Oh to be in England

Further to my review of Match Point - and it has been interesting to note that the most spirited defense that anybody can muster of it is "I can't remember that I was so appalled" - I watched The Social Network last night, which is a far far far far far far far do re mi far far better film. EXCEPT for five minutes in which the excellent meathead twins row at the Henley regatta, and then attend a reception afterwards. Women are loitering in gigantic frothy hats, a string quartet is playing something blandly Mozartian, so you know you MUST be in England because all we ever do is go to receptions with big hats and string quartets, and an elderly English man claims that his daughter is "majoring in French literature" at Cambridge University. FAIL. DOUBLE FAIL. Seriously, if you're Aaron Sorkin, how difficult is it to get a British person to read one page of your script?

I am going to organise a field trip for notable American screenwriters to take a tour of the UK. I will show them around myself. Who's in?

Match [what is the] Point [?]

Last night I saw something which I just HAD to share with the group.

Now I've seen some bad movies in my time. I have sat through the remake of The Wicker Man, in which Nicolas Cage beats up a cult of lesbian beekeepers whilst dressed as a bear. The scars may never heal from enduring, as an impressionable teen, Heartbreak Hotel, in which a teenage Charlie Schlatter kidnaps Elvis in order to cheer up his mum (Elvis goes on to redecorate his house in the style of Graceland, and propel him to victory in the high school Battle of the Bands.) I have even seen the Mariah Carey vanity flick Glitter, notable for Ms Carey only being filmed from the 'good' side of her face, for the appearance of Max Beasley as a sexy xylophone player, and for both of them being acted off the screen by a cat. Last night, though, I saw the actual worst film I have ever seen in my life, and that film was Match Point.

This Woody Allen-penned and -directed thriller (OK and here we're running into trouble already. Would you rush to see a Michael Bay-penned and -directed romcom?) is set in the kind of London someone who has never been to England might come up with if his only source material was one Nancy Mitford novel and Wimbledon (the tournament, not the movie). All the characters have come straight out of the 1930s, with the exception of Paul Kaye, who briefly plays an estate agent from a 1970s Two Ronnies sketch. It is saying something when a Paul Kaye Two Ronnies cameo is the most up-to-date character in your 2005 movie. Back in the lead roles, Jonathan Rhys Meyers (apparently heavily medicated and struggling to produce even one convincing emotion from his arsenal of two or three) plays a retired tennis ace, allegedly a poor Irish boy but with an accent that could not just cut glass but create an entire crystal sculpture, who falls in love with (or seeks to financially exploit? unclear from JRM's "performance") sweet, dim but rich Emily Mortimer (hiding behind fringe, palpably embarrassed) but can't resist bonking Scarlet Johanssen (and at some point we should really open the debate: despite being sexy beyond previously existing human measurements, can she actually act? Those in favour: evidence please). If I tell you that his chat up line is "What's a beautiful American ping pong player doing mingling with the British upper classes?" you might get some idea, but you might also think that the line is supposed to be funny and IT ISN'T. IT'S A RED HOT SEXY CHAT UP SCENE. (Scarlet Johanssen has just beaten Mark Gatiss at ping pong, and one of the tangential pleasures of this unspeakable movie is seeing the parade of middling-league Brit stars who were SO EXCITED to be working with Woody Allen until they saw the script. So just as you think you might be suffocated into a coma of awfulness, it's Rupert Penry-Jones as a louche tennis pro! It's James Nesbitt as a mysteriously astute police officer!)

Tragic consequences ensue, but not before JRM has screwed ScarJo in a cornfield in the rain - SO English, just like all my summer holidays - and by candlelight, dousing her in baby oil as snow gently falls outside, and in an exciting bondage scenario where she blindfolds him with his tie and rips off all his clothes, pausing only to have a duscussion about the relative merits of cheese versus peanut butter as mousetrap bait with her elderly neighbour. At the time, you will be thinking WTF, little realising that the cheese vs peanut butter debate is of devastating importance later on. Sex with ScarJo begins to wane when she is transformed in the latter part of the film into a bitching, demanding harpy, constantly screeching WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO LEAVE HER while drinking from an assortment of seltzer bottles that I got freakishly obsessed by. WHO DRINKS THAT MUCH SELTZER? Meanwhile, back home, Emily Mortimer is desperate to get knocked up, pointing out, not unreasonably, that she wants three kids while she's young, but that this should not be a problem for a man with such a powerful serve. Clearly, either the wife or the mistress must go. But which? And how? And what will the consequences be?

Gentle reader, let me tell you. The consequences will be that people will die, and after people have died they will reappear and have a philosophical conversation with JRM who will quote Sophocles at them, and at that point you will be hit by the realisation that OH MY GOD, THIS FILM IS A HOMAGE TO CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. THAT'S WHY JRM WAS READING CRIME AND PUNISHMENT AT THE BEGINNING. BECAUSE WOODY ALLEN THINKS THAT THE TWO ARE LARGELY THE SAME, EXCEPT THAT CRIME AND PUNISHMENT COULD HAVE BEEN IMPROVED BY RASKOLNIKOV BONING SCARLET JOHANSSEN IN A CORNFIELD IN THE RAIN.

In Joe Queenan's excellent odyssey into American pop culture 'America', he coins the term 'scheissenbedauern' to describe "the disappointment one feels when exposed to something that is not nearly as bad as one hoped it would be." Watching this movie is the opposite of that feeling. Match Point is a perfect storm of terrible, the kind of terrible which can only be achieved when a hugely talented writer director assembles a hugely talented cast - well OK, but it does have Penelope Wilton in it - to make a film based on one of the greatest novels ever written and IT IS RAINING SHIT.

Of course, I cannot recommend highly enough that you see it.

Lesbian posture

Just back from seeing The Kids Are All Right, the lovely new American indie hit starring Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as a lesbian couple struggling to deal with the reappearance of sperm donor Mark Ruffalo in their and their children's lives. It's been getting rave reviews all over the place and pretty much lives up to them, in an American indie not much happens but people spend a lot of time talking about it sort of a way. The magic is in the performances. Ruffalo is disarmingly charming as essentially a bit of a clueless jerk, and you can see why everyone falls for him and is disillusioned by him in turn. And Bening and Moore are utterly believable as the lesbian couple who've been together for so long that they're like a pair of old socks - and then like old socks, they start to get holes. Anyway, it's a film well worth seeing. But that isn't the point of this post.

There's an arch reference in the script to lesbian porn casting straight women to pretend to be gay and of course that's exactly what's happened here. Bening and Moore have clearly worked hard on their lesbian-ness (Bening more butch, Moore more femme) which stretches to costume, hairstyles, make-up (or lack thereof) and posture. Posture? Yes posture. Did you know there was a lesbian posture? No, neither did I. I have met many lesbian women in my time, from a paralympic sports coach to a Grace Kelly-lookalike filmmaker, and I have never noticed that they had a particular kind of posture. But I couldn't help but notice that Moore in particular affected a kind of slump-shouldered slouch that seemed to say "Look how I am not interested in traditional feminine ways of holding myself!" Yes, that might just have been the character. Except that I have also been watching the BBC3 lesbian drama 'Lip Service', which is terrible, by the way. Of the three main leads, all are played by straight women, two make no concession whatsoever in appearance or body language to lesbianism (except when they have sex, during which the body language is pretty conclusive, although the angles of the heads and hands are all slightly off but that's another story) - and the third, "butch" one, has choppy hair and slouchy, affected posture.

Who knows, maybe it is just coincidence. But to experiment, if those of you who are not lesbians will just take a moment to "act lesbian" at your seats... Did any of you do anything weird with your shoulders? Are you sure? Because I'm starting to wonder if we have all internalised some kind of odd belief about the way lesbians stand (or sit, I suppose) which only emerges in straight-acted lesbian dramas.

Music Monday

A short Music Monday today. I've been finding myself singing this song a lot lately for obvious reasons, and it reminded me how fantastic the whole of the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid soundtrack is (also check out the brilliant 'South American Getaway'), and thence how fantastic the whole of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is, one of my favourite films for a long time and probably only not now because it's so long since I've watched it, and so how I absolutely must watch it again. But in the meantime, here's the classic bicycle scene with Paul Newman and Katharine Ross looking impossibly young and beautiful:



Oh screw it, here's 'South American Getaway' as well:

For the love of Brosnan

Lalala I haven't watched it I HAVEN'T WATCHED IT.

Well what the hell else have I been watching then?

Pierce Brosnan movies. Obviously. And I have been writing about my admiration / love / obsession / pathological disorder about Pierce Brosnan over on the Beat Website. Which has lots of other fantastic and slightly more serious articles for you to read. Once you have finished reading mine, naturally.

What's that you say? A sample, so that you can decide whether to click or not? Very well...

Pierce Brosnan is everything a movie star should be: handsome, debonair, with perfect teeth and a full head of hair, able to keep his head when all around him are losing theirs and blaming it on the script / director / co-star / catering, this is a man who even managed to retain his dignity, not to mention his sex appeal, while dressed as a lobster on The Muppet Show.

Ah, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on.

Prematurely balding actors needed

Rumours of wifi in Hay proving unsubstantiated, I will in fact be blogging all about it now that I've returned. That's an epic post which needs proper attention, so just for fun in the meantime, I will share, without comment (none needed), this job advert a friend of mine (young woman, full head of hair) was recently sent:

Prematurely Balding Actors Needed for THE Film of 2010, CASTING CALL

London, Gloucestershire Unpaid (Expenses Paid)

Description

The film will last approximately 25 minutes, it will be dense, muddy and frenzied, have something of the high school teen flick about it, and be filmed entirely at night. Centred around the resurrection of EPOS and his last days on Earth, the film will be a howl clad in pre-ripped denim, the script puked out by the actors as though attempting to break from the confines of their bodies or like a speech from the scaffold with a noose about the neck, an offering from the ‘Abandoned Generation’, writ large. ‘Please excuse our unsightly, real, protruding guts’ etc.

A band of prematurely balding outlaws try themselves as pet mediums and style themselves as saints, spin donuts in car parks, spit black and howl under the crumbling stars.

The film is to be shot between the 20th the 29th August in London and Gloucestershire. Whilst we are unfortunately unable to pay you for your time, you will be chauffeured, fed and sheltered alongside some of the finest company to be found on the island.

Roles:

EPOS THE DEAD – (age 17 – 25) Charismatic messiah figure, reluctantly resurrected. Hollers spells. Chews Oreos/ Spits Black. Levitates.

THE OUTLAWS – (ages 17 – 25) Inhabited by tapeworms that take sporadic control of their vocal chords and bring on convulsions. Pates gleaming in the kitchen light under thinning hair. Spin donuts in heavily modified cars - Body kits, underglow, mesh and grills.

SON WOUNDS OF EPOS - (ages 17- 25) Grown from portions of EPOS’ ass. Lousy copies, incredulous bald patches, tonsures abound. Their speech deteriorated like an over copied tape.

Weeks later...

...and I'm still obsessed with this:



I'm so up to date. In about two months I'll blog about how cool it was that The Hurt Locker swept the board at the Oscars.

That old romcom dinner cliche

A film which is much better than you might expect, though not exactly braving the dizzy heights of "good", is Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous. Mainly I liked it for the following reasons:

- I have a bit of a weakness for Sandra Bullock doing funny (as opposed to Sandra Bullock doing serious, which sends me screaming to the hills.)
- Funny Sandra Bullock gets to wear a lot of exceedingly stupid outfits in this film.
- It's a romantic comedy with no romance. SB's character is not rewarded by social acceptance in the form of love at the end of the film, as per every other movie about women; instead she has a make-under, dumps the stupid outfits, goes back to wearing trouser-suits and sensible hair, and makes friends with her equally unglamorous female bodyguard.
- There's a scene set in a Las Vegas bar filled with female impersonators.
- The presence of William Shatner and Abraham Benrubi.

Not enough to get your running to the DVD shop I agree, but say you were ill, and it was being repeated on ITV2, you could do worse than switching it on and seeing if anything in the first twenty minutes made you laugh. Laugh might be too much. Smile, anyway.

Having said that, I couldn't help but notice the egregious inclusion of the one scene that no romantic comedy is complete without: the moment early on where the woman goes back to her empty apartment and eats a lonely dinner while miserable music plays. Think of any romantic comedy you like. Say Sandra Bullock again in the otherwise great fun Two Weeks' Notice, so pathetic that her local Chinese takeaway knows her order by heart. Or Jennifer Lopez in The Wedding Planner with her obsessive compulsive meal, perfectly neatly presented with hospital-corners-folded napkin. (Now seems as good a time as any to mention that The Wedding Planner is so awful I cried at the end from the sheer futility of living a life that had included watching it.) I can't be bothered to list them all, but once you notice, it's impossible to unnotice, and now my heart sinks when the female lead closes the door of her apartment, says hello as often as not to her cat, and the weepy music swells as she opens the fridge.

They have to play the weepy music, because otherwise there's a risk that you might notice that the female lead has a really cool apartment in the centre of a really cool American city - New York, or San Francisco say - and it really doesn't seem like such a miserable option to sit down in front of her really cool product-placement flatscreen TV and stuff her face with delicious food. In fact some might argue that one of the perks of being single and living alone is that you get to eat exactly what you want, when you want, and there is no such thing as table manners. If I ever make a romantic comedy, there will be happy, joyful music when the heroine eats alone, and we will only graduate to the weepy stuff when the batteries of her vibrator have run flat or some heavy boxes need lifting.

It's Complicated...

...could have been just another so-so romcom, but is elevated way above its station by charming, perfectly-timed performances from Meryl Streep (maybe the world's best film actor of either gender? Answers below, but if you want to contradict me you have to watch 'Doubt' first) and Alec Baldwin (almost as good as he is in '30 Rock'.) Plus there is one joke in it which alone is worth the price of admission, and had my parents, sister and myself laughing so long and hard we missed the whole of the next scene. Alec Baldwin is talking about the side effects of his medication, and then, well...

Seriously, who is a better film actor than Meryl Streep? I want to know.

Inconceivable!

Last night I got together with friends to inaugurate a little film club where each of us shows the others a favourite film, projected onto the living room wall with a proper DVD projector, very exciting.

My friend the Guardian journalist showed us an Italian film called Dear Diary, written, produced, directed by and starring Nanni Moretti as himself. Not nearly as self-indulgent as this sounds, the film was in thee parts: the first, a meditative section in which Moretti quietly rides his moped around Rome, backed by a beautiful selection of music including Leonard Cohen and Keith Jarrett; the second, a more narrative section in which Moretti and friend tour a series of Italian islands, looking for a place where they can work in peace, before the friend goes insane for lack of access to his favourite soap operas (I can sympathise); and the third, a true recounting of the year Moretti spent searching for a cure for a mysterious itch, getting misdiagnosis after misdiagnosis before discovering that he has cancer. Crossing boundaries between fiction and documentary, the film had a dream-like quality but also a healthy amount of Woody Allen-like humour and I enjoyed it very much. Then again, I have had proper training in watching boring films in which nothing happens (otherwise known as my Visual Anthropology MA) so my views on non-narrative film should be taken with a healthy shake of salt.

My choice? The Princess Bride. I had obviously not counted the number of Guardian journalists in the room (two, or to put it another way, 50% of participants). Either that or I care nothing for my credibility, and I refer you to the Strictly Come Dancing posts on this blog for you to decide. Anyway, for those who have not seen it (why? why?) The Princess Bride is a fabulous, over-the-top fairy tale pastiche comprising everything you'd hope for, from pretty floaty blondes in long dresses to pirates, giants, sword fights, albino masters of torture, and rodents of unusual size. It's also got a great selection of cameos from the likes of Peter Cook and Billy Crystal, and the worst special effects you will ever see (check out the very human-shaped rodent feet.) And I adore the script. "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." I think I managed to convince both Guardian writers but the other film clubber (barrister) merely offered: "I can see why it's a cult classic, because it is so bad". Hmm.

Afterwards I was thinking about my choice and why it is that I had gone for a film I loved when I was 12, given that that was ahem years ago now. I have seen better films in the interim, sharper scripts, more striking cinematography, better acting (Cary Elwes takes a lead role, need I say more.) In the end I realised that for a film to be a "favourite" I need to have seen it several times, so that it goes from appreciated to loved. It needs a chance to become a part of me. When I was a child and a teen, if I loved a film I watched it over and over again - films like When Harry met Sally, or Withnail and I. These days I almost never watch a film twice. there are too many fresh films I want to see. So while I might be bowled over by, say The Lives of Others, I am not going to buy the DVD and watch it until I can do all of the dialogue in the original German with my back to the screen.

How about you? What's your favourite film and how old were you the first time you saw it?

'Moon' + Q&A, Screen on the Green 19.07.09

Now this is going to be tricky, because I want you to go and see this film, but I also don't want to tell you anything about it, because the less you know, the more you'll enjoy it.

The film in question is 'Moon'. I went spontaneously yesterday afternoon, because I was walking past the Screen on the Green and noticed that they were having a Q&A after the movie with the director, Duncan Jones, and there is very little I enjoy more than a Q&A with a director. But one of the things I enjoy at least as much as a Q&A with a director is a good sci fi movie, and I didn't have anything else planned for Sunday afternoon, so all in all this was a bit of a result.

Here is as much of the story as I am willing to tell you, and I would urge you not to find out more before you go. It is the future. Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is nearing the end of his three year contract, working alone on a mining station on the dark side of the moon. All he's had for company over this time is a friendly robot (voiced by Kevin Spacey) and occasional video messages from his wife and daughter. He watches old sitcoms, he is whittling a model village as his hobby, he plays ping pong against the wall, and every so often he goes onto the surface to deal with breakdowns in the otherwise automated mining equipment. And he is fed up. You'd be fed up too if you'd been woken up every morning for three years by a musical alarm clock playing 'The One and Only' by Chesney Hawkes. He's only got two weeks left on base, and things have just started to get weird...

Anyway, it's a terrific, intelligent, scary, funny film, made on a shoestring budget (£2.5 million, which is nothing for a sci-fi movie), heavy on character and light on explosions. Much of the success of the film is down to Rockwell, who puts in a great performance as Sam Bell, and it was only after the film ended that I looked back and realised how good his performance had been. He makes it look easy and natural when it's anything but. Meanwhile, in part because the film is so low budget, the special effects are done the old-fashioned way, using models and camera trickery instead of CGI, and it's all the more atmospheric for it. A film like this stands or falls on its believability, and the simplicity and tangibility of the models and sets really helps with this. Equally, when the film takes on a more violent edge, the pain looks seriously painful. The film's physicality is so brutal that I kept flinching in my seat. But it's never over the top either, so you can't dismiss it. It has a fantastically understated aesthetic which packs a bigger punch than films with far more money to throw at spectacular effects - everything that needs to be real is so real that it's easy to buy the unreal elements. It's exactly the way sci fi should be.

Afterwards, Duncan Jones was brought on to answer questions. I was nervous. He's the son of one of the world's most famous stars (David Bowie*) and he's a film director: two very high risk indicators for being a self-obsessed arrogant cocktard. Or at the very least having terrible hair. But he's lovely, and his hair is completely normal. He answered all the questions with modesty and a fair amount of nervous laughter, and as it turned out it was one of the most interesting Q&As I've been to (and I have been to a lot), because when you're talking about the art of making films, little is more interesting than how to put together a convincing film, set in space, when all you've got to spend is the paperclip budget for the pre-production of Angels and Demons. Though again, I can't give any concrete examples as it would ruin the surprises in the film.

You could feel the audience warm to him very quickly, so much so that there was an audible rise in tension when a pedant in the audience got him into the following exchange:

Pedant: I think you'll find that there's no atmosphere on the moon, and so you wouldn't actually have been able to hear the trucks driving around.
[collective eye-rolling from audience]
Jones: Yes, I know. We tried it without sound and with no stars in the sky, but because it was so cheap it really did look like someone pulling a toy cart across a cardboard moon.
Pedant: Kubrick managed it in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
[Loud muttering throughout auditorium.]
Jones: I promise you, I tried it and it didn't work. But you can always watch it on DVD and turn the sound down.
[Applause]

So, fab film and charming director. I urge you to go and see Moon, and / or get the DVD (volume controls of your choice) as the commentary is bound to be fascinating. Also, it would be a personal favour to me, as Jones will use profits as funding for his next project, a Bladerunner homage based in Berlin, and that's a film I really want to see.

*UPDATE: Filled with terror that I have inadvertently slagged off David Bowie, my first ever crush. I would cheerfully eat my dinner off his feet. However, being a child of anyone famous can do odd things to a person, like growing a potato in a shoebox. Also, Bowie does sometimes have quite odd hair.

Tearjerkers

Every week on his blog The Medium Is Not Enough, Rob (aka MediumRob, when he comments here) posts a TV or film related meme, which usually I answer in the comments section there. This week's meme, however, deserves a post here all of its own. The question simply is: what's the most tear-jerking movie you've ever seen and why?

So here's the thing. I am a full-on, unashamed movie blubber. If you are going to see a sad film with me, bring extra tissues because I will be needing them. I don't think there is anything that makes me cry more than films, except perhaps really unhelpful customer service, and missing trains, but that's a whole different post.

I should probably warn here - this post will no doubt be full of spoilers, because I am going to talk about very sad films and what makes them very sad, and maybe some of the films in question you won't know are sad or why. So reader beware...

The first film I remember making me cry was Out of Africa, which I saw in the cinema when it came out in 1985. I was nine. As I recall the bit that really got to me is when Meryl Streep can't bring herself to throw the handful of earth on Robert Redford's grave. I managed to hold it together until we got outside, but then in the street outside the Swiss Cottage Odeon my whole body went into judders. My oldest sister asked me what the matter was, and I just about managed to say "It's sooooo sad" before I was engulfed in huge, racking sobs.

From then on my sister instigated the tear test, in which, at any potentially tear-jerking juncture in any film we were watching, she would shove her finger underneath my eyelid to see if I was crying yet. She also gained huge pleasure from taking me into her bedroom, playing the theme from Watership Down on her record player, and telling me the saddest story she could think of, usually involving a dying animal, until I wept.

There were, of course, any number of films which got me teary in the interim, but the next full-on sob-fest that stayed in my memory was Beaches, which I watched by myself on video in the living room of the family home. Looking back, I can't remember what exactly it was about Beaches that got to me, but I suspect it has to do with the protracted and painful death of selfless but beautiful Barbara Hershey from cancer while her traitorous but repentant best friend Bette Midler looked on and then wrote a soppy song about it. Yes, that's probably it. Again I made every possible effort to hold it in and managed to get across to the video player, press stop, and get halfway back across the room before collapsing into floods of tears. What was significant about Beaches is that it was the first time that I knew *even as I was crying* that I had been manipulated by a shamelessly sentimental heap of tripe.

I got older, I got tougher, I learnt the ways of the world. The crying did not stop. If anything, it got worse.

Take Atonement, for example, which I went to see with a new friend, after which - despite (or because of?) having read the book, and knowing exactly what was coming - I was so hysterical I couldn't leave my seat in the cinema, and had to wait while the whole of the rest of the room filed out, nudging each other and whispering "what's the matter with her?" Or Miss Austen Regrets, which was on TV a while back, and is about Jane Austen of course, looking back over her life as a spinster author and wondering whether the brilliance of her career was an adequate replacement for the lack of romantic love and and children. Inexplicably I identified with her predicament - I know, it's weird - and I cried pretty much all the way through from the beginning, so when Jane Austen actually died (she does die at the end, I hope that's not a spoiler) it barely registered.

But I think the most embarrassing of all was The Lives of Others, which my parents took me to see on my 31st birthday, a few months after I had signed the publishing deal for Gods Behaving Badly. In the lobby on the way in, we happened to run into Dan Franklin - my editor and the head of Jonathan Cape - and his wife in the lobby. My parents had never met them, so we chatted pleasantly for a while before taking our seats. As chance would have it, we were in the row directly behind them. For those of you who don't know, The Lives of Others is one of the most brilliant and unbearably sad films made in the last few years, filled with moments of selfishness and selflessness, love, betrayal, misunderstanding, forgiveness, self-sacrifice, death, redemption - any one of which could make me cry, but all at once? I cried my eyes out in the film, but managed to pull myself together and thought I was going to get out of the cinema OK, until I saw the name of one of the characters (Christa-Maria, the writer's wife, for those who know the film) in the end credits, which set me off again. Which normally would not have been a problem. My parents are used to this. However, what doesn't usually happen is that I have to stand in the lobby of the cinema making small talk with my publisher while chocking on vast, engulfing sobs. I was crying too hard to even be able to say goodbye. Eventually I sort of waved and walked away, but then - but then!! - almost immediately walked into an old schoolfriend of mine who I hadn't seen for some years, who was there with her new husband who I had never met, and had to do a whole other round of small talk ("How was the wedding? How lovely!") with tears streaming down my face.

I could go on, but I won't. Suffice to say that I love a sad movie. And there is nothing worse than a film which promises a wealth of weeping but does not deliver. Love Story, I'm looking at you.

The I Can't Be Bothered To Type It Again Book Dictatorship: Next Month: The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie

Last year, I spent the entire year trying to write a funny book set in a 1930s girls' boarding school, before finally having to abandon hope and the book, which is a very painful and difficult thing for a writer to do, but possibly the reason I couldn't finish the book is that The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie has already been written, and it is impossible to improve upon perfection. Damn you, Muriel Spark!

My first exposure to Miss Jean Brodie was via the justifiably famous film starring Maggie Smith. It is one of the very first films I can remember watching, and was probably shown to me in the misguided belief that if a film is about children, it must be for children. Which is emphatically not the case. But even so, I remember being completely absorbed by, and envious of, the blooming sophistication of the schoolgirl characters as they grow up. The latter part of the film has sex in it, and this was mesmerising and slightly disgusting. Only later did I realise that, ironically, the earlier part of the film is about children being desperately curious about sex but slightly disgusted by it.

It was only years later that I read the book, but even that was a long time ago now, and my memories of the novel and of the film have melted into one another. I picked the book off the shelf yesterday (nice narrow spine) and started reading it again, and was immediately reminded of what makes it so brilliant: the impeccably observed, hilarious dialogue; and the character of Miss Jean Brodie herself, possibly the most fascinating in modern literature.

Published in 1961 but set in the 1930s, it's about the sexual awakening of a group of girls at a time when they weren't supposed to have sexual awakenings, but it's more than that: it's an intellectual and political awakening too, and an examination of the attractions and terrors of fascism, the fascination and fragility of power, a study of the social danger that is an intelligent, sexual, unmarried woman, and an exploration of what happens to that woman when she starts to age.

It isn't perfect, no matter what I might have said in my first paragraph, and I imagine it will divide readers, but that makes for a more fun discussion. Meet back here to talk about it on Thursday May 21st.

Oh god. You probably all did it for A Level, didn't you?

PS Thank you all for your brilliant discussion of A Month In The Country, it totally makes this book club worth doing.

PPS How brilliant is that poster?

What is a bad movie?

As you might remember, I went to see a series of mediocre movies earlier this year, all of which were considered good enough to get nominations and awards thrown at them, but were not actually good enough to hold my attention in any convincing way.

Over the last fortnight, in contrast, I have taken myself to see Duplicity and He's Just Not That Into You, both of which were completely disposable movies, and yet, for a couple of hours, totally entertaining and fun.

Duplicity is a stupid movie about industrial espionage, and He's Just Not That Into You is a stupid movie about romance. Duplicity is the classier affair: the double-crossing (or are they?) leads (Julia Roberts and Clive Owen) look gorgeous, the supporting actors (notably Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giametti) are smartly-cast scene-stealers, the direction is slick and glossy, the script sharp if shallow. If you liked Ocean's 11 and you liked The Thomas Crown Affair - and who didn't? - you will like this film. You may not remember it all that clearly five minutes after leaving the cinema, but you will like it. In the end it's a Tony Gilroy film, which is pretty much a guarantor of quality. He wrote the Bourne movies, he wrote Michael Clayton, and I've blogged about his fabulous ice dance romance The Cutting Edge before. (Toe pick!) You will not go wrong with Duplicity, but it's not going to win any Oscars.

Then there's He's Just Not That Into You. You need to peg your expectations around the mark suggested by a movie based on a self-help book based on an episode of Sex and the City. Pretty low, in other words. And yet my pretty low expectations were pleasingly surpassed. Feminist readers, or women with even a shred of self-respect left, may have to hold their noses around the Ginnifer Goodwin storyline (perky and somewhat thick hopeless romantic is taught the rules of dating by a self-satisfied Scott Baio ugly-alike who turns out, of course, to be the man for her - it's hardly a spoiler if you have ever seen a movie before). However the Jennifer Aniston and Jennifer Connolly strands were surprisingly moving, thoughtful and mature, and both actresses put in excellent performances (it's an aside, but: is Jennifer Aniston the most underrated actress of her generation? She is consistently excellent in both comic and dramatic roles.) And for male viewers dragged along by their girlfriends, Scarlett Johansson is ridiculously sexy. Those tits! That bum! Those lips! That hair!

In conclusion? I would rather sit through Duplicity or He's Just Not That Into You two or three more times than see The Reader or Benjamin Button again. Remind me which are the bad movies?

Then, last night, I went to Nicko and Joe's Bad Film Club, which I have also blogged about before. Last night they showed Leprechaun In The Hood, the fifth movie in the Leprechaun franchise, a Leprechaun rap musical if you can imagine that. Of course, it was bad. As bad as only a movie that might choose to name the lead rapper hero 'Postmaster Pete - because I deliver a positive message' can be. As bad as only a movie with a sex scene between a leprechaun and a fat, unconvincing transvestite can be. As bad as only a movie that stars Coolio as himself can be. I mean, BAD.

And yet - despite Nicko, Joe and guest Rufus Hound's excellent commentary - it was disappointing. It was the wrong kind of bad. The problem with Leprechaun In The Hood is that it was obvious that nobody involved in the film at any level thought that it was good. Everything about it drips cynicism and carelessness. It was cheap, nonsensical and at no point did anybody even bother to focus the camera. It looked like it had been cobbled together on someone's lunchbreak with the direct intent of taking as much money as possible from the pockets of fourteen-year-old boys. It couldn't truly be bad because it was never intended to be good.

A really, truly bad film needs to have been believed in by somebody. It needs to have been crafted and nurtured. Effort must go into its creation; vision and dedication. And despite this it must turn out to be a horrendous, laughable turkey. Only then can the true hubris of bad filmitude be achieved. Did Mariah Carey think that Glitter was going to be a pointless heap of crap? No, she thought it was going to showcase her incredible talent for all the world to see. Glitter was sacrificed on the altar of Mariah Carey's ego. This is the kind of bad film I want to see.

Which is why I have such high hopes for next month's Bad Film Club offering The Wicker Man. Did Nicholas Cage turn up in the morning thinking "I don't care, just show me the money"? Did Neil LaBute think "Who gives a toss how crap this is as long as people pay to see it?" That's Oscar-winner Nicholas Cage and multiple award-winner Neil LaBute. No: they thought they were onto a good one here. The very best bad movies are made by talented people, blinded by ego, making awful decisions with the loftiest of goals. Think of almost any Kevin Costner movie made from 1995 onward.

Which is why He's Just Not That Into You could never have been an entirely bad film. It's based on a self-help book. Thus it fulfills its intentions admirably. But is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button any kind of success as a huge-budget cinematographic feast of an adaptation of an F Scott Fitzgerald story? Well, you'd need to see it to find out. And I really can't recommend that...

A Long Hard Look in the PVR

Having persuaded my PVR to take early retirement (read: sacked it for refusing to record programmes I really wanted to see, despite still having several gigs left on the clock), and installed a shiny new one in time to for Red Riding tonight, I can now play: what do I think I want to watch, but actually don't want to watch? Or to put it another way: which programmes did I record but never bother to look at? A portrait of my own self-delusion through the medium of television awaits.

- 1 x ep of Free Agents
- Swing Time
- Richard III
- King Lear (? don't even know which production)
- Wallace and Gromit Christmas special
- Lark Rise to Candleford Christmas Special
- The Good Girl
- entire series of Paul Merton in India
- True Stories: Forbidden Lies
- 1 x ep of What To Eat Now (I know the presenter, although apparently not well enough to go the extra mile and actually watch his show)
- Hellboy
- The Long Walk to Finchley
- Imagine: Oliver Sacks (apparently I can imagine him just fine by myself)
- In The Shadow Of The Moon
- Walk The Line
- The Sweet Smell of Success
- Holes

In conclusion: I think I like movies. I think I like documentaries. I even seem to think I like comedy, a bit. But what I actually like are drama series. In the time that I've had a PVR, I've made my merry way through any number of series of Doctor Who, ER, Mad Men, The Sopranos, The Wire, Gilmore Girls, Six Feet Under, Northern Exposure, Being Human, The West Wing, Heroes etc etc, and indeed have purchased a whole new box so that I don't have to miss any more of episodes of these programmes ever ever. I have been obsessively watching Heroes when I could have been watching The Sweet Smell of Success or In The Shadow Of the Moon. What was I thinking? Seriously? It's actually quite sweet that I think I have taste, when really I have no taste at all.

Thing is, I *still* think I want to see all of those things. Just, you know, not right now. Some of them I've had for years, and despite all evidence to the contrary I genuinely appear to think that one day I'm going to watch them. I am completely delusional. Sadder than that, if any of them came onto TV when I was in, I probably would watch them, but there is something about *owning* them which makes me not bother. There is probably some kind of lesson here about why marriages go sour.

All of which means that I'll keep my old PVR in storage because I believe that the urge to see a decent Jennifer Aniston movie will overwhelm me enough to make me reconfigure my entire "home cinema" (ancient second hand television, cheapo DVD player that has subtitles switched on as default so I have to turn them off by hand, irritating me every time I watch anything, and shiny new PVR which [I hope] actually works, as yet unproven - BUT in preference to real cinema, nobody eating loudly, talking, or taking mobile phone calls, aside from me) in order to facilitate this, when being within two button's push of the same was too much effort.

Now: what are the chances of me actually watching Red Riding?

How much am I looking forward to In The Loop?

In The Loop, for those who are not in the loop (ha ha! sometimes I even impress myself), is Armando Ianucci's big screen version of the brilliant The Thick Of It. You can watch a clip of it here.

Warning: contains swearing. Lots and lots of swearing. And a slightly irritating advert for Toshiba.

UPDATE: I just watched it again and the advert was for something incredibly sinister involving a dead child and I would just like to point out that this wasn't the "slightly irritating advert for Toshiba" I saw the first time. I am not that flippant.

Curiouser and Curiouser, said Benjamin

I had a conversation a few weeks ago with two friends who were complaining of the trend, in reviews, to describe everything as either superlatively good or stupendously bad, when the reality is that the vast majority of things are merely OK. True. On the other hand, about two thirds of the way through any given OK movie - especially if it is a very long OK movie - you do start losing the will to live, which does tend to propel one's verdict of OK into speedy depths of stupendously bad. Accordingly, David Fincher, director of The Curious Incident of Brad Pitt In The Nighttime, chooses precisely two thirds into the movie to supply us with the most stunningly beautiful shot of Brad Pitt aboard a sailing ship that you can possibly imagine. I'm not sure if it was worth the £10 admission ticket, but at least it stopped me from sharpening popcorn and trying to sever a vein with it.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Bunny is about a man (Brad Pitt) who is born old and spends the rest of his life getting younger. At around the age of ten (or 70, body-wise) he falls in love with Cate Blanchett, who is living her life in the conventional direction. There. You now can fill in every possible blank in your own head, because this is a film with absolutely no surprises in it whatsoever. No surprises, no characterisation, not a huge amount of wit, a lot less plot than you might expect, in fact nothing particularly memorable, or even all that curious, except maybe the chap who gets struck by lightning seven times, seven times equalling seven laughs, which you will be needing.

To appease my pro-mediocrity friends, though, I must say that it looks ravishing. The sets are magnificent, and the make-up / CGI aging / rejuvenating of the leads is jaw-dropping (the "20-something" Cate Blanchett had me almost leaping from my seat yelling 'I'll have what she's having' even if 'what she's having' turns out to be someone following me around photoshopping my face 24 hours a day). Also, there are entertaining interludes to pass the time. For example, I liked the bit with Tilda Swinton in it (or SWINTON, as she must now forever be called), even though she is basically irrelevant to the story and could easily have been cut. Plus it's quite fun watching Brad Pitt get progressively hotter until he suddenly turns into an acne-ridden teenager played by someone who is no way going to grow up as hot as Brad Pitt, and then a baby, who might, if he is lucky, but who is that lucky? Brad Pitt, that's who.

There's not much else to say. Basically this film contains enough enjoyment to keep you awake long enough to eye up Brad Pitt in his younger years, but if you fancy Cate Blanchett you may well find yourself drifting off to napland around the time they start giving her wrinkles.

As an aside, I think I am getting too old and cranky to go to the cinema any more. Quite aside from the ludicrous price of the tickets and the refreshments (£2.50 for a bottle of water?!), I was so infuriated with the constant talking from all the people around me that I had to shush the auditorium twice. And I am not the shushing type. Plus the person next to me's phone rang just as Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett were finally about to have sex. Here's a question for the floor: have movie manners got worse in recentish years, or have I just got grumpier?

Interim

I'm going out. I'm running slightly late.

I do, however, have a review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Boring up my sleeve for you later. There is a clue to my opinion in this post: can you find it?

Where Are The Bafta Babes?

Watched the whole of the Baftas last night. I find awards ceremonies more mesmerising than I should. I love playing Fug or Fab with the dresses, being surprised by which of the award presenters were terrified (Matthew McFadyen) and unsurprised by which were drunk / stoned / insane (Sharon Stone), I love guessing who will win (it was obvious Slumdog Millionaire would go home with everything) and getting irate when the deserving are robbed (Kristin Scott Thomas! Kristin Scott Thomas!) and there is always an excellent speech or two (Mickey Rourke). This year's bonus ball was a sprightly Mick Jagger presenting best film and making a very witty speech beforehand too.

Here's my gripe though (there had to be one): where were the women? I mean, it was a slightly less all-white affair this year, thanks to the Indian crew of Slumdog Millionaire, plus Noel Clarke and Steve McQueen picking up gongs, but aside from the actress categories, the only female winners were Jean Black and Colleen Callaghan for make-up and hair on Benjamin Button, plus one female producer (Esther May Campbell) on the two-person team who won the award for best short film. This means they were almost outnumbered by the two studios who won an award. Surely inanimate objects should not be competing for prize numbers with female humans? And checking the list of nominees there were very few women there either.

Now I know it's boring to be feminist feminist bang on drum, and we supposedly live in a post-feminist era where all opportunities are equal etc etc, but don't tell me that this is because women are not interested in film-making. (I'm assuming nobody here will go down the women are not good enough route.) I will accept a tiny nod towards film-making involving anti-social hours that are hard if you have young kids. Though they seem to get actresses enough. Not to mention hair and make-up. (Maybe that's the real question here: why don't more men go into hair and make-up? Oh, my mistake, almost all the other nominees for that category were men as well.) It's incredibly depressing that almost ten years into the 21st century film is still a man's game, and largely a white man's game at that.

I may mention all this a few years hence when I'm picking up my Best Screenplay Bafta for mumble mumble haven't started it yet. Watch out male-dominated film world! Here I come! Also, I am shit at hair and make-up.

Reader Getting Barcelona. Or something.

It won't have escaped the attention of UK readers that, it being Oscar season, enough good films to keep us going for an entire year are being released within one month, guaranteeing that even the most dedicated film-goers will miss a decent chunk of them, and have to spend the rest of the year watching Knocked Up 2: Knocked Down - The Domestic Violence Years!* and wishing they were at Slumdog Millionaire / Milk / Revolutionary Road / Frost Nixon / Doubt / The Wrestler / The Reader / Rachel Getting Married / Vicky Cristina Barcelona instead. To help you in your film-choosing misery, I am thus reviewing the films off that list which I have already seen, so that you don't (necessarily) have to. It's novel, it's innovative, it's a public service.

Anyway.

1. The Reader. Begins with the most graphic and protracted vomiting scene since John Hurt, or possibly Ian Holm (I can't tell them apart), spewed up the Alien in Alien. Through his chest! But you know, that's what vomiting feels like. Anyway, this scene is somewhat less necessary than that one, given as The Reader (surprisingly) is not about a monstrous vomit creature. My first piece of advice: arrive ten minutes late. As for the rest of the movie, it is mostly remarkable for the amount of time Kate Winslet spends in the nude, showing off her authentic body hair. If she wins the Oscar, it will be for services to armpit hair, in the tradition of giving Oscars to beautiful women for playing ugly (cf Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman etc.) Kate doesn't play it that ugly - she has a perfectly honed gym body, as you'd expect on a 1950s German bus conductor - but she does walk like a sack of potatoes on legs, to emphasise her unprettiness. Other irritations include the syrupy music poured over absolutely everything to let you know how you feel, as we wouldn't want to risk someone coming out a post-holocaust movie with the wrong opinion, because that would be WRONG, and the fact that everyone in the film affects a German accent, to emphasise that the film is set in Germany, and about Germans, otherwise you might forget. More positively, the film is absolutely competently executed in every way and not actively a waste of your time, and there is loads of sex.

2. Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Everything you'd expect from a good Woody Allen movie (forget the last decade or two) - except less. Intellectual discussion - but less of it! Furrow-browed angsting - but less of it! Awkward social interaction - but less of it! Clever humour - but less of it! And so on. The only thing there is more of is more pretty young women (Penelope Cruz, Scarlet Johannson and Rebecca Hall) indulging in more tortured love triangles with a more sexy than Woody lead Javier Bardem. You know, that does make it worth it. But manage your expectations.

3. Rachel Getting Married. OK, so this is the one to see. From the title and the casting of Anne Hathaway I was expecting a chick flick nightmare, but what I got was a highly intelligent, beautifully performed, wonderfully directed film which is about as close as you can get to actually going to a wedding without having to eat any sugared almonds. The entire film takes place over a wedding weekend for a huge wedding, and is filmed handheld and semi-improvised so that you feel like another guest. The "front" story is Hathaway's return from rehab for her sister's wedding and the impact that has on her family. This is bravely handled by the screenplay which refuses to give you obvious "good guy" and "bad guy" characters for you to side with or hate. I spent half the movie in painful sympathy with Hathaway, and the other half wanting to slap her. Wait a moment, that's how I feel about myself. The "back" story is the wedding itself which provides way more than a living backdrop. It's a wonderful seething mass of wedding, which, like a real wedding, is alternately sentimental, moving, boring, exciting, going on for far too long, punctuated with moments of magic, padded out with semingly endless speeches and so on. All of the incidental music in the film is "real" ie comes from wedding guests and band practising, performing or just noodling away. I thought this film was fantastic and a virtuoso effort from Jonathan Demme. One not to miss - hat optional, no gifts please.

*May not actually be a movie.