The Repeated Meme: The Impossible Astronaut

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

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

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

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

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

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

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