Anyone who thinks that movies are continuously becoming more formulaic and
commercially driven can now whoop with smugness, and then cringe with
sheepishness when everyone turns and looks at them, unless they are on their own
in which case they can run around naked doing star-jumps and.... ahem...
sorry.
Director and screenwriting lecturer Sue Clayton, from the University of
London and the British Film Council has, via unknown methods (although we
suspect the use of lots of little numbered pieces of paper in a big hat), come
up with a recipe for the "perfect" feature film:
30% Action
17% Comedy
13% Good Vs. Evil
12% Love/Sex/Romance
10%
Special Effects
10% Plot (!!!)
8% Music
Taking into account current movies we are assuming that
these will be percentages of the remainder after Colin Farrell
has taken his cut.
In response to this we commissioned our own study and the results were a guy
called George, down a coal mine, saying: "Bollocks".
Acording to the formula, the "Perfect Film" is "Toy Story 2", closely followed
by "Shakespeare in Love", neither of which appear in the top 75 films of all
time on the Internet Movie Database. In fact the latter didn't even make
it into the top 250!
George is probably right.
