Ben Falk: “What’s on your mantelpiece?”

The Steeple Times asks entertainment journalist, author and teacher Ben Falk: “What’s on your mantelpiece?”

The Steeple Times shares “wit and wisdom”. What’s your guiding force?

Generally being pessimistic and then being extra pleased if something good happens.

“Don’t get even, get medieval” is, in our humble opinion, a great motto. What’s yours?

“There are two kinds of people in this world. Those that love Neil Diamond and those that don’t” – Bill Murray. I might be paraphrasing, but it’s very true.

Kerry Katona was considered unacceptable in 2007. Who or what is unacceptable in 2013?

I met Kerry once and she forced me to take a picture with her and her then husband, despite my protestations. In fact, to be fair her ex did most of the suggesting. So, I would probably say being forced into having your picture taken (not necessarily with a minor celebrity).

Tony Blair misses being Prime Minister. What do you miss most in your life?

Running around building forts and pretending to camp on the field opposite my house. That or living somewhere sunny.

What might you swap all your wealth for?

Batting number 4 for England and scoring a century at Lord’s whilst defeating Australia in the Ashes.

Donald Trump was once a case of: “If you owe the bank a thousand, they close you down; but if you owe the bank a billion, you own the bank”. What’s your view on the banking crisis?

All I know is according to the papers, everyone in the investment department of my bank seems to be getting massive bonuses and I earned £6 in interest last year on all my accounts. I think that says it all, no?

What phrase or word do you most loathe?

Whenever someone says that their God is better than someone else’s God.

In the UK, some people consider charity to “begin at home”. What’s your view and what causes do you personally support?

Chuggers do annoy me – I’ll decide when I want to give, thank you very much. And it often depends on how drunk I am when Comic Relief is on. Saying that, I give money to the WWF and a cancer charity. Although I remember getting irritated when I offered a homeless person a sandwich and he asked me what the flavour was and rejected it when I told him. That probably makes me a terrible person.

The judge in Law Abiding Citizen states: “I can pretty much do whatever I want” before being blown up whilst answering her mobile phone. What’s your view on the appropriate use of such devices?

Having your phone on in the cinema particularly offends me, unless you are waiting for the birth of your child or something. Not sure it’s murder-worthy, but people Tweeting during a film is just pathetic. You’re not that f****ing important.

If you could fill a carriage on The Orient Express, who would be your fellow passengers?

John Irving, Roald Dahl, Graham Thorpe, William Goldman, Kermit and Han Solo. No, not Harrison Ford: Han Solo. I’m married, otherwise I might well say Jennifer Connelly or Winona Ryder.

Journalist, author and teacher Ben Falk

If you were unfortunate enough to end up on death row, what would be your last meal and where would you eat it?

I would eat it on the cricket pitch in Little Marlow, Buckinghamshire in the late afternoon mid-summer sun. What would I eat? Rare steak, French fries, a bar of Dairy Milk, chocolate sponge and a pizza from Amigos in Nottingham circa 1994.

What time is it acceptable to consume the first drink of the day?

Whenever I bloody feel like it.

A Negroni, a martini or a cup of tea?

Don’t know what the first one is, the second one is just a posh way to drink a vodka shot, so a cup of tea – milky English breakfast with no sugar.

Whose parties do you enjoy the most and why?

I actually like my own if I’m cooking, because it’s fun and you feel like you’ve contributed. Although I’ve been lucky enough to go to some amazing parties. Watching John Legend play Rocket Man with Elton John after the Oscars, getting hammered and dancing with a cardboard cut-out of David Hasselhoff at a film premiere party in New York… Since I’m a hack, I suppose I enjoy any party with a free bar. You should always watch the journalists at a party: we know the exact place to stand to get first dibs on the canapés.

Who is the most positive person you know?

Everyone’s a bit depressed these days, so I don’t really know.  David Cameron?

What’s your most guilty pleasure?

A good quality single malt whisky.

If a tattoo were to sum you up, what would it be of?

I hate tattoos, so none. Although looking at it, I now appeared to have answered that question in a rather existential way. That’s not the intention, I just despise tattoos.

If you were a car, what marque would you be?

Marque? What the fuck does that mean?

Cilla Black presented Surprise, Surprise. Tell us the most surprising thing about you.

I went to the same school as Christopher Nolan, who directed the Batman films. I told him so after I interviewed him for Batman Begins. He didn’t give a shit.

What’s currently sitting on your mantelpiece?

Wedding pictures, Neil Diamond song lyrics my wife gave me as a present, an action figure of BA Baracus out of the A-Team and a photo of me playing quite a nice off-drive in 1995.

I critiqued it on this site and it was about that review that Michael and I started chatting when I caught up with him while he was in London recently. Both pleased about my praise and respectful of my criticisms, the interview began with his response to my belief that there were a couple of false endings in Light.

“We went through this before with Animorphs and the final book in that series ended up being very controversial with the readers. They weren’t really happy with where we went,’ he says. “I thought I’m not going to be self-indulgent this time. I’m going to do it the way I want to do it up to a point, but I’m going to keep the fans happy. Because by this time, kids have paid me $70-80 and I’ve asked for six years of your life and if that means I add an extra five per cent to make sure the fans are happy, I owe it to them.”

We get into Nutella and Lost later, but in the meantime, enjoy (and don’t worry, it’s pretty much spoiler-free)…

So you feel you owe your fans the finale, then?

Do I owe them? You’re goddamn right I owe them. They’ve trusted me. The fact that they’re happy is a very satisfying feeling. I’m like, ‘thank you, you had a million books to choose from and you chose my book.’

Did you know what the last few pages of this book would be early on in the GONE process?

I think I knew the last line fairly early. And I never do usually, because I make stuff up as I go along each time. But all I knew was the last line, I didn’t know who was going to die, I just knew where it had to end.

I don’t want to know what’s going on. It would be boring to me. I like the level of anxiety and fear that comes from sitting down at my computer each day and thinking, ‘how am I going to do this? What’s going to happen?’ That anxiety feeds what I do.

I respect the world’s capacity to give me answers. I’ll give you an example. A train makes its appearance in the GONE series. I was writing that book and I was missing something. So I was driving my daughter to school and went the wrong way and got cut off by a train. And as I was sitting waiting for the train to pass I broke out in a grin and went TRAIN. I had my answer.

It’s, I guess, kind of a happy ending though, right?

Except for the ones who are dead! (laughs) I don’t like these triumphal endings. That’s anomalous. That’s not the way the world usually works. Sometimes people come out of it just fine, some are just destroyed and there’s everything in between. I wanted to show realistic reactions to terribly traumatic situations.

Lost, another piece of art that people said was made up as they went along was an inspiration for GONE. People were a bit harsher on that ending.

The Lost guys have a much tougher gig than I do. They have to hit a commercial break every 12-and-a-half minutes, they have to have jeopardy at the end of every episode, a mid-season cliffhanger and then they have to listen to everybody’s agent saying, ‘my guy wasn’t in this last episode, what the hell?’ I’ve got complete autonomy, I don’t have to worry about what things cost. If I want to fly a spaceship into the scene I can. The word spaceship is as cheap as the word bagel.

Your characters became so in-depth and intricate and surprising as the series went on. Cheesy question, but who’s your favourite to write?

I think my favourite to write was always Diana. I got the voice, I knew how she sounded, I knew how she felt. The question about her was always we know she’s a bad girl, but is she a bad girl with a basically decent core or is she just bad? I liked playing with that. Both Astrid and Diana are like two sides of my wife, depending on the day. In many ways, Quinn is the me character in the whole thing. I don’t think I’d be particularly brave, but I’m a bit of a workaholic. When he finds his place, he becomes a serious character who has some depth and we can admire him. I knew from the start Edilio was not the – quote unquote – Mexican sidekick. I knew there was something more going on there. He had no special powers apart from the fact he was hard-working and faithful and then he became at the end one of the central characters.

And then there’s Drake, one of the most horrific people ever put on a page. And he’s a kid. But you maybe say a little something to why he might be the way he is in Light. Why?

I was really doubtful about writing that. I got that point and I did not know that that was Drake’s grandfather and I was like, ‘that’s Drake’s grandfather’. I wanted to do an un-nuanced, no shades of grey, this guy is just BAD. I didn’t want to explain him too much, but I thought people would pester me for explanations of Drake, so I threw that out there. There’s not a lot there, it doesn’t really explain it.

The series has been bandied around as a Hollywood vehicle over the years. How’s that going?

I have gone a couple of rounds with Hollywood on this. Its natural home is television, but you’ve got a lot fewer venues to go to. There’s something fundamentally different about showing a 13-year-old kid hitting another kid in the head with a full swing of a baseball bat. Putting that on screen is just so explicit. I wouldn’t want to see that.

If it never goes to Hollywood, I’m fine with that. If I’ve got a choice between something that’s going to embarrass my fans, I’m not going to do it.

Do you have crates of Nutella and Cup-A-Noodles delivered to your house now from thankful companies?

No! (laughs) All the way through Animorphs we kept talking about cinnamon buns, because there was a character who was obsessed with Cinnabon – because I was obsessed and Katherine was obsessed. We put that in the book.

But no, nothing from Nutella. But Nutella and Cup-A-Noodles were in there because of my kids. There was a period of time when our daughter would say, ‘go and buy me 500 cup-a-noodles.’ And our son is a Nutella addict. It was an inside joke.

Now that you’ve finished the final book, what are your thoughts about the FAYZ?

I created this horrible place and every kid that reads it wants to live there. At the end I say you’re now free to leave the FAYZ. And the universal reaction is, ‘but I don’t want to.’ In this space kids were empowered, kids did important stuff.

Do Sam, Decca, Brianna, Astrid, Caine and co. still visit you in your sleep?

You have to remember my relationship with characters is different to the readers. From my point of view they’re like employees, they work for me. They’re employees that I like hanging out with after work. I try to think of myself as a benevolent employer, although I kill them occasionally (laughs). There’s a little bit of killing.

I used to work at that place and now I work at other places, but I have very fond memories of it. I could see myself sitting down with them – as soon as they get to legal age – and hanging out. It’d be fun to catch up on old times with them.

Light is out now.

He calls himself Alif – few people know his real name – a young man born in a Middle Eastern city that straddles the ancient and modern worlds. When Alif meets the aristocratic Intisar, he believes he has found love. But their relationship has no future – Intisar is promised to another man and her family’s honour must be satisfied. As a remembrance, Intisar sends the heartbroken Alif a mysterious book. Entitled The Thousand and One Days, Alif discovers that this parting gift is a door to another world – a world from a very different time, when old magic was in the ascendant and the djinn walked amongst us.

With the book in his hands, Alif finds himself drawing attention – far too much attention – from both men and djinn. Thus begins an adventure that takes him through the crumbling streets of a once-beautiful city, to uncover the long-forgotten mysteries of the Unseen. Alif is about to become a fugitive in both the corporeal and incorporeal worlds. And he is about to unleash a destructive power that will change everything and everyone – starting with Alif himself.

BEN’S REVIEW

This is a quirky book. It’s also a substantial book – one that tackles topics not normally associated with traditional YA. Wilson is a white American woman who converted to Islam while at university and has since become a respected comic book writer and journalist on Muslim issues. That immediately lends the novel a certain focus, a different prism.

Because ostensibly this is a chase story, a pacey romp about hackers, secret code, an oppressive force seeking to quash the uprising. Wilson does that solidly, even if the action itself isn’t particularly bombastic.

What makes the book intriguing though is the geography. Set in an unspecified city (though it’s not hard to guess who the author may be suggesting), through this narrative we start to think about the question of freedom, the power of the less wealthy populace, the potentially tyrannical nature of a patriarchal state with impossibly deep pockets.

Wilson also laces her tale with the supernatural and it’s deliberately – I think – opaque. The book at the centre of the novel is magical, or maybe not. One of Alif’s group is a demon, or maybe not. This DOESN’T belong in the fantasy section, but it adds a unique twist.

Overall, the novel didn’t quite join the dots for me and some of the storytelling felt a little slow, which reflects its rating here. But as something different? This is an ambitious and effective attempt.

Perhaps its greatest achievement is in the sidekick. A devout, burkha-wearing young girl with devotion to her God who is also witty, intelligent, brave, resourceful and loving. Young readers don’t get to read about many of those.

Rating: 3.5/5

Long has my desire to watch something cricket-y on the big screen been quashed. I know there have been attempts, by Bollywood and others, yet none have ever penetrated the national conscience, or been all that good. Which is strange to me, because there are plenty of movies about baseball and while I love baseball, it’s just as slow moving and stat-related as cricket. Nevertheless, Field Of Dreams (magnificent), The Natural (brilliant), that one about the kid who somehow has a super-strong arm (creepy and rubbish) are all part of the cinematic canon.

So what can we do about it? The BFI pledges to support British cinema, so maybe we need to encourage it to really think about what makes a proper British film. Cricket has it all. Parochialism – check. Ethnic diversity – yep. Idiosyncrasy – absolutely. However, generally the Brits still seem obsessed with trying to make another Guy Ritchie-style gangster hit or turning that Downton Abbey-mania into movie gold (for the record, ex-Abbey resident Dan Stevens is himself an elegant strokemaker).

As such, I’ve decided to offer my services. This blog is essentially an open pitch session to all you big-time producers and shakers who might want to dip into your investment funds to angel me a few mill. Kickstarter should come later. Here are my best ideas for a cricket-centric film. I guarantee should you decide to help me make any of them, they will win either an Oscar, a BAFTA or an award I’m planning to create myself.

My contact details are below. Let’s do this.

• Botham’s Ashes – a fictional reboot of the awesome drama that was the 1981 Headingley Ashes Test, starring Gerard Butler as Beefy. Also featuring John C. Reilly as Bob Willis.

• A cinematic version of the brilliant Bodyline TV miniseries – with Hugh Grant as Douglas Jardine, Robert Downey Jr. doing his Aussie accent from Natural Born Killers as Bradman and Shia LaBeouf as Bill Voce. Unfortunately, I worry Shia does a rubbish Nottinghamshire dialect.

• Argo did very well last year, so how about the cricket version? In a desperate bid to extract a kidnapped team of 11 electrical engineers from Pakistan in 1978, an MI6 operative (Clive Owen) and David Puttnam (John Goodman) travel to Islamabad to put on a faux pre-cursor to the IPL. This film is called Knockout and is similar to Escape To Victory, but without Sly Stallone trying to save a penalty. N.B.: inspired by a story made up by me.

• A hilarious but touching period romcom about the abortive romance between England women’s player June Bragger (Katherine Heigl) and Peter May (Bradley Cooper) on a tour to India. Aimed at the Eat Pray Love crowd.

• In a Frost/Nixon-esque battle of wills, Tony Greig (Paul Bettany) and Viv Richards (Lennie James) meet up after each day’s play during the ‘grovel’ scandal to talk about life, love and how not to get hit in the head by Michael Holding (Idris Elba).

• Shot by director Paul Greengrass or Michael Winterbottom in docu-drama style, we follow Mike Gatting (Timothy Spall) leading the 86-87 England team to victory in the Ashes Down Under against Merv Hughes (Russell Crowe) and Dirk Welham (an interesting newcomer).

Cheques should be made out to cash and sent to the address stated please.

Want to know why a financier is called a financier? And no, I don’t mean that kind, I mean the cakey type.

Because the tins they are traditionally cooked in makes them look like gold bullion. There, you’ve learned something. It wasn’t the only thing I learned on my French pastry course, held in a strange little garret on the second floor of a concrete block near Swiss Cottage, the home of Bake With Maria.

courtesy: opacity/Flickr

In fact, I learned lots – such as the fact there is a thing called pistachio paste and you can only buy it from trade suppliers, that uncooked choux roux (bless you!) looks like mashed potato and that I am useless at rolling out sweet pastry.

Luckily, we had the benevolent but knowledgeable hand of teacher Marianne (Maria herself was in New York teaching bread-making to Brooklynites) to guide us, a chef who has worked with greats like wedding cake impresario Peggy Porschen. I didn’t know who that was before my five-hour course, but I was filled in by my co-students, a lovely all-female cohort who swapped pictures of their phenomenal amateur efforts with vanilla sponge.

Celebrity cake maker Peggy Porschen

The reason they were there was to supplement their skills in the pastry department – cakes obviously being no challenge anymore – and we had our pens at the ready so as to quickly add notes to the comprehensive recipe sheets we were given for choux puffs filled with crème patissière, fruit tartlets, the aforementioned financiers and sablé biscuits.

It was great fun, despite my flappy hot hands meaning I found it practically impossible to utilise my pastry without it turning into a sweating, soft mess. I longed for the help of all those exes who constantly whinged about their mitts being cold due to poor circulation and briefly cursed the successful capillaries in my fingers.

Lack of kit/space on the hob did mean we had to leave it to Marianne to make both the crème and the roux, a shame since I would have liked trying to cock that up as well.

But the results – which I took universal credit for – were pretty spectacular, at least according to colleagues who yummed them up the next day and my wife who helped me polish off the choux puffs. And it was great learning little kitchen tricks about how to easy it is to make a sauce, how to get shell pieces out of cracked eggs (use another bit of shell apparently) and how to make your goodies look shop standard with the simple addition of an apricot glaze.

courtesy: avlxyz/Flickr

Bake With Maria also does croissant courses and artisan bread tutorials, so those of you with less of a sweet tooth should be able to find something to suit.

Me? I’ll be holding my hands under the cold tap.

I attended the French Pastry Class, which costs £110 and lasts from 10a.m. until just after 3p.m., depending on whether everything is cooked in time. Lunch is included. See the website: www.bakewithmaria.com

Not only that, but she lives on a farm, which she shares with her husband, kids and various livestock including a much-loved cow and some fainting goats.

I met her in a nice patisserie in London during a recent visit, where she wasn’t able to eat the cakes because of a flour allergy, but still managed to shoot her coffee all over me in a classic spit-take (the first I’ve encouraged) after I said something silly about cream.

All in all, she was cool and happy to chat about everything from selling more copies than the Bible (for a while) in Eastern Europe, to why the Welsh are novel-worthy.

You’ve sold millions of books. How does that translate from a fame perspective?

When I went to Lithuania, I was queen of the pygmies because the week that I landed my books were selling above all other books in Lithuania. There were paparazzi when I landed and when I went to dinner there were pictures of me and they were in the tabloids the next day, ‘Maggie Stiefvater eats Lithuanian food’ and it was very disconcerting. I’m like, “am I chewing with my mouth open?”

My first actual proper stalker I had to call the police about because she called and said she was going to kill herself unless I picked up the telephone. That was actually with my first novel. Stalking doesn’t go along with levels of fame.

Your novels have a strong fantasy element. When you do signings, are you like William Shatner having to answer very specific queries about scenes in episodes of Star Trek, with people asking complicated questions about sequences in your books?

I get that as well. All Star Trek questions (laughs). When I was at one of the school visits [in the U.K.], one of them asked how I got so evil. Another one asked me if I hated all people. They’re always quite happy about it.

So you have those kinds of fans…

I have a huge Italian male following, I don’t know why. 55% of YA books in the States are bought by adults for adults. So when I go and do a signing in the U.S., a lot of times there won’t be a single teen there.

Despite that statistic, you still find people compartmentalising YA books into being just for kids. Do you find that weird?

We have no problem as adults watching movies with teen characters, like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. That’s the best movie ever and if it was a book, it would be a YA book.

But what about when it comes to censoring books for younger audiences?

I write for the teen I was. I don’t change my content. When I wrote Shiver – because it’s got a sex scene in it, it’s very fade to black but it’s in there – I was asked by book clubs if I would be happy to do a version without that chapter so they could sell it in schools. I said no, because I thought it was ridiculous to have two different versions of the same book. It’s much easier to put sex into your book than put swear words into your books. I get much more flak about the swear words in Raven Boys than I do about the sex in Shiver.

When did you start writing?

I had 30 unfinished novels before I went to college. I’d write and then I’d get stuck and usually I’d have aliens come down and kill everyone! And then I realised I had to know how a book finished before I began or I’d just wander in the desert forever. I started writing a version of The Raven Boys when I was 19. I had a handwritten version of it. It’s terrible. It’s just been cooking my head all this time.

You like writing about Welsh mythology. Why?

I’ve been obsessed with Welsh mythology since I read the Black Cauldron series when I was a kid, which was all about that. And then I read Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series. That series made me the writer I am now because she was the first writer I read who took mythology and put it in the present day.

So what are you working on now?

My writing is very much a way for me of processing the world. Right now, technically I’m working on 3 novels. I just finished the second Raven Boys book and I’m drafting a middle grade novel. And this year, I am racing rally cars.

Maggie’s follow-up to The Raven Boys – The Dream Thieves – will be published by Scholastic in September. Follow her on Twitter @mstiefvater or via her website: www.maggiestiefvater.com

The sixth and final heart-stopping instalment in the bestselling GONE series. An exceptional page-turner. Escapism just doesn’t get better than this. All eyes are on Perdido Beach. The barrier wall is now as clear as glass and life in the FAYZ is visible for the entire outside world to see. Life inside the dome remains a constant battle and the Darkness, away from watchful eyes, grows and grows …The society that Sam and Astrid has struggled so hard to build is about to be shattered for good. It’s the end of the FAYZ. But who will survive to see the light of day?

MY REVIEW

And so it comes to an end. Six glorious books full of friendship, horror, sacrifice, idiocy, courage, weirdness and intelligence. Just like life, then. It was always going to be something of an anti-climax, the end of the FAYZ, simply because those of us who spent so much time in there had grown to love it, in a strange kind of way. And while there were brief thoughts that Grant might pull a Lost and do some kind of wacky supernatural ending, ultimately it came down to a bunch of kids trying to get home.

There won’t be any spoilers here, don’t fret. Rather we should take time to marvel at a complex narrative which spanned 3000-odd pages and made readers come to terms with the sheer awfulness that can be perpetrated by children in a way which hasn’t been done since Lord Of The Flies, the benchmark for that kind of thing.

Fans of the series – and there’s no point in writing here for anyone else because there’s simply no way a casual reader can drop into Light – will be pleased at how Grant handles our so-called heroes. I think they’ll be even more pleased by how he deals with the villains. Not only that, but the tangled relationships continue to feel realistic, even as they bleed back into the real world.

There’ll be tears – at least there were for this reviewer, I’m not afraid to admit it. But then GONE has never compromised on sorrow.

I do have one small criticism. Even though I too was desperate to know everything there was to know about what happened to everyone at the end, it reminded me slightly of the third Lord Of The Rings movie, where there were about four different endings. As much as I would have inevitably raged about it initially, I could probably have handled one less epilogue.

But it’s a minor quibble. Some ends are tied up, others left brutally undone. And yet others, well, they’re quietly packed away and forgotten, like we all tend to do when we’ve done something we have no wish to revisit.

Epic, bold, terrifying, beautiful – the saga of Perdido Beach and its environs is a towering achievement. One that were it not given that slightly pejorative YA label, thus deeming it “for kids” and rendering it unreadable for a vast amount of the book-buying public, would be considered up there with the best of them. Be happy you’re a part of it.

And if you’re not? The first one’s called Gone and is about a boy called Sam Temple. One day, something happens…

Rating: 4.5/5

Light is out now from Egmont.

We hear the words reboot or remake so often these days, hardened film fans have given up rolling their eyes and punching their popcorn boxes. For modern Hollywood, name recognition is everything and that’s why over the past few years we’ve had yet another Spider-Man origin story, a mediocre retread of Red Dawn and the bloke who made Underworld doing Total Recall, to the applause of absolutely no-one.

Yes, I can forgive the idea that American audiences want an English-language version of a foreign hit (Girl With The Dragon Tattoo). But the argument that “Hamlet’s been done loads of times”, or that the cinema-going audience is constantly refreshing itself and therefore aren’t aware of previous versions is, quite frankly, bollocks.

The problem is, now they’re starting on the really good ones. The Robocops, the Dirty Dancings, Romancing The Stone(?!) – these were innovative, fun blockbuster movies which are readily available on DVD and TV. And aside from the odd deceased star or pre-CGI special effect (which should be relished not removed from existence), still hold up remarkably well as pieces of entertainment.

Which leads me to Point Break. Point bloody Break. The kind of film men want to be in and women want the men who are already in it. The Swayz. A still slightly wooden but nevertheless perfectly cast Keanu. A tight, clever script. Nailbiting action worthy of hilarious British parody (Hot Fuzz). Surfing. Kathryn Bigelow before the Oscar but still at the top of her game. Gary Busey before he went weird. Anthony fricking Kiedis.

Anyway, you get the point. It’s awesome. And now, according to the movie news grapevine, it’s being rebootmade™. By a director called Ericson Core, no doubt a very nice chap, with a name that sounds like a South African drilling company. And it’s set in the world of extreme sports. Because, you know, Xtreme sports are really cool and like you can do parkour and skateboarding because that’s what the kids love and stuff, right?

Wrong. You remake Girl With The Dragon Tattoo because millions of people can’t be arsed to read subtitles. You do a hundred versions of Macbeth because the writing is so complex and universal that each one can yield myriad subtext or reflections on our own modern-day existence.

Point Break is Point Break. There’s nothing to interpret. And while some of the surfer dialogue is a bit weird, overall it’s pretty understandable.

What are you going to do, put a spin on its iconic scenes? Have TWO people rolling around on the ground shooting their guns in the air and going ARGH? Get Channing Tatum to play a character called Billy Montana? Be all political by having the bank robbers wear George W. Bush masks? The only possible new take would be to do it as a full-on, overt gay love story, which is highly unlikely in a Hollywood tentpole.

It’s hard to get my head round this. I mean, is there such a thing as a 2013 version of Gary Busey? Other than Jake Busey?

If this film does indeed get made, I only hope it achieves one thing: and that’s give Lori Petty another role. She deserves it.

An article for Woman’s Day Australia magazine about celeb trainer Valerie Waters’ regime Hot In A Hurry. Click on Val to see the article.