The wind that shakes the barley

I went to see this on Monday night at the Duke of York, the first time I'd been to that cinema since I saw The Corporation last year. It's after winning the Palme D'Or at Cannes, something that was somewhat filtered out by the insufferable vanity of the critics the night I saw the coverage of the festival.

The first time I saw a Ken Loach film (Sweet Sixteen), I was struck by how realistic the dialogue was, how much it was stripped of theatre and drama, and how it reflected, pretty much more than anything else I'd seen at the time, how conversation between people flows in real life, complete with hiccups, pauses, and misdeclarations. There was also the fact that, in order to stay true to the working-class Glaswegian accents, it was necessary to subtitle parts of the film.

This was interesting in a different way. Set in a part of Cork not a million miles from where I live (the county council of Mallow, amongst others, was thanked in the closing credits), it follows the story of a group of young Irishmen who set up the first resistance movements in response to the oppression of the Black and Tans. The Cork accents were spot on. Thick, but not staged, if you get my drift, like. It then followed the split that happened in their ranks in the aftermath of the acceptance of the Treaty. It followed almost exactly the same timeline as Neil Jordan's Michael Collins, but in many ways it couldn't have been more different.

Loach's credentials as socialist are on quite the display here - watch out for the scene where Cillian Murphy and Liam Cunningham's characters meet for the first time - but it's the right context in which to show them. I have to wonder at how he gets the nuances of speech, character, and stage set right when so many other directors can get it wrong, or at the very least be hamfisted about it. A non-Irish director making one of the most authentic Irish films out there is quite an achievement.

So. Go see.

All this reminds me of a screenplay I started work on a while back, back in the summer of 2003. As is often the case with many things in my life, it ended up being put on the backburner, but ideas for it still come and go in my mind, and about a month ago, I re-read it. I expected to cringe, but it wasn't half as bad as I thought it may have been. Then again, I had only written the opening scene.

The greek chap I met recently told me that I should write a screenplay as a book first, and then, after going on a crash course on scriptwriting, adapt it for the screen. I'm not sure about this, and I'm even less sure if I should embark on something like this without at least reading in general a bit more first, but maybe I might just throw caution to the wind, do a Kerouac on it and stay up for days pounding on the keyboard non-stop.

Anyway, I have so far come up with the following:

a) It'll be set in the gay community of a major american coastal city. Surprise!

b) There will be bears.

c) There will be sex between the bears.

d) To balance things out, there will be lesbians, and sex between them. I've already thought about casting Kristanna Loken, Leelee Sobieski, and Chiaki Kuriyama in this regard.

e) The main character will be a dashing bearish writer-in-waiting in the throes of an existential 30-something crisis (he doesn't want to work, or at least not for a living, in the way that everyone else does). In an attempt to arrive at some resolution, he will sleep with lots of other bears. This will be in the film. A bit like the portrayal of Charles Bukowski in Barfly, except instead of hard liquor, the drug of choice will be hard...Oh, you get the picture.

f) As a counterpoint to this modern-day rendition of Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, the other main character will be a renegade lesbian pharmacist who supplies the Bear Who Is Not Of This World with drugs, an Albert Hoffman to his Aldous Huxley, if you will. I decided a long time ago that the only actress who could possibly play this role would be Jennifer Connelly. I will accept no substitutes. It also provides me with motivation to stay on my degree course, so that I can ...erm.. research certain things a little more.

f) Aphex Twin and/or Philip Glass are amongst those under consideration for soundtrack duties.

Are you getting this, Harvey Weinstein? Cash or cheque acceptable.

Anyway, now I must go to bed as I have a headache.