Tag Archives: film

It’s beginning to look a lot like…


… Bad Christmas Movies

My family love bad Christmas movies.

I don’t mean bad Christmas movies like Love Actually where they have the time and budget to allow the cast to do their thing and then to edit the thing properly at the end. (Many things irritate me about this film, but I love the scene where Rowan Atkinson takes forever to wrap a Christmas present.)

Nor am I talking about bad bad Christmas movies where cast and crew are are just going through the motions.

No, I’m talking about good bad Christmas movies. The sort of movie which has all the ingredients, they just don’t have time and budget to put them together properly. The sort of film where the script talks about the evil Bolton Brothers who run an evil business, but the budget only runs to one of them showing up on screen.

What I love about these films is that they understand what the audience wants and they try to deliver it.

There’s a female lead who hasn’t had a relationship for some time.

She has a best friend who tells her to put herself out there and so she heads off to a small town (possibly her home town, possibly a town in New England or Scotland, occasionally a village near a castle in a small Kingdom in Europe)

The clock starts ticking, counting down to Christmas day.

The lead meets a Prince, a Lord or a Duke in disguise. If none are available she’ll settle for a handsome carpenter who is good with kids.

For some reason there will be a baking competition.

On Christmas Eve, it will start to snow.

And then she will realise she has met her man.

I have no problem with films that follow a structure. The first stories I placed were romances, sold to UK women’s magazines.

I learned a lot by writing them: if two people are going to fall in love in a romance, you have to make them attractive both to the reader and each other. Beginner writers, when confronted by something difficult (and getting your characters right is difficult) have a habit of dodging this by changing the structure.

Changing the structure can be fantastic, but not in this case.

I saw a film called Hot Frosty recently.

In it, a lonely woman builds a snowman who comes to life. He’s a good looking guy, totally ripped with great abs. The other women are jealous of this Hot Frosty.

And all I could think was, why don’t they build their own snowman? What if they did, and the town was suddenly filled with hot snowmen? What would the regular men do?

But this wasn’t a bad SF film. It was a bad Christmas movie. People watching this film (and I include myself in this) didn’t want internal logic. If they did they wouldn’t be watching a film where a snowman came to life.

If you’re looking for some ideas on what to write over the coming weeks, then I would recommend the following: write a straight love story. Or given the time of year, write a Christmas love story. Learn the structure and follow it. It’s excellent practice.

Jack Wedderburn and the Manatees

It’s been over ten years since I wrote Dream London. Someone asked me about this scene last weekend, the one where Jack Wedderburn gets raped by the manatees. They wanted to know what was going in my mind. A fair question.

The answer is I was making a point. I’ll come to it shortly.

I’ve been watching old James Bond films while I’ve been doing the ironing. There’s a common structure to these films. James Bond will usually sleep with two women. He’ll hook up with the first about a third of the way through the film, and then around half way through he’ll come back to his hotel room to find her dead in his bed.

The second woman will be the “real” Bond girl, the big name female star. Bond have to pursue her, will probably save her from the exploding secret headquarters, and will usually end up making out with her just before the end credits.

There are two sorts of people in these films: heroes and victims. In a Bond film the first woman is an ordinary person and therefore a victim. The second woman is a hero, and therefore Bond always saves her before she is too badly mistreated.

You get the same sort of thing in the Marvel universe. Marvel heroes never suffer the consequences of their actions in the way ordinary people do. Even when heroes die, they die a heroic death. They’re never humiliated or suffer indignities in the way ordinary people do, merely to provide motivation to the heroes.

That’s why Jack Wedderburn was raped by the manatees in Dream London. I don’t like heroes, and I didn’t want Jack to make it through the story unscathed. Besides, Jack Wedderburn was an unpleasant character, one who fooled everyone by using his good looks and charm.

Many people were upset by what happened to Jack Wedderburn, they say I shouldn’t have written the scene.

Two points

1) I didn’t actually write the scene: only the lead up and aftermath is shown.
2) So called heroes don’t get special treatment in my books

One last thing. Jack Wedderburn lied about what happened to him by the manatees, and everyone believed him. It’s amazing what you can get away with if you’re good looking.