Australia

Baz Luhrmann is always a draw but the critical response to Australia has been mixed at best. In the end, a few clips enticed me. I have to be honest -it was the beardiness and yumminess of Hugh Jackman that did it for me but, in the end, the film transcended my crude libido and anyone who fancies a bit of escapism with Baz’s trademark quirks won’t be disappointed.




Set just before WW2, Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) leaves England for Australia to her husband’s ranch and drive 1500 cattle across the outback to Darwin. Dressed in lace and pressed lined and carrying a parasol, it’s not long before she clashes with wild’n’dirty Australia.



The first part of the film is beautiful to look at but also uncomfortably camp; Baz is determined to pull you into ‘his’ world, abide by his rules and, as he said in one interview, have you “check your coat at the door.” The music is too loud, each movement has a touch of flamenco and the camera lunges from one scene to another in a way that doesn’t work as well as it did in Moulin Rouge. And people take prat falls while Nicole squeals in indignation every opportunity.

About half an hour in, there’s a very, very welcome shift and the story proper gets going.

Nicole Kidman gives her trademark to some eyes - ‘subtle’ and ‘nuanced’, to others - ‘wooden’ performance as the English toff who’s brought down a peg or two by the environment and transformed into a tough Sheila. Trust Australians to spin the Cinderella story so that she only becomes a princess when she gets rid of her finery and throws away the glass slipper. And what a prince she lands! One review I read had me in stitches with its snarky insistence on referring to Hugh Jackman as “Hugh Russell-Crowe-wasn’t-available Jackman” but this doesn’t do justice to his virile performance. Jackman is wonderful; he has the composure and silence about him of the young Clint Eastwood and…I’m going to stop there or you won’t take another word I say seriously…

Visually, the film is glorious from beginning to end. The breathtaking landscape is painted in super-real colour and everything that can gleam or shine does. We are given plenty of time to enjoy the almost Martian landscape and marvel at the boab trees.

There are many memorable scenes such as when a body falls into the river, the cattle drove, King George, the aborigine grandfather standing on one leg watching from high up which suffuse the movie with its unique and often plain Australian feel which must have the local tourist board rubbing its hands in glee.

At the same time, there’s much to recognise from regular westerns and Baz directs the exciting sequences of the cattle drove with panache giving many stuntmen the classic gig of their lives! The drove is unmistakably the highlight of the movie and I haven’t seen anything like this since Dances with Wolves. It brings the movie and the characters to earth and the story settles into that of little people with massive personalities leading out their intense lives against a brutal landscape and in a dangerous period in history.

The added Australian twist is the dark story of the mixed race Aboriginal children something which, I am ashamed to say, I knew very little about. It was the Australian government’s policy to forcibly remove children from their homes and ‘program the Aborigine out of them’. One of the main threads of the plot is Lady Ashley’s maternal attachment to young Nullah, played by Brandon Walters, whose performance is glowing.

I believe, that despite the self-righteous carping by some critics about the movie, where they say it’s too soft-focus, raising public awareness of these issues is of vital importance. David Gulpili who plays King George is the most famous actor of aboriginal descent; he starred in Walkabout all those years ago and his troubled circumstances to this day serve as a blot on the consciousness of white Europeans whose ancestors have neutered and almost obliterated so many indigenous races worldwide. It’s worth reading Germaine Greer’s article (preferably after you’ve seen the film) for an intellectual, pc, Australian perspective on this issue.

By twisting history, garbling geography and glossing over the appalling exploitation of Aboriginal workers, Baz Luhrmann's film Australia bears more relation to fairytale than fact, argues Germaine Greer


One reviewer said that Baz Luhrman knows very little about real history and more about film history – this is a fair point, the film is sprinkled with endless references to Gone with the Wind, the Wizard of Oz and probably Skippy too! I too know very little indeed about Australian history but I know a thing or two about watching movies; I assume, before the lights go down, that movies are there to entertain and I also expect any movie that has a ‘historical’ element will be twisted to fit the story. It’s not The Truth up there just because it’s bigger than life size and even if the director wants you to believe it is.

Yes, film-makers have enormous power to influence us as do advertising, the media and any political ranting you might be exposed to but we should all know better by now. Question everything – we have that freedom; use it. Baz makes damn clear that you know you’ve entered into the world of the unreal. I heard him talk about how nowadays we’re all too damn cynical and too damn clever for our own goods – there’s a time and a place, hang up your coat, put your feet up and munch on that popcorn and escape from the credit crunch and lack of daylight to chest hair, screen kisses, good guys and bad guys and shiny, shiny landscapes for a few hours. You can pop your cynical coat back on and google the plight of the aborigines once you get home.

blessings and all that

There are eight days until the winter solstice when the days become gradually longer. Thank goodness – I’m giving myself cheek strain and probably mild cirrhosis of the liver in an attempt to remain positive and happy in the drizzle and grey. It could be worse.





I’m reading an extraordinary book at the moment, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl . I can’t believe I’ve not come across this before but I’m thrilled that I have this opportunity to read it. Frankel was a psychotherapist, and this is the story of his time in Auschwitz and other camps and his subsequent development of logotherapy based on that which he learned about human nature in his three years before liberation by the Americans. He writes from the perspective of a psychiatrist observing human suffering and asking what is it that we do to retain our freedom and hope in order to survive, (or die with dignity) in such appalling circumstances?

This from the preface by GW Allport:

in the concentration camp every circumstance conspires to make the prisoner lose his hold. All the familiar goals in life are snatched away. What alone remains is, “the last of human ‘freedoms’” – the ability to “choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.”

Frankl’s depiction of events centres on the psychological experience, the dreams, the meaning that he developed within and observed in others. It is sobering for me living in a gluttonous society, grumbling about the credit crunch and the difficulty of finding time to exercise when I have nothing but plenty and security from harm. How is it that we manage to lose touch with these inner resources. This passage sums up a typical day for Frankl:

I shall never forget how I was roused one night by a fellow prisoner, who threw himself about in his sleep, obviously having a horrible nightmare…I wanted to wake the poor man. Suddenly I drew back the hand that was ready to shake him, frightened at the thing I was about to do. At that moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.

This in the week after I watched Louis Theroux’s, Law and Disorder in Johannesburg, an examination into the private security firms hired by individuals in a city where the police can’t keep on top of the brutal crime.

Watching Louis in his flak jacket like a kid with his hand always a moment from the flames, it was hard to feel anything but relief that it was all a million miles away. The townships foul and disgusting as disgusting and dangerous a habit as you can imagine, are filled with people trying to lead a normal life just like I am. The nightmarish reality for them is that life is cheap as chips.

Constant victims of crime and with absolutely no faith in the police’s abilities or willingness to help them, they routinely take the law into their own hands. Louis was there shortly after a mob had captured and executed a suspect by burning him to death. The private security firms here, small affairs run by brutal ‘realists’ who thrashed petty criminals to deter them were in as much danger from retribution from the rage of ‘the community’ as a criminal. Meanwhile, rich whites paid firms that rode around in SUVs – “An African solution to an African problem.” One happy customer declared.

The level of crime and its brutality was terrifying. Whole apartment blocks were hijacked and the poor tenants forced to pay their rent to pirates until the security firms could ‘save’ them. No doubt aware of the marvellous viewer tension he would create, Louis snuck into what seemed like an abandoned building, the place stinking of shit and god knows what, not a light flickering within. It was classic horror; no lights and no idea what might be round the corner waiting to pounce. Inside he found normal people who considered this a ‘good place’ and had lived there with no utilities for four years. Outisde he watched as security guards doled out beatings on one street corner while turning a blind eye on another where a drug dealer plied his wares. Better the devil you know, they reasoned for if they had arrested him, another would have take his place instantly so what would have been the point?

The most haunting image was the grimace of an unspeakable monster who happily mimed what he would do and has done to people when he breaks into their homes to force money out of them. He was brilliant at his job and had found his calling.

The parts of Johannesburg we saw were bedlam, a world full of despair. Everywhere there was blank eyed acceptance - this is what things are like here. no one could save them.

I couldn’t help myself; a few days later one of my baby yoga mums, a white South African living and working here, nodded when I asked if she’d seen this programme.

“I wish I hadn’t.” she said, her baby lying across her outstretched legs. She has plans to visit her parents in Johannesburg after Christmas. “It’s nice where they live but I couldn’t live there. I couldn’t just come out with the baby like you do here and even driving around, what if someone pulled me over and asked me to give up the car, what would I do with her?” She nodded at her sleeping daughter.

Later, I took the dog out. It was a bright, golden afternoon. The park was pretty much deserted. I thought about the space I had. I thought about how far from desperate my life was. For once I didn’t take it for granted that I felt safe in my bed at night, felt safe in the streets. It just doesn’t cross my mind that anything will happen to me.

“You know what, Twiggy?” I said to her, “We live in bloody paradise.”

If she could have spoken, I know she would have said, “But I knew that all along.”

Stephen Fry at the V&A

What a treat! Last Wednesday evening I joined about a hundred other book fans in the V&A’s lecture theatre to hear Stephen Fry talk about his TV series and book, America.





The TV series has recently completed its Sunday night run and while I tuned in for every episode, it didn’t really hit the spot for me; much as I love Stephen Fry and would happily watch him paint a wall as long as he provided a running commentary, I found the seat of your pants tour of the all the states left me hungry for more; with so many snippets and no depth – it was teasing rather than informative. And I couldn’t help remarking Fry was ridiculously even tempered and uncritical of all he saw and everyone he met. There’s no doubt he’s a charming individual but where was the snark and snip he can also deliver? I wanted to know what he really thought.

In the domed room at the V&A, surrounded by portraits of Holbein and Leonardo da Vinci, I was inspired to consider lofty questions. In the TV series, Fry’s stubbornly wore a blazer and slacks pretty much whatever the weather and whatever the activity – in one scene it was a relief to see him in a cowboy hat. Would he still be wearing the same outfit or would he be in a more formal costume given the literary air of the occasion? He didn’t disappoint, blue blazer, tan trousers and Oscar Wilde’s ‘bad-hair-day’ hair.



Much of Fry’s gentle humour centres around observations on language; he was amused at the American pronunciation of ‘docile’ so that it rhymed with ‘fossil’.

He talked with a wry smile of how he’s not considered, “a man of action,” but swam with sharks, flew in a micro light on a day when even the pilot was terrified, he remarked on the “beauty and grace” of the North Carolina mountains and spoke nothing but well of his charming hosts and on a couple of occasions he had to ally fears for they were half excepting a ‘Borat’ treatment. In fact that it reflected badly on the English should they want to mock Americans and that this was nothing but an expression of an inferiority complex.

The one time he was unable to contain sarcasm was when recalling his long, long night listening to matter-of-fact rubbish from the Big Foot spotter where,

“I was so clenched, if I’d stood up I would have taken the chair up with me.”

He summed up the popular world view on Obama and expressed relief at change and how everyone wants to love our “handsome, roguish younger cousin,” again.

He revealed that while he was quite well known among younger people, (V for Vendetta and Bones) he was as anonymous as his black London cab. When asked what they thought of his personality vehicle, he replied his hosts, “had no conception whatsoever!”


“I hope he’s funny.” Someone behind me had said. I’d felt a little crass expecting it; how annoying to earn your living being amusing and have this enormous pressure to perform all the time and lighten everyone else’s moods. Of course, Fry rose to the occasion, effortless in his delivery, instantly at ease and charmingly self-deprecating. He’s a hard guy not to like.

Apocalypto and Adventures in Advertising

golly, gosh, I’m agog
If you’re off on your travels and you hear someone in front saying something like,

“golly, gosh, I’m agog!”

it’s not Bertie Wooster but Dan Cruikshank on location for ‘Adventures in Architecture’. Half man, half Muppet, he causes unintentional hilarity frolicking across yet another foreign vista, alternately making jazz hands and enunciating his glee at a pillar, pyramid or slum. This TV series is un-missable and has made me consider selling Casa Sangue and travelling the world. Maybe not… I don’t mind displacing the rest of the Sangues but I wouldn’t want to upset Twiggy.

Each episode is themed; my favourite so far was the one on death in which Cruikshank led us breathlessly through India, Guatemala, the Czech Republic and Italy and showed how places and building reflect how societies views death.

Go here to enjoy the Cimitero Monumentale di Staglieno, Genoa, in Italy The site is in Italian but this doesn’t matter; hover over one of the labels on the plan then follow the link to the photo pages – you will never have seen anything like the monuments to the dead in this extraordinary temple to the Gothic. The sheer beauty and self-indulgent almost kinky representations of various tableaus of death would feed any pre-pubescent, or indeed middle-aged Goth.

(This place, by the way, can go on the proud to be Italian stack.

More Gothic horror to be found in the Sedlec Ossuary, a Christian chapel in the Czech Republic where some crazy carpenter recycled the contents of overcrowded cemeteries. You couldn’t make this up…

Then Cruikshank took us to the banks of the Ganges where Hindus cremated their loved ones in a chilling, to modern eyes, but beautiful ceremony. It brought home how anaesthetised we are to death in our society. In Mamma Sangue’s time, family members laid out their loved ones and sat with them until the funeral – we’re one small step from Tescos doing even that for us.

Finally, Cruikshank visits Guatemala and the site of an ancient Mayan temple where he mimed with spit-spraying relish the ancient, horrific blood rites. I was so impressed/horrified by his graphic description of human sacrifice that I re-thought whether or no not I should watch Apocalytpo…I’ve always been a bit too scared of it having read some awe-struck reviews with grudging respect paid to Mel Gibson’s fascination with brutality. I really get squicked by decapitation as I’ve mentioned more than once in my film reviews such as in the abysmal Kingdom of Heaven. Why would you need to see such a thing? Fortunately I came to my senses.

Apocalypto
Mel Gibson…what can you say about a man once so beautiful revealed to be seriously ugly on the inside by his grotesque, anti-Semitic comments? He’s no longer a draw to see a movie for me and I haven’t seen anything linked to him since the fabulous and very silly Braveheart.

Apocalypto is one of the most exciting films I have ever seen! It tells the of an ordinary, Mayan villager and his fight to escape the clutches of a kind of tatooed, ruthless press-gang whose sole purpose is to provide an endless supply of bodies for sacrifice to angry Gods in a time of disease and famine. Sent into the jungle to harvest men and women, these characters are so good at what they do and so accomplished in the art of killing that you get the feeling they did their work for love not money. There has been some discussion about how historically accurate this is and how routine the scale of slaughter depicted in Apocalypo actually was but, thanks to Braveheart, we know better than to believe any of this as fact. What we have is an utterly gripping, bloody, violent, funny and beautifully shot story.



And, get this, its in Mayan dialect with sub-titles. I wonder what the popcorn audience made of that? With an uncomprising, meticulous attention to detail, Gibson brings the ancient world horrifically and savagely to life. These people are ‘real’ and the distance provided by the language maintains the illusion that we have somehow actually travelled back to the time of the conquistadors in the 16C. Gibson went to great lengths to cast indigenous actors for the key roles including the delightfully named and rather hot Rudy Youngblood. You’ll see some of the scariest villains ever too. And who knew that, as the subtitles reveal, ancient Mayans at play conversed like guys in a dug out?



If you have a strong constitution, see this film; I can promise you a spectacle.

No Country for Old men

No Country For Old Men is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy. Set in the bleak borderland of New Mexico, it deals with the fate of almost retired, disillusioned sheriff, Edward Bell played by Tommy Lee Jones, as well as the story of Llewellen Moss, Josh Brolin, a down at heel welder who has an unexpected opportunity to haul himself and his young wife out of near poverty, if he’s willing to risk his life.

It’s won four Oscars, best movie, best adapted screenplay, best director and best supporting actor for Javier Bardem. While I’m not sure if this film is quite as incredible as many critics make out, it is rather wonderful in that it manages to exist successfully on two levels, the popcorn and the philosophical.

On the one hand, sitting squarely in the universe of entertain-me-while-I-scoff we have a super tense, perfectly paced, bleak ‘chase’ movie where our ‘hero’, Llewellen, played by James Brolin, stumbles upon $2 million, part of a drug deal that went wrong, decides to make off with it and is pursued by the menacing, psychopath Anton Chigur, played by Javier Bardem complete with scary, floppy hair and faintly bloodshot eyes.

On the other hand, if you prefer, and I certainly do, you’ll have something else, a very, very deep and essentially dissatisfying experience …in an existential way, which is to say this is exactly what the Coen brothers were hoping you’d feel, because, like, that’s what the human condition is like. Man.

It’s inevitable then, that main protagonists and a plot evolve into anti-climax and a sense of ‘huh?’ Those dastardly Coens know exactly what they’re doing and, while it’s exciting and thought provoking, ultimately I found the ending bloody annoying. Just like life, I guess.

When you leave the cinema, you’ll be asking those questions which, for Parisian waiters at least, are every day ones: are our actions dictated by Fate? Or, you might say as you munch on posh food, peut etre, life is meaningless and we are engaged in haphazard meanderings where each decision we make, every action isn’t pre-ordained and we can be easily, randomly thwarted by chance, by accidents, by…?


So we have a bloody, tense, modern (set in the 1980s) ‘western’; life and death struggles, gritty, visceral themes set in hideously modern buildings; trailers, motels – essentially fragile, ugly shoe boxes perched on the barren, unforgiving landscape of New Mexico, a terrain which will outlive the main characters no matter how muscular and brutal they are. The place names are familiar, El Paso, Rio Grande etc, they are the names of Western legend and movie mythology and while the struggles in this film are for life and death, and the bad guy, Chigur played with terrifying lack of humour by Bardem, is memorable and the perfect amalgam of every hitch-hiking, relentless, psychopath you’ve ever seen on screen, you’re never in any doubt that this all means nothing. A conversation between Tommy Lee Jones, the sheriff and his retired from law-enforcement uncle outlines the philosophical heart of the film. His nephew talks about how things have changed, how the criminal has become almost untouchable and his uncle says simply, in that tobacco chewing way of westerns,

Whatcha got ain't nothin new. This country's hard on people, you can't stop what's coming, it ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity.

We cast ourselves as the heroes, the principal characters, it seems the Coens are saying, yet we’re not.

In this blank view of human existence and purpose, there’s a smattering of humour, plenty of desperate, painful violence and a relentless tour of the interiors of one Texan motel after another. In this film, everyone is on their own and vulnerable to sudden death. There are huge spaces between people physically and long moments of silence, no traffic, no other people – it’s a huge country. There is no perceptible soundtrack in the film yet the use of sound puts you right there in the protagonists’ shoes so you can hear their breath, feel their reactions to an ominous footfall. It’s extraordinarily tense and self-assured work. Special mention has to go to English cinematographer, Roger Deakins, who has found beauty somehow in the angular plains and ugly architecture.

The three main protagonists are played with agonised intensity: Tommy Lee Jones cracking dark jokes and filled with blank wonder at the horror of the crimes he’s witnessed, his face a barely contained wrinkled mask of horror with only the eyes showing how he’s lost the heart and belief in what he’s doing. For this character, the good guys are too small, too weak to fight the modern evil; Josh Brolin is amazing; he looks like Nick Cave without the hair dye and his determination and virile fight against evil is both superhuman and human. He struggles against this Terminator style bad guy and has all our hopes pinned on his success. The actor’s struggles with mediocrity and his own personal demons before this role add poignancy to the experience. Hopefully this will be the beginning of a much deserved rise to the top for him. Javier Bardem won an Oscar for his part which, apparently, wasn’t fleshed out in the novel where all we told is that Chigur has no sense of humour. Unlike the actor who, in his acceptance speech said,

"Thank you to the Coens for being crazy enough to think I could do that, and [for putting] one of the most horrible haircuts in history on my head!"



The exchange between Chigur and a hapless gas station proprietor will go down in cinema history as one of the most agonizing moments you’ll witness – on a par with Joe Pesci’s “In what way do I amuse you?” in Goodfellas. Chigur believes in fate and he has constructed his own fucked up rules and moral code about what has to be and what must happen. The man with all the power believes, ironically, that every action he takes is down to fate.

It is a testament to the casting in this film that everyone, from the main characters to one-line speaking bit parters have such real personalities, so much history, such uniqueness that their deaths, if that’s how they’ll end up, hurt you. These aren’t the faceless victims of a serial killer, no; these are real people with real aspirations, real outlooks on life, coming up against a genuine monster and all we can do is cross our fingers for them.



Whether or not you’ll ‘enjoy’ this film is questionable. It’s shockingly violent, unexpectedly visually beautiful, epic in theme but ultimately rather depressing. And it makes no sense – which is the point. You’ll be unsettled and haunted by it for days.I want to watch it again just to make sure, after all, what was all that stuff about the dreams at the end…?

The Book Thief

It pains me when I see magnificent books, works of art like this, being sold for three quid in Tesco. Every so often a book comes out that has a weight about it, a scope that is so huge that you feel you need to put it on a shelf of its own – such a book is The Book Thief, by Marcus Zusak.



The novel tells the story of Liesel, a nine year old girl, living with foster parents after her mother is taken away to a concentration camp. Later the same family hide a young, Jewish man risking terrible punishment should they be caught. Liesel makes sense of her life and escapes through reading. She also reads to other when they are in an air-raid shelter. A non-existent supply of books means that she resorts to stealing them when she can, hence the title of the book.

The novel’s ‘angle’ is that the narrator is Death. It’s divided into bite-sized chunks sometimes witty, chatty and sometimes tragic. Suddenly, in the middle of the text, a section in bold font and with a decorated heading pops up as if on the screen in a silent movie. Through these headings significant moments and situations are emphasised, and we never forget that Death is an omniscient narrator.

The characters are so beautifully drawn that your heart aches for them. Liesel’s adopted father, her boyfriend Rudi who worships the athlete Jesse Owens and the Jewish teenager they later hide in their cellar are so real that a whole other perspective is thrown into this ever-changing tale of the plight of the Jews in the war. Here you hear about the Germans who didn’t condone, the little Schindlers if you will, who had to make their protests small and subtle or lose their lives. The teenager in hiding, Max, white washes over the pages of Mein Kamf so that he has clean pages to write and illustrate a book for Liesel. The symbolism is obvious and very beautiful and I cried reading this part of the book in a way that I don’t recall having done since reading books as a child.

Death describes many deaths and how he carries their souls away that reminds us how precious each life is and how keenly each loss is felt.

This is a beautiful, emotional and surprisingly uplifting book; through it’s ‘small’ stories it achieves something that ‘great’ art often does, it reminds us that humans are capable of much that is evil and much that is great in equal measures. A tangle and conundrum...

Cloverfield

This is my film of the year so far. Cloverfield is not for the faint hearted among you, but if you know how to breathe through fear, make the effort and see this amazing piece of work.

Cloverfield is an old fashioned monster movie in the best sense of the term. It relies on traditional, tried and tested, behind you, behind you methods that have worked ever since we’ve been telling each other stories but it also achieves something that the best genre movies manage, it captures the mood of the time. In the fifties and sixties, The Threat was the red peril from the red planet, communism, now we have The Osamasaurus, a merciless, indiscriminate, unpredictable menace that strikes, maims, kills yet gives no reason.

The movie ‘forgoes’ modern film technology and instead opts for hand-held, shaky, faux video. We begin the film with a message on screen that this is a video film discovered in an area ‘formerly known as Central Park, then the film ‘runs’ with no explanation, apparently and un-edited account of the events code named Cloverfield. The fake video is a very effective technique which brings immediacy and intimacy in a way that traditional special effects and perfect camera work would not have.

At the beginning, we have an overlong section where Jason, played by Mike Vogel, is handed the video camera and reluctantly shoots the mundane events at a party; beautiful, shiny twenty-somethings discuss relationships and flirt. For a while, to remind us that this is ‘real’, a digital clock runs in real time in bottom left screen. Occasionally, cuts to show the underlying tape which documents a romantic day between two of the main characters which proves to be significant back story. Peace is shattered when the proverbial shit hits the fan. An unexplained earth tremor, or bomb or something and the party spills onto the street. What follows is a desperate and fragmented record of four party goers’ fight for survival.

New York is under threat and in scenes consciously reminiscent of 9/11, crowds run from rolling clouds of dust and shelter in shops. No one mentions the similarity but they don’t need to for it’s part of our collective consciousness. What follows is visceral and truly exciting and more than once I caught myself gazing at the screen open-mouthed. The heroes are pitched into a chaotic battle scene with just themselves, their wits and luck behind them, no weapons, no bags, no coats, utterly naked so to speak.



Director, Mike Reeves, tells what a challenge the camera style was; they had to re-shoot much of footage because it was too perfect and after studying hours of YouTube footage, they get it right. We have people passing between the camera and the subject, shaking, jarring, dropped camera and always just misses the action in the way that you would if something made you jump out of your skin. The cameraman is one of the subjects too. This is his experience and when he gasps and runs we do too. Cloverfield feels very contemporary for this is a society where recording our experiences via blogs and digital images is part of all our lives. When the Statue of Liberty’s head clangs into view, the filmed image courtesy of the screen, naturally includes bystanders holding up their camera phones to preserve this surreal and momentous moment. And in one priceless frame, looters stand in an electrical goods shop, bearing armfuls of cassette players, they too staring open mouthed up at the monitors showing the news and the devastation of their city. The movie manages to keep up the pace, and it’s genuinely thrilling and with consummate skill, holds off from showing the monster providing just occasional glimpses.

There has been some expressions of annoyance among reviewers at how young the five main protagonists are and because they’re ‘annoying kids’ they can’t relate; well, I take issue with that. First of all, they aren’t just monster-fodder like the (on purpose) idiot protagonists in movies such as The Evil Dead; we are invited to care about these people and get to know them, albeit in an overlong section (8 minutes) at the beginning of the movie. Yes, I got a little tired of hearing them talk about their feelings and they wouldn’t be my first choice friends but I also don’t know anyone from Afghanistan and this didn’t stop me relating to the characters in The Kite Runner. Maybe because they’re close in age to my children helped me care but I thought the guy playing Rob, Michael Stahl-David, was particularly good and conveyed emotion subtly and with conviction. I would also never criticise a movie for which I am definitely not the target audience for having youngsters as the protagonists.

The Blair Witch style, viral publicity, has proved very successful but Cloverfield lives up to the hype. It’s the best monster movie I’ve seen since Alien. It teems with moments when you want to bellow at the screen, “Put the light ON!” and “Pick up a weapon, Go’dammit!” Cloverfield is a ride and a half and a tribute to imaginative film making.

Sweeney Todd

Tim Burton’s version of Sweeney Todd does not disappoint; it’s a glorious, over the top, dark, broody, operatic assault on the ears and eyes. After two hours of white pan stick, Robert Smith hair styles and gin swilling kids, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven, or should I say – hell.
It’s an unmistakable Burton picture right from the opening credits which haul you straight into the movie’s universe; Sweeny Todd’s titles are to the Gothic what James Bond is to spy films. From the first breath, the rush of a climbing organ lifts you into a dreary, dangerous, studio-London where the sky is always inky and tears inevitably turn to blood. Rivers of blood.



I knew very little about the tale of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, who took gratuitous and grisly revenge on the people of London when he was deported for a crime he didn’t commit. He was set up by a pervy and corrupt Judge Turpin, played by the gorgeous Alan Rickman, and separated from his wife and baby daughter. Now back in London, Todd changes his name, takes up with the equally amoral Mrs Lovett, played by Helena Bonham Carter, and sets up a grisly production line,

“How about a shave, sir?”

And before the towel has settled on their chests, he’s slit their throats, and Mrs Lovett’s transformed the plentiful victims into delicious meat pies to be fed back to eager but unsuspecting Londoners.

Johnny Depp, in the title role, is unrestrained but magnificent. I have never been the biggest Jack Sparrow fan. I loved the novelty of the first Pirates film but I’ve refused to watch the last two in the franchise. In Sweeney Todd, while Depp’s mock-ney accent rankles on the English ear, it’s more David Bowie than Keith Richards this time round, the film is so theatrical that somehow it can take it. It’s his fifth collaboration with Tim Burton and, there’s no doubt about it, they’re good for each other. Burton keeps Depp’s feet down on the ground by challenging him and in return, the Depp’s presence, the sheer brilliance of his physical acting, gives the film just enough reality and weight to keep it from looking like animation. I have never seen a man walk through a door like Mr Depp does.

What I didn’t like, of course, was the music. I love a musical but I’m not au fait with the Sondheim phenomenon and I felt mildly uncomfortable at the sheer volume of singing; the songs aren’t catchy or melodious but instead are vehicles for plot and motivation and no sooner are sung than they’ve disappeared down the drain like regular dialogue. There’s nothing to lift the spirits there and certainly no tune to hum in the shower.


Fortunately, I got so much pleasure from the visuals that I didn’t exactly suffer.

The film is dark and beautiful; Monochrome lit faces and midnight blue are a perfect canvas for the relentless bloodletting. Rooftops and skylights, dodgy pie fillings, attics and slums – it’s a London you wouldn’t want to live in but which you can’t tear your eyes away from. My favourite shot is where Sweeney Todd and Mrs Lovett stand in her shop window; he holds a cleaver and she holds a rolling pin – the perfect couple. http://www.movieweb.com/movies/film/50/4450/gal2878/
"> loads of lovely stills here

I understand that Helena Bonham Carter, Mrs Burton, auditioned with the rest of the pack; in one interview she said, a hint of faux bitterness in her voice,

“The fact that I was the mother of his children made no difference.”

And she’s fine. I just wasn’t convinced and I can’t quite put my finger on why. Depp, was Sweeney; in every frame he frowned and brooded and was driven by vengeance. God knows how he slept at night. Helena, on the other hand, looked like she was playing a pantomime villain and I sensed a flicker of irony in her performance which may have been her characteristic, English, dead-pan humour or, it may have been something to do with that slight mad look in her eyes which, while it made it seem believable that Mrs Lovett would adapt to the new pie filling overnight, means that she never looks at the camera and doesn’t engage with you.

There are strong supporting performances from everyone: Rickman is first choice for unsavoury but well-spoken types in a wing collar. Sporting calcified nails he is lascivious and pathetic, inappropriately showing off his leather bound porn collection, he reminded me of Tiberius in I Claudius. The judge is ably assisted by the best turn in the movie – a cross between Joe Pesci and Tweedledum - Timothy Spall, ballectic, Dickensian and riveting. Sacha Baron Cohen plays an Italian barber and it shows what kind of movie this is that he fits right in. Did anyone else notice how ‘packed’ his tights were? A special mention must go to Ed Sanders who plays the gin guzzling boy who falls right out of the workhouse and into the fire.

Treat yourself; go see Sweeney Todd. It’s worth it just to hear the word ‘tonsorial’ uttered on screen. And remember, it’s all fake blood.

The Golden Compass

I haven’t read Philip Pullman; reading children’s books is a bit like a busman’s holiday for me, but I was intrigued by the trailer I’d seen; Pullman’s cool idea of a daemon, a person’s soul made ‘real’ and concrete, in the form of an animal or bird, was convincingly brought to life – birds flew around children’s heads, monkeys leapt ahead of their masters and a snow leopard pud-pudded alongside Daniel Craig.

The Golden Compass is set in an alternate universe similar to Earth. It tells the story of Lyra Belacqua, a young girl who overhears a plot to kill her uncle, Lord Asriel, played by the remarkably un-bookish looking Craig, and is thrown into complicated adventures full of kidnappings, betrayals and silly names which, may have meant something to Pullman fans, but which I found exceptionally hard to follow. Multiple plot threads were launched and faded out with little storytelling skill so that at the end of this first instalment, I felt utterly dissatisfied. One of the three stories reached a resolution and Lyra spoke dreamily of “next time” and the next adventure…which made me respond, “Huh?” They should have got the director from 24 in on the act and show them how it was done.

The daemons didn’t disappoint. In one delightful scene, children chased each other through a meadow with their little CGI souls scampering and flitting around them. It added this incredible dimension where you wouldn’t just read another person face, or tone of voice or their body language but also their daemon. It was fascinating watching the daemons interact with each other too expressing arguments through their own fights and threats. Amazing too observing the interaction of a human with its daemon which in some cases, such as one scene between Mrs Coulter and her ‘monkey’ was tantamount to abuse followed by intense regret on her part which was disturbing to behold. Worse of all was the
dreadful sense of violation if anyone touched or forcibly separated a daemon from its human.

Lyra’s daemon hadn’t ‘fixed’ because she was a child and varied in form - sometimes a cute gerbil creature that peeked out form under her collar, other times a Pantalaimon, a racoon (I think) and occasionally a baby snow-leopard. I wonder what mine would be? Just think, it would be another area in life where we could develop complexes; imagine the internal conflict caused by the discrepancy caused by the daemon you had and the one you wanted? Or the dismay when you thought your child would turn out to be a snow-leopard but instead she ‘stuck’ as a crow?


Pantalaimon

I loved all the philosophical, pseudo-religious mumbo jumbo too about ‘dust’ and free-will although I had no idea what any of it meant. Does ‘dust’ represent God or knowledge or what? There seems to be as many theories as nutters out there; for all its flaws, I loved that a mainstream movie encourages children to navel-gaze and maybe take a peek at a dictionary once in a while with statements such as, “there will always be free-thinkers and heretics”.

The film was a feast for the eyes: it was beautifully lit and everyone’s eyes shone. It had the look of the 1940s with a smattering of Victorian technology: romantic airships; gas lamps; springs; clockwork and documents sealed with wax. The period feel made one think immediately of Orwell’s 1984; this might have been what the sets would have looked like - before it all went to rack and ruin. The splendour before it faded.

With all these Big Ideas and Big Visuals, the characters faded somewhat: I liked Lyra, played by the gloriously named, skinny and boyish, Dakota Blue Richards, although she faltered a little on the highly emotional scenes; Daniel looked a bit strange with a beard, spent a great deal of time gazing into the middle distance and disappeared from the story line for ages; Nicole Kidman tried very hard to be a less camp Cruela de Ville but the part wasn’t intimate enough for her to shine; Sam Elliot was his usual, effortless, charismatic self but I felt mildly resentful of his American Cavalry role.

Did I mention I hated the polar bears? A great concept in the book, perhaps, but I loathed the whole idea on screen. Polar Bears, well, they just aren’t very…nice…see the recent story about a Mamma Polar Bear chowing down on her Baby Polar Bears. The storyline fell into the picture like an unwanted dinner guest. Despite the cool Norwegian style names, I wasn’t convinced. There was a touch of the Watership Down discomforts – they were all earnest voices and motivation when, in fact, they were polar bears in very silly outfits. And polar bears can’t talk.

I hated the annoying Harry Hausen-style climactic fight complete with appalling, corny music; a cacophony of trumpets and strings such as you might find in a b-movie Roman movie; I found myself getting a bit bored. And why did no one not once mention how cold it was?


I doubt I’ll bother with the next instalment so I’ll never have my very own daemon puzzle solved: why does my soul-mate enjoy nothing more than rolling in dead rats by the river?