It is useful to have a general consensus that the worst film of 2011 was Sucker Punch. There are plenty of reasons why this film is terrible. Nested dream sequences within nested hallucinations. Gratuitous titillating video-game combat sequences which appear to be focus grouped by sixteen year old boys, yet a film that likes to think of itself as in the vanguard of female empowerment. An issues picture where the issue it is complaining about is the mistreatment of women in 1950’s mental asylums – bang on the button there. And of course all of these wild contradictions, all of these mecha-mistakes on narrative cinema, and even the state of current blockbuster cinema is why it really isn’t the worst film of last year. Its also what makes it so fascinating to talk about in a way that, say Scream 4 just isn’t.

I still feel comfortable in saying it was my worst film of last year (even if I got a much more visceral dislike from Confessions), as I cannot say I really enjoyed watching it. And sometimes I really do enjoy watching films other people hate, even I have to check myself when I say how much I enjoyed Speed Racer. But I have to say that all the time I was watching Sucker Punch I was also taking it apart in my head. Saving up the bizarre train rescue sequence, saving up the point and click “collect a key” structure to make some point about the video gamification of movies. As I said last year, the thing that really annoyed me about Sucker Punch was its structure was just like a musical, where the musical sequences were her replaced by over the top CGI combat effect sequences. I will still stand by that, but then I really like musicals. And I had heard that there was a point when there were musical and dance numbers in Sucker Punch, so perhaps I was lamenting the film I wanted to see. I want to see Zack Snyder make an OTT original musical, and why not have samurai swords and nazi’s and machine guns and everything in it, because that is what musicals are. And of course this is the problem.

There is a good chance, a very good chance, that all of the problems with Sucker Punch are laid bare in the movie. I’ve elucidated them at length. But there is also a good chance that the problem is with me. The trailer did say “from the visionary director of 300 and Watchmen”. I’ll go with that, he has a good knack for reproducing comic styles on celluloid. But there is a chance that Snyder is also a proper visionary director, ahead of his time, using this first opportunity to make an original film from his own bonce that stands so far outside mainstream conceptions of good narrative cinema that I, and most critics, could not appreciate it. After all I saw forty silent movies last year, I see too many films anyway and surely I would be the last person to recognise this. I think its unlikely, but maybe I should give him the benefit of the doubt. But to do that, I have to still say it was the worst film of last year. I want to eat these words in twenty years time!

I have been torn about my number two for this reason. Confessions was a film I had a strong reaction against, but was it because I had seen Tetsuya Nakashima two previous films in the two previous weeks on DVD. Both Memories Of Matsuko and Kamikaze Girls had pulled me out of a long standing funk about the paucity of decent recent Japanese films. Pop savvy but fun, moving about the human stories tied into our newer archetypes. Sharp, with strong female leads and stories I hadn’t seen before told in a way I hadn’t seen before. And so I was really rather excited to see Confessions at the ICA, a dark high school tale exposing the pressure of Japanese public schools and the cruelty children to their peers.

Here is a graph of my reaction to Confessions as I watched it. My dislike building arithmetically to an uncomfortable boiling point near the end.

I hated it. And such a visceral reaction came out of me from almost the first twenty minutes. The visual flair from the previous movies had been tamed, the story was not only offensively over the top it also made little sense and was so bizarre that it couldn’t work as a commentary, satire or – well – anything. And yet when I came out, the only thing that could adequately describe my dislike of the film was to say it has Radiohead on the soundtrack. Proper 90’s, mopey, film soundtrack of the disenfranchised teen Radiohead. You know, the Radiohead that Radiohead are embarrassed of.

Its quite possible that the ubiquity of Radiohead in film soundtracks fifteen years ago, in films like this, has soured me on them forever. But what it has soured me on is the use of Radiohead as shorthand for the angsty teen. For the murderous evil teen depression which is all over Confessions like no teenage who ever existed. It’s a film which starts with a child who is infected with HIV, stabbing other kids with a needle contaminated with his own blood. And then gets darker, sillier and less relatable by the second. There are slow motion bombs, there are handwringing suicides and the tone is so portentous that you might be forgiven for thinking it’s a Public Service Announcement. When you finally discover what it is all about, who the real apparent mastermind of the beyond far fetched plot is, if you ever had any goodwill towards any part of the movie it gets torn to shreds. Confessions is a multi-layer revenge story where the dish is not only served cold, but served via clockwork robots made of brown paper and fairy breath. It is that ridiculous – whilst all the while pretending to be IMPORTANT.

Confessions is based on a novel, and I cannot help but think, and want to think, that the problems with the film (the lousy characters, the ridiculous plot) are likely faults of the book. I want to think that because I want Nakashima to bounce back, go back to his previous films which delighted me so much. Because Confessions was toxic to me.

Here see if the trailer works for you…

There were a lot of question marks about Horrible Bosses before it came out. Could Charlie Day make the leap from TV to film, could Jason Bateman redeem himself from plenty of diminishing return comedies of late*, is the room for a mainstream black comedy about murder, could a film with such a dumb title be any good. Well most of these questions were answered no, with the exception that Charlie Day is by far and away the best thing in this. And bearing in mind he is saddled with the worst storyline (the sexual harassment by Jennifer Aniston which is unbelievable, unsavoury and also acutely disturbing in equal measure). Jason Bateman gets lumbered with Kevin Spacey in Swimming With Sharks mode, makes a fist of the workaholic loser bullied by his boss. And Jason Sedaris Sudeikis turns in a repulsive turn as a fundamentally good guy tortured by a dick of a new boss who for reasons only known by the writers, turns into a womanising git for no reason in the plot.

Its this left turn by the film, which wimps out on its Strangers On A Train / Throw Momma From The Train / Why Not Put A Train In This, to concentrate on killing Spacey, and turning Sedaris Sudeikis into a sleezebag which murders the film. It had already shown its sexual politics to be dodgy with the Aniston plot, but at least that is part of the plot. Sedaris Sudeikis is supposed to be a good guy compared to the horrors of Colin Farrell’s boorish, drug addicted boss (the other good comic performance in this film). But the film kills off Farrell, makes Spacey some kind of proper moustache twilling bad guy, waters down any aspect of its premise and leaves you thinking the worst thing you can ever feel at the end of a comedy. More depressed than you felt on the way in. Horrible by name.

*The answer to this is almost certainly no. I did not see the body swap comedy The Change-Up because I had more than an inkling that it would end up on this list.

Hardwicke House was a star filled, high-profile comedy set in a comprehensive – Grange Hill shone through the prism of ITV sitcom.  But it was their new, late night flavour of sitcom, tinged with fashionable ‘anarchy’ – the snarkiness and mock brutality that had almost become standard in the the thrall of of alternative comedy.  A later, unbroadcast episode even featured the Comic Strip stamp of approval: cameos from Mayall and Edmonson.  ITV had great faith in it, showing the first extended episode the day before its regular, weekly slot.

It had plenty of jokes, but what it became notorious for was the callousness of teachers and pupils alike.  In one episode a teacher tricks a new girl into electrocuting herself, while elsewhere the school hard boy, played by a youngish Kevin Allan, forces his victims to eat raw liver.

At a forensic level, the broadcast episodes are no more violent than, say, the Young Ones, but to my eye, it shared the harder edge of ITV comedy of the era.  The programmes it aped usually found their scattergun destruction landing on the hubristic and foolish, but Hardwicke House and some stablemates – especially the New Statesman - appeared to set up characters as insipid or pathetic and then punished them for it.  Its mischievous and sometimes witty, but still with a nasty taint of laughing with the bullies.

Perhaps because of the setting, and almost certainly because of the pre-watershed time slot, the programme was particularly effective at animating criticism.  Between the two broadcasts, the writers and lead actor were held in television’s equivalent of the stocks, soaking up righteous abuse on the phone-in show Open Air.  After the second, liver and electrocution episode, the show was tarred and feathered by the tabloids, and then withdrawn forever by the broadcaster.  There’s an excellent write up of it all here.

So along with its dangerous content and effective banning, Hardwicke House has earned a third distinction. Plenty of sitcoms have been shunted around the schedules, and some abandoned after a single outing.  But, I’m guessing, at two episodes in two days, Hardwicke House can claim to have the shortest run in the history of British sitcom.

The 2012 broadcast proved that time travel exists. Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins accepted the Brit for best international group via videotape, clutching the strange little statuette, and at one point even kissing it. But the show was live?! How could Mr Hawkins possibly have taped his acceptance speech before the outcome was known? The only explanation is that there were two timelines for the show. In the first, Taylor – or indeed, any or all of the other Foo Fighters – are actually at the ceremony and accept their award. However, while the band is in England, bassist Nate Mendel’s girlfriend and Sub Pop marketing honcho Kate Jackson becomes bored and elopes with former Melvins bassist Matt Lukin. Realising his tragic error, Mendel persuades the band to build a time machine so that they can go back in time and stay on the West Coast, taping an acceptance speech in advance. This buys Mendel time to spend all weekend with Jackson and even do a bit of landscaping. Ver Fighters have the foresight to bring the Brit statuette into the time machine with them so that it can be present in the acceptance video. Well played, Foo Fighters, well played. It’ll be a Nobel next time.

Lana del Rey was there, acting as bizarrely damaged and emotionally fragile in her acceptance speech as you’d expect, to the point where it’s almost impossible not to believe that her entire existence is a massive piece of assiduously rehearsed performance art.

Adele was there and sang “Rolling in the Deep”. You may be sick of it, but the Martin Scorceses of the future are going to be putting it into their movies as a signifier of the early 2010s and you’ll hear it and go “Hey, that’s pretty good.”

Part of Adele’s appeal is that she seems like a throwback to an era when everybody could agree on a singer, an exception to our current mode of demographic microsliver niches. But the Brits reminded us that the concept of a lukewarm, unconfrontational “mainstream” still has legs by serving up a big warm helping of James Blake, Kasabian, Ed Sheeran, Noel Gallagher, Anna Calvi, Chase & Status, Coldplay xvsdbi\bn … I’m sorry, I just fell asleep typing that.

And just when the Grammys had you thinking that maybe the high-end showbiz tier of the music industry isn’t all that bad, the Brits were a salutary reminder that actually most of the time, it really is. It is helpful to have this laid bare. Without the sudden jolt of grief that Whitney Houston’s death provided on the eve of the Grammys, it’s doubtful such a touching tribute would have materialized for her in LA. It would have looked a lot more like the Amy Winehouse tribute at the Brits: a black and white photo montage played over an interview clip, and a hasty segueway.

Cesc Fabregas presented an award. Cesc Fabregas!!

The attendees displayed magnificent good sense in completely ignoring James Corden whenever he spoke, chatting amongst themselves endlessly in the vasty caverns of the O2. And Adele had the good sense to flip him off. Sure, she was flipping off “the suits”, as she said afterwards, the ones who had given Corden the command from on high to cut her acceptance speech off after 15 seconds (I timed it), but were they the only targets? It was the last award of the night. Her name had been read out by another big natural voice, George Michael, who claimed that he’d been asked to appear at the Brits for each of the last 17 years, this being the year he finally agreed to present an award – the biggest one, Best Album, to Adele. World-conquering Adele, finally coming home after her triumph at the Grammys, the youngest ever winner of the “top three” Grammys (album, record, and song of the year), the first British musician to win six Grammys in one night since Eric Clapton, and performing there for the first time since vocal surgery had laid her low. After the applause over the Blackwall Tunnel Approach died down, she began expressing how grateful she felt to represent Britain at the Grammys, “waving our little flag”, when Corden scooted up to the podium and cut her off. To the extent that Corden obeyed the suits, to the extent that he carried out their wishes, that bird was meant for him. Did we learn nothing from Nuremberg?

What was so important as to humiliatingly cut the show’s climactic moment off at the knees? Why, Blur! You know, Blur? They were a boy band in the 1990s. They’d won some kind of lifetime achievement award earlier. And now they were about to play an entire SET at the other end of the arena. Somebody’s walkie talkie must have malfunctioned. Or else playing in the O2 is like flying in the space shuttle. Once that countdown begins, clear the fucking decks. Blur waits for no one. The mood soured from the outset by Adele’s rough handling, Damon Albarn proceeded to do the equivalent of a beery karaoke version of his first band’s most radio-friendly hits. Which is to say, bellowing, off-key, out of breath and entirely too pleased with himself. So chalk up another victory for last night’s Brit awards. A definitive result on the question of whether Blur still have it.

Tower Heist’s main problem is in its name. Die Hard could have been called Tower Heist. Die Hard IS a Tower Heist. But instead it has a name like Die Hard because that makes it interesting, makes it sound exciting, is intriguing. Who is the John McClane and why is he so Die Hard? In Tower Heist, Ben Stiller’s shafted hotel manager decides to rob Alan Alda’s banker. In many ways it isn’t even really a heist. It is breaking and entering. Penthouse Robbery would have been even more apt, and even less prosaic.

I’ve always liked Ben Stiller, but there are occasions when he is happy to settle for mediocre. And Tower Heist is mediocre. Stiller plays a lazy lowkey Ben Stiller type from the early 00′s. Eddie Murphy plays an tired Eddie Murphy type from the late eighties. Matthew Broderick is settling to play the Matthew Broderick type – but those lousy 00′s retired, given up on life type of recent Broderick’s roles. And Casey Affleck, well he’s done Heist’s before in Ocean’s 11 so he is pretty much on as the experienced guy. Oh and the reason for the heist? Well its a pure Robin Hood job, to get their pensions back, so its not a proper robbery at all! So a bog standard plot, relying on star power, so far so Hollywood. With a decent stylist in control of the film, with a grasp on the post recession realities there may be enough to make this a decent, even subversive film. But it is directed by Brett Ratner who can describe a set piece, but not really film one.

I guess what bothers me the most about Tower Heist is that as a New York film, it really could have hit the zeitgeist. If the film had ended with the hotel staff rising up and occupying the hotel then you would have had a film. Admittedly I wanted the proletariat to rise up at the start of the Kings Speech too. Perhaps you can’t judge a film on what it should have been, but you can juxtapose it with what it is – and this is a lazy, poorly made heist which has been cut to death (there are characters in the final act that just vanish). Often with comedies its about catching a bit of magic. Here everything should have aligned, a potential return to form for Eddie Murphy, Ben Stiller playing a perfect role for him. And smuggle in a decent piece of proper social commentary. Or alternatively do a few dumb misogynistic gags about a fat woman. They chose the latter.

Both Green Lantern and The Green Hornet were pretty poor films. And it is more than tempting to tie that to the coincidence in their names. And actually let us pin something on it. Captain America is not the Blue Captain American. Batman may be the Dark Knight, but he hasn’t specified his colour scheme in his name. For Green Lantern its unforgivable, there is absolutely no way you are going to miss that he is green. His glow in the dark, CGI pasted on suit (one of the many mistakes in the film) may be designed to have an eerie, alien quality to it, it infact looks like cheap post-production (look in the trailer at how its just a sickly wrong shade of green).

The Green Hornet is even more perplexing, when you consider that Seth Rogen wears a coat which can barely be described as green. The name is flippant, like much in this film, and completely throwaway. What is actually wrong with both of these films is quite different, but I wonder if the slight silliness in asking for a ticket for The Green Wazoo – and stumping up the extra for your 3D glasses – has already knocked the wind out of the average viewer.

So in order of release. The Green Hornet is a stab at a superhero buddy comedy. This could work. But as in any buddy comedy, the ability for the two partners to comfortably communicate is really important. Jay Chou, as Kato, has the moves but barely any of the talk. Seth Rogen is a comedian who needs to bounce off his co-stars, and the only bouncing here is around how little they talk the same language. There are some ideas here which are funny in principle. Rogen is a waster who is given a kick up the arse by the death of his extremely worthy crusading newspaper editor father. Rather than live up to that legacy by becoming a useful member of society, he does it by becoming a rubbish superhero. So far we have a bit of Kick-Ass going on, but he turns out not to be that rubbish merely by the application of lots of money, a sidekick that does all the work for him and extreme amounts of violence. This is a remarkably violent film. The USP of the Green Hornet is that the heroes pretend to be villains to get close to the criminals. There is no pretending here, there is property damage, there is numerous car crimes, there are honest to god murders taking place. With a few jolly laughs afterwards. Michel Gondry creates a few interesting visuals, around something really empty. Maybe it would work as a low budget exploitation film, but it doesn’t work as a blockbuster. An idiot with Daddy Issues is not what we are really looking for here.

Green Lantern has a set of very different problems to Green Hornet. In theory, it is one of the most cinematic heroes available in comics. The power is a ring which creates anything that the hero can imagine. So it is imagination incarnate and in the comics this has often been a boon to artists. Except in the comics, as here, this often boils down to them imagining weapons, modes of transport or something amusing as a gag when its not a life or death situation. The same is true here, all rendered in a garish green which makes the imagined artefacts all blur into a green mess which is particualrly bad if your villain is mainly the cloud from the end of the second Fantastic Four film. A lot of money has been thrown at it, and quite a lot of foreshadowing too, for future films which will not get made.

That said both Green Hero films do share a number of flaws beyond genre and colour. Both lead actors are known for being slightly glib wisecrackers elsewhere. Both are reluctant heroes at best, and certainly not the best at what they do, Green Hornet is outshadowed by Kato and Green Lantern by all the other Green Lanterns. But fundamentally, when searching for character motivation for both leads, they went to the superhero box of motivation and came back with “daddy issues”. Here is my tip to screenwriters – if you don’t know why your hero is a hero, non-canonical daddy issues is a rubbish way to go. Just ask Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider. Which was also rubbish, and about as rubbish as both of these films.

The lead in the anime is irrepressible, full of life, working through petulant comedy to a rather moving denouement around responsibility. The live action film she is dour, upset much of the time and the whole thing reaches a crescendo of unbearable melodrama and syrupy strings. Perhaps I should have been a bit more buyer beware about this DVD, and maybe I should have just done some of the research I did now. It turns out that the anime is a very loose adaptation, the film is much more accurate to the book. Do I care? Of course not. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is a terrific movie, Time Traveller is the opposite. Sure its a source I know little about, and a tone of Japanese films that I rarely dig into. But it didn’t stop it being one of the most disappointing films I saw last year.

With this cast, and James L.Books directing, number eleven promises an intelligent, revisit of romcom staples with an attractive, likeable cast. Does this plot description (thanks IMDB) look interesting?

“After being cut from the USA softball team and feeling a bit past her prime, Lisa finds herself evaluating her life and in the middle of a love triangle, as a corporate guy in crisis competes with her current, baseball-playing beau.”

In the forgettably named “How Do You Know” Reese Witherspoon just about convinces as the softball player, and in the comparison between her success and Owen Wilson’s pro-baseball players success there is a really interesting bit of gender politics. Completely missed in some business about toothbrushes. Paul Rudd, America’s favourite underachieving schlub, is the third point of this triangle, who appears to be taking part in a completely different movie with Jack Nicholson. Now Jack isn’t just phoning it in here, there is a yoghurt pot an a piece of string for his evil corporate machinator who is about to sacrifice his own son. Think James Murdoch.

And I did think James Murdoch unfortunately. And there is no way I am going to root for James Murdoch in a romcom. Or for that matter a pampered, spoiled baseball star. So I didn’t want our heroine to end up with either of the options, and quite quickly got a little tired of Reese’s softball player too. Sure I can understand why she is disappointed with being cut from the USA team, but every player knows that is a possibility. The problems of an amateur / professional sports player are pretty outside my experience, and are not made vaguely interesting here. The worst thing about “How Do You Know” is that it squanders so many good ideas and turns it into one of the drabbest romcoms in years.

So why thirteen? Well thematically there are a few films which crop up together, which means there will be ten entries – with some nice joint entries to try to decide exactly why the colour Green is so bad for films.

So lets start with the first of the joint entries: coming in equal at twelve is a pairing which includes a film nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.:

12: You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger / Midnight In Paris

I have been here before. The standard Woody Allen isn’t as good as he used to be gripe, which as been made all the more evident by the recent Woody Allen comedy retrospective at the BFI Southbank. I have a long gestating piece on why Zelig is a masterpiece waiting to come out, which is also a nice counterpoint to why Midnight In Paris is so bad.

I feel a little bad for Owen Wilson here – because he is easily the best Woody surrogate in twenty years. His own verbose laconic style makes a great alternative mouthpiece for Woody’s own delivery,its just that the whining weedling he has deliver in Midnight In Paris is so lumpen that even his charisma has trouble. I don’t deny that the magical realism of Midnight In Paris is a fun little short story puffed into a parade of the worst kinds of impressions and a moral so banal that when it is spelled out to the audience the third time you want to take up home trepanning.

“Hey Zelda”
“Hey Scott – That’s F.Scott Fitzgerald, my husband”
“Does that make you Zelda Fitzgerald?”
“Yes, you should meet our friend Pablo. He’s a painter. Pablo Picasso. HE’S REALLY FAMOUS IN CASE YOU DON’T GET IT.”

Alison Pill’s Zelda is great, Adrien Brody’s Dali is a good one scene gag, but what is left is all rather hollow. Perhaps Woody feels the only way the audience will get his conceit is if he spells it out over and over again. To which I say, yes – everyone looks back to a golden age. For me its those 70’s / 80’s films you made which they have just been showing at the BFI.

However Midnight In Paris is acres better than “You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger”, Woody’s 2010 effort which got a UK release in 2011. His fourth London based film, following up Cassandra’s Dream which elsewhere I have identified as one of the worst films ever made, and certainly one which excuses Dick Van Dyke from ever being teased about his English accent again. Now “You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger” is nowhere near as bad as Cassandra’s Dream, but its still an hour and a half of actors vainly looking for a movie. It plays like a low octane Husbands And Wives, with plenty of soapy moral dilemmas thrown in. Let’s look at some of these dilemmas:

-Should the failed author steal his dead friends manuscript? (Note, dead friend turns out to only be in a coma…)
-Should Naomi Watts have an a affair with Antonio Banderas?
-Should Lucy Punch’s bubbleheaded actress be sued by the entirety
-Should Freida Pinto be a bit more aggressive when negotiating character points in her movies.
-Should Antony Hopkins retire PROPERLY.

I cared not a whit about any of these people, their predicaments did not seem in any way real, and I could see why Nicole Kidman dropped out of the sorry affair. There is another writ large message, this time around fate and fortune telling which is pretty much explained by the films title. Basically its a waste iof everyones time. Find anything of note in this trailer, and maybe you’ll find something in the film – I’ll be surprised.

Which village has a graveyard like this?

Its Royston Vasey, and this is The League Of Gentlemen Christmas Special. A transition point for the series which started as a series of sketches linked by a common village, the Christmas Special was the first without the canned laughter, and was a lot more ambitious in scope. Its Christmas Eve and the local vicar is about to get three visitors who will tell spooky stories with a very unsettling ending. It was a highpoint of the year 2000 Christmas season and you can revisit it all here. Just watch out for the yellow snow.

http://video.uk.msn.com/watch/video/christmas-special-2000/12g281baf

But what if your brother was a superhero from another dimension? And he had to fight this?


The He-Man and She-Ra Christmas Special hand-waves over the fact that Christmas doesn’t actually exist on the twins’ home planet of Eternia by a) ‘reminding’ us that their Mum is human and b) ‘accidentally’ zapping in some Earth children for bonus empathy points. Sample dialogue:

He-Mum: These birthday celebrations totally remind me of CHRISTMAS!
She-Dad: Christmas? What’s that? An Earth holiday?
He-Mum: A VERY SPECIAL Earth holiday!
She-Dad: Does that mean more booze than usual?
He-Mum: DEAR GOD YES

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzH7hztIHeg
He-Man and She-Ra Christmas Special (Youtube link if the embed doesn’t work)

She-Ra gets most of the action in the episode, buggering off halfway through to a completely different planet where she fights some tentacle monster or other and then escaping from some robots. But most surprising is that Skeletor’s icy Scroogey heart ends up MELTING when he ends up looking after the Earth moppets viz. protecting them from an evil Yeti! The holidays do bring out the best in some people!

Sketch shows are tough for Christmas specials because, well, there is nothing special about a set of sketches. You could do it so that all of the characters are doing something Christmassy, but that is still a bit scattershot. Luckily all sketch shows have at least one Scroogelike character for us to laugh at, and have other characters take them through their life in a Ghost of past, present and future way.

So who had a Ghost Of Christmas Past like this?

Of course this was not Tennant’s special, but his old Doctor Who companion Catherine Tate, essaying her second most popular character “Nan”. And I wonder how many people watch Nan’s Christmas Carol with a similarly curmudgeonly grandmother last year. And had to explain what popular beat combo Madness was doing there, and how something quite so broad and self referential got a nice Christmas Day slot.

You can watch it here, though I don’t recommend it!

More on Minder here (a proper 90′s website!!!) including a link to the Minder computer game…

There is not much Minder on Youtube, but here is a compilation of all of the actor James Coombes scenes in Minder On The Orient Express.

- Must be Christmassy
- Must not be part of regular series/season

This latter one is important as the BBC in particular have a habit of rolling the Christmas Special as the sixth episode of six if they are scheduling before Christmas. Many US sitcoms will have Christmas (and Thanksgiving, and Halloween) episodes, but just as part of the regular run.

Will we stick to these rules religiously. Maybe. While you ponder that, this is screenshot from today’s special, which despite what it looks like, really is a Christmas special. What’s that you say?

“I DON’T BELIEVE YOU?”

1: ONE FOOT IN THE ALGARVE
In which someone notice that all the letters in GRAVE AL are also present in ALGARVE, and thus Victor Meldrew, and his long suffering wife get into no end of farciacal scrapes on holiday in the Algarve. And then Victor Meldrew says “I don’t believe you” all the time, despite ridiculous, farcical things happening to him all the time.

I remember watching it with the family when it was on, sharing the misery, and being really rather embarrassed by the opening couple of minutes which appears to be a not-too subtle Emanuelle parody. Peter Cook plays a paparazzi who is probably best off out of the Leveson enquiry, and the whole thing is a little bit jingoistic and has nothing at all to do with Christmas.

Its all on Youtube, start here if you love Richard Wilson and his catchphrase/pratfall humour:

*See what I did there?

Every Thing fan who hasn’t read Ann Billson’s wonderful BFI book on John Carpenter’s The Thing should do so immediately; I quibble with Billson here and there but it’s a pleasure to read a good writer given free rein to create a searching, detailed love-letter to the object of her obsession.

The review you’re reading right now is not, unfortunately, that.

When the 2011 prequel to Carpenter’s 1982 version was announced a couple of years ago, Billson wrote an article for the Guardian about it. It ends like this:

The prequel will be set in the Norwegian camp, which, as we already know from Carpenter’s film, is doomed.

But is the prequel doomed as well? Perhaps, but only if the slow-burning tension is broken up by fashionable staccato editing and camerawork. Only if the Norwegians all turn out to be young studs with six-packs, apart from maybe a couple of hot lady scientists played by skinny chicks under the age of 25. Only if everyone speaks English with cod Norwegian accents, if the special effects are all rendered by CGI and if Ennio Morricone’s chilling orchestral score is replaced by a hard rock soundtrack. What are the odds?

Pretty good, actually. Mary Elizabeth Winstead is a shade over 25 but you’d never know it. The special effects are, indeed, CGI. Morricone’s score makes a tantalizing appearance in the opening seconds but immediately gives way to conventional orchestral underscoring, never to be heard from again. The controls in the Norwegians’ snow trucks are all in English. The Norwegians themselves aren’t exactly studs (and what lurks beneath their woolens remains blissfully – or is that criminally? – unexplored) but they appear to all be cut from curiously similar cloth, a pretty serious flaw in a movie with such a large cast of victims.

But you know, none of these things is really a dealbreaker on its own, or even in combination. What sinks the movie is a complete blindness to what made Carpenter’s film so great, combined with a paradoxical unwillingness to deviate even an inch from its template. As many critics have noted, it’s as if the 2011 movie is a Thingified version of the one from 1982. The details come correct. It’s the humanity – the problem-solving, the sex, the recklessness, the swagger – that’s been noisily eliminated.

Unfortunately this applies as well to Winstead who, unfairly or not, has to compete with Kurt Russell’s barnstorming turn in the 1982 version. Winstead plays a sweet, smart kid who’s plucked from obscurity doing research in the States and flown immediately to Antarctica at presumably enormous expense by a Norwegian research team who have stumbled across what appears to be an intact alien, frozen just inches below the surface of the ice.

It’s handy that her job affords her this kind of leeway; she appears to have no boss to ask permission from, no classes to cancel, no boyfriend to check in with, no out-of-office reply to turn on. Just your average idealized brainy beauty, ripe for knighting into the Order of the Action Movie. But the sum total of the team’s expectations for her turns out to be advice on how to get the t(T)hing out.

She suggests cutting a rectangle shape.

After that she’s ignored.

It’s her subsequent attempts to dent the cloddish control of the man who recruited her that create the only substantive narrative in the movie. As the Norwegians stumble from one Thing attack to the next, she keeps finding clues, and her pleas to the others to use this evidence to make good their survival resemble a desperate whistleblower filing reports to a calcified bureaucracy. It could hardly be otherwise, given that Winstead’s character is a triple outsider: non-Norwegian, non-male, and not part of the camp in the first place. So the shifting group dynamics of earlier Things, with all the heirarchy games and paranoia they entailed, is out the window. This is a modern tale of individual pluck. This is Winstead versus the world.

Which is a shame. It would have been cool to finally investigate what sort of “distractions” Carpenter and Campbell were deliberately avoiding in making their casts exclusively male. The only boy toys here are Platonic. Can you imagine – being schtupped by a Thing without realizing it?

Other notes:

* The opening titles tell us that it’s “Winter, 1982″. Surely no one goes to Antarctica in the winter! The sun never rises, so you can’t see anything! And it’s 70 below. Right? I watch Frozen Planet, I’m no fool.

* Getting Thinged is in some way already a kind of schtupping – you are entered, changed, merged with another. It’s probably no accident that the first victim in the new version is penetrated from behind, or that the first woman-Thing committed to film is witnessed here engaged in a kind of weirdly tender moment with her victim.

* I’ll take any chance I get to share this link, an essay called “Fecund Horror” by Noah Berlatsky. “We have seen the enemy, and it is coming out of us.” – http://gayutopia.blogspot.com/2007/12/noah-berlatsky-fecund-horror_12.html

* Carpenter’s movie was delayed by about a year, allowing him time to comb over each line of the script and get everything the way he wanted it, a rare luxury for a director. Its ambiguities and mysteries have withstood a cavalcade of obsessive Youtube deconstructions. Not so with this one. What happened to the storm that was supposedly on its way? Why can you see everyone’s breath at the beginning, but not at the end? Why don’t we ever see the famous shredded clothes, clues that provided so much of the suspense in the 1982 version?

That said, there were enormous leaps of illogic in Carpenter’s movie, far more egregious than the above, but somehow we just accept them. The blood test, for instance. Macready, a helicopter pilot, conjures an idea from his whiskey-addled imagination that blood cells from the Thing might somehow become motile when threatened with heat. It’s just lunacy, a kind of hallucinatory dream-logic, but it nevertheless winds up being bang on the money. It’s as if the craziness of the Thing has created a world in which your own imagination creates its laws. That would never fly in the 2011 version. Audiences, you can practically hear the producers saying, are more sophisticated now. The test has to be believable. And so it is. It involves dental records.

I missed The Box in the cinema, it being my year without film. It is the kind of film I would normally jump at, liking claustrophobic paranoid fantasies, films based on Twilight Zone episodes, Cameron Diaz, James Marsden and even not minding Richard Kelly*. And it starts promisingly enough, with a decent period scene setting and some nicely sympathetic leads. And then Frank Langella turns up at the door with the Box. The Box is a nice, cheap, period looking piece of technology – with its big red button under a dome. But the box isn’t the problem. The box and what it leads to may be as preposterous as anything thrown at us in Kelly’s other films but at least has a semblance of fun fantasy storytelling around it. The problem is Langella. Or at least his digital face.

Langella has played some of the greatest villains known to man. Insert Richard Nixon and Skeletor jokes here. He can play a morally ambiguous creep in his sleep, and sort of does here. But for some reason, never all that clear, half of Langella’s face is digitally removed as a scar. A bit like Aaron Eckhart in The Dark Knight, but without the reasoning. Look at it here.

Its not horrific to look at, its just a bit odd. And it give Diaz some initial reason to distrust him (before he suggests she pushes the button and kills someone randomly). But the ubiquity of digital effects means this is a digital effect. Indeed what is a grimy little sci-fi film is packed with pointless effects use. They are probably used to kipper up Marsden’s tie for all I know. I am not sure why this pointless use of technology bugs me more than two and a half hours of Transformers hitting each other**? It just seems to be there because science fiction equal effects in someones mind. The really annoying thing is that actually make-up couild have done something just as good. Because remember there was a film where all of the skin on Langella’s face was removed.

*I only disliked about 40% of Southland Tales, which puts me way ahead of the curve.
**It bothers me more cos I saw the Box.

Film 2Oh!! is an attempt to write about every film I have seen this year which is really quite tricky. This year I have seen 169 films, written about 53.

Super 8 is an homage to Spielbergian kids fantasy films of the early eighties. Its more than that actually, its DNA is plainly on display. Its Mom (correct word in this context) is ET, its Dad is The Goonies. We have a gang of kids (Goonies) who discover something remarkable and alien (ET). And its interesting that the setting, and the characters hark back to a bucolic seeming small town America which I get the sense that JJ Abrams believes doesn’t quite exist any more. You get the sense the turning point was rap music (the music in Super 8 is all over the place, though follows the “if in doubt, use ELO” model).

Anyway we have an annoying kid gang like the Goonies, plus themes of childhood difficulty laid on far too thick like ET. This does explore the other side of ET’s parental problems, and displaying some kids without mothers, for little point beyond plot reasons. But Abrams film is an unruly child, rebelling on its parents, at its heart Super 8 has a juxtaposition between the suspenseful kids films that Spielberg was interested in, and the films these kids are actually interested in – horror. So not only does it dissolve into an oddly horrific alien attacks movie in places, it tries to have a Spielberg ending as well. These two don’t merge well together and t does not manage to credibly insert its own child heroes into the monster movie last third of the film.

Plus four million lens flares. They must be a joke. There are lens flares in scenes with no light sources.

52: Attack The Block (Cinema)

Attack The Block is an homage to John Carpenter horror films of the late seventies. But it does it in a very different way to Super 8. Rather than set it in the late seventies, its bang up to date (perhaps too much with a bang). Instead of trying to recreate the setting to tell a story that Spielberg probably wouldn’t have told, the setting and characters are contemporary, the concerns and story are pure Carpenter. It is exactly what if aliens turned up not in a sleepy fishing village, or Arctic research station, but a South London estate (fortuitously on bonfire night).

Neither films have aliens which are convincing the moment you leave the cinema, but Attack The Block’s are when you are watching the screen. In particular, as lovingly well made as Super 8 is, it feels like redundant nostalgia. Attack The Block feels a little too bang up to date. Still if anyone does not understand the riots in London in the last few weeks, and thinks of England as just cricket and afternoon tea, Attack The Block is an excellent primer. With aliens.

Film 2Oh!! is an attempt to write about every film I have seen this year which is really quite tricky. This year I have seen 169 films, written about 52.

41. The Navigator (Cinema)
Minor Buster Keaton, which has some typically well staged physical humour and innovation. It does seem to be missing Good but it does seem to be missing a whole third act, though I didn’t see its deus ex submariner coming. To be more precise it is missing Act 2 Scenes 1 & 2, all of act three and would probably be considerably better without its somewhat racist (though not at the time of course) canibles.

42. Bobby Fischer Against The World (Cinema)
Senna for the chess set, lacks the oomph that motor racing has. Or indeed colour TV footage or a decent proper rivalry. Definitely proof that when they say truth is stranger than fiction, what they actually mean is messier. Child prodigy chess champ wins world championship, goes off the rails and becomes an anti-Semitic USA hating exile from his own country in Iceland. Its not that you can’t write it, its just that no publisher would take a story which lacks such a sustained dramatic throughline.

43. Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva (Open Air in Canary Wharf!)
Would anyone dare make a Western film based in some sort of generic twenties Japan now? Not just based, but with wholly Japanese characters which are basically walking amalgams of archtypes without much research beyond, say, Lofting’s Doctor Doolittle books (THAT’S who Layton looks like). Oh do they ever say in the games what Layton is a Professor of? AND DON’T SAY PUZZLES. THAT IS NOT A PROPER SUBJECT.

44. Beginners (Cinema)
The theory on Beginners is that its Ewan MacGregor’s best acting role for ten years or so. But as he is playing an emotionally closed, commitment-phobe who has a nicely goofy voiceover, an autobiographical director-writer behind the camera and next to zero story, you wonder how he could get it wrong. It is almost impossible to act badly in this film, because anything put down as bad acting could just be character quirks.

45. The Big Picture(Cinema)
I fear Roman Duris’s presence destablises The Big Picture, a fun potboiler which is surprisingly inventive, though it is unclear for what ends. Duris lends the accidental (hmm) criminal a bit too much dignity, and I am really not sure what the film is trying to say about art. Duris pre-crime is a workaholic family man who has given up on his dream of photography. Post-crime he is a feted snapper, until it threatens his freedom. And then in a bizarre coda he is an accidental hero, sort of a Littlest Hobo with a camera. None of which appears to resonate or redeem the character, who doesn’t cinematically need redeeming because he is heroically played by Duris.

46. Takers (DVD)
Which brings us nicely to Takers, in which the ultimate gang of bank robbers come up against a cop who breaks all the rules and make a mistake. The mistake being inherent in the film because cops who break the kind of rules Matt Dillon breaks here (namely taking his estranged kid on a stakeout, beating up EVERYONE) are not very sympathetic. And as much as Idris Elba emotes, he and his gang of robbers are as sympathetic as any gang that has superbland Paul Walker and HAYDEN CHRISTENSEN IN A PORK PIE HAT can be. Which is not very sympathetic at all. Its the kind of film that when you get to the end you are quite disappointed when some of these characters survived it.

47. Arrietty (Cinema)
Its nice to look at, as is any Ghibli, and tells its story nicely. But do we really need another version of the Borrowers, and does it need to have a sick child thrown in for extra emotion? Much like The Big Picture it ends at a weird juncture, though I believe it ends where the first book pretty much does, teasing awesome kettlebound adventure. Also I was a little annoyed that the Cineworld didn’t advertise they were showing the subtitled version – I was rather looking forward to the sympathetic UK dub. The subtitles didn’t really work for the non-Japanese five year old in the cinema either.

48. Fantasia (DVD)
More animation, and the Disney film that I always avoid because, you know, classical music. Initial response, the only decent bit in it is The Sorcerers Apprentice. Other disagreed on twitter and I’ll give them that the dinosaur bit is at least as god if not better than the comparible sequence in Malick’s Tree Of Life. And there is something nice about a film with a programmed in intermission. I made a cup of Earl Grey, which possibly was the best thing about the whole experience. Because, you know, classical music.

49. Grown Ups (DVD)
It is kind of a microcosm of the UK riots in a film. A bunch of adults bemoan their kids being shit whilst being the CAUSE OF THEM BEING SHIT. Or at least their shrewish wives are. Because as the film says, there is no way Adam Sandler could be a bad parent. Ever. He has now destroyed any goodwill I gave him for You Don’t Mess With The Zoltan. (Also contains a water park sequence which reminded me that there is already a canonical waterpark set-piece which effectively retires it from history in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure).

50. Captain America: The First Avenger:(Cinema)
OK, so its a superhero film set in WWII where the bad guys are “too evil for the Nazi’s”. SO evil they do a double handed Heil. So realism is not the order of the day. Its fine to have a super-soldier, and cosmic cubes and the like. But it feels a touch offensive to stretch the wish-fulfillment to suggest the US Army happily had a Japanese member in its elite unit, and not actually in an internment camp in Iowa. I am not sure fantasy gives them that licence (thanks to @Cigaretteburns for this germane point). Oh and what do cinemas think about this post credit easter egg business, because I am getting heartily sick of waiting through eight minutes of credits to see Samuel L.Jackson again?

Film 2Oh!! is an attempt to write about every film I have seen this year which is really quite tricky. This year I have seen 161 films, written about 50.

3:08PM The markets are rallying. Like they did three summers ago. Still a long way to go, but I’ll probably leave you with this one from the Evening Standard for now. Early prices Special (there was nothing special about the early prices). If only we could zoom in to see what he is saying in that outlook window. I’d give you good money (which is worth NOTHING now) that it is SELL SELL SELL.

2:18PM Sky News: its your iPad optimised web gusher. And they take this important story from two different angles. The wrap-around the back of the head, and the full frontal prayer support of the chin. Both are risky stabs at the head in hand, but both count in my book.

2:07PM The Telegraph are knocking it out of the park today (thanks to Stevie T for this spot).

1:49PM Channel 4 News webpage goes for a low mouth clutch, a strangled scream…

1:05PM Let’s go abroad again, and this time to one of the places being blamed for this crisis. Italy. A nice little top of the head reverse hold here from Il Foglio. Their story is headlined: Il feticcio della discontinuità Google Translate fans.

12:58PM Oh Washington Post. Have courage of you convictions. On the front page you lead with this great photo. Click through and it the boring old Reuters Sun one from below.

12:26PM Mark S points out something very interesting regarding Black Friday. If you Google it these days you are much more likely to get this. REBECCA BLACK FRIDAY.

Kat has also found some useful advice if the news is disturbing you: What to do if the news upsets you. Though kicking off with a recap of the Dublane massacre seems a touch counter productive.

Daily Mail using an AFP image here – which is known in the business as a Bad-Day/Nosebleed shot.

12:13PM If you are finding this all too depressing, why not go to “Women Laughing Alone With Salad”.

Also pleased to see that an old Tumblr that I was not aware of, but clearly had to exist from a few years back with an identical idea has sprung back to life with the Reuters/Sun photo. The Brokers With Hands On Their Faces Blog

To which I note that Le Monde is apparently not taking this seriously:

12:06PM And now to Australia, where we may have a hint of what we are expecting when the US opens. Namely the trifecta of the Banker head in hands WITH A MOBILE. This is one hand, nicely splayed fingers, with something in the other, from News.com.au – taking a parochial view of the crisis (Australian sharemarket dives after Wall Street tumbles on recession fears). I think its the first place I have seen the phrase BLACK FRIDAY used with regards to today however.

11:59AM You can always trust Reuters (and it appears that Sun image came from them – get your own Banker with head in hands photos). The full back of the head here, from this story which suggests that the new banking crisis is about to get worse (if that’s what All Eyez On Payrollz means)

11:49AM I have started to notice a slight trend. Its almost as if Barclay’s Capital traders are TRAINED to put their head in their hands in the most photogenic way. What photographer, from say the Telegraph, could ignore this little beauty. Yes its a one hand, face job but such pathos, such drama.

11:42AM US Markets haven’t opened yet but the New York Times is an old hand at these. These two are classics from their front page slideshow.

11:33AM It is a Global Recession after all so let’s see what the Germans are saying. Welt Online uses the wonderful phrase SALAMICRASH – but no proper heads in hands.

Bild on the other hand goes the Sun route (not just with naked women on its front page). If anyone can do the German for me that would be great.

11:25AM The Daily Express as ever doesn’t worry so much about the global economy, rather WHAT WILL IT DO TO OUR PENSIONS BOO HOO! Note this picture of Barclay’s trader with head in hands may be an old one from when he discovered Diana was dead.

11:15AM The Tabloids are happy to play this game too, though are completely down with the programme. Here we have The Sun with a one hand one head policy from their Market panic as shares crash further page.

11:07AM Nice work here from the Telegraph. A four way montage : three with heads in hands, the fourth with a thumbs down from their DEBT CRISIS LIVE page.

19.53AM Lets start with the gold standard The Guardian. Banker with head in hand right profile

The Guardian: Banker with head in hand left profile.

I have no sensitivity to gore. Blood can spurt out of wounds on film like Old Faithful and the more it spurts the less sensitive I am. Guts can fall out of bodies and it might even push a giggle out of me. The moment someone is getting sliced in two and sliding apart like a cartoon, well its like a cartoon. Cartoons never used to be gory, but since the toon within a toon of Itchy and Scratchy, and the gorefest that is Superjail even this is no longer true. There is nothing about gallons of fake blood that bothers me. Indeed the gallons help.

There is an interesting sequence in the faux (but tonally spot on) grindhouse quickie Hobo With A Shotgun that illustrates the difference perfectly. Rutger Hauer’s tramp has turned up in Fucktown, and has been driven to homicidally clean up all the evil he sees on display with his shotgun. Much splatter continues in such a strong cartooonish fashion that even the most egregious nonsense is clearly so far removed from reality that it hold little to no emotional attachment. Except one point where the female lead, the tart with a heart (its that kind of film), is held down by the armoured villains “The Plague” who start to hacksaw off her head. Nearly all the other gore in the film has been supplied by shotgun blasts and swift limb choppings. The hacksawing creates little blood, but is the most shocking action in the film, and proof that Hobo With A Shotgun created a character that I at least cared about a bit.

A lot of Japanese gore films overdo it, but also have absolutely impenetrable storylines (I have no idea what happens in Tokyo Gore Police still). Hobo With A Shotgun has barely a story, but is surprisingly entertaining for the rubbish it wants to be, and is.

39: Black Dynamite (DVD)

This is in a very similar vein, a really well done pastiche of a Blacksploitation movie. Perhaps it leans a little bit harder on the parody aspect than Hobo With A Shotgun, but then there is little in the kind of Grindhouse film Hobo is to parody. What Hobo gets right (without being slavish to) is the supersaturated early eighties video colouring, and the kind of shots you might get. Black Dynamite is almost too slavish to this, it maybe throws in a few too many flubbed shots and dropped booms to be completely respectful to its source. But what it does understand is what is enjoyable about the genre, and plays it completely straight. This is in contrast to the much more comedic (though equally enjoyable) Undercover Brother from a few years back

In particular, it gets that peculiar kung fu film obsession of blacksploitation, plus the difficulty the films often had in finding the right profession for the lead. Like Shaft, Black Dynamite is (or was) on the side of the government: his list of jobs range from Vietnam Vet, via CIA operative to occasional Pimp. But in the end any blacksploitationsploitation film 9which this is) lives or dies by its soundtrack, and this one feels just right. You can listen to it on Spotify here.

40: Piranha 3D (Movie)

The other gorefest I saw over the weekend was another Cigarette Burns late night screening, for once showing a modern movie. Albeit a modern movie remake of a Roger Corman semi-classic. Piranha 3D is both modern remake, pastiche, serious horror comedy and comic commentary on the entire genre. From a drunk midnight screening perspective it worked perfectly, yelps at the dafter deaths, cheers for our heroic lead (Elisabeth Shue is the action hero and pulls it off fantastically). Its a film whose plot appears to be making some sort of point about the excesses of Spring Break, whilst happily ogling the naked bodies before, and after they get eaten. There is nothing to be taken seriously about Piranha 3D, and my usual 3D gripes stand up though at least seem at home in a gimmick fest like this. If you’ve ever wanted to see Richard Dreyfus, or indeed Kelly Brook get eaten by fish, here is your chance. Or if you have ever wanted to see Elisabeth Shue taser a piranha, then run across some inflatables like it was a game in We Are The Champions, this is the film for you. Or at least it would be at midnight with a few beers inside you.

Film 2Oh!! is an attempt to write about every film I have seen this year which I am not helping with by seeing lots of films all the time. This year I have seen 145 films, written about 39.

Terrance Malick’s divisive The Tree Of Life is probably my favourite Malick since Badlands. Which isn’t saying an awful lot, me and Malick have rarely clicked, but I was much more engaged with it than I was with even The New World (which I saw in an excellent double bill with Pocohontas so I knew what was going on)*. And I cannot say I particularly liked Malick’s everything but the kitchen sink history of creation / forensic family drama. But it was very interesting, a fascinating watch stylistically but, and this is where I usually part company with Malick, also narratively. Particularly if you top and tail the film, lopping of the National Geographic and the Ten People You Meet In Heaven segments, you are left with a ninety minute impressionistic view of a disfunctional fifties family.

Or at least cinema, and cinematic technique, wants us to feel it is disfunctional. The air of dread around the dinner table and Brad Pitt’s hard, driven father figure all suggest that there is more to this scenario than meets the eye. The undercurrent of tension plays well, the kids are our viewpoint characters and as there is barely a narrative, tension fills the gaps. But even when Pitt’s father explodes, the film suffers from a difficult dichotomy. Film has taught us that aggressive dads are bad, that dramatically there is no smoke without fire and dread has to come from somewhere. But at the same time Jessica Chastain’s mother is so gossamer thin, an angel made flesh in her sons eyes that any comparison with the father will make him feel wanting. The most burning question I wanted to ask others on the way out is if Brad Pitt’s father is a bad dad? Or at least is he abusive, bullying or just the way Dad’s were in the fifties? Because it strikes me that I knew the dread around the dinner table, there was real sanction in “wait til your father gets home“, and the role of the father as disciplinarian was often out of necessity and not seen as a bad one. It was the way that, up until recently, Western families were.

This is when the lightbulb tinged, possibly annoying everyone else in the cinema. The Tree Of Life starts with big whispered questions, around loss, around grief. Asking God why could he take a child. We then get the already infamous creation/evolution sequences – and a dinosaur standing on another dinosaurs head. This is all shared history, and definitely shapes some sort of secular spiritualism for the film(being set to religious choral music). And then, after half an hour or so, we finally settle into the Wonder Years or Stand By Me, just in the fifties in Waco, Texas. Impressionistic shots of a summer with three boys playing, with a kind of detail which suggests that this is autobiographical. It may be, but that doesn’t matter. The small details feel right, which means you don’t miss what is actually missing. And what is missing is context, no TV, no radio, no newspapers, no history, no future. Its a bubble of archetypes, a bubble of the standard American, if not Western, nuclear family in the boomer years. And if the film connects, as it did with me, its all about getting the nostalgia right. I did not grow up in fifties Texas, but I did grow up with a similar family set-up: Dad out at work, Mum as a housewife, playing in the streets, being naughty, pushing at my parents. Something I did not expect from a Malick film, an emotional narrative connection, was created.

Then the cynic in my took over. This could be an intensely personal project. This could be autobiographical. But does it harm the films accessibility, its surprisingly wide release for example or its awards potential with a Cannes Jury or Academy who will have similar childhoods? Because I think the nostalgia seeping through those sequences is so strong that for all the guff surrounding the central sequences, its difficult to not connect, and not be moved. Unless it feels universal because its very much a boys view of his mother and father and I was a boy once. I am not sure I have seen many female reviews of this film, which may be interesting since this film deifies** the mother, and the boys relationships with their father is partially based around their masculinity.

In the end Malick has spliced a natural history film with a Hallmark family movie, shot it in a way that invites study and throws Sean Penn in the mix to suggest that it all means something. I don’t think it adds up to that much, nostalgia is at best a self-indulgent wallow, and the cod spiritualism almost completely derails it. But it is an interesting way of spending a couple of hours, and crucially shorter than Transformers 3.

*Neither are a patch on Adams Family Values take on the same story.

**There is an interesting reading of the film in which the mother is so angelic because she actually is an angel. She barely interacts with anyone outside of her own family, and only really exists for them. It would fit a few of the trickier bits of the messy end sequence too. And explains why she is flying in the bit where she flys.

Film 2Oh!! is an attempt to write about every film I have seen this year which I am not helping with by seeing lots of films all the time. This year I have seen 143ilms, written about 37.

Of course I tease. Of course I am being deliberately provocative. Satyajit Ray’s trilogy is nothing like the three cack handed George Lucas toy shilling adverts, these are lovely elegaic films, of coming of age, of town and country, of sweeping understated* tragedy. Of course there is a superficial similarity with the lead character Apu losing his family, growing up with an air of mysticism and then in anger rejecting his own child until a reconciliation. Of course Apu doesn’t strictly turn to the dark side in the intermediate sections, there are no clone troopers or incomprehensible battles beyond the stars. Just Benares, Calcutta, countryside and the growing pains of a difficult child.

As a set of “classics” I had never got round to I had always been a touch suspicious of Ray’s early trilogies. And not just when I realised that I was misreading Pather and Panther, and thus no sleek big cats would be in it. Indian film is something I know little about, but I am aware of the hugeness of Bollywood and that as a film industry it doesn’t have much room for arthouse small films. So My view of the Apu Trilogy was always that it was beloved of the critics so they could use it as a stick to beat Bollywood with. And having seen them, I can certainly see that being applicable. The trilogy sits in a interesting mix of traditions though, with a definite strand of Italian neo-realism sprinkled over its jungle locations which blossom into full on ne-realist cityscapes in Aparajito. And along with that comes the endless stream of tragedies that face poor little Apu, the mischievous scamp we see at the start of Pather Panchali loses everything to become the haunted loner at the end of The World Of Apu. Which does make it a slightly tougher watch fifty years later, as all the tricks in the trilogy have been endlessly trumped out again in cinema ever since. Put it like this, when everything is going well for Apu in the middle of the world of Apu, I could sniff tragedy just around the corner, to the extent that it made me quite angry when it turned up. How day Ray submit Apu to this final indignation.

The fact that an overly plotted but naturalistic 1950′s Indian film can stir such emotion in a view – albeit by being annoyed by its overly theatrical plotting – illustrates how well the films work. And while there are creaky filmic devices being used, the foreshadowing and the intentional echoing of the Apu of Pather Panchali in Kajal, they really work to make the whole thing satisfying. Or at least satisfying as a narrative within itself. The other frustrating thing about the trology is something it shares with the Star Wars prequels. As we follow Apu through his life, overcoming the death of his sister, father, mother and wife there is a sense that this is his story. That this will be instrumental to his hard fought but inevitable success. And yet we are left at the end of the trilogy with Apu finally taking responsibility for his son, a son who we have already associated with the Apu of Pather Panchali. There is a sense that the story of Kajal is the real story, his fathers difficulties will be distilled into what is left of his upbringing to create a truly heroic child. Perhaps that is what I get from watching too many films. We have seen the story of Apu, full of much disappointment. We have to believe that the story of Kajal will be a happier one, a better one, a more successful one, perhaps one where he destroys the Death Star too.

*OK, it gets a bit overstated by the World Of Apu where EVERYONE he has ever loved dies mainly for plot reasons. It could also be the Angela’s Ashes of Indian Cinema by that point.

Film 2Oh!! is an attempt to write about every film I have seen this year which I am not helping with by seeing lots of films all the time. This year I have seen 141 films, written about 36.

The cinema shorthand, when I was a kid, was that Nazi’s were evil cannon fodder. Classic dehumanising techniques from a jingoistic media trying to make sense of years of war, and the aftermath. It was handy that the Nazi’s made it pretty easy to portrayed as such, Hitler and his Final Solution still seem objectively much more evil than most wars about territory. And as Mitchell and Webb pointed out recently, wearing skulls as insignia suggest that you might be the bad guys.

I don’t know much about Chinese history beyond some of the bulletpoint bits and Chairman Mao’s really rather versatile jacket. I do know that Japan and China were at war pre-WWII, and that Japan had significant gains within China, such as Shanghai and so on. But Japanese cinema barely touches anything resembling modern history, and Chinese cinema (depending on its provenance) also seemed to avoid films about this time too. Both national cinemas seem to play a lot more on the long history and Wuxia and Samurai type historical films (with their own codified genre tropes).

This had been the case until recently when I have seen two Chinese martial arts films set in this period. Ip Man, and Return Of The Fist both have leads who are stoical martial artists whose own codes of honour are sorely tested by their new implacable foe. More than implacable, the Japanese are presented much like the Nazi’s were in 50′s films. Its a given they are evil, its a given they have corrupted the weak Chinese, and these films do not have a single Japanese character who could be said to be humanised. It is an interesting technique that really stands out to an outsider. For the domestic market in China it not only makes sense, it is probably something that is well overdue. There has been a hidden subtext to much Chinese historical crossover Wuxia films that Chinese warriors are the best. In which case how did the Japanese occupation ever happen? IP Man and Return Of The Fist can’t really explain the first question, but they do show what such unbeatable warriors do in this situation.

Ip Man is based on a real person so treats its wartime storyline with a touch more sensitivity than Return of the Fist. Return Of The Fist is basically a jingoistic martial arts superhero film, down Chen Zhen donning a Kato-like suit and mask before his stependous, near superhuman Martial Arts feats. Its first ten minutes features a fantastic sequence of Chen Zhen vs the German army which is as preposterous as it is entertaining. Both films are good popcorn martial arts films, and realise that a good action film needs good baddies. And in the Japanese on the Sino-Japanese War, modern Chinese film seems to have found its new Nazi’s.

Oh, and a key point also is that Ip Man, and Chen Zhen, are both played by Donnie Yen, our current go to guy for astoundingly well choreographed kung fu (I am looking forward to his take on the Monkey King).

33: Green Hornet (Film)

Really only here to say that the mask / hat combo used by Chen Zhen is identical to that used by Kato in the Green Hornet. Chen Zhen has a much classier jacket though, which appears to be slightly rubberised (its certainly extremely waterproof in the first fight with it on). The Green Hornet is a mess, and in some ways a slightly loveable mess. Sometimes a film can inadvertently represent the personality of its lead far too much. In a good way you get something like School of Rock, which is just Jack Black made into a film. Green Hornet is an uncomfortable, odd film which is, much like Seth Rogen, much more likeable that it ought to be. There is nothing about Rogen’s spoilt playboy character to like either before, or after his Damascene conversion to ultra-violent crime fighting. And yet, whilst knowing it was all a bit worthless, I still kind of liked it. Perhaps it was at its heart trying to make Rogen a plausible action hero, but knew he wasn’t, much as he tried to make a romance with Cameron Diaz work, when they knew it wouldn’t. Yes there is a great lost Stephen Chow film hanging around The Green Hornet, but for a winter action film it was a tolerable way to keep out of the rain.

Film 2Oh!! is an attempt to write about every film I have seen this year which is really quite tricky. This year I have seen 127 films, written about 33.

26: Senna (cinema)
Remarkable how cinematic a documentary made completely from grainy TV footage can be. Remarkable how much the non-stop historical cigarette advertising throughout the film made me want a gasper. Particularly Rothmans, the Williams and my Dad’s formula one cigarette of choice. I remember one Christmas at family gathering racing a packer of John Player Special against a pack of Rothmans on the dining table as we “played” Formula 1. And being mighty disappointed that no-one in the family smoked Marlboro’s.

27. Julia’s Eyes (cinema)
Dear the makers of Julia’s Eyes. I can understand why thematically it may make sense in a film about someone losing her sight, you may want to mirror her failing eyesight with dull fading cinematography. I understand it, but it is as bad an idea as associating “unremarkable” with “invisible”.

28. Soylent Green (DVD)
I used to quite admire Chuck Heston for making these high concept sci-fi films in the seventies. And then I saw them. Soylent Green raises a lot more questions than it answers, unfortunately most of them are about its plotholes. But the key questions I came away with were
a) In a city defined by overcrowding, why are the streets so empty at night
b) dustbin lorry technology never improves
c) I am assuming Soylent Orange is cats and Soylent Yellow was a hilarious racist joke in the early 70′s.

29. 127 Hours (Cinema)
I must admit, whilst I am unsure if I could saw my own arm off to save my life, it I were in the situation described by the film, I WOULDN’T WAIT 127 HOURS TO DO IT. He is well aware his arm is “dead” by about hour 12. If he was really an awesome survivalist, he would have chopped it off while he still had adequate water and strength to survive. Say about 28 hours I’d say. And then Danny Boyle could have called it 28 HOURS LATER. And got the zombie* crowd in.

30. Daddy Long-Legs (DVD)
I don’t think there is ever a time when Fred Astaire doesn’t look considerably older than his female co-stars, or put across a slightly creepy air, but even if that wasn’t the case in Daddy Long-Legs, the plot would handle it nicely. Its all well and good that Leslie Caron is playing 18 when Fred Astaire become her legal guardian / mystery benefactor / groomer from afar, but there still seems to be an abuse of a power relationship, 32 year age gap and – well have you seen the Sluefoot – the dance craze that never was? (I’m with the disgusted teenage boy).

Still Leslie Caron eh?

*YES THEY ARE FUCKING ZOMBIES.