List to the Right

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

..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

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

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

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

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

...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

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

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

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

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

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