowed by the enormity of the event. She’s almost casual to a fault even when asked to step up to the front to have her moment that MJ offers her. We’re going to hear a lot more about this lady who plays the guitar like it’s an extension of her fingers.

Go see Ori and MJ together on stage at: http://www.orianthi.com/player/default.aspx?meid=5213

It’s easy to see the concerts would have been one of those moments you could look back at during your life as pinnacles. Seeing Paul McCartney sing ‘Yesterday’ live, or Art Garfunkel master ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water.’ This show would have been ‘it’ with ‘show’ being the operative word. It reminded of Alice Cooper’s shows where what’s going on around the band is just as important as what’s been played. The link with the new Thriller video is obvious; show masters. The dancers, the action and the thrill of it all mean so much. Great effort had been placed by MJ in having the whole show much more important than just the songs. This bears no relation to those pop bands who just have dancers on stage to boost the shallow songs and singers you’re supposed to be listening/watching.

Kenny Ortega’s direction is first class. We were there at the gig. I never saw MJ live in concert. This is the closest I’ll ever get. How sad, but how glad I am to have seen this movie.

The bigger shame is that the CD of this movie features the original songs as recorded way back when and not those as performed in this movie. They’ve missed an opportunity there.

This year it’s the girls only turn.

Forbes magazine has compiled a list of what the actor was paid verses the cost of the movie and then compared that to the money the movie brought it. They don’t say if it includes DVD sales or movie downloads (the legal ones!) so we’ll have to guess it’s just about the ticket sales in the theatre.

1. Naomi Watts - $44 for every $1 paid
2. Jennifer Connelly - $41 for every $1 paid
3. Rachel McAdams - $30 for every $1 paid
4. Natalie Portman - $28 for every $1 paid
5. Meryl Streep - $27 for every $1 paid
6. Jennifer Aniston - $26 for every $1 paid
7. Halle Berry - $23 for every $1 paid
7. Cate Blanchett $23 for every $1 paid
7. Anne Hathaway $23 for every $1 paid
7. Hilary Swank $23 for every $1 paid

You can go see the Forbes list at their website:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/05/best-actresses-buck-business-entertainment-naomi-watts.html

You can go see our list from last year here:

http://filmandmoviemaking.com/will-top-actors-bring-money-to-your-movie/

So here’s the advice for all you budding producers or directors.: Choose one of the guys on the list above and you can’t possibly fail to get a great financial return, but don’t hold me to that as the screenplay is still vitally important. Usually only a great script will get you though, but if you employ one of the actors listed above, then an average screenplay will probably suffice.

This is providing you can attach them to your movie and you can afford them. Surely the bank will lend you
the money based just upon the attached actor? Of course you’ll need $10 million for those at the top of the list and $5 million for those at the lower stages.

If you’re in charge of a teenager, or you’re a parent or guardian of one, or likely to become one, then you must go and see this movie. It will shock you to your bones. It’ll show you the less favorable options available for young people and the routes they might take. After see this movie, hopefully less will be devoted to ruining their lives and getting in with the wrong ‘gang’ for the wrong reason. Even one less life lost or harmed, is a result.

This movie shows the misfortune of teenage pregnancy, incest, grievous bodily assault, abuse within family, the down side of selling drugs and drug use, police brutality (although many will say the person being beaten deserved it) and most importantly, children having to grow up too soon.

I’m told that the school head teacher’s attitude to expel pregnant teenagers was an accurate portrayal, locating the movie in Barbados. I can only hope that all head teachers will help and guide these young ladies, accepting their situation and making them part of the school life, not to make their lives worse at a time of eventual new joy.

The teacher needs to learn that teenagers will have sex. You need to teach and prepare young people how to have sex safely, not to stick your ostrich head in the sand and hope it doesn’t happen. It does!

Writer Marcia Weekes completed an excellent task in bringing together the many difficult aspects of being a teenager in the world these days. Critics will say she involved too many domestic problems, but the way she has crafted the screenplay makes you just sit back in wonderment.

The laughter heard in the theatre showed people’s embarrassment at the many aspects of family life which portrays the view of better to laugh at a situation that cry when in public. Many times you just wanted to shout out ‘don’t do it, don’t go there’ in the hope the actors would change their actions.

The movie provides excellent acting from leading ladies Claudette Wadman and Sharon Griffith as two mothers who have different ways of bringing up their children. Sophia Thomas, who plays the pregnant teenager who meets her father for the first time before suffering beyond belief at his very own hands, portrays the innocence of the child taken to womanhood in minutes, rather than years.

Andrew Thornhill as the young father to be and Leslie Cumberpatch provide excellent support roles.
Mark Daniel, playing the monster father, might need to change his appearance because of the incredible degenerate lifestyle he leads in the movie; he makes himself so hated in the film, that fans should remember, when they meet him out, that he was acting!

Trailer;: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78wcM9lRWI4

If this movie isn’t listed for showing in your local theatre, then it’s time to go and request it. I understand that some schools are sending all their thirteen to sixteen year olds to see it. Sensible schools, those.

Screenwriter Larry Doyle wrote a first class screenplay for this movie; it’s just a shame that the cast and direction didn’t match up to expectations. I haven’t read his book of the same name, which I hear is quite good.

The movie starts well, we all get the premise of ‘dork loves prom queen’ and gets rewarded by being noticed by her. Unfortunately, the movie goes from fast action to very, very slow for long periods and never finds its pace again with the end petering out into (almost) the oblivion.

We never really believe the dork is really a dork and we never quite consider that the hot prom wild child is an authentic untamed teen. They both tend to meet someone either side of centre/normal. Okay she drives a little fast, but what 18 year old doesn’t? She threatens to be outlandish, but we don’t see her kiss the store clerk in exchange for beer or act wildly apart from taking a shower at midnight at her old school for no point other than to perhaps have her remove her clothes, but that section is about as exciting as a funeral, so perhaps it wasn’t worth it. No offence to actress Hayden Panettiere; she’s obviously good looking with a great figure. Her acting career goes back years with many television and theatre movies, but the direction for her is limp and missing in action.

I feel most sorry for the cheer leaders’ current and soon to be ex-boyfriend. He exactly matches the stereotype that this movie plays too close to. He doesn’t have a character that differs slightly from the other 5000 movies made with this theme.

There are a few laughs in the movie, but it never makes the grade expected. I say expected, because the screen play by Larry Doyle really is terrific. The lines are in there to be delivered, but the actors never manage to present them in a way that a Sandra Bullock or an Eddie Murphy would (although I grant you that those guys are too age-unrelated to play the parts in this movie, which is equally true of the actual actors – why do movies of 16 to 18 year olds not feature any 16 to 18 year olds – why are they always 22+?) You just wonder with a different direction and perhaps a different crew, whether we’d have got the movie the screenplay demanded. This doesn’t mean the team was poor, but sometimes even great teams don’t perform.

It was fairly low budget by today’s terms which means it will make money at an early stage, but at what cost to the movie ticket purchaser? The only payback we received was to hear Alice Cooper’s anthem; School’s Out. The links to other movies became more fun to seek out rather than see where this movie was going.

Why, oh why is a quality actor like Gerard Butler in a movie like this that is so predictable and shallow when his talents have been proved in Nims Island, 300 and the brilliant Rock’n’Rolla, among others (and dare I never call him Gerald again for fear of being tied to a tree and beaten to a pulp by his multitude of fans LOL.)

There are no jokes. There isn’t even the faintest chuckle to be found in what appears to be a romantic comedy according to the official listings.

Predictable is probably overstating it. Any stay at home movie viewer could write down the format of this movie, probably coming up with the ‘staged’ version of what will happen and when in ten easy steps. This script by Karen McCullah Lutz, Kirsten Smith and Nicole Eastman sticks to those steps rigidly. We all know what will take place and when and the dialogue doesn’t help anyone take an interest.

The ending is just so unsurprising and bland we wonder if the movie has actually finished or question whether it will continue for another fifteen minutes after the credits. It didn’t. Oh well, the guy got the girl (and equally the other way around), but who cares by then?

Without spoiling the conclusion (not that it really even started), it’s hardly a great last line for the girl to tell the guy she may or may not have been faking it. It was supposed to have been a play on words to sum up the whole movie, unfortunately I believe they’ve all been faking it for the director’s benefit. By then Gerard’s fans were just pleased that he found time to remove his clothes, but they’ll complain it was all in total darkness!

It’s just so disappointing that movies like this get made, because of the attached actors while many quality scripts remain on the scrap heap, unmade, not even sold in an option agreement. The movie has already made three times its budget before Gerald Butler’s fans buy the DVD and watch it with the mute button firmly on.

I didn’t need to waste 95 minutes of my life, but unfortunately, unless you believe movie reviews, you have to take a chance to find out yourself.

I haven’t read the book, but I hear it’s very good. I’ve seen the movie; it isn’t.

Audrey Niffenegger’s work of fiction is a book I’ve been meaning to read. It’s on the shelf with many others. It’s turn hasn’t come yet. Having seen the movie, I doubt that the book will make it to the top of the pile.

There’s no attachment by the audience to the characters. Quite simply, we don’t care enough about them to worry about what might or will happen.

The story is confusing and never explained sufficiently. However, in the book, I’m told it is all explained. I’m also told that while it’s common knowledge that a movie director can only cover some of the book (they’ve only got two hours screen time against ten hours to read the book) the parts left out from this book were the better parts.

The screenplay doesn’t give us enough to explain why the time traveller appears to come back in sequence (mostly) but appears at different ages when he does come back. When we’ve given up caring we realize that he could come back after he’s died, just at a younger age, but they hardly go there because it’ll spoil the plot and fill in the holes.

The only redeeming features were the nice shots of the pasture in summer and winter. If that’s the best it gets you know you’re in the right theatre at the wrong time.

Some trailers are completely misleading. There was a Will Smith movie, Hancock, where the official trailer gives you the impression that the movie is about one subject, yet when you get to see the finished product, it has another entirely different focus. Fortunately, the second route it took was the best part of that screenplay.

Experts will tell us that the trailer should give us enough to want to get us to the cinema. It should entice us to tell our friends to join us on a gamble none of us have ventured to yet. It most probably deals with only the first third of the screenplay so we have a lot more to see.

Murder By Mistake, written and directed by Carolyn Hodge, is a movie doing the festival circuit at the moment waiting to be picked up for full distribution. The logline tells us

it is a story of mistaken identity when a pair of twins separated at birth are reunited 27 years later and one is murdered.

Without giving too much away, the living twin is a police detective. Already, you know where the movie may be going.

Murder By Mistake trailer from Carolyn Hodge on Vimeo.

If this trailer http://www.vimeo.com/5146878 is anything to go by, it’s got me hooked to purchase a ticket or two when it comes my way. If it doesn’t make it to the full release, I’ll certainly rent the movie.

I’m already intrigued. The trailer shows me enough to have me hooked for more, but not so much so I know what the outcome will be, although we’ll all take a guess and hope it’s got a great twist to stop it going down any obvious routes.

From the opening scene until the fade out you can see where they spent the $170 million budget. The explosions and the special effects now set the new standard of expectations. Anything less than those provided in this movie will be deemed less than acceptable. What was real and which were special effects left a blurred line. At times you didn’t know if the character was in the room or being projected there from elsewhere, such was the mix and match of real and false life.

The screenplay is a collaboration from Stuart Beattie, David Elliot and Paul Lovett from a story by Michael B Gordon, Stephen Summers (the director) and Stuart Beattie. All of this is taken without a need to bear any resemblance to the original comic book by Larry Hama. You don’t need to get out your original GI Joe or Action Man figures (was there an Action Girl?) ; this movie just goes where it wants and doesn‘t care whether it has logic or not. Often the good guys are fighting the bad guys and no-one except the screenplay writers (hopefully) have a clue as to who is who and what’s going on. Quite clearly it really doesn’t even matter. We don’t get time to bind with any of the characters although all the main line actors give their characters quality individual variation.

Despite all that I’ve read about Sienna Miller, her wonderful BBC class English accent bodes well against her rampaging and killing activity; she really doesn’t care who gets in her way, former boyfriends and current husband included. She may not match up to Michelle Pfeiffer or Halle Berry’s Catwoman leather close fitting suits, but she shows raw talent for winning any battle, alone or with (temporary) friends. Bruce Willis, in his John McClane days, wouldn’t mess with her. She does an excellent job matching a real force of evil with superior amusement and tongue in cheek expressions. The girl ‘done’ good. I’ll certainly watch out for more of her movies and ignore the press trash about her.

Marlon Wayans is the surprise star of the movie. His highly crafted lines of dialogue provide nearly all the movie’s laughs which arrive frequently and in abundance. The audience liked his jokes, cheering throughout. His comedic timing was brilliant.

So what’s the movie about? It doesn’t really matter. One man wants to rule the world, yet again. Usually you’d say ‘enter James Bond’ but their last effort was very poor and may have lost a large slice of their regular audience for the follow up to this GI Joe.

One point I found amusing; the chief baddie, Dr Who, (Christopher Eccleston) is an Englishman who gets to play with a Scottish accent, while the last Dr Who was played in English by a Scotsman. Perhaps they should have just swapped roles.

Don’t go looking for plot holes as you’ll find many and miss the point of this movie; high entertainment. You just need to sit back and let it ride over you.

You get the picture; Blake’s influence on the world of screenplay writing has been immense. To hear of his death from cardiac arrest this week at just 51 is a bolt from the blue.

Most movie goers won’t know his name and what he did; what he brought to the industry.

His Save The Cat books have shown screen writers the world over not only many ways in which to prepare planning for the script, but also (in his second book) show how this works in tangible practice. We were due a third book from him later this year: Save the Cat! Strikes Back: More Trouble for Screenwriters to Get Into… And Out Of. I understand it is finished, but obviously his family will have a say in what happens next.

Many people have been inspired to write more due this one man’s efforts to show and teach us all how to better our skills. His books will live on for a long time and I’m sure we’ll all still be talking about his planning methods for years to come.

The best way we can honour his loss is to write, with your beat sheet by your side.

To read the review of his first Save The Cat book, click here.

4 stars****

If you’ve ever been to a waterpark and expected to sit in a car tire and go slowly around a two miles an hour lazy river, but instead found yourself on a kamikaze 50 miles an hour downhill waterslide then the latter is how you will feel when you experience this movie. From just a few minutes in you are hit with a nonstop avalanche that keeps you gripped to your seat. The feeling won’t leave you even after you depart the theater.

If you’re an aspiring screenwriter that wants to learn from the experts, then the premise of ‘show, not tell’ is heavily underlined in this outing from David Leslie Johnson who writes from Alex Mace’s story. In the opening scene you learn of the lead character’s loss of a child, her alcoholic problems and the accident that led into her daughter’s hearing loss. We don’t hear these actual words, but we easily digest this information from all that we are shown. Here is a writer that grants the audience with an intelligence and doesn’t need to treat us all as though we have low intellect and are unable to understand unless it’s painted in large billboard lettering.

Young actress Isabelle Fuhrman keeps the audience locked to the screen with her manipulation of all around her, younger or older. Such was the intensity of her acting ability that the audience found the need to release a laugh when she contrived to deliver murderous blows. The alternative was to acknowledge that such a monster really exists. If this actress can work with similar quality writers and directors then her long future should be confirmed. It’s unusual that the sight of a mother fiercely punching her nine-year-old adopted daughter would bring an audience to loudly cheer the action.

Vera Farmiga (so good in ‘Nothing but the Truth’) is again an excellent lead character. She manages to pull off the rare ingredient of being extremely sexy in sex scenes. As a mark to other actors and actresses who believe that the more flesh shown equals the more sexier they appear, Farmiga proves that the scene cast in an audience’s mind is more powerful than eyes actually see.

Orphan is not a horror film, it’s a thriller with a small coating of tomato sauce splattering now and again from beaten bodies. The death count is low, but until the last scene it does not give you any clues as to who might make it through the movie alive. Even then it’s touch and go to see who might survive.

While some will argue that the screen play follows an expected route it is patched together perfectly giving you just enough information only when you need it and not before.

The twist is first class and I defy anyone to guess it without cheating.

People looking to adopt children may not wish to watch this movie. However the link between adopted children and this monster doesn’t exist.