A Brief Entry In Lieu Of A Proper Post
The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn – not the kind of ungainly title you’d expect to see at the start of the post on a comedy blog. (I imagine the film is no laughing matter either, though I have no plans to find out.[i])
But digging through some of the ridiculous internet sturm und drang that has blown up around the film, I discovered something worthy of note, if little more. The latest Stephen Speilberg project, produced by Peter Jackson, is written by a Scot and two Englishmen who are, to all intents and purposes, comedy writers: Steven Moffat (writer of various sitcoms, and co-creator of last year’s Sherlock); Edgar Wright (director of Spaced, co-writer and director of Shaun of the Death and Hot Fuzz); and Joe Cornish (one half of Adam and Joe).
Is this the future for the animated blockbuster? Should we brace ourselves for Pixar movies scripted by Graham Linehan, or Dreamworks commissioning Chris Morris to write yet another Shrek sequel? Will this influx of British sitcom expertise revive a slumbering giant, or will these writers become lost in the labyrinthine bowels of the Hollywood system?
The real mystery, of course, is how Stephen Moffat, a man who co-created the latest version of Sherlock Holmes and wrote the excellent first episode, could also have been responsible for Coupling, one of the most wearily formulaic sitcoms I have ever seen. Something for an intrepid Belgian boy journalist to investigate, perhaps (if he ever makes it back to the big screen).
