Owen Wilson plays Gil Pender, a part which Allen would have probably played himself if he were the right age. Allen has increasingly employed this tactic in recent movies, starting with Kenneth Branagh in 1998′s Celebrity, and Wilson does an admirable job here. Pender is a frustrated Hollywood screenwriter who dreams of writing a great novel. He is holidaying in Paris with his fiancee Inez (Rachel McAdams, playing against type as an unsupportive conservative shrew) and her parents. One night Gil gets drunk and wanders the streets of Paris trying to find his way back to the hotel. Shortly after midnight he comes across an antique car and its passengers invite him to join them on their travels and offer him champagne. He soon realises that he has travelled back in time to the 1920s and he is in the company of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. They take him to Bricktop’s famous nightclub and introduce him to Hemingway who promises to give Gil’s novel to Gertrude Stein.

Every night thereafter at the same time Gil goes back in time to the 20s and meets a host of famous literary and artistic people, including Gertrude Stein (played by Kathy Bates), Dali (Adrien Brody), Alice B. Toklas, Djuna Barnes, Degas, Toulouse Lautrec, Gaugin, and Picasso. He falls in love with Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a captivating girl who has been a muse to many great men and is now with Picasso, and gets advice on his novel from Stein and Hemingway. Gil struggles with his dawning realisation that Inez might not be the girl for him and his nostalgia for the world he visits every night after midnight. Should he attempt to stay there or should he return to reality?

Midnight in Paris is a perfect film for a writer, evoking the inspirational artistic milieu and hedonism of 1920s Paris exactly as I imagined it. It’s not a groundbreaking movie and it doesn’t tackle big issues so it’s unlikely to win Best Film at the Oscars, but it reminds us of the best of the movies, how a film can transport you and make you believe in magic and for that reason alone it’s worth watching. Highly recommended.

Sassoon is a self-made man from a tough Cockney background. He was taken into a Jewish orphanage as a young boy when he, his brother and mother were left by his father and his mother struggled to find a home for them. He stayed in the orphanage until war broke out in and he was evacuated to the countryside. Upon his return to London aged 14 he left school. His mother had a premonition that he would become a hairdresser and she took him to a Whitechapel to find an apprenticeship, thus igniting the passion that would sustain him for life.

The film features a fascinating montage of 60s architecture juxtaposed with Vidal’s geometric haircuts. He took huge inspiration from Bauhaus architecture and at one point in the film mentioned that he would have loved to have been an architect. Sassoon worked hard for nine years from 1954 to 1963 in his salon, trying to innovate and create hairstyles that complimented the face, rather than the teased and sprayed high-maintenance helmets of decades past. The zenith of this creative period was the famous “5 point cut” with a very young Grace Coddington (now Creative Director at American Vogue) as the model. He created Mary Quant’s iconic bob, Mia Farrow’s much copied elfin haircut from Rosemary’s Baby and was the first celebrity hairdresser to create his own international line of products.

In the documentary Sassoon is an extraordinarily youthful 81 year old, probably in part thanks to his obsession with keeping fit. Self educated, articulate, driven, handsome, and charming he comes across as admirable and very likeable man. Definitely a documentary to watch.

Nancy Kwan with her famous Sassoon haircut. Pic by Terence Donovan

Grace Coddington modelling the famous "Five Point Cut". Pic by David Montgomery

You get the idea? These are the kind of images that usually make me gag/feel a violent urge to punch my computer screen because the grammar is wrong/laugh at the idiocy of the person that created it. If you click on any of the above pictures it takes you to the post on That Isn’t Art where the blog owner rips them apart. Sterling work.

I watched a gorgeous little Irish film earlier this week called His & Hers, a documentary feature released in 2009 and directed by Ken Wardrop. His & Hers features seventy Irish women from the Midlands and chronicles their relationships with the men in their lives – fathers, boyfriends, husbands and sons. They range in age from very young children right the way through to women in the last years of their lives and the stories unfold sequentially from young to old. His & Hers is heartwarming and finds real magic in the seemingly ordinary and mundane. The piano score, by Irish composer Denis Clohessy, compliments the film perfectly.

His & Hers won the Audience Award in the Dublin International Film Festival, The Feature Award in the Galway Film Fleadh, an IFTA for Best Feature Documentary and the Cinematography Award at the Sundance Film Festival 2010. Highly recommended.

A mate alerted me to this tune yesterday. Initially I was unimpressed – “meh” if you will. However once you get past the initial 80s cheesiness, the beat kicks in and it explodes into a filth bomb! Love love love it. (Sorry there isn’t a better video but this is all I could find.)

Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel usually does a film piece to accompany his collections and this film entitled “The Tale of a Fairy” for Cruise 2012 is gorgeous. It stars Amanda Harlech, Kristen McMenamy, Anna Mouglalis, Freja Beha Erichsen, Bianca Balti and many more. The acting is a little over the top and unintentionally funny at times but the clothes…oh the clothes…. McMenamy’s first outfit, classic monochrome Chanel, is to DIE for and her peroxide hair with luminously pale white skin is striking and über chic. Enjoy!

Last week I reviewed Declan Burke’s book Absolute Zero Cool which I loved. I asked Declan if he’d be up for doing an interview on this blog and he agreed. A bit of background before we kick off:

About eighteen months ago I was asked to be part of a writing group which started with four members including Declan and ended up with just two, due to time constraints and prior commitments of Declan and one of the other participants. I only managed to meet Declan a couple of times before he left the group but kept up with him through his blog, Crime Always Pays. When I finished Absolute Zero Cool I knew that I’d love to get a real insight into Declan’s writing process and luckily for me he was up for answering my questions.

Below is the interview in full. I know it’s a very long post but I think it’s a particularly good one for any aspiring writers that read the Multiverse. Many thanks to Declan for taking part and hope you enjoy reading it.

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Declan Burke. Photo by Kathy Burke.

When we met eighteen months ago you seemed to be working on a different novel. Did Absolute Zero Cool have its genesis in that book? 

“I was working on a very different novel eighteen months ago; but no, AZC didn’t have its genesis there. I first got the idea of AZC not long after 9/11. I was living in Sligo at the time, after taking some time out to write full-time, and I suppose I wanted to write something in response to 9/11 – like most people, I saw it as one of those era-defining moments. By the same token, a lot of the conversation that took place in the wake of 9/11 was about the fact that the terrorists had used the technology of Western civilisation against itself, and that’s something that we here in Ireland were long accustomed to, and also the idea that terrorism is not something that comes from without, but from within. Anyway, I started wondering one day about what building a group of terrorists might attack if they wanted to terrorise a town like Sligo, and it seemed to me that the hospital was the perfect target – and by ‘perfect’, I mean the most perverse, the most likely to strike fear into the heart of the populace. So I wrote a story about Karlsson, a hospital porter who believes that too much compassion will eventually soften and undermine the human race’s instinct to survive at all costs, to the point where it will go extinct. And so he decides to blow up the hospital where he works, to alert humanity to the dangers of excessive compassion …!”

Absolute Zero Cool has a meta-fictional narrative, wherein the author enters into a dialogue with characters and becomes a character himself within the book. How did that come about? Did you sense the characters were taking on a life of their own and take inspiration from that? 

“Well, there was an element of the characters taking on a life of their own, but not necessarily in the sense that most writers mean that. When I wrote the original draft of the story, and showed it to my agent, he was more than a little taken aback – previously, I’d been showing him private eye crime novels. Anyway, it was a pretty dark story, and quite obviously uncommercial, and so it went into a drawer to gather dust. About six or seven years later, when my wife was about to have a baby, I made what I thought was a big sacrifice, and told her that I’d give up writing for a whole six months, so that I’d be available to lend a hand with the new arrival. That lasted about three weeks, because I get like a bear when I don’t write, so the compromise I offered was that I’d redraft something, rather than write something new. A couple of days later, I was standing at my office window, looking out into the back garden, when I got the idea that Karlsson appeared in the garden, saying, ‘What about me?’ In essence, he was complaining that my baby girl had been born, and was real, whereas he was stuck in this manuscript limbo. He was ‘real’ enough, but being unpublished, he wasn’t ‘alive’. And so I sat down to redraft the Karlsson story, and to a large extent, how the story of the rewrite evolves in the book was how it happened at my desk. Although I should point out that I never tried to poison my baby girl, and that no hospitals were hurt in the rewriting of that manuscript.”

I could see elements of Paul Auster and Flann O’Brien in the narrative. I also thought there was an interesting parallel to be drawn with Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. Were you conscious of any other influences when you were writing this?

“Well, I did specifically mention Fight Club, if memory serves, and I did love that film, and subsequently the book; and I’m a fan of Flann O’Brien’s meta-fiction, and especially At Swim-Two-Birds. Having said that, probably the strongest influence on the book was Kurt Vonnegut – Karlsson decides that he wants to be known as ‘Billy’ for the purpose of the redraft, on the basis that he’s a nicer guy now, and ‘Billy’ was a nod to Billy Pilgrim, from Slaughterhouse-Five. I’ve been a fan of Vonnegut for many years, and in one sense the absurdity of the plot (hospital porter blows up hospital) was a bit of a homage to Vonnegut’s plots, and I also love the way that he tends to wander in and out of his stories, dropping bits of info here and there, and does so in a way that looks careless and half-thought out, a little shambolic. Anyway, AZC has a lot of that kind of thing going on, but the fact that the author of the book also gets involved with the characters, and co-writes a redraft with one of them – that was my way of doffing the cap to Vonnegut.”

“I work full-time, and as a freelance journalist, which means that it’s pretty time-consuming. And I’m married, with a baby girl, so I have all the family-related demands and responsibilities that most blokes my age have. So, if I want to write, I really need to get up early to do it. I get up at 5am, and write for as long as the house stays quiet; if my wife is working early, I’ll knock off around 7am and start getting my daughter ready for school, etc. If she’s working late, I’ll write on until 8am, maybe a little later.

“One of the most wonderful quotes I’ve ever read about writing came from William Golding, who, when he was asked in an interview about his writing schedule, said, ‘Well, when I’m writing …’ At the time, I thought you had to write every day, without fail; I didn’t realise you were entitled to work for six or eight months at a stretch, say, and then spend four months researching, or at least not writing. Anyway, when I’m writing, I write every day, although I’ll allow myself a sleep-in until 6.30am on a Sunday morning. I tried to reach a certain word count every day, although I’m generally more worried about quality rather than quantity.

“But I do think it’s important to write every day – it is for me, anyway. Ultimately, and whether you like it or not, you’re competing against people who can devote eight or ten hours of the day to writing, every day, while you only get a couple of hours. Or, if you want to think of it another way – say you were an Olympic athlete, would you train whenever you felt like it? Or would you train every day, as hard as you can?”

“I’ll be honest, I’m not big on the idea of ‘being creative’. I write because I like messing around with words, and proving something to myself on paper, although I’m not sure yet what it is I’m trying to prove. But I’m not a natural writer, or an instinctive writer – I’m not a writer in the mould of Lawrence Durrell, say, who used to write in blocks of ten thousand words per day, and then bin the lot and start again if he didn’t like what he read. I’m very slow, very patient; I grind words out at a ‘three words forward, two words back’ rate. I’d say the backspace is the most used button on my keyboard. Creative? That’s fine in terms of generating the initial ideas. After that, it’s routine, routine, routine. I have a little motto sellotaped to the bottom of my PC monitor, a quote from Isak Dinesen (I use it in AZC, actually): ‘I write a little every day, without hope and without despair.’”

“Well, I can only speak for myself, and yeah, I’ll be scaling back on the blogging for the foreseeable future. Last year was a pretty busy one, I brought out a novel and a non-fiction title, and it was really time consuming. I’m putting my latest book to bed right now, and I do feel like I’ve been burning the candle at both ends. Plus, I’m looking at bringing out another two books later this year. So something has to give, and the blogging is an easy target.”

“As I said above, I’m just finishing off a last draft of my new book, which is a kind of private eye story, and should be published in June this year; and I’m also in the process of co-editing a non-fiction collection, which should be terrific fun when it hits the shelves. That’s the plan for this year. After that, I don’t know. I do have stories I’d like to write, and I have a couple of drafts of novels I could go working at; there’s one in particular, which is set on Crete, that I’d love to do, if I could do it properly. Right now, though, the idea of an extended break from writing is very, very appealing. I really do feel very drained.

“Mind you, I say that now … I’d probably take a break for about a month, and be chewing my arm off to get writing again. It’s a sickness.”

RAMS will be joining Snow Patrol and Everything Everything on three of their upcoming arena shows: on 21st January in the O2 in Dublin, on the 24th January in the Odyssey in Belfast and on 12th February in London’s O2. RAMS are first on so get there early to check out the live show which is well worth it. As Tom Robinson from BBC6 Music said, “RAMS’ Pocket Radio is about to scare the ******* out of every other piano based band on the planet.” I couldn’t agree more!

Here’s the video for Dogs Run In Packs, a tune which is becoming a fast firm favourite of mine. You can buy it on iTunes here.