Well played, Mayans.

Skyfall: Definitely the best James Bond film since On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

Goldeneye: Hailed upon release as a return to form for the franchise, mainly because the 1980s had been such a terrible time for Bond films. Stripped of that context, it's not bad, but it's also rather dated (sometimes ironically so-- the villains didn't need to take down the European banking system, they could just have waited twenty years) and Pierce Brosnan is really rather boring.

The Spy Who Loved Me: Stylish and Seventies, with my favourite Bond car, and Roger Moore looking amazingly good for fifty. Also fun to play spot-the-Canadian-actor-playing-an-American. Let down by some nasty business in which a perfectly innocent Bond Girl gets used as a bullet shield for no good reason.

The Magical Mystery Tour: My general thesis on the Beatles is that they weren't innovators, but were very good at picking up on, and popularizing, coming trends, and this film supports that. It's a Sixties avant-garde movie, but made for people who had yet to discover avant-garde film, introducing the population at large to concepts like the nonlinear narrative, the lack of an ending, improv and surrealism. To watch alongside The Prisoner.

Blade Runner (Final Cut, and yes, again): Everytime I see this movie there's something new to discover. This time, it's architecture.  Watch the film again thinking Mayans and industrial sectors, and see what you think.

Donnie Darko: Another rewatch, but this time with the director's cut. While it clarifies a lot of things, I think it's actually a more beautifully surreal movie without the extra material. Watch both.

Valkyrie: Docudrama about one of the many assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler. It's well made, but how they managed to make it as boring as this is completely beyond me.

The Man Who Never Was: Unintentionally hilarious docudrama about Operation Mincemeat, the WWII British scheme to plant a corpse containing false information for the Nazis to find. As Enigma was still classified information at the time the film was made, they have to concoct a bizarre scenario involving a perfidous Irish spy probing the veracity of the corpse's  identity to show how the British knew the Axis had taken the bait, which just gets more and more preposterous.

Movie count for 2012:75

The Repeated Meme 2012: The Power of Five

Asylum of the Daleks
Central Premise Recycled From: "Planet of the Daleks", mostly. And "Dalek", and one particular bit of "Revelation of the Daleks".
References to Moffat's Back Catalogue: The Doctor fixing up the Ponds' relationship again. White rooms on space stations. Ginger-haired Moffat Moppets. Oswin as an adult verison of the little girl in "Silence in the Library". Space zombies. Nanogenes with magical powers of handwavium. How is it that the whole population of Earth has not been turned into Dalek dickheads?).
Amy Saves the Day with Wuv: Apparently it has the power to stop her from getting turned into a Dalek dickhead.
Gratuitous Plot Hole of the Week: Why don't they just drop a bomb down the great big hole in the planet and have done with it? Also, how did a spaceship crashland on a planet with an impenetrable force field?
Cliche of the Week: Bisexual girl hacker genius. Willow Rosenberg and Lisbeth Salander would like a word.
Nostalgia UK: More like a sort of nostalgia cocktease, as the Doctor Who publicity machine spent months telling us about how there were all these original-series Daleks in the show, where they were sourced from, etc., etc., and then we barely see any of them at all.
Continuity Frakups: How is there still a Skaro?
Gratuitous Hymn to Motherhood: Apparently the whole reason the Ponds are at outs is because Amy can no longer have children. Couldn't they adopt?
The Pond Relationshipometer: Sharp swing from "getting a divorce" to "madly in love," via "Rory gets passive-aggressive."
Amy's Job This Week Is: Model.
Doctor Who!: Exclaimed by the Daleks.
Hats! Not on the Doctor, but some people have the Daleks eyestalk coming out of their foreheads.
Small Child! OK, it's a Dalek really, but Amy thinks it's a small child.
Item Most Likely to Wind Up as a Toy: Well, actually, they've already released "Death to the Daleks"-style toys. They're inaccurate and say the wrong things, though, so something tells us they won't sell all that well. How about some of the Dalek dickheads?

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship
If the Doctor took the Queen of Egypt back along her own timeline, so she could meet herself, would he get a pair of Nefer.... oh, I'll get me coat.
Central Premise Recycled From: "The Ark," and Space: 1999's "The Taybor". Crossed with "42".
References to Moffat's Back Catalogue: Gratuitous parents (Rory's not Amy's this time), random pterodactyls.
Amy Saves the Day with Wuv: No, just a lot of parental bonding from Rory.
Gratuitous Plot Hole of the Week: What's the value of a ship's control system that has to have two operators who are genetically related? Seriously, like, what?
Cliche of the Week: Nefertiti. Come on, people, other Queens of Egypt are available, and ones that did a damn sight more than she did. What about Hapshepshut, who actually ruled Egypt as Pharaoh in her own right?
Nostalgia UK: The British Empire! Full of jolly, handsome explorers! Who go about shooting elephants and shagging natives, but somehow that's OK, because they're jolly and handsome and things.
Continuity Frakups: Oh no! It's the return of the Silurians with Hooters and Honkers!
Gratuitous Hymn to Motherhood: At least we're spared that this week.
The Pond Relationshipometer: Set firmly on "domestic", with a couple of swings to "flirting with the guest star when the Pond of the other sex isn't watching".
Amy's Job This Week Is: Holder of stepladders.
Doctor Who!: Not actually stated, but plenty of people don't know who he is.
Hats! Nefertiti is wearing a silly-hats giant version of the crown in the famous bust of her.
Small Child! Well, there's some Eggs! anyway.
Item Most Likely to Wind Up as a Toy: You don't actually need one this week. The whole story is like something a child would make up using his Doctor Who action figures, his toy dinosaurs and robots, a couple of great-figures-from-history action figures from some worthy educational playset bought by a faintly misguided relative, a toy spaceship oh, and including his Dad because his Dad's the best Dad ever. A little hunting around in Tesco's and the British Museum gift shop (or, perhaps, the Argos catalogue), and you've got the set.

A Town Called Mercy
Central Premise Recycled From: Red Dwarf, and The Three Amigos.
References to Moffat's Back Catalogue: Moffat Moppets, hymns to motherhood, fetishization of the USA, the Doctor traveling alone for too long, hats, narrators. The original name for Captain Jack was Jax.
Amy Saves the Day with Wuv: She plays Doctor's conscience all episode.
Gratuitous Plot Hole of the Week: Not really, but there is a great big plot convenience in Jex deciding to blow himself up rather than forcing the Gunslinger to confront a basic moral issue. Also, if your afterlife involves carrying the souls of everyone you've wronged, won't the people you're carrying also be carrying other people's souls, who they've wronged in turn? Perhaps even your soul, considering that people are quite capable of wronging each other? Think your metaphors through, Kahler People.
Cliche of the Week: Ah-merrah-cuh! The land of second chances! Actually, social mobility is harder in the USA than in the UK. And this particular town is way too racially egalitarian to be credible. But never mind.
Nostalgia UK: Is there anyone under the age of forty who actually played cowboys as a child?
Continuity Frakups: Although it's deliberate, it's worth noting that this story actually takes place in the middle of the one which follows it, since they've recently visited Henry VIII and had to leave hastily.
Gratuitous Hymn to Motherhood: Apparently you can tell Amy's a mum because she has kind eyes. I would suggest that her hair-trigger temper is probably a better indication, but maybe I'm being cynical.
The Pond Relationshipometer: Stagnant. Seriously, you'd never even know they're married. I'd be worried.
Amy's Job This Week Is: Companion. She asks the questions, holds the screwdrivers, and tells the Doctor he just can't do the unethical thing.
Doctor Who! No, but plenty of tedious the-Doctor-has-a-dark-side stuff. Seriously, this is the episode the Nineties forgot.
Hats! Get shot up a lot, again suggesting that Stetsons are still not cool.
Small Child! And a pretty useless and gratuitous one.
Item Most Likely to Wind Up as a Toy: This is another episode allowing the viewer to source their action figures from elsewhere; buy a few cowboy toys and a Palomino horse to scale, and one of those Terminator action figures of Arnie with half his face off. A few hours customising, and you have your own set. Recession-conscious Doctor Who for the win!

The Power of Three
Central Premise Recycled From: Most of the Davies Era, but I'm thinking mostly either "The Sontaran Strategem" or the one with the Adipose. Also "Terror of the Autons," but given that the Davies Era recycled it repeatedly, that's a given.
References to Moffat's Back Catalogue: Amy and Rory getting all domestic and the Doctor getting all patronising. Fish fingers and custard. The Doctor, as in "The Lodger," trying out real life for a while. Creepy zombies with gas-mask-like faces which hang around with a creepy small child.
Amy Saves the Day with Wuv: There's a lot of buildup about Amy and Rory's wonderful relationship which, along with the title, suggests that their being together with Brian or with the Doctor is somehow going to save the day. Huge big letdown when it doesn't happen.
Gratuitous Plot Hole of the Week: If all those people have been clinically dead from heart failure for more than five minutes, how is a defibrillator going to help (as even if you could get the heart restarted, irreparable brain damage would have set in)? Is the writer aware that defibrillators aren't automatic magic heart-restarting machines? Why did the Doctor leave all those people on the spaceship to die? Why were the ventilator-faced creatures kidnapping people anyway? What was the point of having the little-girl android monitoring things when the Cubes are supposed to be monitoring things? Why have we never heard of this alien race in the past if they're such a big deal (and the fact that this keeps happening in Doctor Who is no excuse)? Wouldn't preventing humanity from spreading out into space frak up all those fixed points in time that result? Wouldn't creatures which exist "throughout all time" know that?
Cliche of the Week: Kate is a "scientist." Like every TV "scientist," she doesn't seem to have a specialty like real scientists do, though at least we're spared the TV-"scientist" cliche of having her turn out to be an expert chemist, physicist, microbiologist, geneticist or whatever the script demands.
Nostalgia UK: Not much for the UK generally, though obviously there's a lot of UNIT-era referencing going on for the fans.
Continuity Frakups: Although, as noted, last week's story takes place in the middle of this one (unless they've visited Henry VIII twice), we still get images from it in Amy's opening-narrative montage.
Gratuitous Hymn to Motherhood: Well, actually, fatherhood this week, as the Brigadier's daughter finally becomes canon.
The Pond Relationshipometer: Apparently they have to choose between Doctor-life and real life. With the implication that real life is somehow not particularly exciting. That's your fault, Ponds.
Amy's Job This Week Is: Travel journalist.
Doctor Who! No!
Hats! Surprisingly, no.
Small Child! One which sits around an emergency room for over six months without getting noticed. Possibly a pointed comment on the state of the NHS.
Item Most Likely to Wind Up as a Toy: Character Options are missing a real trick if we don't get novelty desktop Cubes by Christmas.

The Angels Take Manhattan
Central Premise Recycled From: "Blink", mostly, with a certain amount of "Dalek" and "Doomsday".
References to Moffat's Back Catalogue: How many more Weeping Angels stories are we going to have? Cherubs = Weeping Angels crossed with Moffat Moppets, the Moffat Bifecta of Evil. River Song getting all domestic with the Doctor. Obsession with spoilers.
Amy Saves the Day with Wuv: Deciding to Stand By Her Man in the end rather than run off with the Doctor.
Gratuitous Plot Hole of the Week: So, there's some wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey reason why the Doctor can't visit Rory and Amy again (not even by virtue of parking the Tardis in Newark and taking the bus, or inviting them for a weekend on Rhode Island), but apparently that doesn't preclude him visiting Little Amelia in a timeline that now hasn't happened, because it was rewritten two seasons ago. OK, whatever. And the other big question is, how does the Statue of Liberty actually move, given that in a city like New York, the amount of time where absolutely no one is looking at it is going to be infinitesimal? And how does River get to hear the detective's story-- the obvious way would be for her to go back to Winter Quay in 1937 and interview the old man, but if Winter Quay's been erased by the paradox, she can't do that, and there's no reason for her to do it in the first place.
Cliche of the Week: Kind of excusable actually, as the Raymond Chandler cliches turn out to be justified by the story.
Nostalgia UK: Chandleresque detective stories, The Maltese Falcon.
Continuity Frakups: The Angels used to look like statues, now they apparently take statues over.
Gratuitous Hymn to Motherhood: River keeps calling Amy and Rory Mother
and Dad.
The Pond Relationshipometer: Throwing themselves off buildings for each other.
Amy's Job This Week Is: Book publisher.
Doctor Who! River Song gets to say it.
Hats! On River Song, for a change, and of course pretty much anyone outdoors in 1938, though that hardly counts.
Small Child! There's one in the windows of Winter Quay, just for atmosphere. And of course the Angels now come in creepy-small-child form as well. Guest appearance by Little Amelia at the very end.
Item Most Likely to Wind Up as a Toy: More Weeping Angel variants to go with the several dozen already out there. Though Melody Malone: The Angel's Kiss has
apparently been released as a tie-in e-book already.

Softly softly

Killing Them Softly: One of the genre of philosophical-gangster movies, with Brad Pitt as a hit-man sent to resolve a local conflict with extreme prejudice and, in doing so, ruminating on the nature of American society and the difference between business and community. Set during the 2008 election campaign but based on a 1970s novel, and it did have that 1970s things-falling-apart feel, as well as a 1970s tendency to ultraviolent scenes. The fact that both fit so well with a modern setting probably says something.

Movie count for 2012: 67

A Load of Old Tati

Catching up on the holiday viewing.

Jour de Fete: Tati's earliest feature, already showing a lot of his signature themes: the tension of modernity versus tradition (symbolised here by a traveling fair coming to a little French village), the wise-idiot protagonist (though Francois is a more aggressive character than Monsieur Hulot, and more easily seduced by the attractions of modern living), the vast number of small human dramas interweaving within a simple storyline. It's like Playtime for a small town.

Les Vacances de M. Hulot: Largely what it says on the tin: M. Hulot goes to a Breton seaside resort, has a good time, goes home. Though Tati himself points out that there's a more subtle idea working there: everyone else may have an agenda, political, social, economic or otherwise, but Hulot just wants to have a holiday, and so should we all.

Mon Oncle: Back to the tradition/modernity theme, as we get a glimpse of M. Hulot's home life; he lives in gleeful traditional ramshackleness in a rundown but friendly quarter of Paris, while his sister, living in a gleaming but cold new-built suburb, despairs of him.

Parade: Towards the end of his career, Tati did a rather strange film for Swedish television themed, apparently, around the idea of a circus where the audience are participants as much as spectators. The result is car-crash terrible, as it becomes pretty obvious that the audience is salted with acrobats, stuntpeople and magicians early on, most of the acts are either dull or inexplicable (for some reason, a team of acrobats keeps coming on in different costumes and doing very similar bench routines) and other sequences contrived or misjudged (the end of the film has a rather long bit of two small children playing in the circus ring which is supposedly drawing a link between children's play and adult performance but just looks like someone's home movie of their sprogs). Some of Tati's own vaudeville routines are funny, though, and so is one involving an incompetent magician being upstaged by the scene-shifters.

Horse Feathers: Marx Brothers comedy in which Groucho is the head of a university who has to improve its football team in order to keep the institution afloat. The potential of this is unfortunately largely wasted, plus there's a tedious attempt to plug what the studio clearly intended to be a hit single. There's also a strange bit about Harpo having a job as a dog-catcher which is never really paid off. Still funny, though, with jokes about speakeasies (during Prohibition, naturally) and polygamy which have a pre-Hayes Code cheery wickedness.

Monkey Business: Patchy Marx Brothers comedy, let down by an attempt at working in a serious gangster story and a romantic subplot for Zeppo, though the early scenes in which they stow away on a transatlantic liner in four barrels are really quite funny.

Duck Soup: My favourite Marx Brothers comedy-- no romances for Zeppo (polygamous or otherwise), no attempt at a serious or dramatic story-- just the black humour which results from Groucho becoming dictator of a small country and Chico and Harpo being employed as spies by his political rival.

Blithe Spirit: Noel Coward fantasy sex-comedy, in which a man is haunted by the spirit of his dead wife. Very funny, and hugely influential on pretty much any film/TV series involving a character being followed by an invisible companion.

Gideon of the Yard: 1950s detective piece. The story and characters are fairly weak and stodgily patriarchal, but this is still worth the time for the delightful location shots of postwar London-- bomb sites, tenements, Fitzrovia and all-- and the candid period detail, e.g. the problem of unlicensed Soho clubs.

Idiocracy: Two average people, frozen for 500 years, wake to discover a world in which the average IQ has dropped to submoronic levels and they are now the smartest people on the planet. This leads to a surprisingly biting satire of corporate control and the way in which businesses will sabotage their own survival in pursuit of short-term profits. It's a lot of fun.

The Outrage: Inexplicably overlooked 1964 remake of Rashomon as a cowboy movie; as with a lot of Kurosawa, the translation reads well, and it's more or less done straight (for the curious, an Indian shaman takes the role of the medium). A young unknown called William Shatner plays the town's preacher and does it well.

The First Men in the Moon: 1960s film of Wells' novel. The Harryhausen effects are good, and it has the rather optimistic (for the early 1960s) idea that the first modern moon landing would be a UN expedition (including people from both sides of the Iron Curtain). The script is let down, firstly, by the clearly studio-driven need to include a female character as well as the two male ones in Wells' story, meaning that one character out of the three inevitably winds up being sidelined at various points in the action, secondly by the fact that the storyline of Bedford's villainy never gets an onscreen resolution (it's implied that his girlfriend dumped him after the moon landing, presumably fed up with his financial shenanigans, but we never actually find out the specifics), and thirdly by some rather unnecessary anti-working-class material. Plus some of the slapstick is a little annoying. Still worth it for the rather cute Selenites.

Movie count for 2012: 66

Movies for Republicans

American Graffiti: Baby boomer Fifties-nostalgia piece about a group of teenagers driving around in cars the night before they go off to university, work, etc. To be honest I just found the lot of them annoying, and the sheer amount of petrol being consumed in the making of it probably sparked the fuel crisis. The diner is rather pretty though.

Million Dollar Baby: Simultaneously uplifting and depressing film about a female professional boxer, her coach (Clint Eastwood in his current angry-old-man persona) and Morgan Freeman (as the narrator).

The Hurt Locker: Film about a bomb squad in Iraq, and the personal conflict which develops between a by-the-book soldier who's counting the days until his term is up and his show-off NCO who's an eccentric with a death wish and a developing persecution complex, with the third member of the team, who appears to be about 17 and suffering from advanced PTSD, caught between them.

Restrepo: Feature-length documentary about the Afghan War, specifically about a unit of soldiers spending a year manning an outpost in an isolated valley. They don't know why they're here; the locals are understandably more inclined to trust their cousins and brothers in the Taliban over a group of strange interlopers who keep killing their livestock and arresting their village elders; the officer in charge appears to be hanging on to sanity by a very thin thread indeed. Sort of like a modern Full Metal Jacket, without actors.

Starship Troopers: Watching it the first time, I did get the twist that we have been watching a propaganda film for a fascist government of a future society. This time around, though, the film is scarier as the propaganda seems closer and closer to the sort of things one actually sees and hears in film and television, like the patriotic phrases desperately spouted by the dazed and traumatized soldiers in Restrepo. Nineties fashions are also starting to hit the 'naff' phase of the cycle (contemporary --> naff --> retro), with all these grey long-pointed, wasp-waisted suit jackets. Also slightly jarring to realise that the drill sergeant would go on to be Brother Justin in Carnivale.

Movie count for 2012: 54

This year's airline-film roundup, plus badflicks

The Hunger Games: Surprisingly good updating of The Running Man and The Year of the Sex Olympics via Starship Troopers. In a future America, the one-percent keep the ninety-nine-percent suppressed through televised gladitorial combat which, as its President notes, gives them simultaneous fear and hope (and also, of course, the titillation of watching various attractive teenagers killing each other). And, in the tradition of the abovementioned films, the viewers themselves become implicated, as we are encouraged to buy into the romance narrative the protagonists construct as a means of attracting audience sympathy.

The Adventures of Tintin: Had one or two entertainingly postmodern moments (plus one very tedious inside joke right at the start), but mostly impressed by its ability to take The Secret of the Unicorn and make it boring. Snowy was pretty cute, but they left out his continued fourth-wall-breaking meta-commentary, which for me was one of the highlights of the comics. Not looking forward to sequel.

Fractured: Anthony Hopkins plays a man who murders his wife, makes no effort to conceal his crime, confesses to the cops... and then, when he reaches the courtroom, promptly pleads not guilty, to the bafflement of intrepid state prosecutor Ryan Gosling. Having spent all its intellectual energy coming up with that premise, the film then spends the next two hours fizzling and finally expires in a vague anticlimactic cough.

Nazis at the Centre of the Earth: It's got Nazi! Zombies! At the centre of the Earth! Plus UFOs! Abortions! And giant mechaHitler! Makes Dead Snow look like Schindler's List.

Movie count for 2012: 49

Road Trips

The Road: Depressing, but not unrealistic, film about survival in a nuclear winter scenario, reminiscent of Oryx and Crake in terms of pointing out that, action movies to the contrary notwithstanding, this wouldn't be terribly exciting and would mostly involve fear of death by starvation, death by cannibal gang, or death by perfectly treatable infection. Nonetheless manages to suggest some hope for the survival of the species.

Magnum Force: The original Dirty Harry film was like a right-wing revenge fantasy: this one is similar, but making the point that Harry has his limits. Also entertaining for hitting every single Seventies trope you can think of (hijackers, Jimmy Hoffa, pimps, homosexuality, swinging...); if this weren't a contemporary film, you'd accuse it of exploiting cliches.

Total Recall: The general sense of Philip K Dick's exploration of reality versus fantasy is there-- however, since Dick's story was less than 30 pages long, this film expands it out with almost Peckinpahesque sequences of ultraviolence, which, given the "fantasy" theme, actually works surprisingly well. The other surprising thing was how retrofuturistic it all looks, which is a weird experience, because I consciously remember when it just looked futuristic.

Movie count for 2012: 45

Fascism and Feelgood

The Dictator: A biting, pull-no-punches satire on dictatorship, democracy, management, neo-liberalism, the other sort of liberalism, conservatism, anti-Semitism, Judaism, racism, tolerance and refugees. No wonder the Guardian was completely confused by it.

Iron Sky: Nazis-on-the-moon crowdsource film. Very funny, with some good performances and some nice satires on the US and the UN, and riffing pointedly on the similarities between neoconservatism and fascism and on why both appeal to politicians and people. Let down a bit by some bad performances (mostly the Sarah-Palinesque American president), but don't let that put you off. A region 2 DVD is £10 from Play.com; buy it and keep these people making movies.

Prometheus: Hard to review this one, since Scott is visibly setting up for a series of movies here (you don't cast a young guy in makeup as an old character unless there's going to be some sort of payoff later on). I will say for the moment, though, that it's rather like a big-budget version of Terry Nation's pilot for a Dalek TV series, 'The Destroyers', albeit with dodgier characterisation. Michael Fassbender's worth the price of admission alone, though.

Singin' in the Rain: A movie about two gay men making it in the late silent/early sound era. Although Debbie Reynolds does turn up to provide an ostensible love interest for Gene Kelly, she's actually just a metaphor for his relationship with Donald O'Connor.

Quantum of Solace: Just boring.

Movie count for 2012: 42

What I Saw at the Sci-Fi London Film Festival, by Fiona Aged 37 1/2

Clone: Explores one of the logical, if disturbing, results of human genetic engineering: a woman whose boyfriend dies suddenly in an accident arranges to give birth to his clone.... with the inevitable disturbing possibility of incest emerging as the child grows up and starts to resemble the man she knew. Stars Matt Smith just before he took over the role of the Doctor, and showing why he was a good choice for the role.

Robo-G: Probably my favourite film of the festival (and that's a very tough choice indeed): a Japanese comedy about a team of robotics engineers who "cheat" and hire a septuagenarian to pose, in costume, as their robot at a technical expo, but the stunt rapidly gets out of hand. Definite proof that the Japanese can laugh at themselves-- taking in robotics, cosplay, strange fetishes, gerontology, and mecha-- but also touching on a lot of themes that everybody can relate to.

Shuffle: Sort of like Slaughterhouse 5 crossed with The Time Traveler's Wife, as a man finds himself unstuck in time, traveling through his life in a series of seemingly random jumps, knowing he has to save someone's life-- but who that someone is, and how they need to be saved, is not entirely what he thinks it is.

The Golden Age of Science Fiction: A subtly revealing documentary about Joseph Campbell, editor of Astounding, exploring his positive role as a nurturer of talent and exponent of good SF stories, while not sugarcoating the fact that he was a casual racist, sexist and anti-Semite.

Exit: Strange and beautiful Australian film, portraying modern urban life as a kind of nightmarish maze, and following a group of people who become convinced that one of the doors in the city is an exit. Partly an exploration of fanaticism and obsession, and how half-remembered childhood beliefs can drive us as adults without our realising it, but also a meditation on what exactly is an "exit" in such a context.

Ghosts with Shit Jobs: I was really looking forward to this and wound up being slightly disappointed by it. It's got a great premise (the "ghosts" are Canadians, in a future where China is the dominant power, and all the shit jobs are outsourced to North America), some good acting (the woman who did piecework assembling robot babies was scarily convincing as a frustrated talent about to go postal), and makes such clever use of its small VFX budget that you don't actually realise how small that budget is. My problem was mainly that it carried on longer than it should, and in particular the ending wound up being dragged out to the point where my disbelief started to un-suspend. Good effort though.

Great Masters in Short Form: An unusual take on the short-film anthology, gathering a set of short films based on great works of SF. All were good, but the standouts were "Impossible Dreams" (an Israeli comedy), "The Other Celia" (a masterpiece of non-explanation) and "A Piece of Wood" (about whether war is inevitable).

Other Short Films: As always something of a mix. Standouts include this year's short film competition winner, "Believe the Dance" (www.believethedance.com-- seriously, you need to see this),  "Lucky Day Forever" (a Polish animation about predatory capitalism), Error 0036 (a satire on the annoying nature of helpdesks), Decapoda Shock (about a mutant man-lobster who... a postmodern satire on... um... OK, just see it), "This is Not Real" (about children and their imaginations) and "How to Kill Your Clone" (Mad Men meets the Tyrell Corporation). The winner of the 48-hour film challenge, "Future, Inc.," also deserves a mention for being hilariously twisted.

Movie count for 2012: 37

New short story in BFS Journal

Quick note: the British Fantasy Society Journal for this quarter has a short story by me entitled "The Kindly Race." Interested? Check it out here: http://www.britishfantasysociety.co.uk/news/bfs-journal-spring-2012-edition-out-now/

Rocket Science

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists (in 3D!): Silly animated comedy, aimed at kids but with plenty to amuse adults (e.g. references to The Elephant Man, or Queen Victoria as a ninja), and with so much background detail I may have to buy the DVD just to get more of the jokes. Kind of anti-Darwin (presumably in a misguided attempt to appeal to a certain tranche of American society), but not anti-evolutionist (presumably on the principle that those same Americans aren't bright enough to figure that out).

Pinnoccio: A story about a wooden boy with an unhealthy obsession with 'real boys', who is seduced by a couple of tramps to take up acting, which leads to him being imprisoned and exploited by a big-nosed, long-bearded impresario out of the pages of Der Sturmer; escaping, he is seduced into going to Pleasure Island, along with a load of other boys, by Charles Laughton. Arguably Disney's most offensive film yet: anti-gay, anti-gypsy, antisemitic, and, somehow, anti-whale.

Lady and the Tramp: Short but sweet film about animals, instantly recognisable to anyone who's ever had a pet.

Spartacus: Yes, I know it's a classic of the genre and yes, it has a lot to say about human nature, liberty, society and idealism, to say nothing of McCarthyism and politics, but to be honest, this time around I found it difficult to get into.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service: Still my favourite Bond film; however people feel about Lazenby, he was just fine in it, the supporting cast were well chosen, and the soundtrack was good even before we get to the James Bond Novelty Christmas Hit, which gets points for sheer chutzpah.

 Hitler: The Last Ten Days: Terrible Italian historical starring Alec Guinness doing a subpar Hitler impersonation. Slightly saved by being indirectly responsible for this parody of Downfall parodies.

The Shining: Despite what everyone thinks, this is actually a film about alcoholism. No really. Watch it with that in mind, and it all makes sense.

Movie count for 2012: 31

Edward Cullen? Never heard of him.

Cronos: Early Guillermo del Toro interpretation of the vampire mythos. Basically about the fear of aging and death, and resisting the temptations of power.

Let the Right One In: Applies the Scandinavian genre of films about creepy dysfunctional children to the vampire mythos. Mostly a poignant and disturbing meditation on psychopathy, sociopathy, deviant sexuality, exploitation and enabling, but somewhat let down by an inadvertantly hilarious scene involving CGI cats.

Thirst: Gory Korean gangster-flick take on the vampire mythos. The general message is, never piss off either a) your daughter-in-law, or b) the village priest.

Movie count for 2012: 24

French leave

La Regle du Jeu: Apparently a classic of 1930s French cinema, exploring bourgeois social mores. I was kind of bored by it. Apparently the story involves a cat getting shot, but since the cat in question runs to the left of the picture and the actor fires his gun to the right, it's hard to tell.

Movie count for 2012: 21

Catching up

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada: Story of one man's quest to piss off another.

Cronos: Early Benedicio del Toro film; the body horror is less understated than in his more recent material, but it's still a disturbing and strangely touching take on the vampire theme.

Barton Fink: A tale of creativity, hypocrisy, and why it's not a good idea to get on the wrong side of an insurance salesman.

The Reader: Better-than-I-expected adaptation of the book. An intelligently ambiguous story about the German people's difficulties in coming to terms with the Nazi past.

The Ladykillers: Saw this right after seeing the West End play version of it. The film is less laugh-a-minute, but has more in the way of sinister atmosphere and visual humour; it's also really interesting to see what the King's Cross/St Pancras area looked like in the 1950s.

The Time Traveler's Wife: Somewhere, there's a plagiarism lawsuit waiting to happen involving this film, and everything Steven Moffat's written for Doctor Who.

Movie count for 2012: 20

Think of the children

M (ein Stadt sucht ein Moerder): Fritz Lang's first (partial) sound film. Draws disturbing parallels between police and criminal organisations, while also managing to condemn vigilantism.

If...: A good counterargument to anybody who claims that all these teenage rioters need is strong authority figures and military discipline.

Beguiled: Proof that it's not just male schoolchildren who can go, homicidally, off the rails.

Baader-Meinhof Complex: Scary docudrama about the German terrorist organisation, providing context for their actions while also revealing the brutal infighting within the group. Also draws disturbing parallels between police and criminal organisations, while managing to condemn vigilantism. Costarring the ubiquitous Bruno "Hitler" Ganz.

Movie count for 2012: 14

Oscar material

The Artist: "Silent" movie, which actually makes quite clever use of sound. The period detail is fantastic, but the show is completely stolen by a wire-haired terrier.

The Iron Lady: Controversial Thatcher biopic, which was a lot more even-handed than I was expecting; it doesn't condemn her, but also makes it quite plain that even before the hubris began to sink in, her policies did as much damage as they did good, if not more. I also thought the dementia aspect was sensitively handled.

Come And See: Nightmarish Russian film about war. Brilliant and uncompromising, but a single viewing is likely to induce post-traumatic stress disorder.

Gunfight at the OK Corral: Average Western. The casting is good and there's an interesting subtext to the general effect that the lawmen and the various factions of criminals are all playing each other off against each other, but it made for pretty tedious viewing, there's a romantic subplot which is built up hugely and then hastily abandoned, and, oh yes, it is one of those Westerns with an annoying song running through it.

House of Flying Daggers: Beautiful period martial-arts piece which has a) probably the best use of colour I've ever seen in a movie, and b) also one of the most stunning plot reversals, with information revealed in the final third of the story completely rewriting the viewer's percetion of the relationships seen in the first two-thirds.

Movie count for 2012: 10

Between the Head and the Heart

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

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

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

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

Movie count for 2012: 5

Over the Rambow

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

Movie count for 2012: 1

Wrapping up the 2011 capsule movie reviews

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

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

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

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

Movie count for 2011: 128

The Repeated Meme: The Horse and His Boy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teeth! None, they're trees.

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

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

Small Child! Two of them.

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

Special effects

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

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

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

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

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

Of Human Bondage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Movie count for 2011: 120

Mannequin Skywalker

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

Movie count for 2011: 113

The Last Sarah Jane Adventures Checklist: Serf's Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sonic Lipstick: Versus magic alien pen.

Wristwatch Scanner: Yeah.

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

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

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

The Repeated Meme Toywatch: How did we do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benares brass

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

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

Movie count for 2011: 112

The Sarah Jane Adventures Checklist: Wooden It Be Lovely

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

Tie-in with Doctor Who story: None.

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

Luke Cameo: By mobile phone, no less.

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

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

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

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

The Crimes of Sarah Jane: Child abuse.

Sonic Lipstick: Present.

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

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

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

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

The Sarah Jane Adventures Checklist: Sky me a River

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wristwatch Scanner: Yes.

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

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

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

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

No, it actually *does* get worse.

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

Movie count for 2010: 110

The Repeated Meme: The Song of Wedding River

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

Central Premise Recycled From: The Pandorica Opens, mostly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fish! No, which rather misses a trick.

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

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

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

Three rather disappointing films

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

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

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

Movie count for 2011: 109

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teeth! On the Mat!

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

Fish! Alas no. I miss them.

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

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

Title explained here.

The Repeated Meme: Complex God

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

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

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

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

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

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

Murray Goldwatch: Oddly suited to the setting.

Nostalgia UK: Eighties hotels.

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

Teeth! On the naked mole-rat person!

Hats! On the clown!

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

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

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

Todo sobre violence and murder

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

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

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

Movie count for 2011: 106

The Repeated Meme: Rory's Choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hats! Old Amy's chapeau.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teeth! On the bulldog!

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

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

Small Child! Erm... pass.

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

Title explained here.

It Should be Wookiees

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

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

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

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

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

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

Movie count for 2011: 103

The Repeated Meme: Let's Kiss Hitler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nostalgia UK: World War II, crop circles.

Inside Jokes: Why did the Titanic sink again?

Teeth! Not so much.

Hats! Toppers are cool.

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

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

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

How do you know Darth Vader is badass?

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

Pastiche

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

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

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

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

Movie count for 2011: 101

Naked gangsters

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

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

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

Movie count for 2011: 99

Shotgun wedding

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

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

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

Movie count for 2011: 97

Translated from the Japanese

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

Movie count for 2011: 94