Arsenic and Old Lace

Apart from epics, great films are, at base, rom coms or thrillers. You might find exceptions pretty easily but I think that's a starting point for a theory of endurable films. To make a canonical film, you need to have a love story or a thriller plot. Think of the great comedies from classic films. …

The Girl from Andros, Terence

This would make an excellent basis for a modern comedy about arranged marriage. The lead character should be changed to a woman, who is secretly pregnant, so that when she reveals her pregnancy, or proves it with a test, at the end, there is no need for the resolution to come from the citizenship question, …

Mean Girls and Shakespeare

The Folger Shakespeare Library podcast recently interviewed Ian Doescher, who has rewritten Mean Girls as if it were a Shakespearean play. In the podcast he says he sees Cady as a Miranda figure, Regina as Kate from The Taming of the Shrew and Regina's mother as Lady Macbeth. Which Shakespeare play is Mean Girls most like? The obvious …

When Harry met Sally was nearly crap

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBqRyPiDJ9k Like I said, we're all rooting for a wedding.

When Harry Met Sally

The smart move this film made was to show us H&S after they got married. Traditionally we don't get that. I believe there's a Bridget Jones sequel about the grim reality of the washing up. Usually though 'every happy plot ends with the marriage knot', as the lyricist tells us. We see H&S talking about their …

Dead to me

Hats off to Netflix. The comedy-crime genre isn't easy. Just when it starts to feel like the plot is sagging, they end the episode and you start negotiating with your wife how many episodes you can binge that evening. You will not predict the ending.

What I’ve been reading

King of the Badgers. The sort of book I am bored of in theory but enjoy in practice. Crisp social comedy about a small town with two halves. Funny and well done, realistic, sharp, a little snobbish. But how many more of these books do we need? The subject matter means it was worth writing. I …

Penelope Fitzgerald: ‘The Beginning of Spring’, ‘Offshore’.

PF has to be read slowly and with real concentration. She is one of the most concise fiction writers in English, along with Evelyn Waugh. Imagine whole novels written with the concentration of the first two pages of Decline and Fall, but with much subtler wit. She lacks E. M. Forster's civilised waffle. It's hard to imagine …

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Finally got round to reading this. It's very short and remains one of the most anthologized short stories in America. It's surprisingly badly written, until you realise it's about genre. Mitty's dreams are all cliched versions of genre stories: the hero pilot, the miracle surgeon, the indifferent killer. The cliched language is another way of …