Little Miss... Bad Grampa. A review of 'Jackass Presents: Bad Grampa'

I grew up watching the Jackass crew doing things to their bodies, and each others, that equally petrified and fascinated me. Nothing it seems was off limits for the boys who regularly dared one another to do the most ludicrous things all in the name of making each other laugh. It included some of the more sensitive areas of the male anatomy that made me wince, bizarre contraptions invented solely for the reason of causing pain and going fast and putting stuff in, and then taking it out, of places that objects should never really be for an extended period of time. What was so strange though that it was oddly compelling and funny - appealing to the most basic instincts I had that make me also enjoy: UFC, eating my body weight in cheese and Michael Bay films. I cared about the cast (Johnny Knocksville, Ryan Dunn and Steveo) they seemed like well meaning guys who had found their calling, and it just happened to be falling over for my amusement.

When a wheelchair just won't do for the old man.

Ultimately the internet, and more specifically Youtube, killed off the small screen version of Jackass (and proved Darwin wrong) with an endless supply of idiots willing to do things that endanger their health on demand twenty-four hours a day and without the need to pay for cable TV. However, undeterred Jackass evolved, rolling with the times, and became Bad Grampa. It's still walking around on four legs, but at least it's out of the sea and no longer has its eyes on the side of its head but it's making an attempt to get itself upright.

In Bad Grampa 86 year-old Irving Zisman (Johnny Knocksville) is on a journey across America with the most unlikely companion, his 8 year-old Grandson Billy (Jackson Nicoll). The pair are brilliant on screen bouncing off one another like the best of buddy cops on a stake out. They have a chemistry that suggests that the pair really did get on during their little road trip, the cameras just happened to be around them and at the end they thought that they might as well cut a film out of the footage just for the hell of it. Nicoll is simply brilliant as the snotty little pre-teen who is equal amounts cheeky and charming in the right places. I predict that after returning from filming he was an absolute nightmare for his parents after being allowed to truly be a little shit for the duration of filming every day for the shoot!

Just to get this out of the way Bad Grampa is not a film. It's a series of stunts that are loosely tied together by a journey that the two are on. If you ever went into the screening hoping to see something other than a film about farting in crowded places or Knocksville falling over you're going to be disappointed, but if that is what you expected Bad Grampa delivers and then some. In another universe the film could have been a heartwarming indie comedy that would have made it big at Sundance. There are some moments when the pair are alone in the car, at the diner, or playing HORSE on a basketball court with one another where I genuinely thought that they were going to ditch the gags and let me enjoy an affectionate moment. But then someone decided that that was too much sentiment and needed another fart noise to keep things going. The one moment at the diner though had me in hysterics for some time though and the reaction from the old man sitting across from them is worth the price of admission alone.

Trying to read into the subtext of Bad Grampa a little (and if you look hard enough there is some) you are struck by just how nice people really are. No matter where they go, or even what they say to people, the general public seem to be inherently good always wanting to help what they just must see as a kooky old man and his grandson. It's not as if they are hanging around in middle class areas either, some of the places that they go look to be destitute, even a little seedy, where the threat of possible violence is very real. However, there's always a good samaritan on stand by that will either help the pair negotiate the situation they have got themselves in or resolve it for them. It also has to be said that Knocksville is fearless as Zisman, no matter where they are or who he is talking to there is never a flutter of his eyes that show he is scared. There is one bit in a bike bar, and another in a male strip club that had the potential to go south very, very rapidly but I'll leave those for you to squirm through yourself. The film leaves its final punches for the end of the film at the beauty pageant that must have been set up for the film itself delivering a damming verdict of American parenting with clever cut aways at the right time. 

It should have made me more angry than it did that the road trip storyline is basically a rip off of one of my favourite films Little Miss Sunshine but at the end I was willing to accept Bad Grampa for what it is - a great film to watch with friends that everyone doesn't take too seriously. Its also proved to me again that Knocksville has this built in charm that he's unable to switch off and I hope that he gets more serious acting work in the future. I can see him playing a very good 'Bottom' in Mid Summer Nights Dream. Your move RSC.

NFTS - Documentary to Drama course

I'm panicking, I've got five minutes left to finish what I'm shooting, not nearly enough time to get everything done that I wanted to and onto of that I've still got this nagging thought in my head that the last take of the previous set up isn't really working for me but it's still the one that I really think that I want to use in the edit and on top of all of that I've just remembered the idea that I had for another shot late last night is never going to happen! It's only a tiny taste of what it means to direct drama but I'm already hooked!

Last week I had the pleasure of going on the NFTS Documentary to Drama directing course run by Dan Reed and the NFTS short course department. The week long course was five days aimed at converting documentary filmmakers into drama directors for the small (and big) screen. It was great to hear how things really are rather than the methodical approach of how you should make a TV show, this was actually how things got made and the sacrifices and decisions that you had to make. Using the skills of taping racist protestors, kicking footballs over the back wall of the North Korean embassy and chasing Chuck Norris making the small docs that I've done I was hoping that converting to producing a drama short would be easy where there weren't so many variables to think about and there wasn't the possibility of ending up in a gulag. How wrong I was.

After the first two days of intense seminars with Dan and other visiting guests (Stuart Harris - Cinematography, Elaine MacKenzie - 1st AD and Karen Lindsay-Stewart - Casting director) I had a solid idea about what my task ahead would be. From Monday 7th October to Tuesday 8th I had learnt more about what it means to be a director that I had in the rest of my life. I was deconstructing everything that I watched (Why is Walter White framed like that? How come Rick is doing that? Why does Jess have to be shown to be looking at that?) All of a sudden I was thinking about everything not just as a loving representation of a script but as a process in itself. Just as a script can't have any "dead weight" hanging off it, the same is true of the actual finished product. The camera has to be involved with the telling of the story, helping the viewer work out the relationships between characters and the subtexts of each scene.

I had a lot to think about on day three when I was given my assignment, to produce a scene from The Changeling as I saw fit. I was given a scene where Christine confronts Jones about how the boy that they have given him isn't her son. I wanted to play it differently from the original just to try something new and see if I could do it so I made it so that Jones is trying to close this case anyway that he can - fully knowing that the boys isn't hers but seeing the "job" as a personal and professional success. He tries to get Christine to accept the situation anyway that he can eventually threatening her that if she continues to look for Walter that he will make her the prime suspect. On the other side Christine realises that Jones is trying to fob her off and wants to get him to keep looking. I didn't want her to be this hysterical stock female character who weeps and begs Jones to keep trying to find him so I made her strong and cold to him knowing that he hasn't done his job properly and fully certain that her boy is still alive. To try and make it more apparent that Jones hasn't done the job to Christine's satisfaction I had her "straightening" his office out during the conversation that they have so that when he gets back to work on it everything will be in the right place. The actors that I got for the scene were brilliant (Paul and Abi) and really helped me out realising that I was new to the game, steering me through the process whilst picking up on how I was trying to direct them perfectly delivering great performances.

Filming was tough - we had two and a bit hours to get three minutes done. Although this sounds like a long time when you're new to this it flies by and before you know it you're wrapped and you can't remember exactly what you did but you're hoping that your well prepared plan was executed - but it might not have been. I wanted to experiment with stuff to see what would work and what wouldn't, I knew that the main objective had to be to make something that I was proud of but as a task on the course I could take a few risks with the set ups.

In the edit suite after breathing a sigh of relief realising that everything was there (and if I can say looked and sounded remarkably good thanks to the team of students and ex students who worked on it with me! Thank you again to Susi, Matthew, Nik and Isobella) I worked on getting the final (rough) cut together with another ex student (Nicolas) who after only needing a short conversation understood exactly what I wanted out of the scene and with what seemed a few movements of his hands across the keyboard he had cut together exactly what I wanted. It has cemented in my mind that editors are indeed magicians and do not get the praise that they deserve!

At the end of the course we all screened our films in the student cinema and had them deconstructed by Dan. I was happy with my feedback and it was nice to talk about why I did certain things with someone who has to make these kind of decisions for a living. The minute or so that we spent analysing just the one ten second shot that I had put in over another more conventional one is something that will stick with me - it really allowed me to better understand the decision making process for a director and is one that I hope to replicate when/if I'm trusted behind the lens of a camera again!

Anyhow - the video is attached to the blog - let me know what you think of it! Now it's just to try and get myself a gig directing Doctors or if I wish really, really hard the next season of The Walking Dead!!

Update - How to Write a movie in 21 Days

So... I've decided to do it - I'm going to take on the challenge of writing a first draft of a movie in just 21 days using a book by Viki King called, you guessed it; How to Write a Movie in 21 Days.

It sounds like a fun challenge and gives me a time frame to actually get something down on paper rather than stressing about this being right, or that sounding authentic or even basic stuff like character arcs and tropes - you just write what you're feeling at the time and hope that everything comes together at the end. It's called the Inner Movie Method - basically you "watch" the film unfolding in your head and write it down as you think that you see it on the screen. All the tweaking, character description, malarky that goes into actually writing a polished screenplay comes later in a second or third draft.

So I did a little work before I started so that I didn't entirely have the fear of the great white page and came up with a couple of ideas before settling on what I was going to write. In the end I settled on an action/comedy that I've had kicking around for a while and seems the most formulated in my mind. It's called The Deck and was the result of too long spent on CNN late at night. I found out that there was a crazy/genius guy who at the height of the hunt for Bin Laden decided that he could do with the reward for his capture and set off into the hills of Pakistan with little or no knowledge of what on earth he was doing to bring the worlds most notorious terrorist to justice and collect his pay check!

I decided that I wanted to make the piece a little more comedic and write it as if myself and my friends had one day thought that it would be a good idea to go after one of the "deck" of most wanted terrorists as put out by the CIA after the latest Iraq war. Unable to relate to the hunting of terrorist all that well and for obvious reasons not being able to find all that much about how one goes about doing it online I thought that the closest experience to actually being involved in a fire fight was playing on COD. So The Deck became a bunch of avid computer games players out looking for what they considered a "soft" terrorist in the hope of picking up some easy money using the "skills" that they leant when they were behind the sticks.

Obviously it needed a little more and I crafted the lead character Stu into a recently unemployed investment broker who is now unable to pay for his fathers medical bills and after realising that he's never going to make it onto the pro-circuit with his "team" of gammers who are unable to work together to win a qualifying spot he decides to convince them to turn their attention to heading out to the middle east. Though Stu might be hiding something from the group that will shake them all and could mean an end to even their current tenuous partnership.

On day 1 you have to write pages 1-10 (or the ordinary world - establishing where the hero was/is before they set off on their adventure. It has to show the overall tone or theme of the piece and set up the questions that will be answered during the film). I started the group playing for a spot in the finals of the MLG Call of Hero's tournament in Vegas each at their respective homes. It all goes horribly wrong where none of the guys are willing to work with each other and eventually the other team win and the gang falls out for the first time.

Stu then heads off to an interview at Happy Burger where he is turned down for the job because he is over qualified and the paranoid manager thinks that because he turned up in a suit he must be from head office being sent as a spy. He then leaves for the hospital to see his dad who, with no medical care to pay his bills, is looking to be turfed out of the hospital.

It's as far as I've got and it's only a first draft but I'm happy with how things are going so far and I'm enjoying discovering what I want to do with the characters so far on the fly making me learn new things about them with each new scene that I put in.

Anyhow keep up-to-date with the blog to find out where The Deck goes!! Once it's finished I'll be more than happy to have people read it - just give me another 20 days!!

peace,

- Ted

We're drug smugglers, not drug dealers! A review of we're the Millers

We're the Millers - the family down the street that everyone was a little worried about.

Last night I had the pleasure, and what only can be described as the pleasure, of watching We're the Millers starring Jason Sudeikis as David Burke the small time pot dealer who after a run in with "... the cast of Annie" finds himself unable to pay his boss the money that he owes him for this weeks stash and has to travel to Mexico and bring a "smidge" of the green stuff back in order to call it quits.

His plan is fool proof - create a fake family that will help him slip past the boarder guards undetected and onwards to freedom with the stash in tow. In comes Rose (Jennifer Aniston) playing either herself or Rachel Green if she had made some poor life choices after the end of Friends - I can't decide, Kenny (Will Poulter) the 18 year old with the mind of a child from the flat downstairs and Casey (Emma Roberts - who after the film finished google told me it was OK to fancy, she's actually 22!!) the likeable but stroppy homeless teen who is "between couches" as she calls it. All looks like it's going well until upon arrival at the pick-up point it turns out that it's a little more than a "smidge and a half" they're bringing back, and it might not even be theirs to take.

The family unit work well together and the chemistry flows well between them with the characters bouncing off each other as if in another universe the actors are really blood related creating the best looking family ever. The humour comes from those awkward situations that all families at one time or another find themselves in: that talk with your dad about the birds and the bees, the squabble in the RV about how fast it should be going and the disapproval of a daughters boyfriend. In any other film this might be played as straight drama but because we're in on the joke (they're not a real family don't you know) it becomes a great way that Faber and Fybel (the writers) can explore the real emotions behind the fronts that the characters put on. It's clear that they get family dynamics and slowly in the film you're rooting for Dave not only to make it back with the shipment but wake up and realise that a wife and 2.5 children might not be all that bad after all.

However, it's not without its flaws. The laugh riot slows to a crawl sometimes with the story trying to cram too much in, and often a few too many coincidences occurring to service the narrative. Usually a sign that the filmmakers are running out of ideas, but in this case I think that it's just that they had too many and couldn't decide which ones to leave out; I'm sure that there's more that will come out on the DVD extras (I'm going to be sure to buy it). The only real problem that I have with the entire film is that someone insisted that Jennifer Aniston took her clothes off as often as possible. Now I'm not complaining, as a red blooded male she's hot and it's always a draw to see some bits on show, however it's either the desperation of the producers to get more teenage bums on seats ("LOOK TITS GREAT - COME SEE THIS!") or Aniston's management trying to show that she's still got it, and you should call us if you need someone to take their kit off in the latest action film you're thinking of getting off the ground. As a side-bar, and I don't know how she'll take this, Aniston would make a great stripper.

[What is more depressing in that trying to find a picture to go with this blog typing in 'We're the Millers' to Google furnishes you with over three pages of Jennifer in her skimpies before you get any other pictures of the film - Internet you're drunk, go home!]

Though for all the huge jumps and overly toned middle aged flesh the thing that wins the film back is the supporting cast that the Millers run into on their journey. The subliminal Kathryn Hahn, that is rapidly becoming my favourite actress, playing her special brand of loveable crazy in each of the features that she is cast in, Nick Offerman bringing Ron Swanson to the big screen along with his amazing moustache and Ed Helms as the Orca owning drug baron.

Ultimately a film that picks you up and shakes you drumming in the idea that the only opportunities you don't take are the ones you regret. Whether this be the offer of being taught to kiss by your fake mom and sister in-front of your fake dad while the daughter of the family you just met rounds the corner, a chance to join a drug smuggling gang brining enough weed to kill Snoop Dog across the boarder or knocking out a world renowned criminal on the count of 1.

The ending will leave even the hardest hearts warm and fuzzy and giving you a little bit of hope that the Millers might actually become something of the weirdest neighbours in existence with just a little bit of paperwork and a few "I-do's". That is until the sequel and we'll have to revisit them five years later when someone they've crossed will be out for vengeance and the smuggling stakes have gotten even greater! I for one will be watching it!

Updates Galore!!

So the past few days have been a little hectic but I've been getting things done!! Yay!

The website for 'Chasing Chuck' is, hopefully, about to be up and running - here's a little sneak peek if you're interested!! (I'm so excited about this and hope that everyone loves it, and obviously we get wad of cash to get making it!!)

A little sneaky peek of the website.

Me working hard on the site to get it finished by the end of August.

Also, I've decided that my writing output has slid into non-existence over the last few months so am making a huge concerted effort to churn out a few more projects before the end of the year! I'm looking at hammering out two first drafts of two new projects over September and October using Viki King's How to Write a Movie in 21 Days  - more to challenge myself to see if I can do it than anything else. Be sure to check out all of the blogging that will go along with it! I'm also keen to get a few short films written that could possibly go into production next year!!

In other news I've got another 1st AD job working in the North that I'm really excited about on a short film called Nah.

I'm also getting increasingly excited about this idea that I had a while ago called The Sitcom Showdown  - it's started off as educational tool that is loosely based on the "writing process" that I go through when trying to come up with ideas for TV to help me look at new combinations of characters and situations but then I thought that it might actually make a cool card game that people could play at dinner parties or other writers might use when they're lacking inspiration.

Have a look at some of the beta tests of the cards here:

Examples of some of the character cards for The Sitcom Showdown.

I'm hoping to get a mock-up set made by next week and start road testing it on some unsuspecting friends. I'm then hoping to take it into schools and colleges and then even maybe get it on Kickstarter to try and see if it's an idea that might have some legs to it. If not I've had some fun coming up with it and I'm hoping that it helps my own writing in the future!

P.S. I'm still writing Between Lambs and Lions - I'm hoping to get it finished soon!!

A chicken on 'Chickens'

Today I finally got round to watching the new offering from the brains behind the wildly successful ‘The Inbetweeners’ that was a breakout hit on Channel 4 a few years ago that was a perfect antidote to ‘Skins’ and rather than cast a group of too cool for school teenagers running around taking drugs, having plenty of sex and staying up all night it showed me my own pre-university years in full glorious HD where any fun usually had to happen before midnight when I was due home and the only sex I was having was with myself and the strongest drugs that I could get my hands on were caffeine, and I didn’t even like coffee.

Simon, Will and Neil is that you?

Recently, I read the exemplary book We Will Not Fight by Will Ellsworth-Jones on the conscientious objectors during World War I and began to sympathise with the young men who although they refused to fight were embroiled in a war of their own between their conscience and the views of their communities. I consider myself a bit of a “conchie” (read coward) and hope that it a world with professional armies and peaceful democracies I will never need take up arms as I don’t think that it would sit very well with me. Wrestling with my own worries of war I became interested in the topic and began to become very interested in the men who daily had to have white feathers pressed into their hands and the lengths that they would go either for their political, religious or moral views.  So I settled in to watch what I sure would be a witty ride through a village in 1914 that would have me equally laughing and thinking about the men who couldn’t fight in the First World War seeing them in a different light. I was disappointed.

We have a problem in the UK that we seem to glorify the horrendous conflict that occurred between 1914 and 1918 on mainland Europe that killed millions and can be argued as the first time that war was performed on an industrial scale. We call it the “Great War” and remember it with the words of Siegfried Sasoon and bibles stopping snipers bullets. We reduce it to “our boys” fighting against the evil “Hun” who ate babies and worshiped the devil. If anything we were doing France a favour by driving out the “Boche” and restoring order in mainland Europe. As Winston Churchill said: “History is written by the victors” and it’s only written that way because we won. In another reality we would hear how Germany was entitled to the same great Empire that the once great nation of Britain had and because Africa was taken and America was now on its own the only place left to invade was across the border. It was only what everyone else was doing at the time. But this isn’t a history lesson, this is a review of ‘Chickens’ (but I promise that we’ll come back to this later.)

“Conchies” didn’t just not fight out of fear, or this radical idea that killing another human being for whatever reason might not sit well on his religious or moral conscience. Often socialists out of political principals refused to shoot at their fellow man because it would be possibly killing another socialist brother. They believed (like all good “pinkos” do) that wars are fought for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. The poor and well-meaning are sent to do battle against the ideologically different and brainwashed for another either to make those back at home richer or simply prove that one system is better than the other. If the “proletariat” who would form the majority of the rank and file of the army collectively laid down their weapons it would be impossible to have a war as no matter how many bullets there were with no one to fire them it would be a very quiet front line. However, this isn’t a lesson in socialist international politics this is a review of ‘Chickens’ (but I promise that we’ll come back to this later.)

Simon Bird and Joe Thomas are very, very bright guys having both graduated from Oxford and I’m sure they know all of the above. I understand that they need to make it funny but they’ve missed a huge chance to make the comedy relevant and socially biting as well. Instead they decide to recycle their tried and tested ‘Inbetweeners’ banter. Simon (oops I mean George) is still chasing after a girl who doesn’t want to be with him, Will (oops I mean Cecil) is the well-meaning looser who just really wants to be at the front but being a little flat footed and short he has to resort to darning socks with the WI in the village, and Neil (Whoops I mean Bert) is the mentally challenged idiot who just wants to get laid. You can see the formula, and don’t get me wrong it was good the first time but it’s now time to move on. Could it be that we are actually looking at the great-grandparents of the gormless teenagers from the popular show?

Some of it is funny, but not the laugh out loud funny, or the; this is getting so awkward I’m going to have to hide behind the sofa funny. It raises a titter and nothing more. The comedy comes in the treatment that the three heroes face at the hands of the female only population of the village burning effigies of them and general snide remarks of their lack of manhood at a time when their country needs them most. The milklady is a particular favourite hurling their day’s rations at the wall of their graffiti daubed house.

Maybe because I am passionate about the subject I wanted more from the show. Less knob gags and more of a look at the endlessness of war that this century finds itself in (especially relevant as it seems that we are being sold the same story of Iraq again over the current conflict in Syria, admittedly with a little more evidence this time). Comedy after all is most successful when it says something about the times we live in, and it may be 1914 in the village but I’m sure that the parallels can’t be seen in today’s conflicts. But this is “light entertainment” so we might as well just tell a couple of jokes about how men are desperate for sex and have a little misunderstanding about a hankie. Maybe if Will’s [damn it Cecil) has a hot mom – that’d be funny wouldn’t it?!

I repent - I've indeed been a bad blogger

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

I know that there aren't many people out there who tune into this blog on the regular but for those of you who do I am really sorry that nothing has appeared over the last few weeks. It's not that I've been any busier than before I just thought that I'd give spouting drivel a rest for a while - but now I'm back and yah'll have to listen to be again!

I thought that I'd use the first blog back to update on everything that I'm doing at the moment if that's alright - I've got a few things cooking up about various bits and bobs but everything is a little half baked at the moment and I want to try and get stuff right before I put it up!

Anyhow in the style of a doctor doing their rounds these are the following prognosisis for the projects that I've been working on.

Chasing Chuck - Shouldn't even be at this hospital, it's well ready and being a little too active at times. We're hoping to have the website up by the end of the month for anyone and everyone to see! All we want now is the cash to turn it into a full feature doc!

Aftercare  - is dead, dead as a doornail at the moment. There's nothing going forward or backwards. The last feedback that I had from a contact at Talkback, after a rather promising start, was that no-one will ever make this; "it's too clever" was the main line of thought. I've never thought that could be considered much of an insult but apparently "being clever" doesn't do well on TV and despite protests of The Thick of It and Newsroom there was no reply, but no change of mind. Disappointing on all accounts but now it's time to grieve and move on.

Jezza might never get the roasting he deserves.

Dark Matter - The ambitious webseries that I'm working on with a producer and director is alive and doing well. I can't really say much about it as currently I'm sworn to secrecy by a contract but I'm about to explode with all this information running through my head. The second that I'm allowed to Facebook and Tweet about it watch out as there's going to be a social media tirade heading your way.

Between Lambs and Lions  - I was approached by a producer after last year's Enter the Pitch film competition to write a feature length version of the pitch that I put together called Between Lambs and Lions about a corrupt government in the future. I'm ever so close to the finish line I just need to really get my head around the last few scenes and I'll have another complete screenplay that I'm excited about. Basically, it's looking good but I don't want to jinx it yet by saying either way.

Sorry - but I'm trying to give nothing away

Enter the Pitch 2013 - Is just about to head in for surgery in the next month. I've been waiting a year for this operation and by gum I'm going to make the most of it. This year's pitch is again along the democracy lines that Between Lambs and Lions was last year. However, I'm now updating the message it's all about an Edward Snowdonesque whistleblower and her dilemma about is she doing the right thing in a short called Tides of Change. See a shot of the trailer here:

Sundown; First Light - There are a few more artists other than Sam on-board now but at the moment it's a little like herding cats - more chasing is required so it's a little akin to looking after grandma in a home I'm sure she's there getting on with stuff but I'm trying to keep the doors locked so that she doesn't scarper to the park to feed the ducks.

Sitcom Showdown - Now this is a baby of mine at the moment and I'm loving and caring for it in the maternity ward and it's still a little wrinkly and ugly so I don't really want to show you it yet but here's a sneak peak. Hope you like it.

Anyhow I might post something a little more serious tomorrow!

peace,