Plotting to have Christopher Nolan make a rom-com next...

Plotting to have Christopher Nolan make a rom-com next... But who plants the seed ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

26 August

Plotting to have Christopher Nolan make a rom-com next... But who plants the seed ?

Which is Christopher Nolan going to be riffing on more :

Sliding Doors (1998) - or the Lynch of The Lost Highway (1997) or Mulholland Drive (2001) ?

Meanwhile, #UCFF is using considerable stealth to implant the idea that Nolan should make 'a rom-com' :https://t.co/LZbUQBk5Wn https://t.co/lirgX9vpkc

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 28, 2020

Nolan heard it from Lilly first* : Chris, are you really writing a rom-com ?

Signed, as long as it's not in the vein of Richard Curtis in About Time (2013) ! ;)

But maybe making Nikolai Leskov's 'Lady Macbeth' into a comedy, told from the PoV of the cat (dreamt of in chapters 6 and 7) - and channelling Zinovy Ismailov's much-overlooked witticisms ?

->

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 26, 2020

This is a far more detailed script treatment than I expected, so you've basically just been greenlit.

— Sarah Parkin (@SarahParkin1) August 26, 2020

Signed, sealed and delivered* :)

'Uncork the champagne, Violet !'

* In accordance with s. 1 Law of Property (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1989. pic.twitter.com/CcXMB1yoNT

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 26, 2020

Cypher : It means fasten your seat-belt, Dorothy, cos Kansas is going bye-bye !

End-notes :

* Or was it Lana... ?


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Preparing for death or Living well

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

14 March

Out of an honourable sense of duty, you have performed the 5005 required acts of reading, listening to songs, cinema-going, and travel around the world to view buildings and 'natural wonders'. (Your doctor kindly exempted you from the 2002 meals and sex-acts with which the same sense troubled you*.)

They were all a prerequisite to dying, and although you are not - worn down though you are by reading, listening to songs, cinema-going, and travel around the world to view buildings and 'natural wonders' - ready to die on one level, on another you could now happily and dutifully 'peg out'**.

So, to start setting your affairs in order, you go to sell off the invaluable books that have told you what 5005 acts to perform, and, with a neat - if fairly hefty - pile of them by your laptop, you search to find out what to ask for the first of them, your pristine copy of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die***.

Yet, nice though yours is, it weighs probably at least 2 kilogrammes and the cost of posting it, despite an allowance of £2.80, even so cuts well into the modest amount that lesser specimens are set to fetch. Puzzled, you try the same thing with another - very similar - title, whose ISBN is obscured by a luggage-label (which ended up there during your world-tour), and realize that the book about 'natural wonders' is out in a new edition.

Out of duty, you put just that one for now into your basket (although you establish that two other books are in new editions) and buy it. In what seems like minutes, it arrives, and you flick through idly first of all, but that becomes a horrified realization that there are now other wonders that you must see, if all is to be well with your death, and that, also, some that you thought were wonders could not have been so wonderful after all, because they are not in this edition.

You spent at least £10,000 just watching the films alone, let alone all spending on those books, the travel, the downloads... And must you now seek out, amongst that magical tally of 1001****, the new things in the new editions that they say constitute constituent parts of that figure?

No, for you infer that, as it is an almost Sisyphean task, you must, after all, be immortal - immortal, but penniless through having had to go through all this expense to find the truth, and with an eternity to face!

In the face of the intense mixture of elation and regret, so your body deems it apt to call time for you: the books stay piled up by the laptop, and your copy of 1001 Natural Wonders You Must See Before You Die remains lying open, for some reason, at The Hanging Gardens of Babylon.


End-notes

* And you, thankfully, did not even know that you were also required to listen to as many albums, and also to play video games.

** A term that, without reference to any (other) authority, I shall allege has its origins in croquet. (After all, Lewis Carroll loved croquet.)

*** Those who wish to know in detail what list Nithan Palal created can go to Movies I Watched Before Dying.

**** The 1001 Nights?


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