Forum Film Pitch Box: Exeposé Screen picks your Top Five ideas!

Everyone loves free cake. If you turn down free cake, it’s a definite sign that something’s wrong. You’re an alien in disguise as a human, with no understanding of this wondrous offer. Or you’re so upset about something that you don’t really notice, which is distressing because free cake would almost certainly help ease your worries. Maybe you suspect that the makers, bakers or purchasers of said cake have tampered with it, maybe they don’t look trustworthy at all…

Image Credit: Craig Browne

Exeposé Online occupied the Forum last week to promote the website and force students to participate in silly games, like Guitar Hero, which certainly doesn’t seem that heroic to us. Anyway, the free cake has already been widely publicised but you could also get involved with the Screen section by coming up with an idea for a film or TV show and dropping it in our Film Pitch Box.

We wanted your imaginations to be as crazy and colourful as possible. My feeble powers of creativity are evident from the opening paragraph of this article. I mean seriously, aliens disguised as humans? Already done to death in the Men in Black franchise and elsewhere. It’s really hard to conjure a truly unique idea for a film or TV programme out of thin air!

When we set up camp in the Forum then, we were looking for nothing less than genius. Below are the entries that you submitted in our box, followed by our Top Five picks, including our winner. All the suggestions have their merits, but obviously the Top Five have the potential to spawn lucrative movies or shows.

Enjoy! (We accept no responsibility for some of the disturbing ideas submitted…)

• I got a fever and the only cure is more Christopher Walken

• ‘Being Nicholas Cage’ a remake of ‘Being John Malkovich’

• Big Brother in the Forum

• Marketplace comedy skits – “who took the last ham sandwich Barbara?”/”Johnny. From Cricket. Thinks he’s a big cheese”

• The Dark Knight + cooking show = Ready, Steady, BAT!

• Zombies invade school – one young boy raids the sports cupboard and fights back, killing one undead bastard at a time

• Everyone takes drugs and does Takeshi’s Castle

• Cumberbatch and Fassbender making sexy eyes @ the camera

• Biopic of Ellie Swingewood

• Ben Affleck talks about beards for 2 hours

• Fifty Shades of Grey – both the guy and girl are played by Emma Watson

• Remake of Schindler’s List with every character played by Samuel L Jackson

• A soap set in a museum

• Bryan Cranston tries on hats for an hour

• Period Drama (meaning ambiguous…)

And now, the Top Five!

5) Christopher Walken is Jane Eyre – he’d be brilliant, wouldn’t he?

4) Boobs – extra points for originality. This pitcher understood that sex sells!

3) Craig Browne trying to score a slam dunk – an endless struggle against circumstance and life itself. Only an Oscar-winning actor could do this idea justice.

2) Topless Men Baking – a brilliant high concept idea, easy to summarise to potential investors and even easier on the eye for the ladies. Simon Cowell might get hold of this one.

1) War film from the perspective of a maggot – an ultimately disturbing but irresistibly dark and different idea. War films all look the same these days, but this one wouldn’t. A visionary filmmaker could make this into an abstract study of battlefield horror. Or Pixar could make it into a fun adventure story, about one maggot escaping from his grim destiny to the delights of a peaceful world…

Congratulations to Jessica Cath for submitting the winning idea. Maybe watch a comedy DVD to banish some of your demons though?

Behold a poster for your film…

Image credit: soil-net.com

La Haine (Hate) for World Cinema?

It was after having seen a review of Lore, a film depicting Germany’s devastation in the immediate aftermath of World War Two, focusing on the children of Nazi supporters whose beliefs are challenged by their dependence on a Jewish refugee, that I broached the possibility of seeing it with a housemate one evening. However, his initial ambivalence quickly turned to an outright no, as soon as I explained that it was a non-Hollywood German language movie and would consequently be subtitled.

 

Image Credit: Rotten Tomatoes

On asking the other four of my housemates whether they’d rather see the latest Die Hard movie, Argo or Lore, to see if this was a shared feeling, three of them chose the Hollywood option. In addition, all had never heard of Lore, and one went so far as to say that he’d rather kill himself than choose either option (but that if he had to choose, it would be Die Hard). Well at least that technically isn’t a vote for Hollywood then.

So why does there seem to be at best, apathy, to World Cinema (films from non-English speaking countries, often in a foreign language) and at worst, aversion?

 

For many people, going to the cinema is a form of escapism. They want to enjoy the spectacle. They want to find themselves lost in a fictional world away from a rosy reality of unemployment, a rising cost of living and one star rated local food establishments (here’s looking at you Mega Kebab).

 

This isn’t to say that this experience is impossible with a foreign subtitled movie, far from it in fact. La Haine (Hate) is a striking, gritty portrayal of the struggles of three friends from different ethnic backgrounds living in the banlieues of Paris. The extensive use of argot (slang) and verlan (inversion of syllables in words to create slang) alone allows an insight into a marginalized part of French culture that just could not be replicated in an English language Hollywood context.

 

Despite this, if we consider the top 20 films released in the UK and Ireland in 2010 according to the BFI, there is not one World cinema film in the list.

 

This is not surprising though after a brief comparison of Exeter’s three main cinemas (Odeon, Vue and Picturehouse). Of the three, only Picturehouse in a given week will be screening World cinema. From Thursday 7^th March to the following Thursday, only one World cinema film from this year (Lore, although released at festivals in 2012) in terms of widespread release, is being screened.

 

Three other World cinema films from the last four years are being screened too: Amour, Eleanor’s Secret and Long Live the Family, each with one screening. This amounts to a mere seven screenings out of a total 60 of over ten films. At least they are being screened; in fact, they are over-represented if we consider the lack of screenings at other cinema chains and the total absence of World cinema in the BFI list.

 

A preconceived notion of World cinema as being intellectual and pretentious is culpable for this almost automatic rejection of World cinema. This is then perpetuated by a tendency of sacrificing the screening of popular mainstream World cinema films – already suffering from a lack of exposure due to inadequate distribution – in favour of art-house (independent, non-conventional and intentionally non-mainstream films) World cinema, which fit this notion. A notable exception here is Amélie, which was intended for an international audience and demonstrates the great success that World cinema, in particular popular World cinema, can have with adequate distribution.

 

Regardless, when faced with a choice between the next installment in a popular series with a favourite actor or a relatively unknown foreign movie, the average person is going to choose what they are comfortable with.

 

Nevertheless, I remain hopeful that in the future, World cinema will account for a much greater percentage of British weekly screenings and that they will feature in the yearly top 20… even if this would still have no impact on my housemates and possibly result in the end for one of them.

 

Benjamin Lewis