Here’s a selection of the different types of people involved with screenwriting: writers, consultants and teachers.

Just one hour of your time watching/listening to these videos may provide you with years of expert knowledge.

Christopher Volger

Michael Hauge

Joe Eszterhas

Julian Friedmann

Callie Khouri

Linda Seger

Blake Snyder

Many have been big hits, like The American Pie movies, the Road Trip genre, Meet Dave, Chuck and Larry and anything involving a teenager trying to lose their virginity, especially when friends are offering to help.

One sad fact comes before each of these types of movie; you know that all the best jokes were contained in the two minute trailer you just saw.

We need to define ‘what is comedy?’ Bend It Like Beckham was a great movie, but it was hardly a comedy, yet that became it’s genre. It was a wonderful screenplay with quality acting but it didn’t have you holding your stomach in place. Love Actually had a high number of quality chortle factors. Bill Nighy’s comedic timing was perfect throughout.

Shaun Of The Dead and Hott Fuzz have shown us a different type of joke recently. We laugh at the characters, not at the jokes. It’s what they do that is funny, not what they say, especially as they don’t intend to be amusing.

A young lady told me that she couldn’t wait to go and see the recent ‘Shopaholic’ film. Having seen the trailer I’d rather watch paint dry, so we must all accept that not everything appeals to everyone and one person’s amusement is another person’s cough. That’s why we talk about marketing and genre. That’s why movies are made to fit age ranges, sometime gender and often different types of humor. Some films are best seen after a few beers and some should be teetotal to gain the benefits.

Another of this ilk hits the silver screen soon. I Love You Beth Cooper, due July 2009. The trailer is interesting, with a few almost jokes that might be funny. Here’s the trailer; you be the judge.

Airplane made me laugh, ripped my sides and kept me amused. There’s Something About Mary was funny. Monty Python’s Life Of Brian had me laughing consistently. What’s similar throughout these movies is the constant quality gags arriving on a regular basis. The Carry On films and the early Pink Panther pictures were dependable. Current movie makers appear to consider two or three average jokes placed 20 minutes apart will suffice for a big seller; just get a couple of big name stars and the dollars will follow.

Which films made you really laugh? Which made you want to repeat the jokes to friends who couldn’t understand the humor because they didn’t see the same visual content that aids the joke?

1. The movie only reached the theatres less than two weeks ago.
2. It’s not out on DVD yet.
3. It’s not likely to be out on DVD for another 3-6 months.
4. The DVD must be an illegal copy.
5. How much will the screenplay writers get from this ‘purchase’?
6. At what stage is it right to buy a pirated movie?

The last question obviously doesn’t need answering because it’s a case of never, ever, should you buy such unlicensed property. Anyway, Halle Berry isn’t in this latest movie in the franchise.

After asking other film fans for comment, some believe that if it’s a big movie that’s made oceans of profit for the stars, the crew and the studio, then it’s okay to buy a cheap copy because the stars already have enough money and after all, DVDs are expensive, especially if you want Blu-ray quality in these credit crunch times.

I can see why people would hold that point of view, but who decides the cut-off point between the screenwriter getting paid for his work and not getting paid via cheap copies? How well does the movie have to do at the cinema before it’s okay to rip off the movie?

I thought that the governments and industry had managed to find funds to source and control piracy – how wrong I was. A quick ‘Google’ search shows so many hits for torrents of movies being released not this week, but in a month’s time.

It’s theft whatever way you look at it, but the consumer who is willing to pay $5 for a recent movie rather than $20 at the theatre is a difficult force to control

These thefts cost us all money. Go check out these piracy information websites:

United States - http://www.mpaa.org/piracy.asp
UK - http://www.piracyisacrime.com/
Australia - http://www.mipi.com.au/

What is your government doing?

This YouTube video is an official anti piracy comment. Unfortunately, despite what it says, people do steal handbags, televisions and cars.

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A change of director and the loss of the brilliance of writing team Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais proved the franchise didn’t learn from Goal 1. To have the player move to Real Madrid in Spain, where his long lost mother just happens to live, is stretching believability too far.

The mistakes still abound. There’s no recognition of the Gavin Harris character moving to Real Madrid, especially when he looked all through with his previous club and heading downwards in his career, rather than on a high. The lead actor and Anna Friel got engaged, but without mentioning it. You’d think the plan to leave out these matters would leave a movie with a crisp screenplay. Alas, still every cliché you’ve forgotten comes back into play.

The good news is that the brilliant football footage still shines through. The games look so realistic that you do believe the actors played at Real Madrid’s stadium. You’ll just to put up with players running with the ball, but you either only see the feet with the ball or the body moving without the feet or ball. You can’t have it both ways unless you’re a professional footballer who becomes an actor. Apart from Eric Cantona and Vinne Jones, the list grows short.

The Blake Snyder action plan for a successful Hollywood movie is still showing through, leaving your need for a sick bag or two, close at hand. The lines are so embarrassing that the German team manager looks like he’s going to run away each time he speaks.

This movie isn’t as good as the first, but it does move the story along through obvious highs and lows and leads us directly to the third in the set.

We all know the script by now, guessing it seconds before the actors say the lines. We even guessed that he wouldn’t run over his little unknown brother who runs out in front of a Ferrari doing around 100mph.

My goodness, in Goal 3 they’ll have him decide between representing his home countries of Mexico and The United States. He’ll choose Mexico and he’ll go on to score the winning goal in the World Cup final. In Goal 4, he’ll transfer to a team on the moon, win the first league championship there, break two legs and still play on for ninety minutes to score the winning goal against the Daleks. I know, it’ll never happen, but it did in Goal 1 and Goal 2.

Patricia Highsmith wrote good quality thriller novels. Just go look at her Google listings and search out ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’, for example. However, it’s her first book, ‘Strangers on a Train’ that is on the best read list. It was made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock and then a play that has toured the world. I’ve seen it twice in two different adaptations and it clings right through to the end.

Her 1962 novel, ‘Cry of the Owl’ became a French movie in 1987 – you can still get it on DVD.

Now it’s the turn of an updated version with the screenplay written by Jamie Thraves (who also directed). He’s completed a difficult task with generous results.

Julia Stiles gives the movie it’s big star name. She plays Jenni, who has her own personal stalker. What the stalker didn’t know was that Jenni was a tad more strange than he. She invited him into her house and into her life, dumping her fiancé at the same time.

The twists and turns mix between the expected and the unpredictable. The stalker’s ex wife, played by Caroline Dhavernas, while owning a serious disposition herself, teams up with Jenni’s ex fiancé to rid the world of the stalker. The stalker is now appearing like the most sane character in the whole film. Even the police officers appear to have 40 cents to the dollar.

Paddy Considine, as the stalker, is excellent. This may not be the first movie where the victim falls in love with the stalker, but we end up feeling so sorry for this stalker we want him just to leave his home, his city, his country and just get the hell out of there.

A couple of the twists are quite, well, silly. There are also a couple of coincidences (which move the film along nicely) that are just too way out to be believable. We’ll forgive them, though, as this script moves us in different directions, leaving you believing that a bad day can’t get any worse, but it can.

You’ll say you guessed the ending because it’s quite obvious, but did you really? My guess is you didn’t really expect the way it turned out. Let me know after you’ve seen this agreeable thriller.

I particularly like the acting from Caroline Dhavernas. She’s expertly playing an ex-wife, with more than a small grudge against her ex-husband. Their views of the past don’t tell the same story. The way she jokes about not wanting a divorce and then saying it was just a gag - she does want one - are riviting and sad. If ever you should meet such a person, don’t be afraid to leave the continent on the next airplane. It could save your sanity and your life.

I hope it gets a general release soon. It’s too good to go straight to DVD.

Our rating 43%

So here’s what the directors and writers did; they sat around a large table with lots of movie industry (but not football) people. They spent hours writing down ideas on little pieces of paper. Each idea contained a scene or incident that ‘could’ happen during a movie about a boy that grows up finding out he has a great football talent. The ‘goal’ of the film is to get him to move from point A to Point Z where he’s a professional footballer, forgetting anything about character arc.

The vital move next was to add any football cliché you might conjure up to any real life cliché you could imagine of a boy moving from a poor environment to a very rich one. Finally, you need to blend in all of the standard Hollywood movie plans to ensure that Blake Snyder’s laws of screenwriting for Hollywood hits, was applied.

Any normal team would now sift through the pile of ideas and place together a plan for the movie, discarding papers that won’t fit and reducing the plot to a manageable and believable script. Unfortunately, this team decided to keep everything in, lock stock and barrel.

I laughed so much when it wasn’t supposed to be a comedy and said ‘I don’t believe it’ so many times as we guessed this movie’s plot before each scene arrived. We were correct nearly every time in planning the film’s next move.

Incredibly, two of the four writers were the genius team of Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement. I can only guess they added the good parts of the script!

Taking a boy from the poor end of Mexico, breaking into the USA and then being spotted by a former scout from Newcastle United in England, failing his trial, but getting asked back for another trial before breaking through to the first team, would have been so much better if they’d talked to some football people. Perhaps they did, but they needed to get past basic errors. For example, you can’t sign a player that late in the season. With only four games to go and the need to win them all, you couldn’t add to your English Premier league squad past January. These games would be in mid April. You can’t just become an Agent to a player. FIFA (the governing body) UEFA and the English FA have strict rules about who can become an agent. Not anyone can and you can’t do it in an afternoon.

I could go on, but to avoid cliché movie reviews, I’ll say that the camera work, moving between the actors and the professional footballers, was excellent. You couldn’t see the breaks, it was so seamless. In this area, this film beats all previous football movies.

I felt sorry for the superb Anna Friel. You would have thought she’d have learnt about being the tag along wife after her spell with Nic Leeson, so a footballer is the next best bet. She must have looked at the script wondered if the lines were really expected to be read out loud. Then a quick look at her pay check would have convinced her to actually repeat the lines.

The Paul Gascoigne/ George Best character was a perfect foil to the clean, good living Mexican. Disaster was always only a few feet away. However, we all know that in movie-street, disaster is always followed by success.

I would guess David Beckham won’t be taking up acting after his small part in this movie, but his bank balance would have improved considerably.

Unbelievably, this is still one of the best football films of all time even though it’s two hours long, despite the plot, the clichés and the inevitable ending. I mean, apart from Manchester United, who scores incredible goals in the last few seconds to win matches?

There’s some people on the pitch, they think it’s all over… but no, Goal 2 and 3 will follow.

Sadly, this movie didn’t gain a large theatre release due to ‘problems’ with the distributor, possibly economical. That’s a real shame because this is a real film, not a shoot ‘em up big action, explosions movie. A real film has a great script, great crew and makes you think. A real movie gets you talking well after it’s finished. We’re still talking about it in our household.

This film is supposed to ‘parallel’ the case of Valerie Plame, a CIA agent exposed by the media after her husband wrote a newspaper piece attacking government lies and manipulation (they wouldn’t do that would they?)

How this differs is that the premise may be similar, but the actions and script bear no real resemblance to the original story; this version is totally fiction; it’s just the idea that is fact. I don’t know if we’re allowed to call Plame a former CIA spy, so we won’t.

The screenplay by Rod Lurie is a masterpiece; he also directed. He holds the suspension from the first minute right through to the last. Only when the twist/reveal is disclosed do we know why a mother of a six year old would spend a year in jail refusing to name her source.

Okay, we know journalists like to keep some sources private, there’s a need if you want to be trusted in the future, but do you need to lose your husband, your job, your family and your child just to prove a point? You spend the whole movie telling her just to give up her source. This brings the movie’s only fault. Now that you know (you will when you watch it!) the source of the information, why not reveal it because nothing terrible could come from it, apart from the journalist’s sources being open to question, or perhaps that’s her point all along.

The actors had plenty to say. Kate Beckinsale as the journalist who outed a CIA agent is astonishing in her role. There is total belief in her ability to keep her secret. Why didn‘t they just torture her? Whoops, I forgot, they don’t do that anymore.

You can’t begin to like Matt Dillon’s character. He doesn’t want you to. He’s the bad guy; the prosecutor. He’s only defending the government’s right to keep CIA agents safe from the enemy while working in the field, someone else’s field. He’s consistent to the point of getting his woman prosecuted, come what may.
Vera Farmiga plays the CIA agent who has to lose her job. Her department will cover their backs by losing her. She’s so nice in many scenes, but reverts to shocking back street language when provoked (no offence back streeters).

Alan Alda, David Schwimmer and Angela Bassett all perform to the highest of their talents as the back-up teams, although we do wonder which side of the fence they really are supporting.

There are several points to this movie (all for your movie club to discuss):

Should journalists be able to maintain secrecy and protect their ‘sources’ of information?

Can the media ‘out’ a working CIA agent (and risk her life)?

Can the government force a journalist to reveal their sources?

How long can someone be held in contempt of court?

How far do you need to take your integrity, especially when you become selfish as it affects your family?

Go rent this movie; it will make you think and you will be discussing it for hours afterwards.

Our rating 55%

Much fun and entertainment arrives with this Disney movie. It’s suitable for (almost) all age ranges, which as we know, increases food sales at the cinema. Some young kids under 9 might get scared at a few anxiety driven points.

The story is far-fetched and that doesn’t matter because they make it believable and force you to show an interest in all the lead characters.

Two aliens (who look just like humans) team up with a Las Vegas cab driver (played well by Dwayne Johnson). They need to carry out some actions on earth so that it’s saved and so they can get back to their family. They’re being pursued by a guy who might have been in the Terminator.

This movie has been made before, as Escape to Witch Mountain and Return to Witch Mountain.

The screenplay is well written by Andy Fickman, Mark Bomback and Matt Lopez. They’re obviously taken the school of screenplay writing in Hollywood minute by minute standards and apply this knowledge magnificently.

I haven’t read the original novel by Alexander Key so I hope someone can tell me if this movie maintains any resemblance of the novel.

The special effects are worked in well without being too over the top. You kind of accept them as being real and capable from the Aliens, but the cab driver does become too strong in beating off the terminator impersonator when the information we’re given states that this isn’t possible.

This aside, it’s a pleasant ride through the 99 minutes with nothing to take your mind off the movie. The music from former ‘Yes’ man Trevor Rabin fits well without taking over. A sure sign that all’s well with this production.

I know that I appear to be the only person on the planet who didn’t like this movie. Actually, I know another, so there’s at least two of us. I thought this was going to be a comedy but I didn’t laugh once. I did snigger once, which is probably why I scored it so high.

I also know that this film is a send up of a collection of other movies and film people, particularly the studio heads. Whichever way I tried, I couldn’t find it funny and I do so like to laugh . All the reviews I read told me it was a good to very good movie. Oh, how I wished it was. After all, I finally got around to seeing this movie months after its release. I wished I’d stayed at home and watched paint dry.

On a positive note, you can see where they spent the $120+ million budget. The special effects were excellent; worthy of any James Bond movie. It’s such a shame that they were wasted in this script.

The premise of the screenplay is excellent and probably very different from other pitches doing the rounds over the years. Essentially to take a group of actors and place them in a real life situation is ridiculous and therefore, comedic.

Tom Cruise completed a superb task in acting out the part of a mad (some will say ‘normal’) head of studio. He was so way over the top that I’m sure many studio heads will be searching to see if they were part of the character’s make up.

My main loathing with this movie was not in Robert Downey, Jr’s make up and wonderful transformation from an American to an Australian with a move back to being a African American, but with his new speech pattern, where at least half of what he said/mumbled was lost in the wilds of the script. I’ve no idea what he said half the time which is not a problem I ever have with African Americans. I know they thought they were clever, the directors/writers and actors, but it slaughtered the movie for me, which I found generally poor before this problem arose.

It looks like the movie will make some profit after DVD sales, but I won’t want to have a copy as a present. I’ll have to pass it on to a charity shop because life is finite and I don’t have those two hours to waste again.

It’s a PG rated movie which means that younger children might not be a suitable audience.

Some friends wanted to take my six year old daughter to see this movie. Having seen the trailer (who proved of no interest to me) I had reservations that it may be too scary for a six year old.

Someone watched the movie and said it would be okay, so against my better wishes I reluctantly agreed.

The movie scared the poop out of her; she ran into my arms when she left the theatre. She said it was very scary and she didn’t like any of it - whatsoever. It’s easy to say she could have left the cinema, but she’s six and I was in another theatre watching Witch Mountain; which I knew was too scary for her.

I’m not sure what age would be right for this movie, but as it’s along the lines of ‘Harry Potter’ and that entire ilk (apparently) then it’s probably closer to being right for a nine year old or over. Obviously all children are different and something that’s right for a ten year old might be wrong for a different twelve year old. You have to be able to judge.

I called it wrong and that’s a shame because she loves the movies, but not this one, at all.

With a cast including Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent, it has to be able to reach some heights. Alas, on this occasion, the reviewer scored it nil points and we’ve all learnt a lesson.