Stoker

Oldboy director Park Chan-wook makes his American debut with a suitably twisted  tale of an alienated teenage girl’s growing suspicion of the motives of her  newly discovered relative, Uncle Charlie.

India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) is a bright but withdrawn teenager whose  beloved father (Dermot Mulroney) dies on her 18^th birthday. However,  his death is immediately followed by the arrival of his brother Charlie (Matthew  Goode); whose existence comes as a complete surprise to India. Her mother Evelyn  (Nicole Kidman) explains that Charlie has spent the past 20 years travelling the  globe on geological surveys and was estranged from his brother Richard. Charlie  decides to stay on at the Stoker Mansion and while Evelyn throws herself at him,  India maintains an aloof distance. But the mysterious disappearance of their  housekeeper Mrs McGarrick (Phyllis Somerville) followed by a visit from her  grand-aunt Gwendolyn (Jacki Weaver), who warns India to be wary of Charlie,  arouses her suspicions about Charlie’s shadowy past. She soon has concerns about  his present intentions as they start bonding…

Stoker looks and sounds amazing. The  colours are rich, and Park does amazing things with ambient sound; consistently  pushed to the foreground to incredibly unsettling effect giving the film a  sustained intensity of unease. One stunning moment in which the camera circles a  character, following a belt being deafeningly pulled off, creates an effect akin  to hearing the tell-tale warning before a rattlesnake strike. Park doesn’t hold  back on the Hitchcockian flourishes; the camera swoops away and pushes in  dramatically, observes characters eavesdropping, generates suspense from the  mere framing of innocuous dialogue scenes, and even features a memorably  diabolic shower scene. Park teases the audience magnificently, holding on back  on information at key points, and then complicating our interpretation of  certain images with additional back-story. Even performing a simple piano duet  written by Philip Glass becomes a deliriously transgressive experience.

But there’s a flipside… Wentworth Miller’s original screenplay lifts a  number of elements from Hitchcock’s 1943 classic Shadow of a Doubt, but doesn’t pilfer such  crucial traits as a sympathetic protagonist, likeable antagonist, believable  characters, or sustained ambiguity. I’m not sure a film set in Connecticut can  really claim to be part of the Southern Gothic literary tradition as it’s been  positioned, and in any case this is more Shadow  of a Doubt by way of Dexter than  Flannery O’Connor. And this isn’t just me seeing Dexter everywhere; as probably the most  original show of the last decade it’s unsurprising that ideas from it are  percolating. But Dexter DNA doesn’t  include ciphers masquerading as people. Goode’s unblinking Charlie is positively  reptilian, Wasikowska’s India is totally deadened, and Kidman’s Evelyn a mere  melodramatic type. The result is an anti-Hitchcockian emotional detachment.

Miller’s script rocked the Black List in 2010 but it’s the weakest link in  Park’s accomplished film, which lacks his Korean movies’ visceral punch.

3/5

Warm Bodies

Nicholas Hoult apropos of Shaun of the Dead’s marketing shows us what a proper ‘zom-rom-com’ looks like, and it looks much like any other rom-com.

R (Hoult) is a hoodie-wearing slacker who lives at an abandoned airport, listens to his extensive vinyl collection on a private jet, slouches at a bar with his best friend (Robb Corddry), and from time to time shuffles into the city for some fresh human brains. As zombies are wont to do… Julie (Teresa Palmer) is the jaded daughter of General Grigio (John Malkovich), the hardliner entrusted with safeguarding the walled city. Sent into the dead zone with her boyfriend (Dave Franco) and best friend (Analeigh Tipton) to scavenge for medicine she’s ambushed by R’s pack, but he chooses not to eat her and classic rom-com structure develops. Will she love him when she finds out his secret is that he ate her previous boyfriend? And what exactly has changed in R that makes him capable of such human feelings?

So, how do you make zombies sexy? You don’t, you make them not zombies. A perfectly sound solution but you’d hope that someone of the calibre of writer/director Jonathan Levine (The Wackness, 50/50) would’ve gone deeper. Hoult’s voiceover is nicely sardonic, especially in his delightful scene-setting monologue, but if you’ve seen any episode of Dexter you’re wise to some of its tricks already. Corddry is damn good in support portraying seemingly impossible emotional ‘exhumation’, and Tipton has a wonderfully comic awkward exchange with Hoult in slacker shrugging. Palmer though struggles not to come off as simply blonde Bella Swann at critical moments… Ultimately Warm Bodies just cheats too much for its own good. Levine, in his first PG-13 outing, has to neuter the zombies’ appearance and behaviour, so that they don’t alienate with Romero-style bloody dismemberments of living human victims.

This is a difficult balancing act given the film’s brilliant innovative touch; that eating brains allows zombies to experience the memories of the human they’re munching on; powers the unlikely romance. Levine thus unveils a CGI version of Ray Harryhausen’s skeleton army as Boneys, the bad zombies who always eat people, and in one instance attack in a sequence lifted from I, Robot. At a certain point though the featured zombies aren’t really zombies anymore; more people who are so very, very, very drunk that they can no longer remember with certainty their own names or where they live, and find it equally challenging to think of things to say and then articulate the words intelligibly. Montreal is brilliantly rendered as post-apocalyptic wasteland but this is just an amusing rom-com – the power of love is the ‘cure’ for ‘zombieism’…

It seems George Romero’s heroes instead of going in for head-shots should have just stood with a boom-box over their own heads blasting out Huey Lewis and the News.

2.5/5

Seven Psychopaths

Martin McDonagh suffers from difficult second film syndrome as his unfocused follow-up to In Bruges falls between the stools of straightforward black comedy and meta-meditation.

Marty (Colin Farrell) is a drunken Irish screenwriter living in Los Angeles and wrestling with his high-concept film about the nature of love and evil, Seven Psychopaths. His long-suffering girlfriend (Abbie Cornish) is reaching the end of her tether putting up with Marty, not helped by constant visits from his deranged friend Billy (Sam Rockwell); an actor with a penchant for blowing auditions by punching people and ‘helping’ Marty with research on psychopaths. Billy also has a sideline of kidnapping purebred dogs and letting his dog-loving friend Hans Kieslowksi (Christopher Walken) look after them and then return them and collect the reward which they split. But when Billy makes the mistake of kidnapping a dog belonging to mobster Charlie (Woody Harrelson) all hell breaks loose. Charlie quickly identifies the dognappers, and so Marty, Billy, and Hans run for the hills.

It’s tempting to say that the best scene in this movie is the opening scene, because it’s such pure undiluted McDonagh. Michael Pitt and fellow Boardwalk Empire star Michael Stuhlbarg are jumpy hit-men waiting for their target who get into a furious and dementedly logical argument about the marksmanship that killed Dillinger. Tempting, but there are scenes of that calibre scattered throughout the movie. A Gandhi aphorism is dismantled for being illogical, Billy imitates Marty’s Irish accent with truly atrocious results, Marty freaks out when his drinking is condemned as problematic by a character high on peyote, and there is a sublime moment of paralysis involving the great Zeljko Ivanek (rocking a truly terrible moustache as Charlie’s mob lieutenant) when someone refuses to put up their hands because they don’t want to; leaving Ivanek holding a gun and feeling foolish.

But this is a scattershot movie. Marty’s screenplay keeps the film shooting off on tangents, about Quaker stalkers and homicidal Buddhists, which add little. Tom Waits, as a Dexter of the 1960s adds an amazingly gruesome thread of sadistic violence, even by Dexter standards. Abbie Cornish is pointlessly underused, as are Olga Kurylenko and Gabourey Sidibe; something referenced in criticism of Marty’s inability to write decent female characters. But surely writing a complex heroine, which McDonagh has done in his plays, would be a better tactic? McDonagh as playwright can generate unease like Pinter, comedy like Orton, and heightened language like Synge. But, bar a fraught scene with Charlie in a hospital waiting for Hans, this script fails to generate suspense. The desert finale is visually interesting, but the self-referential scripting can’t escape structural convention.

McDonagh has some interesting ideas, and even self-critique, in this script; but as a movie it wants to have its cake and eat it too, and so it never hits the heights it could.

3/5

Breaking Dawn: Part I

Respected writer/director Bill Condon takes the helm of the good ship Twilight, and surprisingly runs it onto the rocks of tonal inconsistency and painful protraction.

This is a film of three parts, each deeply flawed. First Edward and Bella get married in an incredibly prolonged section. The sublime Billy Burke has a number of wonderful comedic moments as Bella’s father. He snipes with Bella’s mother Sarah Clarke, instantly notices the wall of graduation caps the Cullens suspiciously possess, and gives a deliriously pointed wedding speech. Edward and Bella then fly to a private island off Rio for their honeymoon in an incredibly prurient section. Bella wants to be turned after the honeymoon, a decision Jacob doesn’t take too well, given Edward’s super-strength. Edward is equally concerned about the ‘Man of Steel, Woman of Tissue’ conundrum, though bizarrely his focus for potential lethal injury is her arms and shoulders, and he knocks Bella up while knocking her about in bed and destroying the room. Edward’s dumbstruck horror at this unplanned pregnancy sees Robert Pattinson set a high benchmark for comedy reaction shots for others to follow.

Bella returns to the Cullen house to deliver her vampire child, in the final section of the film. Sam, leader of the wolf pack, declares this abomination a violation of the treaty and encircles the Cullen house. Jacob insists on protecting Bella against them, but her all-devouring baby might kill her first as Kristen Stewart wastes away impressively. There’re wonderful comedic moments for the Cullens, surrounded by werewolves and desperate for blood, as well as some presumably politico-allegorical strife between Alice who refers to the foetus while Rosalie refers to the baby. Fellow werewolf Leah tells Jacob “Happiness of any kind is better than being miserable over someone you can never have” but this is countermanded by the pregnant Bella’s bizarre statement to Jacob, “It feels complete with you here”, as Edward looks aghast at this Jules and Jim proposition. The heavily-flagged werewolf ‘imprinting’ sequence is actually effective, but its first shot is so unintentionally funny as to undercut it.

Any notion that splitting the finale was an artistic rather than a commercial decision is dispelled by this film not reaching the 2 hour mark yet, like The Art of Getting By, being farcically padded with pointless montages in the hope that mediocre pop songs will disguise that sod all really happens. Melissa Rosenberg, Dexter producer and screenwriter of the entire saga, enjoys herself with a flashback revealing that a rebellious Edward killed murderers, a monster that killed monsters, as he dubs himself. Just in case you didn’t get the reference Dexter’s brother (Christian Camargo) shows up at the wedding as Edward’s cousin, accompanied by a blink and you’ll miss her Maggie Grace. Film though is a director’s medium. Condon starts promisingly with a self-referential gag as Edward kills someone during Bride of Frankenstein, featured in Condon’s biopic of its director James Whale. But thereafter Condon’s lethargic tone-deaf direction seems to say “This is beneath me, but it pays well”.

David Slade’s approach to directing Eclipse, by contrast, seemed to be saying “This is a great opportunity, and I can make it plenty nasty”. Slade of course had a better plot to work with, because Eclipse had a plot, but Condon renders the honeymoon sequence excruciating to watch with its Austin Powers choreography and unarticulated sexual nervousness, while the tartness Slade brought to handling the love triangle is largely absent throughout. Condon only achieves the required supernatural nastiness, which Hardwicke and Slade used to ground the eyelid-fluttering lip-biting romance, in the closing horror scenes which seem to be as gory as the rating allows, with the final image being cheered at my screening. But that final image sums up the film: you can see it coming for about 90 seconds but Condon still builds up to it very, very slowly – laziness or high camp?

Condon moves into Whale pastiche with his campy ending, credits and post-credits sequence – offering hope that a Fassbendering British actor might save the final film.

2/5

Justice

Nicolas Cage gets involved in vigilantism masterminded by an increasingly sinister Guy Pearce but director Roger Donaldson doesn’t tighten the Hitchcockian screws.

Nicolas Cage plays ye typically inspirational English teacher at ye typically deprived inner city high school in New Orleans. He’s married to January Jones’ cellist and plays chess with his principal and good friend Harold Perrineau. And then a rapist brutally attacks Jones, and at the hospital a shaven-headed Guy Pearce approaches Cage with an offer of true justice – in return for owing a small favour at an unspecified date in the future to Pearce’s shadowy organisation. Cage of course soon discovers such favours include not just surveillance or logistics but a murder in return, and, as the net tightens, finds himself running from the police over a murder he didn’t commit, estranged from his wife who’s convinced he’s keeping something from her, and subject to wonderfully justified paranoia as Pearce’s organisation seems to pervade every strata of New Orleans.

Pearce’s introduction recalls Steed offering a hospital surgeon help in avenging his wife’s murder in The Avengers pilot, and Mr Chapel in Vengeance Unlimited offering victims a chance to get even at the cost of a million dollars or a favour, while there’s also a touch of the Twilight Zone in that the person you just killed may not actually have been guilty of anything – but now you sure are. Cage reins in his craziness for the most part but effectively channels his eccentricities into portraying the increasing nerviness of a peaceful man forced into violent confrontation after violent confrontation. This time the bad lieutenant is the always great Xander Berkeley who may be utterly corrupt or perversely honourable somehow. Dexter’s Jennifer Carpenter is criminally underused as Jones’ best friend, but Harold Perrineau fares better in another studiedly ambiguous turn.

Roger Donaldson (No Way Out, 13 Days) is a good director experienced in paranoia, but raw material that Hitchcock would have relished exploiting for suspense and black comedy is perfunctorily rushed through. The escalation of Pearce’s machinations invokes Strangers on a Train’s trading of murders to elude detection, and the fact that no one can be trusted, that whistle-blowing journalists, trustworthy cops, anyone at all could suddenly mutter the Edmund Burke derived shibboleth “The hungry rabbit jumps” and reveal themselves to be part of the organisation is prime Hitch. The best wasted set-up is Cage breaking into a newspaper office, and then having to walk through the distribution bay where his face is on every front page… Donaldson instead prioritises shoot-outs, chases and unlikely action-man heroics.

This is solidly entertaining, but feels far longer than its running time. The great high concept so obviously buried in here but failed by the execution honestly just frustrates me too much to give it the 3 stars it probably deserves for about scraping being good.

2/5

Troll Hunter

Since the 1970s there has been only one man in all Norway who dares to fight in the Hall of the Mountain King, who possesses the strength and skill to defeat the Tosserlads and Jotnars. He is Hans – the Troll Hunter!

Three kids from Volda College try to make a documentary about a series of unusual bear deaths but things get wildly out of hand when they try to surreptitiously film a man they suspect of being a bear-poacher… There’s a healthy feel of Cloverfield in how one actor is unseen for most of the ‘found footage’ as he’s stuck behind the camera filming events, and how despite nightmarish encounters the need to ‘document’ overcomes the need to survive. There’s also a solid three act structure to be retrospectively found in the ramshackle series of events, with an amazingly logical maguffin unveiled at the end. The moment when the students are surprised by the panicked ‘poacher’ running past them shouting “Troll!” is reminiscent of the episode of Supernatural where the Winchester brothers explode into the home-movies of amateur occultists filming their own terrible pilot Ghostfacers! And just as the Winchesters took the Ghostfacers (!) under their wing to fight scary monsters, Hans allows the students a peek behind the curtain.

Be forewarned that first glimpse of a troll is a bit disappointing after some truly wonderful sound effects, but as the film proceeds the trolls become scary because of how large and stupidly vicious they are. The battle with an aggressive Ringelfinch on a bridge is a supremely scary encounter, complete with a Jurassic Park homage as the troll-hunter uses a goat for bait to the dismay of the vegetarian boom-operator. Otto Jespersen is wonderful as Hans, equally battle-weary and stoically efficient. The scene-stealing character though is Finn Haugan, the hapless bureaucrat (with a curiously Irish sounding name) heading the Troll Security Service whose unenviable job is covering up Hans’ activity, with the help of extremely dodgy Polish bear-hunters (who cause more problems than they solve) and nonsensical press releases.

Writer/director Andre Ovredal make wonderful use of pseudo-science in explaining how trolls turn to stone when exposed to sunlight or the rig of UV bulbs our hero keeps on top of his car and is quite remarkably adept at mixing comedy and horror. A wonderful running gag utilising the legend of Trolls being able to smell the blood of a Christian man becomes intensely suspenseful, even as it satirically skewers the tyranny of Dawkins and his ilk in removing religion from ‘liberal’ public discourse. The finale has an incredible sense of peril as our heroes attack the 200 ft giant Jotnar with a jeep as robust against this creature as the mosquito in the opening credits is against Dexter.

Troll Hunter isn’t on wide release but its mordant horror deserves the widest possible audience.

4/5

The Morpheus Solution

I’d been waiting to see the resolution of the cliff-hanger of season 10 of CSI: LV before finishing this piece; only for Deadline.com to announce, on the very day that the first episode of season 11 aired on RTE, that Laurence Fishburne would not be returning for season 12…

This is a pity, because the writers did a creditable job of solving the Morpheus Problem. To recap, CBS undertook research to see why fans weren’t reacting well to Laurence Fishburne replacing William Petersen. The response, “We’d like to see Ray in more of a leadership role”, was code for “We’d like to see Morpheus being Morpheus…” Grissom had passed the torch to criminology professor Dr Ray Langston, but explicitly invited him to apply for the Level 1 CSI vacancy. Catherine Willows became the new supervisor of the night shift while Fishburne waltzed into first billing, but as the new rookie. Ray’s medical background allowed him attend autopsies with coroner Dr Robbins as Grissom did, before the writers outrageously jump-started a new dynamic by having Ray and Doc Robbins go on a road-trip to fight crime – while listening to their beloved blues records. Some Morpheus was added to the mix as a baffling case was solved by Ray’s knowledge of ancient Greek history and philosophy. But the real problem was that Fishburne was too big a screen presence to play the lowest ranked person. I asked if Ray could really take on a leadership role without wreaking chaos on the internal logic of 9 seasons of CSI?

The first episode of season 10 saw the writers use some neat tricks and some wilful blindness to solve this conundrum. A nice gag saw Morpheus Ray kung-fu kicking a man thru a glass window in a bullet-time pan around the entire lab as it was raided by Russian mobsters stealing a corpse from the morgue in the cold open. The episode then played out the events leading up to this daring raid and we learnt in conversation with Ecklie that Ray had taken many classes, “You’ve had quite the busy summer … You’re already two courses over your training allotment for the year”, “I know, and that is why I paid for them, and took my vacation to do them”, and so is promoted to Level 2 CSI in record time. Indeed we actually see Ray at this start of this dialogue training himself to recognise knife-wounds in a remarkably Zen manner, before later selflessly volunteering for a boring assignment when Greg whines about being pulled off a celebrity car-crash.

That incident where Greg pulls rank on Ray on being reassigned before Nick restores order is pivotal. Lauren Lee Smith’s Riley has quit, and Ecklie upbraids Catherine for Greg’s insubordination, “This is a discipline problem. I’m beginning to think that Riley was right about you”, “What is that supposed to mean?”, “You didn’t read her exit interview? I put it on your desk! Just read it!” Riley had scathingly questioned Catherine’s ability to lead, but the returned Sara Sidle suggests that all Catherine lacks is a No 2 as good for her as she was for Grissom, and so Nick is promoted to assistant supervisor. The re-introduction of Sara restores one of the missing trinity that the show had lost in quick succession (Sara/Warrick/Grissom) and her intervention encourages Catherine to let her subordinates have the freedom to improvise, and Ray immediately does just that, cryptically promising his superior, “I’ll tell you if I can prove it”, as he searches for the subcutaneous bruising that proves the celebrity car-crash was a staged murder; by the ever wonderful Garrett Dillahunt’s shady private security operative Tom O’Neill. Ray’s determination solves this case, suggesting that this mental re-shuffle of their characters by the writers has had its desired effect.

The introduction of Dr Jekyll at the end of this episode was a bold move, echoing as it did the only previous season-arc villain (The Miniature Killer in season 7) by giving Langston a villain who was his own particular nemesis. Just as season 7 had seen an increasingly obsessed Grissom build a miniature model of his own office before taking a teaching sabbatical as the case got to him, season 10’s arc storyline became the increasingly obsessive struggle between Dr Langston, the hospital administrator who’d been conned by an Angel of Death surgeon back East, and a demented surgeon given to performing grotesque farces of lethal unnecessary operations, like tying a victim’s organs up in a bow, or giving someone a second appendix. Dr Jekyll is as about as disturbing a killer as you can get on network TV. Actually given that Showtime’s loveably twisted Dexter ran screaming from using the villain Dr Denko from Jeff Lindsay’s second novel Dearly Devoted Dexter for their second season he’s probably about as disturbing a killer as you can get on TV period.

The writers also cleverly introduced another Grissom parallel. Nick tries to talk Langston through guilt about the shoot-out at the end of season 9, “It was killed or be killed Ray, it’s a terrible situation to be in, you can’t let it bother you”, “It hasn’t been bothering me, and that’s what’s been bothering me”. Langston became increasingly haunted by the thought that he shares his father’s genetic predisposition to violence. This fleshing out of his character brought him twice into conflict with unsuspecting and uncomprehending DNA expert Wendy, and paid off wonderfully twice; when it led to a flashpoint with a surgeon in a hospital whose face Ray slammed into a wall after one taunt too many about the superiority of surgeons to administrators, and when it pointed a huge finger of suspicion at Ray in the penultimate episode of the season as possibly having murdered a journalist investigating Dr Jekyll, or even actually being Dr Jekyll himself unawares. All this beautifully invited comparison with Grissom, who was also in denial of his own genetic predisposition – to deafness.

In addition Nick and Ray formed a partnership that effectively resuscitated the old Nick/Warrick dynamic, while also cleverly guaranteeing Ray an ‘in’ to the most interesting cases. The penultimate episode replicated Grissom’s suspension from a high-profile case in the season 1 finale, and then saw Nick break that to run the investigation from Ray’s house, just as Catherine had done with Grissom way back when. Fishburne wasn’t stepping into Gary Dourdan’s shoes though but using his own persona. An early episode in season 10 involving a possible racist white cop killing a black cop saw Ray walk into the CSI lab’s rest-room during a heated discussion. Ray was the only black person in the room but he unexpectedly eased a scene suddenly fraught with racial tension by saying racism didn’t come into play in split-second shootings. He then tried to stop the suicidal white cop killing himself at the end of the episode. It this all-encompassing compassion that more than anything else links Ray to Grissom, so that serial killer Nate Haskell in the finale asked Ray what happened to Grissom, and was convincing when he sagely muttered “You’ve replaced him…”

Fishburne like Petersen is now the quiet heart of the crime-lab, quietly comforting all who need counsel.

Mark Pellegrino gets ambitious

INT.HOLLYWOOD OFFICE-DAY
DELANEY, an agent to the stars, well, minor actors, sits at his desk lovingly watering his potted plant while MARK PELLEGRINO, seated opposite him, complains…

PELLEGRINO: I just…it feels like I’m stuck in a rut, you know.
DELANEY: A rut? Don’t I get you roles in good stuff? Didn’t Capote win Oscars? Doesn’t Dexter win Golden Globes?
PELLEGRINO: Yeah, and I’m glad to be in good stuff but…I’m getting typed. What was I playing in Capote? The second-string killer from In Cold Blood. What was I playing in Dexter? Rita’s strung-out abusive ex-husband. I don’t want to become the go-to guy for down the bill vicious rednecks. I’d even shave if that would help…
DELANEY: Is this an ego thing? You want to be a regular now?
PELLEGRINO: No, it’s not a credits thing. I just want something, bigger, you know.
DELANEY: Bigger?
PELLEGRINO: Yeah, (mimes with his hands) BIGGER.
DELANEY: So, okay, bigger, okay, so you want something like Jake La Motta, something where you can bulk up like De Niro for the part? Be bigger-
PELLEGRINO: No, not physically bigger you idiot.
DELANEY: -Because I could still get you an audition for the Blob in Wolverine if you want to go full-on method to get attention.
PELLEGRINO: No, no! Not… (pause) Why do I keep paying you?
DELANEY: Some deranged sense of loyalty?
PELLEGRINO: (sighs) I don’t want to gain weight you moron, try to understand me. When I say bigger I really mean, loftier, you know. Some role where I don’t have to explain what my part was, and then have people go ‘oh’, and think ‘vicious redneck, I can see that’. I want a character whose name speaks for itself. I don’t mean get me Macbeth-
DELANEY: What’s Macbeth?
PELLEGRINO: (pretends he didn’t hear that) I just mean get me something that’s a bit classier than the seedy thugs I’ve been playing with distinction and sensitivity.
DELANEY: So, still a small supporting role, not a regular, but lofty.
PELLEGRINO: Lofty, you know.
DELANEY: Lofty, yeah, I getcha.
PELLEGRINO: So, do you think you can get me something lofty?
DELANEY: Sure, no problem.
PELLEGRINO: Good, good. Thanks Delaney.
(Exit Pellegrino)
(Delaney waits a few beats, dives into his desk, and emerges with a dictionary)
DELANEY: ‘Lofty’…

INT. HOLLYWOOD OFFICE-DAY
DELANEY sits at his desk lovingly watering his potted plant while MARK PELLEGRINO, seated opposite him, looks expectantly at him…

TITLE: 2 MONTHS LATER…

DELANEY: They’re so lofty they’re practically- (hits speakerphone switch) Janine what was that word again.
JANINE: (O/S) Non-corporeal.
DELANEY: They’re so lofty they’re practically non-corporeal.
PELLEGRINO: Well what are ‘they’?
DELANEY: Well I’ve got you a part in Supernatural.
PELLEGRINO: That’s the one with the two guys?
DELANEY: Yeah, the two pretty boys who drive around the country looking outrageously pretty while killing monsters with a surprising amount of gore for a network show so that it appeals to every demographic!
PELLEGRINO: Okay, that doesn’t sound over lofty though, what’s my part?
DELANEY: Lucifer.
PELLEGRINO: Oh cool! There’s name recognition for ya! No need to explain that part to people. Good going Delaney.
DELANEY: I thank you. I also got you another recurring role in another show.
PELLEGRINO: What show?
DELANEY: LOST.
PELLEGRINO: No freaking way!
DELANEY: Yes freaking away.
PELLEGRINO: Awesome! I get to ‘work’ in Hawaii. What’s the part? Is it lofty?
DELANEY: Oh it’s very lofty, you’ll be playing Jakob.
PELLEGRINO: Who’s Jakob?
DELANEY: He’s so lofty he’s non-corporeal. He’s, sort of, God, on the island.
PELLEGRINO: He’s God?
DELANEY: Yes. No.
PELLEGRINO: Well which is it? Yes or No? Because that would make just a teensy bit of difference to how I play the part…
DELANEY: He’s, well… Look they explained it down the phone and they weren’t particularly clear about it but just play it as probably being God, okay?
PELLEGRINO: Probably?! (pause) Okay, I can explain to people that Jakob is God and then go ‘I also played the Devil – Range!’ When do these two roles shoot?
DELANEY: Next few months.
PELLEGRINO: What, both? I’m doing them simultaneously?
DELANEY: Yes, that’s what I agreed to.
PELLEGRINO: Oh Christ, that’s going to get confusing. You’ve got me playing God and the Devil in two shows at the same time!
DELANEY: Well it shouldn’t be hard to remember which is which. If it’s hot as hell,
PELLEGRINO: Yeah?
DELANEY: Then you’re playing God.
PELLEGRINO: (beat) Not helping dude.
JANINE: (O/S) Did you want something else sir, because I’m still on speaker…
PELLEGRINO: (head in hands) About a million post-its with, ‘Please tell Mark which Ultimate Being he’s meant to be today’, please Janine.