We saw our first blockbuster of the Summer this weekend – Shrek 2. A complete, delirious pleasure. What impresses me most about great Hollywood output like this is not so much the specific expression (which is very good) as the sheer ambition, the quite awesome unwillingness to compromise, to leave anything half done. Americans – when making movies, especially – really care. There’s not a slack moment, not the tiniest slip in the commitment to creating a giant, unarguable aesthetic unity. You might not like the final product – you might even hate its obsessive and arch re-use of movie and TV history – but you can’t argue with its life force.
• There’s something depressing about the way British stars pack the cast list: in a huge creative enterprise like this, we’re reduced to talent – support staff. We’re constitutionally incapable of making anything so grand, so monumental. We apparently can’t do epic – only cheeky, ironic, eccentric, cute (sometimes ugly, often amateurish). Once in a while I’d like to see us produce something really grand.
• Shrek 2’s audience is pretty well-defined – in our 9:45 Sunday morning screening (only bleary-eyed parents and small children permitted) we saw four ads for identikit small MPVs (those ‘flexible’ slab-sided multi-seat mini-buses for young families): Toyota, Renault, Peugeot and… er… Mazda? All silver, by the way. Must be this season’s colour…