Nyder's Dyner and Takeaway

Between the Head and the Heart

2012-01-15T21:04:00.006Z

How to Get Ahead in Advertising: Surreal comedy, a scathing indictment of 1980s selfishness and greed which is, if anything, even more uncomfortable viewing today as so many of its predictions have come true.

The Prestige: Fantasy about rival magicians and Nicolai Tesla, which conceals under a steampunk exterior a tragic story about the cost of obsession, and how it blinds its protagonists to love, human kindness and the genuine miracles around them.

Devils of Darkness: Sixties vampire badflick. Hilarious if you're in the right sort of mood, but massively derogatory to Gypsies, the French, Americans, lesbians and beatniks, as well as containing some of the most inept day-for-night filming I've ever seen.

I Heart Huckabees: Returning to the surreal comedy theme, this one is a psychological farce about an environmentalist and a corporate executive who are connected on the existential level.

Movie count for 2012: 5

Over the Rambow

2012-01-02T11:14:00.002Z

Son of Rambow: A story about the dangers of personality cults, revolving around two eleven-year-old amateur filmmakers? Yes, it works, and the result is a cross between Lord of the Flies, Oranges are Not The Only Fruit and Bowfinger, with an exciting plot reversal approximately every fifteen minutes.

Movie count for 2012: 1

Wrapping up the 2011 capsule movie reviews

2012-01-01T00:32:00.003Z

E.T.: Visibly from Spielberg's postmodernist period, as he inverts the tropes of 1950s alien-invasion B-movies in both plot and visual terms, with the alien as childlike and vulnerable, and the Earth authorities portrayed as invading, faceless spacesuits. Detracted from by the annoying squeaky voice of the hero child, the product placement, the shameless underuse of Peter Coyote, and the climax of the film, which went on way too long, was far too maudlin, and was, frankly, hackneyed.

Sarah Palin: You Betcha!: On-the-fringes documentary as the filmmaker, failing to get an interview with Palin herself, constructs the process of trying to do so into a sinister portrait of the failed Governor of Alaska as a bullying, selfish creature not above backstabbing those who helped her get into power. At the time of writing Gingrich has just declared that he would like her as a running-mate.

Dancer in the Dark: A film which breaks every single rule of filmmaking, and makes it work. Tragic, yet somehow also beautiful and uplifting.

Dorian Gray: Takes rather a lot of subtext and, unfortunately, makes it text. With a tragically uncharismatic Dorian and a curiously unhomoerotic Henry.

Movie count for 2011: 128

The Repeated Meme: The Horse and His Boy

2011-12-26T14:54:00.007Z

Central Premise Recycled From: "The Empty Child" mostly (see next point).

Reference to Moffat's Back Catalogue: WWII-set story involving small boys and their mummies, and something which looks villainous actually just trying to help out; parents as the real heroes; girls with pigtails; Christmas special which is a Doctor Who-styled reinterpretation of a British children's classic; the Doctor as some kind of wizard-figure who fixes everything for everyone. Though he's borrowed Gatiss' wooden dolls, and Davies' celebration of the nuclear family unit as some sort of ideal.

Amy Screws Up the day with Wuv: What's wrong with carol-singers, I'd like to know?

Robert Holmes Called...: It does make the story less saccharine knowing that the planet that's harvsting the trees is Androzani Major.

And from the Hiatus: There's a story in one of the Short Trips anthologies by Mark Michalowski entitled 'The Lying Old Witch in the Wardrobe'.

Murray Gold's Festive Number 1: None! What, did they run out of budget there as well? We couldn't have had a novelty Forties-style song number from Alexander Armstrong or something?

Nostalgia UK: The story takes place in that kind of fantasy WWII which lurks in the heads of the British, where courageous RAF pilots fight dastardly Nazis on behalf of stiff-upper-lipped mothers and their children, with none of the messy details like the Dresden bombing or black marketeering or Churchill's secret realpolitik or information censorship getting in the way.

Inside Jokes: Alexander Armstrong as a WWII pilot. Come on, who didn't think that his first words to his navigator would be "Vera Lynn, she's well fit, innit?" Rather a lot of Chronicles of Narnia inside jokes (Uncle Digby, sentient forests, a child's journey to an alternate universe providing a means of saving a parent, etc.). Androzani Major.

Teeth! None, they're trees.

Hats! A space helmet with airholes in the back, it seems.

Fish! I'd have to watch it again but there's got to be an aquarium in that playroom somewhere.

Small Child! Two of them.

Item Most Likely to Wind Up as a Toy: Bill Bailey's team would seem obvious but there might be some lawsuits from the designers of Halo over the look of their environment suits, so I'll suggest the big tree people.

Special effects

2011-12-26T14:42:00.005Z

The Conversation: Simple but powerful film about interpretation: Gene Hackman is a private surveillance operative who records a conversation; he doesn't know what it's about or why the person who commissioned it thinks it's important, leading to a spiral of brilliantly-rendered paranoid delusion as the operative speculates endlessly on its meaning and interprets the events of his life in regard to these speculations.

Hugo: I went to see this in part because of reading a review which said that this is the first film to actually use 3D as an integral part of the storytelling rather than a gimmick. I'm not sure I'd really go that far-- the 3D certainly added excitement and drama but I didn't see anything that couldn't have come across fine in a 2D version. That aside, it was still a rather sweet family drama (albeit one which occasionally segues into a lecture on the history of early cinema), with Sasha Baron-Cohen giving a surprisingly touching performance as the ostensibly-evil-but-it-turns-out-just-misunderstood antagonist.

The Red Baron: How anyone managed to make the story of a group of largely-aristocratic teenagers/twentysomethings given access to really powerful flying machines and more or less carte-blanche as to how to use them into such a boring movie, I'll never know, but they did. The misguided worthiness of the piece is summed up for me by the fact that they actually made up a Jewish flying-ace secondary character, adding in a title card at the end of the story that he "represents" the Jewish pilots who distinguished themselves in the German Air Force of WWI-- it's like saying "we have to emphasise this so no one will accuse us of being antisemitic, but God forbid we should actually tell the story of a real German Jewish pilot".

The Magic Roundabout: I was going to go sarcastic on this one and interpret it as a metaphor for how the underlying selfishness of the postwar generation led to the very same bright-eyed hippies and communards of the 1960s and 1970s becoming the relentless commercialists of the 1980s and 1990s. But it's too much work, so I'll just sum this up by saying that I don't remember kung-fu ninja death skeletons being a part of the original TV programme.

Movie count for 2011, with a week to go: 124

Of Human Bondage

2011-12-18T17:00:00.011Z

Dr No: Had never seen this before. It's quite a beautifully-filmed slice of late Fifties/early Sixties period colour, with calypso and the Carribbean underlying a story with elements which had yet to become cliched (deformed mixed-race geniuses in Nehru jackets with secret island bases and plans to Take Over the World). Connery looks good, so does Ursula Andress.

From Russia with Love: More beautiful Sixties material, and the idea of SPECTRE as a third party setting NATO and the USSR off against each other for their own purposes is clever, but I found it not as interesting or as much fun as either of the previous films. The fight sequence on the train was very much the highlight.

Diamonds Are Forever: Again, hadn't seen this one before, and things seem a bit more on the slide-- perhaps it's the fact that Sean Connery has gained weight and the design is tending towards the brown polyester of the early 1970s (during the scenes in Amsterdam, I kept expecting him to walk past Van der Valk brooding by a canal). Still, the two crypto-homosexual murderers are lots of fun, as is Charles Gray as Blofeld and his collection of doubles, and there's a fun reference to faked-moon-landing cosmpiracy theories. Points for audacity, basically.

Raging Bull: A film about what happens to people who peak too early, following boxer Jake La Motta to the peak of his athletic career and then the relentless slide downhill. A cross between an art film, a gangster film and a sports film, which somehow works in all three categories.

The Long Day Closes: Impressionistic memoir of a working-class 1950s Liverpool childhood. Does a good job at conveying the randomness and surrealism of being a child, but the slowness of it all does make it difficult to empathise with in places.

Xala: Senegalese comedy about postcolonialism. The protagonist is a Senegalese businessman and politician who marries a third wife, but discovers that he is under a Xala curse which renders him impotent; the events which follow are a metaphor for the corruption which afflicts the country. There's also some clever use of language, with a lot of significance attached to who speaks French and who speaks Wolof, and when.

Beowulf: I enjoyed this more than I thought I would-- it takes liberties with the original story, but I think they're actually for the good (since the last third of the epic is kind of disconnected from the first two, it helps a modern audience to have some kind of through thread) and it's not like people haven't done alternative/postmodern takes on it before. The motion-capture did make everyone look somewhat doll-like, but then, well, it's a legend, where people tend to be rather archetypical.

Movie count for 2011: 120

Mannequin Skywalker

2011-11-21T11:13:00.004Z

Revenge of the Sith: I was prepared to revise my initial opinion on the prequels for about the first fifteen minutes of this film, which was an exciting, well-paced rescue sequence with a bit of humour and convincing violence. The moment Anakin and Obi-Wan are back on Coruscant, however, things start going downhill. To be fair, this one does have generally pacier dialogue than the previous two (any line involving the word 'younglings' aside), Samuel L. Jackson actually gets something to do for a change, I've always had a bit of a liking for General Grievous as a character (albeit a two-dimensional one), and the scene where Yoda advises Anakin to let go of his grief for his mother and fears of losing Padme, but Anakin simply can't do that, is a nice touch (however brief) of a real-world philosophical problem. But none of this really helps.

Movie count for 2011: 113

The Last Sarah Jane Adventures Checklist: Serf's Up

2011-10-20T20:42:00.003+01:00

Absence of Crowds of People Under Alien Influence: Actually, this time we get a crowd of aliens under people influence. Way to ring the changes!

Tie-in with Doctor Who story: None, but "Joseph Serf" was one of Patrick McGoohan's pseudonyms when writing The Prisoner.

Rani's Mum is Annoying/Is Absent: The latter, and for once not even mentioned in an anecdote.

Luke Cameo: Clearly this was intended as the mid-season Luke episode.

Sky says something so daft that you have to wonder how she gets through life without being mercilessly bullied: No, but then she's got to compete with Luke apparently having always called Clyde and Rani "Clani," even though that's never appeared before in the series.

Sarah Jane Waxes Maudlin: She goes on about family so much I suspect she's planning a US presidential campaign.

Mobile Phone as Plot Device: Luke actually makes a joke about the sheer number of mobiles destroyed in the service of the plots of this series.

Racism Towards Aliens: Yes, but, in a nice twist, not from the regulars this time.

The Crimes of Sarah Jane: Breaking and entering, deception, theft, destruction of property.

Sonic Lipstick: Versus magic alien pen.

Wristwatch Scanner: Yeah.

One or More of Sarah's Companions Falling Under Alien Influence: No, but you've got a whole crowd of hypnotised journalists.

Sarah And/Or Companion Acts like a Selfish Cow: The way she and her kids lord it over Clyde and Rani over getting to go to the big exclusive Serfboard launch, I'm amazed they're still friends.

Wide-Eyed Speech About the Wonders of the Universe and How Great it Is to be in Sarah's Gang: Copied from the first episode for obvious reasons.

The Repeated Meme Toywatch: How did we do?

2011-10-17T13:55:00.004+01:00

Well, the second wave of Character Options figures are out, so time to check how we scored on the "item most likely to wind up as a toy" predictions front.

The Impossible Astronaut: I predicted the Silent. That didn't take much predicting.

Day of the Moon: I predicted a limited-edition Amy Pond Up the Duff. Thus far, still none. We did get an astronaut, though.

The Curse of the Black Spot: I predicted either a green glow-in-the-dark mermaid, or Hugh Bonneville with a small child. We didn't get either. Still, Playmobil have a range of glow-in-the-dark pirates.

The Doctor's Wife: I predicted Idris. We got not one but three different versions. And Uncle, as well. Plus it seems you don't actually have to custom-make your own Nephew. Is this to make up for the lack of pirates above?

The Rebel Flesh: Predicted gangers. Got gangers, or at least a Doctor-ganger.

The Almost People: The Limited Edition Amy Pond in Labour playset. Come on, I dare you!

A Good Man Goes to War: Predicted Eyepatch Lady (and hoped for a nine-inch dress-up River Song, and a Lesbian Silurian). Thus far, no Eyepatch Lady! What hope have River Song and the Lesbian Silurian?

Let's Kill Hitler: We do get a River Song (albeit a reissue and thus in the wrong costume) but alas, no poseable Hitlers or pull-back-action Amy-and-Rory motorbikes.

Night Terrors: Yep, creepy dolls, or one of them anyway.

The Girl who Waited: Also no Amy Pond up the Menopause.

The God Complex: What, no naked mole-rat person? I'm disappointed.

Closing Time: Rusty Cybermen, as predicted. Though the job-lot of Cybermats were also predictable.

The Wedding of River Song: Novelty eyepatches. None yet, but I'm keeping an eye, so to speak, on the front of Doctor Who Adventures magazine.

Benares brass

2011-10-17T13:36:00.005+01:00

Pather Panchali: Classic Indian neo-realist film, which I'll admit is a genre and location I'm not very familiar with, so I'm coming at this as a bit of an innocent. This film reminded me more than anything else of the British kitchen-sink drama of the same period (early Sixties): a story about a poor working-class family ground down by a combination of debt, poverty, bad luck, unsympathetic neighbours and hypocrisy (when, at the end of the film, the family finally decide to cut their losses and go to the big city, the village elders, who have been no help at all to them throughout the story, all turn up to beg them to stay on the grounds that it's their ancestral home). A familiar story which needs to be told over and over, and the characterisation of the family and their neighbours is nuanced, but the story was stretched over about three hours, mostly consisting of long shots of people looking faintly puzzled in the countryside, so I'm in no rush to view the rest of Indian neo-realist cinema.

Milk: Well-cast biopic of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician in the USA. Viewed here and now against the backdrop of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the somewhat terrifying rise of the religious right in the USA, it's particularly clear that his story has wider implications: that it's difficult and sometimes soul-destroying (and, as in Milk's case, also sometimes fatal) to stand up for equal rights and justice for the oppressed and marginalised, but that if enough people do, the movement can win in the long run.

Movie count for 2011: 112

The Sarah Jane Adventures Checklist: Wooden It Be Lovely

2011-10-13T20:17:00.006+01:00

Absence of Crowds of People Under Alien Influence: Just one, and a diminishing chorus of homeless people.

Tie-in with Doctor Who story: None.

Rani's Mum is Annoying/Is Absent: The latter, though we do get a story about how she met Rani's poor, hapless father.

Luke Cameo: By mobile phone, no less.

Sky says something so daft that you have to wonder how she gets through life without being mercilessly bullied: Actually she's the only sensible one this episode.

Sarah Jane Waxes Maudlin: In fifty-something years of living in London, it seems, it's never occurred to her that there were homeless people. See "Selfish Cow," below.

Mobile Phone as Plot Device: Clyde's gets stolen and stamped on-- he seems to be losing it a lot these days.

Racism Towards Aliens: Sky's clearly picking up on her mother's attitudes when she says that everyone's strange behaviour must be down to "some alien."

The Crimes of Sarah Jane: Child abuse.

Sonic Lipstick: Present.

Wristwatch Scanner: Also present, though not really much good.

One or More of Sarah's Companions Falling Under Alien Influence: Clyde.

Sarah And/Or Companion Acts like a Selfish Cow: Sarah and Rani really don't come over too well this story, even when out from under alien influence. They drag Clyde away with them rather than wait five minutes for Ellie to turn up (thus ensuring that Ellie's never found again) and, when Clyde goes on his search for Ellie through the homeless hangouts, Sarah Jane acts like it's never occurred to her that such places exist.

Totem poles, incidentally, are a West Coast Indian thing, not a Plains Indian thing. And the Mojave desert, being on the Southwest Coast of the United States, is well outside of Plains Indian territory. It took me two minutes on Google to find that out.

The Sarah Jane Adventures Checklist: Sky me a River

2011-10-10T11:10:00.008+01:00

After some thought, I've decided to carry on and finish the series. No disrespect intended to the late wonderful Elisabeth Sladen, but there are some things about the SJA that do need saying.

Absence of Crowds of People Under Alien Influence: Just four or five nuclear power station workers this time.

Tie-in with Doctor Who story: No, but people of a certain age may remember a 1970s children's series called "Sky" after its protagonist. Though the Pharos Institute does get a namecheck.

Rani's Mum is Annoying/Is Absent: The former, henpecking her poor husband over the lightbulbs blowing and turning up round Sarah Jane's with a bunch of flowers for the baby (exactly what a new mum needs).

Luke Cameo: I expect we'll be seeing fewer of these as Sky becomes the New Luke, but we've got one here.

Sky says something so daft that you have to wonder how she gets through life without being mercilessly bullied: Her very first episode, and she's already making with the "what's air?" type questions (and there seems to be no real rhyme or reason to what she does or doesn't know). Prepare yourselves for plenty of fish-out-of-water "humour" over the next two stories.

Sarah Jane Waxes Maudlin: Apparently starting a family is "the best adventure of all".

Mobile Phone as Plot Device: Yes, Rani is woken by a call from Clive to say Sarah Jane isn't answering her phone. Later, Clive's phone is destroyed by the infant Sky so he can't call for help.

Racism Towards Aliens: Sarah Jane condemns an entire species just because she's met Miss Myers. That's a bit like condemning the entire human race just because you've met Tony Blair. "What kind of a sick species is Miss Myers" she wonders....

The Crimes of Sarah Jane: Breaking and entering, entering by deception, corrupting a minor.

Sonic Lipstick: Yes, and Floella Benjamin appears to have lipstick envy.

Wristwatch Scanner: Yes.

One or More of Sarah's Companions Falling Under Alien Influence: Sky, obviously.

Sarah And/Or Companion Acts like a Selfish Cow: Fairly light on the selfishness this fortnight.

And, because it's the first episode of the season:

Wide-eyed speech about the wonders of the universe and how great it is to be in Sarah Jane's gang: Yes, in front of a telescope no less.

No, it actually does get worse.

2011-10-09T12:07:00.002+01:00

Attack of the Clones: I vaguely remembered this one as being better than The Phantom Menace, but now I'm not so sure. The dialogue was cliched, and, although there's a reasonably good idea going through the political subplot (that Palpatine is secretly backing both the rebels and the Republic and manipulating them into fighting each other), it's not big enough to sustain the whole movie. The romantic scenes play like a parody without the wit; Christopher Lee is underused; and the real tragedy is that the whole film has clearly had so much money and talent invested in it which could have gone on something much more worthwhile.

Movie count for 2010: 110

The Repeated Meme: The Song of Wedding River

2011-10-07T14:54:00.006+01:00

Idea Proposed and Used to Death during the New Series: The Doctor's dead! Oh no he isn't! Oh yes, he is!

Central Premise Recycled From: The Pandorica Opens, mostly.

Reference to Moffat's Back Catalogue: River Song, weddings, monks, Cleopatra and other ancient Roman celebrities, the annoying blue guy from the mid-season closer (still not dead), doubles, animate skulls, nerdy guy with an unrequited thing for a pretty girl who's waiting for the Doctor, a timeline arrested but then continuing inexorably towards someone's death, weddings, some catastrophe which is spreading through the universe with the Earth as its epicentre, an explosion-in-a-Tesco-toy-department array of aliens.

Amy Screws Up the day with Wuv: Turns out, judging by her drawing of her ideal man, that she doesn't love Rory, but Stephen Gately.

Robert Holmes Called...: ...from beyond the grave, but he'd like to remind you that there was an often-overlooked and unimportant episode of Blake's 7 featuring electrocution by chess game as a spectator sport observed by jaded New Romantics who like brutalist decor.

And from Lawrence Miles: The Doctor's dead! Because some alien things with a connection to Area 51 want it so! Or maybe not! And there's pyramids!

Murray Goldwatch: I notice that he managed to work the da-da-da, da-da-da-da-da theme into the children's story competition winner in Confidential.

Nostalgia UK: Is the title a reference to the V-after-it-got-really-camp episode The Wedding of Charles and Diana?

Inside Jokes: "What's with all the eyepatches?" asks the cover of the Radio Times. It's a tribute to Nicholas Courtney, of course. Confidential also indicates that one of the jaded New Romantics has a gasmask for a face.

Teeth! On the pterodactyls! And the skulls! And the anachronistically humanlike ones on the Silurian with a Honker.

Hats! Stetsons are still not cool if they've been given to you by James Corden.

Fish! No, which rather misses a trick.

Small Child! There's a group of them menaced by pterodactyls.

Item Most Likely to Wind Up as a Toy: Character Options probably won't, but I'm betting there'll be a future issue of Doctor Who Adventures which provides kids with their own wearable eyepatches.

Just so's you know, last weekend I had half an hour to kill in Euston Station, so I went to the cafe, ordered scones, and then texted everyone to let them know.

Three rather disappointing films

2011-10-07T14:40:00.006+01:00

The Fog: The undead leper/pirate zombies attacking the Californian small town were well realised and the soundtrack was good, but to be honest it was all a bit John-Carpenter-by-numbers: voiceless, vaguely supernatural killer(s) stalking a group led by a pretty but slightly masculine woman. In fact, arguably the leper/pirates being explicitly supernatural beings (as opposed to only possibly or implicitly, as in Assault on Precinct 13 or Hallowe'en) unbalances the film and makes it less disturbing.

Skokie: Another based-on-a-true-story telemovie, this one about a neo-Nazi group trying to do a march through a predominantly Jewish suburb of Chicago; the story focuses partly on the efforts of the local Jewish community to prevent this, and the problems faced by the (also Jewish) ACLU lawyers defending the Nazis on the principle that freedom of speech must apply to all. Some interesting ideas and debate-worthy points, but the presentation is often unintentionally funny due to a lot of flat acting and humourless dialogue. Worth watching also to see Danny Kaye in a rare non-comedy role (he's the Holocaust survivor who spearheads the local anti-Nazi effort).

Frost/Nixon: Dramatisation of the events surrounding David Frost's interviewing Richard Nixon in the late 1970s. Unfortunately I found its main dramatic line less than credible-- it seemed to revolve on the idea that David Frost was a lightweight talk-show-host who, at the eleventh hour, suddenly found his interviewer mojo and won the day, which contradicts what I know about the man's role as a controversial interviewer in the 1960s and 70s (and the impression I get from reading about it was that Nixon's people saw Frost as a lightweight because they weren't aware of this side of his career, but rapidly discovered they'd underestimated him). Watch the last two hours of the actual interview instead, they're more exciting.

Movie count for 2011: 109

The Repeated Meme: You May Still Be Here Tomorrow, But Your Dreams May Not

2011-09-25T12:11:00.007+01:00

Idea Proposed and Used to Death during the New Series: We are now three for three this year for stories about fathers who are having trouble relating to their sons and wind up bonding with them. Did I mention that my least favourite film in the world is Nine Months?

Central Premise Recycled From: "Rose," which has to be completely deliberate. Also the idea that babies have a secret inner world as galaxy-conquerors who view the rest of us as peasants is a running gag in Family Guy, among others.

Reference to Moffat's Back Catalogue: Small child, the abovementioned parenting issues, Doctor as saviour of children, River bloody Song (and just when I was starting to like her...), creepy nursery rhymes, running gag where people assume two straight friends are a gay couple (c.f. the recent Sherlock Holmes).

Craig Screws Up the day with Wuv: And then saves it again.

Russell T. Davies Called...: He wants to know who's condensed his entire era into fifty minutes. Neil Gaiman would also like bits of Anansi Boys (cool guy who gets away with things paired with normal guy who tries to do the same things but can't get away with them) back.

And from Lawrence Miles: Babies feature as characters in both of the FP audio series.

Murray Goldwatch: Has gone back into soundtrack-for-kids'-movie mode.

Nostalgia UK: Arguably, the saucy slapstick comedy-of-manners in the abovementioned running gag about gay marriage. And Lynda Baron (she of Captain Wrack's Cleavage).

Inside Jokes: The phrase "Spare Parts" is repeated over and over. When a little girl asks Amy for her autograph, then looks excitedly towards the Doctor, one can't help but suspect she's telling her mother "I just met Karen Gillan and Matt Smith!"

Teeth! On the Mat!

Hats! Stetsons are only cool if they've been given to you by John Wayne.

Fish! Alas no. I miss them.

Small Child! Lots and lots of them, not even counting the co-star.

Item Most Likely to Wind Up as a Toy: We're going to get another lot of Cybermen, these ones rusty. Aren't we.

Title explained here.

The Repeated Meme: Complex God

2011-09-25T12:02:00.006+01:00

Idea Proposed and Used to Death during the New Series: Alien species visibly based on real-life animals-- to the rhinos, cats, vultures etc., we can now add a naked mole-rat peson.

Central Premise Recycled From: "The Mind of Evil," crossed with "The Curse of Fenric".

Reference to Moffat's Back Catalogue: Small children with father issues. The Girl Who Waited.

Amy Screws Up the day with Wuv: In a callback to "The Curse of Fenric," the Doctor has to destroy her faith in him before it kills them all.

Neil Gaiman Called...: He wants his labyrinth, and his quirky take on Greek mythology, back. Oh, and Joss Whedon would like his cowardly but cunning demon with wrinkly skin, floppy ears, and kitten obsession.

And from Lawrence Miles: Who also featured a minotaur in one of the BBV Faction Paradoxes.

Murray Goldwatch: Oddly suited to the setting.

Nostalgia UK: Eighties hotels.

Inside Jokes: Not from the show, but from Greek myth-- the hotel's spa is called Pasiphae (Minos' wife, and famously the mother of the minotaur). The clown, there to frighten someone who isn't there anymore, may be a reference to the fact that Ace was afraid of them.

Teeth! On the naked mole-rat person!

Hats! On the clown!

Fish! In a bowl! Eaten by the naked mole-rat person!

Small Child! Return of Amelia Pond, also, Rita imagines herself being a small child scolded by her father. We also briefly see a small girl in the flashing montage of images as Lucy confronts her fears.

Item Most Likely to Wind Up as a Toy: The naked mole-rat person.

Todo sobre violence and murder

2011-09-25T11:54:00.005+01:00

Echoes in the Darkness: American telemovie about one of the longest murder investigations in crime history. Watched this hoping for some serious badflick potential, and it delivered (the first half in particular is a you-can't-look-away progression of bad dialogue and worse characterisation, and it's filmed so much on the cheap that, despite the action starting in 1979 and ending in 1986, the filmmakers couldn' apparently be bothered to put authentic Seventies clothing on the actors for the early bits); however, the fact that it was a true story made it oddly compelling and gripping, mainly for the lacunae. What was the murderer's real motive? Was there more than one murderer? As neither of those accused are talking, we'll never know, and so you can also get some intriguing speculation out of the viewing experience.

Todo Sobre Mio Madre: Complicated story about a woman, after the death of her son, going in search of his father and building a new multi-generational family unit in the process. The film is a celebration of the way in which we make communities through friendship ties which can be stronger than blood, and of gender diversity (as the new family includes a lesbian couple, a transsexual, a nun pregnant by another transsexual, and a HIV+ baby) but I think you have to be better versed than I do in the cinematic oevre of Bette Davis to actually appreciate it fully.

Faust: Classic of the Expressionist era, and with a brilliant performance by Emil Jannings as Mephisto, effortlessly segueing through the character's various personae-- mysterious, debonair, buffoonish, sinister-- without losing track of the evil underneath. Based more on the Goethe than the Marlowe version (albeit with some input from the Book of Job) this version comes across as a gender-inverted take on the story of Jesus, as Gretchen suffers and dies for the sins of Faust, but, in doing so, Faust himself is redeemed and sacrifices his life in her name. Worth seeing, but make sure you get the DVD version with the original German edit-- the overseas edit is decidedly inferior.

Movie count for 2011: 106

The Repeated Meme: Rory's Choice

2011-09-14T14:05:00.005+01:00

Idea Proposed and Used to Death during the New Series: Alan pointed out the other day that pretty much every episode this half-season has been ripping off The Doctor's Wife one way or the other. I'd say it's a bit early to begin recycling it, but it did wind up held over for a year, so maybe not.

Central Premise Recycled From: The Mind Robber crossed with Amy's Choice and squeezed into the B-plot of The Doctor's Wife, via the New Adventures novels (in which, early on, Ace got left behind by the Doctor and picked up somewhat later, during which time she'd turned into an embittered warrior woman). Though mind you, that could describe this whole half-season so far.

Reference to Moffat's Back Catalogue: Duplicates, Amy duplicates, get 'em while they're hot. Plus wibbley-wobbly-timey-wimey stuff again, and Amy Having Issues about her relationship with Rory versus her relationship with the Doctor. "Duck." One character's timestream moving at a different rate to the other's.

Amy Screws Up the day with Wuv: Well, it's more like "everybody else screws things up out of Wuv for Amy," but she's central to it anyway.

Joss Whedon Called...: He wants both his kick-ass warrior woman and a plot based around a person working against their own doppelganger/alt-universe/future self back.

And from Lawrence Miles: Different characters experiencing time in different ways? Hello, The Judgment of Sutekh.

Murray Goldwatch: Pretty good this week; Gold is always best when he's going all introspective and Bear McCreary with the bells and percussion.

Nostalgia UK: Those robots were straight out of The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy film, and a quarantine facility cum leisure park is a rather Adamsesque/Red Dwarf sort of idea.

Inside Jokes: The Doctor's proclivity for taking his companions to rather dangerous leisure planets is well established.

Teeth! No, though robot-Rory has a fetching smile.

Hats! Old Amy's chapeau.

Fish! There's an aquarium, though we never get to see it.

Small Child! No, though everybody's likely to think the title refers to little Amelia.

Item Most Likely to Wind Up as a Toy: The robots obviously, though there might be a market for a limited-edition Amy Pond Up the Menopause.

The Repeated Meme: Gotta get off, have to get, gotta get offa this ride...

2011-09-14T13:24:00.008+01:00

Idea Proposed and Used to Death during the New Series: In the entire 26-year history of the original series, there were thirteen appearances by children under twelve, only two of which were actually central to the story (OK, you could argue that Pangol in The Leisure Hive and Benton in The Time Monster were pretty central, but their screen time as children was limited). In the six-year history of the new series, we've had 22, ten of these in the Moffat Era alone (and I'm not including metaphorical children like Nephew or alien eggs like Bron, though I did include the kittens in Gridlock). Haven't we made up for enough lost time already?

Central Premise Recycled From: Really, wasn't this just Fear Her given a second draft and a change of gender?

Reference to Moffat's Back Catalogue: Vulnerable small child (in pyjamas no less) with a connection to an alternate reality; Doctor as saver of small children; father issues; creepy mechanical/doll things; nursery rhymes; "everybody lives."

Amy Screws Up the day with Wuv: Not so much this episode, probably because somebody else is screwing things up with Wuv instead.

Neil Gaiman Called...: Joss is on holiday, and Neil would like a word regarding several plot elements of The Doctor's Wife, to say nothing of Sandman: A Doll's House.

And from Lawrence Miles: Creepiness with an eighteenth-century look. Plus he invented one of those "civilisations of pure thought" that the Doctor namechecks.

Murray Goldwatch: I generally like his original songs (with the exception of "You Put The Devil In Me"), and the creepy nursery rhyme is good, though the incidental music which follows Amy and Rory around the dolls' house is a bizarre mixture of suspenseful and bombastic.

Nostalgia UK: Toy soldiers, plus the decor on the council estate has a brilliantly retro feel (although young George must be the only child on the estate whose parents buy him no branded merchandise whatsoever).

Inside Jokes: "Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday"; also the Doctor refers to "empires of glass," which is undoubtedly a ref to Andy Lane's Missing Adventure The Empire of Glass (spoiler: the title refers to Venice). It's not a Doctor Who inside joke, but one of the tenants' names is Rossiter (as in Rising Damp).

Teeth! On the bulldog!

Hats! I did wonder at first what the Amy-doll was sprouting out of its head.

Fish! Not on the menu tonight, though George owns some dinosaurs.

Small Child! Erm... pass.

Item Most Likely to Wind Up as a Toy: The creepy dolls obviously, although the tragedy is that they will probably wind up as 5-inch action figures rather than actual doll replicas of the creepy dolls (although if future generations want a cool idea for a limited-edition collectible, there it is).

Title explained here.

It Should be Wookiees

2011-08-31T20:26:00.004+01:00

Return of the Jedi: In this movie, Lucas starts pastiching himself. We get a return to Tattooine with shots of decadent aliens enjoying themselves, the return of the Death Star, the death of one of Luke's mentors, a confrontation with Darth Vader complete with revelations, and a really big battle with fancy Imperial technology (in a forest not a winter landscape this time). It's not a bad movie (at least not compared to things to come), but it's not as good as the first two, and suffers from the fact that a) Han Solo was originally supposed to die, and thus mostly spends this movie as a fifth wheel or someone for Princess Leia to rescue, b) it really should have been Wookiees as the primitive but friendly race in the climactic battle, not Ewoks-- they're less cute, and it would have given a nice bit of narrative closure to the presence of Chewbakka in the team. Oh, and c), they never seem to quite get the scenes of decadence in Jabba's Palace right-- I can understand why they'd want to give them the CGI treatment as the version done entirely with puppets and animatronics is a bit unsatisfying, but adding a kind of singing muppet plus Greedo with breasts just turns the whole thing into a Saturday morning cartoon. And both versions of Sy Snootles look equally ridiculous, but for different reasons.

The Phantom Menace: If I'm going make it through the franchise, unfortunately I have to do this one. To be fair to it, there are only two things really wrong with it on a story level and one on a directing level, but unfortunately they're all pretty major:

1) The Child. If this had been a movie where the focus had been on the political situation surrounding Naboo, concentrating on the two Jedi and Queen Amidala, oh, and somewhere briefly, almost as an afterthought, they acquire some little kid named Anakin who might be special but nobody realises just how special, it would have been a better movie. OK, it would have been basically The Hidden Fortress starring Jar Jar as both of the peasants, but Lucas is at his best when he's pastiching. As it is, the precocious wee lad gets way too much screen time, and it's just irritating at best and a drama-killer at worst.

2) Naboo's WTF Political System. Five minutes into this movie, I thought it made sense. A fourteen-year-old queen suggested to me that we had a Henry VI/last emperor of China situation, where you have a ruler dying suddenly leaving an underage monarch who is weak, inexperienced and thus prey to every unscrupulous vizier looking to be the power behind the throne. But no. Naboo is a democracy which apparently elects monarchs too young to drink to rule the planet during a crisis, and Lucas seems afraid to let any of the blame for what follows to fall onto Amidala, even through ignorance or inexperience.

3) And the directorial problem: Nobody's giving a performance, barring Ian McDiarmaid. Not even Samuel L. Jackson or Liam Neeson. When these two are being outacted by the Voice of Frank Oz as Yoda, the movie's in trouble.

Oh, and I'd also like to give a brief shout-out to the racism and anti-semitism in the film, but they've been commented on so often I don't feel I really need to bother.

Movie count for 2011: 103

The Repeated Meme: Let's Kiss Hitler

2011-08-30T11:32:00.004+01:00

Idea Proposed and Not Used during the New Series: Russell T. Davies famously suggested that Hitler would make a good Doctor. Evidently the current production team decided to have some fun with that.

Central Premise Recycled From: Not really so much recycling this week so much as retconning-- tying up a lot of loose ends from explaining why the Ninth Doctor regenerated when he did, to how it is that River Song is both a mortal archaeologist and an immortal regenerating time-traveler.

Reference to Moffat's Back Catalogue: River Song's backstory is now all sewn up. Plus we get a trio of Moffat Moppets (and a virtual one), a lovesick boy who reckons he'll never get the girl, [fill in the blank] lipstick, and getting the Doctor's attention through creating a crop circle he'll read about later (sort of like the Doctor's getting Amy and Rory's attention in "The Impossible Astronaut").

Amy Screws Up the day with Wuv: Amy wuvs her best friend, and effectively raises her best friend, and she grows up to be, well, River Song. I blame the parents.

Joss Whedon Called...: He wants his snappy montages of explanatory flashbacks back.

And from Lawrence Miles: Drawing a blank this week I'm afraid.

Murray Goldwatch: Not quite so bad this episode, though Pachelbel's Canon has to be a pretty damn banal choice for the restaurant.

Nostalgia UK: World War II, crop circles.

Inside Jokes: Why did the Titanic sink again?

Teeth! Not so much.

Hats! Toppers are cool.

Fish! No, unless I really stretch the metaphor and assume that at least one of the people eating in the classy restaurant is having the sole meuniere.

Small Child! Three real small children (in the flashbacks of Amy, Rory and Mels) and a virtual one (the Tardis' visual interface of little Amelia).

Item Most Likely to Wind Up as a Toy: No monsters that we haven't seen before this week, so let's get creative! I'd love a little Hitler action figure, wouldn't you? Or the Amy and Rory pull-back action motorbike. And this episode just completely reinforces my call for a Bionic Woman-style River Song with a range of dress-her-up outfits and accessories.

How do you know Darth Vader is badass?

2011-08-23T20:13:00.003+01:00

Because he has Adolf Hitler and a Bond villain working for him.

Pastiche

2011-08-22T13:11:00.007+01:00

Continuing the British Urban Violence and Star Wars mini-seasons respectively.

Exit through the Gift Shop: Meta-documentary about a documentary filmmaker who set out to make a film about graffiti artist Banksy, then, when the film proved terrible and Banksy patronisingly told him to go out and make some graffiti art instead, promptly became a huge international art sensation, with art selling for millions of pounds, despite having no artistic talent whatsoever: however, he astutely noticed that a lot of graffiti art is about marketing, reproducibility, and the use of particular iconic images over and over. Simultaneously a celebration of contemporary art, a scathing critique of contemporary art, and very funny.

The Empire Strikes Back: Still my favourite film of the whole series, with its noirish dialogue, downbeat story, sweeping direction and snow planet. This episode, Lucas is going more into mythology than film history, pastiching the Ring of the Nibelungen famously, but also I saw strong elements of The Aenead (a young hero, encouraged on his destined quest by the ghost of his mentor, taking a trip to the underworld partway through where he learns something pretty sobering). However, we've still got a lot of The Hidden Fortress (the middle section of both films, where a general and two comedy bumpkins escort an irascible princess out of a war zone), and Dune, plus lots of visual nods to chapterplays (the snow planet/cloud planet/swamp planet imagery, plus I swear the architecture for Bespin appeared in an early Flash Gordon). Yoda reminded me strangely of William Hartnell's take on Doctor Who. It's also structurally the inverse of the first film, where the action began with Luke finding out something dramatic about his family and ended with a set-piece battle. Somebody also apparently had a word with Lucas about the fact that the first film has only one woman and no non-white men, though it's a bit depressing that Bespin is apparently the only place in the universe with any ethnic diversity.

ETA: Somewhat nonplussed to learn, while googling for information on the production of this film, that Admiral Piett (you know, the goggly-eyed bloke who gets a field promotion when Vader puts the strangle on Michael Sheard) has a seriously huge fandom. The heck?

Movie count for 2011: 101

Naked gangsters

2011-08-13T16:57:00.005+01:00

In honour of the London riots, I'm holding a mini-season of films about British urban violence!

Get Carter: Seminal British gangster film, which Michael Caine does not so much star in as bestride like a colossus, looming through a series of tiny, dingy houses and bleak industrial landscapes as a Geordie gangster, returning to Newcastle from London to avenge his brother's death, only to find his London partners are implicated as deeply as his Newcastle rivals. Bleak, but curiously beautiful and poetical as well.

Sweeney!: Spinoff of the well-known British cop show, which continually drops visual namechecks to Get Carter (scenes in car scrapyard, scenes on industrial site, scene where protagonist appears in public stark naked....). Basically a cool Seventies political thriller exposing oil companies' attempts to influence international politicians and dealmakers through the corrupting actions of a supposed PR agent, though loses points for a ridiculously melodramatic ending and for some cringeworthy examples of Seventies fashion-victimhood.

Movie count for 2011: 99

Shotgun wedding

2011-08-11T13:44:00.005+01:00

Hobo with a Shotgun: Reminded me very much of Jacobean drama, particularly The Revenger's Tragedy. It features a man who wants to live a peaceful life, but then is confronted with a society which is so evil that the only course of moral action open to him is to take up arms, but, in doing so, is also committing evil acts and must ultimately himself perish rather than return to normality. The sheer level of violence is also pretty Jacobean.

Se7en: Enjoyable mystery, revolving around murders committed on the theme of the Seven Deadly Sins and consequently having an air of literacy and creativity to it. Made in 1995, the film is notable for the absence of mobile phones, PCs or the Internet, all of which would have been unavoidable even two years later.

A Clockwork Orange: Film about feral teenagers looting, raping and murdering for kicks in the Greater London area (not to be confused with current reports on the 24-hour news channels). The book is disturbing for its personal exploration of Alex and final suggestion that Alex can, indeed, grow up to have a normal life as an ordinary member of society; the film, instead, is disturbing for its exploration of the way Alex's bloodlust is fueled and given a kind of tacit permission by the society around him, with its violent sexual popular culture, its lack of support for parenting, its opportunistic politicians, trend-driven scientific establishment, and rigid bureaucracy. Part of Nyder's British Urban Violence Season (see following post).

Movie count for 2011: 97

Translated from the Japanese

2011-08-02T10:10:00.009+01:00

Star Wars (A New Hope): Watching this again now, after having done a lot of relevant re-reading and viewing, the thing which strikes me the most is the fact that this movie is, in all its elements, mainly a clever pastiche. The core of the story is indeed "The Hidden Fortress" (with at least one scene almost shot-for-shot identical and Leia clearly the American cousin of Kurosawa's princess), but the sequences on Leia's ship and the Death Star owe the most to Flash Gordon, particularly as regards dialogue, and Lucas was actually sued over the resemblance between his cute droids and the ones in Silent Running. Meanwhile, on Tattooine, substitute "Confederate Army" for "Academy", "cotton plantation" for "moisture farm" and "slaves" for robots, and you've got a Civil War coming-of-age drama, which then morphs, rather logically, into a Western the moment Obi-Wan turns up to pull everything sideways into The Searchers. There are a few elements of Die Nibelungen (the quest of a young blond hero, whose mentor is keeping some rather important secrets from him), and of course 633 Squadron and Fifties angry-young-teen-makes-good movies, just to round things out. Between this and Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, I would argue that Lucas' best films are inherently postmodern.

Movie count for 2011: 94

Quatermass Special: TV to Film

2011-07-31T22:58:00.008+01:00

Alan and I have been watching the Quatermass TV serials, followed by the films. So I'm going to do something a little unusual for this blog, and review the films, but in light of how they compare to the original serials.

The Quatermass Xperiment: A slicker product than the serial and, despite series creator Nigel Kneale's (understandable, given that he'd been cut out of the project) reservations about it, improves on the TV serial in a number of ways. The dialogue is cleaned up (to be fair, the TV script was essentially a first draft), and some of the problematic aspects have been dealt with through rewriting (e.g., rather than having the wrecked spaceship guarded by a couple of policemen and the wounded astronaut taken off to a cottage hospital, the army are called in and the injured man is isolated in a lab). And no, I don't mind Brian Donlevy as Quatermass; he's unsympathetic, but the character's a bit of a jerk in all his incarnations. Where the film is not so good is that it misses the message of the serial: the fact that the returning astronaut is a gestalt of the other astronauts is largely glossed over (which means we also lose a lot of the emotional content of the story, as the grief and astonishment of the other characters as they figure it out is now gone), and the ending takes an original and subversive idea of Quatermass talking the alien out of its takeover plans, and instead substitutes a stereotypical kill-the-alien resolution.

Quatermass 2: The TV serial is considerably more polished this time, with a few more drafts having been written and the BBC having developed a special effects team in the intervening years. Brian Donlevy comes across as considerably more sympathetic both than the TV version and his previous outing, probably because the character is on the back foot fighting authority rather than imposing it. The movie again benefits from a larger budget (e.g. we actually get to see the despised prefab houses of Winnerden Flats), but again loses out on the emotional front, as the chilling deaths of a picnicking family are edited out and the sequence where journalist Conrad (played in the original by Roger Delgado and in the film by Sid James) tries to call in his story while being taken over by an alien becomes a more conventional shooting, plus the plant labourers come across as a slightly cute collection of regional types rather than the rather scary oppositional force they were in the TV serial.

Quatermass and the Pit: In colour! And with an expanded role for Barbara Judd as she takes over most of James Fullalove's part from the TV series, which is generally a good thing (not that the TV version is problematic, but she does get sidelined a bit sometimes). Where the TV Colonel Bream is a scared, blustery, ignorant man dragged into the discovery of the prehistoric alien capsule by Quatermass, the film version is much more in-control and sympathetic (if no brighter), and is instead the one who drags Quatermass into the situation-- indeed, their relationship seems to presage the Doctor and the Brigadier in 1970s Doctor Who. Although the alien spacecraft is more beautiful and there are some wonderful claustrophobic scenes of panic, here I think the film's production actually lets it down vis-a-vis the series: the TV serial's archaeological dig was much more like a real dig site of the time, and the aliens much more convincing. Plus it's a shame the film version of Prof Roney couldn't have been a Canadian like the TV version.

The Quatermass Conclusion: Doing this one for completism, though one can't make much of a comparison as the film version is literally the TV version cut down to 100 minutes and topped and tailed by film-style credits. This is actually my favourite of the Quatermass stories; I like the poignancy of having Quatermass as an old man who's just trying to find his missing granddaughter in a world which largely doesn't care, and the backdrop of a Britain in a state of social collapse through privatisation and capitalist overexploitation has a lot more resonance now than in 1979. It also, weirdly, anticipates furries.

Movie count for 2011: 93

Sane

2011-07-28T22:45:00.004+01:00

Aladdin: Early Eisner-era cartoon, and a good example of that period's key traits: postmodernism (between the heavy borrowing from The Thief of Baghdad and Robin Williams' potrayal of the Genie as a 1990s standup comic) and casual multiculturalism. Arabian mythology is given the same playful treatment as classic Disney gave European mythology-- and as such, I would argue that the film tacitly acknowledges that Muslim identity has as much place in American culture as any other. Critics have argued that the fact that the central couple have conventional Western good looks while the supporting characters are paunchy, big-nosed caricatures is racist, though I think that is a slightly problematic claim as the pretty-leads-caricatured-supporting-cast is a staple of all Disney fairytale movies (q.v. the near-contemporary Beauty and the Beast); however, context is everything, and it does have to be said that some of the descriptions of the fictional Arabic kingdom as being barbaric, and the guards' gleeful focus on corporal punishment, are not exactly striking a blow for tolerance and understanding. The sad thing is that, flawed or not, I can't see them making a cartoon even this sympathetic to Islamic cultures now-- however, the good thing is that it's out there, and maybe they'll do a better one someday.

Movie count for 2011: 89

Adventure Movies

2011-07-17T15:55:00.006+01:00

Leon: Brutal but charming Luc Besson tragicomic thriller about an assassin who finds himself, through a strange chain of events, the custodian of a twelve-year-old girl out for revenge on her parents' killers. The whole story is strangely credible, with Natalie Portman having IMO thus far never bettered her performance as the girl in question.

Les Aventures D'Adele Blanc-Sec: Besson in considerably more playful mode, a slightly silly steampunk comedy about an Edwardian adventuress on a quest to find and revive the Egyptian mummy who she believes can save her sister's life, complicated by the intervention of the police, a pterodactyl and Rameses III. Gets a bit annoyingly slapstick at times, but it is saved by a rather biting sense of humour and the fact that the heroine is rather obviously a sociopath.

The Hidden Fortress: Kurosawa/Mifune classic, featuring a bearded general's attempt to get a rebel warrior princess to safety in enemy territory, as witnessed by two foot soldiers (George Lucas, in the intro to this DVD, tries very hard to downplay how influential all this was on the Star Wars franchise). While Mifune is great as the general, the plot is gripping, and the themes touching on the meaning of loyalty and honour, the brilliant touch really lies with the foot soldiers; cowardly, venal, greedy, stupid, cunning, loyal and affectionate by turns, and always utterly believable.

Life Force: Faintly misguided mid-eighties attempt to revive the British horror-SF genre, ripping off Quatermass, Blake's 7: Killer, various episodes of Doctor Who and arguably The Satanic Rites of Dracula by turns. Which should have been a lot better, but the problem is that it's a) humourless and b) pointless (as in, it's not actually about anything bar looking cool). Still, there's some very good animatronics.

Black Sheep: Not the New Zealand horror(bad?)flick, but a low-budget Russian drama about a group of criminals who escape during WWII and find themselves in a tiny peasant village, fighting off the German army on the one side and the Russian army on the other. With a setup like that it could have been a pointed satire, a tragic drama and/or a witty black comedy, but unfortunately it's just a bit unengaging.

Movie count for 2011: 88, and still haven't got onto the Tati boxset yet.

8 1/2 movies

2011-06-14T21:28:00.011+01:00

Watchmen: The 3.5-hour director's cut version, with The Black Freighter running through it, and believe me it didn't feel anywhere near that long. While the theatrical release was good, it really does benefit from the extra time, which allows for more worldbuilding and layers of detail (and don't miss the "Under the Hood" DVD extra, featuring a "Where are they now?" profile on the Minutemen). Anyway, it does for the superhero movie what Watchmen did for superhero comics twenty-five years ago, and the world needs it.

Castle Keep: Another Vietnam-through-the-allegory-of-an-earlier-war movie, and like M*A*S*H* ultimately about the blackly hilarious pointlessness of it all. But it's grimmer and more surreal than M*A*S*H, acknowledging the strange beauty of war, with Major Falconer, on his pale horse, becoming an allegory of Death leading the youth of the nation to their collective demises, and presiding over the destruction of Western culture.

Nobel Son: Black comedy about a sociopathic academic and his dysfunctional family. Starts well and carries on being great for about two-thirds of the film, but the final bit feels seriously rushed, with a lot of necessary character development and narrative progression being ditched in favour of a quick voice-over and a resolution that consequently doesn't feel properly earned. It would actually have made a pretty good six- or twelve-part TV series, a sort of Six Feet Under for the Ivy League set perhaps, but 106 minutes wasn't really enough to allow the sort of tension and ambiguity the narrative needed.

The Black Hole: An underrated hybrid of Fifties and Seventies sci-fi; the use of greenscreen, computer graphics, animatronics and some really well-staged weightless sequences form the backdrop to a deeply Freudian story about the fear of female and gay sexuality (represented by the Black Hole itself). It's like Forbidden Planet crossed with equal parts 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Psycho.

Bambi: Seen right after the Adam Curtis documentary All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, which lent a strange subtext to the experience of watching a balanced ecosystem of herbivores in a mechanistic steady state, intruded upon only by the occasional intervention of humans. Also, continuing the theme from the previous entry, there are some strange Freudian messages to the story, with every single character apparently having a distant father and close-bearing mother. Despite that, the forest is beautifully realised, and the death of Bambi's mother genuinely tragic even for a non-child audience (and, really, how many other cartoons seriously address the inevitability and finality of death in terms that a child can absorb and understand?).

Pirates of the Caribbean On Stranger Tides: Really a lot better than I was expecting, given the lukewarm reviews. It gained points in my mind for a surprisingly subversive approach to organised religion (with the religious characters being either vandals or deluded), for excellent casting (Ian McShane FTW) and for some lovely surreal uses of voodoo-inspired magic. The set pieces weren't as much fun as those in the second PotC film, but I'm willing to overlook that for a good piece of storytelling that didn't bore me.

V for Vendetta: I remember really disliking this when I first saw it in the cinema, but was willing to give it a second go. The first half-hour or so, I thought I'd changed my mind, but it sort of went downhill from there and wound up a curate's egg. Good points: Natalie Portman was better than I remembered her being, and a Britain in the grip of right-wing demagogues stirring up fear of epidemics and hatred against Muslims and gays has if anything only got more relevant. Bad points: John Hurt as one of the most boringly one-note dictators in cinema, Stephen Fry somehow managing to play an embittered, suicidal closet homosexual celebrity as a cosy, cuddly uncle, and an ending which is too stylised to be credible, but not stylised enough to be postmodern. Still, the mask is cool.

Kick-Ass: Noticing a theme here? Anyway, this is another film based on a subversive alternative comic, which is pretty good up to a point and then compromises itself. The story is, effectively, one about the dangers of fantasy: a lonely, inept teenager starts to live out his daydreams of being a superhero only to discover that in fact that's a really stupid idea; unfortunately the film provides a justified revenge plot and a happy ending which are all out of keeping with the original comic's downbeat tone. Oh, and the Daily Mail as usual has the wrong end of the stick about the portrayal of Hit Girl, the 11-year-old assassin: it's not exploitative, it's tragic.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008 Remake): Pointless and tedious. And an insult to the original.

Movie count for 2011: 83

The Repeated Meme: Cry me a River!

2011-06-04T21:34:00.005+01:00

Idea Proposed and Used to Death during the New Series: Monster mashups which, as Arthur Darvill notes in the "Confidential", look sort of like an enormous game of action figures.

Central Premise Recycled From: "The Pandorica Opens," only in reverse (The Pandorica Closes?)-- instead of having a Tesco toy-departmentsworth of monsters ganging up on the Doctor, the Doctor gets a Tesco toy-departmentsworth of monsters to gang up on someone else.

Reference to Moffat's Back Catalogue: It'd be easier to spot the things that aren't references to Moffat's back catalogue. Small children who are special, timey-wimey, the Doctor meeting yet another small girl who will grow up to get jiggy with him, everybody in the universe knowing who the Doctor is, creatures in monks' robes with funny heads, girls with guns, militant Anglican monks, parenthood/couplehood issues, a nursery-rhyme-style poem...

Amy Screws Up the day with Wuv: It's true; those Flesh copies are so good even a mother can't tell the difference.

Joss Whedon Called...: He'd like you to know he's got the corner on Blake's 7 references. Also Rory remembering his time as a Centurion even though it didn't happen in this universe is far too much like Xander's having memories of serving as a soldier even though they didn't actually happen.

And from Lawrence Miles: UNIT-type military organisation with a thing against the Doctor, the idea that time travel affects people's DNA, struggle by various groups wanting to weaponise a time traveler who can't really fight back.

Murray Goldwatch: Much as usual.

Nostalgia UK: The retro Doctor Zhivago-style outfits on the future soldiers.

Inside Jokes: One of the many abortive Doctor Who movies had the Doctor dressing as a woman to defeat Jack the Ripper. The Doctor is also evasive as to whether he's had children.

Teeth! And Hooters! And Honkers! All on the Silurian!

Hats! Sort of, mostly Hoods! though.

Fish! No, they're taking a break this week.

Small Child! Um... pass.

Item Most Likely to Wind Up as a Toy: Eyepatch Lady of course, though while you wait you can go buy some desert-camo Action Men and make your own militant Anglicans. And I'm still holding out for a nine-inch River Song with her own line of outfit and accessories, and adding to that a cross-dressing Silurian with Hooters, Honkers and her own lesbian lover for accessories.

The Repeated Meme: The Almost People

2011-05-27T18:48:00.007+01:00

Idea Proposed and Used to Death during the Classic Era: Doubles. Particularly of the Doctor. The Chase, The Massacre, Meglos, Mawdryn Undead (sort of), Black Orchid (sort of), Arc of Infinity...

Central Premise Recycled From: There's one hell of a lot of Alien: Resurrection in this one; the monster-Jennifer chase down the corridor is pure homage, but the tough female leader with a secret terminal illness and the whole alien-or-human identity crisis. Setting it in a monastery also recalls the religious subtext to the story (when properly done, that is, not the bowdlerised cinematic version). Androids, or something like them, which are indistinguishable from humans. Plus the idea that the Company is up to something deeply unethical that needs exposing.

Reference to Moffat's Back Catalogue: Small child, asking "where's my father?"

Amy Screws Up the day with Wuv: The last five minutes are one serious Screwup with Wuv, though how, and what the Wuv involved, are for the cliffhanger.

Joss Whedon Called...: He wants back his surprise twist where it turns out one of the main characters isn't who or what you thought they were (q.v. Dollhouse, or am I stretching this one too far? Don't answer that).

And from Lawrence Miles: A woman who drops her jaw and swallows a man? Sort of like the TARDIS in Alien Bodies.

Murray Goldwatch: Strike up the bland!

Nostalgia UK: That mock-regeneration sequence bit, arguably.

Inside Jokes: Ben Aaronovitch once wrote a Virgin novel called The Also People. The Doctor's greatest-hits riff on his own past incarnations mirrors Logopolis; although "Reverse the polarity" and "would you like a jelly baby" are too cliched to be inside jokes, Hartnell's "one day we will return" is just obscure enough to count.

Teeth! Jennifer's got quite the mouth on her.

Hats! No, shoes! are cool this week. Also eyepatches are undergoing a revival.

Fish! No, though the fish and chips remark from last week gets a revisit.

Small Child! Wee Adam, the five-year-old boy who is willing to spend ten minutes on the phone waiting for his Dad to get done murdering himself. Plus an incipient Small Child in the last five minutes of the story.

Item Most Likely to Wind Up as a Toy: I was originally going to predict a limited-edition Amy Pond Possibly Up the Duff (same as the regular Amy Pond figure, only it comes with one of those little red-blue positive-negative icons), but now it looks like we just might get the Amy Pond in Labour playset, so I take that back.

The Repeated Meme: The Rebel Flesh

2011-05-23T10:42:00.007+01:00

Idea Proposed and Used to Death during the RTD Era: Seriously, doesn't this feel like the distilled essence of RTD-era Base-under-Siege stories? It's equal parts "The Impossible Planet," "42" and "The Waters of Mars," plus echoes of the Master duplicating himself endlessly in the Era Finale. Also the Sontarans apparently got hold of some of that Flesh stuff.

Central Premise Recycled From: "The Impossible Planet," as mentioned. More philosophically, there's bits of The Thing, Blade Runner, Alien and The Death Guard in there.

Reference to Moffat's Back Catalogue: Surprisingly little this week, though we do get a quick Moffat Moppet, and surreal zombie creatures in spacesuits.

Amy Screws Up the day with Wuv: After the last two episodes, it's probably not surprising that Rory seems to be getting a bit up-close-and-personal with Ganger-Jennifer.

Joss Whedon Called...: He wants the philosophical concepts behind Dollhouse back. Oh, and Bioshock claim we've stolen their suits.

And from Lawrence Miles: People being reconstituted from a magic vat of fleshstuff, like in Interference.

Murray Goldwatch: Hits the heights of banality this week, with a distinctly Muzaklike tone to some of the non-leitmotif pieces. Or perhaps it's a comment on the alienating nature of manual labour?

Nostalgia UK: Casting Marshall Lancaster in a story about industrial unrest is just going to make everyone think of Life on Mars, you know.

Inside Jokes: Marshall Lancaster, above. There's a quick visual reference to Lady Cassandra in the sequence where Ganger-Jennifer emerges from the Flesh, and the Doctor shows his RTD-era fondness for climbing up spires. A monastery with an anachronistic record playing in it appeared in "The Time Meddler."

Teeth! More freaky-mouth action as a full-blown set of lips sprout out of the Flesh

Hats! None, but the suits have nifty Helmets.

Fish! The Doctor thinks Amy and Rory should go out for some. With chips.

Small Child! Ganger-Jennifer holds a picture of herself as a small child and reminisces about her early memories.

Item Most Likely to Wind Up as a Toy: The Gangers of course.

Alice and Wonderland

2011-05-19T22:33:00.007+01:00

Temple Grandin: Biopic of the genius autistic animal behaviourist, which uses clever editing and animation sequences to convey how she perceives the world. Two takeaways: 1) it's amazing how much autism has normalised in the last thirty years, and 2) I'll never look at a cow the same way again.

A Town Like Alice: War-Britflick about a group of female British POW's, wandering around Malaya looking for a Japanese prisoner camp that would take them and dying of various tropical ailments and stress-related illnesses along the way. I know it's a classic, but I found it pretty unengaging.

Eyes Wide Shut: A film about a man who is convinced the world revolves around him, and then is extensively confronted with the fact that it doesn't. Slow, but also very beautiful and compelling, with Cruise and Kidman impeccably cast, and a haunting use of Christmas tree lights to convey atmosphere.

What a Whopper: Adorable teen comedy from an era that tends to get forgotten by popular culture, i.e. the early 1960s, when Britain was in transition from Austerity to Grooviness. Where else would you find a romantic subplot involving a radiophonic musician, Charles Hawtrey and Sid James before they got typecast, girls in underwear which contains more fabric than most modern outer clothing, Spike Milligan as a tramp on the Serpentine--and a couple of postmodern touches to remind us that the mad self-referential films of the late Sixties are only a few years away? Plus, it was written by Terry Nation. If you're feeling down, go buy it on Amazon and enjoy.

Movie count for 2011: 74

The Repeated Meme: The Doctor's Wife

2011-05-15T19:37:00.006+01:00

Idea Proposed and Not Used During the JNT Era: The Doctor's Wife. Look, JNT was just baiting the press with that one, stop taking it seriously.

Central Premise Recycled From: "Edge of Destruction." No, really, think about it. Also quirky malevolent aliens naming themselves after family members is straight out of "The Family of Blood."

Reference to Moffat's Back Catalogue: Doctor having romantic relationship with woman who Understands Him Like No One Else Does, but is doomed, and gets his companions out of the way to do it. Rory makes yet another reference to his now-nonexistant life as a Nestene. Also, from this season (already), companions going all timey-wimey and graffitiing messages as a consequence.

Amy Saves the day with Wuv: Actually the theme this year seems increasingly to be Amy Failing to Save the Day with Wuv, as the incident with Rory aging to death seems to indicate that Rory's got a few abandonment issues.

Joss Whedon Called...: He wants his patchwork people made out of bits of demons/aliens back.

And from Lawrence Miles: The TARDIS is a human girl. Plus Idris says "it's About Time" at one point.

Murray Goldwatch: The "Da-da-da, da-da-da-da-da" theme comes in about 26 minutes in, and we also get some Carmina-Burana-by-way-of-The-Phantom-Menace choir action during the running around corridors.

Nostalgia UK: Neil Gaiman counts, unfortunately. But apparently Tardis consoles include a "retroscope."

Inside Jokes: The Doctor's Wife, and "it's About Time!" see above. The episode starts off with what sounds like a reference to "The Androids of Tara," but it turns out to be a fake-out. The Doctor asserting that he's rebuilt the console before is probably a Pertwee Era reference. There's a shaving mirror on the jury-rigged console, and a reference to the Eye of Orion as a holiday spot. Idris' babble is taken from Dalek Sec, which is itself taken from Ghost Light (which is a clear massive influence on this story). The original Celestial Toymaker story featured a malevolent Aunt and Uncle. Opening a door through telepathic visualisation is from the novelisation of The Doomsday Weapon.

Teeth! Idris is bitey.

Hats! Some pretty good examples on Auntie and Uncle, plus Idris' wig.

Fish! "Like fish fingers!" "Oh, do fish have fingers?" Idris taking the mick.

Small Child! Not a literal one, but the Auntie-Uncle-Nephew setup has a metaphorical one in Nephew.

Item Most Likely to Wind Up as a Toy: Idris, naturally. Though you can already make your own custom Nephew figure by painting the eyes of an Ood figurine with glow-in-the-dark green paint.

Worst Episode of Deep Space 9 Ever

2011-05-10T13:21:00.004+01:00

Fight Club: Another of these Generation-X-defining films, about young men feeling alienated by the postmodern, post-ideological, consumer-driven zeitgeist of the late 1990s, spending too much time on airplanes and, with no ideological cause to rally round bar self-help groups, becoming drawn into an anarchic rebellion-as-therapy movement, with boxing clubs and bombing raids becoming a kind of self-actualisation process. Although some of the film feels a bit pre-September-11th, unfortunately a lot of the alienation and consumerised stagnation it portrays are still with us-- and indeed, now that the credit bubble has burst, in need of urgent resolution.

Waltz With Bashir: Animated film about post-traumatic stress syndrome, as the filmmaker/protagonist attempts to recapture his blocked memories of the 1982 Lebanon War, and in particular his witnessing of a massacre at a refugee camp. The nature of the animation and the soundtrack of frenetic electronica gives it a suitably nightmarish feel, while the climactic account of the massacre is a case study in how atrocities start and then keep going because nobody has the nerve to say "stop!"

Brideshead Revisited: A why-bother film. Pretty much all of the good bits were the ones which most resembled the TV adaption, and pretty much all of its problems were things which the TV adaptation was able to resolve (the short length of the film, for instance, meant that interesting characters like Anthony Blanche only get a spit and a cough, the casting of the Flyte siblings was all wrong, with Sebastian too uncharismatic and camp and Julia too beautiful and confident, and the frame story of Ryder's military service contributed nothing). This is a story which needs slow development, not the blockbuster treatment.

Movie count for 2011: 69

The Repeated Meme: The Last Saskatchewan Pirate

2011-05-08T13:39:00.009+01:00

Idea Proposed and Used to Death by Walt Disney: Pirates. Look, anything you do will be compared to Pirates of the Carribbean one way or another, so either a) roll with it and get as silly and "arr me hearties" as you can, or b) go against type and play it nasty, gritty, and filthy, sort of like The Oneidin Line with more gore and grime.

Central Premise Recycled From: "The Stones of Blood." Only Cessair of Diplos was at least more camp.

Reference to Moffat's Back Catalogue: Moffat Moppet aside, the idea of a spaceship whose crew are dead and one of its computer routines is kidnapping random people is pure "The Girl in the Fireplace," while the purpose behind the mermaid's activities is from the resolution to "the Doctor Dances." Plus, there's a Black Spot on people's hands exactly where the Red Spot was in "Day of the Moon"-- couldn't they have waited a bit before recycling?

Amy Saves the day with Wuv: Rory, despite his medical training, is convinced that Amy's Wuv will be enough to allow her to do competent CPR. Mind you, since it seems working as a kissogram girl has qualified her to do competent swordfighting, he might not be far wrong.

Joss Whedon Called...: No, actually, he didn't.

And from Lawrence Miles: The eighteenth-century setting, arguably. A more likely candidate is the Doctor's remark about "alien bogies" (as a pun on Alien Bodies).

Murray Goldwatch: Nul points for the "ahahahahaaaaaa" siren chorus, sort of like "The Phantom of the Opera" without the tune.

Nostalgia UK: Pirates. Who did once used to be a real problem for the British Navy, but by the time of Gilbert and Sullivan, J.M. Barrie etc., were panto-fodder. Like these ones.

Inside Jokes: More "Warrior's Gate" references as regards mirrors being used as transdimensional gateways.

Teeth! On the mermaid! Whenever she goes to red.

Hats! Tricorns are cool.

Fish! The Doctor describes the mermaid as "a green singing shark in an evening gown" (they should have gone with that image, not Lily Cole).

Small Child! Toby. The least said, the better.

Item Most Likely to Wind Up as a Toy: Wouldn't a glow-in-the-dark mermaid be cool? Unfortunately we're probably just going to get Hugh Bonneville with a small child instead.

The Funny Pages

2011-05-01T04:00:00.000+01:00

Enchanted: Enchanting. Outrageously cute Disney self-parody which affectionately takes the mick out of princess films, featuring a cartoon fairytale princess who finds herself, through a malign enchantment, in modern New York-- and yet still retaining fairytale-princess traits like the ability to summon cute animals (cue Snow-White inspired sequence where she cleans up a flat with the aid of pigeons, rats and cockroaches) and inspire musical set-pieces (there's a production number in Central Park which manages to be funnier than the dancing cutlery number from Beauty and the Beast). But while it has the obvious Disney message that everyone needs a "bit of fairytale magic" in their lives, there's a less-obvious message that fairytale people also need a dose of reality.

Superman Returns: Continuation, or possibly greatest-hits compilation, of the 1970s/80s Superman films (and sharing their slight confusion over when they are set, featuring as they do a strange mix of Seventies and 2000s aesthetic features). It's more in the serious Richard Donner than the silly Richard Lester mode, but this isn't really to its credit, as it's overlong and boring, with Kevin Spacey's Lex Luthor lacking the sense of OTT fun of the Gene Hackmann version.

Movie Count for 2011: 66

What I saw this year at the Sci-Fi London Film Festival

2011-04-30T22:43:00.006+01:00

Remember, people, support the festival. In these days of arts funding cuts, great things like this are vulnerable.

Your Days Are Numbered: The Maths of Death: Not actually a film, but a stand-up comedy show about mortality statistics. Which is audacious enough, but the show itself was both informative (most deaths in airplane crashes are actually from smoke inhalation, who knew?) and a laugh riot. They're on tour right now, check and see if they're visiting your area.

Robotica: A short film compilation by the One Dot Zero art collective, on the theme of robots, ranging from the silly to the surreal. My favourite was a steampunk Russian fantasy piece-- sort of like I Robot crossed with Grant Morrison-- but there were also some great music video pieces and animation tests featuring giant mecha.

Gantz: One of the two standout features this year. A Japanese superhero film, which uses the idea (a mysterious entity seemingly kidnaps people at the point of death and uses them as an army to combat a series of aliens) as a jumping-off point to ask what it is to be heroic, and how we can all be heroes. Features an attack on Tokyo by a giant statue of the Buddha of Compassion, and gets away with it.

We Are All Cylons: Clever documentary on Battlestar Galactica fandom, and how they use the series not just as a form of escapism, but to inform the moral codes of their everyday lives in a world where the boundary between human and technology is increasingly vague.

Sharktopus: So-bad-it's-good Roger Corman badflick in which a Mexican resort town is terrorized by a CGI monster shark/octopus hybrid. Visibly paid for by the local chamber of commerce (as the film not-so-subtly highlighs the vacation fun opportunities in the area while cheerily dispatching as many tourists, preferably attractive ones aged 18-35, as possible), and starring Eric Roberts, who quite visibly gets drunk during the filming.

Dinoshark: Variation on the above theme, also by Corman and involving a revived pliosaur terrorizing the same Mexican resort town. More of an effort went into making this a serious film than "Sharktopus", which is mostly to its credit (there's a subplot involving the corrupt local police chief which is absolutely sparkling and could have come out of a much better Third World crime thriller), but occasionally to its detriment (the attempts to give "characterisation" to the main players are just boring and pathetic). Some lovely CGI of the dinoshark (sic) coursing along under the surface of the water, and a hilarious sequence involving stunt surfers.

You Are Here: The other standout feature, a surrealist Canadian piece (shot, and set, in Toronto, hooray) which, I suspect, is about the human brain and the question of what consciousness is. Cleaning up at film festivals worldwide-- go see it, it defies description.

Short Films: Standout pieces this year were "The Interview" (pointed topical satire in which the last man on Earth goes for a job interview), "Virus" (cute animated short about computer viruses in love), "VortX Inc" (clever low-budget take on literal technological wizardry), "Death of the Real" (just a lot of evocative shots of a deserted New York), "Once Upon a Time on Earth" (a couple split up, then the Earth is invaded... will they get back together in time?), and "Goodbye Robot Army" (a charmingly ironic take on the mad-scientist genre).

Other Stuff: The freebies are back in spades this year-- I scored five magazines (including SFX's True Blood special, hooray!) seven books, one DVD (albeit of an anime series that looks dreadful) and a couple of inflatable swords promoting a new fantasy RPG from EA. Plus we got to play with the new 3D portable game player from Nintendo.

Movie Count for 2011: 64

Red sails

2011-04-30T22:36:00.005+01:00

Sunset Boulevard: Satire on the entertainment industry which is, if anything, truer today than in the 1950s. Norma Desmond serves as a metaphor for the whole of the commercial film industry, a fame-addicted creature making a devil's bargain with creative talents-- feed my ego with facile celebrity-focused tat and I'll reward you, try to be your own person and you'll wind up dead in the swimming pool-- who collude in their own subjugation even as they resent it.

Movie count for 2011: 60

God bothering

2011-04-30T22:05:00.004+01:00

The Day the Earth Stood Still: Fifties take on Christianity for the Cold War, as Jesus comes to Earth in the form of the alien Klaatu to try and save humanity from itself. In keeping with the dominant memes of the era, the proposed solution to human aggression is essentially authoritarian (a kind of robot police force which act to forestall any act of externally-directed violence). Not sure how well that would really work in practice. Also visually beautiful, with that kind of clean, spare austerity one associates with the early 1950s.

Dogma: Nineties take on Christianity for the postmodern era, as a group of Generation Xers take a road-trip to try to stop a pair of disillusioned angels from destroying all of creation. The message throughout being that legalism, doctrine and even belief are to be rejected, that grand narratives are generally false, and that what ultimately matters is being good to others, forgiving people and having ideas. Oh, and that Alanis Morrissette is God. Apparently more people were offended by this than by Jay and Silent Bob's continued existence.

Movie count for 2011: 59

The Repeated Meme: Day of the Moon

2011-04-30T20:28:00.008+01:00

Idea Proposed and Used to Death in the Virgin Books Era: ...the above theme continues, with a trip to actual Area 51.

Central Premise Recycled From: "The Invasion of Time." No really, think about it. Also the Men in Black (who can, of course, wipe people's minds... and who inhabit a universe where aliens have walked among us for centuries).

Reference to Moffat's Back Catalogue: Leaving aside the kids, the spacesuit, the catchphrase, wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey etc., we have magical Doctor-induced TV images saving the day, Amy-loves-the-Doctor-really action, "silence will fall" and about a million references to last year's season (celebrity world leaders, phantom pregnancies, Rory's past as a Nestene....).

Amy Saves the day with Wuv: Well, she makes Rory feel better with Wuv, but considering that her getting pregnant with Schroedinger's Child is going to be the catalyst for the action all season, I'd say she's got a lot to make up for.

Joss Whedon Called...: ...he wants his Ben and Glory bit back (remember how, in Season 5, anytime anyone found out that Ben and Glory were the same person, they immediately forgot it? Course you don't. Think about it.)

And from Lawrence Miles: Someone falling off a building and landing in the TARDIS pool.

Murray Goldwatch: In the very first scene, he manages to give us yet another musical theme consisting of a single percussive phrase repeated over and over with no variations. This wouldn't matter if we didn't know he could do better.

Nostalgia UK: And the Mad Men meme continues as River and Rory cosplay as Joan and Pete.

Inside Jokes: Dwarf star alloy, plus the Doctor tells Nixon to tape record everything, plus yet another trip to Manhattan (complete with confrontation in a partly-finished block of flats, Empire State Building prominently visible in the background). River cements her position as the female Captain Jack by making the exact same joke Jack does in "The Empty Child" about the lack of utility of a sonic screwdriver outside of the putting up of shelves.

Teeth! Still the anti-teeth!

Fish! Missing! this episode.

Hats! No, though River has a new hairdo! every five minutes.

Small Child! Who might well be looking for its Mummy.

Item Most Likely to Wind Up as a Toy: See last post.

The Repeated Meme: The Impossible Astronaut

2011-04-30T16:34:00.009+01:00

Idea Proposed and Used to Death in the Virgin Books Era: American space programme, aliens, Area 51, FBI, conspiracies, blah blah blah. It was the 1990s, you see, and that was fashionable.

Central Premise Recycled From: Pretty much any conspiracy-theory series of the 1990s, via "Dreamland" (the animated David Tennant spinoff story from a couple of years back).

Reference to Moffat's Back Catalogue: We've had creepy spacesuits and cute children, now have a cute child in a creepy spacesuit! And creepy tape recordings! Also wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey stuff with the Doctor's timeline and him and River Song meeting in reverse order.

Amy Saves the day with Wuv: Well, she can't save the day yet as it's only Part One, but her Wuv for the Doctor does get her running out to Monument Valley on a moment's notice.

Joss Whedon Called...: He wants The Gentlemen back. Oh, and Mark Sheppard.

And from Lawrence Miles: The Doctor's body is so dangerous, even dead, that it must be destroyed.

Murray Goldwatch: The irritating da-da-da, da-da-da-da-da theme starts in Scene 2, before the credits even, and never gets better.

Nostalgia UK: Mad Men-inspired Sixties-iana, the Moon Landings, Laurel and Hardy.

Inside Joke List: Space: 1969. "Since when do you drink wine?" Amy asks the Doctor (the Pertwee era, actually).

Teeth! Anti-teeth, on the Silence, who have no mouths and therefore cannot tooth.

Fish! Mentioned, as fingers with custard.

Hats! Stetsons are cool this week.

Small Child! In a spacesuit, no less.

Item Most Likely to Wind Up as a Toy: The Silence of course. Although it looks like the chances of us finally seeing a limited-edition Amy Pond Up the Duff are increasing.

French Fried

2011-04-22T19:43:00.004+01:00

French Connection II: In my review of The French Connection, I mentioned its poorer imitators; well, this is one. Perhaps the problem with it is summed up in the sequence where Popeye Doyle is kidnapped and deliberately addicted to heroin by the baddies and subsequently goes cold turkey; it's both saying "drugs are bad, so all that seemingly useless effort that Popeye went to in the first film was justified, really it was," and at the same time "but people who are addicted to drugs are just weak people who can't kick the habit like Popeye can." Otherwise not much, just Gene Hackman wandering around an unattractive Southern French city in a silly hat getting into trouble and doing obvious riffs on better scenes from the first movie.

M*A*S*H*: Another film on the absurdity of war, this one seeing it through the blackly comic misadventures of a campful of army surgeons-- most of them very intelligent, dedicated, drafted, unhappy to be there, and therefore determined to cause as much trouble as possible so long as it's entertaining and doesn't interfere with doing their jobs. Deliberately rambling and plotless, instead focusing on the theme of coping, or failing to cope, with the madness of it all. Contains some brilliant directoral touches, in particular Altman's skilful way of filming scenes where everybody is talking at once in such a way that the audience hears exactly the phrases he wants them to hear.

Movie count for 2011: 57. Hoe for the Sci-Fi London Film Festival next week!

Straight Up

2011-04-21T11:00:00.003+01:00

The Straight Story: David Lynch can do feelgood, who knew? Also, it's really lovely to see a Hollywood feelgood film that keeps everything completely low-key throughout-- Alvin Straight, the octagenerian who decides to make a cross-country trip on his lawnmower to visit his brother, isn't played as a lovable quirky eccentric, and there's no dramatic blockbuster ending where everyone who the protagonist has encountered on his journey bands together to help him get that extra mile, cheering as they go. There's no tacked-on sense of closure anywhere, just of simple intimate dramas into which Alvin and the viewer both drift, participate, and drift on.

Movie count for 2011: 55

Back and Back again

2011-04-11T14:36:00.004+01:00

Back to the Future II: OK but unnecessary sequel. It had some nice moments (e.g. the "1980s nostalgia" cafe in the 2015 sequences, plus the plot riffed entertainingly on the idea that events were continually repeating themselves from one generation to the next), but really it just felt like a greatest-hits compilation from the first film-- like it was saying "here are all the bits you liked from the first film, writ a bit larger so you'll enjoy them more." Plus, science has exactly four years in which to come up with a flying Delorean.

Back to the Future III: Adequate but even less necessary sequel. Effectively the same jokes are told but in a Wild West setting, which I suppose has humour value in a kind of "the same things happen to the same people every generation" sort of way, but not only is it getting a bit dull and predictable, it also loses the element of irony the first fim (and to some extent the sequel) had, whereby we can contrast the aspirations, ambitions and personalities of the 1950s youthful characters with what they subsequently became in the 1980s. It's also made outrageously dated by being visibly set within the brief window in the late 1980s/early 1990s when Westerns suddenly became fashionable again for a moment.

Movie count for 2011: 54

Mods and Rockers

2011-04-07T22:49:00.003+01:00

Brighton Rock: The 2011 remake. One of those movies where I felt like some bits worked and some didn't. Good use was made of the Brighton setting, but having the blowsy ex-prostitute who decides to investigate the murder be the same person as the owner of the cafe where the girl who witnessed the deed works made the town feel far too small. Likewise I could understand the decision to transpose the action to the 1960s, as Pinky's attempt to take over the gang ran paralell to the youth riots, but on the other hand it occasionally made the whole thing feel heavy-handed and caused accidental flashbacks to Quadrophenia (and also, Pinky never really felt like he belonged in a 1960s setting; he wasn't engaged with the youth culture, or much of an Angry Young Man). The religious themes were well handled though, leaving one to think at the end that God may well have forgiven Pinky, whatever Pinky himself believed about his hell-bound status.

Amadeus: The director's cut. An exploration of envy, which was gripping (despite being about three and a half hours long), well-staged and well-cast, but I also have to say I found it difficult to empathise with Salieri and rather felt he needed to get over himself-- I kept wanting to say, "so what if you're not Mozart, be happy with the achievements you have, and be grateful that you're one of the few who can appreciate Mozart's music for what it is", and, twitterpated idiot that he was, I kept rooting for Mozart.

Movie count for 2011: 52

Movie Roundup

2011-04-07T19:05:00.009+01:00

Burn after Reading: Cohen Brothers black comedy, following on their familiar two-idiots-acquire-something-valuable-and-mayhem-ensues theme (q.v. Fargo, Raising Arizona, A Simple Plan), but setting it in Washington among the paranoia of the Bush Junior regime. A friend of mine describes it as "bleak," but I just thought it was hilarious.

Infamous: Truman Capote, portrayed here as a cross between Holly Golightly and Porky Pig, writes a fictionalised biography of a convicted murderer (played by Daniel Craig with such intensity as to make anyone realise he's wasted on the Bond franchise), but finds that the experience takes him to his moral, spiritual and ethical limits. Through telling this story, and also exploring Capote's friendship with Harper Lee, the film considers the boundaries between truth and fiction, and the cost of fictionalising truth, without coming up with any easy answers.

Fantasia: the 1940 version (to be precise, the 1969 edit with the racially insensitive bit removed). Some bits work better than others: The dinosaur/Rite of Spring and the witches' sabbat/Night on Bald Mountain sequences were definite hits, the Toccata and Fugue left me rather cold, the Nutcracker Suite/flower fairies and Pastoral Symphony/Greek gods ran the complete gamut from charming to boring to downright offensive, and the dancing hippoes/Dance of the Hours was vaguely insulting to women, composers and Italianate architecture. And how I feel about The Sorcerer's Apprentice depends on my mood.

Fantasia 2000: Scored slightly better than the earlier version in terms of outstanding sequences, with the nature spirit/The Phoenix and Rhapsody in Blue/New York in the Thirties sequences being both fantastic, and the Pomp and Circumstance/Donald Duck loading the animals onto the Ark sequence deserving an award for sheer chutzpah. Unfortunately there was also two tedious sequences, an overly cutesy one involving flamingoes, and a bunch of pointless celebrity intro spots, which just makes the film look like the studio are afraid no one will see the movie without slebs. Take about half of this movie, about half of the previous movie, mash them together and get James Earl Jones to introduce the lot, and you're sorted.

Toy Story: A film that manages to weave together product placement, computer animation, kidult sensibility, irony and metatextuality (prior to this film, after all, Woody and Buzz Lightyear weren't toys...); thus, probably the defining film of the 1990s.

Manhattan: Woody Allen is a New York writer with a complicated sex life. Diane Keaton is a New York writer with a complicated sex life. Meryl Streep is a New York writer with a complicated sex life. In fact, pretty much the only person in the film who isn't a New York writer with a complicated sex life is Mariel Hemingway, which explains why Woody Allen winds up dumping her and then regretting it. So not exactly the most complex or original Woody Allen film, but it's charming and pretty, with some witty lines and a wry take on a world recognisable to anybody who's ever been involved with any sort of literary/arts/academic scene.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves: Disney's first full-length feature. As it was made before animation had settled down to a series of tropes, it's interesting to view in the context of 1930s cinema more generally: a male and female love interest who might as well have been Dale Arden and Flash Gordon with slightly different hair; dwarves; organised labour (Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work we go), and animated animals which are cute but still recognisably animals, even if they do weird things like scrubbing pots with their tails. Also interesting in terms of the ambiguous Christian imagery at the end: is the Handsome Prince actually Jesus Christ, resurrecting the deceased Snow White and taking her away to a golden castle which hovers on the horizon as if in the sky, or is Snow White herself a regendered Christ-figure, a person of royal blood who dwells among the poor and the lowly and makes their lives better, is killed by those in power, and, after lying dead for a while, revives and goes up to claim her magical/heavenly kingdom? You decide. The version we saw had a couple of worth-seeing featurettes, in the form of a behind-the-scenes piece (with surreal footage of dancers in huge dwarf masks and beards cavorting around so the animators could get the movement right) and a cut sequence which explains what happened to the soap that Dopey swallows during the washing scene, and where Snow White is supposed to sleep.

Movie count for 2011: 50

List to the Right

2011-03-24T15:01:00.004Z

Schindler's List: I'd like to propose that this film be read in terms of the socio-political context of the early 1990s. Namely, what we have is a text arguing that 1) death and survival/salvation and damnation are arbitrary and random; 2) that the person who can do the most to fight oppression and injustice is not the state, not the party, not the church [repeat ad nauseum through all the traditional institutions], but the individual, and 3) that this fighting of oppression can, indeed should, be fought through capitalist activity. And as such, it's part of a philisophical continuum with privatisation, deregulation, "trade not aid," and the idea that social activism need not cause one to sacrifice one's material comforts (indeed, that one might even turn a profit doing so-- and it's only at the very end of the film that Schindler ceases turning a profit and starts going bankrupt in the name of saving Jews). Not saying it's a bad film-- quite the contrary, it's well shot and the performances are superb, though it could definitely have done without the cloying "I could have done more!" speech at the end-- but that maybe it needs to be seen not as having a universal message, but as a film made at a time when the old institutions were failing, capitalism was on the ascendant, and people were looking for a philosophy.

Movie count for 2011: 43

I said, I think I remember the film, and as I recall I think we both kind of liked it

2011-03-09T11:51:00.006Z

Superman III: Better than I and IV, though frankly that's not saying much as both are beaten in quality and believability by Hollyoaks. I liked the idea of the villains being a big businessman and a computer programmer, and also found it refreshing that a) Richard Pryor's villain isn't so much a bad guy as a man driven to crime through recession conditions, and b) the character articulating the idea that lower taxes and reduced pension funds are a good idea is a bad guy. However, the film really failed to gel: the main storylines didn't have much to do with each other, and Pryor's character arc kind of got lost (it looked like they were taking him along the lines of good guy--> temptation --> bad guy --> series of epiphanies where he realises what he's doing is wrong --> good guy again, but that fizzled out round about the start of the epiphany cycle), there were several completely pointless set pieces (though I did find the Tati-esque one at the start, where Metropolis seems to be full of strange little catastrophes, quite sweet), and the fantasy-science entered the Kingdom of the Nuclear Fridge far too rapidly.

Breakfast at Tiffany's: Blake Edwards on peak form, viewing like a charming and non-nihilistic version of Cabaret ("sensitive" failed writer falls in love with a charismatic but dodgy crypto-prostitute with a strange past, and through her finds himself and his creative voice). Features the best cat actor I've ever seen (and that includes the creepy Siamese in UFO). The only false note is struck by the comedy "Japanese" neighbour played by Mickey Rooney in appalling yellowface-- remember, this film was made two years after The Crimson Kimono-- for which there is no excuse at all, but steel yourself to get through those scenes and there's a lot to love.

Citizen Kane: Brilliant, magical, simultaneously realistic and surreal, thoroughly exploring Kane's character while still leaving him a mysterious figure at the end. To review it properly would take an academic career, not a capsule review, so I'll just leave it at this.

Movie count for 2011: 42 (title explanation for those who didn't get the reference here)

Two movies about cute blonde children

2011-03-06T13:51:00.006Z

Poltergeist: The best horror movies are always the ones which aren't really, actually about the horror, but use it as a gateway to explore something else. Hellraiser is about marital infidelity. Hallowe'en is about teenage sex. The Wicker Man is about religious faith and temptation. The problem I had with Poltergeist is that it doesn't seem to be about anything. The spirits invade the house through the television-- is is about fear of the media? Nothing else suggests that. The victims are a Reaganite suburban family-- is it a satire on middle-class American hypocrisy? Apart from the fact that the family keep the disappearance of the youngest child hushed up, apparently not. The catalyst for action is an adorable child-- is it about paedophilia or child abuse? Seems not. There's a suggestion at one point that the mother of the family got pregnant at 16 (the eldest child is 16, the mother is 32), which perked me up thinking that the twist would be that the channel for the spirits was the teenage daughter, fraught with issues about the nature of her conception and her jealousy of her adorable younger siblings, but no, the teenager might as well not be in the movie for all the writers keep shunting her off to a friend's house. Even why this particular suburban family gets the treatment is unexplored (surely the entire subdivision was built on the abandoned graveyard, so why just them? If it's because the father of the family was the estate agent who sold the houses, how are the ghosts supposed to know that, particularly as he did so not knowing about the graveyard?). To top it off, I couldn't manage to care enough about anybody in the story to worry overly if the ghosts got them. Also contains the most product placement per minute of any film I've ever seen, particularly for Star Wars toys. I honestly can't understand why this movie was/is so popular. And remember, this is the producer who made Munich, Empire of the Sun and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Metropolis (2001): Not the Lang version, but a Japanese writer and director taking some of Lang's themes, ideas and imagery and running with them, and the result is a lot better than you might think. It's a story of startling visual and political complexity (particularly the portrayal of the two counter-cultural groups, the crypto-Maoist rebels and the crypto-fascist "Mardukes," and of the coup d'etat promulgated by the aristocrat Duke Red), and its main flaw is that it's kind of difficult to figure out precisely what the Ziggurat, the Tower of Babel-like creation in which Duke Red is investing so much of his time and energy, is supposed to do, which makes some of the characters' motivations equally cryptic. It's a good movie, but be prepared to invest a certain amount of time in trying to figure it all out.

Movie count for 2011: 39

Winterized

2011-03-03T16:51:00.004Z

The Lion in Winter: A film about the internal politics of the English/Northern French Royal Family in the 12th century might sound like one for the specialists, but this is amazing stuff, taking history as a loose basis for a psychodrama about a powerful family whose members are all plotting and counter-plotting against each other with schemes of amazing complexity. That Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn are brilliant as frenemies/lovers Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitane goes without saying, but watch out for Anthony Hopkins, Nigel Terry and Timothy Dalton in roles which are completely and totally different from the sort of thing they're respectively famous for.

Movie count for 2011: 37

Man and Superman

2011-03-02T15:48:00.005Z

Viva Zapata: There's a good message to this film, namely, that people, especially people in revolt, are better off without leaders, as Emilio Zapata discovers that, firstly, the cult of personality revolving around him does more harm than good, and, second, that when he achieves power, it corrupts him as much as it does anyone else. Unfortunately the message is buried under far too much leaden dialogue, plus some appallingly Orientalist stereotypes of Mexicans (particularly Mexican women). Marlon Brando shambles through the story as the title character, looking embarrassed by his costume and blackface and mumbling all his lines.

Sleeper: Witty and savage satire, ostensibly about a 1970s man who wakes up 200 years later to find himself in a strange future society, but actually a polemic against contemporary bourgeois American attitudes-- selfish people lulled into compliance by their gadgetry, silly intellectuals convinced that they're changing the world by writing poetry but being terrified by the thought of actual subversion, "revolutionaries" who are no different to the rulers they propose to replace. It's just gotten worse in the past 40 years. Co-stars some very beautiful modernist architecture, and Diane Keaton.

Superman: I wasn't expecting much, but this actually surprised me by how appallingly bad it was. Inconsistent in terms of plot, characters and even what decade it's supposed to be (it couldn't seem to make up its mind whether it was the 1950s or the 1970s), establishing a group of antagonists at the start and then never actually using them, shameless abuse of CSO, equally shameless waste of a great cast... the list goes on. The only good things were, 1) occasional lovely directorial touches (mainly in the scenes of Superman's boyhood in Kansas, where the principal photographer just goes nuts over the wheatfields), and 2) the initial conceit of making Lois Lane a nasty, sadistic bitch, which seems to have been nicked from the Fleischer cartoons. Though unfortunately it all falls apart as the writers don't seem capable of reconciling her being a nasty bitch with her being Superman's main love interest (I know people say the appeal of The Godfather had more to do with the films than the book, but you'd think Mario Puzo could have managed a tiny bit of character complexity). Marlon Brando drifts through the story as Superman's father Jor-El, looking embarrassed by his white pompadour wig.

Movie count for 2011: 36

The Road to Mandalay

2011-02-25T14:02:00.006Z

Manderlay: Sequel to Dogville, and I actually liked it better than the first film. It's a story about a rich white woman who encouters a plantation where the slaves have apparently not been told about the Emancipation Proclamation, and sets about trying to turn it into a collective farm. The results, firstly, skewer white liberal reformist attitudes (as Grace's efforts bear fruit in some areas, but lead to starvation and death in others, and she is ultimately forced to confront the uncomfortable similarity between herself and the plantation's former owners as regards their relationship with the black workers), and secondly, poses deeper, Enlightenment-philosophy-style questions about the complicated relationship between individual freedom/rights, collective freedom/rights and the law.

The Roaring Twenties: Justifiedly famous James Cagney gangster-picture with a political message: made in 1939, the film pins the blame for the rise of gang activity in the 1920s on, firstly, America's involvement in WWI; secondly, the government's failure to provide for the returning soldiers in its aftermath; and, thirdly, the enactment of prohibition laws. Cagney plays a young man who returns from the war to find all jobs taken, but the criminal underworld open to employment for intelligent young men with mad gun-wielding skillz. The plot which develops also has a strong moral message, as the "good," "innocent"-seeming characters are actually responsible for some of the most calculated acts of amorality in the story, while Cagney's character, despite being a criminal, also tries to do what's right by his friends and girlfriend. A clear influence on Boardwalk Empire.

Movie count for 2011: 33

Going Places

2011-02-23T10:05:00.009Z

Run Fatboy Run: Better-than-expected Simon Pegg comedy, falling somewhere between the brilliance of Shaun of the Dead and the blatant catering to the Americans of How To Lose Friends and Irritate People. Pegg plays his stock character of the drifting underachieving male who is galvanized into action-- in this case, he resolves to run a thinly-disguised London Marathon (renamed the Nike River Run, presumably for product placement purposes) in order to win his estranged ex-girlfriend and the mother of his child back from an evil American financier. Although it's set in London it feels a bit aimed at the American market (although the American character is the baddie, it takes place in tourist-London rather than real London, and it carefully contains no cultural references that Americans are unlikely to get), but despite that it's cute and feelgood, and has two supporting characters, played by Dylan Moeran and Harish Patel, who have all the good lines.

Raising Arizona: Classic Cohen Brothers comedy about a Southern petty criminal who resolves to fly straight after marrying a policewoman, but, when they learn they can't have children, the couple find themselves drawn into crime through hatching a mad plot to kidnap one. My Name is Earl appears to have ripped off quite a lot from it (the protagonist even has a shaggy haircut, moustache, predilection for loud shirts, and idiot-savant sidekick, and narrates the whole thing in the same perplexed-but-dry tone as Jason Lee), though it also has a distinctly magic-realist aspect in the protagonist's prophetic dreams and the presence of a biker who represents the protagonist's shadow-self made real, and it also features a bank-heist subplot which views like a dry run for O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Syriana: Complicated film interweaving a series of seemingly disparate, but actually interconnected, stories revolving around the merger of two oil companies to take over a drilling operation in an unnamed Emirate, and the power struggle between the Emir's sons, both of which are shadowed and influenced by forces within the American government and business community. It's a story with no good or bad guys: Alexander Siddig's reforming prince is determined to help his country modernise and realise its potential outside of American control, but is a thoroughly unpleasant type with al-Quaeda connections, while George Clooney's sympathetic CIA agent engages in assassination attempts without so much as a moral qualm, the sweet, family-oriented young Pakistani immigrant workers are being groomed as suicide troops by their smiling and earnest imam, and there is a distinct question as to whether Matt Damon's international economist really is, as his estranged wife contends, profiting over his son's accidental death at a party thrown by the Emir. It's the sort of film Edge of Darkness should have been.

Young Frankenstein: Mel Brooks comedy made around the same time as Blazing Saddles, with some of the same people and a similar starting point, sending up the foibles and biases of the Universal horror films of the 1930s rather than Westerns. Very funny, but it doesn't have the same biting social commentary as Blazing Saddles-- although it does send up the sexual/gender subtext of horror films by having a priapic Frankenstein's Monster in pursuit of an ostensibly-fridgid, actually-rapacious woman, that side of it doesn't really come in until quite late in the story, and the complexities of sexuality in the genre, such as the gay subtexts that some have noted in James Whale's horror films, never really get explored. Perhaps it was a bit too early for all that. More puzzlingly given the team involved, the antisemitism angle seems to mostly get passed over. Still, lots of fun to be had, and see if you can Spot Gene Hackman.

Movie count for 2011: 31

Napoleon complex

2011-02-18T16:10:00.002Z

Napoleon Dynamite: Strangely funny, almost plotless comedy about an irritating teenager (he actually makes one sympathise with the school bullies) living in a small town which appears to be stuck in the mid-eighties, with a bizarre collection of friends and relatives. A surreal, funny and non-preachy take on the traditional teen-movie themes of being true to oneself and finding one's calling in life; Napoleon does both, but the way he does it is so off-the-wall you might not realise he has.

Movie count for 2010: 27

Two True

2011-02-18T15:58:00.004Z

True Grit (1969): Intense Western about a fourteen-year-old girl who hires a bounty hunter to seek revenge on her father's murderer, with a Texas Ranger who also has an interest in getting his hands on said murderer joining them on the hunt. The story explores the complicated nuances of interaction between the characters on their journey, and manages to portray the girl's courage without resorting to patronizing her. My only real complaints are that, firstly, the woman playing the girl is in her early twenties, and it shows, and secondly, that the climax somewhat undoes the portrayal of her as intelligent, brave and logic-driven by having her do something pretty unbelievably stupid when confronted with a rattlesnake.

True Grit (2011): Similar to the first version in many ways (some dialogue was even identical), mainly differing in making LaBoeuf, the Ranger, a more complex and nuanced character, and in giving the story a darker, eerier tone. This is accomplished, first, by setting the action in winter, giving us grim dark skies and occasional snow to contrast with the original's bright skies and lovely landscapes, second, by peopling the hinterland with strange, random people and unexplained events, and third, giving the ending a tragic, downbeat tone which shows how everyone involved in the story paid the price for their decisions and actions. It all feels much less like a traditional Western, and more like Heart of Darkness.

The remake also gets points for casting a real fourteen-year-old, and for having a more believable rattlesnake scene.

Movie count for 2011: 26

Boldly going

2011-02-16T11:14:00.001Z

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: 101 minutes of Kirk and his crew digging themselves out of a hole.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: is basically Galactia 1980 done right-- people from the future time-travel back to California in the Eighties in an invisible spaceship, hook up with a daffy girl local, hand out formulae for miracle products, and engage in funny scenarios due to their failure to understand local culture, only in this movie the characters are likeable, the situations and their attempts to get out of them uncontrived. Also, after the Captain Ahab theme of Star Trek II, it's nice to have a movie from the point of view of the whale. The only problem is the last five minutes when all the charges against the crew are dropped, Kirk busted back to Captain, a new Enterprise is built (funny, the Federation were scrapping it just one film ago) and everyone flies off into the sunset with the reset button firmly pressed.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier: Reportedly the film which nearly scuppered the franchise, and viewing like a catalogue of everything not to do in a Star Trek movie. Don’t use “The Way to Eden” as your reference point, don’t introduce random relatives for Spock, don’t have cutesy scenes of Kirk, Spock and McCoy singing around a campfire, don’t have knockoffs of the Star Wars cantina sequence… and if you’re going to have a charismatic preacher as your antagonist, then please, make his message actually interesting and not some kind of Californian encounter-group shibboleth about acknowledging your pain and having a group hug. Also, I’m all for celebrating the sensuality of the older woman, but having Nichelle Nichols do a striptease really doesn’t fall into that category.

Star Trek VI: Witty and intelligent finale to the original movie series, building on the fact that the original series was basically a metaphor for Cold War politics and doing the collapse of Communism in space, complete with jokes about Fukuyama’s “the end of history” comment and a space-Chernobyl incident. Some complain about the classical misquotations scattered throughout, but for me they worked; it starts out as the Klingons apparently misunderstanding Shakespeare, then morphs to the Klingons actually doing a kind of postmodern reinterpretation of Shakespearian themes, and before long Spock, Chekhov and even Kirk are getting in on the postmodern action, with Spock claiming Sherlock Holmes as a literal ancestor, and Kirk acknowledging his Peter Pan syndrome with a quote from J.M. Barrie. Kim Cattrall guest stars as a Vulcan calculated to induce ponn farr in anything within a fifty-mile radius.

Movie count for 2011: 24

Mad Dogs and Teenagers

2011-02-16T10:33:00.002Z

Dogville: Tragic reflection on the bad side of human nature by Lars von Trier. Nicole Kidman plays a fugitive from gangsters who hides out in a small mountain town, paying back the villagers by helping them out with their work; the villagers, faced with mounting pressure to turn her in on one side, and the temptation of having a ready source of labour on the other, gradually ratchet up the exploitation until it turns into outright abuse. The ending turns the whole thing into a philosophical discussion on the nature of forgiveness which is not dissimilar to that in Bad Lieutenant, but taking the opposite narrative tack: because the person called on to forgive would, in the same situation, have acted no differently to the person they are asked to forgive, they cannot, in the end, do so.

Also, what is it with Scandinavian directors and dogs?

You Don’t Know Jack: Biopic of euthanasist Jack Kevorkian, which is both sympathetic to Kevorkian’s initial idealistic reasons for assisting the suicide of the terminally ill and/or incurably disabled, but also paints his final trial and conviction for murder as the result of his being emotionally traumatised by assisting at all these deaths until, as the trial judge states, he wanted to be stopped.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: Having managed to get through the 1980s without seeing this, I thought it was time to give it a go. It turned out to be a surprisingly witty and accessible teen movie, full of well-timed physical comedy, whose ultimate message is: be true to yourself, and don’t obsess about what other people do or think.

Movie Count for 2011: 20

Eye of the Beholder

2011-02-11T10:03:00.004Z

Black Beauty (1971): The original book was an early animal-rights polemic, told through the picaresque journey of a horse as he goes from a pleasant rural life on a country estate to a harder life as a London cabhorse, before finally being rescued when close to death from abuse. The film loses most of this thematic progression, instead giving us an adventure series and inserting sequences where, for instance, the eponymous horse spends a while with the biggest set of gypsy stereotypes this side of a Channel 4 reality programme, as a circus horse on the Continent (I'm not making this up), and as a warhorse in Afghanistan, leaving a trail of corpses in his wake (again, not kidding-- he's directly responsible for at least two deaths even before going to the Hindu Kush). This vignette-style treatment also leads to interesting narrative strands being violently cut off (what, for instance, will happen when the girlfriend of Beauty's soldier owner finds out that her father's needling the lad into going off to war lead directly to his brutal death in combat? We never learn). The horses are beautiful, the foals are cute and the landscapes dramatic, and the ending does get somewhere close to the bittersweet tone of the novel (despite a shoehorned-in and pointless cameo for Anna Sewell), but it's not really worth setting the Skybox for.

Movie count for 2011: 17

Crimson faced

2011-02-09T23:12:00.004Z

The Crimson Kimono: Not-very-good late-fifties noir-lite B-pic; a stripper who had been planning a Japanese-themed act is killed, an artist who did a painting of her is threatened, the team of police detectives assigned to the case (one European-American, one Japanese-American) both fall for the artist, and it all ends with the world's slowest high-speed chase and the world's most laboured apology. Interesting mainly for its portrayal of Japanese-American (and to a lesser extent Korean-American) culture: at a time when Asians tend to get stereotyped as evil inscrutables or accented comedy-figures, the Japanese characters here are portrayed matter-of-factly as sportsmen, parents, teachers and war heroes (the Korean War naturally-- WWII remains the elephant in the room), and likewise their culture is not something impenetrable by Caucasians (e.g. the Caucasian detective is a kendo enthusiast). The religious diversity of such communities is also unproblematically portrayed (the minor characters include a Japanese Buddhist priest and a Korean Catholic nun). At the end, too, the Japanese detective gets the (Caucasian) girl. It's just a shame this couldn't have happened in a better movie.

Movie count for 2010: 16

Life lessons

2011-02-07T19:02:00.008Z

Le Diner des Cons: The diner in question is a supper party where the participants are all supposed to bring along an idiot; the amoral protagonist finds a prize one, who turns out to be a sort of demented and less-likeable Monsieur Hulot. The escalating series of resulting hilarious disasters teaches him some painful but true lessons about compassion, and very possibly gets him a tax audit.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: Still the best of the Star Trek films, wisely eschewing the Enterprise-fetishism of last outing in favour of a story about learning to accept bitter truths. Kirk is portrayed as a man perpetually afraid of confronting his own aging and death, and having to do so over the course of the film, ending up sadder but wiser. Khan, meanwhile, has a contrasting story as a man unable to let go of his insane desire for revenge on Kirk, and as such winds up wasting his own and his followers' lives.

Hoax: Based-on-a-true-story film about Clifford Irving's famous faked "autobiography" of Howard Hughes. Although played for comedy-drama and disowned by Irving himself, the film does raise the question of what is truth: if one can write a fiction indistinguishable from reality, does this make it true? Worth watching in a double bill with F for Fake.

Movie Count for 2011: 15

Not so edgy

2011-02-02T23:18:00.003Z

Edge of Darkness: Takes an intelligent, paranoid, gripping tale of corruption in business and government, and turns it into a banal whistleblowing thriller. So banal, in fact, that I really don't want to waste any more time reviewing it than I have to. Suffice it to say that it's a good thing that it seems to have more or less sunk without trace.

Movie count for 2010: 12 (don't worry, I've got a Tati box set, two Kurosawas and Le Diner des Cons somewhere about the house, so there is much better to come)

Seal of approval

2011-01-28T22:43:00.005Z

The Seventh Seal: Ninety-minute-long metaphor for the brevity and absurdity of life and the randomness and inevitability of death.

The Big Heat: Film noir ostensibly about a good cop trying to put away a well-connected mobster amid a web of corruption. However, it's directed by Fritz Lang, who can't resist putting a slight shadow of ambiguity over said cop's morality-- specifically, whether the vengeful actions engaged in by a gangster's wronged girlfriend at the climax of the movie were her own idea, or whether the cop manipulated her into it.

Goodfellas: Sort of like a cross between "Mean Streets" and "Casino," a morality tale which follows the career of a mobster from his first entry into crime in the 1950s through to the catastrophic implosion of his criminal network in the 1980s. Predictably good performances all around, but particular credit to Joe Pesci, who is simultaneously funny and terrifying.

Movie count for 2011: 11

Fridge moment

2011-01-22T23:11:00.005Z

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: Possibly my second-favourite film of the series, because it does for the 1950s what Raiders did for the 1930s, presenting us with a kind of collective unconscious of the decade while playfully riffing through the films of the period. An example: the Nuking of the Crystal Fridge not only plays like a knowing parody of the nuclear-test footage I reviewed earlier (watch them and you'll see what I mean), but also reads less like an accurate portrayal of the nuclear tests than like the contemporary mythologising of them: there was no "town" in the desert, but certain government propaganda films made out that there was, and hiding in the fridge is if anything less daft than some of Bert the Turtle Says Duck and Cover's suggestions for how to survive a nuclear blast. Also continues some of the playful self-parody of Crusade, for instance Indy referring to the Bhagavad Gita inaccurately as the "Hindu Bible" (suggesting he knows a lot less about Hinduism than he thinks). The film also has a huge unacknowledged debt to Quatermass and the Pit. My three main problems with it are that: 1) the Cate Blanchett character should have continued for another few films (heck, scrap Indy and give Spalko her own series-- Irina Spalko and the Men Who Stare at Goats, now that's a sequel); 2) the father issues are much more conventionally played than in Crusade, and 3) I still think models are better than CGI. Though it mostly worked OK here.

Movie count for 2011: 8

Parenting issues

2011-01-20T19:39:00.002Z

Juno: Non-judgmental, unsentimental yet upbeat tale of teenage pregnancy, which consequently felt believable. The film doesn't sentimentalise Juno's condition (binge-eating, hormonal surges, constipation, plus the most amazingly distended pregnancy prosthetic I've seen in a movie), but at the same time doesn't make it out to be some kind of punishment for her misdeeds (Juno's parents are disappointed in her but supportive, and the ending of the film implies that Juno will go on to an otherwise-normal late adolescence and early adulthood), while adoption and blended families are given a good press. The gradual unfolding of the characters of the adoptive parents, also, is touchingly done, and the whole thing is a portrayal of flawed, but generally good, human beings which, well, the whole family can enjoy.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: I was looking forward to this as it was my favourite of the trilogy when I was a kid, but found it a little disappointing this time round. Although much, much better than the second film, it is mostly a rehash of the first, with a few changes rung on it for variety. It's a good film for a game of spot-the-thesp (can you find Ronald Lacey among the Nazis?) and has some good lines; even the father issues worked fairly well as Spielberg plays them almost like knowing self-parody (although there were one or two cloying bits towards the end). However the film referencing is much thinner on the ground (mostly coming in the witty casting of an actress with a strong resemblance to Lauren Bacall as the treacherous Nazi Dr Schneider), and most of it felt fairly tick-the-boxes to me (quest for Judaeo-Christian mythological object? Check. Nazis played by Brits? Check. Dieselpunk-style souped-up Thirties techno-porn? Check. High-larious scene indicating what a terrible teacher Indy is? Check). Still, I've spent worse evenings. Next: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Nuclear Fridge.

Movie count for 2011: 7

The Repeated Meme: A Christmas Carol

2011-01-16T14:12:00.000Z

Must... resist... temptation to make "Jump the Shark" jokes...

Idea Proposed and Used to Death in the Davies Era: Christmas specials. Gratuitously Christmassy Christmas specials. With snow. Which, unfortunately, look really stupid when they get repeated on BBC3 in July.
Central Premise Recycled From: Go on, guess. Though they're also ripping off Blade Runner visually. Oh, and Torchwood's episode "To the Last Man" (look it up, I'm not summarizing it for you). And "Voyage of the Damned", of all things. And Amy and Rory's outfits are clearly Make Do and Mend.
Reference to Moffat's Back Catalogue: Where to start, where to start...? The Doctor forming a relationship with an adorable moppet in the past and also with the same moppet as a grownup in the future, conversing with a TV picture that's somehow connected with the changing timeline, the Doctor rewriting the story as he goes along by nipping back and forth along his own timeline, airborne sea-life.
Gratuitous Scottish Joke: None actually. I think they may have done with that bit.
Amy Saves the Day with Wuv: Amy and the Doctor appeal to Sardick's Wuv for Abigail to Save the Day.
Star Wars Bit: Freezing someone to pay off debts, plus Abigail's blue hologram-recording.
Nostalgia UK: Space Dickensiana.
Tennant Line: Sardick says "I'm sorry, I'm so, so sorry" to his younger self.
Murray Gold's Festive #1: Well, if you're going to hire Katherine Jenkins, you may as well get value for money by having her sing something vaguely classical.
Inside Joke List: A Tom Baker scarf on Matt Smith, plus photos of Matt Smith visiting the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower.
Teeth!: On the Shark!
Item Most Likely to Wind Up as a Toy: Didn't have to guess at this one, as Forbidden Planet London's already got a Christmas box set, consisting of.... Amy, the Doctor, and the Tardis. Seriously? You couldn't give us a lousy Michael Gambon in a bowtie, to say nothing of a pull-the-string-and-she-sings Katherine Jenkins? Or a half a sonic screwdriver? Oh well, go to The Entertainer or Tesco or wherever, spend £1 on a plastic shark and a Santa-and-his-sleigh-set, take five minutes to customise it and you've got your own Christmas Doctor Who toy.
Something Gets Redesigned: Sardick's life.

Goats and Cheese

2011-01-13T10:46:00.007Z

The Men who Stare at Goats: Valiant attempt to make a fictional story of an interesting documentary/book about the US Army's for-real attempts to research the existence of, and possible military uses of, the paranormal. The action focuses on George Clooney as a burnt-out former member of a unit set up in the 1980s to develop the psychic powers of soldiers, now wandering through Iraq convinced he's on some kind of mission, with Ewan McGregor in tow. Where the film fell down was: 1) it didn't go far enough in highlighting the absurdity of military culture and the so-called post-war situation in Iraq-- occasionally I was reminded of Buffalo Soldiers, for instance the sequence where two groups of civilian contractors accidentally start a firefight with each other, but it never got as good as Buffalo Soldiers in that area; 2) Clooney really does have psychic powers, where it might have been more interesting to continually play on the idea that really he doesn't, but he's convinced he does; and 3) the filmmakers clearly wanted the story to have a happy ending and wedged one into it, when in fact the ending of the story is clearly a sad one.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture: Plotwise and conceptwise, pretty good, and with an interesting Freudian subtext (as the child-entity VGER moves from the oral-anal stage, in which it is represented by a suspiciously sphincter-like space anomaly, to the stage of adult sexual relationships through taking human form and joining with Commander Decker); had this been an extended episode of Star Trek: TOS, I'd've rated it as outstanding. Its big problem as a movie is that it's long and boring, with huge swaths of it divided between sequences which seem to be an attempt to copy 2001 without really understanding what 2001 is about, and sequences which amount to, basically, spaceship-porn. It's also the start of the series' fetishization (and yes, I use the term deliberately) of the Enterprise, which always bothered me a bit; in TOS, there was no real indication that the Enterprise was anything particularly special, but from here on there seems to be this idea that the Enterprise is somehow this really exciting, really special ship which everybody would give their right arms to be on. Sorry, not buying it. Next up, The Wrath of Khan.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: An almost total inversion of Raiders of the Lost Ark, being dumb, crass, racist, sexist, and not as funny as it thinks it is. There are far fewer knowing filmic references and, apart from the opening sequence's pastiche of Gold Diggers of 1933, also, and what I suspect is an attempt at referencing Black Narcissus later on, most of them are pretty banal and obvious. The religious side of the plot was also pretty crass, treating Hinduism as a kind of tribal superstition rather than a sophisticated world faith, despite an attempt to save it at the end by suggesting that the god Shiva exists and is pissed off at the mad Kali-cultists Indy is up against. The racism I found genuinely offensive, starting with the gurning sinister "Orientals" in Shanghai and going on through a corrupt and decadent India where people apparently eat live snakes, beetles and monkey brains while enslaving peasant children. Even on a plot level it didn't really hang together, with the opening sequence in Shanghai having no connection to the rest of the story bar providing a reason why Indy is traveling around with a dumb blonde and an eleven-year-old street urchin, and with set pieces which don't so much advance the plot as (to leap ahead a couple of films) nuke the fridge. Remember, this film was directed by the same man who directed Munich.

Movie count for 2011: 5

Raiders

2011-01-09T13:55:00.007Z

The Social Network: Film about the development of Facebook, seen through the subsequent lawsuits between the various parties involved. It both a) reminded me a lot of Oxford (the complicated Darwinian patterns of alliances and fallings-out between the overly intelligent and the overprivileged) and b) helped me understand the appeal of Facebook more (it's all about giving people the university experience, by which they mean dating, embarrassment, parties and social one-upmanship). A lot more fascinating than a film about a website ought to be-- but then the website itself is more fascinating than it ought to be too, so that's appropriate.

Raiders of the Lost Ark: A postmodern masterpiece, and early example of proto-dieselpunk. Lucas and Spielberg go beyond simply pastiching 1930s adventure serials to creating some kind of perfect distilled essence of the 1930s adventure serial, tapping into the technololgical and social fantasies of that generation (producing a Spruce Goose and Nazi delta-wing plane which actually work, and playfully referencing the decade's obsessions with Egypt and Nepal) while knowingly referencing the films and novels of the era. Also, for a film focused on the Ark of the Covenant, manages surprisingly well to steer clear of religious issues; Judaism and Sunday School both get only passing mentions, Islam none at all (although at least one of the hero characters is implied to be a Muslim). For a film that's thirty years old, too, the effects still stand up well, supporting my hypothesis that a well-done physical effect lasts better than CGI. Next week, The Temple of Doom.

Movie count for 2011: 2

The Repeated Meme: How did we do?

2010-12-31T02:32:00.005Z

Those of you who follow this blog's Doctor Who: The Repeated Meme series will recall that every episode, I made a prediction on the Item Most Likely To Wind Up as a Toy. Now that it's Christmas sales season, let's see how well I did:

The Eleventh Hour: I didn`t exactly predict that one, as the sonic screwdriver and Matt Smith dolls were released almost as soon as it premiered. Nice to see them adding Prisoner Zero to the line, though.

The Beast Below: I predicted Smilers. We got Smilers.

Victory of the Daleks: I predicted Daleks (no prizes for guessing) though I didn`t expect the Bracewell figure-- and they did include the cool-looking Dalek as well as the fake-looking ones.

Time of Angels: I predicted, obviously, angels. We got them, in three different flavours.

Flesh and Stone: I predicted glow-in-the-dark Crack in the Universe stickers for your wall. Don`t know if it counts, but there was a Facebook fad for adding the Crack in the Universe to your profile picture for a while.

Amy`s Choice: I predicted a limited-edition Amy Pond Up The Duff. Not yet, but it`s early days. In the meantime, you can make your own with a regular Amy Pond figure and some plasticine.

Vampires of Venice: I predicted either a generic vampire girl or else Rosanna. Surprise, it`s Francesco.

The Hungry Earth: I predicted Silurians with noses and honkers. We got not one, but two. Silurians, that is. Not honkers. There were four of those. Ahem, I`d better stop.

Cold Blood: I predicted Silurian ray-guns. Alas, thus far `tis not to be, which is a shame as they were really the only good thing about the design of the Silurians with Noses and Honkers.

Vincent and the Doctor: I predicted the Invisible Chicken Monster. However, as it`s invisible, we`ll never know if they released it or not.

The Lodger: I predicted nothing. We got nothing, and mercifully no six-inch articulated James Cordens.

The Pandorica Opens: I predicted a coin bank based on the Pandorica. Thus far, I`m still waiting, though the MP3 CD cases which come with the Pandorica Figure Collection do come together to form a Pandorica-like box which I suppose you could keep things in.

The Big Bang: I predicted a stone Dalek; in fact, we got a stone Roman soldier and a stone Cyberman.

Madre de Dios

2010-12-29T23:19:00.003Z

Treasure of the Sierra Madre: Three men go prospecting for gold, find it, and also find that, out in the stark wilderness and with the temptation of incredible riches in front of them, the basest impulses, most venal suspicions, and deepest greed can emerge. Two of the men are ultimately saved because what they want the gold for is essentially benign purposes-- the old prospector wants to have a comfortable retirement, the young one wants to buy an orchard and start a family-- and both lose the gold, but get their wishes. The third one, Dobbs, played creepily well by Humphrey Bogart, wants the gold for creature comforts and to be able to lord it over other people, and he ends up getting all the gold, but losing his life.

Movie count for 2010: 130

Comedy of Errors

2010-12-26T23:08:00.004Z

The Human Comedy: 1943 Mickey Rooney film which I saw through no fault of my own on TCM. It's an example of that kind of American nostalgic-picture-of-village-life genre, along the lines of Our Town, Meet me in St Louis or To Kill a Mockingbird, though unfortunately lacking the bite of all three of these. Rooney is the middle male sibling of a small-town Irish family with a deceased father (who narrates, irritatingly, throughout); the younger one appears to have some sort of mental disorder, the older one is in the Army and quite visibly destined to die heroically in action before the end of the story, and Rooney spends his time failing to pay attention in class, winning school track and field meets, and Learning About Life through his after-school job as a telegram delivery boy. Mainly worth watching for the rather peculiar lesbian subtext revolving around Rooney's sister and her best friend, and there's a cute if sappy big-up for the Alternative Family at the end of the film as the Irish clan, by implication, take in the older sibling's now-disabled army buddy as a kind of adopted child. Oh, and there's a before-they-were-famous cameo from Robert Mitchum, of all people. Relentlessly sentimental and propagandistic, but peculiarly fascinating in that car-crash way.

For some reason this won an Academy Award; clearly talent was rationed that year.

Movie count for 2010: 129

What She Drewe

2010-12-26T22:50:00.004Z

Tamara Drewe: Stephen Frears continues his exploration of different aspects of British life with an adaptation of a Posy Simmonds comic which continues her exploration of the foibles and hypocrisies of the literary and academic worlds. The film tells the story of a journalist (Tamara) who returns to her native village and finds herself at the centre of a tacit conflict between the reality of rural village life (represented by two poisonously bored teenage troublemakers, and a cute hunky farmhand) and fanciful interpretations of it by city-dwellers (represented by a literary couple with a deteriorating relationship, and the various writers and lecturers attending a writers' retreat at their farmhouse). The film portrays this conflict well, and through excellent casting and design captures the feel of the comic impeccably. Unfortunately I didn't think the film was quite as successful in portraying the pretentiousness of Tamara and her London boyfriend (which the comic does by interweaving excerpts of Tamara's facile Polly-Filla-esque newspaper column with her experiences).

Movie count for 2010: 128 (still debating whether to review the Mickey Rooney film I sort of watched the other night).

Top Tati

2010-12-25T01:19:00.003Z

Playtime: A wonderful movie about the essential inhumanity of modernism, which celebrates its destruction at the hands of simple human fallibility. Bear with me on this. Tati serves up a series of coldly beautiful Sixties Modernist cityscapes called "Paris"-- an airport, an office building, an exhibition centre, a block of flats, a restaurant-- and then into this throws a simple man in an overcoat, who manages to hurl whole systems into chaos simply by walking through the wrong door at the wrong time, and yet who also never quite manages to overcome the sheer weight of the surrounding bureaucracy. The screen is always relentlessly busy with action, and Tati never actually uses any of the conventional cinematic cues to "tell" you what you should be watching, so it can be difficult to realise what's actually going on in any scene until you figure it out for yourself. But then again, perhaps the sheer randomness of it all is the point.

Movie count for 2010: 127.

Jungle VIP

2010-12-19T22:12:00.007Z

The Jungle Book (1967): Not the best Disney cartoon feature, but in its defense it's trying to weave together a coherent plot out of a series of loosely-linked short stories, and also trying to make a crowd-pleasing kid-friendly film out of a pair of books which are, essentially, about colonialism and the loss of innocence, and rather disturbing in places. The two main points in its favour are a) Baloo, who is really seriously cute, and b) the "I Wanna Be Like You" song and dance number, with jitterbugging monkeys and a scat-singing orangotang. The close-harmonising vultures based on The Beatles, though, have not exactly stood the test of time.

Catch Me If You Can: Reasonably good Spielberg film; the father issues are strong with this one, but it does actually work pretty well in this case, as Spielberg interprets the case of Frank Abagnale Jr. as being about a young man with an inadequate father; he first denies and then tries to make up for his father's inadequacy through impersonating authority figures and engaging in successful cheque fraud (as contrasted with his father's failed tax evasion), but he only achieves closure by recognising, in Tom Hanks' FBI agent, his true spiritual father and giving up a life of crime for an even more lucrative legal job.

The caveat, though, is that the whole thing is relentlessly cheery and feelgood, even though I kept having fridge moments afterwards about the people damaged by Abagnale's schemes. What about the college girls he, at one point, duped into believing they'd won a competition to be stewardesses and then, apparently, dumped in an airport somewhere? What about his fiancee, who accepted him in good faith as being someone he wasn't? Or her father, who helped him through his bar exams and took him on into his law firm? We're never actually shown any of this, and yes, this does bother me, in that it means we're continually being given an image of Abagnale as a likeable, lovable sort, and never asked to consider the harm he's done beyond the financial.

Movie count for 2010: 125 (both Spielberg and Disney in the same post, the very evocation of the Hollywood commercial juggernaut.)

The Potentially Good, the Sadistic and the Mildly Repellant

2010-12-17T14:05:00.007Z

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Woot, I finished the "Dollar" trilogy before the end of the year! Despite coming third in order, this film is actually a prequel to the other two: firstly, it is only at the end of the film that the Man With No Name gains his trademark poncho, which he wears in the other two films, and also only then that he becomes genuinely The Good. Likewise, there is nothing to entirely deny the possibility that Lee van Cleef's Angel Eyes (The Bad) is in fact Colonel Mortimer from For a Few Dollars More: in the latter film, Mortimer admits to having done some pretty bad things in earlier years; Angel Eyes is an officer in the Union army; Morricone's score plays the Mortimer clock-chime theme over the climactic standoff between the three protagonists of TGTBATU; and, although Angel Eyes is apparently shot dead at the end of the film, it's possible that he was in fact only severely wounded, and survived to team up with the Man With No Name years later (though the name "Mortimer" suggests the living dead, and it wouldn't be the only time a character in a Leone Western turned out to be a vengeful ghost; not insignificantly, the hoard of gold which the protagonists are after is buried in a grave marked UNKNOWN, also linking the Man With No Name with wealth and death). Finally, The Ugly, a comedy Mexican bandit of dubious loyalty, can be seen to foreshadow the more serious Mexican bandits of the other two films.

TGTBATU is a good film which would be an excellent one if it could lose about thirty minutes; part of its conceit is to weave the action in and around the American Civil War, which, while it nicely contrasts the absurdity, brutality and venality of the protagonists' pursuit of riches with the absurdity, brutality and venality of war and allows Leone to explore his trademark bleakness-of-the-West theme (never before has a Western included so many amputees), also leads to a couple of set pieces which slow the main action down far too much. If you're rewatching this, fast-forward through them and you'll probably enjoy it more.

Movie count for 2010: 123

Gangsters Hieronymous

2010-12-10T15:15:00.003Z

In Bruges: Contemporary low-budget Britflick in which two Irish gangsters, following a hit gone wrong, are ordered by their boss to hole up in Bruges. The Cultured One thinks this is fantastic and goes on a tour of the canals; the Rough and Ready One is bored and goes off in pursuit of a pretty local woman. It sounds like the setup for a thriller-comedy, and indeed it starts off being one, but as the story progresses the revelations get darker and the scenery gets weirder, ending with Bruges transformed into Hieronymous Bosch's Last Judgment as the consequences of the botched crime and the strict moral code of the boss bring everything to a surreal climax. It's set at Christmastime, too, making it perfect holiday viewing if you're already sick of syrupy family films.

Movie Count for 2010: 122

Nyder goes Nuclear

2010-11-26T19:55:00.000Z

I've become obsessed recently with tracking down footage of American 1950s nuclear damage tests-- the ones where they build houses, power substations, etc., then put them at Ground Zero of an atom bomb and watch what happens. I thought this might lend itself well to a small multimedia blog essay, selecting and reviewing some of the better ones.

Or, in other words, if you've got a spare fifteen minutes or so and want to get the context behind that piece of footage of a two-story house with its front blowing off that always turns up in documentaries about America in the 1950s, here's a good place to start.

1. Damage and Destruction

I put this one first, even though it's probably the least accessible, because it is essentially a lot of raw, loosely-edited-together clips of the preparation for and execution of, nuclear tests, without any contextualising voiceover (the YouTube description is vague on its purpose, so it might have been either the rough cut of a documentary or possibly, given the continuous jumping back and forth chronologically, something meant to accompany a lecture). Pretty much all of them turn up again in "Operation Doorstep", "Operation Cue" and "The House in the Middle" at some point. The silence, plus the rough nature of the film, gives the whole thing the feeling of some kind of really creepy Fifties home movie shot on Super 8.

2. "Operation Cue"

This is much the same thing, but with context, being a loose narrative in which a Girl Reporter "visits" the Nevada Testing Grounds and asks naive questions of a disembodied authoritative male voice as a means of explaining the run-up to, and the results of, the "Operation Cue" destruction tests (some sources indicate that "Operation Cue" wasn't their official name, but one dubbed onto it for the purposes of this film, and it was really just part of Operation Teapot). The film seems unsure whether it wants to scare the American public about the destructive power of the bomb, or reassure them as to the survivability of same, leading to a final sequence where, as the test crews survey the carnage and destruction, the Girl Reporter optimistically remarks that the buildings are easy to repair.

Also contains some footage not in the earlier film, of tests on mannequins and foodstuffs (just in case we were worried that she wasn't a Real Woman, what with her having a paid job and all, the Girl Reporter eagerly lets us know how interested she is in the effects of nuclear radiation on clothing and canned goods). Particularly disturbing is the sequence where, to test the results of the bomb blast on garment fabrics, a group of well-dressed mannequins are tied to posts facing the blast; it looks like the mass execution of the cast of Mad Men.

I'd also advise skipping to about two minutes into the film if you want to avoid a lecture on megatonnage and go straight to the Girl Reporter's day out.

3. "Declassified Nuclear Test Film #55"

Similar to the above, albeit without the patronising female questioner/male authority figure setup, just going for the traditional authoritative male voice, and with a mix of footage of different tests edited together to pretend they're a single test. The test footage starts about halfway through, following a hymn to civil defence and air-raid shelters. Also explains the purpose behind the tree tests and the materials tests.

4.. "The House in the Middle"

This film was declared "Culturally Significant" by the US National Library of Congress. They clearly weren't doing so for aesthetic reasons, but it certainly does provide a fascinating (as in, you can't look away) insight into the anxiety-ridden nature of life in 1950s America, as yet another authoritative voiceover explains to us emphatically that not painting your house could lead to it being destroyed in a nuclear explosion; indeed, just leaving the TV listings magazine out or the plastic covers off the armchairs could lead to the whole house burning down. The message is complex, at once reassuring the PTSD-ridden, demobbed former servicewomen/factory workers that indeed, they're serving their country even more by keeping the house spic-and span, encouraging xenophobic hatred of that family down the street who don't keep their fence painted, and bringing in all sorts of Freudian imagery about morality and hygiene.

5. "Operation Doorstop and Operation Cue."

(this doesn't seem to want to embed-- click here for the film if it isn't)

The back half of this video is just "Operation Cue" again; the first half, though, is a cleaned-up and edited film of the earlier test alluded to in the "Operation Cue" film, plus lots and lots of footage of mannequin tests (the researchers setting up their subjects into dinner-party groups, children playing, people in cars etc. with an almost sadistic glee). It handles the balance of fear versus reassurance better than "Cue," focusing on how the houses get destroyed (FEAR!) but the shelters don't (REASSURANCE!). The sequence where the authoritative male narrator observes that all the cars subjected to the blast were still driveable is rather ironic from the point of view of modern autos with their dependence on vulnerable electronic systems-- those 50s clunkers might have been driveable, but even my eleven-year-old no-frills Rover 25 wouldn't be. Also explains why the fixed-camera footage of the blasts has an eerily darkened sky-- the tests take place at 5:20 AM.

5. "Survival Town"

A short one this, apparently being a newsreel made up from "Operation Cue" footage, with some "Operation Doorstep" thrown in for dramatic effect. Some of the fixed camera footage from the 5:20 AM blasts has had the colour inverted, possibly to make it look like they take place in daylight and thus match them up with other footage in the reel of broad-daylight tests of military emplacements (populated by soldiers, many of whom are probably unwitting cancer statistics). The tone is also precisely the opposite to "Operation Cue"'s, emphasising that survival is down to the decisive actions of The Army and The Civil Defence, not builing materials-- hm, I wonder who paid for this film?

Sunshine in a bag

2010-11-23T10:38:00.000Z

Beauty and the Beast: A great film from Disney’s output during its 1990s “revival” period, this does what Disney arguably does best: taking a classic fairy-tale and retelling it with enough added riffs, bells and whistles to a) extend it to feature film length, and b) keep mums/dads/babysitters watching along with the kids. This one’s particular strengths for the adult market include an unbelievably trippy production number involving furniture and cutlery (complete with a Busby-Berkley routine performed by teaspoons) and a mad battle sequence also involving animated furniture, which is well worth slowing down to catch the background action (including, among other things, a quick visual reference to Battleship Potemkin-- there’s actually a lot of German and Russian Expressionist namechecking throughout). As for the romance plot, this one shines through being not a story in which the protagonist woos and wins a love object (e.g. Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, The Lion King etc.), but in which both main characters woo and win each other. Which I rather think is a much better message for the kids, and more satisfying for the grownups.

For a Few Dollars More: Sequel to A Fistful of Dollars, in which Clint Eastwood’s drifting mercenary, now turned bounty hunter, teams up with mentor-figure Lee van Cleef and learns a lot about strategy, revenge, and gunplay. Features similarities to the first one (Eastwood infiltrating a bandit gang, a vendetta on behalf of a family member, Eastwood being found out and beaten up by gang members following which he manages to exploit splits within the gang to his advantage, and a bandit obsessed with a dark-haired woman), but, rather than simply repeating with variations, actually deepens the themes of the first, exploring the motivations of both bandits and bounty hunters in a bleak and unsympathetic West.

Tightrope: Boring 1980s Eastwood-vehicle cop-flick, borrowing liberally from Manhunter and Coogan’s Bluff, without being as interesting or disturbing as either. Its main saving grace is, first, casting Genevieve Bujold (and, particularly, Genevieve Bujold in jeans, utilitarian haircut and no makeup) as a leading lady and love interest for Eastwood, and, second, subverting misogynist cop-film tropes by making Bujold’s character a feminist and a rape-crisis counselor, but not then making this a setup to reveal that all these tough women are really weepy, teary girls inside and they really just Need A Man. This one, attacked by the inevitable serial rapist/murderer, fights him off, then tidies her hair and goes round to Eastwood’s place to make sure his kids are OK. We could have done with more of her sort in this genre.

Double Take: Fascinating, complicated news-clip documentary, which interweaves parallels between the Cuban Missile Crisis and the films and career of Alfred Hitchcock. Through using the theme of doubles, a clever melange of news clips and Folgers coffee adverts (no really), and a fantasy conversation between Hitchcock in 1962 and his own future self from 1980, the filmmakers set up America and the USSR as evil doppelgangers of each other. The crucial point comes from an excerpt from Kruschev and Nixon’s “kitchen debate,” in which Kruschev states that the USSR has a better space programme than the USA, and Nixon counters that the USA has more televisions—something which Kennedy later used as a stick to beat Nixon with in the infamous televised debate, but, well, if you think about it, it was television, not spaceships, which won the cold war. There’s a lot more in there to enjoy, so go and watch it two or three times if you can.

Movie count for 2010: 121

Spartan settings

2010-11-17T18:34:00.000Z

Go Tell the Spartans: Adequate Vietnam movie, loosely based on the Battle of Thermopylae, about a small group of Americans and South Vietnamese who get unexpectedly pinned down by Viet Cong at an outpost. Brings up a lot of interesting lines of exploration (the trigger-happy psychopath of a Vietnamese interpreter, the fact that the South Vietnamese are usually the ones who wind up paying for the Americans' military blunders, the interesting pasts of the various characters) but doesn't really follow up on any of them.

Movie count for 2010: 117. Have mostly been watching Colditz instead.

SJA Checklist: Goodbye Sarah Jane

2010-11-15T17:18:00.001Z

..alas, no, I've got to keep on doing this for another year.

Crowds of People Under Alien Influence: No, they can't afford both crowds of people and a CGI stomach that splurts.

Tie-in with Doctor Who story: Not actually a canonical one, but one of the authors of this story did a Big Finish audio featuring an imposter version of the Doctor turning up and trying to take over. Plus Sarah gets to repeat her personal narrative about how she met the Man Who Changed Her Life.

Rani's Mum is Annoying/Is Absent: Episode one: the former. Pushy, nosy, gossipy, insisting on painting the house a pale lemon yellow. Episode two: she has a complete personality transplant and is suddenly the sweetest, kindest, least embarrassing mum in the world. This doesn't contradict anything, it just comes as a bit of a shock. Oh, and there's another implication that her husband is sneaking around behind her back with Sarah Jane.

Luke/K9 Cameo: Since it's the final story, they actually turn up in person this time-- well, Luke does, K9 is clearly still immobile after the kebab-van incident.

Sarah Jane Waxes Maudlin: Lots of it. As well as her traditional speech about how wonderful her gang are, episode one sees her going on about the Doctor, about how old and feeble she is (at fiftysomething), how nobody needs her, and how she wants to pass the torch to Ruby. The latter demonstrates her fitness for the job by making speeches about how wonderful the universe is (could this be... Ruby Wax-es Maudlin? Ahem). Ruby's faked message in which Sarah Jane waxes maudlin about the responsibility of her job is unsurprisingly spot on. Because it's the last episode, too, we get guest waxing: Clyde gets a nice maudlin Last Message on his mobile and Luke gets to go on about his special mum.

Mobile Phone as Plot Device: Episode Two is practially deus ex mobile, as Rani's camera-phone not only provides the clue to Ruby's identity but a means of shutting down her computer. Clyde also gets to record his last message on his smartphone.

Racism Towards Aliens: The moment Sarah Jane trusts one, she turns out to be an evil soul-devouring creature. Give those damn aliens an inch and they'll take a yard.

The Crimes of Sarah Jane: Surprisingly, none.

Sonic Lipstick: Handed over to Ruby as Sarah Jane leaves. There really is some kind of female rite-of-passage thing going on here.

Wristwatch Scanner: Within ten seconds of the opening.

One or More of Sarah's Companions Falling Under Alien Influence: Oh, go on, guess.

Sarah And/Or Companion Acts like a Selfish Cow: When Ruby turns up, she's rude, brusque and selfish... and Clyde's first reaction is to blurt out "she's just like you, Sarah Jane!"

And, because it's the last episode of the season:

Wide-eyed speech about the wonders of the universe and how great it is to be in Sarah Jane's gang: Yes, though a surprisingly brief one.

SJA Checklist: Lost in Time

2010-11-08T18:38:00.000Z

Crowds of People Under Alien Influence: Nope, can't make this one work even at a stretch.

Tie-in with Doctor Who story: Again, more plot-ripoff than actual tie-in, with the traditional quest-through-time-and-space format (q.v. The Keys of Marinus, The Chase, The Key to Time) heavily exploited. And the idea of Emily's granddaughter giving the key to Sarah Jane at the right moment is a steal from "Blink."

Rani's Mum is Annoying/Is Absent: The latter.

Luke/K9 Cameo: Not even a mention. How soon we forget.

Sarah Jane Waxes Maudlin: In episode 2, when telling Emily how lucky she is someone loves her.

Mobile Phone as Plot Device: Clyde determines that he's in the past by checking the signal, and Emily gets in a (ahem) heavily telegraphed comedy moment as she marvels at the idea that "Mr Bell's invention" not only caught on, but went wireless. Plus it seems MP3s have Nazi-repelling capabilities.

Racism Towards Aliens: Clyde, of all people, tells an SS officer that he's a blind bully who judges others only on appearances, and hates and fears anyone who's different to him. Tu quoque, Clyde.

The Crimes of Sarah Jane: None, though Rani gets in one count of Grand Theft Music-Box, and another of Impersonating a Tudor Personage. And the characterisation of the pantomime Nazis is indeed criminal.

Sonic Lipstick: No.

Wristwatch Scanner: Used to scan for "ghosts."

One or More of Sarah's Companions Falling Under Alien Influence: Well, everyone goes into the past under alien influence, technically.

Sarah And/Or Companion Acts like a Selfish Cow: Actually, Rani gets to be nicely unselfish for a change, giving up the chance to go back in order to urge Queen Jane to martyrdom.

SJA Checklist: The Empty Planet

2010-11-05T20:11:00.000Z

Crowds of People Under Alien Influence: Non-crowds of people, removed due to alien influence. Sort of a bizarro-universe crowd.

Tie-in with Doctor Who story: No out-and-out tie-in, but a lot of referencing: Turlough (alien prince hidden on the Earth), The Android Invasion (mysteriously deserted English urban conurbation), the Judoon, The Daleks' Master Plan episode 12 (returning to a planet to find it deserted), The Curse of Fenric (Clive's "I love you, Mum!" when finding himself trapped); plus a reference to "Survivors" when Rani says "Please don't let me be the only one."

Rani's Mum is Annoying/Is Absent: The latter, though that's no different to anyone else. And she does get a good panic at Rani's Dad over the phone when they think Rani is missing.

Luke/K9 Cameo: None, though Clyde and Rani spend a lot of time wishing there was one.

Sarah Jane Waxes Maudlin: Episode Two ends with a heroic maudlin-fest as Sarah Jane, Rani and Clyde gush about how great it is that they know each other.

Mobile Phone as Plot Device: Is back, hooray!

Racism Towards Aliens: When Clyde considers the possibility that Gavin might be an alien, he leaps straight away to the conclusion that Gavin somehow caused the disappearances. Although everyone can be forgiven for assuming initially that the great big Cyberman/NuDalek-offspring robots are up to no good.

The Crimes of Sarah Jane: Well, Sarah Jane is absent this story, but Clyde and Rani severally engage in: Breaking and entering (Rani, Gavin's flat), use of private property without permission (Clyde in the cafe-- it's not theft, as he leaves money to pay for it), and Grand Theft Bicycle ("we'll bring them back," Rani says, though there's no evidence that they do).

Sonic Lipstick: Rani grabs it and uses it repeatedly, in some kind of symbolic female rite of passage.

Wristwatch Scanner: Was presumably on Sarah Jane's wrist when she vanished, so Rani doesn't get that too.

One or More of Sarah's Companions Falling Under Alien Influence: Retroactively-- Clyde and Rani being grounded by the Judoon means they don't get Raptured along with everyone else.

Sarah And/Or Companion Acts like a Selfish Cow: To be fair to them, no more than anyone else would in similar circumstances.

Shivers up the Spine

2010-10-31T15:10:00.000Z

The Insider: Film about a journalist who makes a documentary about a whistleblower for the tobacco industry, then winds up turning whistleblower himself when his network won't screen it. Also serves as a warning against accepting a job with a tobacco firm if one has any sense of self-preservation, let alone morals, at all.

The Devil's Backbone: Typically surreal and complex film by Guilermo del Toro; it's tempting to compare it to Pan's Labyrinth (featuring as it does the supernatural, vengeance, the Spanish Civil War, and children's views on the evil that grown-ups do), but it's a different sort of film, focusing on issues of masculinity and the role of the father figure through the contrasting roles of the kindly, intellectual, but impotent Doctor Caesares, and the charming, priapic, but ultimately evil Jacinto. Of particular note is the character of Jaime, who starts off looking like a stereotypical school bully, but winds up becoming something much more complex by the end of the film.

Movie count for 2010: 116

Sleep is for Tortoises

2010-10-28T16:13:00.000+01:00

Sleepy Hollow: Tim Burton is in full relentless-fun mode here, with an updating of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow which is cheerily, rather than knowingly, postmodern. The reason for the ghost's appearance, and who's behind it, appears at first to be straightforward but in the final act turns out to be the result of a chain of events so convoluted it might well have come from a Cohen Brothers film, and the writers of Murdoch Mysteries (which also features a historical detective with ideas about forensics which are literally centuries ahead of their time) may well have been taking notes, but again both of these are presented gleefully, rather than as a kind of one-upmanship on the audience or characters. The costumes and design are also beautiful, with Sleepy Hollow managing to feel quite real despite being shot in near-monochrome. With the likes of Michael Gambon, Richard Griffiths, Christopher Lee, Michael Gough and Alun Armstrong slyly inserted into the cast, it's also fun to play Spot the Thesp while watching it.

Movie count for 2010: 114

SJA Checklist: The Death of the Doctor

2010-10-25T19:45:00.001+01:00

...shouldn't that be "The Death of Doctor Who"?

Crowds of People Under Alien Influence: No, though apparently there are crowds of ex-companions running charities around the world. And getting married.

Tie-in with Doctor Who (and, not incidentally, Faction Paradox) story: UNIT claiming to have the Doctor's corpse in a lead coffin? Where are Lawrence Miles' royalties? Meanwhile, every single bit of Doctor Who books continuity regarding the future lives of the companions gets rogered bar one (namely, that Ian and Barbara got married).

Rani's Mum is Annoying/Is Absent: The latter, though her husband reveals that she even does grief annoyingly.

Luke/K9 Cameo: Luke gets another quick Skyping session, though where is K9? Possibly on the top of the kebab van in St Giles' Road, sporting a traffic cone on his head....

Sarah Jane Waxes Maudlin: In pretty much every scene she's in.

Mobile Phone as Plot Device: No. Has everyone on the series suddenly had a personality change? Because this sudden wave of off-grid living is weirding me out.

Racism Towards Aliens: Rani, for once, calls Sarah Jane on her knee-jerk "you can't trust them!" reaction towards the giant space vultures, though unfortunately it does have to turn out that Sarah Jane was right and you can't, in fact, trust them (though this season's face-saver comes in a brief mention at the end that these vultures aren't remotely representative of their species as a whole, no sir). Clyde also gets called on his racism against the Groske, though this doesn't seem to have the slightest impact on him, and he's decidedly ungrateful when one of them saves his life.

The Crimes of Sarah Jane: None, though the kids' forays through the air ducts probably constitutes breaking curfew or something.

Sonic Lipstick: Gets a good outing in episode two. Jo allows as how she'd rather like one of those.

Wristwatch Scanner: by contrast, doesn't appear at all.

One or More of Sarah's Companions Falling Under Alien Influence: Poor old Clyde finds himself as a conduit for the Doctor, a mere episode after having to do similar for Androvax.

Sarah And/Or Companion Acts like a Selfish Cow: When Jo Grant turns up, it seems at first that we've got an ex-companion who's actually well-adjusted and unselfish... until she and Sarah start comparing notes on their past experiences with the Doctor and the jealous-off begins. Sarah, meanwhile, decides to interrupt Jo's moment of bonding and reminiscing with the Doctor in episode 2 by blowing a whistle and telling them to get back to work. There may be dozens of ex-companions doing good works out there, but they're undoubtedly all bitter and twisted despite it. Clyde also gets a good bit of jealousy when he discovers that Luke has a new best friend forever. And both Clyde and Rani pass the selfishness meme on to Santiago by encouraging him to tell his parents to stop working to help other people and start paying attention to HIM, GODDAMNIT, even though he's getting perfectly good parenting from a loving grandmother.

Bridezilla

2010-10-23T17:09:00.000+01:00

Brides of Dracula: Clearly an attempt by Hammer Films to cash in on the success of the Cushing/Lee Dracula, but unfortunately it's missing Lee, and rather suffers for it. The Dracula-substitute character lacks Christopher Lee's sexual chemistry with the titular women (who are played by a predictable array of girls cast more for looks than acting ability), meaning that one doesn't get that sense of twisted eroticism which Gothic stories should have, and his non-sexual chemistry with Peter Cushing, meaning that confrontations between van Helsing and the vampire tend to be a bit unexciting. However, it's worth watching for Cushing, who plays the whole film totally seriously and thus does manage to give it something of a sense of terror and urgency, and also for the fact that, being an early Hammer Horror, the sex and violence are considerably more subtly played than they would be later, and thus more effective. Also features the world's least convincing fake bat, which seems to be a close relative of the animatronic cat in Doctor Who: Survival; in the scene where it attacks van Helsing, Peter Cushing can briefly be seen hiding a tiny smirk.

Movie count for 2010: 113

Made of Honour

2010-10-21T16:43:00.000+01:00

Sword of Honour: Technically a miniseries rather than a film, but it was included in a Daily Mail free film DVD series, so I'm reviewing it. Overlong, but trenchant, Evelyn Waugh adaption about a man who lets himself be carried along by life, drifting through marriage, fatherhood and World War II, unwittingly at the mercy of the intrigues, politics and love affairs of his friends and co-workers. In other words, sort of like Mr and Mrs Bridge, but with things actually happening in it.

Miller's Crossing: Cohen Brothers gangster flick with a plot too convoluted to outline here (and in any case, half the fun of the movie is figuring it all out), in which Gabriel Byrne is at the epicentre of a Byzantine struggle for control of an unnamed Prohibition-era city by Irish, Italian and Jewish gang bosses. Also noteworthy for an unbelievable piece of black comedy involving Albert Finney and a Tommy gun.

Made in Dagenham: Amazing-- a film which manages to be simultaneously pro-industrial action, and yet anti-union, with a group of plucky women taking on both factory bosses and unsympathetic shop stewards. I feel this is a development of our era (as witness American "Tea Party" actions), and, while, on the one hand I can understand it given the undermining of the unions since the 1980s and their documented patchy record in representing the concerns of women and ethnic minorities, on the other, as a union member who believes that organised resistance with the backing of the law is better than disorganised, scattered (or worse, secretly corporate-controlled, as witness recent revelations about who's funding the Tea Party) actions with no real legal standing, it really, really worries me. Also includes Bob Hoskins (as the token decent union man), Daniel Mays and Roger Lloyd-Pack, making this the only movie to co-star Kruschev, Satan and Trigger.

Movie count for 2010: 112

SJA Checklist: The Vault of Secrets

2010-10-19T10:18:00.001+01:00

Crowds of People Under Alien Influence: There are at least five people who individually come under alien influence, so it's kind of a strung-out extended crowd.

Tie-in with Doctor Who (and, not incidentally, Faction Paradox) story: Part of Sarah Jane's job involves preventing NASA from finding Osirian pyramids on Mars. Though the story itself is also ripped off from "City of Death" mixed with "Dreamland," taking in a couple of homages to the Auton stories, "The Hand of Fear" and "The Robots of Death" along the way.

Rani's Mum is Annoying/Is Absent: The former, and in spades, as she joins a UFOlogist conspiracy theory group, drags her husband along, and drives her marriage that little bit closer to the edge.

Luke/K9 Cameo: Luke, like every undergraduate on the planet, is keeping in touch with Mum via Skype, but the mutt is conspicuous by its absence.

Sarah Jane Waxes Maudlin: She gets a good maudlin moment in episode 2 when going on about how alone Androvax must feel, what with his civilization destroyed and all.

Mobile Phone as Plot Device: No; amazingly, that's four episodes now that this team of mobile addicts have managed to keep their hands off their Blackberries. Unless the fact that Mr Dread is an Android is some kind of laboured pun.

"Maximum [something]!": No, the script team are clearly onto this blog :).

Racism Towards Aliens: Sarah Jane actually concedes for once that just because Androvax is a criminal, it doesn't mean everyone in his species is, though Clive does keep up a sustained background chorus on the general untrustworthiness of aliens.

The Crimes of Sarah Jane: Breaking and entering (St Jude's); damage to private property (Minty's scanner, Mr Dread's Humber Super Snipe).

Sonic Lipstick: Correct and present, from episode one.

Wristwatch Scanner: Correct and present, five seconds before the sonic lipstick.

One or More of Sarah's Companions Falling Under Alien Influence: Rani, Clive and Sarah all play host to Androvax at various points. So does Rani's Mum, if she counts.

Sarah And/Or Companion Acts like a Selfish Cow: While it's understandable that Sarah Jane wouldn't want the Veil civilization revived at the cost of Earth, it's rather callous that she doesn't even entertain the notion that this is a tiny bit speciesist of her. Clive and Rani, meanwhile, put on their biggest teenage pouts while whining at Mr Dread to save the Earth so that humanity can carry on destroying its own planet in an excess of consumerism (and they don't seem in the slightest bit sorry that it costs him his life). SJA may throw up the odd moral complexity once in a while, but you wouldn't know it from the way its protagonists act.

And in other news, Colditz is being repeated on the Yesterday channel at the end of the month. Between this and Secret Army on Alibi, it's all Chrisopher Neame, all the time.

SJA Checklist: The Nightmare Man

2010-10-11T23:18:00.000+01:00

Crowds of People Under Alien Influence: Semi-check; Luke's dream about his farewell party only involves the illusion of crowds of people under alien inluence.

Tie-in with Doctor Who story: Can we please have a moratorium on guest appearances by the Slitheen now? They've outstayed their welcome, and the callous attitude of everyone on SJA towards the killing of sentient beings by throwing acid on them is creeping me out.

Rani's Mum is Annoying/Is Absent: Rani's Mum is both, as Sarah Jane, helping Luke with his packing, says "I got these from Gita; you're lucky, she wanted to help."

Luke says something so daft that you have to wonder how he gets through life without being mercilessly bullied: Not in terms of what he says, but in terms of his lousy timing, wanting to talk about his A-levels while handcuffed to a bomb.

Sarah Jane Waxes Maudlin: In her treacly speech in episode 1 to Luke about how she'll always be here for him, and her equally treacly speeches in episode 2 about how Luke is off on a big adventure by going to university (and nothing about how he's conveniently saving the production team money by taking himself and K9 off to Oxford).

Mobile Phone as Plot Device: Surprisingly no-- just a plain old videocamera, not even a cameraphone.

"Maximum [something]!": No; perhaps someone noticed how much they were using the expression last year.

Racism Towards Aliens: Luke tells the Nightmare Man that he's "just an alien," and reveals how he himself was genetically engineered by aliens, but that Sarah Jane "made [him] good."

The Crimes of Sarah Jane: None, unless you count teaching Luke to drive before he's old enough to have a learner's permit.

K9 Interprets a Figurative Expression Literally: No, but he seems to be developing his unhealthy rivalry with Mr Smith.

Sonic Lipstick: Absent.

Wristwatch Scanner: Not present.

One or More of Sarah's Companions Falling Under Alien Influence: Luke, Nightmare Man, yadda yadda.

Sarah And/Or Companion Acts like a Selfish Cow: Considering how much selfish behaviour she's previously shown on the series (including being willing to erase Luke from history), is it that surprising that both Luke and Clyde should dream about Sarah Jane revealing she doesn't really care about them? "If you're going to be a journalist, you've got to stop worrying about other people's feelings," says Louise Marlowe.

And, because it's the first episode of the season:

Crash-zoom onto the planet Earth/UK/England/London: Check, yet again.

Wide-eyed speech about how good it is to be in Sarah's gang: Check, though to be fair it has the added twist of Luke finishing it with a quick "...and then everything went horribly wrong!"

Rising expectations

2010-10-10T20:30:00.000+01:00

Hannibal Rising: Retroactive destruction of the Hannibal Lecter legend. An abominable waste of Rhys Ifans and Gong Li.

Young Guns II: Actually not half bad for a sequel, with the music being a definite improvement on the original, and continuing the earlier film's riffing on classic Westerns (with homages to the likes of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, among others). But unfortunately it was too unfocused, and as a result was unengaging (and at times downright dull).

Le Boucher: Finally, one that was actually really good, a psychological horror story about a school headmistress in a small French town who befriends the local butcher, who has been driven to murder by a combination of an abusive childhood and PTSD from fighting in the Indochina campaign. The result is like a combination of Hitchcock and Lynch (in his less surreal moods).

Movie count for 2010: 109

Clued In

2010-09-30T18:50:00.000+01:00

Without a Clue: Alternative take on Sherlock Holmes canon, in which Sherlock is in fact an actor, hired to play a genius detective by Watson, who is the real brains behind the operation (with some collaboration from Mrs Hudson). Its value is as an exploration of how people in a long-term relationship, sexual or not, can sometimes forget, or take for granted, what their partner contributes to it; however I did feel the central joke went on a little too long.

Crimes and Misdemeanors: Postmodern Woody Allen film, which starts out familiar-- wealthy businessman, threatened with blackmail by his mistress, plots her murder, while a nebbish documentary-maker falls in love with a wistfully beautiful production assistant-- and turns it on its head, with rewards and punishments falling in unexpected places and breaking all the Hollywood tropes. Also: Martin. Landau.

The Page Turner (La Tourneuse de Pages): Disturbing tale of creativity twisted by a lust for revenge, in which a young girl, who fails a crucial piano audition due to the negligence of a well-known pianist, grows up to carefully and deliberately ruin said pianist's life. You just can't look away.

Superman: The Quest for Peace: Hilariously terrible movie, with inconsistent plotting and characterisation reinforced with really bad CSO and some magnificently heavy-handed 1980s attempts at a political message. I'm not sure if it's an influence on the LaHaye and Jenkins school of bad fundamentalist Christian rapture-fiction, or vice versa (with the UN ineptly portrayed as some kind of one world government and nobody in the world seeing anything wrong with Superman's plan to destroy all nuclear missiles). Strangely, there is actually a possible clever storyline limping through it, when a thinly-disguised Rupert Murdoch takes over the Daily Planet and tries to turn it into a tabloid, but the sweet innocent optimism of Clark Kent causes "Murdoch"'s evil daughter to see the error of their capitalist ways, but that unfortunately gets buried under all the silly and is hastily wrapped up in a coda which appears to suggest that newspapers should be publically owned (which one would think rather goes against the American capitalist ethos). You just can't look away from this one either, but for different reasons.

Metropolis: One of my favourite films since I was a teenager, seen here in the restored version with the extra footage discovered in Argentina in 2008 reinstated. While two scenes are still missing, the new material makes all the difference, giving clarity and depth to Rotwang's motivations and plans, and actually giving Slim a personality (curiously, now that the plots involving him are restored, you actually notice him a lot more in the previously-extant footage). Also contains the Yoshiwara sequence, and some extra bits to Freder's visions which clarify and crystallise the expressionist symbolism of the rest of the movie, in which his memories of seeing a monk preaching on the book of Revelations in the cathedral merge crazily with the reality of Maria's erotic dance in the Yoshiwara to form a mise-en-scene in which Slim becomes a preacher and Maria the Whore of Babylon.

Movie count for 2010: 106

Holiday movies

2010-09-12T13:29:00.000+01:00

The Romantic Englishwoman: A Tom Stoppard adaptation of a story about a writer (Michael Caine) with a disintegrating marriage (to Glenda Jackson), who vents his frustrations by writing bits of said marital disintegration into a film script he's working on, with the ultimate postmodern result that the fiction and the reality become conflated. Which should be a lot more interesting than it actually is. There were a few good moments (some of the knowing inside jokes, for instance, or the bit where Michael Caine's character rakes a hypocritical pseudo-feminist newspaper columnist over the coals), but the postmodernism rapidly became tedious and the story unengaging.

The Satanic Rites of Dracula: A Hammer film from the mid-seventies, which is often reckoned as the studio's declining period, since it was focusing less on making real horror films and more on making thrillers with lots of nudity. Which actually works to the film's advantage, as what we get here, gratuitous boobs aside, is the Dracula mythos cleverly reimagined for the Quatermass/Jon Pertwee's Doctor Who eras, with van Helsing as a posh British scientist with an interest in the supernatural and a cute and smart granddaughter (who's also capable of giving a jolly good scream when required), and Dracula suavely infiltrating the London business community with shades of the Master's successfully becoming an Establishment figure in Doctor Who: The Mind of Evil (written by Don Houghton, who also scripted this movie). The apocalypse is said in this film to begin on Nov. 23-- the date of Doctor Who's first broadcast, but also, since the year is 1974, the day I was born. Make of that what you will. Also contains the world's cheekiest blue plaque ("Site of St Bartolph's Church, Built 1672, To the Glory of God and demolished for the site of this office block 1972").

Hammer over the Anvil: Sort of an Australian version of The Go-Between, about an Englishwoman (Charlotte Rampling) who emigrates to Australia and starts Lady Chatterleying about with a local horse rancher (a young Russell Crowe), seen through the eyes of a local child who is excluded from most of the rural community's life due to being a polio victim. To be fair to it, it has good points; the metaphors aren't unsubtle, and the denouement works well, with Charlotte Rampling showing more courage than anyone had given her credit for and the narrator finally coming to terms with his disability and earning the community's respect. However, it's still so boring it feels like it's almost double its length. Based on a book, and was probably better as one.

Movie count for 2010: 101

Malteasers

2010-08-31T09:21:00.000+01:00

The Maltese Falcon: A well-deserved rewatch, one of those lightening-in-a-bottle films, as attested to by the fact that Warner Brothers then spent the next few years putting Humphrey Bogart together with Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet and shaking vigorously, and never getting the desired result (Casablanca is their only arguable success, but it's a very different movie). Anyway, what one has here is a tense, witty thriller with cleverly-used sexual subtexts, impeccable casting and a denouement scene which is still powerful despite repeated viewing.

Movie count for 2010: 98

Teenage Kicks

2010-08-28T14:17:00.001+01:00

A Fistful of Dollars: Another rewatch; what I noticed this time around was the ethnic politics of the town. Both of the gangs that the Man With No Name sets against each other, the Baxters and the Rojas, are clearly mixed-race, but the Baxters emphasise the Northern European section of their ancestry while the Rojas emphasise the Hispanic, suggesting a further racial dimension to an already-complicated situation.

The Lover: Fifteen-year-old French girl, living in 1930s Vietnam, has sexual affair with thirty-two-year-old Chinese man. This could have been a powerful, erotic tale of love forbidden on many levels, but unfortunately it's just boring.

Spider-Man: A rewatch, but one of the few superhero movies I can stand rewatching; it actually does something interesting with the concept by making Peter Parker's transformation into Spider-Man a metaphor for adolescence, both physical (as Peter's body gains new powers, but everyone still treats him like a dork), psychological (as Peter comes to grips with the moral issues surrounding the use of his new abilities) and social (as Peter struggles with the tacit class issues underlying his friendship with Harry and his love for Mary Jane). Willem Dafoe as the Green Goblin is amazingly Grand Guignol, but makes it work.

Cyrano de Bergerac: This was one of my favourite films when I was a teenager, and watching it again after many years I can kind of see why. Both Cyrano and Roxane are deeply adolescent individuals, with Cyrano obsessed with his image as a tragic lover and rebel against the system, and Roxane a superficial woman who spends fourteen years locking herself away in a convent after the death of her husband rather than grieving and getting on with it. Unfortunately this adaption, while beautiful, well-cast (hooray Depardieu) and nicely researched without making that background research too intrusive (coughgangsofnewyorkcough), cuts out some of the dialogue from the original play which indicates that the author regards Cyrano as a bit of a self-obsessed manchild, meaning that the audience has to take the characters here at face value.

Movie count for 2010: 97

Of Dogs and Men

2010-08-22T13:08:00.003+01:00

Old Boy: Man locked in hotel room for 15 years then mysteriously released seeks out the person/persons responsible. Result is sort of like The Prisoner, only with martial arts and some gleefully Jacobean incest, mutilation and ironic vengeance schemes.

My Life as a Dog: An earlier you-will-cry-buckets dog story by Lasse Hallstrom, about a young Swedish boy separated from his beloved pet and sent to live with small-town relatives when his mother develops a fatal illness. Suffused with guilt and grief, as well as burgeoning feelings of sexuality which confuse his relationship with his tomboy friend Saga, he conflates his own identity with that of his dog, his mother, and the then-recently-deceased Laika, eventually coming to accept his situation despite all its unfairnesses, leaving the viewer to carry on the anger and grief on his behalf.

10 Things I Hate About You: After my last foray into the post-Lurman Shakespeare-for-teens genre, I was not expecting too much from this, but it proved surprisingly good, being The Taming of the Shrew redone as a Whedonesque high-school comedy, full of zingy one-liners and humourous stereotypes of teenage cliques and with the misogynous treatment of Kate in the original play considerably mitigated (as the focus is less on Kate's brainwashing at the hands of Petruchio, as on the Kate- and Petruchio-equivalents both unbending and becoming less hostile to each other and the world). The one real complaint is that the start of the film seems to set up a subplot involving Alison Janney's randy school guidance counsellor which gets abandoned about one-third of the way in.

Movie count for 2010: 93

There Will Be Issues

2010-08-15T12:43:00.001+01:00

Inception: One of the best new films I've seen this year, a modern take on the sort of reality-bending issues explored by the likes of McGoohan and Cocteau, and in print by some of the best New Wave science fiction, with a cleverly ambiguous ending. Also, the less cute Leonardo DiCaprio gets, the more he actually shines as an actor, here brilliantly portraying a man slowly going mad in a series of dreams within dreams.

There Will Be Blood: Takes several familiar tropes of frontier fiction-- the small wilderness settlement caught in a power struggle between big business and a small community leader, the father and son becoming estranged and reconciled, the unexpected arrival of the long-lost relative who may not be all he seems, the up-from-poverty entrepreneurial life history-- and plays with them to explore the complex dynamics between an oil prospector, a pentecostalist preacher, and the oil prospector's son (or maybe not, it's complicated). I'm not really certain it deserved all those awards/nominations, but certainly it's got a lot going for it.

ETA: Alan suggested a somewhat more complicated subtext exists in TWBB, in which Daniel Plainview is the devil, hiding in plain view (Daniel being a reference to Daniel Webster); first seen in a pit, mining for silver, he then becomes an oil man, leading Paul to sell his birthright and Eli to become tempted by the sins of pride and avarice (note that, like Jacob and Esau, they are twins), leading the latter to deny God in the end; HW, however, ultimately rejects his father and walks away from temptation. So perhaps it did deserve all those awards, and thanks Alan for seeing what I didn't.

Movie count for 2010: 90

Capsule Catch-Up

2010-08-13T15:40:00.000+01:00

Disturbia: Essentially Rear Window for teens, with a couple of knowing winks to Psycho and Vertigo in there as well, as a teenage boy confined to the house by a court order suspects his neighbour is up to no good. The title would suggest some kind of Donnie Darko-esque comment on the nastinesses hidden by the polite face of suburbia, but it’s actually just a popcorn flick. Also the love interest is a bit too much of a fantasy figure for me to take her remotely seriously.

Les Valseuses: Follows the adventures of two ne’er-do-wells stealing, breaking and entering, and, depending on how one views the complicated consent issues involved, raping their way through France, until a strange tragedy forces them, gradually, to rethink their position on life and women. An American film would have made them lovable rogues who never do anything seriously objectionable; this film doesn’t shy away from the evil side of the characters, but also provides them with a satisfactory ending which gives them emotional closure as well as an implicit comeuppance for their crimes.

Austin Powers: Nineties nostalgia classic which shows a clear love on the part of its creators for Sixties pop culture (even working in visual references to the Doctor Who stories The Daleks’ Master Plan and The Invasion); watching it now, what strikes one is that the Nineties references are the bit that feels dated, not the Sixties ones (I winced when Robert Wagner announced “The world is dead, there are only corporations”-- we all know where *that* philosophy led). Oh, and that Mrs Kensington Senior is much lovelier than her daughter; guess the modern celebration of the Cougar/MILF was a few years off at that point.

The Sweet Smell of Success: 1950s indictment of celebrity and the press culture which surrounds it, which is if anything more relevant today than at the time. Almost Shakespearian in its portrayal of a press agent and gossip columnist’s conspiracy to bring down a rising young musician, and a clear influence on Mad Men.

Manhunter: Genuinely disturbing adaptation of Red Dragon, exploring the grey area between criminal and investigator, through unfolding the complicated triple relationship shared by FBI agent Fisk, his current quarry, serial killer Dolaryde, and his previous quarry, Hannibal Lecktor. The décor and soundtrack are 1980s to the point of distraction, but, apart from leading to a couple of dreadful synth numbers, it’s mostly a good thing, helping to build up the tension through oppressive music and spare minimalism.

Mr and Mrs Bridge: The single most boring and pointless film I’ve ever seen, consisting of two hours (and about ten years of screen time) in which nothing really happens. Every so often a drama seems to be emerging, but it quickly gets stomped flat. Otherwise there’s not much to do other than develop one’s hatred for the titular characters, a boring and hypocritical man and a woman who never seems to stand up for anything, even herself.

The Untouchables: Garnered a lot of awards when it came out, but really, it didn't tell me much I didn't know (or couldn't infer) about crime and law enforcement in Prohibition-era Chicago, and I'm far from an expert on the place. Also contained a sequence of a raid on some smugglers by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, mounted on horseback (I kid you not), in which, despite the presence of Tommy guns, not one horse gets shot.

Movie count for 2010: 88

Who's on Faust

2010-08-05T12:21:00.001+01:00

Mephisto: Brilliantly incisive retelling of the Faust story. Klaus Maria Brandauer plays an actor with vague socialist leanings but a stronger sense of personal ambition, who is tempted by the promise of success the Nazi party offers, and compromises himself and his ideals, all the while offering platitudes and excuses. Of course it's bigger than that, with Brandauer's experience being an allegory for that of the whole German people post-Weimar, and the complexities of compromise explored through the various characters. There are also some clever breaches of the fourth wall in which the audience is placed as a character in the film, and a very Prisoneresque sequence in which an entire wedding party, some masked as devils and animals, dance wildly to the German tune Im Grunewald.

Passion of the Christ: Disappointingly conventional retelling of the Crucifixion story. Yes, it's gory; yes, they went to a lot of trouble recreating first-century Palestine, yes, everyone's speaking Aramaic or Latin, but Jesus is European-looking, Mary Magdalene is the Woman Taken in Adultery, the implications of Pilate's washing of his hands as regards his culpability in the whole affair is skated over quickly. Even the gore is hardly without precedent (go take a look at 15th century Flemish religious art). If you want a straight presentation of the modern mainstream Protestant take on the Crucifixion, watch it, but if you want a consideration of the implications of the story for society and religion, frankly, you're better off watching Ben Hur.

Movie Count for 2010: 81