OK, Cloverfield was not a documentary, but it did pretend to be found personal footage of a city-wide disaster. The heart of Trouble The Water is Kim Richards Roberts (aka Black Kold Medina) own camcorder footage of the hurricane as it hits. It starts playfully with its mock documentary fashion, and kids who ain’t afraid of no hurricane. And then it gets patchy, blurry, and increasingly scary as the flood hits town and people hide in attics and run out of food and water. The biggest issue about the verisimilitude of Cloverfield was that no-one would keep filming (and the battery life would run out). Well Kim keeps filming, once safe at least, and talking. We see flood waters rising and for days we see lack of any kind of support. Though her battery does run out halfway through her story - filled in later by her and her husband Scott.

They survive, though some people we see on camera don’t. They eventually get out, embracing the disaster as an opportunity. Then they come back, realising the social bars to employment and a better way of life evaporated like the flood water, there wa sno consistency or follow through long term. All through though Kim and Scott remain active, focussed for improvements and you end the film willing it to happen. It is a film of tiny surprises, around the now well known fuck ups of Katrina. It is a reminder of individual acts of heroism (Scott rescues a number of people and finds a new voice and self confidence in his own modesty). And the moment when Kim discovers the only suviving copy of her rap demo and flawless raps over it, beats any giant monster stomping on New York.

Trailer below, its on at the ICA for a bit and will probably turn up on BBC4 or More 4 later in the year.

-Her tits. Let’s be fair, the only film I can think of with Winslett in where you don’t see her saucer sized areolas is the Peter Pan one, Finding Neverland. So her nipples have not stopped her being nominated before. But The Reader is one quarter soft porn and three quarter philosophical melodrama (in precisely that order). Not sure how that will play to the prudish members of the establishment or indeed David Kross’s cock-shot (I wonder if Ralph Fiennes got to approve how large the actor playing his young selfs member was?)

-Her accent. The film is set in Germany, and stars a predominantly German cast who speak in predictable German accented English. Perhaps this is why the two big English actors in the film, Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslett also do German accented English. But it does nevertheless seem off. It is a step from that to a WWII film and a “Schnell schnell kartofolkopf”. But then Winslett’s Hanna was ex-SS so this may actually be a masterstroke.

-Despite the progession of CGI in the last twenty years, and Winslett being a genuinely talented screen actress, film make-up still cannot adequately age a thirty three year old woman into a sixty six year old. Winslett tries her hardest, but even with a bit of hard-drinking blood shot eyes and unflattering dishrag hair she still seems young. It probably doesn’t help however that when we first see Hanna in the film she is supposed to be thirty six, three years older than Winslett now. David Kross playing the young Fiennes barely seems to age in the 1958 and 1966 segments. (The 1966 segment which I kept thinking the Baader Meinhof’s from two months ago were going to crash).

Dodge all these bullets and the Reader stands a chance, despite having the feel of a rather slow moral philosophy primer. And for all its hand wringing about post-war Germany and collective guilt, the film is really an afterschool special about literacy. Hey kids, it says, learn to read or you too could be responsible for genocide. Which may be more hard hitting than the Government’s Gremlins adverts, but also seems a touch specific to this particular (fictional) case. And on balance, I think I’d rather see Gremlins (or at least Gremlins 2: The New Batch).

There is no doubt that all of the above contribute to the Spirits’ awfulness, but at the same time the film has a gusto and energy missing from many movies, something which could be down to the writer directors singular vision of the titular character. Which unfortunately boils down to “What if Miller’s Batman moved into Sin City?”. So we get endless voice-overs of how “The city” is The Spirit’s wife and life - which is somewhat ironic as the choice of filming technique leaves us with little image of the city itself except as a black silhouette and a few bricks.

So to take those criticisms above:
a) Frank Miller is not a film director. That co-directing credit on Sin City was a vanity to Robert Rodriguez, which luckily - via Miller’s choice of almost identical shooting style shows who the real director was there. The other criticism of Miller is that he had taken Eisner’s distinctive character and turned him into a stock Miller caricature also holds, but then its not as if anyone outside a small circle knows the backstory of The Spirit.
b) Superhero fatigue has set in already, that was clear well before this summer. What this summer did differently was give us superior films in their genres. And good actors. Which Gabriel Macht is not, even without stupid flapping tie, no motivation and a rubbish mask.
c) The Spirit is stupendously, cartoonily violent. Some of this violence if plenty fun (my views on the use of toilets in fights has been documented elsewhere) but when it is all the film has to offer in the way of conflict resolution it really gets dull quickly. My views on fights between indestructible protagonists are also well documented.
d) Why is it that blue screen digital set building has led, on the whole, to an aesthetic which can only really be called grimy. Every hue of desaturated blacks, greys and browns are enlivened only by the flappy red tie and Tennantesque waffle pattern of the Spirit’s Converse.

What (questionably these days) works for Miller on the comic page, fails him on the big screen. Cinema, even blockbuster cinema, has no room for his unnaturalistic dialogue, and the characters find it hard to move from one set piece to another with motivation and demeanour intact. So in the end what is left is a flapping red tie and the images which luckily do burn themselves into your memory. So not terrible if just for the memory of:
a) Samuel L.Jackson dissolving a kitten whilst dressed as a Nazi
b) The Spirit escaping from a precarious situation with his trousers down
c) The hosts of sixties Batman henchmen with their punning names on their tops.

In all other ways, terrible!

It’s certain that Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah” will be the Christmas #1. But which version? PR Media Blog reports on a Facebook campaign to put Jeff Buckley’s version at #1 instead of the version by X-Factor winner Alexandra Burke.

The blog post sets up the battle as old v new media, but also as the manipulative hand of S.Cowell vs “the people”. A quick Twitter search for “Hallelujah” seems to back this up. “Stop X-Factor getting to number 1, buy Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah”. “Buckley’s is still my favourite version of Hallelujah and this fact will not do me any favours.” “attention pundits: Stop mis-interpreting “Hallelujah”. It is not about redemption. Nor is it a song of Hope.”

Though other notes are being struck: “Oh I loved the hallelujah song”. “did not follow X-Factor but has just listened to Hallelujah and choked up a bit.” The reactions - whichever version they favour - suggest that the pop critic Mike Barthel was right when, in his excellent 2007 paper on the song, he described its appeal as lying in its intimacy - it’s a song that, however mainstream it becomes, always feels like a personal discovery to its fans.

So no wonder the anti-Cowell brigade, busily organising themselves on Facebook, feel personally slighted by his promotion of the song in this new version - complete with redemptive key change (O horror!). But as Barthel precisely explores, the canonisation of the Buckley version was itself the culmination of a process of discovery and development of the song. The John Cale version that Buckley’s is based on was used in Shrek and Scrubs; Buckley’s own cover surfaced in The OC and a host of other teen dramas - it became a shorthand for sorrow. Barthel also argues that Buckley’s cover represented a “flattening” of the song’s meaning, emphasising its misery and desolation at the expense of its other dimensions. So perhaps the key change is something of a return to the source! Either way it suggests the idea of a “definitive” - rather than a “previously most famous” - version of this particular song is a bit of a chimera.

The anti-Cowell, pro-Buckley posse undoubtedly feel a sincere connection to “Hallelujah”, but the sheer intensity of its recent usage makes it very likely that the people wanting to stop Cowell’s “desecration” of the song themselves found out about it via ‘old’ media - the cinema, the TV, a BBC iPlayer advert maybe… Of course it doesn’t matter a jot how a fan discovered a song - unless you’re constructing a narrative setting the authentic fans against the newbies, of course. The PR Media Blog story rests on the idea that the social networkers are ‘the people’, and the viewers buying Alex Burke’s new version are somehow not - as if joining a Facebook group was somehow far more effortful than taking part in a phone vote. But joining one feels more individual, which is the great advantage social media organisation has - “donating your status to Obama” or “Rickrolling Jeff Buckley to the top of the charts” are both means of conspicuous participation.

Like the ‘old v new media’ story itself, the clash of the “Hallelujah”s is a clash of early majority vs late majority. The uptake of the song had reached a plateau until Jason Castro’s rendition on American Idol helped open up a big potential new audience for it, but it was already mainstream. It’s the qualities that make it hitworthy - its effectiveness in creating a link between listener and song - that also create the outrage among many of its existing fans. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Buckley fans get their way - there’s a recent micro-tradition of tweaking authority’s beard when it comes to the Xmas No.1 race: Gary Jules’ cover of “Mad World” and Nizlopi’s “JCB Song” were both promoted as representing a kind of authenticity amongst the tinsel and tat - Buckley could build a similar momentum.

Vintage Cookbook Trials is by Alix, Sarah and Elly and involves trials of recipes scavenged from old cookbooks (and cookery cards).

How To Nom is a collection of NEW recipes submitted by Eli and others. Future branes will consider THESE their vintage texts.

Neojyanisme is Sarah and Cis posting about mad Japanese boybands as far as I can tell.

Bookmark them all!

But this hints to the other area of greatness in W. When Oliver Stone announced the project, it was easy to imagine what he might turn out. Released a few weeks before the election to remind Americans of the terrible mistakes they had made in the previous elections, W. clearly had to be a partisan Democrat’s film bashing the Republicans. Except, as Michael Moore found with Fahrenheit 911, preaching to the converted and bashing your enemy just makes your enemy not listen even more. It makes them draw their wagons in and protect their man – even if they are getting pissed off. So instead we get this odd film, critical in places but also contextualising the decisions. Showing influence, manipulation, mistakes but also a very human President (and one which Josh Brolin makes so watchable). The two hour running time picks and chooses its incidents, there is no time for either of Bush’s election victories, but the pretzel gets a look in. No hagiograph, too selective a biography, toothless satire and no stylised fever dream of a nation: it nevertheless hints at all of these approaches (down to the Fox News salute). What I realised at the end was that W. is the sum of all of the films it isn’t. It’s a film designed to please absolutely no-one*. Democrats are annoyed that its too soft, Republicans will find it too critical. Americans will get enough shame and embarrassment out of it, the rest of the world will be baffled by the free ride so many aspects of the story gets. Brits would be appalled that Oliver Stone appears to have cast Prince William as Tony Blair, the French that Chirac is represented by a Clouseau voice-over down the phone. There is little of substance here for fans of political drama, but there is no closure or dramatic force for a narrative film. But its individual scenes and sequences belong in all of these films. And all of those films would be even less relevant than W. is. It is almost the opposite of Todd Haynes Dylan biopic I’m Not There which manages to paint a convincing portrait of Dylan without directly showing him once. All W. does is show George W.Bush, without ever really attempting to show him at all.

Stone is having more fun here than you would expect from him. Perhaps in trying to grapple with how to make this film he realised you can’t. No singular vision of W. would work, so just do them all. In some ways Brolin being so good almost spoils it for Stone, his W. is so watchable it almost feels like there is a narrative arc here worth pursuing. On the other hand Stone the entertainment filmmaker may have realised that it was exactly the trick he needed to pull. It is a film with one hundred views of nothing, pretending to be a film about someone important. Which, from whichever of the angles Stone tries to show him, is not a bad metaphor for the real George W.Bush.

*Except perhaps me, when I realised this fact.

The mind, distracted by something, fails to notice the lamp post, and the body - in its mechanical way - just keeps on going.

There’s little that French people laugh at more loudly than seeing someone stumble into something, and though there’s not much physical stumbling in Agnès Jaoui’s new movie Let’s Talk About the Rain, there’s an awful lot of the metaphysical kind.

* * *

Jaoui stars as a hard-headed careerist launching a new life in politics and her long-time screen partner (and real-life husband) Jean-Pierre Bacri plays an utterly inept yet supremely confident hack photographer. But the living pulse of the movie finds its rhythm in Jamel Debbouze.

Debbouze is virtually unknown outside France, but within it he’s the most famous non-white Frenchman other than Zinedine Zidane. A stand-up comic and actor, Debbouze is a wiry and intense young man, here playing Karim, the son of an Arab housekeeper who has looked after Jaoui’s family for decades and who lives in the guest house of one of those sprawling country manses that seems to be every (white) French family’s natural cinematic birthright.

Like Michael Haneke’s Hidden, this movie is about the son of an immigrant who has been left as a second-class citizen by a bourgeouis French family. But where the underclass of Hidden were mute, foreboding and utterly cut off from the rest of the film, we see the complicated interweaving of lives here, the small everyday irritations. And the immigrant’s son has quite a bit to say.

Karim wants to change his life. He’s a hotel clerk but has artistic ambitions. At the beginning of the movie we’re made to understand that he lacks motivation, needing the guiding hand of Bacri’s experience to lift him up to something better - but this schematic breaks down quickly, and Karim becomes virtually the only character with any kind of real self-awareness. Debbouze becomes, despite his background in making people laugh for a living, the least mechanical and least comic actor in the film.

As the two make an ill-conceived and disastrous documentary about Jaoui (because she’s a “strong woman”), we go deep into the family’s past, its relationship with Karim’s mother, various infidelities and yearnings, farm politics, feminism, and the extent to which one can lie to oneself. That all these themes can unfold so naturally is a real achievement. But what’s really amazing is that it’s all so funny.

* * *

Bergson warns that any trace of pity for a potentially comic character can render the comedy inert - that laughter is a form of “social ragging” which must always humiliate its object in some way. But the laughs here are seldom simple mockery.

In Jaoui’s most nakedly vulnerable moment, she calls her longtime boyfriend (the fantastic Frédéric Pierrot) a few days after breaking up. She gets his answering machine and she’s a mess - crying as she pretends that she’s calling for any other reason than just to hear his voice. When she finally admits how much she needs him she freaks, and concludes, just before hanging up, “Please don’t listen to this message!”

Her sense of control is so ingrained that she imagines she can even subvert the linear procession of time. She can’t. Her heartbreak is palpable but her line is hilarious - and we take the one with the other comfortably.

I had never seen Bacri before - he’s a total ecosystem of bluster, avuncular wisdom and reassurance, but it’s based on nothing. He’s the kind of man who can convince himself of anything. He sits in a restaurant with his pubescent son, who asks him about a certain kind of dessert. Bacri adopts a knowing air, gesturing as if putting into words something he has only ever known by touch and instinct: “It’s a kind of custard, a.. it’s a flan. It’s basically a flan. Sometimes with some raspberry sauce.” He smiles. When the waiter arrives, Bacri can’t help asking about it, and the waiter replies, “It’s vanilla ice cream with candied fruit.” Bacri looks shocked. “It’s not a flan?” “No, monsieur. Ice cream. With candied fruit.” As the waiter retreats Bacri looks pensive and a bit disapproving.

“Pffft. They don’t even serve it with raspberry sauce.”

In this controversial piece of op/ed in the Guardian David Cox argues that there seems something wrong about Hunger being funded by mainly British taxpayers money. Whilst I think for once the UK Film Council’s money has gone into a strikingly good film, I do have some sympathy for the argument (less so for the way in which he makes it and his views on torture). There is a feeling that it is a sop to middle class British guilt that paints Great Britain, in their guise as the English/Unionists, as the cinematic bad guys in Northern Ireland. They are the guys running the prison, they are they men in uniform and they are backed by a government. And while McQueen tries very hard to show the futility and provocation inherent in Bobby Sands and his compatriots actions, the film does spend the last twenty minutes lovingly watching someone starve themselves to death* without once referring to any of the crimes committed by the prisoners.

Its not that I am looking for balance in cinema, far from it. And perhaps the balance that these films create make up for the pretty consistent meida bias in reporting the troubles (interesting Roy Greenslade lecture from 1998 on the potential damage caused by the bias). But it will continue to be this way as the IRA and their methods and martyrs fit the cinematic myth so much better than any Unionist tale could (including the one David Cox suggests). I cannot say I ever expected James Bond to go in and sort out Northern Ireland, but even in the throes of the troubles it was hard to paint the IRA in the cinema as wholly bad guys. They are the underdogs, the individuals fighting a massed English army, the rugged individual vs the faceless mass of authority. If Irish baddies were spirited up they were usually too mad for the IRA: Tommy lee Jones in Blown Away, Sean Bean in Patriot Games or Brad Pitt in the Devil’s Own (though he may have been kicked out for a ropey accent). But if the history books are written by the winners, and if both sides have sort of won, the movies seem to be falling solidly on one side only. This isn’t surprising, we tend not to go to the cinema for a complex dissection of a very messy historical conflict. But from a retrospective view via cinema, the Brits are the Nazi’s in this one: you half expect them to break the fourth wall and wonder when they were made the bad guys (its not as if we put skulls on out uniforms!) Hunger tries to touch at some of these complexities – but even in its seventeen minute conversation sequence it is Bobby Sands talking to a Catholic priest, peaceful vs violent Republicans. I’m not sure there is an easy solution to this, though I wonder which British actor would have the balls to take up one of the toughest roles of the 20th Century in PEACE PROCESS as John Major.

*Really, really not the moment to cop a feel of your date. If you still have popcorn left you might just survive.

Neil Morrissey’s Risky Business, the everyday tale of celeb beer brewing (and how peed off must Richard Fox be that he’s not in the title?) might be exactly the sort of programme you’d expect us here at FT to be interested in, and we are, but mainly due to our EXCITING CAMEO in said programme! In programme two about 35 minutes in, a focus group is used and there, holding forth on the palatability of their brew is Pete, with me sitting silently (in the clip anyway) behind him.

The important thing to note about the Morrissey-Fox Blonde is that it may be the most tasteless ale I’ve ever had. It makes Discovery taste like Westmalle Triple, it’s about half a step above tap water in the complexity stakes. Before arriving at the focus group (which we knew was being filmed but not why) I had two theories, either it was going to be some sort of celeb beer or that it was ALCOHOL-FREE ALE and for about the first five minutes I honestly thought it was the latter, it has that slight bready taste you get from kaliber.

And Morrissey thinks this blandness is a good thing because like Dan Brown, Indiana Jones and Monty Python before him he is searching for THE HOLY GRAIL, a bitter that lager drinkers will buy. It is an entirely fruitless* task, it’s like trying to get football obsessives into rugby, or indie kids into heavy metal (Oi isn’t heavy metal) because although to the outsider they appear to share similar characteristics and though there may be a few outliers who cross over, they are entirely different beasts and, when you have a microbrewery that can only make three barrels a week, why would you even want to go for that market where Fullers,Youngs and other brewers with hundreds of years of experience have failed? Why not try and make something interesting? OK, the boys down the road who brew their first batch call them bastards for getting a decent recipe on their first attempt, but they also damn it with their “oh, very drinkable” praise, which is clearly brewerese for “this tastes of nothing”.

The other guys in the focus group, none of whom seemed to be primarily ale drinkers, reacted the way i think Morrissey was expecting, even suggesting, after some quite heavy prompting, that (holy grail pt 2!!!) their girlfriends would drink it (imagine that, WIMMIN drinking ale! now some of my best friends are both wimmin and ale drinkers (even CAMRA members) and i’m pretty sure they would find this as unpalatable as I did)!

He actually says here:

If Kronenbourg is the Coldplay of the beer world, then my own beer is like John Lennon and Julie Christie driving through London in a silver Jaguar E-Type circa 1967 with The Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset blasting out of the speakers.

no it isn’t mate, it’s James Blunt at best.

Also, [SPOILERS FOR PART THREE] I’ve just found this press release from Tesco, which makes me weep into my pint of Nero/Deuchars/Landlord/insert your favourite ale here

Mind you, with my track record on success or failure of Guinness Red (spotted in the wild in Watford O’Neills on Saturday), it’ll probably go on to be a roaring success…

*although, somehow, the cidermakers (fruitless? cidermakers? oh please yourselves) have managed it…

Anyway, science fiction, like everything else, goes in fashions. From the stark whites of a lot of seventies sci-fi, getting over-desiged but grottier via Alien ending at the night-vision rainy grainy greens of much recent science fiction. These black and golds are just another step in showing worlds that look more awesome than they make sense (really, that supercomputer is the dumpest thing EVER!)

I blame Sam Sparro. Well I blame Eagle-Eye Cherry too, but he hasn’t recorded a version of Black And Gold yet.

Oh and Fergie had an album called the Dutchess which, spelling notwithstanding, is way beyond a coincidence.

(The context of the question, best forgotten, sadly is from plugging an unusually shit and unncecessary book by a DJ of similar qualities.)

This immediately makes Night Garden more attractive viewing for nostalgist parents like me than Teletubbies, whose gentle gobbledigook is crack to the one-year old mind but harder going for Dad and Mum. The budget’s noticeably higher too - ITNG looks extremely classy, and in a further sop to middle-class parental sensibilities it even has a proper theme tune. As the programme is meant for a slightly older audience than Teletubbies, there are even actual stories, though they’re glacially paced: a typical episode has a character losing something, then asking every other character in turn if they’ve found it. Since each character has their own theme song and special dance the half hour fills up quite quickly. As yet, though, I’ve not seen an episode which has the near-random wonder of some bits of Teletubbies - those Winsor McCay moments when (for example) suddenly Tubbyland would fill with water and three ferries would sail through it and then vanish. Existence and events are less arbitrary for ITNG’s audience, and the show follows suit. But luckily, it puts its wonder elsewhere.

What makes Night Garden strange isn’t the action of the episode, but the location. I’m not really talking about the Night Garden itself, beautifully realised though it is (a sort of toddler Portmeiron, complete with giant bouncing balloons), but the metaphysics of the show. Each episode starts with a different child being lulled to sleep by a parent, who tells them about the show’s hero, Iggle Piggle, who is himself going to sleep in the tiny boat which seems to be his only home. The boat is adrift on an endless sea in an endless dark - we don’t know where it’s going, or why, only that as each episode begins Iggle Piggle is furling his sail and lighting his light, and as he falls asleep the stars above HIM turn to flowers in the Night Garden.

The week’s jolly adventure then happens, and at the end the inhabitants of the Garden go to sleep, leaving Iggle Piggle awake and alone in the darkening Garden. The kindly narrator tells him not to worry, and we pan out to find him asleep and drifting in his boat.

So to recap: Iggle Piggle is a kind of universal child adrift in a sort of womb-sea of the collective unconscious, a deeper layer of which turns out to be the Night Garden, where he can play but never truly belong - and which children can’t access directly, only through this sailor intermediary. To make the sea scenes more haunting, they’re filmed in stop-motion compared to the smooth film of framing scene and Garden. This has the effect of increasing their weird unreality for the viewer.

Judging by the success of ITNG it’s struck a chord among kids and parents - my one-year-old adores it - but what strikes me is that the show doesn’t need the framing seascape at all: on paper it would work just as well to have Iggle Piggle be a paid up member of the Night Garden crew, and simply have the child dream about them. The sea scenes - which are always the same and very short - take us into another place entirely, tapping into something much more primal that won’t soon leave the memory of this generation of kids.

But head over to the BBC page for television coverage of the Olympics and try viewing the listings for fencing. Strange, no? It hasn’t - like baseball - been voted out (baseball will make its last Olympics appearance in Beijing this year). It’s just not being shown by the BBC.

Back in June, when the BBC’s coverage was being hammered out once and for all, there was only one Briton expected to compete in any fencing event. That was Alex O’Connell, who’s handy with a sabre - one of the three swords in fencing along with epée (thinner) and foil (the thinnest). Since then, in a mysterious ruffling of cloaks, the sport’s international governing body has decreed that Finchley’s Richard Kruse - a foil man - and Martina Emanuel - also foil - will get to stab a little in Beijing.

Fencing isn’t one of those Olympic sports where you’re washed up by the time you’re university age. At 22, Emanuel is a little green for a fencer - she’s mainly trying to get experience for 2012. (She also trains, lives, and was born in Italy. Hmm. British mum, apparently.) But there are high hopes for 24-year-old Kruse, who some say is Britain’s best shot at the country’s first fencing medal since 1964.

Today, American Mariel Zagunis took the gold in women’s sabre. (Americans won bronze and silver, too). Zagunis thus repeats as gold medalist. She won in 2004 - the first gold for an American fencer in 100 years - after a last-minute reshuffle allowed her to join her compatriots in Athens. So there’s hope for Richard Kruse yet. It’s just too bad his friends won’t get to tune in. Especially after he took the time to present this “fencing for beginners” guide for… BBC Sport.

The promised tourists don’t come. The three hundred and eighty seven stalls set up by locals to exploit their promised windfall go unpatronised. The toilet is not used. And there is a look of abject desolation, a failure of the scheme yes, but also a dashing of hope too. No matter how the film tries to tag a life goes on ending to the film, it does not convince. The film really ends with the realisation of failure. This is not a comedy, it is a searingly angry film about poverty, and to a lesser extent religion. It is about striving so hard for something, pushing yourself to the limit and then realising there is nowhere left to go. Except for on the Pope’s Toilet you just used your life savings to buy. And you can’t even flush those dreams away without using a bucket.
(By the way, that’s the Japanese poster above. The original one is below. The Japanese one is MUCH better.)

Much has been written about the politics of Wall-E (from its anti-obesity scare tactics to its not exactly hidden green agenda). What I think is Wall-E’s real legacy however is being a film which can expand and signpost new areas of interest for kids. Rather than the usual whiz-bang action adventure that children’s films tend to be these days, it is a bit more thoughtful, and lays the seeds for kids to discover whole new worlds of fiction. Wall-E is clearly a well made science fiction tale, posing some standard early sci-fi questions* - opening the air-lock to an Aladdin’s Space Cruiser of speculative fiction. But it is also a hefty emotional romance, tinged with heartbreak and sweeping rescues. You’ll not find many a Mills & Boon about robots, but you will find analogs of this plot. It also contains within it two constant nagging reprieves from Hello Dolly, so it could even stir an affection for musicals.

Pixar have always pushed innovative boundaries with all of their films, but now the technology has been tamed they seem just as interested in pushing the kind of stories traditionally dished up to kids. The film it reminded me tonally more than anything was ET (though without quite the devastating power of that film). Which also leads me to a slightly disquieting thought. I am sure the emotional heft of ET has left me more pro-alien than anti, and I daresay Wall-E does much the same for robots. Which could of course be a bad thing. Wall-E may be creating a generation who, for one, will embrace their robot overlords. Romantically. With hugs.

*Not just about recycling, rubbish and waste disposal, but also nature of the self, mind/body dualism and what emotions really are. Though the biggest question I came out with was how exactly did the various generations of morbidly obese humans pro-create?

What we get is Mulder and Scully acting like an old married couple, bickering when an old flame re-enters their lives. They have moved on, her to successful doctoring, him to wild man in the woods giving Grizzly Adams a run for his money in the shaggy beard stakes. The old flame returns, in this case the FBI needing their help on a paranormal case, and their cosy status quo is threatened. It becomes a weird relationship drama, showing us a how these characters have grown (or not) in the intervening ten years, throwing up new conflicts, weird work related jealousies and old reminiscences.

Your sci-fi, X-Files loving fan is not going to see the film just for that, and truth be told (for it is out there), the actually plot that this is framed by isn’t that promising. There is a missing FBI agent of whom visions are seen by a psychic paedophile priest – played with worrying conviction by Billy Connelly. Psychics were ten a penny in the old X-Files, and don’t call for big special effects. This is where I think most of the reviewers walked out. Its not that the film gets that much more exciting, it is as downbeat and snowbound as much of the series was. But the story does get more whacked out later, it progressed to organ harvesting and then full on body transplantation. And hints at an interesting question (Beware, spoilers a head – literally).

Premise 1: Our bad guy is “married in Massachusetts” to his boss, a man with a rare blood type.
Premise 2: Our bad guy is procuring bodies with the same blood type so they can do a full body transplant, head on to new body.
Premise 3: The boss, the guy who wants the transplant, was buggered by Billy’s priest at a young age (this appears to be why Billy has a psychic connection with him!)

What is never mentioned, and obliquely left out there for the viewers to notice (something I haven’t seen a reviewer do yet), is that all the living bodies, abducted and procured for the transplant, are female. Is the film subtly making a point about abuse, sexuality perceived to be based on childhood experiences, homosexuality? How does the bad guy feel about swopping his boyfriends body with a girls body? Did he abduct women for his own physical preferences (he does scope them out in a swimming pool first). It comes out with none of this openly, and all the above facts are mentioned briefly or left for the viewer to observe. And yet this brief bit of subtlety reminded me of one of the few things I liked about the X-Files. Sometimes it would trust its own audience to work stuff out for itself.

In The Forbidden Kingdom, Jet Li pays the Monkey King with some awesome stick on whiskers. However it eschews the traditional story of Journey To The West and instead turns him into stone in the first third. This would be a waste of Jet Li, if he didn’t also play a mysterious monk who wants to save the Monkey King. In this his is aided in a fashion by Jackie Chan (after the obligatory meet-up misunderstanding) who appears to be reprising his breakthrough role as the Drunken Master. Both of them are actually aiding the Chosen One - who for some reason is a kung-fu fan teenager from Boston who has been transported in time for hilarious (read tedious) anachronism jokes. On the way the battle the Bride With White Hair, and hundreds of usual Wuxia army henchmen. Basically The Forbidden Army is a PG rated primer into kung-fu movies which should have been made twenty years ago. Not only would I have been young enough to enjoy it properly, but Chan and Li would have been young enough to make their pair really something special. Whilst they are impressive for old geezers, old geezers they remain and the film rests a little too much on their past glories. Whilst forgetting that in the meantime we’ve see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and possibly loads of other Hong Kong movies to make this kid friendly tale seem a little tame.

Nevertheless, there is something nice about seeing Li and Chan together. And like many Hong Kong classics, once it gets their obligatory fight out of the way, there is only one thing left to do. A sequence in which Jet Li pisses all over Jackie Chan. Literally. (When I mentioned this scene to a number of people they all reacted, unsurprised as if this is exactly what they expect from a Hong Kong action comedy). Here you can watch the highlight of the movie, where Jackie prayed for rain, but instead get u-RAIN:

So not a proper Monkey movie then. Though Stephen Chow is rumoured to be making one for 2010 - which would be something worth seeing. As, maybe, would be the Journey To The West opera which is on at the ENO at the moment which seems to be fortuitously timed with the BBC advertising it using it in for their Olympic coverage.

(By the way watch this space for OUR exciting Olympic coverage!!!)

Looking at this summers blockbuster fayre I think I have noticed a new trend. Namely the blockbuster aimed at middle aged women. Sex In The City and Mamma Mia seem squarely aimed at the 30+ female set, and unapologetically so. This is interesting because post-Jaws - this is an audience who have been generally ignored. And yet in the golden age of Hollywood, this was the largest cinema-going audience. You don’t crank out the Sound Of Music, or even Gone With The Wind for the blokes. But women brought their dates, and it was seen as a reliable piece of luxury in their lives.

Television supposedly destroyed this, and Hollywood decided to concentrate on teenage boys, who also would revisit films if they liked them. Hence the big blockbuster summer movies, tentpole movies we have become inured to. It is interesting that this years crop of summer movies have been both the most formally experimental and thematically similar. It is an upshot of the way the Hollywood hive mind works that five years after superhero films really started to take off, we have had five this summer. And yet they have all set about their task in a different way (from trad Hulk Smash to halfassed deconstruction in Hancock). None of which have been as anywhere near as risky as Mamma Mia, and Sex In The City.

Neither of these films are actually risky from a profit point of view. They are both realtively cheap to make after all (in Mamma Mia’s case, promising the cast six weeks on a Greek island did most of the work). But they both promised potentially huge profits, or egg on the face. Sex In The City repaid massive dividends, and Mamma Mia will be the slow grower of the summer, and will sell a million DVD’s. But they are both bold in their out and out marketing to a female audience. What is most interesting about Mamma Mia is that in doing so it has invented a strange kind of joyous amateurism, a gang feeling between the cast and audience. One which is not strictly apparent in the stage version (which is silly but earnest).

Mamma Mia reminded me less of the stage musical, or other screen musicals, and more of a stupid Will Ferrell comedy like say Anchorman. The tone is of knowing silliness all the way, the jokes are tongue-in-cheek, the ridiculous plot is lampooned and Julie Walters flaps and gawks and tries to out ham everyone else. No-one is taking anything seriously here, and when you finally get this (and it takes about fifteen minutes and a couple of songs) you can sit back and enjoy the silliness. Its a gang show, a sketch comedy with Legs & Co rocking up every ten minutes to dance to some terrific music. It is almost musical hall in its construction, lacking the gravitas of a Hollywood Musical, which makes sense when you think of its British pedigree. Indeed the plot and ending is very British, being a film about a successful single Mum, a bit anti-marriage and one of the protagonists coming out too!

(It also made me cry a little bit, but then the double sucker punch of Slipping Through My Fingers and The Winner Takes It All come as such an emotional sucker punch that you are barely ready for it).

So what now for this trend? Are musicals back? Maybe. Will romantic comedies get sillier, raunchier and more musical? Possibly. Will Hollywood being paying more attention to the female audience - almost certainly. Which means some more interesting, entertaining, counter-programmed summer movies.

I was 16 when the Tim Burton Batman film came out. At the time it was the most-hyped movie I could remember for several years. It was the first major comic-book film to come out for a while, and the first since the new wave of comics - and specifically, superhero - respectability had hit in the mid-80s. That respectability had been kickstarted by a Batman yarn, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, and word was that this new, big-budget Batflick would cement the new, slick, media-literate, violent and intelligent take on superheroics that Miller had helped pioneer. The NME, which had a fair few comics nerds hidden on-staff, used the (sizeable) figleaf of Prince’s soundtrack to run a bundle of coverage. The serious papers nodded in approval at Jack Nicholson’s vicious, charismatic, Joker. In retrospect, it was probably the high watermark of “WHAM! POW! Comics Aren’t Just For Kids Anymore!”.

And I honestly can’t remember anyone who saw the film being disappointed. I went with my Dad, who’d been impressed by my Miller Year One comics, and we both thoroughly enjoyed it. In Burton’s hands the film lived up to the hype, Nicholson was generally considered a triumph, the caped crusader monstered the box office and dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight seemed to sum up pop culture in 1989 quite admirably.

The film’s tone and mood was, to be honest, nothing much to do with the Frank Miller Batman, which was becoming the grim template for the character in the comics. Burton’s Gotham was colourful, queasy, and dangerous, and the film enjoyed its aura of curdled, menacing camp. It was a necessary step away from the version of Batman laid down in the 60s - the full-on kitsch crusader, fighting the Riddler and rubber sharks - but it wasn’t a complete break from it, and nor was its sequel, with the Catwoman and Penguin, which I enjoyed even more. Later films slipped back into the family-fun mode, only without the “fun”. But the sensibilities of the two Burton Batman films, despite a few concessions to modern viciousness, are closer to the twisted comedy of Batman in the 1970s comics - stories like “The Laughing Fish”, where the Joker gives every fish in Gotham his rictus grin, and then murders people who won’t pay him a royalty for it.

What’s intrigued me most about the build-up to the enormously successful The Dark Knight is how similar it is to the hype for Burton’s Batman - visionary director, true to the comics, dude you gotta see this Joker - and how much fan reputation of the Burton movies is now tinged with retconned disappointment, as if Arnie and his Freeze Gun were always implicit, hidden in the frames of the 1989 film just waiting for Joel Schumacher to free them. But it goes deeper than a tarnished franchise - Burton’s efforts are judged wanting compared to the new Nolan films because they present an inferior version of the Proper Batman.

The Proper Batman is, in essence, what happened when Frank Miller’s Batman vison took over the character. The Proper Batman is hard, dedicated, driven and ruthlessly efficient, but still heroic. His war on crime is unending, his character is defined by his parents’ murder rather than by his friendships or status as a superhero. He is not, absolutely not, in NO WAY “camp”. His stories are dark. His enemies are psychopaths. He isn’t an asshole, though it’s easy to write him like one. His adventures are - “realistic” isn’t quite the right word, dude’s still a multimillionnaire who dresses like a bat, but they have a patina of “realism”: people get hurt and killed in them, if not killed by him.

The Proper Batman doesn’t really exist in the comics - in some senses he hasn’t since 1940’s BATMAN#1, which introduced Robin (who Nolan refuses to use in the films, probably rightly). Attempts to write him have foundered, partly beause you need to be a very good writer indeed to catalogue the adventures of such a monomaniac on a monthly basis, and partly because Batman in the comics lives in a shared universe where not only Robin exists, but where Superman is his mate.* Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns and Year One reinvention of Batman, in fact, is simultaneously the most effective superhero reimagination of modern times and the most unworkable. It only really works in one-off stories in which Batman’s war on crime is a genuinely lonely one. Enter Nolan and his movies, which can realise the Proper Batman in spectacularly intense fashion.

So The Dark Knight is a “comic book” film at one remove - a film based on idealised, not real, comics. The current comic adventures of Batman, ironically, are closer in feel to the surreal, blackly funny dreamscape of the Burton Gotham than anything DC Comics has published since the late 80s, and are also the first time in years and years I’ve regularly enjoyed reading the character. As one outraged blog comment asked, what are DC thinking if a new fan, enthused by the stark realism of The Dark Knight, walks into a shop looking for Batman comics and finds the current issue? Which features Bruce Wayne high on meth, convinced he’s a Batman from an alien world and sewing himself a gaudy new yellow-and-purple costume, with his pal from the fifth dimension, Bat-Mite, looking mockingly on.

The concept behind the current Batman storyline, by Freaky Trigger favourite Grant Morrison, is in its way as radical as Miller’s tight focus on Batman the obsessive noir vigilante. Faced with stories dating from the 30s to now, with Batman and Robin fighting freakish gangsters in the 40s, meeting aliens and mermen in the 50s, palling about with Superman in the 70s and 80s, and undergoing trial after sales-chasing trial in the 90s, he’s simply asked the question: “What if all this stuff happened to the same guy?” He hasn’t picked and chosen to make a Proper Batman, he’s just assumed that every Batman story is in some way ‘valid’, and then tried to work out what all that would do to Bruce Wayne. The answer being, obviously, that it would drive him completely mental. The storyline is called “Batman RIP”.

Morrison’s Batman, haunted by crazy adventures and higher-dimensional imps that may or may not be in his head, is as unfilmable now as a Miller version would have seemed in the 60s, Adam West era. In spirit, though, as a patchwork of compromised visions, he’s close to the Tim Burton vision of the Dark Knight, whose balancing of camp memory and strident new realism was so loved at the time and has ended up so curiously unthanked.

*This puts a serious spoke in the wheels of Proper Batman, as outlined by Al in an ILC post of yesteryear: “Hey wow, Bruce, how’s that neverending quest to clean up Gotham working out? You know the one, the one I COMPLETED IN 8 SECONDS with SUPER SPEED. Yeah the Joker put up a hell of a fight for an ORDINARY MAN WITH A DEFORMED FACE. Also I don’t know how you slept at night when there was a man dressed as a penguin roaming your town…”

No, the problem with Watchmen’s filmability, which judging by the trailer is likely to remain a problem, is the question of who the hero is? This is, basically, a superhero story whose protagonists are either ineffectual, inscrutable, or insane. Again, this needn’t be much of an issue - it’s not as if morally murky films with no clear heroes are any great novelty. But the buffer Alan Moore ran into (and admitted as much in interview) is that, despite every attempt to make Rorschach repulsive and pathetic, he ended up as a total bad-ass. OK, he was pathetic in his ’secret identity’, but so’s Superman. And it’s not like he’ll be less of a bad-ass on film. “He’s mentally ill but arguably the most heroic of them all.” as an MTV interviewer puts it to the film’s director. (The trailer suggests balance will be provided by making Nite Owl and Silk Spectre bad-asses too, but it might just be that we’re being shown their more bad-assy moments).

This is the context of Moore’s current round of interviews, in which he’s been expressing concern that - not that he gives a monkeys about the film, you understand - Watchmen’s director also did 300, which glorified militarism and war, and maybe this new film will also glorify bad things. He knows perfectly well, of course, that if he was worried about glorifying bad things he probably shouldn’t have written a scene in which his supercool masked vigilante murders three enemies from behind his cell bars. The message Alan Moore perhaps intended to convey with Watchmen was, superheroes are completely fucked up, let’s not write so much about them pls. The message he ACTUALLY transmitted was, superheroes are completely fucked up, that makes them EVEN COOLER, and so instead of killing the genre he reinvented it and here we are in our brave new world in which the Watchmen film is almost certainly NOT attempting to kill anything at all, it’s meant to fit right in with a superhero movie boom. It’ll be a “dark take” on superheroes, of course, but there’s a world of difference between ‘anti-hero’ and just plain ‘anti’.

So what I’m getting from the trailer - and it’s only one trailer, and I went “wow!” in all the same places most other people did - is sense of a film which is playing off immense faithfulness to the source material from the perspective of visual, panel-by-panel recreation, against a certain (inevitable) faithlessness to the intent of the comic. But without Moore’s doomed botched utopian rage to animate Watchmen, what is it? A fun bit of superhero sci-fi with a dodgy ending? I’ll be very interested to find out.

Oh sure, the site boasts more than 22 million “comments, posts, plays and views”, but those comments and posts are all from OTHER sites like YouTube, last.fm, iTunes, myspace, and the like. Sound Index sent automated “robot” scripts to these sites looking for the names of bands, fed what it found into some kind of magic algorithm, and produced a constantly updated list of the 1000 buzziest bands on the planet. Or well, the English-speaking planet. Probably. Slap some shiny, gumdrop-like buttons on the results, organise things with a direct rip-off of the iTunes “Coverflow” feature and hey presto.. well, what exactly?

The subcontractors who made it, Nova Rising, had some heady early expectations that it could be “the chart to replace the Top 40″. And indeed, the TV show Sound (for it is that which the Index is named after) is the BBC’s attempt to make up for the lack of live chart music on television precipitated by the cancellation of Top of the Pops.

One could argue that the Top 40 was the original “web 2.0″ concept. The songs are all written, performed and recorded by other people; their order of presentation each week is determined by millions of people’s individual listening and buying habits; all you have to do is play the songs. Brilliant! For Top of the Pops you’d have to invite a smelly band or two, but even the dancing bits were “user generated”. Just turn on the cameras and away you go.

But Top 40 radio shows and Top of the Pops were popular, when they were popular, because we understood how things worked. If a band sold enough records, it would be - or should be, with ensuing debate - invited on the show. There was no mystery about why a song had reached number one - it had sold the most. But Sound - and even Top of the Pops near the end - introduced a nefarious editorial element. Why are these bands playing?

And with the Sound Index it’s even less clear. The algorithm Nova Rising used for trawling through other sites’ comments threads was developed by IBM and has apparently cost a fortune. IBM’s presentation of some of the challenges involved says that “online comments are absolutely the worst way to find out what is popular… except for all the other ways.”

So, is money really obsolete? Do sales really rate less than 10,000 variations on JAN47 from TAMPA, FL’s contention that “ONE NIGHT ONLY ROX”? I don’t think so. Ultimately the only people who care about this kind of popularity - i.e. aggregate internet buzz - are record labels, and it has been pointed out that they already have Music Week for that sort of thing already.

For those who do care about the pop music horserace of the charts, the Top 40 still exists. And in the absence of a real chart show you can do what my friend Josh and I did when we were seven or eight and had the use of a real cassette tape recorder all to ourselves. You can sing your own versions and play them back, collapsing in laughter. Hey, maybe we could YouTube it. Then we’d get in the Sound Index!

So the hugely indulgent set-up for this season finale - salad of all the companions! - works on levels beyond new-fan service. It works on those levels too, of course, but it’s a final flourish for Davies’ study of what sidekickdom involves, and one Doctor Who with its rotating leads is uniquely placed to deliver. What other show could possibly get so much logical dramatic mileage out of a big cast reunion? If anything I’d have liked to see the Doctor out of action for longer and the assorted companions sorting things out themselves a little more, rather than relying on the man in the big blue box. The “six pilots” payoff scene was the most indulgent, and deserved, bit of all - a little flash of joy before the status quo, or lack of it, resets. It’s not just Donna: every companion is “just a temp” - here was a scene playing with the idea that it shouldn’t be that way. Has there ever been a notionally SF series quite so happy to embrace the sentimental? With RTD moving on, will there ever be again?

This is another level on which the themes of companionship and temping and loss and return resonate, of course: Doctor Who is a TV show for kids, brought back by adults who’d been changed by it, watched by more adults who’d never been quite able to shake it, and now passing it on to kids themselves. The clip-montages of scenes from the last four years were a showy goodbye from Davies; the final scene of the Doctor in the TARDIS, morose and alone, worked just as well. He’s had his faults as Who helmsman - there’ve been plenty of times where I’d have liked to decide for myself that the plot or details weren’t important to an episode, rather than have him rub it in - but “Journey’s End” proved to my satisfaction that he’s always had a grip on the show’s thematic and emotional rudder.

The problem of the Telmarines: book-Telmarines are Puritan colonisers, Early Americans if you will, pirates-turned-moralisers out of sync with the nature they’ve invaded. They had excellent pointy helmets and nifty mini-skirts. Film-Telmarines are Spanish Conquistadors extpriating the Aztecs, proud and treachorous all, except for tyrant-usurper Miraz, who is Hitler obv, and therefore Iranian. Their military knowhow is negligeable — they don’t even know that footsoldiers should break stride on a nearly built bridge — but luckily they are up against the cluelessl of Old Narnia.

The problem of Narnians: Centaurs and Satyrs and Furries oh my! Mr Tumnus (as channelled by Mallarmé, one afternoon): “I adore you, wrath of virgins–fierce delight/Of the sacred burden’s writhing naked flight/From the fiery lightning of my lips that flash/With the secret terror of the thirsting flesh:/From the cruel one’s feet to the heart of the shy,/Whom innocence abandons suddenly,/Watered in frenzied or less woeful tears.” <— This is what kosher fauns get up to when it isn’t winter. In the film, the massed ranks of centaurs are all nips up top, all pubes everywhere else. Old Narnians are REALLY REALLY none too bright, at least outside the ranks of Dwarf Nikabrik’s sadly thwarted Campaign for REAL Old Narnians (CAMRON) (Carmody to thread!)

The problem of war: is the problem of the story. War is, like, horrible: and to be remotely exciting on film today it has to be amped UP not tamped down. In the book it’s a romp where nearly no one gets killed; the film has to stand against LotR and Troy and 300 and whatevs. It’s a tough call guess which side adopts the more incompetently insane strategy: the Narnians who stand in FRONT and then undermine their own fortifications, or the Telamarines, who set their cavalry off at charge then fire massive trebuchet boulders at them from behind. “We detest and fear the trees! Let’s do battle right in the middle of them!” Etc. Perversely, I rather liked the added-in castle-attack: the book sees General Caspian, on his own and untrained, lead a failed foray — Giant Wimbleweather broke out “at the wrong time and from the wrong place”, and a centaur is “terribly wounded” — and its glum aftermath (poor dim Wimbleweather crying all over everyone). The film turns this into a Robin Hood-type escapade, which goes wrong bcz Caspian and Peter are squabbling inexperienced rivals, bcz plans are not stuck to, and bcz castles are kinda built to withstand Robin Hood-type escapades, 90 years of cinema cliche notwithstanding. So hurrah for PC’s plot-departing genre-busting daring here, even if it does mean a bunch of lovely Furries dying in horrible agony, a downer even Lucy’s winsome freckles and snub nose can’t entirely dilute. Lots of Narnians die because Peter and Caspian are idiots — not to mention KIDS d00d! — and the grown-ups, viz Aslan, are prancing about in the woods playing test-yr-faith hide-and-seek. Did I mention Aslan is a kn0b?

The problem of the children: why does Narnia need Kings and Queens who are Sons of Adam? It is of course because you are NOT ALLOWED TEH SECHS IN unless you already fell off the wagon, eden-apple wise. CSL gets himself in SUCH a silly mess about this — Aslan has set up an RPG with ad hoc rules that make a happening FantasyWorld totally impossible. (Old Father Time, last to leave, will put out the light before three of these Earthlets even lose their virginity; and the lion will be carpeted by the Emperor-Overseas: “With all due respect, Aslan, youre fired”))

The problem of Susan: beestung lippie-tastic stunna from the off, fending off mere mortal mingers, I will happily defend that Susan can’t keep her eyes or hands off Suave Latino Caspian, and vice versa — horn’n'faun jokes are the Rampaging Oliphaunt in the Narnian Spare Oom already, and TORCHWOOD AGENDA GET OVER IT ppl. Susan is a super-boring character without this dimension; I prefer the Pevensies flailing around getting stuff wrong and bickering convincingly.

The problem of High King Peter (the Magnificent): worst general evah (but then he is 13 AT MOST and quite properly expecting Aslan to arrive soon and sort stuff out). I liked the way Peter lurched from decency to flustered petulance — the oldest brother character is a classic dud in KidLit anyway (tone set by Swallows and Amazons, John Walker the utterly wooden-be-good stand-in for real-life tomboy Taqui Altounyan, who sounds like the Pirate Queen of the Calormenes). So yeah. “We would have got away with it if it wasn’t for those meddling kids FANNYDANGLING DEITIES WHO MADE THIS WORLD AND EVERYTHING IN IT” <— fixed

The problem of Aslan: is that like all monotheistic supreme being he was a preening self-absorbed tw@t, and being voiced by Liam Neeson makes it worse. I enjoyed this film immensely: TASH-SLASH NOW!