Three Recent Films

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Kick Ass v X Men

I watched, at the weekend, the first X Men, followed by Kick-Ass. I remember when the first X Men came out - it seemed fresh, at the time, with a serious cast (Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan; an excellent Rogue, played by Anna Paquin, and nice turns from James Marsden, Famke Jansenn, Hugh Jackman, et al.) It had quips, and wit, and wasn't too full of itself. But now, after the slew of portentous superhero movies that have come after it, it seems to have lost some of its lustre.

Unfair, perhaps; but far more exciting, sweet, involving and clever was Kick-Ass, starring Aaron Johnson, and with the unforgettable Chloe Moretz as the super-cool eleven-year-old foul-mouthed assassin, Hit Girl. Even Nicholas Cage managed to be good. It has a fabulous conceit (for those of you who don't remember, it sees a geeky boy try to become a real life superhero, only to become embroiled both in organised crime, and in a revenge plot led by Hit Girl's father.) The direction is sparky and aware of its comic-book status; the violence, though perhaps extreme, is leavened by the fact that we know it's all a silly dream.

Unfortunately, there were trailers for Kick-Ass 2 in the ad breaks. It looks like the film has become more of a straightforward action movie. Let’s hope that Johnson’s endearing goofiness, and Moretz’s totally ice cold moves, endure; that it won’t become yet another boilerplate, doom-laden action flick, whose momentous images leave nothing behind when you’ve finished watching. Let's remember that in real life superheroes don't exist; so they may as well make us laugh.

The Great Gatsby: Baz Luhrmann's crazy fairy tale

I went with the lowest of expectations to see The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann's film version of F Scott Fitzgerald's book. I'd read a number of so-so reviews, and had been given personal recommendations ranging from the indifferent to the positively dismissive.

We saw it at the Dalston Rio, a cinema swathed like a theatre, where Gatsby cocktails (well, cocktails labelled with character names) were on sale. I went in, armed with a "Gatsby" - a gin and tonic (large) - prepared for the worst.

And in a sense my feelings, and those of the world, were confirmed. What this is, is  Fitzgerald if Walt Disney had taken the helm. Leonardo di Caprio is a fairy prince offering vast wealth and pleasure; Daisy is the princess trapped by an evil wizard or king, who  trips out at night to the other realm, wearing out her dancing shoes.  When you first see di Caprio, and he all but fizzes with magic dust, my yelps of laughter could be heard throughout the cinema. How long would it be, I wondered, before they all broke out into song? The princess will never be tempted by the empty promise of magic; she will retreat into the apparent safety of her prison. And so she does.

It was strange, too, to make Nick (a jug-eared Tobey Maguire) into such a cypher. In the novel there are at least hints of his character; here he was simply, totally, in love with Gatsby, a vehicle to transmit the truth behind the glamour. And Jordan Baker, such a brittle, malevolent presence in the book, here just loomed about looking like she was permanently embalmed. But then, with the personality of Gatsby exploded from a few lines (all that is needed in the book) into the fleshy-faced persona of Leonardo di Caprio, there wasn't much room for anything else.

There were some lovely touches: those parties! Nick being left on his porch in nothing but his underwear; also when Gatsby fills Nick's house with flowers, awaiting Daisy. "Do you think it's too much?" he asks Nick. "I think it's what you want," is the answer. Gatsby agrees. Of course it is.

The problem is that Luhrmann has made a fairy story out of a fable. He's taken a morality tale rooted in realism and transported it to the realm of fantasy; by trying to inject it with some historical resonance (the Wall Street crash, etc.) he in fact simply makes it more unreal. All that tinsel and glitter fades the moment you've seen it: like fool's gold, or a fairy's spell at dawn; behind the glamour, there is nothing but an empty promise.

The Artist: review

The artist. And his owner.

I want to go and live in Silent Movie Land. (Although maybe it wouldn't be entirely practical - remember that scene in Love Actually where Andrew Lincoln declares his love to Keira Knightley via cardboard signs? Imagine the expense on marker pens, not to mention the environmental cost! But it would be fun, don't you think?)

Everything in Silent Movie Land seems to happen more solidly - walking out of a room, off a stage; winking, whistling, weeping; everything has a kind of physical significance that we rarely get in "talkies." "Mugging," as new talkie star Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) dismissively puts it when she's being interviewed in The Artist about the death of silent stars. But then she doesn't mean it, as she later admits. Silent films have their own artistry, depth and power. The metamorphosis that came with The Jazz Singer gave us something - but it also lost us a simple pleasure.

The plot of The Artist is straightforward. Peppy (and boy is that an apt name) is an ingénue seeking fame; her trajectory is onwards and upwards. On the way she meets someone coming in the other direction - George Valentin, a silent film star, and the artist of the title, (played by Jean Dujardin, whose looks make him seem like every matinée idol rolled into a big matinée idol package.) He plays men in masks and top hats; dashing heroes who flee villains in motor cars and biplanes, and always get the girl. And he has a funny dog, too.

When talkies arrive, Valentin refuses to join in, saying they'll never work; his career is ruined faster than you can say (or, rather, mug) "I told you so." Peppy, meanwhile, reaches the dizzy heights of sonic fame. She can talk! And act! America swoons at her slippered feet. There is a very touching moment when Valentin goes to see her latest blockbuster, which has elbowed his own effort into oblivion - it mimics a scene right at the beginning, where Peppy watches her idol, Valentin, and dreams of glory to come. It does cast a slight shadow over the whole film, though - one cannot help but wonder what will happen to Peppy when the next bit of "fresh meat" comes along.

The actors put in sterling performances: both have immensely mobile, expressive faces. Both have sinuous, slinky movements, whether dancing or even just walking. Peppy has two lovely "trademarks" - a whistle and a wink, which render her pretty face at once vulnerable and strong. There are some innovative touches to the cinematography as well - Valentin, drunk and depressed, pours his drink onto his reflection; more weirdly, he hallucinates a tiny version of himself which then proceeds to attack him with a whole load of men wielding spears; and more frighteningly, when he dreams that he's actually in a talkie.

The narrative arc is predictable, but then that doesn't seem to matter, as the charisma of the stars makes up for it. There was, I thought, one slight problem - there is a hint, at the end, as to why Valentin might have been so anti-talkie, in one of the film's few moments of sound. I won't give it away, but it did seem to me marginally unbelievable that an actor as keen on fame as Valentin wouldn't try to get himself into new technologies just because of one attribute. But hey ho. The film more than makes up for that: for instance, there is a priceless scene where Valentin's increasingly estranged wife yells at him (and when I say "Yell", you know what I mean) "We need to talk! Why won't you talk?"

The Artist is a delightful piece of cinematic froth; an intelligent, witty and pleasing rejoinder to  the manic jet-setting and incomprehensibility of such films as Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Whether there will be any more silent films remains to be seen; but with its simple tale of love, loss and redemption, it will please the hearts of many. (And don't forget the dog, either.) Now, if you see a man walking down the street holding up cardboard signs and mugging furiously, then it's probably me, unless it's someone on day release. Do feel free to join me in a foxtrot, if you like.

Scream 4 and the nature of horror

"How meta can you get?" is something that people in Scream 4 say. A lot. Most critics, when it came out last year, thought that it could have been, er, well, a bit less meta and a bit better. Which was a shame, since Scream (directed by Wes Craven and written by that most savvy of scribblers, Kevin Williamson), stands as a biting comment on horror films - and yet, as a truly biting horror film itself. Scream 2, with its film within a film (Stab, starring Tori Spelling, and retelling the events of Scream) succeeded; Scream 3 was, though it had lost its bite, still enjoyable as practically a screwball comedy. They all followed the practised ruts of a horror film though, in which an external force causes mayhem for a while, but is tamed and neutered. They do, though, like revenge tragedies, bleed into each other; and like revenge tragedies, it's very hard to stop the cycle. The Oresteia did it by chaining the Furies up underneath a statue of Athena - but you can't do that with mask-wearing pyschopaths, can you? There just isn't enough room.

So what of Scream 4? Well I would argue that it has found a way to end the cycle. The meta-ness takes many forms. There has been a Stab franchise (they are now on the sixth - or seventh - outing; nobody can quite agree). Sidney Prescott (an always effective Neve Campbell), the original survivor of all three films (boy she must have some scars, says someone wryly), has emerged from the darkness to write a memoir of her experiences, and returns to her home town to give a reading. Gail Weathers, the fast-talking reporter, is now married to dopey Sheriff Dewey (David Arquette), and unable to write her own novel (having written the book that Stab was based on). Meanwhile the highschool students act out versions of Stab, hang up ghostface masks in reference to the original killers, and even have their own Stabathon, where they watch all the films in one go whilst brandishing fake knives.

The pacing of the first two thirds is uneven; new characters are either goofy (such as Dewey's deputy and Sidney's assistant, one of whom dies [the wrong one, in my opinion]) or unbelievable, like the high school geek who records his entire experience on a webcam nailed to his head. Imagine Peepshow, but with added toilet time. Mercifully we get none of that. The death scenes are not particularly frightening; and there is hardly a batsqueak of suspense. But it's still enjoyable, as a curiosity.

Until the final reel, that is, when a surprise is sprung upon us in true Wes Craven style. The film becomes a mordant, affecting response to the horrors of social networking and the vapid need for fame, with echoes of Nicole Kidman's To Die For. As a film, it's entirely clued up (with references to mobiles, Facebook, Twitter and so on) - but these references are not merely window dressing. They are part of the texture of the whole, and essential to the success of the film.

The last third, when Sidney is running for her life, then becomes almost better than the first three films put together. The tension, entirely lacking, suddenly appears like a noose around the neck.  Everything is called into question: love, family, friendship; the nature of celebrity, the desire for an admired self. Nothing is sacred in Scream 4. Which makes it, perhaps, closer to the bone than any of its predecessors. And in the final scene, after the film has quietly managed to laugh at itself, you're left feeling troubled, not cleansed; and that, surely, is what a horror film is meant to do.

As the final credits roll, the horror is rooted deep inside the viewer, much as it is when you read of true crime. There is nowhere left for the Scream series to go. In its meta-ness it returned to the beginning; but it's also carved out an end.

The Immortals: review

There is no canon in Greek myth. They're fluid, and The Immortals has moulded something of its own out of them, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to hardly any of the legends we know. It's crazy, balletic, silly, powerful, beautiful, and totally ridiculous; and it's also amongst the most fun and impressive films that I've seen this year.

Theseus and his army

It takes place in a never-never Greece (about 1,200 BC, apparently, although it looks more like an alien desert landscape); the Olympian gods have suppressed the Titans (who suffer, chained up in something that looks like it came from the brain of the Human Centipede guy, under a mountain) but have decided not to take any active part in human affairs. This does not prevent Zeus, however (played with an impish might by Luke Evans) from disguising himself as an old man - and not just any old man, but John Hurt, who is so wise that practically every other word is an aphorism – in order to influence (but not actively, you see) his son Theseus, who must learn to do things of his own free will (and not having been influenced by Zeus. At All.)

Theseus lives in a stone town which has conveniently been carved out of rocks looking over a cliff edge, which can't be very practical, or comfortable when the wind blows, but that doesn't really matter, because it looks pretty impressive. Theseus is also a humdinger of a man - played by Henry Cavill, who's obviously been working out (since he's about to play Superman) - he's the sort of chap that would make the average Abercrombie and Fitch model not want to take his top off on the beach for shame. He is not the prince of myth, though; he is a humble peasant who would die to protect those he loves. He's also pretty nifty with a spear, as it turns out, which is lucky. Think Brad Pitt in Troy but without the sulkiness. And boy does the camera love him, lingering on his body whenever it can; even when he's close to death, having been enslaved, he looks like a bronzed Lycidas. Even the virginal Oracle  (Frieda Pinto, for whom most would swoon any day) whose second sight is tied to her chastity, thinks twice when she sees Theseus. Cavill does a good job with the fairly dire script, too - when he gave a speech to his soldiers to rouse them up a bit, I found myself getting roused up too, despite the cringeworthiness of the lines.

Zeus and Athena: Daddy's girl

The village's - and all of Greece's - existence is threatened: the vile King Hyperion wishes to find the Epirus bow (a magical weapon of great power) and, well, like all baddies ever, take over the world; he also wants to unleash the Titans, though quite why is anyone's guess. Meanwhile, he invades a monastery where the Oracle lives - who happens to be an extremely beautiful girl who likes sleeping on a silken couch with her three other very beautiful oracle-friends - and tortures and kills people, willy-nilly. When one of Theseus' villagers defects to Hyperion's camp, and sees a silver bull into which victims are thrown and burned, as well as dead bodies hung up everywhere, you can almost hear him think, uh oh, this was a bad idea, wish I'd stayed with those lame villagers... Hyperion is so evil he makes Darth Vader look like Bambi. He likes wearing masks, too, as do all his followers - weird, toothy animal masks. He believes in democracy, you see (apparently).

The plot, though, is sort of beside the point, because every scene is so enthrallingly enjoyable in its sumptuous finery, violence or lunacy that one is compelled throughout. It doesn't seem to matter that the Olympus of the Greek gods resembles a gay nightclub, with all the male gods lounging around half-naked  in diamanté and Heath-Robinson hats (there's only one female god, Athena, played by a too-beautiful Isabel Lucas - she should have been Aphrodite, surely?) Nor does it matter that the oracle and her friends wear jangling tea-cosies on their heads. I think the film itself is aware of its excesses - Theseus laughs at a priest's similar headgear.

The film has its own grace, and if you are prepared to take it on its own terms, then you'll find yourself swept away just as if Poseidon himself had come down and caused a tidal wave. And the final scenes point towards a sequel that looks like it might be even bigger, and even sillier, with an aeronautical battle between gods and Titans. Hats off - the sillier the better - to director Tarsem Singh, for this deeply luxurious nugget.

The Door: dir. by Andrew Steggall

The Soho Hotel is massively trendy, possibly more trendy than any hotel I've ever been into, ever; it also has its own private cinema, which was the scene for the first showing of Andrew Steggall's short film, The Door. Guests flocked to the two screenings. The film was produced by actress Daisy Lewis; in attendance were actress Olivia Grant, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett from Misfits, writer Ivo Stourton, director Luke Rodgers and his girlfriend painter Phoebe Dickinson, as well as hordes of others.

The film itself was beautifully shot, acted and paced. Based on a short story by H G Wells ("The Door in the Wall"), it concerned a man's obsession with a childhood event that changed his life. Charles Dance played the hero, who tells of his memories: As a  boy (played with great sensitivity by an angelic Thomas Hardiman), he saw a green door in a wall (which looked very much like Thistle Grove to me); through it he finds a strange world inhabited by angels, mad clockwork kings, and mysterious, mobled women. Is it a place of imagination, or a real other world? A sterling cast, and an atmospheric soundtrack provided enchantment and strangeness, making us question what we were seeing as they wandered through a world that might be ours, or might not.

In Steggall's reading, the other world seemed like a preparation for death, with the young boy seeing himself held in the arms of a winged man (an angel? a swan?). Everything was tinged with elegant light, with a sense of mystery and foreboding; an excellent score and sumptuous costumes added to the elegiac feel. It was a charmed experience, a window indeed into another world. And next time I go down Thistle Grove, I shall certainly look to see if the door is still there.

Drive!: Better than snail porridge? Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan star

Gosling: expressive nostrils

If Drive were a nest and critical praise was a bower bird, it would be the sort of nest that any self-respecting bower bird lady would love to hang out in, so becrusted with baubles would it be. Ryan Gosling, they say, is a knightly, existential warrior whose feline beauty is belied by his ability to kick people's heads in. Carey Mulligan, they say, can make eloquent gestures like Heston Blumenthal can make snail porridge. And it has cars in it!

So being the sort of person that I am (somewhere in the Womack vaults there lies a videotape of my, I think, fifth birthday, shouting ecstatically: "Cars! Just what I wanted! Cars!", although of course they were not real cars, only models, but still), I thought I'd go and see it for myself.

Gosling (I just can't help thinking about little baby geese) plays a man with no name and a really snazzy jacket with a golden scorpion on the back [warning: this scorpion is symbolic]  that he never cleans, even when he's eventually covered in blood and oil and presumably lots of other fluids I have no wish to know about. At the beginning we see him in his moonlighting role as a getaway driver. The scenes are enjoyably tense, with Gosling remaining as serene as a Greek statue as he evades police - not by zipping really fast around Los Angeles, but by cleverly anticipating their moves and sliding into hiding places just when he has to. His final move - he has rules, and he sticks very close to them - in the getaway is breathtaking in its simplicity and audacity. There's a nice, bassy soundtrack too.

He has two day jobs ("You look tired," says his boss at one point), one as a stuntman and one as a mechanic, and lives in a flat where he likes to tinker (no, that's not a euphemism), and has quite large, expressive nostrils.  He's doing all right, as far as nameless beautiful stuntmen go, he's pretty much got the nameless beautiful stuntman biscuit. If only he didn't find a love interest in the comely shape of Carey Mulligan, his neighbour, who he helps out with a car problem and carries home her shopping, which is how we know he is a good person; we also know that he is tender and sweet because he carries her son to bed TWICE. Wow! That's sensitivity for you. Their relationship is almost wordless - in fact I'd be interested to know how many words Gosling speaks in the film – and whilst it was all very suavely shot, I did feel that the character setups were overlong, as there are only so many shots of people looking longingly at each other whilst the sun comes through a window and a child looks adorable that one can take, otherwise you think you're in a Boden catalogue, which will not do.

Trouble comes - of course - when Mulligan's imprisoned husband comes home; he owes money to some rather nasty chaps, so Gosling the crusader offers to help him out. And it goes wrong - horribly wrong. (So the moral of the story, kids, is don't help anyone, ever, or you'll end up in very big trouble.) There is finely-wrought tension through the entire film, contrasted with the few moments of light, which reminded me of the adage in Homer - that the gods have two jars, one full of good things and one of bad; to some they dole out only bad, but to others a mixture. Not just good things, you see. There are some great, A History of Violence style scenes of inventive killings, too.

The film is slick, sleek, like a dolphin's wet back in the sea. Gosling is indeed preternaturally good, seeming almost divine, a sort of compromised Galahad. His closest living relative might be Philip Marlowe. Mulligan is lovely too, all achey and trembly and yearningy. The ending, with its lack of respect for teleology, may annoy some and please others: for me it was rather good, since it expressed the rough edges of life. So all in all, whilst I can't quite bring myself to rave about it in the vein of most critics, I would say that this is certainly more fun than eating snail porridge, even when cooked by Heston Blumenthal.

Rushes: Soho Shorts Festival

To the Mall, and the ICA, for the Short Film Category of the Rushes: Soho Shorts Festival. There were fifteen shorts in all, and they were, mostly, very good indeed; a heartening sign for the British movie industry.

First up was Modern Times by Ben Craig, in which a slouchy astronaut projected a Charlie Chaplin film onto the moon for the amusement of a spaceshipful of people. Whilst the technicalities were excellent, and the theme (of continuity and agelessness) interesting, I felt this was more of a calling card, or a music video, original and clever though it was. Expecting the entire moon to be used for the projection, I was disappointed when it was only a small square of lunar landscape. Hard cheese. Paper Hearts by Rob Brown, about a son's relationship with his divorced father, I'd seen a hundred times before. The dialogue was plot-heavy: "Why didn't you tell me?" "I thought you'd disown me!", and the son seemed to fall down rather too conveniently to help the plot along for my liking. But good acting, though.

Still from Missing by Luke Rodgers

Missing by Luke Rodgers was a sharp slice of contemporary life, starring Tim McInerney and the shouty one from Misfits, playing, well, a shouty girl. Their brief encounter (sunlit, belying the savagery of what was happening) on a bus was convincing and touching, bringing into play the inanities and frustrations of modern life, as well as the possibility of connection, however fleeting, between two entirely disparate people, whose final parting on a bridge (very apt) you feel may not be a parting at all. There was more lunacy - well, lunar activity - with Dust, by Ben Lavington Martin, a film that was clever but incomprehensible; it followed an astronaut's last minutes on the moon, over stock footage of the landings. It had a certain harsh beauty but was ultimately unfullfilling.

Pride of Dover by Joseph F Fawcett was full of eerie shots, off-screen shouting and lingering looks; I couldn't work out what the relationship was between the man and woman and felt that the artiness (which was brilliantly executed) had got in the way of the plot. Colourbleed by Peter Szewyck was baffling too, seemingly about a girl's creativity crushed by the actions of a blackened bureaucrat, with an extremely unsettling scene in which said girl, having had said creativity crushed, pulls out her own nails with pliers. Nice.

Papa by Schuman Hoque had a more successful plot, in which a young girl goes to work at her father's factory, where he is mercilessly teased by a cocky young worker, played with cheeky and aggressive charm; the slight unbelievability of the storyline (which ends with the young girl knocking someone out) spoiled what was otherwise an interesting effort.

A far stranger beast was Hitler and Henry VIII by Jane Gull, which wasn't sure whether it was a comedy or a tragedy. It began well, with an exhausted and exasperated teacher shooting one of his obnoxious pupils. We all laughed. But soon it became clear that we were meant not to laugh. A strange one, as we had been led to be on the teacher's side - and he had an excellent point. It was entirely spoiled, for me, by one of the horrible teens saying "You're just the same as them now." Thanks for pointing that out, I hadn't noticed. (This seems to be a feature in shorts. Let us decide for ourselves!)

Initiation by Alex Hardy

Initiation by Alex Hardy was one of the best. A young gangster is to be initiated by his fellow gang members: he must kill someone he knows. Only the real initiation is something completely different; and the twist at the end left surging ripples in the audience. Filmed jerkily, it bore a cold authenticity that made it stand out.

Capturing Santa was an effort done for Sky by Chris O'Dowd (yes, he of The IT Crowd fame, and, more recently, Bridesmaids), so I won't give it much attention except to say that it was, of course, funny, but too long. Thinking Straight by Ric Forster was about a boy-girl who loves a girl who the boy-girl thinks likes boys but actually likes girls (this isn't a Blur song, don't worry), and it was funny and sensitively acted and directed.

The two films with the most money thrown at them were, inevitably, the most successful in terms of how they looked and felt: The Foundling by Barney Cokeliss, which had Ridley Scott's name attached to it, was set on a freak show in the early twentieth century. A mother abandons her son (who has a horn growing out of his forehead); he becomes a Unicorn Boy for the show. They meet again later: but their meeting, of course, is frustrated. It looked lovely, but it was a bit like having a slightly unsatisfactory bath. I do hope for more from Cokeliss though as there was much to be enjoyed.

The second big-budget short was Love at First Sight, by Michael Davies, which starred John Hurt. It was as Technicolour Cheese as a fluorescent Brie, but it did bring tears to my eyes with its simple tale of true love between two old people. There were some quirky touches (a new attendant at the nursing home mixing up everyone's dentures; a chorus of oldies egging Hurt's character on).

Finally, two short shorts: 0507 by the Blaine Brothers was a bitingly true to life sketch about a couple who are about to get married (the numbers refer to a date: the boyfriend's recognition of its significance had the cinema in positively Austerian quantities of laughter). Bistro by Sean Gray was a farce set in a restaurant in which a man with a pig's nose was fed with tiny pork chops and ended with him confronting the chef, who had a duck's nose. Yes, I didn't really understand it either, but there was a salutary comic turn from the waiter.

Exclusive: Review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two: I hate giving stars, but this is definitely a ten out of ten

I was lucky enough to attend David Heyman's screening of the new Harry Potter film in Leicester Square. There was no fuss: after a brief reminder of Voldemort's taking of the Elder Wand (from a superbly modernist grave containing Dumbledore), we were straight into the action. The texture of the film itself is startlingly convincing: gone is the faint cheesiness of the first two films. We are in a world whose strangenesses and darknesses are ever-present.

Snape: not evil after all

What really sets this film apart, making it (I think) possibly the best of the series (excluding The Prisoner of Azkaban, and perhaps The Goblet of Fire), is the attention to detail. Hermione changes into Bellatrix Lestrange at one point (to go to Gringott's Bank), and Helena Bonham-Carter superbly conveyed Hermione's sulkiness and quavery expression, at one point doing such a convincing impression of Emma Watson that it spookily seemed that she might actually really have changed shape. There is wit, too, among the darkness: a bleeding Neville Longbottom, having seen off a ravening horde of Voldemort's supporters, and having almost fallen to his death, pops up cheerily with a 'well that went well.'

I must admit that, being slightly sentimental, I was weeping quietly all the way through. What this film does is enhance Rowling's slightly clunky prose (which made her last two books a disappointment for me), so that the epic touches which she was unable to convey by writing are writ large on the screen. The last battle at Hogwarts always seemed faintly ridiculous to me: here it is genuinely terrifying, with battered schoolchildren fighting desperately against screaming Death Eaters. The deficiencies of Daniel Radcliffe's plankish acting vanish as we meet what is truly the heart of the series: there is darkness in us all, and we must all fight to overcome it.

We learn, too, about the exceptional loyalty and devotion of Snape to Harry Potter's mother, Lily, and of Dumbledore's realpolitik. There is a beautiful scene, when Harry is looking in Snape's memories, which I think was the best in the film: a young Lily makes a flower grow in her hand, but her sister calls her a freak. Hiding in a tree trunk nearby is a young Severus, who blows a leaf to her. It is sun-filled and dappled and touched with a sense of wonder and loss and brimming with the sadnesses of human relationships. It delicately haunts the mind long after, and even now thinking about it I am filled with emotion.

There are some superb set pieces, too: the escape on a damaged, maddened dragon from Gringotts, whose wings and claws drive gouges into London's rooftops; an eerie, white King's Cross; and the film never lets up on energy, drive and spirit. It's an excellent piece of work, and as David Heyman himself said, it's not the end, but the end of a beginning.

Read my review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One

Splice: review

Spliced together

Genetic manipulation is a tricky subject. Ought we to meddle with DNA if there is the possibility that certain conditions can be thereby eradicated? Surely we humans have always been manipulating DNA, breeding cows, dogs, fruits for our own benefit... Splice is a film that deals with this question in a fascinating, frightening, and really very disturbing way.

Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody (the King and Queen of Quirk) play a pair of super-cool biochemists who are developing a new creature for a shady pharmaceutical corporation. When the company threatens to shut down their advances into human / animal splicing, they go off piste and inject a piece of human DNA into a mutant egg. Whose DNA it is will become highly significant as the scientists play out their own turbulent inner lives. Polley's character is the agent; Brody stands by and watches aghast.

From the off the creature is troublesome: it almost stabs Polley to death before it's even born. When it first appears it's a little, lizardy type thing, stumbling around like a weird sort of chicken. It eventually grows into a young woman of alien-like appearance. Polley and Brody must keep it - or rather her (and therein lies the rub) hidden. Thus arises the terrible question: is it just an experiment, or is it a person? They call her 'Dren' (NERD backwards)'; she is intelligent and emotional. They keep her in a basement (in a horrible parallel to Polley's character's own childhood; raised by a mad mother and kept in a bare room). They develop emotional attachments to Dren, which eventually cause enormous problems.

When one of the non-human creatures that the scientists created turns into a male, killing its rival in spectacular fashion in front of a whole room of potential investors, it soon seems that Dren may not be all that she seems, turning from lust object and surrogate child into the monster from Jeepers Creepers. The end of the film is a perfectly judged piece of horror. It also raises troubling questions about our prejudices, and our need to keep disabled and deformed people out of sight. Splice is an intelligent, keenly disturbing piece of science fiction which, I hope, will not see its real questions raised in the real world for a good long time yet...

The Asocial Network

In an anti-social Saturday night mood (I have a lot of work on this week) I decided to watch The Social Network. As I consumed it on my laptop, I couldn't keep my Facebook page open (as many people increasingly seem to do). This was probably a good thing.

Zuckerberg, Prince of Geeks

According to the film, Facebook started out of a miasma of greed, spite, boorishness and awkwardness. Mark Zuckerberg, reeling from being dumped by a girl, sets up a site called Facemash which compares girls at Harvard in terms of hotness. It gets him into (ahem) hot water; it also receives thousands of hits in the first day it was set up. Zuckerberg was portrayed by geek idol Jesse Eisenberg as a sort of mechanical, sleep-walking droid who dreams of algorithms and of being socially accepted into one of Harvard's clubs (which seem, as far as I can see, to be far more exclusive than anything Oxford has to offer). His friend, Savarin (played with emotional heft by future Spiderman Andrew Garfield), is on his way to becoming part of those clubs, which sows the seeds for future revenge.

The Olympian Winkelvoss twins, who embody the patriarchal, moneyed system that Zuckerberg wants in on (I think I met one of the Winkelvoi [as Zuckerberg calls them], at Oxford: which one I can't remember, but it was definitely something to do with rowing and I seem to remember a vast expanse of lycra), note Zuckerberg's success with Facemash and tell him about a network that they want to set up between Harvard students. Zuckerberg plays them off, telling them he can't do it, whilst at the same time setting up exactly the same sort of thing - which will eventually become Facebook. The film is slick, dark, with a sinuous soundtrack (by Trent Reznor and Atticus Rose which loops and grinds and whirls in deep ambient beats), as gripping as a hawk's talons on a mouse.


Something that is meant to encourage us to become freer, to share, was born from the most negative human emotions: lying, cheating, oneupmanship. Zuckerberg's treatment of his friend Savarin is particularly poignant, diddling him out of his share of the business with the help of Sean Parker (a dotcom brat played as an empty, vain cokehead by Justin Timbersnake). The Facebook office moves, at Parker's advice, to California, where Zuckerberg and his pals lark around like stupid fratboys toking on bongs, diving into pools and getting 'wired in' to computers. It's not a pleasant sight, and it slightly worried me that that sort of empty hedonism might be anybody's idea of a good time.

A friend of mine with Asperger's syndrome told me once that, at his fortnightly meetings with the Asperger's group, they had decided that Facebook had been set up by someone with a similar syndrome. Watching this film has confirmed that point for me. Social interaction on Facebook is much, much easier for people who are unable to speak to each other face to face, who find the multitude of signals and ironies that people use in speech too confusing. It is not designed to be 'creative'. Zuckerberg seems to think that it is creative. In fact it is almost the opposite of 'creative', as it forces thoughts and feelings into trammelled paths. On a day that three or four friends announced their engagements, as a joke I put my status up as 'engaged'; within ten minutes I'd received congratulatory messages from people who surely must have known that I wasn't in the slightest about to get hitched. There is not much room for jokes or irony on Facebook.

A truly creative site would allow you as the user to make it what you wanted it to be. People talk a lot about Facebook's role in revolutions: I've also seen its role as a mobiliser of hate - there was a truly vile page about the woman who put a cat in a bin, for example. For every page promoting peace and love there's another promoting destruction.

I am uneasy about Facebook, I will admit. It sucks up my time. I like to pretend that it is a passing fad, that within ten years we'll all have moved on to something else. But it's been part of my life for six years now; many teenagers have grown up with it as a viable and normal form of communication. There is an image at the end of the film where Zuckerberg befriends his ex-girlfriend on the site; we see him pressing refresh, every few seconds, to see whether she has accepted him. Zuckerberg has succeeded, is my feeling, not in becoming part of those exclusive clubs; but in making the world his club, and turning us all into versions of himself.

And now I shall upload a link to this piece onto Facebook, and press refresh until somebody 'likes' it... The Social Network is a superlative piece of filmmaking - of last year's Oscar contenders, I think the best. And it is also the most worrying.

True Grit: review

I love the Coen Brothers - well, mostly. I loved The Hudsucker Proxy, even though it was flawed; I loved Fargo; I loved The Big Lebowski. Surprisingly, I loved rather less O Brother Where Art Thou?, which seemed (despite, or more probably because of, its Odysseanic origins) aimless to me (though of course The Soggy Bottomed Boys provided amusement.)

True Grit is similarly helmed by the Coen Brothers. It has, on the surface, many of the qualities present in their other films: a certain quirkiness of style; a quest / journey narrative; a deeply imbued Americanness. The film starts with a sentimental voiceover which put me on the alert at once. 'It's all right,' said one of my companions, 'it's the start of the novel.' Phew, I thought. However the rest of the film did little to bear out my worries.

The heroine is Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld), a fourteen year old girl with vengeance on her mind: her father has been killed by a vagrant (Josh Brolin) (who I was convinced was called Dick Cheney - alas it was Tom Chaney). We first see her negotiating with someone over three ponies. We were meant to find her mature and ballsy as she knocked down her opponent; I felt the scene went on a little too long. She hires Jeff Bridges - a marshal with 'true grit' - to help her bring in the nasty murderer; Texas Ranger Matt Damon comes along too (displaying an alarming preference for spanking adolescent girls with twigs.) The scenery was present and correct: I ticked off the wide-screen prairie shot, the last minute gallop. Excitement was pointlessly provided by Matt Damon's pointless character (LeBouef - pronounced 'LeBeef', although this joke is not made in the film), riding off and then riding back again. Jeff Bridges spoke as if his mouth was truly full of grit, rendering most of his speeches as incomprehensible as if they had been pronounced in a lesser-known dialect of Tugalog. Every character prefaced most of his or her remarks with 'I do not know.' A lot of the action felt as if it had been tacked on as an afterthought, as when Mattie falls into a snakepit; although there was one genuinely gripping scene, when Mattie comes upon her Nemesis watering the horses (which, unfortunately, swiftly degenerates). Even the race for Mattie's life seemed mawkish; and a final scene, twenty-five years later, was peremptory.

That first scene was the mark of the film, for me. Everything was a little off kilter. Was it a comedy? Was it a thriller? Was it a coming of age story? Folks, I do not know. My only consolation was that nobody ever said, 'Mattie, it's you that's got True Grit.'

The King's Speech: review

There are many lovely moments in this film, which portrays (as surely we all know by now) the attempts to cure the future George VI of his debillitating stammer. Worthy doctors stick pebbles in his mouth ("It worked for Demosthenes"); a soldier's horse brays in the silence as the Duke of York (as he then was) attempts to make his first radio broadcast. The three main characters are played with wit and sensitivity: Colin Firth as his Royal H-H-Highness displaying temper and charm within one frame; Helena Bonham-Carter absolutely marvellously enjoying herself as the future Queen Mum ("this is rather fun, isn't it", she says as she sits on her husband in a doctor's surgery), and Geoffrey Rush as the Antipodean therapist whose unorthodox methods are to win through in the end. (The little princesses, too, are patently adorable, especially when Margaret forgets to curtsey to her father once he's become king and has to be gently reminded by her sister Elizabeth.) There is a lot of comedy, arising not just from the therapies, but also from social awkwardnesses such as coming home to find the Queen in your sitting room. (What would you do, I wonder?)

The message is clear: repression and anger are bad; we must get in touch with our inner softnesses, dispel all childhood fears, and shake off those nasty Victorian neuroses in order to become a fit and modern country. Fair dinkums, as the speech therapist himself would say.

It's as beautifully shot as the game bag at Sandringham. London emerges from wispy fog; the crown estates loom and glower; even the therapist's surgery conspires to be as enormous and daunting as the shadowy recesses of Westminster Cathedral. It is a large and terrifying world, on the knife edge of war; and George VI will come to embody Britain.

The film moves ponderously - royally, in fact - apart from a few montages of the therapy sessions at work. It's enjoyable stuff, to see a King as a man, and to see that man overcoming his weaknesses to become more than a man. What little tension there is in the story is made up for by the superb acting; my only gripe being that someone obviously felt that more tension was needed and injected it with a slightly unnecessary scene in which the therapist's credentials were questioned by a grumpy archbishop.

Its veracity, too, doesn't bother me: it is, after all, a film. One doesn't want to turn into the sort of person who, on hearing the clock strike in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, says 'but they didn't have clocks in ancient Rome.'

All in all, then, a fine filly of a film; not a work of genius, but something that British filmmaking is justly proud of.

Black Swan: Review, and The Problem of Fantasy

I've only seen Swan Lake on the stage once, which was the Matthew Bourne version at a theatre in Moscow a few years ago. The audience was positively thrumming with jollity; it was a production that highlighted the light touches. Not so Black Swan.

Natalie Portman plays Nina, an ingenue who, still mother-bound, dreams of success (right at the beginning she sees a poster advertising the prima ballerina; Portman conveys her character's suppressed ambition brilliantly with the tiniest of moues.) She dances in a company full of rivalries (overt and hidden). Her director (Vincent Cassell in "I am European" mode) is so sexually manipulative it's a wonder anybody can stand up when he's around. Since he's European, he's obviously a scheming arch-fiend with a Plan. In order to pull out the cash from his uber-rich benefactors, who presumably haven't been coughing up quite so much since his previous darling (Winona Ryder! Who sticks things into her cheeks to prove she's a psychopath!) is almost over the hill, he decides to put on Swan Lake. It's over done, but the public love it.

Poor sweet little Nina! She sleeps with a music box by her bed that her mother winds up for her every night. How is she going to get in touch with her Dark Side so she can play the Black Swan effectively? Darth Vader comes in the form of a loose, free and easy ballerina from California, who takes Nina out to a party and - shock! - gives her drugs! And talks about sex! Nina begins to go doolally. She appears to actually be metamorphosing into a swan, at times, even finding a small black feather growing out of her shoulderblade. She is haunted, too, by a doppellganger, like James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner; or, if Cassell is Archimago, like a wicked Duessa. For this is a film about defined opposites: a chess board, with no grey areas in between.

One ought not, of course, to take Black Swan seriously. It's actually gloriously rendered, almost dripping with luxury and menace, and it's as tightly wound as a ballerina's dancing shoe.

It also brings up the interesting question: why is it only in dancing films that critics mutter, 'oh, she isn't a proper dancer?' Well, no - she's an actor, and actors tend to do things on screen and stage that they are not properly qualified to do in real life. This is something called 'acting', which is 'pretend', and it's something that most of us have done from a very early age. It's not as if watching The Bill people go - 'hang on - he's not a proper policeman - how can he possibly arrest that man?' Or, to take a closer example, pianists. People complain about 'the world portrayed' in films - since when has a film had to be true to life? This is a problem that seems increasingly to be infecting criticism (in general and on the page) - as if people have almost forgotten that a film or a book can be purely fantastical. Black Swan is a gloriously fruity, magic, wedding-cakey confection of tinsel and glitter. It's as real as the Easter Bunny, and just as sick-makingly enjoyable.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One: Review

Harry Potter Review

This, the seven-and-a-halfth in the leviathan-like franchise that the Harry Potter series has become, begins with a scene of rare poignancy. We’ve come a long way from butterbeer, Nearly Headless Nick and eleven year olds grinning open-mouthed at ‘Diagon Alley.’ Hermione Granger, as played by Emma Watson, is in the salubrious surroundings of her parents’ house. She hears them talking downstairs; goes down, and pulls out her wand. ‘Obliviate’, she says – and every single picture of herself in the house begins to fade away. She will have been as nothing to her mother and father. It works so well because all teenagers grapple with their desire to be away from their family – and yet we all know that it is only they who can ever truly love us. So Hermione departs, about to enter upon a quest that threatens the very existence of that safe, leafy street. ‘Obliviate’ echoes throughout the film: the teenage trio take on (briefly) other identities through polyjuice; they transfer affections; at one point near the beginning practically all the adolescent members of the Order of the Phoenix turn into clones of Harry: what could better express the desire for conformity and the need to forget oneself? The action of the rest of the film, too, is a remarkably good expression, too, of the boredom of teenagerdom: the characters don't do much apart from mope around fields and lie around on sofas. I certainly spent most of my adolescence doing either one or the other.

As a film, it worked remarkably well, given that the book itself is so busy. It was clean, and beautifully shot: the fragile tent of the three adventurers, with one light burning, set against enormous landscapes; the children (although not quite so childlike now) walking along a shoreline underneath a bridge; the swooping drive up to the Malfoys’ house. The characters in fact were often dominated by scenery, suggesting perhaps the titantic efforts they would have to make to achieve anything.

Things could be a little confusing at times, even for someone who’s read the book (like me – I read it the day it came out, but have forgotten most of its details.) Hence I did not know why Bellatrix Lestrange thought that Godric’s sword had been in her vault; nor could I at first distinguish what Jamie Campbell Bower’s character was doing – he was Grindelwald, as it turned out. And things could be a little embarrassing too (I won’t mention the hallucinatory silver-body-suit sex scene between an imaginary Harry and Hermione, as witnessed by a Horcruxed Ron Weasley). Also, the sign for the deathly hallows reminded me of the tube advert for a sperm bank, where a d and b are placed back to back to indicate - well, you can guess. But the tone of the film as a whole was remarkably consistent. A scene in the Ministry of Magic was particularly effective, as pamphlets calling for the elimination and control of Muggles swept magically off desks, and Dolores Umbridge and the new, Fascist Minister for Magic surveyed everything with grim glee. The highlight, though, was the shadow-puppet play which told the story of ‘The Deathly Hallows’. The fable itself comes off as rather dry in the book, without the power or depth of folklore. But on screen it appeared as an eerie, haunting tale about morality and our acceptance of death. Even wizards have no power over death. A Socratesian message, in the end: learn to accept, and greet death like an old friend. Except we know that we won’t be obliviated – we’ll stay in memories, photos, films, for as long as is humanly possible. This was a fine, thoughtful and challenging work, which sets us up fittingly for the epic possibilities of the next and final part.

New York, New York

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist is not a film that had come across my (admittedly rather book-filled) radar recently, but on Saturday night, casting around rather desperately for something to watch post-Doctor Who, I found it and was enthralled to such an extent that I actually shouted at the television screen, which is not something I do regularly (except when it's University Challenge and I know the answer).

The story itself is simple, the vicissitudes of a pair of hipster kids in New York city who spend a night trying to find a band and each other. It was charming and refreshing. And what really made it was not only the cityscapes, with those metallic, minatory towers spiking the skyline; nor the sleepy, monotoned Michael Cera; but also Kat Dennings, who, I have decided, is basically the most beautiful girl in the world, and sweet and funny and intelligent to boot. Her presence was luminous. More from her, please, and why have I never seen her in anything before? It also set me to thinking how hard it would be to make such a film in London. You would immediately have the class problem (which, though Nick is 'bridge and tunnel' and Norah a Jewish 'princess', doesn't seem to matter so much as they have the same tastes and accents). And London just doesn't look so cool at night. The metropolis at midnight conjures up scenes of ladettes vomiting outside Leicester Square tube, not cool indie types jumping in and out of taxis. And somehow, Nick and Norah made even drunkenness look cool: Norah's drunk friend popping out of a Christmas tree at a gay version of the Nativity (long story) was priceless, and one couldn't help but loving her, despite her total trollyedness. So that's a challenge: to make a hip, funny, unpretentious film set in London. Let's do it!

In literary terms, it has been a lackadaisical week: I have read most of John Updike's last book of short stories, and found them (mostly) mesmerising; although one story, in which an old man (and in this collection, they are all old men) goes back to his home town and then to a country club to have dinner with some old friends, I did find myself slightly flicking to see how many pages there were left. But on the whole, elegiac and effective.

Man and Superman

The Greek gods were strange beasts: petulant and childish, their immortality rendering every one of their actions futile. It's all been pre-ordained, anyway. All that the lesser gods can do is stall for time; when Zeus wakes up he'll see what's gone awry and sort everything out with a nod of his shaggy head. In Christian literature, God is often rather dull (just dip into Paradise Lost); as is heaven (singing all day in praise of God? Hmmmm.). Goodies are usually much more boring in literature than baddies. Such is the glamour of evil. In the Morte Darthur you'd much rather hang out with the complicated, sprightly, adulterous Lancelot than with prim, pious Galahad (something T H White picks up on in his marvellous The Once and Future King.)

This is true for superheroes, too. That's why Clark Kent's Superman makes my eyes droop, whilst the twisted Batman makes me raise a cheer. And that's why I absolutely loved Kickass. It's a loopy, lovely, weird cartoon, a joyful paean to adolescence as much as it is stuffed with Kill Billesque violence. Though discomfiting, there is no mistaking the two-dimensional quality of the world in which Kickass takes place, so the violence becomes part of the film's expected texture. Mr Sam Taylor-Wood, otherwise known as Aaron Johnson, is sweet and tender and sympathetic. He plays a dorky, speccy teen who puts on a wetsuit and calls himself Kickass - a real life superhero. Johnson is as thin and rubbery as his suit. As he twirls around his room trying out moves, you can't help but like him and admire him for overcoming his vulnerability. The real star of the movie, though, is the eleven year old Hit Girl. Born into revenge, she can run up walls, slice up bad guys and plan military operations with the finesse of the most brilliant general. She is like a malevolent demon, but is also curiously loveable: twisted by her father into an avenging machine, she has never had a chance to have a childhood.

These superheroes made me feel a lot better about the world than Superman or even the brooding Wingedrodentman: when calamities occur, there is no point hanging around waiting for a deus ex machina who may or may not deign to help. Kickass reminds us that self-reliance and resilience are the greatest qualities that anybody can have. I heartily recommend it, to anyone.