Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker review – death becomes them

The swirl of reviews and is up, opinions swooping and swarming, crashing into each other, firing their laser vigour out into the deepest galaxy of internet space; many keen to shout “It’s shit!” as loudly as possible, others to go “It’s fine, I don’t know what they’re on about,” none yet that I’ve seen to say, “Really great, necessary addition to the canon.” I don't know why I feel obliged to add my tuppence; I wouldn't really call it a review as much as to say I guess I've got observations and you, you lucky reader, are good to get em. Merry Christmas!

Put it this way: I might watch it again, but not so much for pleasure as to see whether my opinions hold over a second viewing. And I won’t be doing that for at least, oh I don’t know, maybe 40 years. No, maybe I will, but probably not, because the chief impression I had watching this was that they have sucked the franchise dry, sucked it completely dry, reanimated the corpse through some incredible film-making sorcery, and then sucked the whole fucking thing dry again.

I mean, Emperor Palpatine. Are you having a fucking laugh?

So yeah, the storyline was fucked. I mean how much emotion are you supposed to invest in the question of whether the heroes will kill the dude that was already fucking killed three films ago. Now, he’s being kept in a state of seemingly undead, on some sort of afterlife support system and it turns out he’s been propelling the bad guy (who’s not really a bad dude, just a bit upset) using his ability to psychically talk to anyone in the universe and see what’s going on, sort of like God then, and more than that, while in hiding he’s conjured, apparently out of his undead arsehole, a gigantic fleet of about a kajillion star destroyers that all zap planets like Death Stars. Like get the fuck out of here.

Meanwhile, we’re supposed to be worrying about whether our young, considerably-more-posh-than-I-remember hero Rey is going to be able to resist the entreaties of the bad dude and the undead bad dude who happens to be her grandad to become a superfucking real bad girl and let her friends die and all this jazz, storywise it fucking stinks no two ways about it.

(Seeing her as much posher all of a sudden might be something to do with a newspaper article I read about Daisy Ridley showing she understood fuck all about her class privileges, but it also might be the film-makers up-poshing her for her royal reveal, because it turns out that in 2018, they produced a book championing Rey as evidence that anybody could make it, no matter how humble their origins, in the Star Wars universe; only now it turns out, as before, that the whole thing is basically a spat among princes.)

Furthermore seeing as the bad dude is basically a god, and the story hinges entirely on whether Rey defeats him or not, why do all these other people have to die? The other films (not the prequels which don't count) seemed to find a better balance between the interfamilial drama plotline and the swarming armies of imperial and rebel fleets. This had just as much laser blasting, but it was never clear why any of it had to happen, seeing as Rey wanted to get to the emperor and he wanted her to come.

My feeling is that previously the story might have been hookum but the charm carried it over, but the charm has been clinically and expertly sucked the fuck out. They played around well in Eps 7 and 8 between the new characters and the old, especially keeping Luke back and seeing Han get appendectomied into the next life, plus there was just a huge sense of relief that someone who really loved the originals was in charge after the aforementioned unmentionable prequels, but here it’s just all too much, the nostalgia has worn off and seeing Luke’s family home, for example, or the Emperor’s Death Star throne room, or Billy Dee Williams, it’s like yeah we get it, past references, no one cares any more; and then you’re just left with a storyline that doesn’t engage you.

In place of an engaging story, they do a lot of heartstring tweaking. Here they have got something going on that might bear a second watch, because there were a lot of moving moments, especially to do with Carrie Fisher. I was uncomfortable about the CGI Carrie Fisher mainly because it strikes me as incredibly disrespectful that when one of your actors dies, instead of writing around it, you resurrect them and have them cavort about pretty much as if you were pushing the cadaver around the stage – and in a film where more or less the same thing has happened to literally the most evil character in the universe. I did not like it one bit, but at one point when Rey goes to leave Leia and they have a loving hug and you sense this is the last time they will meet – you kind of hope that maybe this is the last time you see Leia cos it’s so uncomfortable, but it wasn’t – and then there’s a moment when Billy Dee Williams says something along the lines of “Tell Leia how much I love her”, and you get it: they really did love Carrie Fisher and she died and they’re really fucking sad about that. I think, but maybe that's what they want us to think.

And for the first time ever, I was suddenly worried by the question: does Star Wars have a race problem? There’s been some chat about how Kelly Marie Tran had barely any lines in this episode; this after her bigger part in Last Jedi drew a load of internet grief from couchfucking types. But for me, it was something about the way they portrayed the gap yah posh white girl visiting the Indian-looking festival and getting a necklace off the friendly local that gave me the shivers; something about the way the rodent who tweaked C3PO’s brain seemed to be another jolly foreigner type. Both as if they were using aliens to get away with some pretty carefree orientalism. And then there was the way that Finn found his soulmate, another ex-stormtrooper who just happened to be played by a black girl from London, as if they were saying, don’t worry that he seems to fancy the royal big potatoes, he’s going to end up with someone suitable. I dunno, I’m no race theorist, but there was something off key going on there, even while there's progress that they did have some good roles for black people and they don’t even have to die.

The other interesting thing they seem to be getting at is that they keep saying to each other: “Stick together, if we stick together we’ll be able to beat this all-powerful enemy” and I couldn’t help imagining maybe they mean us. Maybe they mean if we stick together, remember our friends, try to work together, we can beat this fascist menace, this far-right monster growing in the black darkness, steadily getting stronger and more confident, coming on ready for its big reveal. Maybe they’re trying to indoctrinate the kids to believe that they can take this thing on. I hope that they did – and I hope that they do. That would be one good meaning of A New Hope, I suppose. But it seems just as likely that they are telling us that we the plebs can’t do anything about the fascist onslaught and have to hope a royal princess takes up the challenge.

It was a film seemingly very preoccupied with death. Lots of people died, lots of supposedly main characters as well, but for most it was time to die (plus they can all come back as fucking ghosts any time so it’s not much of a hindrance). And the truth is that for Star Wars, too, it is, I’m afraid, time to die.

Joker review – origins of specious

About half way through Joker I wondered what I would say if someone asked me what I thought of the film.

“It doesn’t matter what I think,” was what I considered my response would be.

Doesn’t bode well for a review, perhaps, but I think it stands up. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to burden you what I did think; only that, as there are as many Joker origin stories as people to invent them, nobody else’s is ever going to be on the button. The most important element of Todd Phillips’ Joker origin story is that he got it made. I haven’t got mine made; I haven’t even got one to get made, but I do have a clear idea of who the Joker is and most of us, when we are given an end point, can have a stab at getting there.

By which I suppose I mean that Joker is a kind of fan-fic; it’s hardly canon; it’s more a riff or two or three on what’s gone before. No one who comes along to reimagine the Joker or Gotham is going to feel beholden to this film, unless, I suppose, they make a sequel. Joker 2: After the Laughter, perhaps.

There’s a lot to like in Joker. Joaquin Phoenix’s dancing especially. The grit of a trash-strewn Gotham Bronx. Just the very idea of dragging the supernal Joker down into the dirt of having an origin story in the first place, especially one as scrawny and craggy as this one. The violence was satisfyingly authentic. The cinematography, the choreography, the acting were all great. Atlanta’s Paper Boi pitched up in a great scene. The plot twists were – sometimes – effective, while the fears of incel inspo and hand-wringing about Gary Glitter seem wide of the mark.

But there’s a lot not to like. It’s a very confused film. It’s confused about mental illness. It’s confused about protest movements. It’s confused about abuse victims. It’s confused about how old Joker even is (it implies he’s 30, but Phoenix is 44 and looks and acts it; in any case even if he was 30, could the Joker really be 20 years older than Batman?). It's confused about what happens when you suddenly stop taking seven different types of medication.

Its cake-and-eat-it attitude to psychosis, schizophrenia, hallucination, child abuse – that these real, actual real things that happen to actual real people can somehow be juggled in such a way as to give us a plausible origin for something as implausible as a fucking superhuman killer clown – was undignified. It had little or nothing to offer about the world as we find it today, when the killer clowns are running the fucking show. Even its take on Taxi Driver-era New York amounted to no more than saying funding cuts in mental health provision are bad. Not an awful message, but thin.

Of course it’s a comic book, so perhaps it’s too much to ask for more. But of course, it’s not a comic book at all; it’s real, real, realism, not even magic realism, and certainly not comic book. The crux of the film is that the Joker is brought down to earth, explicated in terms of what might happen to any of us; the unreal made real by the force of plot. And it fell well short of managing the lofty goal, although there was plenty of fun on the way.

And the less said about the strand with Bobby De Niro the better – in terms of script anyway, although the joke at the end was pretty good.

Visions in Meditation, Sarah Davachi, Philip Jeck, Darkstar, Union Chapel review

 

Philip Jeck

This happened in October, but I forgot to press go on this until today

It was a strange one at the Union Chapel, an odd Friday night. A screening of four films by Stan Brakhage – the programme had him as “a non-narrative film-maker, the most famous experimental film-maker of the 20^th century” – called Visions in Meditation. These were abstract footage of a journey through the US in the late 80s, filmed on 16mm, and set – with the exception of one film – to a soundtrack of silence. Interspersed between the showings was music – minimalist, experimental, electronic, ambient – commissioned specially for this show, to respond to the films. And that’s what I was there for.

All three pieces were performed by the composer seated at a desk, twiddling nobs on a synthesiser, accompanied by a string trio, two violins and a cello from the London Contemporary Orchestra. The first to go up was Sarah Davachi, a Canadian composer who specialises in “disclosing the delicate psychoacoustics of intimate aural spaces” – this means drones – and who has made some great albums that I’ve enjoyed listening to on YouTube.   

The wafting smoke, pentagram candle holders hanging from the ceiling and most especially the general ambience of grinding discondant drones gave the whole thing somewhat more of a Satanic ritual vibe than your average Friday night in Upper Street – unless you count the Slug and Lettuce, obviously. It would be harsh to call Davachi’s output “anti-music”, but being as it dispenses with rhythm, harmony and melody, it wouldn’t be unfair. In much the same way as in jazz you can play anything except the wrong notes, in this kind of music you can play anything as long as it’s not musical. But I’m a great fan, because by dispensing of all the usual techniques, you get music that is free of the manipulations, end-seeking and confinement typical of most performance*. 

This focus on means rather than ends gives ambient, experimental music a refreshing, egoless and what I am going to call “dis-rational” character. The benefit of disrationality is that by offering nothing for the ego-mind to hold on to, it points to the reality beyond experience. But of course, when we dispense with rationality, it becomes difficult to say whether things are pointing to reality or just stealing a living. It’s one thing to listen to this on YouTube, but something else to pay actual money and spend your actual Friday night doing it in public. There was definitely an emperor’s new clothes/Arts Council funding/#WhitePeopleTwitter about the whole thing; as though at any moment, someone sensible might walk in, turn on the lights and go: “What the fuck are you lot doing?”

The second composer was Philip Jeck, an avuncular-looking figure with white hair, pate shining in the purple light, wearing a blazer. I did enjoy watching this grandfatherly character conjure some extremely dark horror soundtrack on his go. The third was Darkstar – or at least one of them – who played the most “musical” music of the three, which was actually a relief by this point, and gave the string trio some actual playing to do, which was nice. But I was never close to an insight in how the music was responding to the films. 

As for the films, the lack of narrative was challenging. I was struck by how much I craved some – any – narrative. I took to reading the programme by the light of my phone: Oh! He’s travelling across America. Oh! He’s the most famous experimental film-maker of the 20^th century. And these little titbits of narrative did in fact make the experience more compelling. I was left to wonder how much more I would have enjoyed them had I known more about the story of why he had made them, but that did seem as if it might defeat the point of non-narrative cinema.

In fact, I realised, my need of narrative was mostly to justify why I was watching them. If I could tell myself a story about why I was bothering, I’d happily sit there, even if I didn’t “enjoy” the experience. 

It seemed a form over content kind of thing. The films were of the American landscape, but whatever it was they were trying to say – their narrative, for want of a better word – seemed to be carried more by the arrangement of the shots than the shots themselves. There were moments in the films where the rhythm of the cuts and the repetition of shots did come together to offer something like a visual music, but those moments soon passed. Many of the shots were dark, dim or blurred. I was left feeling that if you are going to have no soundtrack and no narrative, the least you could do is have some decent pictures, but that is clearly something else I have to learn about.

A strange one, then. I would have liked to have asked someone who did enjoy it to explain what I was missing, but that’s probably cheating.

* Can you see I’m struggling to explain this bit?

Love & Friendship – film review

Kate Beckinsale shines as the devious, manipulative and indefatigable Lady Susan, in Walt Stillman's adaptation of the Jane Austen novella. Cast by circumstance on to the largesse of distant relatives, Susan remains ravishingly confident, in a succession of stunning dresses, as she cheats, tweaks and seduces whomever expedience demands. The story itself is amusing but slight, and co-star Chloë Sevigny, as Susan's American pal, is curiously absent; she barely inhabits her scenes and appears at times to be reading the script from a very long way away. The rest of the cast have great fun, as the English middle-class always do when called upon to play the gentry. And the film is only 90mins, so win-win. 

PS Searching for Sevigny on Google brings up this fantastic selection of her quotes 

Star Wars The Force Awakens review – well, more a view than a review

Contains spoilers, I guess, but nothing too terrible. I wouldn't worry about it

To the cinema, then, just in time to see the great Force Awakens before everyone else has entirely forgotten about it. The last day of the Christmas holiday, after which we can stop looking back and start looking forward, to Episode 8 no doubt.

There's been a lot of kerfuffle and a whole lot of ker-ching over JJ Abrams' reboot, most of which I have entirely ignored in a vague attempt to A V O I D S P O I L E R S, that most 21st-century of afflictions (it didn't work, however: Twitter served up with several that did ruin the film, despite the fact they turned out not to be true). Thus I don't know where the general view has ascended to, beyond the obvious, which I shall now delineate to all our betterments.

Obvious fact #1: it's good

It's Star Wars. It looks the part. It fills the Star Wars-shaped gap in our grey matter. It does the job. The dialogue mostly makes sense. The characters are passable. There's a strict limit on the number of planetary systems with names made by sprinkling consonants into Egyptian words. There's whizz-bangs, lasers, lonely chaps in black masks, space ships, aliens, lightsabers, spiritual hokum, troubled families. Mostly, it looks the part. It's Star Wars. It's got the space junk thing. Everything looks battered and weathered, not slicked with a shiny veneer of CGI lotion. George Lucas's addiction to CGI was the tragedy that kept on giving, dragging the special editions and then the prequels out of the pock-marked, long time ago, far, far away galaxy and into a virtual-reality junket with no obvious boundary between the movie and the video game. 

Yadda yadda: It looks the part. It's got Han Solo and Chewie and the Millennium Falcon and X-wings and Tie fighters and stormtroopers and desert trading posts and ruined Imperial Destroyers lying in the sand, and sweet-beeping droids that are basically little dogs, and it's got cool, funky bars with wacky aliens playing cool, funky, wacky, alien reggae; it's got people picking things up from a long way away and telling other people to do things and them doing it; it's got the aforementioned bloke in black, only this time he takes off his mask and instead of a scarred Anakin Skywalker, it's some tortured teen who's stopped slapping on the Clearasil just long enough to act out his Oedipal issues.

It's got tree-lined vistas, sweeping desert-scapes, blowy snowy wastes, black galactic skies. It's got a planet that can blow up other planets – like last time, only much bigger and more powerful than that one, which you might remember was much bigger and more powerful than the one before that – and this planet has got a weak spot that the rebel ships can penetrate if only they get the shields down in time. It's Star Wars, basically, and Star Wars is good, so it's good. 

Obvious fact #2: you could complain

You could definitely complain. You could note that it's a bit tough to take the disjunction between where we left the story 33 years ago – the evil empire utterly vanquished, the furry ewoks dancing in the treetops, Darth Vader doing his best Uncle-Arthur-after-two-heart-attacks routine – and where we pick it up, with stormtroopers killing innocent villagers and the dark side back in the black. You could complain about any number of narrative nonsenses. You could complain about the lack of any relation to the world as it is now, our world, which has changed so much since 1977, a world in which small groups of dedicated fighters hiding out in desert enclaves while battling an apparently all-powerful enemy has acquired an entirely different meaning; also one where the hand dryers in the cinema toilets are now more advanced than half the ships in the original film. You could complain about the price of the tickets. You could complain that any boy who had Han Solo as his father would basically be the coolest kid in the universe, the one we'd all wanted to be, not Adrian Mole-goes-Isis. You could complain that a film supposedly about the battle of good and the light against the malign forces of the darkest sort of evil apparently includes a thank you to Darth Insidious himself, George Osborne, probably for giving the film-makers a huge tax break he had stolen from starving disabled children. 

But yeah, Star Wars, it was great. Two hours of intergalactic comic-strip cheeseburger and fries, an absorbing munch for the eyes, lacking key nutrients, sure, but pretty fuckin tasty. 

The Paper Cinema

What happens at the accidental meeting of inkblots, photocopies, cardboard, angle-poise lamps, video technology, a laptop and a banana box?

So I was at this party in a garden the other night when suddenly a woman asked everyone to shush and we all shushed and she turned on the projector and it projected onto a sheet on the garden wall, and then there were these two people and they waved hand-drawn cardboard cut-outs in front of a camera and what they waved in front of the camera appeared on the big screen, and they had a man with them playing music and making sounds and these three conjured up a film right there before our eyes, right in front of us, that we could watch on the big screen, a sort of puppet-animation show, made up of intricately-drawn pictures of characters and scenes and all the elements they needed to tell their stories all waved about in front of the camera in some sort of order and it was like ah! someone's found an beautiful marriage of up-to-date technology and ancient, enchanting technique. An amazing idea and brilliantly executed by Nic Rawling, who drew all the pictures, and his assistants. I happened to be standing behind the puppeteers throughout the films so my eyes constantly flitted from the big screen to watching them perform, which meant I got a behind-the-scenes view, but failed to follow the stories very closely. But the way they conjured up animation from static pictures on sticks was a blessing.

Footage of King Pest, as seen if you just watch the big screen.

A wider shot, including the puppeteers at work, not great but it gives you some idea of what's going on.

The Paper Cinema blog - facebook - interview - bio

Animation bonus: video of Jim Le Fevre (website), talking with others including Nic Rawling, featuring some nifty live animation using a Technics 1210.

Here's how you shred a film

Lindy West on Sex and the City 2 (via)

opportunity knockback

Gwarizm has the script of an unfilmed scene from Kids, the Harmony Korine kiddyshokafilthting from wayback in the 1990s when luminous clothing was for oh fuck knows, I can't even remember that far back. Anyway the scene is worth a read, and probably would have improved the film, which I do remember enjoying, at least for the perving over Chloë Sevigny. I actually met Harmony Korine once, very briefly, while I was walking around Camden with Samantha Morton, as you do, or at least as I did do a long time ago. I'd just bumped into a friend and was chatting to him and I looked over and Sam was talking to someone as well, who I took to be a scabby Camden lowlife punting for a bit of change. This meant that I didn't pay much attention to him, beyond wondering when he was going to go away. As soon as he had, she told me who he was and that he was hiding out in London trying to get off smack, and it was all I could do not to go: 'Fuck's sake go and get him back!' Not that I was a huge fan of Mr Korine, but cos you know he's famous and all that, and also he might have liked my script about um kids what run wild or something and fuck each other and get AIDS. Or maybe he'd have cast me in his next hit, whatever the hell that was. At the very least he could have introduced me to Chloë Sevïġnÿ.

"You can't do anything legally except crime and prostitution."

A short film about Bernard Hare and his book Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew. The book (published in 2005) documents his time spent associating with the 'feral' teenagers of the Leeds under-class.

also posted at Metafilter

Sam The Wheels

Pentecostal minister Clovis Salmon, known in Brixton as "Sam The Wheels" due to his bike wheel-making skills, came to Britain from Jamaica in the 1950s. From the 1960s to the 1980s he used his Super-8 camera to film Brixton daily life and church scenes, including the aftermath of the 1981 riots.

The Dark Knight

What's scary nowadays? Apart from the prospect of having to ring up your ISP to complain about your internet connection being fucked all week long - hmmm, sometimes you can find a little too much out about yourself from your writing - no, really, apart from the prospect of global warming, losing your house, your children growing up to be like Sam Sparro, what is scary? Not monsters, not freaks, no way.

Normally a film is made scary by the tension, but the Dark Knight has very little tension; you know that Batman is going to off the Joker by the end, apart from anything else, and the scenes aren't played for suspense in that manner anyway, yet even so the Joker may well be one of the disturbing incarnations to be brought to the big screen for many a year.

Why so? Heath Ledger's perfectly balanced performance sits between at the under-mined meeting point of comedy and horror; he takes Jack Nicholson's version (YT) and makes it more level, more believable and down-to-earth, even as he incarnates a comic strip in front of your eyes. That is its horror, that he takes something evidently unreal and moulds it into plausibility. That is what grips you as the various bat-toys zwing across two and a half hours of screen time, the prospect that maybe, just maybe, the Joker has a point.

The film-makers do this in a somewhat underhand manner; they take a completely psychopathic lunatic and then feed him lots of reasonable sounding lines. If you miss their sleight of hand, you are in danger of deciding that, if you were to "have some of what he's having", or at least have subscribed at some time to some of the outre, but not unfathomable, theories that the Joker is trying to squeeze out, in between his supernatural feats of ingenious destruction, if you were to do that, you would necessarily and automatically become a psychopathic terrorist with no compassion or empathy for the rest of humanity.

Heath Ledger's Joker is a man on a very bad trip, but he's enjoying it. That prospect does surely worry someone like myself, who likes to think that acid will not turn people into psychopathic killers. Of course Charles Manson long ago buried the idea of the necessarily benevolent psychedelic somewhere in Death Valley, but even so I'm pretty sure that the screenwriters gratuitiously dosed the Joker up on a little RAW discordianism to unsettle the likes of me. Maybe I'm hallucinated it. Whatever, it worked. Heath Ledger's Joker is a work of majesty. When he appears dressed as a nurse, or when you catch a glimpse of him in the crowd without his make-up, he is as perfectly formed as when he drifts carelessly into a room full of Gotham mob bosses, who he just happens to have robbed.

As for Batman, well, whatever, he was always just window dressing for his villains, and though films have got more high-tech and supposedly darker, he is no match for any of them for interest. You feel like he is destined to forever be missing something, like he has stubbonly remained the campest straight at Gay Pride.

Apart from Ledger, the film falls down if not everywhere then at least plentywhere. Despite a fantastic set-piece where Batman kidnaps - extraordinarily renditions perhaps - a Chinese national from Hong Kong, (after all, China won't extradite one of their own, they tell us) and we see the US's current Chinese puzzle, despite that and the film's evocation of a city apparently under a "terrorist" assault - this a terrorist who has, let's be frank about it, purer motives than most - and despite the aerial view of a devastated building which cannot help but remind one and all of the twin towers, despite all of this, the film is never able to anchor itself and construct relevance for itself. It remains comic book stupid, brilliant, but dumb, by which i mean it has nothing to say.

But its fatal flaw, beyond constantly having people mumble potentious sounding lines beneath a soaring soundtrack (nobody i was with could tell me what the last line of the film was), was that it went on too bloody long, for no good reason, and its tightness unravelled like a ball of string rolling across the floor. The Joker, having escaped in typically brilliant fashion from police cells, then decides to run a moral test on Gotham's population, a sort of mass murder version of the Stanford Experiment [OK, probably not the Stanford Experiment, but if you know which Experiment I should be referring to, then by all means drop me a comment]. He does something similar in Alan Moore's the Killing Joke so I am loathe to say that it is out of character, but for someone so pleased with his own outlook, it seems a shame that he suddenly feels the need to prove something by constructing a ridiculous test that doesnt even prove what he claims he is trying to prove. Far better for the film to have ended with Two-Face recently injured - here I have to admit that i cant recall exactly what order things happened in, so bear with me - the Joker on the run, perhaps with his last speech about how much "fun" Batman is still intact and us half an hour better off, with no guff about the spirit of the unJokered humanity to ruin what is otherwise a cracking film.

Addendum: Interesting post by someone far more knowledgable than me, also interesting to note how much better presented the Joker is in most of the comics, compared with Ledger's somewhat grubby incarnation

Oliver Twist

Polanski’s take on the Dickens stalwart rescues Fagin and Sykes from the music hall and returns them to the dark, stinking slums where they belong. At certain points in this tight, captivating film the pair genuinely appear to have been raised up from the depths of hell. Ben Kingsley so perfectly inhabits Fagin that it takes more than a while to remember that this is the same man who played Gandhi. A true character actor, he exposes the paucity of the talent which “graces” our screens most of the time. Of course he has the memory of Alec Guinness to contend with but of all today’s actors, probably only Kingsley could do it justice. Jamie Foreman, meanwhile, as Sykes, looking as pug-faced as his pitbull companion, provides a modern but effective take on the part and the film’s strengths are all on show when at one point he and the dog roam the countryside looking like a phantom apparition.

The beginning scenes are a little ponderous but everything comes together as soon as Oliver hits the city. Victorian London is portrayed in shabby magnificence, seemingly populated entirely by overly aged adults and thin children. The only person apparently between the ages of 15 and 60 is Sykes. The rest of the cast have a great time, laying on the cockney thicker than the mud on the London streets. But what starts out as an enjoyable romp soon veers off into darkness as the criminal screw slowly turns on Oliver.

Interesting, slightly luvvie, interview with Kingsley here.

Pride and Prejudice

The new film starring Keira “Twice” Knightley and Matthew “Who?” Macfadyen is played with a straight bat by director Joe Wright, in his debut feature film, the first film adaptation of the novel for 65 years. Although never going surpass the definitive nineties BBC adaptation, the film is a fair, if unadventurous, stab at the classic period romance. The comedy is certainly handled well, a superlative Brenda Blethyn as Mrs. Bennett - apparently her last role before retirement - by far the best thing in it. Anchored by nice parts for Donald Sutherland, seemingly doing his best Michael Gambon impression, and Judi Dench, donning her well-worn regal air as the Duchess, the film proceeds at a brisk pace through the various turmoils and travails, reaching its destination with a certain inevitability, rather like a train pulling into a station.

I did wonder if I was being churlish, however, in sensing a definite lack at the centre of things; while Knightley is good at the comedy, the forthrightness and the being pretty aspects of the part there is an unfortunate sense that she doesn’t actually fancy Mr Darcy very much at all. At times, as they to-and-fro between despising and adoring each other, you find yourself wondering what she actually sees in him, a fairly major fault in such a definitive romance. Macfadyen, though he handles the acting requirements well enough, just doesn’t seem to have it in him to make her swoon. Very rarely do they occupy they same screen and I wondered whether when they filmed her doing sultry, they didn't have to stick a cardboard cut-out of someone else in front of her.

Ong Bak

Much hyped Thai contribution to the martial arts revival of late, involving extraordinary stunt-work from the lead Tony Jaa reminiscent of Jackie Chan in his heyday. He leaps over, under, around, between moving cars, vats of boiling oil, panes of glass and countless other people - in one shot he escapes a legion of baddies by jumping up and running from shoulder to shoulder over them. Tbe opening scene, featuring 20 Thai schoolkids fighting to be first to the top of a tree - up and down the tree - was fantastic and original. The fight scenes, where he employs Muay Thai against a variety of western and oriental opponents, were dramatic and believable. Unfortunately the film commits the common error of using up all its big fights too early, so that the finale is just more of the same. Also the realism of the Muay Thai is at the expense of the delight and variation seen in the Hong Kong flicks. By the final fights it had almost lost my unforgivably jaded attention.

Requiem For A Dream

Stunningly shot and crafted film, portraying the shocking decline of three junkies and one pill-popping mum. Consummate film-making slightly let down in the event by a rather melodramatic and un-nuanced ending which casts all four protagonists into separate lonely hells. There is something somehow very American, (and slightly childish) about the ending, which seems to have set upon being an unhappy-ever-after. Certainly there is no trace of irony. Haunting visuals and music linger long, long afterwards.